Abstract
Lenin never gave an exact label to the process of regression which he steadily diagnosed from its earliest symptoms, unless we like to accept as such — from something he once said — his frequent but unsystematic denunciations of the ‘bureaucratic distortion of the workers’ state’.1
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Notes
In Lenin’s words: ‘Our Party programme... shows that ours is a worker’s state with a bureaucratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this, dismal, shall I say, tag.’ (V. I. Lenin, The Trade Unions, the Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes (1921), in Sochinenya, vol. XXXII, p. 6; Eng. trans. vol. XXXII, p. 24.)
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Truelove, London, 1871, p. 17
Ernest Mandel, Traité d’économie marxiste, Julliard, Paris, 1962
Pierre Chaulie, I rapporti di produzione in Russia, Samonà e Savelli, Rome, 1971, pp. 30–1
Rizzi, op. cit., pp. 69, 13. Similarly Djilas: ‘The new class instinctively feels that national goods are in fact its property, and that even the terms “socialist”, “society” and “state” properly denote a general legal fiction.’ (Djilas, op. cit., p. 65.) Paillet, in a very recent analysis, writes in the same vein: ‘It is a mistake to see techno-bureaucratic society as being organised in such a way that, through State ownership, it has settled the problem of the nominal ownership of the means of production; in practice it is only by that “collectivisation” that the collectivity of the techno-bureaucrats can fulfil itself as a ruling class. The State form of ownership is not merely a negation of the capitalist form. It is a positive affimation of the rights and powers of the new ruling class.’ (Marc Paillet, Marx contre Marx: La société techno-bureaucratique, Denoël, Paris, 1971, pp. 62–3.)
Rizzi, op. cit., pp. 95, 70 and passim, Burnham follows him very closely in this, as in other matters. Cf. James Burnham, The Managerial Révolunon, Putnam, London, 1942, p. 192.
We refer in particular to the writings of Milovan Djilas (op. cit.) and Roger Garaudy (Le grand tournant du socialisme, and Toute la vérité, Grasset, Paris, 1970)
Isaac Deutscher writes: ‘Marxism sees in the full development of the social character of the productive process the major historic pre-condition of socialism. Without it socialism would be a castle in the air. To fry to impose social control on a mode of production which is not inherently social is just as incongruous and anachronistic as it is to maintain private or sectional control over the productive process that is social. In Russia this basic precondition of socialism was lacking, as it must be lacking in any underdeveloped country.... In addition, the real starting point was one of utter disaster. After the years of world war, civil war, and foreign intervention the little industry that Russia had possessed collapsed into ruin. Machinery and stocks were used up. Economically, the nation was thrown back by more than half a century. Townspeople burnt their furniture to warm their dwellings. Scores of millions of peasants were hit by famine and wandered over the country in search of food. The few million workers who had manned the barricades in 1917 had become dispersed and, as a coherent social force, ceased to exist. The bravest had perished in the civil war; many had taken up posts in the new administration, army, and police; great numbers had fled from the famished cities; and the few who stayed behind spent more time trading than working, became déclassés and were swallowed up by the black markets. These were the formative circumstances at the time when the Bolsheviks, in the early 1920s, were trying to give shape to their regime and consolidate it. In doing so, they could not rely on the class of which they had considered themselves the vanguard, the class that was supposed to be the master in the new State, the mainstay of the new democracy, the chief agent of socialism. That class had physically and politically faded out. Thus, while the bourgeois, despite the famine in the country, survived in the tangible realities of rural life, the socialist revolution was like a phantom suspended in a void. These were the authentic origins of the so-called bureaucratic degeneration of the regime. In the circumstances as they were, “proletarian dictatorship”, “Soviet democracy”, “workers’ control of industry”, were almost empty slogans, into which no one could breathe any content. The idea of Soviet democracy, as Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin had expounded it, presupposed the existence of an active, eternally vigilant, working class, asserting itself not only against the ancien régime but also against any new bureaucracy that might abuse or usurp power. As the working class was bodily not there, the Bolsheviks decided to act as its locum tenentes and trustees until such time as life would become more normal and a new working class would come into being. Meanwhile, they considered it their duty to act as representatives of a non-existent, or almost non-existent, proletariat. That way lay bureaucratic dictatorship, uncontrolled power, and corruption by power.’ (Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution, Oxford Univ. Press, London, 1967, chap. 2, pp. 29–30.)
