Dictatorship of the Proletariat bureaucracy problem?

[Jacob Cliff]

Many claim the Dictatorship of the Proletariat will result in a new bureaucratic nightmare akin the the USSR. How is this prevented? Wouldn't constantly rejuvenating positions of power weaken the efficiency of production? But on the flip side, how do you ensure property lay in workers control?

[tuwix]

Direct democracy is only solution there. If everything is decided democratically, the bureaucracy has nothing to say.

[Bala Perdida]

Don't have a party. Simple as that.

[Remus Bleys]

"The socialist economy kills bureaucracy not because it is applied from the base or from the centre, but because it is the first economy which goes beyond the muck of monetary accounting and of the commercial budget system."

[RedWorker]

Why would the dictatorship of the proletariat result in a bureaucracy any more than elections do now?

[TheAntiReactionary]

Direct democracy is only solution there. If everything is decided democratically, the bureaucracy has nothing to say.

Wouldn't we then have a tyranny of the majority? Plain democracy already has a number of flaws. How can we be sure a society where the majority has the final say would advance any further or be any more fair than a society under the control of a bureaucracy? Sure, we need a source where decision making comes from, but I don't think we can just say that whatever most people will be happy with would be the right choice. If it worked like that in countries with more reactionary populations, they'd probably have death penalty for thieves and castration for those that have extra-marital sexual relations.

So, how would we be able to achieve a democratic society where intellectually reliable decisions are made?

[Tim Cornelis]

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/computers/computers_and_nove.htm


For Nove, bureaucracy is a necessary consequence of trying to plan a vast economy like the former Soviet Union's. Bureaucrats must keep track of all of the intermediate steps involved in industrial production. Nove rejects Lenin's claim that "Capitalism has simplified the work of accounting and control, has reduced it to a comparatively simple system of bookkeeping, that any literate person can do." Nove's retorts to Lenin as follows: "A large factory, for instance, making cars or chemical machinery, is an assembly plant of parts and components which can be made in literally thousands of different factories, each of which, in turn, may depend on supplies of materials, fuel and machines, made by hundreds or more other production units. Introduce the further dimension of time (things need to be provided punctually and in sequence), add the importance of provision for repair, maintenance, replacement, investment in future productive capacity, the training and deployment of the labor force, its needs for housing, amenities, hairdressers, dry-cleaners, fuel, furniture...'Simple', indeed!"

I have worked as a systems analyst, database adminstrator and computer programmer since 1968 and am astonished that Nove does not recognize that these types of tasks have long since been relegated to large-scale automation. I have worked on systems that automate these tasks on and off since the early 1970's and can attest to the fact that bureaucrats are not necessary to keep track of anything in the production process.

What is a bureaucracy? An administrative machinery? Communism will have something like that. Communism will still have accounting and therefore will still have administrative functions.

Marx: "Book-keeping, as the control and ideal synthesis of the process, becomes the more necessary the more the process assumes a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is therefore more necessary in capitalist production than in the scattered production of handicraft and peasant economy, more necessary in collective production than in capitalist production. But the costs of book-keeping drop as production becomes concentrated and book-keeping becomes social. (p. 79)

If we conceive society as being not capitalistic but communistic, there will be no money-capital at all in the first place, not the disguises cloaking the transactions arising on account of it. The question then comes down to the need of society to calculate beforehand how much labour, means of production, and means of subsistence it can invest, without detriment, in such lines of business as for instance the building of railways, which do not furnish any means of production or subsistence, nor produce any useful effect for a long time, a year or more, while they extract labour, means of production and means of subsistence from the total annual production. (p. 192)"

Pannekoek: "The basis of the social organization of production consists in a careful administration, in the form of statistics and bookkeeping. Statistics of the consumption of all the different goods, statistics of the capacity of the industrial plants, of the machines, of the soil, of the mines, of the means of transport, statistics of the population and the resources of towns, districts and countries, all these present the foundation of the entire economic process in wellordered rows of numerical data. Statistics of economic processes were already known under capitalism; but they remained imperfect because of the independence and the limited view of the private business men, and they found only a limited application. Now they are the starting point in the organization of production; to produce the right quantity of goods, the quantity used or wanted must be known. At the same time statistics as the compressed result of the numerical registration of the process of production, the comprehensive summary of the bookkeeping, expresses the course of development.

