BASIS (4)

An example: the class nature of the USSR THE ABOVE remarks are only the ABC of the Marxist theory of class, and the only justification for repeating this ABC is that it is almost universally misunderstood, because both adherents and opponents of Marxism. have preferred second-hand accounts of the basic questions and neglected Marx's own work on the economic relations.

An acquaintance. with the political writings Marx, Engels and others is certainly necessary, but will not have its real value except on this basis of economic analysis, which gives the political and ideological aspects their historical perspective.

In other words, we have so far expanded only on the first point made by Marx in his letter to Weydemeyer, that each type of class struggle is bound up with a certain his torical formation society, derived from the development of the mode of production.

Turning-point All of Marx's and Engels' writings on the revolutions 1848, for example, so often quoted for their analysis of the political forces at work, take meaning from the historical turning-point marked by the French events of that year: the dawn of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism, rising in such a way as to cripple and distort any possibility of the completion of the bourgeoisie completing the revolution in continental Europe.

Even though capitalism proved to have before it a longer span than Marx Engels then anticipated, it is the historical background of this juncture of two epochs, which provides the content of the political and ideological tendencies analysed in the writings on 1848.

In similar fashion, Lenin's polemics against the. Russian Narodniks in the 1890s, from which we have quoted, revolved around the same axis. The problem of problems was not to find a potentially revolutionary' class in Russian society, but first of all to expose the forms of production which were developing to the exclusion of old forms, and thereby destroying the foundations of old classes.

Analysed

Once this was done, the historical tasks before the existing classes, their interrelations, the limits of their political action and programme, and the ideologies and theories appropriate to them had to be analysed; and these are in fact the problems dealt with in the hundreds of articles, pamphlets and books written by Lenin in that period. Similarly Trotsky, since Reality capin introducing Harold Isaacs' the author's method as an would like information about i THE SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE Fill in the form below and send to NATIONAL SECRETARY, SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE, 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, LONDON, SW4. Name ....

Address inquiry into the following questions: are Stat are thn chinet whiat 'What are the classes are interrelationsnips and ela, thosı tasks dictated by the course of development? On the shoulders oI wnich classes rests tne solution of these tasks? With what These methodological pointers approach Marxism: the diass sanure o the USSR.

Cent inter minable discussion in bourgeois sociology about converdence of Soviet and western capitalist societies, associated controversies around the term industrial society', resurrecter rom Comee and Saint-Simon STALINISM We are immediately concerned with Marxist theory itself, though of course a more thorough exposition of any aspect of it would necessitate an analysis of all alternative and opposed theories. In any case, however, it will be found that the basic development of sociology on these questions proceeds from a clash with Marxism, in the writings of Max Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, (2In H. Isaacs' "The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution', Secker & Warburg, 1938.)

Michels, etc., or from revisions of Marxism originating inside the Marxist movement.

Wittfogel's 'Oriental Despotism', for example, was the product of a long evolution on Wittfogel's own part from his early membership of the Communist movement in Germany, and then in the Soviet Union to his present anti-communist standpoint.

Work Another influential work, James Burnham's 'The Managerial Revolution', has recently been the subject of academic detective work, from which it transpires that Burnham, the late 1930s a member of the Socialist Workers' Party in the USA (followers of Trotsky), was deeply indebted, to use parliamentary language, to the little-known work of one Bruno Rizzi (Bruno R. 'La Bureaucratization du Monde', Paris 1939).

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 a given system of economy. TROTSKY A few months before "The Managerial Revolution' was written, Burnham engaged in a bitter controversy with Trotsky on the nature of the USSR and the tasks posed to socialists by the Hitler-Stalin pact, a controversy in which Trotsky drew attention to the work of 'Bruno While the most detailed exposition of Trotsky's views on the social nature of the Soviet Union is his 'The Revolution Betrayed', it was in this polemic with Burnham and Shachtman in the Socialist Workers' Party that his method on this question was made most explicit.

Contrasts It contrasts sharply not only with Burnham's book, with its crude and shallow comparisons and unsupported generalizations, but also with plethora of terminological experiments which pass for 'theory' inside and outside the socialist movement on this problem.

Trotsky follows closely the (acf Trotsky, 'In Marxism'.) method outlined by Marx, insisting first and foremost on historical perspective. Where must the analysis begin, for a Marxist? Not from comparisons of the privileges and wealth or forms of political power characterizing the bureaucrats of the USSR and the capitalists of the West or the fascist rulers of Germany and Italy, but quite differently:

•Scientifically and politically -and not purely terminologically—the question poses itself as follows: Does the bureaucracy represent a temporary growth on a social organism or has this growth already beén transformed into a historically indispensable organ ?

Social excrescences can be the product of an "accidental" (i.e.

temporary and extraordinary)

enmeshing of historical circumstances. A social organ (and such is every class, including an, exploiting class) can take shape only as a result of the deeply-rooted inner needs • of production itself. If we do not answer this question, then the entire controversy will degenerate into sterile toying with words.'25 Trotsky then develops the theme that the bureaucracy in the USSR has always been a brake on the technique, culture and economy of the workers' state, whereas, '... The historical justification for every ruling class consisted in this— that the system of exploitation it headed raised the development of the productive forces to a new level.' Parasitic Trotsky always characterized the Soviet bureaucracy, therefore, as a parasitic growth on workers' state and the nationalized property of the Soviet Union. His basic reason for doing this was his adherence to Marx's historical materialism in rejecting, all sociological analysis based on the external characteristics of social groups and forms of domination.

He pointed out (2Ibid, p. 7.)

("Ibid.) 'left' critics of the Soviet Union that their 'anti-bureaucracy' enthusiasm in characterizing Stalin and his bureaucracy as a new exploiting class was, from the standpoint of Marxism, actually to allot to them vital and necessary historical role:

'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 a given system of economy."

According to Marx, the prerequisites socialism are developed inside the capitalist mode of production: advanced productive forces in science and industry; international division of labouri and world market.

The contradiction between these forces of production and latter's political, state and ideological forms, prepares the conditions for the social revolution.

World capitalism broke first, not at its great advanced centres, but 'at its weakest link' in Russia.

The proletarian revolution is by its nature an international revolution. But yet there is the capitalist production relations, together with all the not and cannot be a simultaneous overthrow of capitalism in every country.

The conditions for political overthrow of the bourgeoisie in Russia matured in 1917, but were not accompanied in that country by the parallel development of the economic conditions and consequent cultural development necessary for the building of socialism. These conditions were prepared on a world scale.

So long as the revolutionary outpost could be maintained in Russia, bureaucratic distortions would necessarily appear, because the proletarian dictatorship, containing within itself the beginnings of its own self-destruction by drawing ever wider masses into its ('Ibid, work, requires a cultural development which rapidly transforms the whole condition of life of the masses. The isolation of the young Soviet state from the world's advanced centres blocked such a development.

Isolation

The bureaucracy which arose in these conditions was therefore considered by Trotsky, rom the Marxist standpoint, not as the tuling class of some new form of society, but as. the result of the temporary isolation of the world revolution in a backward country, a social force extruded from the working class, but which then stands in relation to this same class as a sort of prism to refract all the pressure of the capitalist states remaining outside the USSR and all the survivals of backwardness within.

This effect was strengthened decisively for a whole epoch by the series of defeats for the working classes of Italy (19221924), Germany (1923, 1933), Britain and China (1926-1927), Poland (1926), and Spain (1936-1938).

The ideological means by which this bureaucracy established its position (the theory of 'socialism in one country, etc.) relied heavily on the claim for a 'realistic' assessment of these defeats.

Interaction

Here again the interaction between consciousness economic base/ is essential to understanding the actual course of events. These very defeats were more and more consequence of the very policy which received its first impetus from adaptation to the first of these defeats.

Here again Trotsky insists on a dialectical analysis as against the matter-of-fact acceptance of the 'relation of class forces' to be found in the 'official' school of Communist Party Marxists and their apologists.?

