by Daniel Bell
The Soviet Union: Bureaucracy and the New Class
In Czarist Russia a socialist revolution had taken place: private ownership of the means of production had been abolished and property relations, and consequently class relations had been transformed. Thus, in the most unlikely of circumstances, a Marxian theory of society and social development was to be tested.
Before the First World War, all Marxian theorists had predicted a revolution in Russia. This was based on Marx’s notion, derived from the revolutions of 1848, that the political course of capitalist development would fall into two stages: the democratic revolution and the social revolution. The democratic revolution was essentially bourgeois; it was the achievement of political rights, such as the right of assembly, of franchise, etc. which the bourgeoisie itself needed to establish power, but which, in struggle, could be grasped by the working class as well. The social revolution was the action by the working class, using its political rights, to transform the economic relations of society.
From this point of view, Marxists drew a continuum: England and France had gone farthest in the democratic revolution; Germany’s revolution was incomplete; Russia had lagged most behind. The agenda of history, therefore, remained to be completed; Russia still had to go through its “1848.” Thus all socialists expected a revolution in Russia as an historical inevitability—but a “bourgeois” revolution, February, not October.
Some Marxists, particulary Trotsky, thought it possible to make a socialist revolution in Russia on the basis of what Trotsky called “the law of combined development” for backward countries. “In the conditions of capitalist decline,” wrote Trotsky, “backward countries are unable to attain that level which the old centers of capitalism have obtained,” and since such countries could not develop on a capitalist basis, only socialization could “solve those problems of technique and productivity which were long ago solved by capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.” 59
But in the Soviet Union, after the October Revolution, a new social force had arisen which had increasingly assumed autonomy and independent power—the bureaucracy. In State and Revolution Lenin had argued that the old state machinery had to be smashed, and the new administrative apparatus would be, as in the Paris Commune of 1871, directly in the hands of the people: there would be officials, but they would not become bureaucrats, “i.e. privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people. That is the essence of bureaucracy.” Workers’ deputies were to supervise the management of the apparatus. They were to be elected and subject to recall. Their pay was not to exceed a worker’s. There was to be “immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that all may become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that therefore, nobody may be able to become a ‘bureaucrat’.” 60
But Trotsky, even from the start, had a more realistic view. Bureaucracy, he argued, is inescapable (“the tendencies of bureaucratism ... would everywhere show themselves even after a proletarian revolution”) for the obvious reason that no transition to socialism is ever immediate (“A socialist state even in America on the basis of the most advanced capitalism could not immediately provide everyone with as much as he needs, and would therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much as possible”), so that both a state and some “directing apparatus” in the society would still be necessary (pp. 53, 55).
A bureaucracy, he said, inevitably tends to develop its own vested interests. But the counterweight to the bureaucracy is the Party (“the Party was always in a state of open or disguised struggle with the bureaucracy”). It was Stalin, in seeking his own power, who brought the two together. What Stalin did was to “subject the Party to its own officialdom and merge the latter in the officialdom of the state. Thus was created the present totalitarian regime”.
But bureaucracy has its own trajectory. “The unlimited power of the bureaucracy is a no less forceful instrument of social differentiation,” Trotsky wrote. It uses its power to guarantee its own well-being; it divides sectors of the population from each other, creating privileged strata in the working class and collective farms; it strangles criticism in order to reinforce its own power. In all respects it has “the specific consciousness of a ruling ‘class’, which, however, is still far from confident of its right to rule”.
If a new ruling “class” has emerged, what then is the character of Soviet society? Is it still socialist; and if so, in what way? If not what is it? These were the questions with which Trotsky wrestled in the book, questions crucial to one’s assessment of the revolution.
Trotsky sought to give two answers, one political, the other sociological. The Stalin regime itself Trotsky called a form of Bonapartism, though “of a new type not before seen in history.” Bonapartism arises when “in moments of history” a sharp struggle between two camps allows state power to rise, momentarily, above the contending classes. But as a Marxist, Trotsky could not accept Bonapartism as more than a passing political phase of a deeper struggle, that of contending classes. What, then, was the sociological character, i.e. the class character, of Soviet society?
Was it “state capitalism”? Trotsky considered the question in detail, but rejected the formulation on two curious grounds: one that property had been “socialized” in the Soviet Union and two, that state capitalism was a device in declining capitalist states, such as Germany or Italy, to restrict the “productive forces” of the society in order to serve reactionary purposes. Since, in the Soviet Union, the regime’s intention was to “develop the productive forces” of society, the society was historically progressive. How, then, could one group both fascist and communist under a common rubric of state capitalism?
