The following text is an extract from Craipeau's latest book, The Hidden Face of Capitalism: the so-called socialist countries (1979), which so far exists only in a French manuscript. Yvan Craipeau (born 1911) is one of the founders of the Trotskyist movement in Western Europe and one of its major ideologists. While studying for his BA in French and his MA in Philosophy at the Sorbonne, he was a leader of the French Communist Party youth organisation and of the French Trotskyist group. He was Trotsky's secretary in 1933. He led the French Socialist Party youth organisation in 1935 and the French section of the Fourth International during the Resistance and until 1948. As such, he received 15,000 votes in the legislative elections of 1946 when he was nearly elected. Being opposed to the sectarian approach to the question of organisation, he was from 1954 to 1978 a leader of the French New Left and of the PSU (Unified Socialist Party) while working as a teacher. He had disagreed with Trotsky's views on the nature of the Soviet Union since 1935, and in March 1937 he openly challenged them (see extracts from his article of March 1937 and of his “counter-report” of November 1937 and Trotsky's Defense du marxisme, Paris, EDI, 1972, pp. 73–85 and 311–319. He had even earlier opposed the thesis of the degenerate workers' state where bureaucracy is regarded as a mere temporary excrescene, the definition of the Soviet party as “centrist” and the definition of Soviet society as “socialist”. Well before some better known theoreticians, and while remaining in the Marxist if not the Leninist tradition, he concluded that there was in the USSR a stable bureaucratic class and a new exploitative society. In his later works and in this manuscript, he argues that the USSR is not an exception and that the communist ideology and the workers' movement are not necessarily the main factors in the establishment and the evolution of state capitalist one-party regimes. These represent one of the most appropriate nationalist, authoritarian solutions to economic and social backwardness in the absence of developed socialist societies, hence their spread throughout the underdeveloped countries. Craipeau published six books between 1958 and 1978, including three on the history of Trotskyism, and contributed to many others (in English, to Roy Medvedev et. al (eds), Detente and Socialist Democracy, Spokesman Books, Nottingham, 1977). Part One of The Hidden Face of Capitalism: the so called socialist countries is devoted to the USSR. The extracts which follow have been selected from the introduction (sections 1 and 2) and from the conclusion (section 3 of Part Two, which focuses on the revolutionary regimes in the developing countries). Part Three deals with the future of state bureaucratic societies. The translation was made by David Bilson, Vladimir Claude Fisera and Franz Leivers.
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