In dealing with the role of the state, the most important question that must be answered is this: which class does it represent? The state must be an instrument of a class – which class did it represent in Russia? It could not represent the capitalist class because they were expropriated in 1917. It cannot be argued that it represented the interests of the peasant class, or the petty owners in the cities. It clearly represented the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy. But as a special form of proletarian Bonapartism, in the last analysis, it represented the working class in so far as it defended the nationalisation of the means of production, planning and the monopoly of foreign trade.
Under a fascist or Bonapartist regime, as we have seen, even though these gangsters might have the bourgeoisie by the throat, nevertheless there remains a capitalist class in whose interests the economy as a whole operates and on to which this parasitic excrescence clings. Some formalists say that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted a new ruling class in Russia. But serious consideration would show that this could not be the case. What they are saying is that the state is a class. The bureaucracy ‘owned’ the state, the state ‘owned’ the means of production, therefore the bureaucracy ‘owned’ the means of production, and was therefore a ruling class. But this is simply dodging the issue. The premise is false. The bureaucracy does not own the state. They are saying, in effect, that the state owns the state. Thus, the attempt to solve the matter through the method of formal logic ends in a pure tautology, which solves nothing at all.
Was the bureaucracy then the ruling class in Soviet society? This argument is clearly unsound. In capitalist society, or in any class society, no matter how privileged the top officials may be, they wield the instrument to protect the ruling class which has a direct relationship to the means of production, through their ownership. We know who Napoleon represented. We know who Louis Bonaparte, Bismarck, Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler, Churchill and de Gaulle represented. But who did the Stalinist bureaucrats represent? Themselves? This is clearly false. The state by its very nature is composed of bureaucrats, officers, generals, heads of police, etc. But these individuals do not constitute a ruling class; they are the instrument of a class even if they stand in antagonism to that class. They cannot themselves be a class. The bureaucracy consists of millions of individuals at different levels in the state apparatus. There is the petty local official and there are the high-ranking dignitaries. So, which section of the bureaucracy would ‘own’ the state? It cannot be all the bureaucrats, because they (the bureaucracy itself) are hierarchically divided. The little civil servant is part of the bureaucracy as much as the big bureaucrat.
In his work Germany, the Only Road, Trotsky deals with this question of Bonapartism as follows:
In its time, we designated the Brüning government as Bonapartism (‘a caricature of Bonapartism’), that is, as a regime of the military police dictatorship. As soon as the struggle of two social strata – the haves and the have-nots, the exploiters and the exploited – reaches its highest tension, the conditions are given for the domination of bureaucracy, police, soldiery. The government becomes ‘independent’ of society. Let us once more recall: if two forks are stuck symmetrically into a cork, the latter can stand even on the head of a pin. That is precisely the schema of Bonapartism. To be sure, such a government does not cease being the clerk of the property owners. Yet the clerk sits on the back of the boss, rubs his neck raw and does not hesitate at times to dig his boots into his face.
It might have been assumed that Brüning would hold on until the final solution. Yet, in the course of events, another link inserted itself: the Papen government. Were we to be exact, we should have to make a rectification of our old designation: the Brüning government was a pre-Bonapartist government. Brüning was only a precursor. In a perfected form, Bonapartism came upon the scene in the Papen-Schleicher government. (Trotsky, Germany, The Only Road, in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 276.)
The Bonapartism in the epoch of decay and crisis differs from the Bonapartism of capitalism’s youth. It can take many forms, involving different combinations, depending on the concrete conditions. The rule of Napoleon or Oliver Cromwell – a classical Bonapartism – was based upon the emergence of bourgeois society. The Bonapartism at the stage of capitalism’s rise is strong and confident. Under the conditions of a powerful development of the productive forces, it attains a certain stability. But the Bonapartism of capitalism’s decline is affected by senility. Rising out of the crisis of capitalist society, it cannot solve any of the problems with which it is faced. The crisis of the inter-war period gave rise to a whole host of Bonapartist regimes, attempting to balance between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution. In the ex-colonial world, given the weakness of bourgeois democracy, again many of these regimes are Bonapartist in character. Here we see periods of weak parliamentary rule giving way to military dictatorship.
In contrast, fascist rule represents the complete political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. All democratic rights are crushed. The capitalist class hands over all power into the hands of the fascist upstarts, which use the mass forces of the frenzied petty bourgeois as a battering ram against the working class. The proletariat, on the basis of fascist rule is completely atomised.
