"Coordinator Class"?

[Jacob Cliff]

Watching one of LibertarianSocialistRants' videos, he made the case that the "Red Bureaucracy" – party officials, state-managers, bureaucrats, etc. – constituted a new ruling class. And although I (to an extent) understand that classes are constituent of their social relations to production (worker, boss, etc.), it does seem these people did have very different relations to the means of production than the average wage-working proletarian. They controlled the means of production, controlled it through "one man management" rather than workers' control, and even extracted excess surplus value for their own enjoyment just like the dethroned capitalists.

As Marxists, what are your reasons as to why these people in particular management and administrative roles were NOT of a new ruling class? What makes these people proletarians, or what makes them not new "capitalists"?

[Црвена]

I was under the impression that "co-ordinator class" refers to the bureaucratic strata under capitalism, not the state administrators in a d.o.t.p. or state capitalist society. But anyway. Although I do think that a new capitalist class emerged in the USSR (after a while) and other "communist" countries, I think the arguments made by Leninists to the contrary are as follows: production and distribution do not completely accord to the market because there is a nationalised, planned economy which is organised by the proletarian state. Therefore the mode of production is not the same as capitalism, as the law of value does not have free reign. So it's inaccurate to call it capitalist and correspondingly inaccurate to call the "red bureaucracy" a new ruling class.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

It is wrong, I think, to lump together all of the administrative personnel of the Soviet state into one undifferentiated "red bureaucracy". We are really talking about at least three layers:

(1) the Party and State bureaucracy; people like Stalin, Rykov, Bukharin, Kamenev etc.;

(2) the economic administrators, the heads of the main economic organs; people like Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov, Larin, Sokolnikov etc.;

(3) technical intelligentsia employed by the economic organs; people like Falkner-Smit, Rozengolts etc.

Members of category (2) were, of course, sometimes also members of category (1), in the case of Ordzhonikidze, for example, but in general the relation between the first two categories was not an easy one. The Party and state bureaucracy constantly interfered in the working of the planning organs (stakhanovism, "complete the Five-Year Plan in four years" and similar nonsense), and the economic planners were disproportionately targeted by the paranoid purges of the bureaucracy (not least because many of them had been associated with the Left Opposition, and before that with the Food Dictatorship etc.).

The second category were, essentially, well-paid (although even this can be exaggerated; the paychecks of administrative personnel in the Soviet Union were not that great) administrators drawn from the proletariat (and for a time, from the revolutionary Bolshevik party). They were in the same position as e.g. a chief of a Soviet trade union. The first category also had nominally small paychecks, but engaged in widespread graft in order to improve their material position. But, that's just the point - these were parasites, bloodsuckers, useless men. When you say that a group is a class, you say that it has a necessary role in the process of production. Capitalist production can't occur without capitalists. But the production that happened in the Soviet Union might have happened without Stalin, Bukharin, Beria, Malenkov etc., and it would have in fact been improved.

The third category is impossible to dispense with until the proletariat has trained from within itself its own experts, of a different sort than the technical intelligentsia inherited from bourgeois society, and the second category is absolutely indispensable, in socialism as well as in the transitional period. Someone, obviously, needs to head the planning commission and the inspectorate and the statistical bureau.

[Zoop]

The term coordinator class was coined by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. It refers to the class which supposedly has empowering jobs. According to Albert, they are the "people who monopolize empowering labor in their jobs – while others, who we called the working class, do overwhelmingly only rote, obedient, tedious labor."

Of course, there did exist a ruling class, often called the Red Bureaucracy, which gave rise to inequality and despotism. Whether you wish to call this the "coordinator class" is a moot point.

[Rudolf]

When you say that a group is a class, you say that it has a necessary role in the process of production. Capitalist production can't occur without capitalists.


I think it can.


I'm not going to talk about the USSR because i don't want to get into some drawn out debate over history or anything but I really don't like the notion of bureaucrats, party officials, state managers etc being understood as a new class. It kind of seems to me to be a misunderstanding. The bourgeoisie aren't really an active agent, the active agent is capital the bourgeoisie its human representative. Looking through this lens i think we can conclude that the role of the bourgeoisie can be accomplished without the bourgeois-proper. It could even be internalised in the proletariat on the shop floor constituting a self-managed capitalism (whether the generalisation of this would meet normal capitalist stability im unsure of but i fear it'd be trickier to fight).

So being a bit pedantic i'd say capitalist production necessitates the role of the bourgeoisie but not necessarily distinct human beings that comprise that class.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I think it can.