...

The administration by means of bookkeeping and computing is a special task of certain persons, just as hammering steel or baking bread is a special task of other persons, all equally useful and necessary. The workers in the computing offices are neither servants nor rulers. They are not officials in the service of the workers' councils, obediently having to perform their orders. They are groups of workers, like other groups collectively regulating their work themselves, disposing of their implements, performing their duties, as does every group, in continual connection with the needs of the whole. They are the experts who have to provide the basical data of the discussions and decisions in the assemblies of workers and of councils. They have to collect the data, to present them in an easily intelligible form of tables, of graphs, of pictures, so that every worker at every moment has a clear image of the state of things."

The point is, administrative functions come under direct control of producers. 'Bureaucracy' is not the issue, accountability is.

[D-A-C]

Direct democracy is only solution there. If everything is decided democratically, the bureaucracy has nothing to say.

One of the biggest myths of the entire left wing is that 'democracy' is some miracle cure for everything, that the 'average', 'everyday', 'regular', 'common' person has access to some fountain of knowledge of what's best.

Isaac Deutscher makes a great point in his biography of Stalin when he points out that after successfully winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks would have been democratically kicked from office if they held free elections, and that the other parties who had actively hampered the revolution like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, would have won a majority. All that would have done is give the old regime and the Whites a significant chance to reclaim power.

Democracy doesn't work if people aren't educated enough to make informed decisions.


Don't have a party. Simple as that.

Yeah that'll actually solve the problem! You won't have to deal with a beauracratic nightmare ever if there is no Party ... because you'll never have any real power to do anything.

So if you want to avoid the whole problem, that really is an awesome solution.


Many claim the Dictatorship of the Proletariat will result in a new bureaucratic nightmare akin the the USSR. How is this prevented? Wouldn't constantly rejuvenating positions of power weaken the efficiency of production? But on the flip side, how do you ensure property lay in workers control?

I think a large part of the problem of the Soviet Union lay in the conditions of Russia itself, and also the devastation caused by the Civil War and constant international pressure and outright aggression from the imperial powers. So assuming that model will repeat itself over and over is not necessarily correct as quite often decisions and events were undertaken ad hoc as a result of forces outside of their control.

That said, I doubt constantly rejuvenating positions of power would solve the crises as both the Bolsheviks and later Stalin did such a thing through the many purges of the Party (that was a factor in their undertaking) and it had little long term effect.

I don't have the perfect answer, mainly because I don't fully understand your question, namely, what is the nightmare scenario of bureaucratic control that your referring to? What forms does it take? If you start solving the problem by analysing each of the strands of the problem that would be the best way.

Although off the top of my head there are some interesting discussions revolving around a mixture of a command economy and localised worker ownership of business and manufacturing. Its not my area of expertise, but I would recommend someone like David Harvey as being a go-to source for examining the problem.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I don't think that anyone would argue that democracy is a "miracle", there are major flaws with democracy as a decision-making process, but in matters concerning large groups of people it's the "least bad" option.

[D-A-C]

I don't think that anyone would argue that democracy is a "miracle", there are major flaws with democracy as a decision-making process, but in matters concerning large groups of people it's the "least bad" option.

Maybe I am over-pessimistic but I don't think you can underestimate people's natural tendency towards inaction and stupidity, sometimes you really have to bypass what people 'want' and just act in a way that is good for them in the long run.

A quote supposedly Churchill said springs to mind, 'It has been said democracy is the worst from of government except all the others that have been tried'

But also for some reason so do these ones, again supposedly, from Mao and then Spinoza respectively:

Mao - 'Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy'.

