The Triangular Struggle: Why the Soviet Bureaucracy Couldn’t Save Itself
Mandel’s Framework Illuminates What The AWL-SoB Debate Left Unresolved
In our previous coverage of the November 2025 debate between Workers Liberty and Socialismo o Barbarie, we noted that both organisations were arguing against positions neither actually held. Neither defends the Stalinist states. Both oppose the bureaucracy. Yet they reached opposite conclusions about contemporary conflicts, particularly Ukraine.
What was missing from that debate, as Duncan from Red Mole observed from the floor, was a proper materialist framework for understanding what the Soviet bureaucracy actually was and why it collapsed the way it did. Ernest Mandel’s concept of the “triangular struggle” provides exactly that framework, and applying it reveals insights neither debating organization fully articulated.
What Mandel Actually Argued
In July 1990, writing as “Walter” in the pre-World Congress discussion bulletin of the Fourth International, Mandel laid out his analysis of the triangular struggle unfolding in the USSR and Eastern Europe. His framework has been widely misunderstood, including by some who claim to apply it.
Mandel argued that the Soviet bureaucracy was neither a ruling class nor a progressive force. It was “a privileged, oppressive and exploitative ruling layer in a post-capitalist society.” The Soviet Union remained “a society in transition between capitalism and socialism, frozen at that stage by the delay of world revolution and the stranglehold of bureaucratic power.”
Crucially, Mandel insisted the bureaucracy had what he called a “dual nature.” It both undermined the workers’ state in the long run and maintained it for the time being. This wasn’t apologetics for Stalinism; it was recognition that the bureaucracy’s own interests were tied to the continuation of state property, even as its parasitic rule corroded the foundations of that property.
The triangular struggle, in Mandel’s formulation, involved three social forces contending for the future of these societies: the working class (potential for political revolution), the bureaucracy (defending its power and privileges on the basis of collective ownership), and pro-restorationist bourgeois forces (both internal and external). The outcome would depend on which force prevailed.
The Three Poles in Practice
Mandel’s framework becomes clearer when we examine how these three poles actually operated in the Soviet Union’s final decades.
The Working-Class Pole represented the theoretical possibility of political revolution: workers overthrowing the bureaucracy while defending nationalised property, establishing genuine democratic control over the planned economy. This pole was weak precisely because the bureaucracy had systematically destroyed independent working-class organisation. The atomisation of Soviet workers was not incidental; it was the precondition for bureaucratic rule.
The Bureaucratic Pole was itself internally differentiated. Within the bureaucracy, Mandel recognised distinct layers with different orientations toward the future:
Conservatives sought to maintain the existing system of bureaucratic control over the nationalised economy. They feared both democratisation (which would threaten their privileges) and marketisation (which would introduce unpredictable forces). The August 1991 coup plotters represented this tendency: they wanted to preserve bureaucratic power by reversing Gorbachev’s reforms.
Reformers like Gorbachev believed the system could be modernised through controlled market mechanisms and limited political liberalisation, while preserving the essential structures of bureaucratic authority. Gorbachev never intended to restore capitalism; he aimed to make the Soviet system more efficient. His tragedy was that the reforms he unleashed had consequences he could not control.
Restorationists were those sections of the bureaucracy that had already concluded their future lay not in defending collective property but in converting their political authority into private ownership. These elements would ultimately defect from the bureaucratic pole to join the capital pole.
The Capital Pole comprised the genuinely pro-capitalist forces: Western imperialism seeking to reintegrate the Soviet bloc into the world market, nascent domestic capitalists emerging from the black market and cooperative sector, and those bureaucrats who had decisively broken with the defence of state property. Boris Yeltsin, who had learned from the Baltic independence movements how to exploit sovereignty demands, became the political expression of this pole within Russia itself.
The Decisive Transition: From Bureaucrat to Capitalist
The key insight Mandel’s framework offers is that restoration occurred not through external conquest but through the bureaucracy’s internal decomposition. When Mandel wrote in 1990, he was clear that “pro-restorationist forces are different and apart from those sectors of the nomenklatura which cling to their power and privileges on the basis of collective ownership.”
But he also warned that sections of the nomenklatura were “jumping on the band-wagon” of capitalist restoration. The question was which tendency would dominate.
What actually happened between 1989 and 1993 vindicated the structural analysis while confounding predictions about agency. The conservative bureaucrats tried to preserve the system through the August 1991 coup and failed catastrophically. The reformist bureaucrats around Gorbachev found their project overtaken by events. The restorationist elements, having converted their political positions into economic assets through nomenklatura privatisation, emerged as the new Russian capitalist class.
The mechanism was what researchers have called “insider privatisation.” Officials exploited their administrative control to acquire state assets. Positions controlling high-value rent flows went “on the auction block” in the mid-1980s. The decisive legislative change came in March 1990, allowing private ownership of small-scale factories for the first time since the 1920s. By 1991-1993, this conversion had distributed property among 1.5 million new private owners and 40 million shareholders.
