The term "degenerated workers' state" is commonly used to refer only to the Soviet Union.

Trotskyism uses the term caste rather than class, because they saw the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state, not a new class society.

Trotsky developed the theory that the Russian workers' state had become a "bureaucratically degenerated workers' state".

In particular, Grant attempted to work up from Trotsky's theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state.

Like a degenerated workers' state, a deformed workers' state cannot be said to be a state that is transitioning to socialism.

By the end of the Second World War, they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state.

However, Trotsky rejected that description of the USSR claiming instead that it was a degenerated workers' state.

Mandel blamed the waste of resources in the Soviet economy on bureaucracy, and regarded the USSR as a bureaucratically degenerated workers' state.

Thus, faced with the increasing lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, they concluded that it was no longer a socialist workers' state, but a degenerated workers' state.

Many Orthodox Trotskyist groups attach particular importance in holding that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state and other similar societies are deformed workers' states.

There are various terms used by Trotskyists to define such states, such as "degenerated workers' state" and "deformed workers' state", "state capitalist" or "bureaucratic collectivist".

The Fourth International held until 1951 that the 'glacis' states had remained capitalist even while the FI maintained the position that Russia was a degenerated workers' state.

At this point they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a degenerated workers' state).

He concluded that it could not be defended, as Trotsky held, as a degenerated workers' state, but that it was a bureaucratic collectivist system - an idea he introduced to Trotskyism.

James Cannon was the head of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the late 1930's and, following Leon Trotsky, argued that the Soviet Union was a "degenerated workers' state."

Taking Leon Trotsky's concept of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state, the 1951 Third World Congress of the International described the new regimes as deformed workers' states.

Shachtmanites believe that the Stalinist rulers of Communist countries are a new ruling class distinct from the workers and reject Trotsky's description of Stalinist Russia as a "degenerated workers' state".

In Trotskyist political theory the term degenerated workers' state has been used since the 1930s to describe the state of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in or about 1924.

While Cannon and his allies regarded the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state", Shachtman and his party argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was following an imperialist policy in Eastern Europe.

His growing break with Trotsky was indicated by his analysis, by 1927, of the Soviet Union as "state capitalist", in contrast to Trotsky's designation of it as a "degenerated workers' state".

Trotsky always emphasised that the degenerated workers' state was not a new form of society, but a transitional phase between capitalism and socialism (and closer to capitalism) that would inevitably collapse into one form or the other.

Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a "degenerated workers' state" controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy, which would eventually either be overthrown via a political revolution establishing a workers' democracy, or degenerate into a capitalist class.

Marxism and Freedom presented an analysis of the USSR's economy as state-capitalist - rather than socialist, bureaucratic collectivist, or a 'degenerated workers' state' - based on Marx's economic categories and official Soviet statistics.

Glaberman was associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a radical left group that split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which understood the Soviet Union as a state capitalist society rather than as a degenerated workers' state.

At first, the International held that, while the USSR was a degenerated workers' state, the post-World War II East European states were still bourgeois entities, because revolution from above was not possible, and capitalism persisted.