There is an element of Bonapartism in fascism. Without this element, namely, without the raising of state power above society owing to an extreme sharpening of the class struggle, fascism would have been impossible. But we pointed out from the very beginning that it was primarily a question of Bonapartism of the epoch of imperialist decline, which is qualitatively different from Bonapartism of the epoch of bourgeois rise… The ministries of Brüning, Schleicher, and the presidency of Hindenburg in Germany, Pétain’s government in France – they all have proved, or must prove, unstable. In the epoch of imperialist decline a pure Bonapartist Bonapartism is completely inadequate; imperialism finds it indispensable to mobilise the petty bourgeois and to crush the proletariat under its weight. (Trotsky, Writings 1939-40, p. 410.)
Innumerable references could be given to show that a capitalist state presupposes private property – individual ownership of the means of production. The state is the apparatus of rule: it cannot itself be the class which rules. The bureaucracy is merely part of the apparatus of the state. It may ‘own’ the state, in the sense that it lifts itself above society and becomes relatively independent of the economically dominant class, i.e., the ruling class. That was the case in Nazi Germany, where the bureaucracy dictated to the capitalists what they should produce, how they should produce it, etc., for the purposes of war. So, with the war economy of Britain, USA and elsewhere, the state dictated to the capitalists what and how they should produce. This did not convert them into a ruling class. Why? Because these measures were in defence of private property and in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.
Clearly, the bureaucracy manages and plans industry. But whose industry do they manage and plan? In capitalist society, the managers plan and manage industry in the individual enterprises and trusts. But it does not make them the owners of those enterprises and trusts. The nationalised industries in Britain, for instance, were run by a managerial bureaucracy, but they were not the owners of these industries. They were owned by the state – the capitalist state – and run in the interests of the capitalist economy as a whole. The bureaucracy in the USSR managed the entire industry. In that sense, it is true that it had more independence from its economic base than any other bureaucracy or state machine in the whole of human history. But as Engels emphasised and we must re-emphasise, in the final analysis, the economic basis is decisive.
Bourgeois sociologists resort to arbitrary definitions in order to characterise all sorts of social groupings and sub-groupings as classes, obscuring the real class basis of society. By contrast, Marxism defines a class in terms of property relations. To argue that their function as managers somehow makes the bureaucrats into a ruling class makes no sense at all. It certainly has nothing in common with the Marxist definition of a capitalist class. The bureaucracy, in its role as a managerial stratum, did play a role in production, in the same way as managers in capitalist enterprises do. But there is a fundamental difference. Managers in the West work for private owners of industry (or for the bourgeois state, which operates as the handmaiden of the private sector). They do not own industry, and do not constitute a separate social class.
As managers, they are entitled to what Marx called “the wages of superintendence”, and nothing more. Exactly the same is true of the managers in a workers’ state, including a healthy workers’ state for that matter, where in the transitional period there would still be a differential between the wages of skilled and unskilled labour. But what characterised the Stalinist bureaucracy was that it devoured a colossal part of the wealth produced by the working class. This had nothing whatever to do with its managerial functions, or the “wages of superintendence”.
If they take more, it is in the same way as the fascist or Bonapartist bureaucracy consume part of the surplus value produced by the workers. But they are not a class in the Marxist sense of the word, but a parasitic caste. “In its intermediary and regulating function,” states Trotsky, “its concern to maintain social rank, and its exploitation of the state apparatus for personal goals, the Soviet bureaucracy is similar to every other bureaucracy, especially the fascist. But it is also in a vast way different. In no other regime has a bureaucracy ever achieved such a degree of independence from the dominating class.” (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 248.)
The privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy began precisely where its productive functions (such as they were) ended. In fact, they arose, not in the sphere of production at all, but in that of distribution. Under conditions of general poverty, it was necessary to decide who received what. Trotsky compares this to a queue outside a baker’s shop. If there is a shortage of bread, and the queue is a long one, it can become unruly. A gendarme is necessary to keep the queue in order, and make sure everyone gets his share. In the process, it often happens that the gendarme takes more than anyone else. This may not create the most favourable attitude towards the gendarme. But it certainly does not make him into a ruling class in the Marxist sense of the word!
The Stalinist bureaucracy was not a new ruling class, as argued by J. Burnham, M. Shachtman, M. Djilas, J. Kuroń and T. Cliff (in company with the bourgeois and the Labour Right Wing), but a parasitic caste, which plays no necessary role in the production process. Precisely for this reason, meaningful reform from the top is ruled out. The ignorant Polish ‘dissident’ intellectuals reasoned that if free trade unions were possible under capitalism, why should they not be allowed by ‘state capitalism’? Indeed, for the capitalists under normal circumstances, bourgeois ‘democracy’ (i.e. formal democracy, in which the workers are permitted certain rights, but where the banks and monopolies ultimately decide what happens) is the most economic and secure form of government, far preferable to the monstrous waste and looting of the state which occurs under fascism or Bonapartism. But under Stalinism, democratic rights immediately threaten the position of the bureaucracy. Formal democracy and Stalinism are incompatible.