I'm not going to talk about the USSR because i don't want to get into some drawn out debate over history or anything but I really don't like the notion of bureaucrats, party officials, state managers etc being understood as a new class. It kind of seems to me to be a misunderstanding. The bourgeoisie aren't really an active agent, the active agent is capital the bourgeoisie its human representative. Looking through this lens i think we can conclude that the role of the bourgeoisie can be accomplished without the bourgeois-proper. It could even be internalised in the proletariat on the shop floor constituting a self-managed capitalism (whether the generalisation of this would meet normal capitalist stability im unsure of but i fear it'd be trickier to fight).

So being a bit pedantic i'd say capitalist production necessitates the role of the bourgeoisie but not necessarily distinct human beings that comprise that class.

I don't think there is any real disagreement between us, to be honest. When we say "capitalist", "worker" etc., most of the time we're talking about a role. Now, one person can fulfill multiple roles. A member of a cooperative is both a worker and a petty capitalist. These aren't just word games, either - as modern society is driven by the circulation of capital, the co-operative worker needs to be impoverished so that the co-operative capitalist can survive. The point is that the role of the capitalist is necessary, as long as capitalism exists. But the bureaucrat? The role of the bureaucratic caste is to sit on the necks of the workers and skim off funds. They're parasites, unnecessary.

[Blake's Baby]

Engels talked about the rise of the joint-stock company in 1880 as showing that capital doesn't have to have individual owners any more, it can have corporate or collective owners without being less capitalist. Those who control the economic levers in their own interest are capitalists, whether they formally own the means of production or not.

To the OP: it's funny, you want to refute the 'co-ordinator class' theory in order to demonstrate that the USSR wasn't capitalist. The irony is, that the co-ordinator class theory was invented to refute the notion that the USSR was capitalist. If the co-ordinator class is a new class, it's not the bourgeoisie.

Please let us know when you've considered your position if you stick with 'co-ordinator class theory is false, therefore USSR must have been capitalist', or if you stick with 'USSR was not capitalist, therefore co-ordinator class theory must be true'.

Then I expect you can justify your choice,

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Engels talked about the rise of the joint-stock company in 1880 as showing that capital doesn't have to have individual owners any more, it can have corporate or collective owners without being less capitalist. Those who control the economic levers in their own interest are capitalists, whether they formally own the means of production or not.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a comment on my post; if it was, then I agree, a capitalist doesn't have to be a natural person, but a corporate group (including the bourgeois state) can act as a capitalist. (Whereas the same doesn't seem to be true for the proletariat; the state can't act as a proletarian.)


To the OP: it's funny, you want to refute the 'co-ordinator class' theory in order to demonstrate that the USSR wasn't capitalist. The irony is, that the co-ordinator class theory was invented to refute the notion that the USSR was capitalist. If the co-ordinator class is a new class, it's not the bourgeoisie.

Here, I think, is where things get a bit vague.

The term "coordinator class", as far as I can tell, was first used by Albert, as Zoop mentioned before. That use (that horrible use that implies that filing reports is "empowering") is pretty much tangential to what we're discussing, though. I think the OP was talking about a "managerial" or perhaps "bureaucrat-collectivist" ruling class.

Now, bureaucratic collectivism was, as you say, an attempt by dissident Trotskyist elements to explain the USSR as a non-capitalist society. The theory, one of the few theories from that time that have almost no serious adherents today, has three variants: bureaucratic collectivism is seen as either progressive relative to capitalism, as extremely similar, or as regressive, if not a sign of outright barbarism. So if that is what the OP had in mind, you're correct.

The related notion of a "managerial class", however, is a bit more complicated. Sometimes it was used by Shachtmanists, who did not consider the USSR capitalist. Sometimes, though, it was used by people who thought that the USSR, the US under the New Deal, and Germany all shared a common social structure, a capitalism where the "managerial class" had usurped power from the powerless owners.

[Blake's Baby]

OK, I may be confusing Albert & Hahnel's 'co-ordinator class theory' with Shachtman's 'bureaucratic collectivist theory' and (particularly) Burnham's 'managerial class theory'.

In my defence, I'd say that some adherents of versions of the theory (Anarchists mostly influenced by Burnham) have a) failed to grasp the implications (USSR is a new form of economy) and b) mixed up all these theories themselves.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Are there many anarchists influenced by Burnham? It sounds like such a strange thing, but there you have it, a lot of anarchist influences are weird. In any case, it's not really surprising that people would get lost in all the "new class" theories; I have something of a historical interest in them as the tendency I sympathise with grew out of the Draper-led YPSL, but even then I keep finding these obscure theories and theoreticians. It's a real bureaucratic-collectivist jungle out there.

[Blake's Baby]

I don't know if there are 'many. There are certainly some. Go to LibCom and poke around, and you can probably find evidence of these theories lurking about.

Most Anarchists (of whatever stripe) argue that the Soviet Union was state capitalist of course.