The Thinking Reed

The statocracy was studied by Trotsky, Deutscher, Djilas and, in his own way, by Orwell, as well as by many others.15 Berdyaev was one of the first to write that ‘the new Soviet bureaucracy is more powerful than that of the Tsarist regime. It is a new privileged class which can exploit the masses pitilessly.’16 The difficulty in the position of Marxist critics of ‘the new class’ lies, however, in the fact that this qualitatively new phenomenon cannot be adequately described by using the categories of the capitalist mode of production. For example, the problem arises as to whether, in this case, political power results from economic power or vice versa. Djilas inclined towards the latter view, thereby casting doubt on the validity of Marx’s main idea that politics is the concentrated expression of economics. The Eurocommunists — Johnstone, Elleinstein, and others — are in general disposed to treat economics and politics quite separately.17 In fact, as more recent studies have shown, the question has been posed quite wrongly, through analogy with capitalism. In statocratic society economic and political power are simply identical. The one cannot give rise to the other, for the one already is the other. Power exists here only as complete political and economic power, and can exist in no other form.

There are a number of theories current in the West which see the statocracy as a sort of administrative bourgeoisie.18 This view seems to me to be mistaken in principle, because the historical specificity of the bureaucratic ‘estate’ is not taken into account in the given case. According to Andras Hegedüs, himself a former Stalinist bureaucrat, bureaucracy has always appeared and developed where the formal property-owner

was no longer able to perform directly the management functions which derived from the fact of his ownership, and he was thus forced to share his power with a hierarchically and professionally organized social group qualified to perform these tasks. This group became, however, not only the executor of specific management functions but simultaneously acquired specific interests of its own.19

In 1917 the workers became, formally, the collective owners of Russia’s industry but could not manage this industry directly and were obliged, under pressure from the Bolshevik Party, to yield part of their ‘proprietorial rights’ to a bureaucracy. Brus has specially studied this phenomenon in his book. He notes that the bureaucracy is parasitic upon the gap between formal nationalization and real socialization, appropriating for itself some of the rights and privileges of the owner. Here, however, we find a vital difference between the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie can appropriate and control the use of the surplus product, because it is the formal owner of the means of production. The statocracy (in the narrower sense, the bureaucracy20) can control and partly appropriate the surplus product of labour precisely because it is not the formal owner thereof. Hence the inability of a statocracy to become a hereditary class, its need to reinforce itself by co-optation of new members, and so on.

Another specific feature of the bureaucracy — in contrast to a bourgeoisie of any sort — is that its organization is based almost exclusively upon vertical ties: that it is hierarchical. Hence its specific mentality, in which ‘not only is prestige aligned with the hierarchical order, but so too is knowledge. The higher one stands in the hierarchy, the more one knows, or at least ought to know.’21 In the last analysis, as Marx wrote, it all comes down to the notion that the officials possess ‘superior knowledge’.22 This makes bureaucratic organization unified, discipline, stable — and ineffective. Unlike the bourgeois, or even the bourgeois administrator in the Western sense, the statocrat is not an independent economic and political subject. As for the top leadership, which possesses ‘superior knowledge’, it receives only such information as is supplied by its subordinates, and they unconsciously and involuntarily manipulate their own leaders.