Indeed, the same phenomena can be seen in many other organisations, as Trotsky pointed out to the Third Campists. Trades unions, for example, are workers' organisations, yet they are invariably dominated by a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy. Its existence is testimony to the generally weak position of workers within capitalist society. The bureaucracy exists to mediate the class antagonism between capital and labour not to overcome it. That is one reason that TU bureaucrats are often hostile to the development of workers' cooperatives, where the basis for such mediation ceases to exist. The bureaucracy uses its position to establish for itself a middle-class lifestyle, leaching from the contributions of union members. In numerous cases, the union bureaucrats hold reactionary views. Yet, Trotsky says, this does not lead us to conclude that trades unions are not workers' organisations, or to abandon them.
And, the same applies to the bourgeoisie. As Marx says in Capital III, the various appointees to company boards obtain stipends in inverse proportion to the amount of work they undertake. The top executives of corporations, acting on behalf of shareholders, whenever they can, first act on behalf of themselves, as TYCO, Enron and others have demonstrated. And, even in the most democratic of bourgeois-democratic republics, the bureaucrats at the higher layers of the state bureaucracy feather their nests in fine style, also moving seamlessly from state bureaucracy to corporate bureaucracy, as was described in relation to the military-industrial complex.
At least the originator of these petty-bourgeois, Third Campist, subjectivist theories – James Burnham – was consistent in their application. In his book, The Managerial Revolution, Burnham claimed that the state bureaucracy in the Stalinist states and the state and corporate bureaucracies in the advanced capitalist states showed that a convergence of these systems was occurring, and a new social formation, based upon this managerial class, was being created. The idea was taken up with relish by Liberals, like Hayek, who cites it in his book The Road To Serfdom. It was also taken up by Hayek's protege at the LSE, Ralf Dahrendorf, in developing his own thesis on post-capitalism. The concept is frequently applied by Libertarians/anarcho-capitalists, in the US, whose own opposition to big capital equates it to socialism, because of the existence of such bureaucracies the ability to shape the market via planning and regulation and so on.
In Russia, even in 1879, the bourgeoisie were not “preparing to govern” in the sense of becoming the ruling class, but were already governing.
“...and has been “governing” for ages; it is only the Narodniks who “are preparing” to select the best paths to be followed by Russia, and they will, presumably, spend their time getting ready until the consistent development of class contradictions sweeps aside, jettisons all those who fight shy of them.” (p 352-3)
That was so despite the existence of the Tsarist political regime. In the USSR, the working-class was governing, despite the existence of the Stalinist political regime, but because the manifestation of it offended the moral sensibilities of the Third Camp of the petty-bourgeoisie, they refused to acknowledge it, and continued to construct their own ideal schemas of how the “natural path” for Russia should unfold.
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