Is the bureaucracy a new class? Trotsky had more difficulty with this question. In bourgeois society the bureaucracy “represents the interests of a possessing and educated class.” The fascists, “when they find themselves in power, are united with the big bourgeoisie by bonds of common interest.” In the Soviet Union “the means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, ‘belongs’ to the bureaucracy. ... It is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society” (pp. 248–249).
But Trotsky shies away from calling the bureaucracy a class and accepting the fact that a new and different kind of social system had been created in the Soviet Union. When he uses the phrase “ruling ‘class’,” the word class is in quotation marks, to indicate its ambiguity; so, too, is the word belong when he writes that the state “belongs” to the bureaucracy. His chief argument is that the bureaucracy lacks the essential and distinctive feature of a class, i.e. property rights, and so it cannot “transmit to [its] heirs its rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus.”
The issue, says Trotsky, is still open. The question of the character of the Soviet Union, he declares, is not yet decided by history. It is a “workers state, torn by the antagonism between an organized and armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses,” a “contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism” (pp. 278, 255). The alternatives are either a new upsurge by the proletariat to eliminate the privileges of the bureaucracy, or a “bourgeois restoration.” Trotsky also considers a third variant, that “the bureaucracy continues at the head of the state.” But his orthodox Marxism leads him to reject this as a likely permanent form since he cannot envisage a class becoming a ruling class without becoming a “possessing class,” and passing on its privileges “by right of testament.”
And yet, in wrestling with these questions, Trotsky is led to a startling conclusion: “To define the Soviet regime as transitional, or intermediate, means to abandon such finished social categories as capitalism (and therewith ‘state capitalism’) and also socialism” (p. 254, emphasis in the original). Doctrinaires would not be satisfied, he notes, “sociological problems would certainly be simpler if sociological phenomena had always a finished character.” But “there is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out
of reality, for the sake of logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may wholly overturn it”.
As an orthodox Marxist, Trotsky could only envisage the Soviet Union, in his time, as tending either to capitalism or socialism. And yet, Trotsky did not throw out of his scheme the possibility that the bureaucracy could become a new class, even though it violated the “logical completeness” of the dichotomy of capitalism and socialism. In The Revolution Betrayed he wrote:
If these as yet wholly new relations [i.e. bureaucratic privilege] should solidify, become the norm and be legalized, whether with or without resistance from the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution. But to speak of that now is at least premature.
Three years later, in what was to be his last theoretical pronouncement, Trotsky acknowledged the distinct possibility of another either / or. Writing shortly after the Nazi-Soviet pact, Trotsky told his followers that a new historic caesura had been reached: since the “further persistence of the disintegrating capitalist world is impossible,” either the proletariat would organize the world for socialism or a new social form, bureaucratic collectivism, would establish itself on the stage of history.
Trotsky took the phrase and the idea of bureaucratic collectivism from a book published in Paris in 1939 entitled Le Bureaucratisation du Monde by a man who signed it only Bruno R. No one knew Bruno R., although Trotsky called him “an Italian ‘left-Communist’ who formerly adhered to the Fourth International.” Even more curious, no one seemed to be able to find the book which, for Trotsky, represented the only real challenge to his ideas; and the argument about “bureaucratic collectivism” became known only second-hand, through Trotsky’s account.
The thesis of the book, as reported by Trotsky, was sweeping in its stark and powerful simplicity. Not only did the bureaucracy in Russia constitute a new class but the men of this class—bureaucrats, managers, technicians—were the forerunners of a social revolution which was creating a new type of ruling class throughout the entire Western world: Stalin’s Russia, Hitlers Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal were all part of a common historical phenomenon.
For Trotsky there was a direct political corollary to this new either/or. “However onerous the ... perspective may be,” he wrote, if the Stalin regime was not merely an “abhorrent relapse” on the road to socialism but a distinct new social form, with permanent exploitative features of its own, then the proletariat everywhere would have to repudiate the Soviet Union and refuse to defend it against its enemies as progressive. In the longer perspective, if the larger thesis were true, that socialism was not the necessary stage after capitalism, then the idea itself would have to be considered as a “utopia.” 61
Trotsky, at his death, was still not prepared to accept the second perspective, and for him and his followers Russia was still a “degenerated workers’ state” which could yet be redeemed by a proletarian revolution. For left-wing schismatics, however, for whom the orthodox Marxist categories had become too constricting, the phrase “bureaucratic collectivism” was a felicitous one. It congealed the gropings of independent radicals who sought a sociological category that was realistic about the Soviet regime. The dissident Trotskyite faction, led by Max Shachtman, adopted the concept and in a series of articles from 1940 on Shachtman sought to develop the idea that the Soviet Union was neither socialist nor capitalist but a new kind of society.62 Shachtman’s co-leader in the Trotskyite split, James Burnham, generalized the idea as Bruno R. had, and proposed the theory of The Managerial Revolution as the necessary outcome of Western social development.
Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, which as an idea and a phrase, rather than as a specific set of definitions and categories, has had a continuing influence since its publication thirty years ago, has an artful simplicity. It was based on the assumption that function rather than ownership was the crucial category of power in a technical society, and it presented a seductive theory of historical class succession so that just as the oppressed peasantry did not succeed the oppressive feudal lords but both were displaced by an entirely different class, the bourgeoisie, who remade society to their own image, so the proletariat would not succeed the capitalist, but both would be replaced by “the managers,” who would become a new ruling class, wielding power on the basis of their technical superiority.
Though the idea of The Managerial Revolution may have been suggested by Bruno R. (however there are no references to him in Burnham’s book), the historical lineaments of the conception were clear, and Burnham moved quickly to establish a patrimony in his next book, two years later, The Machiavellians, which he subtitled defensively “Defenders of Freedom.” These fathers were Gaetano Mosca, who proclaimed that all societies are divided into elites and masses and that the political process is always a “struggle for pre-eminence” on the part of determined minorities; Vilfredo Pareto, who saw political history as a “circulation of elites” wherein new vigorous forces in society manipulate the sentiments of the masses in order to gain power63; and Robert Michels, who argued that complex organization creates a need for technical specialization, that “organization implies a tendency to oligarchy,” that the leadership places the defense of its interests ahead of its constituency, and that the extension of state bureaucracy “alone can [satisfy] the claim of the educated members of the population ... the discontented members of the educated classes ... for secure positions” in the society.64
While the phrase “the managerial revolution” had a large resonance, the analysis and categories proved feeble indeed. The central terms shifted constantly. By “managers” Burnham said he meant the “production managers,” “administrative engineers,” “supervisory technicians,” but not the finance executives, this differentiation a bastard version of Veblen’s distinction between industry and business. But the managers were also in government, where they were the administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on. Presumably there was a community of interest between those in industry and those in government.
The managers “will exercise their control over the instruments of production ... through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production.” In Germany and Italy there is a shift from capitalism to managerial society. In Russia, “the nation most advanced toward managerial structure,” the managers, who are the managers of factories and state trusts and big collective farms, are already getting the largest proportion of the national income.
In the West the managerial revolution had to come because capitalism itself will break down.
Experience has already shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment. ... The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer ... there has been in all major capitalist nations a permanent agricultural depression. ... [And finally] Capitalism is no longer able to find uses for the available investment funds, which waste in idleness in the account books of the banks. This mass unemployment of private money is scarcely less indicative of the death of capitalism than the mass unemployment of human beings.
In the same apocalyptic vein Burnham writes: “We are now in a position to understand the central historical meaning of the first two world wars of the twentieth century. ... The war of 1914 was the last great war of capitalist society; the war of 1939 is the first great war of managerial society.” And, he continues: “The general outcome of the second war is also assured. It is assured because it does not depend upon a military victory by Germany, which is in any case likely.” The general outcome is the collapse of capitalism, the consolidation of Europe (“The day of a Europe carved into a score of sovereign states is over”) and the victory of managerial society.65
Apart from the political predictions, which were quickly falsified, how viable is the theory of the managerial revolution? Although Burnham is quite fuzzy a
s to who are the managers, it is clear from the context out of which his theory developed that it is the economic administrators, not the political bureaucrats, who will dominate the society, though at one point he states that there is no sharp distinction between the economic managers and the political bureaucrats when he writes: “To say that the ruling class is the managers is almost the same thing as to say that it is the state bureaucracy.” 66
But in fact the economic managers and the state bureaucracy—if one thinks of managers as the men who run the economic enterprises—are often quite distinct and even often at odds with each other. As Kerr, Harbison, Dunlop, and Myers argue in their comparative study of management:
... in all industrializing societies, the managerial class has neither the capacity nor the will to become the dominant ruling group. The managers are characteristically the agents of stockholders, of state bureaucracies, or in some cases of workers’ councils. Since they are preoccupied with internal affairs of enterprise, which become ever more complex, the members of the managerial class are prone to become conformists rather than leaders in the larger affairs of society.67
To say all this is not to minimize the real changes which have taken place in the social structure of Western society—if one looks at the enterprise in functional rather than formal terms. The power of technical management has forced a decisive change in many of the basic goals of capitalist corporations. And there is a high degree of managerial autonomy.68 The tasks of running a single enterprise in the “socialist” economies often bring such managers into direct conflict either with the economic planners at the center or the political controllers who make the key decisions about targets of planned growth, allocation between sectors, and the like. But this is to delimit the scope of a theory of managerial revolution rather than accept it as the leitmotif of all structural changes in Western society.
