Bureaucracy As A New Class – Leon Trotsky
Trotsky subscribes to the Marxist thesis that bureaucracy serves the interests of the ruling bourgeois class. Bureaucracy was his major concern in the writings after 1923 (The Revolution Betrayed). He said that existence of bureaucracy characterises every class regime. Its power is of a reflected character. “The bureaucracy is indissolubly, bound up with ruling economic class, feeding itself upon the social roots of the latter, maintaining itself and falling together with it.” A Bureaucracy is an instrument, a hireling of class rule which can be found in every class society. He believed since bureaucracy is connected to the bourgeois state, a proletarian revolution against the latter will also create the conditions necessary for the elimination of bureaucracy.
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For Trotsky, bureaucratism is a social phenomenon. It is a definite system of administration of people and things. It is the typical ways of behaving, the psychological make up and working style of a specific identifiable stratum, the bureaucracy. He worked against the spread of bureaucratism which was the result of the transference to the party of the methods and the administrative manners accumulated during the last years.
According to Trotsky, bureaucracy will disappear only in the communist society where no exploitation and no class differences exist. It will become superfluous. It will be absorbed by society, and the administrative tasks lose their exploitative character. In the new society, the administrative system occupies itself with the administration of things and not, as was the case with bourgeois bureaucracy, the administration of people.
Throughout the 1930s Trotsky insisted that the October Revolution had been betrayed — “betrayed by a stratum of self-seeking bureaucrats who had succeeded in destroying the true ‘proletarian vanguard’, the Bolshevik Party.” As said above, he worked against the spread of bureaucratism. He was against bureaucratic dictatorship. He was convinced that ultimately the state structure with its distinct and privileged group of professional bureaucrats would be eliminated. But during the transition bureaucracy must be maintained. “It is needed to arbitrate in the struggle for scarce resources, to stimulate maximum production and to police and regulate distribution as long as contradiction and scarcity persist; and while these functions need to be performed, elements of capitalism, such as wage incentives, must, survive to encourage the bureaucrats to perform them.
As a true Marxist, Trotsky stuck to the view that bureaucracy was not an independent class, although he feared it sometimes. If the bureaucracy dominating the Soviet Union is a new governing class, then the proletariat has been expropriated and a new form of exploitative society has come into being. He said, “If the Bonapartist riffraff is a class this means that it is not an abortion but a viable child of history. If its marauding parasitism is ‘exploitation’ in the scientific sense of the term, this means that the bureaucracy possesses a historical future as the ruling class Indispensable to the given system of economy.” Trotsky was a critic of Stalinist regime in Russia and he regarded it as an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society into a socialist society. If on the other hand, the Stalin regime was the first stage of a new exploiting society, then bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. Despite these trends in the Soviet state and despite the enormous political power, economic privilege, and degree of independence enjoyed by the Soviet bureaucracy (“the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society)”, he did not regard it as an independent class. The bureaucr production and no property in the means of production. It “has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited. supplemented and renewed in the manner of administrative hierarchy independently of any special property relations of its own. The Individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus ……. it is not a class.” For Trotsky, only a class can be an independent historical force. It certainly robs the society in which it exists, but so long as it does this on the basis of the property relations instituted in October 1917, its theft is social parasitism like that of the modern clergy, not class exploitation like that of the bourgeoisie.”