Letter: Lutte Ouvrière and the workers' states
International (IMG)1970sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
His letter only, the first on the Correspondence page (p. 61); read from the scan 4 Nov 2026. The page's other letters are by Alix Holt and Martin Durham, Monty Johnstone, Tariq Ali and 'Miles', and are left on the IMG Archive page.
Dear Comrade,
Let me be the first of numerous connoisseurs of sectarianism to remind the author of the notes to the LCR’s Congress resolution (International, Vol. 3, No. 4) that the French Trotskyist organisation Lutte Ouvriere does not hold that Eastern Europe, Cuba and China are state capitalist countries. On the contrary, they hold that all these countries, with the exception of the USSR, are under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
This bizarre conclusion is, of course, based on their quaint notion that the establishment of soviet-type institutions is the only way in which a workers state can be established. Thus only the USSR qualifies as a workers’ state — the rest remain part of the world capitalist economy. In all fairness to the comrades of Lutte Ouvriere, we should point out that they in fact hold that the theory of ‘state capitalism’ is a revisionist theory. Thus at least we can congratulate them on their very firm grasp of formal logic, but not however in their sensitivity to the intrusions of reality.
Yours fraternally,
Phil Hearse