Degenerated workers' state

In Trotskyist political theory, degenerated workers' states are states where capitalism has been overthrown through social revolution, and the property forms have changed into a collectivized planned economy. It is degenerated because the working class has lost its political power as Trotskyists believe it had shortly after the Russian Revolution through soviets.

For some time after Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky continued to believe that the country was a workers' state. But by the early 1930s, he came to believe that a revolution was needed to restore the working class to power. Nonetheless, he maintained that the collectivization that had taken place had changed the class nature of the state. He therefore began to describe the Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state.

After Trotsky's death, the expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe proved an unexpected development for the Fourth International's theorists. They decided that the East European states could be described as deformed workers' states. Rather than advocating a full revolutionary programme, they came to advocate a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Trotskyists consider the Stalinist bureaucrats to be a priviledged parasitic layer of administrators that are contradictory in nature. From the orthodox Trotskyist viewpoint, the power of the Stalinists is derived from protecting the gains of the revolution, while at the same time it seeks to peacefully co-exist with the imperialist countries that seek to destroy it.

Other Trotskyists came to disagree with this theory, and developed alternative explanations and tactics, describing the Soviet Union as being state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist.