How did isolation of the USSR mean a bureaucratic takeover? [Archive]

View Full Version : How did isolation of the USSR mean a bureaucratic takeover?

Jacob Cliff

7th May 2015, 21:18

Sinister Intents

7th May 2015, 21:21

tuwix

8th May 2015, 05:44

In other words, how did the failure of the revolution to spread to other countries result in the bureaucratic takeover of the SU? How did this lead to its degeneration? What would have changed - and why - if the revolution continued into Germany or more industrialized countries? Would the economic structure be any different? And if not - wouldn't the same central planning lead to bureaucratism?

The model of the revolution chosen by Lenin which means a vanguard party would lead to the same in each circumstances. Lenin tried to do impossible: a build am egalitarian society using an elite. You can't be both elitist and egalitarian. If you try, the elite wins as it happens with all vanguard party movements.

It's only delusion that it can be otherwise. Before a Cuban revolution many western radical left-wingers believed that Castro won't make errors. But he did and to be honest can't do it otherwise with vanguard party.

John Nada

8th May 2015, 07:49

I think Trotsky talked about this, but I haven't really read Trotsky in length. Just remembering quotes. I'll post the work I think it is soon....

The Revolution Betrayed
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/

Hope this helps!
The international situation was pushing with mighty forces in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more self-confident, the heavier blows dealt to the working class. Between these two facts there was not only a chronological, but a causal connection, and one which worked in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted the proletarian defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the bureaucracy. The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection in 1924, the treacherous liquidation of the General Strike in England and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers’ party at the installation of Pilsudski in 1926, the terrible massacre of the Chinese revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more ominous recent defeats in Germany and Austria – these are the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet masses in world revolution, and permitted the bureaucracy to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch05.htm Trotsky should've put By the Workers in the West as a subtitle, for falling to overthrow "their own" governments.

He said the Soviet Union, though it became more advance than most nations in Marx's day, was born out of a semi-feudal level. Unlike many advance nations, most the people were poor peasants who weren't used to working in industry. A lot of the proletariat, which was a minority, got killed in the Civil War. Even then, many didn't have the skills of the proletariat in more advance countries. Not because of some innate inferiority, but due to lack of resources. If another, more advance nation also had a revolution, they could've sent technology and skilled workers to help the Soviets out. Since help never came, the Soviets had to start from scratch.

With potential revolutions in European countries(many of which had vast colonial empires) betrayed by reformists Social DemocratsImperialist, the USSR had no allies and were trapped in a capitalist encirclement.Worse still, over a dozen capitalist countries attacked the SU to aid proto-fascists White Counterrevolutionaries. Many of these old counterrevolutionaries survived, along with rich peasants, ex-Tsarist officers and ex-bourgeois class enemies. Try as they might(and they did), couldn't shoot them all.

The Soviets recruited skilled experts from the Tsarist era to build up the military and industry. These experts trained younger workers. Even though the dictatorship of the proletariat was in charge, a bourgeois mentality still had sway.

Funny thing is, Trotsky said the bureaucracy made up 15-20% of the population. The workers made up 28%, peasants on collective farms 48%, soldiers, students and pensioners 3-4%, and individual peasants and craftspeople(who only controlled a very tiny amount of the economy)25%. Does this mean that almost the whole damn proletariat was in the bureaucracy?:confused:

Strangely in spite of the name The Revolution Betrayed and describing the Stalinist era as a Thermidor reaction that could lead to Bonapartism, Trotsky seems to have viewed the Soviet Union as very progressive, even(especially) compared to many bourgeois "democracies". It was definitely way better off than it would've been under capitalism.
The “friends” will want to dispute our figures? Let them give us others more accurate. Let them persuade the bureaucracy to publish the income and expense book of Soviet society. Until they do, we shall hold to our opinion. The distribution of this earth’s goods in the Soviet Union, we do not doubt, is incomparably more democratic than it was in tzarist Russia, and even than it is in the most democratic countries of the West. But it has as yet little in common with socialism. Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.htm#ch06-4

Mr. Piccolo

8th May 2015, 10:25

Rafiq

8th May 2015, 18:05

The model of the revolution chosen by Lenin which means a vanguard party would lead to the same in each circumstances. Lenin tried to do impossible: a build am egalitarian society using an elite. You can't be both elitist and egalitarian. If you try, the elite wins as it happens with all vanguard party movements.

