💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › isaac-deutscher-roots-of-bureaucracy.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:53:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Roots of Bureaucracy
Author: Isaac Deutscher
Date: 1969
Language: en
Topics: bureaucracy, marxism, libertarian marxism, revolution
Source: Socialist Register 1969 (Merlin Press, London, 1969): ‘At the beginning of 1960 Isaac Deutscher gave three lectures on the subject of bureaucracy to a graduate seminar at the London School of Economics. The following text is a shortened version of these lectures edited by Tamara Deutscher.’ Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1969/roots-bureaucracy.htm. While Deutscher did not identify as a libertarian marxist, this text is useful for a libertarian marxist reading.

Isaac Deutscher

Roots of Bureaucracy

I

We are witnessing an obvious tendency towards the increasing

bureaucratisation of contemporary societies regardless of their social

and political structures. Theorists in the West assure us that the

momentum of bureaucratisation is such that we now live under a

managerial system which has, somewhat imperceptibly, come to replace

capitalism. On the other hand, we have the huge, stupendous growth of

bureaucracy in the post-capitalist societies of the Soviet bloc and

especially in the Soviet Union. We are justified in attempting to

elaborate some theory of bureaucracy which would be more comprehensive

and more satisfying than the fashionable and to a large degree

meaningless cliché: ‘managerial society’. It is not, however, easy to

come to grips with the problem of bureaucracy; in essence this problem

is as old as civilisation, although the intensity with which it has

appeared before men’s eyes has varied greatly over the epochs.

If I have undertaken to speak about the roots of bureaucracy, it is

because to my mind we have to dig down to find the deepest causes – the

initial ones – of bureaucracy, in order to see how and why this evil of

human civilisation has grown to such terrifying proportions. In the

problem of bureaucracy, to which the problem of the state is roughly

parallel, is focused much of that relationship between man and society,

between man and man, which it has now become fashionable to describe as

‘alienation’.

The term itself suggests the rule of the ‘bureau’, of the apparatus, of

something impersonal and hostile, which has assumed life and reigns over

human beings. In common parlance, we also speak about the lifeless

bureaucrats, about the men who form that mechanism. The human beings

that administer the state look as if they were lifeless, as if they were

mere cogs in the machine. In other words, we are confronted here in the

most condensed, in the most intensive form with the reification of

relationships between human beings, with the appearance of life in

mechanisms, in things. This, of course, immediately brings to our mind

the great complex of fetishism: over the whole area of our market

economy man seems to be at the mercy of things, of commodities, even of

currencies. Human and social relationships become objectified, whereas

objects seem to assume the force and power of living elements. The

parallel between man’s alienation from the state and the representative

of the state – the bureaucracy on the one hand, and – between man’s

alienation from the products of his own economy on the other, is

obviously very close, and the two kinds of alienation are similarly

interrelated.

There is a great difficulty in getting beyond mere appearances to the

very core of the relationship between society and state, between the

apparatus that administers the life of a community and the community

itself. The difficulty consists in this: the appearance is not only

appearance, it is also part of a reality. The fetishism of the state and

of the commodity is, so to say, ‘built-in’ into the very mechanism in

which state and market function. Society is at one and the same time

estranged from the state and also inseparable from the state. The state

is the incubus that oppresses society, it is also society’s protective

angel without which it cannot live.

Here again, some of the most hidden and complex aspects of the

relationship between society and state are clearly and strikingly

reflected in our common language. When we say ‘they’, meaning the

bureaucrats who rule us, ‘they’ who impose taxes, ‘they’ who wage wars,

who do all sorts of things which involve the life of all of us, we

express a feeling of impotence, of estrangement from the state; but we

are also conscious that without the state there would be no social life,

no social development, no history. The difficulty in sifting appearance

from reality consists in this: the bureaucracy performs certain

functions which are obviously necessary and indispensable for the life

of society; yet it also performs functions which might theoretically be

described as superfluous.

The contradictory aspects of bureaucracy have, of course, led to two

contradictory and extremely opposed philosophical, historical and

sociological views on the problem. There are, apart from many

intermediate shadings, traditionally two basic approaches to the

question of bureaucracy and state; the bureaucratic and the anarchist

approach. You may remember that the Webbs liked to divide people into

those who evaluated political problems from the bureaucratic or from the

anarchist point of view. This is, of course, a simplification, but

nevertheless there is something to be said for this division. The

bureaucratic approach has had its great philosophers, its great

prophets, and its celebrated sociologists. Probably the greatest

philosophical apologist of the state was Hegel, just as the greatest

sociological apologist of the state was Max Weber.

