We begin this column with an excerpt from Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution: Evolution of a Discussion on the Eastern European Workers States, 1946–1951, an Education for Socialists bulletin that was one of the titles reprinted in June. The excerpt is from an article written by Socialist Workers Party leader Joseph Hansen in 1950 titled "The problem of Eastern Europe."

In this article Hansen joined the debate in the world communist movement at that time about the class character of the governments established in Eastern European countries after World War II. In Yugoslavia and Albania, capitalist regimes were overthrown and workers states were established through popular revolutions that grew out of the mass resistance to fascist rule, despite Stalinist misleadership. In other Eastern European countries, through the resistance of working people, the German imperialist occupation was defeated as the capitalist governments collapsed in face of the advance of the Soviet armies. Moscow installed Stalinist-led regimes and eventually, in face of hostile actions by imperialism and native bourgeois forces, organized tightly controlled mobilizations of workers and farmers that led to the overturning of capitalist property relations in those countries. Hansen argued against those who said these remained capitalist states, maintaining that they were workers states, albeit bureaucratically deformed ones. The Education for Socialists bulletin is a collection of articles that were part of that debate. Copyright © 1969 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

The expression of this relation is not limited to a fixed form. "The forms of bourgeois states are exceedingly variegated," Lenin said. He at once added, of course, that "their essence is the same: in one way or another, all these states are in the last analysis inevitably a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Similarly, Lenin continues, "The transition from capitalism to communism will certainly bring a great variety and abundance of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be only one: the dictatorship of the proletariat." (State and Revolution, p. 31.)

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, as we all know, is based on private property in the means of production. To maintain this social relation it oppresses the working class.

The dictatorship of the proletariat begins with the elevation of the working class into a ruling class in place of the capitalists. The task of the new power is to end the social relation peculiar to the capitalist class. But this does not occur overnight. Even a model workers state is still nothing but a hangover of capitalist society. On top of this, a workers state is forced to maintain for a time, even in the best of circumstances, bourgeois modes of distributing the national income.

We have a contradictory reality--a state that is based on destruction of bourgeois property forms and the nationalization of economy but which still retains vestiges of capitalism.

When this state eventually begins to wither away as the productive forces expand and all danger of a capitalist restoration vanishes, then we can first begin to speak of socialism, the lower stage of communism. If we call a workers state "socialist" it is more because of its aims and tendencies than what it is when it first emerges from the womb of capitalism.

A workers state is a transitional state, transitional between capitalism and socialism.

A healthy workers state carries this transition through as rapidly as possible by extending the revolution along the international spiral. But history has forced us to include in our general category a workers state that is not healthy, one that is retrogressing toward capitalism. This degenerated workers state, spilling over the frontiers fixed at the close of World War I, has upset capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe and given rise to formations that are pretty much replicas of the USSR. Their fate is intimately bound up with that of the Soviet Union. If the USSR must be included in our general category of a workers state, I do not think it is incorrect to include Yugoslavia and the other Eastern European countries where the capitalists have been displaced as the ruling class.  
 
 
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