Dear Editors,

In the January-February issue of Socialist Viewpoint, there is an article by Thurein Mon and Fred Weston on Myanmar (Burma).

In this article, the authors claim that a "deformed workers' state" was established in the country in 1962 under the military dictatorship of General Ne Win and quote British Trotskyist, Ted Grant, as the authority for that characterization.

Mon and Weston point to Ne Win's imposition from above of the nationalization and state planning of the economy.

A similar argument was made once by Livio Maitan, a leader of the Fourth International, concerning Egypt under Nassar, for the same reasons.

At the time, Joseph Hansen refuted Maitan. Hansen explained that under Stalin, the workers' state established by the Russian Revolution in the USSR had become a "bureaucratically degenerated workers' state" as Trotsky explained.

In subsequent revolutions in China, Korea, and Vietnam under Stalinist leaderships, those revolutions developed into workers' states through the mobilization of the working class against the capitalists. Those mobilizations were tightly bureaucratically controlled, and the result was workers' states "bureaucratically deformed from birth" that were patterned on the Soviet model.

In those cases, the Stalinist leaderships in power initially tried to follow Stalin's policy in imperialist-oppressed countries of limiting the revolution to the struggle against imperialism in a bloc with the "national bourgeoisies," but war against these revolutions by imperialism revealed that these bourgeoisies were not anti-imperialist but the opposite, so these leaderships were compelled to move against them.

Even in the case of Eastern Europe, under the military rule of the USSR following World War II, the working classes were mobilized against the capitalist classes in 1948 after a short initial period after the end of the war of preserving capitalism, as Stalin had agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt.

But then Washington and London launched the Cold War against the USSR in 1947, which emboldened the capitalist classes, and in 1948 Stalin moved against them, to preserve the Eastern European buffer zone against the West.

These working masses had just lived through the worst form of capitalist dictatorship against them under the Nazis and were ready to move against "their" capitalists.

In the worker-led anti-bureaucracy movements and uprisings in East Europe, from the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the strugglers for workers' democracy in Poland, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia-none called for the overthrow of the nationalized and planned economy, but for workers' control over the economy and for the democratization of the whole country, as well as Soviet national oppression.

In Cuba there was a non-Stalinist leadership of the revolution, which had a different dynamic rapidly leading to expropriation of the local capitalist class and imperialist property-beyond the scope of this letter.

Hansen's arguments had a positive influence on leaders of the Forth International.

Comradely,

Barry Sheppard, February 9, 2022