[lbo-talk] Bruce Bartlett: " I think it is only a matter of time before the Tea Party morphs into unapologetic fascism"

[Wojtek S]

Shane: "Possible, yes.  But wrong.  The "Soviet system" was the clearest
example of direct class rule through the state apparatus.  That class, the
decisive elements of the apparatus, known to itself and all others as the
"nomenklatura," ruled on its own behalf and, after the curtains came down
on its "socialist" farce, continued to rule over all important parts of the
empire: from the KGB colonel in the Kremlin to the Aliev dynasty in Baku to
the various despots of the various Korruptistans.  The Stalinist class
system moved so smoothly from
state-capitalism to state-monopoly-capitalism that some people, a
quarter-century later and three-quarter-century after the definitive
overthrow of the proletarian regime established by the November revolution,
still call the FSU a "workers' state!"

[WS:] How is it wrong fro chrissake?  What you described is the nearly
total dissociation of the state apparatus from society and its class
structure, as I had argued, but instead of state autonomy you decided to
call it a separate class.  That is a purely semantic argument to me.

 Whether the Soviet nomenklatura is a class  is academic hair splitting -
it is not a class from a marxist perspective but it is a class from a
weberian perspective.  But whatever term we use, the fact remains that the
state apparatus was autonomous from the socio-economic classes in Russia -
the working class, the peasant class and the intelligentsia (which is a
class in the weberian and neo-marxist sense cf. Bourdieu).  That is all
that there is to it.  Let's call a spade a spade.

-- 
Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."