Spinoza - 'People fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance'.

[Celtic_0ne]

i like the idea of a very democratic party one with balances to hold the party leaders in check

[Celtic_0ne]

and if that doesnt work the party revolts and ousts the leaders

[Bala Perdida]

One of the biggest myths of the entire left wing is that 'democracy' is some miracle cure for everything, that the 'average', 'everyday', 'regular', 'common' person has access to some fountain of knowledge of what's best.

Isaac Deutscher makes a great point in his biography of Stalin when he points out that after successfully winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks would have been democratically kicked from office if they held free elections, and that the other parties who had actively hampered the revolution like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, would have won a majority. All that would have done is give the old regime and the Whites a significant chance to reclaim power.

Democracy doesn't work if people aren't educated enough to make informed decisions.

I agree with the point you raise about democracy, it's an over-glorified disaster. It's slow and inefficient at best, having everyone vote. It's pretty limited too, but why the stalinist myth that the bolsheviks where some kind of divine force that pulled Russia out of the ashes? They accused basically all opposition of collaborating with the whites and they went imprisoned any non-party activists. Their revolution was a failure through and after the civil war. There was no drastic social revolution after 1917. They



Yeah that'll actually solve the problem! You won't have to deal with a beauracratic nightmare ever if there is no Party ... because you'll never have any real power to do anything.

So if you want to avoid the whole problem, that really is an awesome solution.

That's one idea. It's better than having a bunch of power hungry opportunists gorge themselves, calling themselves your saviors. The working people stopped having any real power after Kronstadt. After that it was all party officials.

[Tim Cornelis]

I'm still on the fence about democracy. Democracy as principle is silly, but democracy is nonetheless a necessary instrument for self-emancipation. If you delegate the task of emancipation to the most advanced workers organised in a party there is a significant risk that it needs to enforce socialisation, possibly against the wishes of workers. This would mean that the advanced workers would come to decide about the employment of the means of production, and the rest would be excluded and separated from decision-making power. At that point, the large numbers of workers, possibly the majority, would be separated from the conditions of labour -- wage-labour is reaffirmed. Moreover, at what point does it shade into Blanquism?

So the Bolsheviks may have been voted out of power, but this could also be seen as underscoring that they have failed. And if they deny universal suffrage, labour has not been emancipated. The result is well-known.

"Democracy doesn't work if people aren't educated enough to make informed decisions."

And the opposite of democracy, say dictatorship, is no guarantee that the rulers are educated enough to make informed decisions.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The point is, administrative functions come under direct control of producers. 'Bureaucracy' is not the issue, accountability is.

How comradely put! Bureaucracy is a process workers must master if they are to credibly rule.


So the Bolsheviks may have been voted out of power, but this could also be seen as underscoring that they have failed. And if they deny universal suffrage, labour has not been emancipated. The result is well-known.

The Bolsheviks were voted out of power in the soviet elections of 1918 which they responded to with nothing less than coups d'etat. However, what's wrong with proletarian demographic majorities denying universal suffrage to the bourgeoisie and maybe the petit-bourgeoisie?

[RedWorker]

The point is, administrative functions come under direct control of producers. 'Bureaucracy' is not the issue, accountability is.

Bureaucracy as used in this context typically means rule by unelected officials with no control by the population, so if administrative functions were under direct control of producers there would be no bureaucracy.

[Tim Cornelis]

By that definition Bordiga's socialism is 100% bureaucracy, so he's wrong saying bureaucracy will disappear in his vision of socialism.

[RedWorker]

Oh, I didn't know the context of your post. I just saw that one line because Die Neue Zeit quoted you.

[Tim Cornelis]

que? I think you misinterpreted what I said just now?