If this is to be taken as true, then we might all very well accept that revolution is an impossibility. Any revolution, that is, the organized political overthrow of the organs of bourgeois state power is doomed to failure if it does not have a "vanguard". A vanguard is nothing more than the politically organized proletarian class, only the opponents of the Bolsheviks have construed to the some kind of elite caste of super-revolutionaries. The vanguard is the proletarian class for itself, rather than in itself (Marx's dichotomy).

One needs to evaluate why the decisions made in Russia and China were made, most of all: If it was possible to have a so-called "revolution from bellow" then why did it not happen? The idea that Bolsheviks were power hungry makes absolutely no sense in that all evidence points to that the role they took was largely appreciated as an arduous burden. The idea that one can build an "egalitarian society" is equally ridiculous. An egalitarian society cannot be built, it is merely consequential of the political predispositions that lead to it - if this egalitarian spirit isn't ideologically manifested in the movement, which even in the most hierarchically regimented political structures it most definitely was, there can be no "egalitarianism". You claim that the existence of vanguard of the proletarian class compromised of the most skilled and dedicated members would lead to another class society, and this demonstrates a stunning ignorance of what constitutes class itself: moreover, the evidence that you provide us is that all countries which had a proletarian vanguard ended up failed revolutions. As any child should know, correlation isn't causation - and there are more variables to be examined that all of these failures had in common that doesn't amount to a 'vanguard' party: Namely, their demographic constitution. In every Communist state, the proletariat were a demographic minority, and in every Communist state save for Russia, Communists took power largely independent of a revolutionary working class movement. So of course state-bureaucratic organs would have to exercise power in a largely non-democratic manner, considering that the peasantry has no inclination to become proletarianized, considering that they had to assume roles otherwise taken by the bourgeoisie in modernizing their respective countries. The fact that they all had a "vanguard party" in common more than anything suggests that they were all adept in seizing the organs of state power, and nothing more.

Because to say otherwise requires the theoretical premise that a "vanguard party" is destined to creating an elite. This premise is wholly unscientific, it is purely ideological. We can critically evaluate why things happened the way they did - we can, for example, comprehensively explain why anarchists have never been able to seize power save for moments of chaos wherein state power collapses on its own. And in those instances, they died nobly as martyrs - simply crushed by those willing to use the organs of state power and military discipline, never burdened with the responsibility of power to be unjustly scolded by some pseudo-leftists decades later. We cannot, however, consistently pass off a critical analysis for "power became centralized in the hands of few" being exercised in the name of the masses without a critical understanding of why this happened. Was it due to the mere existence of a distinguishable "elite" heading the movement alone? Let's use common sense, then. Anything with an iota of experience in dealing with people in general know that a mere mass of people, even if their aims are identical, cannot lead themselves. Skilled organizers, politically adept and people dedicated to the cause beyond their own proximal interests are necessary to embody their interests in. This is true not simply for the proletariat, but for all classes in history, the bourgeoisie today included. Yet the organs of state power, an identifiable force separate from the bourgeoisie, still exercises power on their behalf. Why is this, if your theoretical premise is to be taken seriously? One can argue that it's because the bourgeoisie has an affirmative social character, while only through political state power can the proletariat in any meaningful sense express its interests as a class. The implications from this would be that the proletarian state cannot act in defiance of the interests of the proletariat, and if it can - that would mean that definite proletarian political interests exist independently of 'just' the state (like it can for the bourgeoisie), which means that the so-called dilemma isn't a problem in the first place.

And one requires an understanding of power itself - why would power be exercised independently of the proletarian masses if they're the only basis of its power? Even if we are cynical and claim they're power hungry and so on, how could they exercise power independently of the proletarian base which supports them? Who carries out their tasks? What social basis is their power owed to? And then we draw our conclusion: through the entanglement of the interests of the primarily defeated and slaughtered proletarian demographic minority, and the peasant majority. Power was exercised independently of both, through the political unity of both vested in the state through the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy had no purpose, absolutely no reason to exist besides through exercising the proletarian dictatorship in the conditions that it did - and with a largely absent proletarian social basis, and the lack of an advanced industrial base to feed your population while at the same time defending yourself militarily, economically and politically against a sea of hostile forces around you makes exercising power independently of the interests of the majority of the population an inevitability.

