/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2655128
>dialectical materialism, can not predict the emergence of classes for a radically new system.
source?

>>2655130
There is no source for that claim, I‘m inferring that from the Soviet Union ending up with a bureaucracy that arguably constituted a class with distinct interests from ordinary workers. Did Lenin simply misapply dialectical materialism if it suffices to predict the emergence of such a class?

bump

you cant. class war is eternal.

the issue is that marxists dont into political science properly, so define class and the state incorrectly. all societies are class societies by virtue of status, which orders people differently. status can be defined by any metric, but there is always inclusion and exclusion.

this scene from "the great gatsby" introduces us to the difference between wealth and belonging to the ruling class, for example.

>>2655882
Marxists have defined both properly, it‘s just that you are a midwit who thinks arbitrary value systems constitute a class. It‘s about societal systems and relations that are consequential, i.e. who owns the means of production under capitalism and who does not.

>>2655882
damn he was shrimpin out

>>2655146
The Soviet bureaucracy cannot be defined as a social class if one starts from a Marxist definition of the term. In Marxism, a social class is defined in relation to ownership of the means of production (the slave owner who owns slaves, the feudal lord who owns the land, the bourgeois who owns machines, tools, and capital goods). Soviet bureaucrats owned nothing; they were administrators, they carried out managerial tasks and received a salary as compensation. The fact that they enjoyed a higher standard of living than a worker does not mean, for a Marxist, that they constituted a different social class. At the end of their lives (and for me this is the key attribute of social classes that is often forgotten), they were not going to be able to leave their children, as an inheritance, either a fraction or the totality of any means of production. If the son of a bureaucrat wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, he had to go through the same process of training and selection that his father had gone through, whereas the son of a bourgeois or a landowner is, from birth, an owner, in potential if not in fact.

What you are observing is not the emergence of a new social class, but rather the emergence of a “new” form of differentiation of labor roles within the context of a society that was in transition toward overcoming class divisions. The distinction between managers and operators is not actually new, but in the capitalist system it both overlaps with and is eclipsed by the more fundamental division between owners and the dispossessed. Obviously, the division of labor will always entail differentiation of roles, but as long as an individual’s membership in one role or another role is not determined by private ownership of one resource or another, it is not legitimate to categorize these groups as social classes.

>>2655128
your premise is based on revisionist anti-communist historiography. the USSR did not 'just end up another system with classes', it simply failed to completely overturn the pre-existing (and still existing externally in adversary nations) class structures. this was due to several complicated factors, primarily the necessity for high military spending as a proportion of GDP to defend itself/compete with america and its proxies. with less resources to use on self-development, and with enemies constantly provoking internal strife, it was a matter of time before it was re-captured (literally, they had to shell the parliament building with artillery because it was occupied by students during the dissolution) by the bourgeoisie.

>>2655976
Workers in the Soviet Union did not own the means of production. The government did. Anyone working for the government is a differentiated class, regardless of the differences in how to become that class compared to capitalism.

>>2656086
This. I think a lot of Marxists, especially MLs, get it in their head that the only possible class system is capitalism, and that if you've abolished capitalism you've abolished class.

>>2655146
The nomenklatura was not a class in the Marxist definition. This is proven by the simple fact that it was overthrown by itself.

The USSR died because liberal ideas were allowed to fester until problems with the Soviet economy were addressed with liberal reforms. With the death of socialist ideology that represented by the mid 80s criminal elements conspired to destroy the state so they could loot it. These criminal elements formed in the party due to lack of discipline allowing the formation of patronage networks.

>>2656100
Infantile. Read theory.

Class is when you work for the government.

>>2656086
If this were true why would the nomenklatura overthrow themselves? They could have been happy little piggies living off the surplus value created by the workers.

The truth is petty bourgeois elements were never fully liquidated in the USSR and they opportunistically joined the party and when they had their chance they carried out a counter-revolution (to the detriment of the majority of the nomenklatura, including almost all the older cadre).

>>2656305
ironically enough having a factioned or multiparty system might have been able to better handle this by keeping such elements visible in their steady growth in number over the laboring elements of the party, which would have made it more readily obvious that the politburo was becoming differentiated from the majority of the populace.