There is no doubt that old Prussia was the paradise of the bureaucracy

and it is therefore not a matter of accident that the greatest

apologists for the state and for bureaucracy have come from Prussia.

Both Hegel and Weber, each in a different way and on different levels of

theoretical thinking are, in fact, the metaphysicians of the Prussian

bureaucracy, who generalise from the Prussian bureaucratic experience

and project that experience on to the stage of world history. It is

therefore necessary to keep in mind the basic tenets of this school of

thought. To Hegel the state and bureaucracy were both the reflection and

the reality of the moral idea, that is the reflection and the reality of

supreme reason, the reality of the Weltgeist, the manifestation of God

in history. Max Weber, who is in a way a descendant, a grandson of Hegel

(perhaps a dwarf grandson), puts the same idea in the typically Prussian

catalogue of the virtues of bureaucracy:

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity,

discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of

material and personal cost – these are raised to the optimum point in

the strictly bureaucratic administration, especially in its monocratic

form... bureaucracy also stands under the principle of sine ira ac

studio. [1]

Only in Prussia perhaps could these words have been written. Of course,

this catalogue of virtues can very easily be invalidated by a parallel

catalogue of vices. But it is to me all the more surprising and in a

sense disquieting that Max Weber has recently become the intellectual

light of so much Western sociology. (Professor Raymond Aron’s gravest

reproach in a polemic against myself was that I write and speak ‘as if

Max Weber never existed’.)

I am quite prepared to admit that no one has probably studied the

minutiae of bureaucracy as deeply as Max Weber; true, he catalogued the

various peculiarities of its development, but he failed to understand

its full meaning. We all know the characteristic feature of that old

German so-called historical school which could produce volumes and

volumes on any particular industry, including the bureaucratic industry,

but could rarely see the mainstream of its development.

At the other extreme we have the anarchist view of bureaucracy and of

the state with its most eminent representatives – Proudhon, Bakunin and

Kropotkin – and with the various derivative trends, liberal,

anarcho-liberal of various shadings. Now, this school, when you look at

it closely, represents the intellectual revolt of the old France of the

bourgeoisie, and of the old Russia of the muzhiks, against their

bureaucracies. This school of thought specialises, of course, in

composing catalogues of bureaucratic vices. The state and the

bureaucracy are seen as the permanent usurpers of history. The state and

bureaucracy are seen as the very embodiment of all evil in human

society, the evil which cannot be eradicated otherwise than by the

abolition of the state and the destruction of all bureaucracy. When

Kropotkin wanted to show the depths of the moral deterioration of the

French Revolution, he described how Robespierre, Danton, the Jacobins

and the Hébertists, changed from revolutionaries to statesmen. In his

eyes, what vitiated the revolution was bureaucracy and the state.

In fact each of these approaches contains an element of truth because in

practice the state and bureaucracy have been the Jekyll and Hyde of

human civilisation. They have indeed represented the virtues and the

vices of human society and its historical development in a manner more

concentrated, more intense than any other institution. State and

bureaucracy focus in themselves this characteristic duality of our

civilisation: every progress achieved so far has been accomplished by

retrogression; every advance that man made has been bought at the price

of regress; every unfolding of human creative energy has been paid for

with the crippling or stunting of some other creative energy. This

duality has been, I think, very striking in the development of

bureaucracy throughout all social and political regimes.

The roots of bureaucracy are indeed as old as our civilisation, or even

older, for they are buried on the border between the primitive

communistic tribe and civilised society. It is there that we find the

remotest and yet the very distant ancestry of the massive, elaborate

bureaucratic machines of our age. They show themselves at the moment

when the primitive community divides into the leaders and the led, the

organisers and the organised, into the managers and the managed. When

the tribe or the clan begins to learn that division of labour increases

man’s power over nature and his capacity to satisfy his needs, then we

see the first germs of bureaucracy which become also the very earliest

prelude to a class society.

The division of labour begins with the process of production with which

also appears the first hierarchy of functions. It is here that we have

the first glimpse of the gulf that was about to open in the course of

civilisation between mental work and manual labour. The organiser of the

first primitive process in cattle-breeding might have been the forbear

of the mandarin, of the Egyptian priest, or the modern capitalist

bureaucrat. The primary division between brain and brawn brought with it

the other manifold sub-divisions, between agriculture and fishing, or

trade and craft or sea-faring. The division of society into classes

followed in the course of fundamental process of historic development.

