Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
In the introduction, the author recounts his first meeting with Ted Grant in 1998, an encounter that led him to join the International Marxist Tendency. Grant, a veteran Marxist, recommended Lenin’s State and Revolution and Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and the author was convinced by Grant and Alan Woods’s Reason in Revolt. Crucially, he was won over by the IMT’s approach to mass workers’ organisations: when the masses move, they do so through familiar organisations, no matter how corrupt their leaders. Events since Grant’s death—the rise of SYRIZA, Podemos, France Insoumise, and Corbyn’s Labour—have confirmed this strategic insight. Grant insisted on having faith in the working class due to its fundamental role in production.
The author argues that Grant preserved the Marxist method during the postwar boom when many others abandoned it. Grant’s key theoretical contribution was developing the concept of “Soviet Bonapartism,” building on Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR’s class nature. The author distinguishes sharply between capitalism, based on private ownership, and a workers’ state, based on a nationalised, planned economy, noting that the same economic base can support different state forms. The ideal form of the bourgeois state is the democratic republic, which controls the working majority through economic coercion, rule of law, habit, and force; military dictatorship is an unstable alternative. On a nationalised, planned economy, the ideal workers’ state involves direct democratic participation by the working class. The alternative is “proletarian Bonapartism,” Grant’s term for Stalinism: a regime defending nationalised property through bureaucratic dictatorship.
Bonapartism arises when class struggle reaches a stalemate, resolved by a dictator imposing order from above. Trotsky used the Thermidor analogy to explain the Russian Revolution’s degeneration: economic backwardness and isolation produced a bureaucratic caste. Stalinism was a political counterrevolution that usurped power from the soviets but did not restore capitalism; it preserved nationalised property. Trotsky argued the USSR remained a workers’ state in class basis, despite bureaucratic distortions. Grant applied this analysis to post-war regimes, rejecting the “state capitalist” thesis and insisting the USSR was a deformed workers’ state. The Stalinist bureaucracy eventually collapsed under its own weight, leading to capitalist restoration. The author concludes that studying these regimes is essential for orienting to future revolutionary possibilities.