The bureaucracy didn’t defend collective property because significant sections of it had already converted their stakes to private form. They had moved from the bureaucratic pole to the capitalist pole. At that point, there was no ruling bureaucracy left to make political revolution against; there was a dispersed capitalist class to expropriate, which is a fundamentally different task.
What This Means for the AWL-SoB Debate
The triangular struggle framework illuminates what both debating organisations got right and where each remained incomplete.
Workers’ Liberty correctly emphasised that the absence of working-class democracy meant the bureaucracy ruled as an alien political force. Their insistence that workers under Stalinist regimes had fewer rights than those under capitalist democracies was, for most purposes, factually accurate but missed the obvious point that the relative advantages of workers in the imperialist countries comes from the exploitation of the exploited countries. The DDR (East German) construction workers Mark Osborn mentioned in the debate, who had internalised submission to authority in ways West German workers had not, illustrated a real phenomenon.
But the AWL framework struggles to explain why, when the Soviet system collapsed, it collapsed into capitalism rather than being reformed into something else. If the bureaucracy was simply “a new class system,” it should have defended its property form. Ruling classes do not voluntarily liquidate their own systems. Yet the Soviet bureaucracy did exactly that, because large sections of it had concluded they could secure their privileges more effectively through private ownership than through collective property they merely administered.
Socialismo o Barbarie correctly emphasised that the bureaucracy’s relationship to property differed from that of a ruling class. The bureaucracy administered collective property; it did not own it. Its privileges were precarious, depending on political position rather than legal title. This explained why sections of the bureaucracy would actively facilitate restoration: they wanted to transform their unstable caste position into secure class position.
But the SoB framework, by continuing to debate whether the bureaucracy was a “class” or a “caste,” risked missing the dynamic process Mandel identified. The question wasn’t whether the bureaucracy was a class at any given moment; it was whether the triangular struggle would result in political revolution (restoring workers’ power), bureaucratic consolidation (continuing Stalinist rule), or capitalist restoration (transforming bureaucrats into capitalists).
The Strategic Implications
Understanding the triangular struggle has direct implications for how revolutionaries analyse contemporary conflicts.
On Ukraine: The debate between AWL and SoB over whether to prioritise Ukrainian self-determination or maintain “independence from both imperialist camps” reflects different assessments of what Russia now represents. If Russia is simply another imperialist power, then supporting Ukrainian resistance is straightforward anti-imperialism. If Russia represents something structurally different from Western capitalism, the analysis becomes more complex.
Mandel’s framework suggests Russia today is unambiguously capitalist. The triangular struggle was resolved in favour of the capital pole. The nomenklatura privatisation of the 1990s created the Russian oligarchy that Putin’s regime now represents. There is no “deformed workers’ state” to defend, no nationalised property to preserve. Russian imperialism in Ukraine is capitalist imperialism, whatever peculiarities its oligarchic form introduces.
This doesn’t automatically resolve the tactical question of whether revolutionaries should support arms from NATO. But it does clarify that the theoretical basis for treating Russia differently from other imperialist powers has evaporated. The triangular struggle is over; capitalism won.
On China: The Fourth International’s 2025 World Congress concluded that a capitalist state has been restored in China. The triangular struggle there has been resolved, as it was in Russia, though through a different mechanism.
When Mandel wrote in 1990, he argued that pro-capitalist forces in China were “totally marginalized” compared to Poland or Hungary. The Socialist Action tendency within the Fourth International disagreed sharply, viewing the bureaucracy as a “transmission belt for imperialism” and arguing that denationalisations, joint ventures, and special economic zones were already dismantling the planned economy. History vindicated the Socialist Action analysis on this point.
China is now characterised as a statist capitalism centralised in the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army. Most large corporations operate as joint ventures between state-owned enterprises and private companies. The “great leap” of the last thirty years was capitalist development, not socialist construction. China has emerged as an imperialist power in its own right, a transformation made possible by the historical gains of the 1949 revolution, which had created the nationalised planned economy that provided the foundation for this development.
The Chinese case demonstrates something Mandel’s framework anticipated but hoped to prevent: the bureaucracy successfully managed its own transformation into a capitalist ruling class. Unlike Russia’s chaotic nomenklatura privatisation, China’s restoration was gradual and controlled. The CCP retained political monopoly while overseeing the conversion of collective property into capitalist relations. The bureaucratic pole didn’t collapse into the capital pole; it methodically merged with it.
This has strategic implications. China’s imperialism, like Russia’s, is capitalist imperialism. There is no “deformed workers’ state” to defend, no non-capitalist property worth preserving against restoration. The working class in China faces a capitalist state with unusually strong statist characteristics, but a capitalist state nonetheless. The task is not political revolution to restore workers’ control over collective property; it is the building of independent working-class organisation capable of confronting Chinese capitalism.