("cf. C. Slaughter, "Trotsky's Marxism Under Attack: a reply to Krasso' in 'Fourth International', Vol 5, No. 2, August 1968.) At the same time Trotsky is insisting on the full historical meaning of the term 'class', a meaning which he refuses to 'bureaucracy'. Thus he wrote:

"The class has an exceptionally important and moreover a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of thé national income alone, but by its independent role in the general structure of economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundation of society.

'Each class (the feudal nobility, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalist bourgeoisie, and the proletariat) works out its own special forms of property.

"The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions ielate basically the political technique of class rule. The existence of a bureaucracy, in all its variety of forms and différences in specific weight, characterizes every class regime. Its power is of a reflected character. The bureaucracy is indissolubly bound up with a ruling economic class, feeding itself upon the social roots of the latter, maintaining itself and falling together with it.?9 We have deliberately exounded the basic economic rguments of 'Capital' Vol. III nd Trotsky's analysis of the ISSR,* first to show the conistency and continuity in the undamental definition, and econdly, because these two ring out many questions of ride-ranging historical perpectives which would norally not enter the sociological iscussion of 'class'.

* The thesis of the 'managerial revolution' would be examined, from a Marxist standpoint, along the sarfe lines. Many critics of the thesis have pointed out thé haziness of Burnham's or any other definition of the 'man('Trotsky. 'The Class Nature of the Soviet State'. New Park Publications. p. 20.)

agers' as a class, particularly on account of the heterogeneity of the classification. Others have drawn attention to the fact that the distinctness of 'managers' from owners is often merely imaginary, and that in any case the spread of ownership among large numbers of small shareholders actually • facilitates business domination by a few holders of larger blocks of capital. The homogeneity of the 'managing' land owning groups effected through other social bonds has also been described. All this material is important in a study of the question, but for the Marxist the first and most essential question would be:

does the 'separation of ownership and control', in so far as it has been brought about, effect any change in the laws of functioning and development of the économy? Does it, for example, change the function of the rate of profit in determining the allocation of capital and labour to different branches, of production? Does it alter the division of the product according to the ownérship of capital, land and labour-power? Not a single one of these questions is seriously asked by the advocates of the "managerial revolution' theory in its various forms. However much the role of the state has increased in the economy of capitaliot fgoiety, it has barged to aid the concentration of capital, to maintain its essential features, rather than changing its character. Whereas planning has greatly increased within individual companies, the economic system within which each enterprise works and to which its 'planned' production is directed, is unplanned and anarchic, and in ever-increasing contradiction with the growth of science, planning and organization within each particular unit of capitalism.

Relationship

Marx and Marxists are askink very different questions from those asked by sociologists when they discuss 'class' or indeed any other social phenomena.

The second great difficulty for sociologists in this kind of presentation is that Marxists write as protagonists of a theory which sees itself as part of the reality it is accounting for, and, more than that, as the conscious expression the struggle of the working class to grasp and change that reality in its developing totality. The relation between Marxism, class, and class consciousness is therefore entirely different from the avowed (and the actual) relation between sociology and society.

Our extract from the discussion of the nature of the USSR illustrates this.

To understand it further we must now go beyond the 'ABC'. Classes manifest themselves politically, in struggle. They have representatives and leaders as well as relatively unconscious layers. They are internally differentiated. Between them and straddling them are transitional and intermediate layers. All these relationships are undergoing constant change. One class, the bourgeoisie, builds up revolutionary potential under feudalism economically and culturally, 'unconsciously' in a certain sense, while another, the proletariat, is united by its lack of any specific 'mode of appropriation' either economicFor culturally under capitalism.

The proletariat therefore requires a qualitative leap in consciousness, concentrated towards the taking of political power, which it must then use for the economic transformation of society.

The dynamics of these struggles, whereby different classes fight to constitute themselves as self-conscious and independent social and political forces, is the subjectmatter of the next part in this series next Saturday.

25h AVNERSARY OF THE POTSDANAGONIRENCE Saturday, August 1, ÊUROPEAN' THREE