As Trotsky points out, every bureaucracy acts parasitically to drain resources to itself. The bureaucracy that the capitalists establish to run their corporations and their state acts parasitically in its own interests to feather its nest. The trades union bureaucracy feathers its nest at the expense of its members. And, in all these instances, these bureaucracies attempt to usurp power to themselves.
“Always and in every regime, the bureaucracy devours no small portion of surplus value. It might not be uninteresting, for example, to compute what portion of the national income is devoured by the fascist locusts in Italy or Germany! But this fact, of no small importance by itself, is entirely insufficient to transform the fascist bureaucracy into an independent ruling class. It is the hireling of the bourgeoisie. True, this hireling straddles the boss’s neck, tears from his mouth at times the juiciest pieces, and spits on his bald spot besides. Say what you will, a most inconvenient hireling! But, nevertheless, only a hireling. The bourgeoisie abides him because without him, it and its regime would absolutely go to the dogs...
Nevertheless, the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the basis of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a “class,” but from those property relations that have been created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (and this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale. During the Middle Ages, the clergy constituted a class or an estate, insofar as its rule depended upon a specific system of land property and forced labour. The present-day church constitutes not an exploiting class but a parasitic corporation. It would be silly to actually speak of the American clergy as a special ruling class; yet, it is indubitable that the priests of the different colours and denominations devour in the United States a big portion of the surplus value. In its traits of parasitism, the bureaucracy, as well as the clergy, is similar to the lumpenproletariat, which likewise does not represent, as is well known, an independent “class.””
The fact that the bureaucracy wielded political power, not the workers, only tells us that the Russian working-class was weak and unable to exercise its social dictatorship directly, via its own political regime. So, why then do the Third Campists not arrive at the same conclusion in the many instances where the bourgeoisie is similarly too weak to exercise its social dictatorship via its own political regime? Tsarist Russia, as discussed, here, by Lenin is a case in point.
When the young British bourgeoisie took on Charles I, it too found itself too weak to rule directly, via its own political regime and gave way to the Protectorate of Cromwell. By 1688, the position of the bourgeoisie as ruling class was established. Britain was a capitalist state. Yet, the bourgeoisie did not exercise political power directly via its own political regime. Parliament continued to be dominated by the landed aristocracy. The bourgeoisie, mostly, did not even have the vote. In 1819, at the time of the Peterloo Massacre when the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie mobilised to demand political reform, dragging the small infant urban proletariat behind them, only 2% of the population had the vote. Even where the bourgeoisie had the vote, they were concentrated in urban areas that often had no MP, whereas the rotten boroughs and rural constituencies that had more sheep than voters, returned several MP's. Only in 1832 does the bourgeoisie get the franchise, and only in 1848 does the industrial bourgeoisie begin to exert its political supremacy. Even then, as Engels describes, it can only do so with the support of workers.
The same is true of Napoleon, and, as Marx describes in the Eighteenth Brumaire, of the subsequent regimes of Louis Phillippe and Louis Bonaparte. In Germany, a capitalist state modernises the economy, whilst the political regime is in the hands of the Junkers. And, the same can be said of the political regime of Hitler. Dozens of examples of capitalist economies with capitalist states, but where the political regime is in the hands of a Bonapartist or military junta can be cited. And yet, no matter what extent these political regimes or state bureaucracies use their positions to appropriate disproportionate amounts of social production, no serious Marxist denies that the underlying economic base of these countries is capitalist, or that the state in these countries is itself capitalist. In most cases, not even the Third Campists deny this. Its only when it comes to the Stalinist states that they claim some different criteria applies.
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