(07-03-2016, 02:20 PM)Odin Wrote:(07-03-2016, 10:44 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Marx saw ownership as the basis of power, ignoring the power of bureaucracies when those bureaucracies have no capitalists to contest them or when those bureaucracies are fully in collusion with the financiers and industrialists (as in America).
Many of us on the Left consider the Soviet regime to be State-Capitalist, the economy run as one huge corporation under the control and effective ownership of the party bosses and the bureaucracy underpinning the party bosses.
I see Stalinist economics as a new serfdom in which the State is the official lord, with the pretense that those who do the work own the economic system through a state that represents the working class. The representation is of course an empty formality. As a new form of serfdom, Stalinism is as reactionary as fascism. its nastiest variant in North Korea is effectively an absolute monarchy that makes the House of Saud look liberal by contrast.
Quote:Russia had effectively no democratic tradition, it was an absolutist monarchy with a highly centralized bureaucracy. The party bosses essentially took over that bureaucracy and made it their own, and given Russia's poor level of development at the time there was very little of an actual industrial working class, let along an industrial working class with any developed traditions of participatory civil society like existed in the US, Germany, and the UK in 1917.
Ironically, Russia was rapidly developing as an industrial society before World War I. But the first stage of industrial development is always harsh on the workers who endure long toil for near-starvation pay under brutal management in dangerous conditions. There is usually no safety net except for "Lord Almighty". Industrial workers crippled on the job go from near destitution to starvation. Industrial accidents that kill can push children into the "great satanic mills" if not into prostitution. The slums are disease-ridden firetraps.
I contrast Russia to India, the latter developing a civil society before it industrialized heavily. Tsarist Russia put its emphasis on resource extraction and heavy industry; India put its emphasis on consumer goods. India started with cottage industries that made the break from rural life to industry less abrupt. Even at a lower level of development, India made sure that children got elementary education.
In contrast to the great authors Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who wrote largely of the elites who could have as easily been British, or the marginally-readable works of Maxim Gorki, the clearest impression that I get of the social reality of Imperial Russia comes from the tales of the village Anatevka by Sholem Aleichem, best known by most Americans in Fiddler on the Roof. Imperial Russia was of course a horrible place in which to be a Jew. It was generally also a horrible place in which to be a Russian unless one was an elite.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.