The Thinking Reed

However exaggerated were the forms it sometimes assumed, the bureaucratism of the war period was only child’s play in comparison with present-day bureaucratism which grew up in peacetime, while the apparatus, in spite of the ideological growth of the party, continued obstinately to think and decide for the Party.142

Although Lenin wrote and spoke a good deal about bureaucratization, only Bukharin raised openly the question of the threatening degeneration of the revolutionary government:

The working class is not homogeneous in its composition, in the level of culture, political maturity, technical skill and so on of its members, its component parts. Consequently, it cannot rule, either in political life or — what interests us here — in economic life, as a ‘Novgorod Veche’ with millions of hands: inevitably, it rules through its vanguard, through its administrative cadre, through its leaders.143

Consequently, the working class has to be subordinated to the apparatus. This is necessary, but not without its dangers. ‘If’, writes Stephen Cohen,

during the transition period, a slowly maturing but largely undeveloped proletariat remained politically, culturally and administratively subordinate to a host of higher authorities, then the danger of a perversion of the socialist ideal was very great.144

Bukharin emphasizes that this does not necessarily lead to the restoration of capitalism. He frankly fears that under these conditions ‘a new ruling class’ and a new form of exploitation may emerge, based not upon private but on state property. This honest self-warning, however, constituted only part of Bukharin’s theory. While his general hypothesis was to some extent confirmed by history, his concrete analysis proved quite erroneous.

In the first place Bukharin, in the manner typical of the Bolsheviks, ‘absolutizes’ the Russian situation of his own time. The backwardness of Russia’s working class — its inability, after the revolution, to create an independent democratic organization in the sphere of production — seems to him a law of universal history. If that were so, the danger he mentions would be absolutely insuperable and socialist revolution would be pointless. Experience has shown, however, that in industrially developed countries the workers are capable of creating their own non-Party organizations, that they are fully capable of democratic participation in the management of production, and so on. Bukharin could not know, of course, about workers’ self-management in present-day Yugoslavia or about Poland’s ‘Solidarity’, but in Turin as early as 1920 Italian workers had created their factory committees, which functioned much more effectively than the corresponding Russian organizations of 1917.

Bukharin, while not doubting the need for the working class to be completely subject to the government apparatus and the Party ‘vanguard’, rests his hope entirely on the culture which later on, many years after the victory of the revolution, will enable the workers to ‘mature’ into independent activity. Cultural development is indeed, as we shall see later, one of the most important preconditions for a democratic organization of society, but it is only a precondition. Nobody can learn to swim without jumping into the water, nor can any people become ‘mature’ enough for democracy otherwise than by establishing democracy among themselves, nor can workers be prepared to participate in management except by beginning to participate in it. In general, culture is not some sort of ‘condition’ which one has to attain, but a historical process: ‘developed’ culture of the masses is possible only as both a precondition and a consequence of democracy. And at the same time, as Marcuse wrote, without democracy ‘the revolution is bound to reproduce the very antagonisms which it strives to overcome.’145