Trotsky was very firm in his view that the bureaucracy was not a new ruling class. In a polemic with a French supporter Yvan Craipeau in 1937 he explains:
This time he draws his smashing argument from a statement in The Revolution Betrayed to the effect that ‘all the means of production belong to the state, and the state belongs, in some respect, to the bureaucracy.’ Craipeau is jubilant. If the means of production belong to the state, and the state to the bureaucracy, the latter becomes the collective proprietor of the means of production and by that alone, the possessing and exploiting class. The remainder of Craipeau’s argument is almost purely literary in character. He tells us once again, with the air of polemicising against me, that the Thermidorian bureaucracy is evil, rapacious, reactionary, bloodthirsty, etc. A real revelation! However, we never said that the Stalinist bureaucracy was virtuous! We have only denied it the quality of a class in the Marxist sense, that is to say, with regard to ownership of the means of production. (Trotsky, Writings 1937-38, p. 36.)
The state is the instrument of class rule, of coercion, a glorified policeman. But the policeman is not the ruling class. The police can become unbridled, can become bandits, but that does not convert them into a capitalist, feudal or slave-owning class. The character of the bureaucracy as a parasite is shown by the fact they are forced to pretend they do not exist as a privileged stratum. In the words of Trotsky: “Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism.” It enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income. “The biggest apartments, the juiciest steaks, and even Rolls Royces are not enough to transform the bureaucracy into an independent ruling class,” commented Trotsky. (Trotsky, Writings 1933-34, p. 113.)
The workers’ democracy under Lenin and Trotsky was replaced by the bureaucratic regime of Stalin. Although the political forms are radically different from those of the initial years of the revolution, what remained was the nationalised property relations. It was this fact – the existence of a nationalised planned economy – that defined the basic class nature of the Soviet Union. It was a workers’ state that had become horribly deformed by a bureaucratic counter-revolution. “A tumour can grow to tremendous size and even strangle the living organism, but a tumour can never become an independent organism,” remarked Trotsky. (Ibid., p. 19.)
The Soviet bureaucracy was similar to other bureaucracies, especially the fascist bureaucracy, with one very important difference. The fascist bureaucracy rested on the private ownership of the means of production, and was the most monstrous expression of a regime of decline. The Stalinist bureaucracy rested on the new property forms established by the revolution, which for a whole period demonstrated a colossal vitality. It was compelled to defend state property as the source of its power and income. This fact alone enabled it to play a relatively progressive role in developing the productive forces. However, even in the best period, it remained a parasitic growth on the workers’ state, the source of endless waste, corruption and mismanagement. It had all the vices, but none of the historical virtues of a ruling class.
As Trotsky put it: “If the Bonapartist riff-raff is a class this means that it is not an abortion but a viable child of history. If its marauding parasitism is ‘exploitation’ in the scientific sense of the term, this means that the bureaucracy possesses a historical future as the ruling class indispensable to the given system of economy.” (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 24, New York, 1970.) This is clearly not the case. Without doubt, the Soviet economy has taken massive strides forward, but this impulse was not due to the bureaucracy as such, but the nationalised planned economy. The bureaucracy has become a massive brake on the technical and cultural development of Russia. At best, the Soviet bureaucracy played a relatively progressive role in developing heavy industry, but with tremendous wastage.
The state under Stalin had nothing in common with that of October, except state ownership and planning. Every gain of the revolution aimed at the introduction of workers’ administration and control of industry and the state was abolished. The bureaucracy had complete control. The so-called elections were a farce, in which the candidates of a single party were regularly elected with 99 per cent of the votes – something which is even technically impossible (people sometimes move house, and even die). The working class was at the mercy of the bureaucracy, subject to arbitrary dismissal, exile, arrest, confinement in mental hospitals, and all the other methods whereby a totalitarian state maintains its people in a state of all-pervading fear. In addition to the usual organs of repression, the bureaucracy had the services of an army of spies, informers and trusties, present in every workshop, office, classroom or block of flats.
It is true that in later years, especially after Stalin’s death, big reforms were introduced, which led to rising living standards, better social services and so on. But at all times, control remained firmly in the hands of the bureaucracy. Such reforms that were made always came from the top and did not in any way modify the fundamental relationship between the working class and the ruling caste. There was no element of workers’ democracy whatsoever.