On Vietnam: The Fourth International’s assessment places Vietnam in a more ambiguous position than either Russia or China. The regime is characterised as bureaucratised and authoritarian, more so than Cuba, and unable to represent a positive alternative pole for non-bureaucratic revolutionary currents.
Yet Vietnam’s trajectory differs from China’s in ways that matter for the triangular struggle analysis. Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms since 1986 followed a path similar to China’s market liberalisation, achieving dramatic economic growth and poverty reduction. But Vietnam’s reforms have been more cautious, with the government pausing or slowing marketisation at various points, particularly after the initial crisis was overcome in the mid-1990s.
Crucially, the Vietnamese Constitution maintains that land is “owned by the entire people” and managed by the state. Private land ownership does not exist; the state retains legal authority to reclaim land for public purposes. While private enterprise is permitted in small-scale production, the state sector remains dominant in strategic industries, and the Communist Party retains firm political control. There has been no definitive point of capitalist restoration comparable to Russia’s nomenklatura privatisation or China’s more extensive privatisation of state assets after 1992.
This constitutional and legal framework means the theoretical possibility of political revolution reclaiming collective property remains more viable in Vietnam than in China, where private property rights are now entrenched. The triangular struggle in Vietnam may not yet be fully resolved. The bureaucratic pole has introduced extensive market mechanisms but has not completed the merger with the capital pole that characterises restored capitalism.
The strategic implication is that Vietnam represents a case where the preparatory work of building independent working-class organisation could still matter. The window that closed in Russia and China may remain partially open in Vietnam. Whether it stays open depends on the same factors Mandel identified: the relative strength of the working-class pole, the trajectory of bureaucratic interests, and the pressures exerted by international capital.
What all three cases confirm is Mandel’s central insight: the outcome was never predetermined. The bureaucracy’s “dual nature” meant it could either defend collective property (out of self-interest in maintaining the basis of its rule) or convert its political authority into private ownership (securing its privileges in a more stable capitalist form). Which path it took depended on the balance of forces, particularly the strength of the working-class pole. In Russia and China, the working-class pole was too weak to impose political revolution. The bureaucracy chose restoration because it could. Vietnam’s outcome remains to be determined.
On the Global South more broadly: Wherever non-capitalist formations emerge or persist, Mandel’s triangular struggle offers analytical guidance. The key questions are: What is the state of working-class independent organisation? Is the bureaucracy defending collective property or converting it to private ownership? What external pressures does the capital pole exert? The answers determine revolutionary strategy.
The Critical Moment We Missed
Reading Mandel’s 1990 text today, what strikes most forcefully is his recognition that the outcome was still undetermined. He listed three possible outcomes: victory of political revolution, temporary consolidation of bureaucratic rule, or social counter-revolution through capitalist restoration. He explicitly rejected excluding any of these possibilities.
The tragedy is that the working-class pole was too weak to contend. Decades of bureaucratic atomisation had destroyed the independent institutions through which workers could have defended collective property while fighting for democratic control. When the crisis came, there was no organised force capable of articulating a third option between Gorbachev’s failing reforms and Yeltsin’s restoration project.
This is the real lesson for contemporary movements. The triangular struggle was decided by default: the working-class pole had been eliminated as a serious contender before the final crisis arrived. The bureaucracy fragmented between conservatives who couldn’t defend the old system and restorationists who didn’t want to. The capital pole won not through superior argument but because no other force was organised to resist it.
For Ukraine today, for China tomorrow, for every situation where working-class interests confront both imperialist pressure and authoritarian control, the strategic imperative is the same: build independent working-class organisation now, before the crisis arrives. The triangular struggle is won or lost in the preparatory period, not in the moment of decision.
A Note on Characterising Theorists Accurately
One pattern that emerged in the November debate deserves comment. Both AWL and SoB invoked historical theorists, Mandel, Pablo, Moreno, in ways that didn’t accurately account for what those theorists actually argued. Elaine Jones characterised Moreno as holding an “objective” view of history where conscious intervention was unnecessary; Moreno’s actual writings explicitly argued the opposite. Both organisations treated Mandel as defending Stalinist states when he was a fierce advocate for political revolution against them.
This pattern, arguing against caricatures rather than actual positions, weakens the revolutionary left’s capacity to learn from its own theoretical heritage. Mandel’s triangular struggle framework has genuine analytical power precisely because it was developed in engagement with real events by someone who wanted workers to win. Recovering what he actually argued, rather than what factional convenience suggests he argued, is part of rebuilding the theoretical equipment the movement needs.
The AWL-SoB debate didn’t resolve the questions it raised. But clarifying what Mandel’s framework actually offers, and what it can illuminate about contemporary struggles, is progress toward the strategic clarity revolutionary movements require.
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Related reading: “How the AWL Defends Ukraine but Not Palestine“ | “Open Marxism vs. Sectarian Dogma“ available at your regular bookseller.