On Nov 14, 2013, at 12:29 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> 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
To say that the people who make up the state apparatus--those people with the institutional authority to order the killing or jailing or destitution of other people--are not part of society and its class structure is violative of all social science as well as common sense. It is nothing more than Hobbes's Stuart-apologetic "Leviathan."
> the Soviet nomenklatura is...not a class from a marxist
> perspective...
What entitles Wojtek to pronounce what is or isn't "a Marxist perspective?" A Polish "education?" Ever since its consolidation of power in the Great Purge, Marxists have always regarded the nomenklatura as an incipient (Trotsky) or actual (CLR James) capitalist class. The class character of the FSU has long since been "determined by history" (as Trotsky said in 1940 would very soon be the case) and the historical outcome fully visible today has determined, beyond a shadow of doubt, that its class character was capitalist.
Shane Mage
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.
Herakleitos of Ephesos