>>2656086

>Workers in the Soviet Union did not own the means of production. The government did.
That's besides the point. The argument that the Soviet government constituted a de facto separate entity from the proletariat (I don't wholly agree with this but it's a valid criticism) does not entail that this separate entity must necessarily be a social class. Society is divided by all kinds of rifts: gender, age, race, etc; in many cases the groups so configured show a disparity of power or privilege. Within the field of the social production of life, the main rift is between those who own the means with which life is produced and those who don't (these, specifically, are social classes) but there are other secondary rifts that emerge in more complex societies, like the distinction between manual and intellectual labour and between administrative and operational work. You can argue that Soviet nationalizations only meant that a strengthened state replaced the bourgouisie as owners of everything, but state property is conceptually incompatible with private property; in practical terms, this means that ownership of the means of production ceased to be a cause of unequal distribution of power, welfare or privilege and it was replaced, to a degree, by closeness to the Party structure, educational level or factibility of pursuing a managerial or political career. This is, objectively, a more fair and meritocratic mechanism of distribution of privilege, even if it is still flawed and unequal. I brought up the inheritance aspect because it is the most illuminating and overlooked evidence of the difference between the Soviet bureaucracy and any previous class of owners. Leaving aside particular cases of nepotism (which always existed), there is no mechanism by which a Soviet bureaucrat could have "enclosed" the privilege of his position in his hands and choose where it will go in the way that any other historical owner could with his own source of privilege. Equating the condition of a manager with the condition of an owner is a faulty consequence of a short-term perspective. People for some reason tend to ignore that the social aspect of a social class necessarily implies an intergenerational aspect: if you can not privately guarantee the intergenerational passage of the resource why you have power and privilage, then you are not the private owner of said resource and therefore the group you belong to is not a social class. The slaveowner, the landowner and the factory owner choose in the privacy of their offices the intergenerational passage of the mean of production that they own; the socialist bureaucrat does not have such a power.

This does not mean, of course, that welfare and power was equitably distributed, it's just that it was not distributed along class lines. Gender and ethnic inequality also kept existing, but we wouldn't consider any society to be less socialist just because of that. Socialism can not sort out all of humanities problems in a generation and bring about heaven on earth immediatelly, and I firmly believe basing it on such an impossible standard is detrimental to our cause, even if it I empathize with such a desire. If we are materialists, also, we must believe that the overcoming of the root separation between the owners and the dispossessed will eventually bring about the overcoming of many other more superstructural schisms.

>we have to content
contend

>>2656086
If the bureaucrats who direct the social surplus are not restrained in their ability to direct it as they see fit, and if they can maintain their position as the directors of the surplus indefinitely, then in that case they are just bourgeoisie who have been chosen by the state, similarly to when state owned property is sold off cheaply to capitalists. It would just be a transfer of ownership by the state to private individuals. This doesn't make the bureaucracy a new class, because it's indistinguishable from the old system of ownership.

On the other hand, if these bureaucrats can't direct the social surplus as they see fit, or if they aren't indefinitely in control of the surplus, then they are beholden to a power greater than themselves who only appoint them to do the day to day managing of the social surplus in their stead. In that case, the form of the state determines what class really owns the means of production. If it's a democracy that is responsive to the working class above all other classes, then the working class owns the means of production.

There's no situation where a new class emerges. State ownership is either the ownership of private individuals sanctioned by the state, or the ownership of the ruling class that controls the state, which is again either capitalists or workers given we're coming from capitalism. It's also possible that the state was contested by multiple classes, but these classes aren't new, they're the classes of (for Russia, semi-feudal) capitalism.

>>2656548
Exactly. With the difference that Soviet mandarins didn't own land.

>>2656456
A lot of coping going on here

Marxism is just a bunch of woo.

>muh bureaucracy
ok, lib

>>2656729
<“We must realise that the fight against bureaucracy is an absolutely essential one… Bureaucracy in our state system has become a malady of such gravity that it is spoken of in our Party programme… With all the more persistence must the struggle against bureaucracy … be waged.”
Against Vulgarising the Slogan of Self-Criticism, June 26, 1928 (Stalin)

>>2655146
>Did Lenin simply misapply dialectical materialism
Lenins state system was adhoc solution to revolutionary war environment. He was pragmatic when it came to Marxism instead of being some kind of dogmatic prophet.