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Correction: "Abstract "knowing" is not enough because without an organization and social forces one cannot maneuver or prove their knowing. Corrected text: Abstract "knowing" is not enough. Without an organization and social forces one cannot maneuver or prove - manifest, the "correctness" of their knowing More opinions IV. Bureaucracy - "the society bureau system," is the glue that holds society together, because means of production are deployed and activated on this basis. It is the guts - "nuts and bolts," of the system. The bureau system becomes enemy of the people and enemy of "the revolution" in degree to which it delivers services to itself. Bureaucracy is a socially necessary function of a society at a certain stage in growth of the division of labor. Bureaucracy is not the result of private property but the division of labor. Private property and a host of subjective factors gives bureaucracy its class - human face. The bureau system is channel for privilege information, delivery of services, short cuts through the societal system, favoritism, a source of checks and balances and good ole fashion red tape. Bureaucracy is administration and administration is inconceivable outside a bureau system. The bureau system founded on the electro-mechanical laboring process, (the industrial revolution) saps the wealth of society as "feed" for conducting "middle man" operations, yet it is indispensable to any society governed by electro-mechanical labor process. The fewer the better is the revolutionary approach from the "left," "right," fascist or communist. The bureau system is socially necessary as an artifact of any industrial society. No one suggests destruction of the bureaucracy "everywhere" except immature anarchists. The bureau system constitutes itself as an "intermediate materially-privileged bureaucratic social layer," to the degree its redundant functions are revealed to be delivery of services to itself. A "party bureaucracy" is an attribute of every society on earth. The ideology of this layer of society should not exist because it lives off the wealth of the workers is not well thought out. Some define the Soviet bureaucracy - a huge layer of Soviet society, as an "intermediate materially-privileged bureaucratic social layer," based on its location from the production of material goods, distribution and services. I do not. The danger in Soviet society was much larger than the "party bureaucracy" or whatever political faction held power. Soviet bureaucracy is a huge concept of a huge society machine. The bureaucracy in real time and real life is an industrial artifact and we will defeat it on the basis of transition away from industrial society. Everyone faces the bureau system to one degree or another. In America the most common hated bureau system enemy is the IRS - Internal Revenue Service. Here's a bureaucracy that is an "intermediate materially-privileged bureaucratic social layer" of the bourgeois property, filled with thousands of people whose job is to keep their hand in your pocket. This general category called "the bureaucracy" or "Soviet" or "Stalinist bureaucracy" looms as an ideological fiction in the sense that one ought to say what they mean and informs others of what they speak so we all make intelligent decisions and estimates. After all we can speak in clear "market terms" understandable to the American mind. The world has evened up in such a way that everyone in every theater is going to understand our narrative if we are clear. Ones market, or rather environment of class struggle is always in flux changing and the nature of routine, based on past practice serve as a brake on the revolutionary process. This applies to capitalists and communists alike. When capitalist are defeat by way of bureaucratic practices they die in the market and are quickly forgotten. During periods of transition from one quantitative boundary to the next bureaucracy stifles the adoption of more efficient delivery system and new ideas. During the evolutionary leap from one technology regime to the next, bureaucracy, as it is based on and rooted in the old political, ideological, economic, social and administrative period, emerges as the immediate enemy of the revolutionary transition. The Soviet party bureaucracy, as it merged with state, government and bureau systems administered services of all kind and imposed layers of redundant administrative systems of surveillance. By surveillance IS NOT meant primarily policing/state agencies/KGB type stuff, but what is called "checking up on the systematic fulfillment of task" systems interwoven into everything. This system can be unraveled, assaulted and leveled based on occupations that are "the people checking up on the people checking up on the people." Trotsky did not seek to defeat bureaucracy . He sought to defeat his political enemy and called his political enemy "the bureaucracy," because every ruling group on earth "heads the society bureaucracy." How could this redundancy - Soviet style, be defeated seems the question. Well, it could not be defeated in the realm of politics and was not. Stalin hit at the bureaucracy using the bureaucracy aimed at the people most responsible or as it is called, "at the top." Then the factional battles and wars took place at the highest level of Soviet life. Stain defeated one political opponent after another with some being jailed, purged and executed. If the question is my attitude towards executing political opponents my vote and answer is this: execution should be used in heinous crimes, like first degree murder and certain degrees of rape and torture. One cannot change the bureaucracy by changing people or a Trotsky for Stalin. One can always change aspects of the shape of a thing,but you are not gong to change "the thing" with a change in personnel. Nor could change come about by everyone within one bureau system being fired or laid off only to be placed elsewhere in the same kind of bureau system. What became the Stalin/Soviet model could not CHANGE, or leap - transition, to a new technology basis or collapse its own redundant system. This law expressed itself as "one protecting their own job at all cost." The evolutionary leap is very different from transition from one quantitative boundary to another. The communists were in the Soviet Union were defeated during a period of the evolutionary leap in 1989. The subjective reasons dealing with actual Soviet life; (party factional feuds from October 1917 - 1989; disgust of the people with the society bureaucracy; the intellectual and cultural life of the party; the slowing curve economic expansion and consciousness of the revolutionaries) is the stuff of the expert. I believe Stalin's individual role in this process between 1928 and his death was to ensure the growth of society wide surveillance systems, previously defined. Lenin faced the old "the bureau system" in a new guise due to its fundamentality in the division of labor. What Lenin faces was nothing compared to industrial bureaucracy or bureaucracy constructed on the basis of an industrial infrastructure. He demanded the "fewer the better" and then got more of the same things. Some folks felt if the "armed workers" and the soviets (small "s") were allowed greater sway the "the bureau system" could have been defeated decisively. If Trotsky had won the political contest Soviet society would have been qualitatively altered along with world communist revolution. Or what is the same, if one "conceived correct thoughts and correct ideology" of the state (reading Trotsky for instance, which I have read) and "understood" the concept of "armed workers as the state," (like Marx) rather than a professional organization, and "democratic institutions" of soviets were empowered with automatic recall of all civil servants our problem would be solved. Well, we will never know this. The cult of the personality is actually the cult of the state/bureau system, justifying its existence outside historical phenomenon. Each "head" of a bureau is a personality and big man with the paramount leader the biggest man. These "big men" make history and allegiance to them is a premium. The best description I read on this subject was that of the Soviet Communists (B). My personal attitude towards "leader worship" is that it is an old model history has discarded. The cult of personality is a lot deeper that making an icon out of Lenin or Trotsky or Mao of Kim or the rapper .50. The cult of the personality is the ideology of the state/bureaucracy as state, blaming everything good and bad on individuals rather than the very systemic relations that is the state itself. Hymns were sung to Stalin but Stalin himself could not create such a system. He could support such a system but not create it. The bureaucracy creates the "cult of the personality" no different than Hollywood creates its cults of movie stars. Both seek to only preserve their existence and keep the masses looking at the individual rather than system relations. If the question is how do we in America avoid "the cult of the personality" then I say we do not and cannot. The difference is that political persons are not cults on the level of our movie stars, and those that rise to such heights are quickly toppled, in favor of a new model More later. WL ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
