Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 22:26:32 +0100
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


Hugh did not come back on my post which ended:

"
Isn't the situation this? How can any modern governmental structure
(under any social system in a techically advanced country - I wish to
exclude the "democracy" of ancient Athens) run without
full time paid officials?

And won't they form a bureaucracy?

So what do you do with that bureaucracy?"


I had certainly wanted to avoid a flame war, or even a knock-about polemic,
and I am not prepared to accept a characterisation that I am trying to 
defend "Stalinism", but I did not intend to be so bland as to cut off
debate altogether.

The lines of the split in December 1923 between Trotsky and Stalin were 
about the bureaucracy. The role of the bureaucracy is central to arguments 
about the nature of the socialist state. The role of the bureacracy is a 
key question in evaluation of Mao. Trotskyist criticism of the interwar 
Soviet Union, where it is not a denunciation of one person, rests at its most 
coherent on  the argument that the paid officials became the social base 
for a (gross) distortion of the revolution.

Mark Adkins started this thread title with the belief that checks and balances
of a bourgeois society are necessary. Some argue for the rule of law. Some
for periodic cultural revolutions. Some for representatives to be elected 
annually and subject to immediate recall. A technologically complex society
requires full time employees. What do you do about them? 

In an earlier post Hugh appears to think he has answered the question by 
referring to political line, and quotes a number of examples where he claims
Trotsky was right and Stalin wrong politically, but this misses the point. 

How in the Trotskyist tradition is this question about the official strata 
answered?

Thanks,

Chris Burford

London.



     --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---