It was an 'incidentally remark'

[Os Cangaceiros]

Maybe I am over-pessimistic but I don't think you can underestimate people's natural tendency towards inaction and stupidity, sometimes you really have to bypass what people 'want' and just act in a way that is good for them in the long run.

A quote supposedly Churchill said springs to mind, 'It has been said democracy is the worst from of government except all the others that have been tried'

But also for some reason so do these ones, again supposedly, from Mao and then Spinoza respectively:

Mao - 'Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy'.

Spinoza - 'People fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance'.

To me none of that actually criticizes democracy as a decision making process, though, because even Leninist orgs uphold democracy in some sort of standing (democratic centralism)

I mean, I think a lot of people look at it in the most base level: people working together makes things better for everyone. Towards this goal, some kinds of decisions will eventually be made regarding the workings of the process by the participants who undertake it. And, as individuals with some kind of human agency, it isn't a particularly radical suggestion that these people should, y'know, actually have a say in what happens to them and their lives.

If anything is ever going to change it's only going to come from some kind of social revolution with people actually looking at their time, their environment, and decide consciously with other men & women who have come to the same conclusions that this is unsatisfactory. I can only see real change coming through a predominantly social revolution with maybe some political developments dovetailing it, but definitely no neo-Blanquist bs about how the masses are constantly dumb & crave deceit.

[Црвена]

A dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't necessitate bureaucracy (although it really depends on how it is defined) and proletarian control of the means of production is democratic. But I don't see how a centralised vanguard party which takes state power and claims to represent the proletariat can ever be democratic...and every time it has been tried, the result has been either permanent dictatorship of the political class or representative "democracy," not dissimilar to bourgeois "democracy."

[ckaihatsu]

Many claim the Dictatorship of the Proletariat will result in a new bureaucratic nightmare akin the the USSR. How is this prevented? Wouldn't constantly rejuvenating positions of power weaken the efficiency of production? But on the flip side, how do you ensure property lay in workers control?


First, make sure that all administrative-type functions are *not* specialized, meaning that there's no exact 'administrator' position for anyone. When *no one* is an administrator then no one is a bureaucrat, and so there's no bureaucracy.

By definition a dictatorship of the proletariat would not allow private property, or claims to property or production on the basis of 'ownership', so, likewise, there couldn't be any claims to 'power' or 'bureaucracy', either -- all production would *have* to be handled by (active) liberated laborers, whether it was 'efficient' or not.

That said, the dictatorship of the proletariat *would* have a collective common interest in efficiency of mass production but I don't think there should be any immediate *anxiety* about it -- production could even start post-revolution with small-scale, factory-by-factory collective decision-making by respective, local groupings of workers and, over time, gradually *generalize* to larger and larger scales, in a bottom-up way, as much as possible.





[W]e might go so far as to look at any given workplace generically, as a series of *situations* (events), through time, with corresponding *issues* from the same. Nowadays it would be entirely feasible to address the *issues* themselves, from a broad-based participation (even bringing in input from arbitrary persons who are so interested and relevant to the situation, over the Internet). The overhead of a hierarchical social relations can be obviated entirely, leaving a 'prevailing informed sentiment' (for lack of a better term) that would be the deciding / determining direction for any given issue.

Obviously this is more suited to a *post*-class-structured societal norm, but it's *logistically* doable, conceivably, at least.

[RedMaterialist]

A dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't necessitate bureaucracy (although it really depends on how it is defined) and proletarian control of the means of production is democratic.

The system out of which the dictatorship of the proletariat develops is highly bureaucratized. The modern corporation and the modern capitalist state is organized in a powerful bureaucratic structure. The dictatorship which emerges out of this pre-existing form must necessarily also be bureaucratic.

Why would proletarian control be democratic? The control of the capitalist state now is highly undemocratic.


But I don't see how a centralised vanguard party which takes state power and claims to represent the proletariat can ever be democratic...and every time it has been tried, the result has been either permanent dictatorship of the political class or representative "democracy," not dissimilar to bourgeois "democracy."

