Deformed workers state

In Trotskyist political theory, deformed workers' states are states where capitalism has been overthrown through social revolution, and the property forms have changed into a collectivized planned economy. They are deformed because the working class has never held political power, as Trotskyists believe it did shortly after the Russian Revolution through soviets, but rather collectivism has been imposed from the top, or from outside.

The theory was developed after World War II, when the Soviet Union had created satellite states in Eastern Europe, by the theorists of the Fourth International. Taking Leon Trotsky's concept of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, they described the new regimes as deformed workers' states.

Rather than advocating a full revolutionary programme, they came to advocate a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Other Trotskyists disagreed with this interpretation, and adopted other theories, describing the Soviet Union as being state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist.

Orthodox Trotskyists cite examples of deformed workers' states today as including Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam. The Committee for a Workers International has also included states such as Syria or Burma at times when they have had a new class, state socialism, state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivist and degenerated workers state.