Moreover, however, has it occurred to you that ordinary people in general do not want to rule? Participation in managing their affairs, or the ability to do this when the time comes is of course something desired, but people need mechanisms of power to act for them in one way or another: think about trivial things like sewage, production of paper and so on - do you ACTUALLY think this is something whose function needs to be regularly decided upon en masse? An autonomous process of production, and political rule, is always a necessity when they concern processes that exist beyond your proximity of life. Managers and so on would never be able to constitute a new social class because the ownership of property in common would be guaranteed by the organs of state power.

LuÃs Henrique

9th May 2015, 16:06

In other words, how did the failure of the revolution to spread to other countries result in the bureaucratic takeover of the SU?

Not directly.

The problem lies in two different layers of explanation; first you have the defeat of the international revolution, and its isolation to only one country. Second, you have the precise history of this one country.

Capitalism cannot be taken down at the country level; it has to be destroyed internationally. So, the isolation of the revolution to one country makes it impossible to proceed to the dismantling of the capitalist system, except through active "exporting" of the revolution. But, in the empirical case of the Soviet Union, there was something else to be done: actually completing the bourgeois revolution, which the Russian national bourgeoisie proved unable to do.

And so, the energies of the Russian Revolution were diverted (not by evil people, but by the logic of the situation) to rebuilding the country (after four years of interimperialist war, in which Russia was badly beaten, and three years of civil war), and suppressing the many still extant remnants of feudalism.

But this process had to be conducted in an alienated way, for it would be politically impossible, both to the leadership and the masses, to pose the issue as a still pre-socialist one (Bukharin, who was closer to understanding this, was consequently defeated). In this way, the capitalist reconstruction of the SU was fancied as its socialist construction; the categories of capitalism and socialism got superimposed and mixed. The role of capitalist management of the economy (and, of course, of companies) could not be restored to capitalists properly, and needed to be performed by someone else - which is the reason the political bureaucracy of the Bolsheviks degenerated into an economic bureaucracy that took over the companies and the economic aspects of the State.

How did this lead to its degeneration?

Degeneration so came in two different ways: ideologically, ideas about capitalism and socialism got confused, with capitalist "tasks" being mistakenly assumed as socialist, and sociologically, with a layer of bureaucrats "doing what capitalists do", ie, organising the extortion of surplus value from workers.

What would have changed - and why - if the revolution continued into Germany or more industrialized countries?

If the revolution continued into Germany, or other more industrialised countries, it is likely that a few things would have changed. Most visibly, the Civil War would have been shorter, hopefully could even be avoided, and the reconstruction of the Russian economy would have started earlier and upon a less degraded base. More importantly, albeit the destruction of Germany and other more industrialised countries by WWI was by no means negligible, those countries not only had a more up to date infra-structure, but also a population much more used to capitalist relations of production.

So, confusion between capitalist and socialist goals would have been less widespread, which hopefully would lead to more clear approaches towards the reorganisation of society. Which, in turn, would have made the role of an economic bureaucracy less prominent, perhaps to the level in which it could prevent the fusion between political leadership and economic management.

Would the economic structure be any different? And if not - wouldn't the same central planning lead to bureaucratism?

This would be the anarchist answer to the issue: the central role in degeneration wasn't related to material issues (the semi-feudal character of Russian society, the isolation of revolution within a quite limited parcel of world's surface and population - and a quite backwards parcel on top of it) but to the "wrong" ideas of foolish vanguardists. But then many anarchists go to the point in which they believe that communism can be attained in individual factories or isolated communes. On the other hand, why would Russian foolish vanguardists be foolish vanguardists? And is that by no means related to the empirical, undeniable fact of Russian "backwardness"? Isn't perhaps the semi-jacobin aspect of the Russian revolutionary leadership linked to the fact that Russia, at the beggining of the 20th century was still in bad need of a, well, jacobin, ie, bourgeois, revolution?

Luís Henrique

Jacob Cliff

10th May 2015, 05:15

If this is to be taken as true, then we might all very well accept that revolution is an impossibility. Any revolution, that is, the organized political overthrow of the organs of bourgeois state power is doomed to failure if it does not have a "vanguard". A vanguard is nothing more than the politically organized proletarian class, only the opponents of the Bolsheviks have construed to the some kind of elite caste of super-revolutionaries. The vanguard is the proletarian class for itself, rather than in itself (Marx's dichotomy).