It can never be democratic except in its outward form. The entire point of the state is to suppress a particular class of people. The proletariat, using its power dictatorially, will suppress the capitalist class until that class disappears and therefore all suppressing classes disappear.

An excellent form for this dictatorship to take is that of a "democracy" which political form now exists in western bourgeois society. That will demand a huge expenditure of resources in propaganda to convince people that they are living in a democracy.

[RedMaterialist]

First, make sure that all administrative-type functions are *not* specialized, meaning that there's no exact 'administrator' position for anyone.

I doubt it is possible to administer a modern state without a high degree of specialization. Almost everything in the modern capitalist state, starting with the gigantic monopolistic corporation, is administered by highly trained specialists. The trick is to make sure the specialists are working in the interests of the proletariat.

A good example might be the current ebola crisis. Everybody, starting with the right wing, is demanding that the experts, the specialists, the bureaucrats at the CDC in the U.S., work together to fix the problem. Further, all these people working together, i.e. socially, leads to another incremental increase in social consciousness, to socialism.

Once the state withers away and dies then it will be possible to have an administration of things rather than of people.

[consuming negativity]

Maybe I am over-pessimistic but I don't think you can underestimate people's natural tendency towards inaction and stupidity, sometimes you really have to bypass what people 'want' and just act in a way that is good for them in the long run.

A quote supposedly Churchill said springs to mind, 'It has been said democracy is the worst from of government except all the others that have been tried'

But also for some reason so do these ones, again supposedly, from Mao and then Spinoza respectively:

Mao - 'Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy'.

Spinoza - 'People fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance'.

When a doctor operates on someone or subjects them to things for their own good or for the betterment of mankind - whatever excuse they use - without informed/assumed consent, we rightly consider that doctor to have acted highly immorally. If the horse will not drink water once you've led it to the watering hole, and you must, let it die of thirst, but do not attempt to force lake water into its mouth or it will just be scared of the lake and will take even greater steps to avoid it as it will be associated with pain. The result being, of course, that the horse will let itself die rather than do for itself what it should - the exact opposite of you want. Similarly, the words you use, the beliefs you have, and the steps you will take to achieve can only result in despotism; regardless of what you want to happen, that is the only option. It necessarily comes from the position that some people are not fit to rule themselves and thus must be disrespected and showed the "right way" of acting with or without their consent. It is an extremely dangerous devaluation of the individual and no thinking person should ever advocate such things; let alone under the guise of being helpful or in the name of freedom. Because it is the exact opposite.

[ckaihatsu]

First, make sure that all administrative-type functions are *not* specialized, meaning that there's no exact 'administrator' position for anyone.





I doubt it is possible to administer a modern state without a high degree of specialization. Almost everything in the modern capitalist state, starting with the gigantic monopolistic corporation, is administered by highly trained specialists. The trick is to make sure the specialists are working in the interests of the proletariat.

A good example might be the current ebola crisis. Everybody, starting with the right wing, is demanding that the experts, the specialists, the bureaucrats at the CDC in the U.S., work together to fix the problem. Further, all these people working together, i.e. socially, leads to another incremental increase in social consciousness, to socialism.

Once the state withers away and dies then it will be possible to have an administration of things rather than of people.


I have no differences or qualms here, but I'd also like to point out that if such field-specific specialists *are* 'working in the interests of the proletariat' then that means they've probably already been *politicized*, and *that* means that they'd no longer be in their positions for careerist / bourgie kinds of reasons. (The only other possible option is that they're being *compelled* to carry out their specialties according to the plans of the proletarian revolution, until such functions can either be closed-out or proletarianized.)

*Medical* specialists -- as you're pointing out -- should be able to *self-organize*, meaning that they ultimately wouldn't require any bureaucratic-type 'administration' over them, for them to do what they do. They would be both proletarianized and politicized, and would no longer have any personal or collective interest in answering to any state or state-like authority.