The Thinking Reed

Everywhere, in circumstances of undeveloped commodity-money relations, the apparatus of government began to be transformed into a ruling class. But in the West this happened differently. Here the barons were quickly transformed from officials into feudal lords. The same tendency existed in the East but did not reach fruition, for the immense spaces made it inevitable that government of the social organism should be connected with the growth of a special apparatus, constantly undergoing organizational consolidation. The centripetal forces prevailed over the centrifugal ones.

Vasil'ev traced the formation of the official class [shi] in ancient China, the distant predecessors of our

nomenklatura and the hanbu of present-day China. He showed how, in the Chinese Empire,

the role of highest and most important estate, guiding the country and fulfilling the functions of a ruling class, fell to the lot of the stratum of administrative officials — widespread, numerous and organized on strictly hierarchical lines — who were headed by the Emperor and his ministers. Real power was in the hands of this estate of officials who served the bureaucratic Empire, and they used it in the name of the Emperor and of ‘the well-being of the state and the people’.120

It is important that we come here upon a ruling class which is not formed on the hereditary principle. The right to appropriate surplus product was ensured in this case not by ‘wealth’ or by ‘descent’ but by office held, by ‘rank’. There were only two real forces in society — ‘the people’ and ‘the ruling bureaucracy’.

So, at the end of our inquiry, we come back to the same questions with which we began. These questions were not invented by the intelligentsia but were inherent in reality itself, arrived at through suffering: history and logic led to them through knowledge of our society and of ourselves. The discussion of the Asiatic mode of production is important from the standpoint of principle.121 It is important that since Stalin’s time the concept of socialism has been bound up with state ownership, which itself has become the basis for the activity of a huge, centralized apparatus of officials and an authoritarian — if not totalitarian — system. But it has now become clear that all this already existed in ancient China, long before the 1917 Revolution, and naturally has nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. Compare this with M. Cheshkov’s conclusions, which I have already mentioned, about the statocracy. Reading reports of the discussion of the Asiatic mode of production one cannot help thinking: Isn’t all this a case of ‘modernizing’? Isn’t it just an example of Aesopian language? No, this research is objective, and precisely because of its objectivity it can lead us to some fundamental conclusions of present-day importance. Understanding and knowledge of the past is here helping us to understand the present, and not vice versa.

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Vasil'ev finds in the history of China various ‘models’, historical archetypes: the patriarchal state (Yin), the transitional xenocratic state (Chou), totalitarianism (Tsing), conservative authoritarianism (Han).

The last-named system proved the most stable and well developed. Sinologists show how traditions of authoritarianism and obedience led ‘to exaggeration of the personal authority of a deified personage and depreciation of the individual’.123

Conclusions suggest themselves. Our notorious ‘cult of personality’ was not a disease of socialism, not a deviation ‘from’ socialism, but a phenomenon logically connected with a particular form of totalitarian and authoritarian state which had nothing in common with socialism.

Finally, the models of bureaucratic behaviour turn out to be similar. In statocratic society we find a high degree of social mobility. A person of peasant origin may become a minister. But there is one circumstance which

sharply alters this whole idyllic picture. It is that every possibility is open to an individual only on this absolute condition, that he will humbly remain within the channel of conformism and never think of displaying his individuality.124