One needs to evaluate why the decisions made in Russia and China were made, most of all: If it was possible to have a so-called "revolution from bellow" then why did it not happen? The idea that Bolsheviks were power hungry makes absolutely no sense in that all evidence points to that the role they took was largely appreciated as an arduous burden. The idea that one can build an "egalitarian society" is equally ridiculous. An egalitarian society cannot be built, it is merely consequential of the political predispositions that lead to it - if this egalitarian spirit isn't ideologically manifested in the movement, which even in the most hierarchically regimented political structures it most definitely was, there can be no "egalitarianism". You claim that the existence of vanguard of the proletarian class compromised of the most skilled and dedicated members would lead to another class society, and this demonstrates a stunning ignorance of what constitutes class itself: moreover, the evidence that you provide us is that all countries which had a proletarian vanguard ended up failed revolutions. As any child should know, correlation isn't causation - and there are more variables to be examined that all of these failures had in common that doesn't amount to a 'vanguard' party: Namely, their demographic constitution. In every Communist state, the proletariat were a demographic minority, and in every Communist state save for Russia, Communists took power largely independent of a revolutionary working class movement. So of course state-bureaucratic organs would have to exercise power in a largely non-democratic manner, considering that the peasantry has no inclination to become proletarianized, considering that they had to assume roles otherwise taken by the bourgeoisie in modernizing their respective countries. The fact that they all had a "vanguard party" in common more than anything suggests that they were all adept in seizing the organs of state power, and nothing more.

Because to say otherwise requires the theoretical premise that a "vanguard party" is destined to creating an elite. This premise is wholly unscientific, it is purely ideological. We can critically evaluate why things happened the way they did - we can, for example, comprehensively explain why anarchists have never been able to seize power save for moments of chaos wherein state power collapses on its own. And in those instances, they died nobly as martyrs - simply crushed by those willing to use the organs of state power and military discipline, never burdened with the responsibility of power to be unjustly scolded by some pseudo-leftists decades later. We cannot, however, consistently pass off a critical analysis for "power became centralized in the hands of few" being exercised in the name of the masses without a critical understanding of why this happened. Was it due to the mere existence of a distinguishable "elite" heading the movement alone? Let's use common sense, then. Anything with an iota of experience in dealing with people in general know that a mere mass of people, even if their aims are identical, cannot lead themselves. Skilled organizers, politically adept and people dedicated to the cause beyond their own proximal interests are necessary to embody their interests in. This is true not simply for the proletariat, but for all classes in history, the bourgeoisie today included. Yet the organs of state power, an identifiable force separate from the bourgeoisie, still exercises power on their behalf. Why is this, if your theoretical premise is to be taken seriously? One can argue that it's because the bourgeoisie has an affirmative social character, while only through political state power can the proletariat in any meaningful sense express its interests as a class. The implications from this would be that the proletarian state cannot act in defiance of the interests of the proletariat, and if it can - that would mean that definite proletarian political interests exist independently of 'just' the state (like it can for the bourgeoisie), which means that the so-called dilemma isn't a problem in the first place.

And one requires an understanding of power itself - why would power be exercised independently of the proletarian masses if they're the only basis of its power? Even if we are cynical and claim they're power hungry and so on, how could they exercise power independently of the proletarian base which supports them? Who carries out their tasks? What social basis is their power owed to? And then we draw our conclusion: through the entanglement of the interests of the primarily defeated and slaughtered proletarian demographic minority, and the peasant majority. Power was exercised independently of both, through the political unity of both vested in the state through the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy had no purpose, absolutely no reason to exist besides through exercising the proletarian dictatorship in the conditions that it did - and with a largely absent proletarian social basis, and the lack of an advanced industrial base to feed your population while at the same time defending yourself militarily, economically and politically against a sea of hostile forces around you makes exercising power independently of the interests of the majority of the population an inevitability.

Moreover, however, has it occurred to you that ordinary people in general do not want to rule? Participation in managing their affairs, or the ability to do this when the time comes is of course something desired, but people need mechanisms of power to act for them in one way or another: think about trivial things like sewage, production of paper and so on - do you ACTUALLY think this is something whose function needs to be regularly decided upon en masse? An autonomous process of production, and political rule, is always a necessity when they concern processes that exist beyond your proximity of life. Managers and so on would never be able to constitute a new social class because the ownership of property in common would be guaranteed by the organs of state power.
I thoroughly enjoyed your answer to the rather infantile criticism of the "Vanguard of the Proletariat," and certainly clears up many of my own views on the concept f the proletarian vanguard, but what is your take on the post - about why the failure of the revolution to spread into Germany and so-forth led to political degeneration?

Also thank you Luís for your insightful answer.