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Le socialisme qui venait du froid’, preface to Antonin Liehm, Trois générations, Gallimard, Paris, 1970, pp. iii
Fejtö writes in his history of the so-called People’s Democracies: ‘To paraphrase the celebrated thesis of the Communist Manifesto, socialist society, erected on the ruins of bourgeoise society, has not abolished class antagonism; it has only “substituted new classes for the old ones, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle”. In fact the history of the People’s Democracies after Stalin’s death is the history of these new conflicts.’ (François Fejtö, A History of the People’s Democracies, Pall Mall Press, London, 1971, p. 274
A work whose main purpose is to put forward a new interpretation of Marx’s model of historical development is not the place to discuss the African mode of production; in this connection see Godelier, op. cit., Suret-Canale, op. cit.; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Recherches sur un mode de production africain’, in La Pensée (Paris), no. 144 (Apr. 1968) pp. 61–78. Coquery-Vidrovitch holds the same stereotyped view of the Asiatic mode of production as Godelier and the other French or French-speaking authors already mentioned, with its tendency to play down the importance of major hydraulic engineering works, but she does argue against ‘drawing a parallel between the Asiatic mode of production and the mode of production found in quite a number of African societies’, holding that ‘the only thing common to both societies is the existence of self-sufficient village communities’ (p. 64). In her view the African mode of production ‘cannot be reduced to Western precapitalist modes of production’ and also differs from the Asiatic mode in its ‘absence of a true despotism aiming at direct exploitation of the peasant class’ (p. 77). Suret-Canale also, who originally held that ‘the most common mode of production in the more advanced areas of traditional Black Africa can be compared to the Asiatic mode’ (Jean Suret-Canale, Afrique Noire, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1958, p. 94)
Emmanuel Terray, Le marxisme devant les sociétés ‘primitives’, Maspero, Paris, 1969
Emphasis on its ‘bureaucratic’ features is inherent in the best present-day political and sociological works by writers on modern Egypt, from Anouar Abdel-Malek to Hassan Riad, from Benno Sarel to Mahmoud Hassan, from Maxime Rodinson to Samir Amin, all of whom repeatedly refer to the country’s particular ‘Asiatic’ heritage in this connection. Abdel-Malek, for example, has this to say: ‘From the earnest dynasties to Mohammed Ali and even to the British occupation, the principal basis of economic wealth — the land — was the property of the sovereign. Only 3 per cent of the area of modern Egypt is fertile, and this narrow green strip through which the Nile runs is surrounded on all sides by deserts, drought, burning sun. These arable lands, parsimoniously doled out to the peasant, must still be provided with regular irrigation, since rain is more than rare. Hence a whole system of water storage, distribution and drainage has been developed. Only a powerful and continuous central authority can carry this burden; here individualism is the synonym for anarchy and disintegration, for no great lord, no provincial governor, could assure his subjects what only the capital is in a position to provide: water, the source of life. It is in this fact above all others that the deep-lying reason must be sought for Egyptian national unity, the oldest unity in the world, the only unity, too, to persist as such, through multiple occupations, for seventy centuries. It is this fact, too, that gives the central authority its crushing, abnormal power. The State is indeed the determinant, the master of life and death, is the day-to-day life of Egypt as it has been through the ages.... Seven thousand years of history within an immovable geographical structure formed the foundations of Egypt’s threefold individuality on the level that concerns us: the State as master of the economic life, the essentials of which were in its hands; the army, the drive shaft in the machinery of the State, and also its sword and shield, formed an integral part of the economic and social structure and activity; it was also a component part of the vanguard of the national movement.’ In Abdel-Malek’s view the present Egyptian regime is neither socialist nor capitalist, and is different from the usual State capitalism too. He stresses the ‘autocratic, paternalistic, statist character of the process initiated in 1961’ and in its wake the formation of ‘a truly gigantic State apparatus, not only the army, but also the various police forces and the mushrooming economic bureaucracy’, and shows how the voracity of the latter class, and the immunity it enjoyed under the regime, made a mockery of the ideological hodgepodge of’ statist centralism and socialism’ proposed by Nasser in the 1962 National Action Charter, which stated that’ since very ancient times, Egyptian agriculture has found genuine socialist solutions for the most complex problems that it has faced, in the first rank of which we must mention irrigation and drainage, which in Egypt today, as for centuries, are carried out as part of the public services’. Thus, comments Abdel-Malek, ‘the name of socialism is given to that hydraulic society which formed the basis of Oriental despotism’. (Abdel-Malek, op. cit., pp. 353–4, 360–8, 331.) Riad writes, in the same vein: ‘The centuries-old ideal of Egyptian society is a bureaucratic ideal... a Pharaoh, supreme power of the entire soil of Egypt, a civil service composed of aristocrats to officer the largely undifferentiated mass of landowning peasants. That ideal has been achieved a number of times in the long history of the Nile basin.... The last revival was bang in the middle of the nineteenth century, under the astounding reign of Mohammed Ali, the father of modern Egypt.’ (Hassan Riad, ‘Les trois âges de la société égyptienne’, in Partisans (Paris), no. 7 (Nov.–Dec. 1962) p. 25.) Riad’s analysis points out the elements of the present regime that form a link with the one just described: ‘If we had to define the new society we should call it reactionary Pharaonic statism. That might seem a contradiction since the regime has plans to industrialise the country and can already boast of undeniable achievements, though they still fall short of what is needed. But it is only a paradox, for the regime is planning to industrialise the country without touching the inherited structure.’ ‘The setting-up of country co-operatives cannot be seen in any other light. They are not an inspiration of modern socialism, but a resurrection of the statism of the Pharaohs.’ The new exploiting class in Egypt is a ‘bourgeoise bureaucracy’: ‘A new middle class, of petit-bourgeoise origin, was created by bureaucratic process as far back as 1953. But the process could not have gone far without the nationalisation of 1957.... The managers of nationalised enterprises have taken on the colours of the upper middle class. A second-generation bourgeoisie has been formed, by that bureaucratic process.’ From 1960 on, with the expropriation of the former haute-bourgeoisie, ‘the traditional bourgeoisie now hopes only to be accepted and integrated into the new State bureaucracy’. (Hassan Riad, ‘Le nassérisme’, ibid., no. 8 (Jan.–Feb. 1963) pp. 43–7.) Samir Amin analyses the Egyptian situation as’ state capitalism’, and Mahmoud Hussein sees it as’ state bureaucratic capitalism’, and to both of them the new privileged class is a State bourgeoisie. (Samir Amin, L’Egypte nassérienne, Paris, 1964, quoted by Anouar Abdel-Malek; Mahmoud Hussein, La lutte de classe en Egypte de 1945 à 1968, Maspero, Paris, 1969.) Hussein in particular dwells on the need to avoid that undue ‘identification of private property with capitalism, and State ownership with socialism... deliberately engineered by Soviet revisionists’ and points to the ‘fundamental question of the relations of production and of the class that holds power’, remarking that ‘in Egypt the economy is run on lines that perpetuate the pyramidal structure wherein all power is concentrated at the apex, as witness the central agencies, the “public” bodies and the boards of directors, and the base is reduced to impotence’ (pp. 169–77). Rodinson puts the question: ‘What then is the nature of this regime which so soon made a clear contribution, achieved some real progress, and yet at the same time, as Abdel-Malek says, has a repellent tone and a peculiar aspect?’ (Maxime Rodinson, ‘L’Egypte nassérienne au miroir marxiste’, in Les Temps Modernes (Paris), vol. XVII, no. 203 (Apr. 1963) p. 1882.) He later defines Egypt as a country with a centralised economy ruled by a military caste. (Maxime Rodinson, Israël et le refus arabe, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1968
Benno Sternberg Sarel, ‘Révolution par le haut dans les campagnes égyptiennes’, in Les Temps Modernes, (Paris), vol. XXIV, no. 274 (Apr. 1969) p. 1801
See also Giampaolo Calchi Novati, ‘Il socialismo arabo corne dottrina di sviluppo’, in Terzo Mondo (Milan), year III, no. 9 (Sept. 1970) pp. 29–45.
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Melotti, U. (1977). Bureaucratic Collectivism. In: Marx and the Third World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15801-0_23
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