Trotsky, Markets, and East European Reforms

The typical Western Trotskyist is apt to criticize reforms of the Hungarian or Chinese type as a step backwards, if not a betrayal. A Trotskyist such as Ernest Mandel is not against the temporary use of money and commodity relations, indeed would warn against trying to abolish them prematurely. None the less, they envisage the transition as a period in which markets are gradually replaced by planning, planning which functions democratically, which conforms to Marx’s vision of control ‘by the direct producers’ of the means of production and the product. This they believe was Trotsky’s own position. Not only they believe it. True, Stephen Cohen is on record expressing his belief that Trotsky was ‘a Nepist’. Also, Hungarian work on Preobrazhensky stressed, correctly, that the bitterness of the factional struggle of the twenties should not blind us to the fact that the protagonists shared many common assumptions and common views.1 None the less, it is quite widely believed that Trotsky was unhappy with the NEP compromise, and that Bukharin was the spiritual father of present-day economic reformism; Moshe Lewin wrote a whole book on these lines.2 When I read his book I recalled a senior Soviet professor, who recalled the controversies, saying ‘Bukharin and Preobrazhensky both believed that socialism and the market are incompatible, and both were wrong.’