Preface to the 2017 edition¶
Core Argument¶
Preface to the 2017 Edition
This preface situates Ted Grant’s 1997 work within the political and theoretical crisis that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Stalinism. The book was not an academic exercise but a weapon in the struggle to defend the October Revolution against a wave of bourgeois and reformist propaganda that sought to bury socialism along with the USSR. Grant’s purpose was to clarify the nature of the Soviet Union, explain why it collapsed, and project where Russia was heading—a task for which he was uniquely qualified as a veteran Trotskyist and follower of the International Left Opposition.
The preface’s core argument is that only the Marxist method—dialectical and historical materialism—can explain the contradictory processes at work in the USSR. Bourgeois critics and Stalinist apologists alike shared a fundamental error: they saw the Stalinist regime as an indestructible monolith. In contrast, Trotsky had argued decades earlier that Stalinism would either be overthrown by a political revolution of the working class or, under certain conditions, could revert to capitalism. Grant himself predicted the collapse of the USSR as early as 1972, though he initially believed the restoration of capitalism was ruled out. The preface is candid about this error, attributing it to an overestimation of the potential for a revolutionary faction within the bureaucracy (the so-called Reiss faction) and an underestimation of the depth of Stalinism’s destruction of Bolshevik traditions. The capitalist counter-revolution succeeded only after a protracted and contingent process, reaching a qualitative turning point with the economic collapse of 1998.
The preface draws heavily on Trotsky’s method of analysing Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s—tracing contradictory tendencies, shifting class forces, and the interplay of objective and subjective factors. Trotsky’s own formulations evolved (from “bureaucratic centrism” to “proletarian Bonapartism”), not from vacillation but from following the process as it unfolded. Grant’s analysis is presented in the same spirit: algebraic, not arithmetical, and necessarily conditional.
A notable polemic runs against the theory of “state capitalism,” which the book’s first part critiques in detail, including an appendix on the law of value in the transitional period. The preface also dismisses the entire corpus of bourgeois, reformist, and ex-Stalinist writing on the USSR as incapable of explaining the real causes of Stalinism’s crisis. It cites contemporary bourgeois sources—the Independent on Sunday and the magazine Transitions—to show that even the strategists of international capital feared a possible return to central planning after 1998, confirming that the outcome was not predetermined. The preface thus defends the continued relevance of Marxist analysis against both the triumphalism of capital and the despair of the left.