[BurrsWogdon]

I could not edit, but I found some Marxian substantation for my critique of soviet bureaucracy:

"The Stalinist bureaucracy is the American Bureaucracy carried to its ultimate and logical conclusion; both of them products of capitalist production in the epoch of state-capitalism" C.L.R. James State Capitalism and World Revolution

"The labor bureaucracy, that alien force ruling over the working class, grows out of accomplishments of the workers movement. In a modern society like the U.S., the working class struggles not against past defeats but against past victories - against the institutions that the workers themselves have created and which have become forms of domination over them." - C.L.R. James, Noel Ignatiev A New Notion

I don't see why this bureaucracy is necessarily or inevitably a product of capitalist production. Was there no bureaucracy back into antiquity? And even if it then also could be correlated with capitalist forms of production (non-dominant, I am told), perhaps it then also was a signal of decline of that respective society.

I suppose C.L.R. James would be put in the Trotskyite camp, though I am of course no expert in socialist taxonomy.


This is where I believe I could make a case for the concept of "collectivisim", which I am aware that you (TIG) believe to be meaningless.