 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Bureaucratic collectivism" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| Part of aPolitics series |
| Third camp |
|---|
Related topics |
Bureaucratic collectivism is a theory ofclass society. It is used by someleftists to describe the nature of theSoviet Union underJoseph Stalin and other similar states inCentral andEastern Europe and elsewhere (such asNorth Korea).[citation needed]
A bureaucratic collectiviststate owns themeans of production, while thesurplus or profit is distributed among an elitepartybureaucracy (nomenklatura), rather than among theworking class. Also, it is the bureaucracy—not the workers, or the people in general—which controls the economy and the state. Thus, the system is not trulysocialist, but it is notcapitalist either.[1] InTrotskyist theory, it is anew form of class society whichexploits workers through new mechanisms. Theorists, such asYvan Craipeau, who hold this view believe that bureaucratic collectivism does not represent progress beyond capitalism—that is, that it is no closer to being aworkers' state than a capitalist state would be, and is considerably less efficient. Some social democrats[who?] even believe that certain kinds of capitalism, such associal democratic capitalism, are more progressive than a bureaucratic collectivist society.
George Orwell's famous novelNineteen Eighty-Four describes a fictional society of "oligarchical collectivism". Orwell was familiar with the works ofJames Burnham, havingreviewed Burnham'sThe Managerial Revolution prior to writingNineteen Eighty-Four. Oligarchical collectivism was a fictionalized conceptualization of bureaucratic collectivism, whereBig Brother and the Inner Party form the nucleus of a hierarchical organization of society professing itself as "English socialism" because of its revolutionary origins, but afterwards only concerned with total domination by the Party.
The idea has also been applied to Western countries outside theEastern Bloc, as a regime necessary to institute in order to maintain capitalism and keep it from disintegrating in thepost-war era.[2] This different form of bureaucratic collectivism is supposed to integrate various sectors of society, such as labor unions, corporations, and government organizations, in order to keep contradictions in the economy from developing into a general meltdown. This form is supposedly embodied in thewelfare state, which organizes workers into a government network subsumed under capitalist relations.
"Bureaucratic collectivism" was first used as a term to describe a theory originating in England, shortly before theFirst World War, about a possible future social organisation. After the war, theRussian Revolution, and the rise to power ofJoseph Stalin in theSoviet Union,Hugo Urbahns andLucien Laurat both began to critique the nature of the Soviet state in a similar manner.[citation needed]
This theory was first taken up withinTrotskyism by a small group inFrance around Craipeau. It was also taken up byBruno Rizzi, who believed that the Soviet, German, and Italian bureaucracies were progressive and celebrated "the class which has the courage to make itself master of the state".[citation needed] It was with Rizzi thatLeon Trotsky debated in the late 1930s. Trotsky held that the Soviet Union was adegenerated workers state and that if it did not undergo a new workers'political revolution, it could move towards a new form of society, such as bureaucratic collectivism. However, Trotsky doubted that a state ofpure bureaucratic collectivism would ever be reached; he believed that, in the absence of aproletarian revolution to return the Soviet Union to socialism, a comprehensivecounter-revolution would return the nation to capitalism instead.
Soon after theWorkers Party in theUnited States (later theIndependent Socialist League), led byMax Shachtman, split from theFourth International, it adopted the theory of bureaucratic collectivism and developed it. As a result, it is often associated withLeft Shachtmanism and theThird Camp. Its version had much in common with Craipeau's, as developed byJames Burnham andJoseph Carter, but little with Rizzi's.
In 1948,Tony Cliff argued that it is difficult to make a critique of bureaucratic collectivism because authors such as Shachtman never actually published a developed account of the theory. He asserted that the theoretical poverty of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism is not accidental and tried to show that the theory is only negative; empty, abstract, and therefore arbitrary. Cliff proposedstate capitalism as an alternative theory that more accurately describes the nature of the Soviet Union underStalinism.[3]
In a 1979Monthly Review essay,Ernest Mandel argued that the hypothesis that theSoviet bureaucracy is anew class does not correspond to a serious analysis of the real development and the real contradictions ofSoviet economy and society in the last fifty years. He asserted thatconflict of interest turns bureaucracy into a cancer on a society in transition betweencapitalism andsocialism. Accordingly, bureaucratic management is not only increasingly wasteful but it also prevents the system of aplanned economy based uponsocialized property from operating effectively. Mandel concluded that this undeniable fact is in itself incompatible with the characterization of the bureaucracy as aruling class and with the USSR as a new "exploitativemode of production" whose "laws of motion" have never been specified.[4]
A related concept is a "command administrative" system within what sociologist Michael Kennedy called "Communist-governed state socialism".[5] In Has Socialism Failed, the lateSouth African Communist Party leaderJoe Slovo referred to the problems associated with a party having "administrative command", stating "post-apartheid state power must clearly vest in the elected representatives of the people and not, directly or indirectly, in the administrative command of a party."[6]
{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help)