In society on the threshold of civilisation to that of our own days, the

basic division has been not so much between the administrator and the

worker, as between the owner and the man without property; and this

division absorbed within itself or overshadowed the former one.

Administration has been, in most epochs, subordinated to the owners of

property, to the possessing classes.

One could broadly categorise the various types of relationships between

bureaucracy and basic social classes: the first one might call the

Egyptian-Chinese type; then comes the Roman-Byzantine type with its

derivative of an ecclesiastic hierarchy in the Roman Church; then we

have the Western European capitalist type of bureaucracy; the fourth

would be the post-capitalist type. In the first three types, and

especially in the feudal and the slave-owning society, the administrator

is completely subordinate to the man of property, so much so that in

Athens, in Rome and in Egypt it is usually from among the slaves that

the bureaucracy is recruited. In Athens the first police force was

recruited from among the slaves, because it was considered beneath the

dignity of the free man to deprive another free man of freedom. What a

sound instinct! Here you have the almost naively striking expression of

the dependence of the bureaucrat on the property owner: it is the slave

who is the bureaucrat because bureaucracy is the slave of the possessing

class.

In the feudal order the bureaucracy is more or less eclipsed because the

administrators either come directly from the feudal class or are

absorbed into that class. Social hierarchy is, so to say, ‘built-in’

into the feudal order and there is no need for a special hierarchical

machine to manage public affairs and to discipline the property-less

masses.

Later, much later, bureaucracy acquires a far more respectable status

and its agents become ‘free’ wage-earners of the owners of property.

Then it pretends to rise above the possessing classes, and indeed above

all social classes. And in some respects and up to a point, bureaucracy

indeed acquires that supreme status.

The great separation between the state machine and other classes comes,

of course, in capitalism, where the earlier clearly marked hierarchy and

dependence of man on man, so characteristic of feudal society, no longer

exists. ‘All men are equal’ – the bourgeois fiction of equality before

the law makes it essential that there should function an apparatus of

power, a state machine strictly hierarchically organised. Like the

hierarchy of economic power on the market, so the bureaucracy, as a

political hierarchy, should see to it that society does not take the

appearance of equality at its face value. There grows a hierarchy of

orders, interests, administrative levels, which perpetuates the fiction

of equality and yet enforces inequality.

What characterises the bureaucracy at this stage? The hierarchical

structure in the first instance; then the seemingly self-sufficient

character of the apparatus of power enclosed within itself. The

tremendous scope, scale and complexity of our social life make the

management of society more and more difficult, we are told; only skilled

experts who possess the secrets of administration are able to perform

the organising functions. No, indeed, we have not moved a very long way

from the time when the Egyptian priest guarded the secrets which gave

him power and made society believe that only he, the divinely inspired,

could manage human affairs. Self-important bureaucracy, with its

mystifying lingo which is to a very large extent a matter of its social

prestige, is, after all, not far removed from the Egyptian priesthood,

with its magic secrets. (Incidentally is it not also very close to the

Stalinist bureaucracy with its obsessive secrecy?)

Many decades before Max Weber, who was himself so impressed by the

esoteric wisdom of bureaucracy, Engels saw things in a more realistic

and objective light:

The state [he says] is by no means a power imposed upon society from the

outside... It is rather the product of society at a certain stage of

development. It is an admission that this society has involved itself in

an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has become split in

irreconcilable contradictions... In order that... classes with

conflicting economic interests should not consume themselves and society

in fruitless struggle, a power had become necessary which seemingly

stands above society, a power that has to keep down the conflict and

keep it within bounds of ‘order’. That power emerging from society but

rising above it and becoming more and more estranged from it is the

state.

Even the welfare state, we may add, is, after all, only the power that

emerges from society but rises above it and becomes more and more

estranged from it. Engels goes on to say:

In possession of public force and power and of the right to levy taxes,

the officials now stand as the organs of society above society.

He describes the process of the emergence of the state from the

primitive community:

They [the officials] are not content with the free and willing respect

that had been paid to the organs of a tribal community... Holders of a

power estranged from society, they must be placed in a position of

respect by means of special laws which assure them the enjoyment of a

social halo and immunity. [2]

However, there is no use being angry with bureaucracy: its strength is

only a reflection of society’s weakness which lies in its division

between the vast majority of manual workers and a small minority which

specialises in brain work. The intellectual pauperism from which no

nation has yet emancipated itself lies at the roots of bureaucracy.

Other fungi have grown over those roots, but the roots themselves have

persisted in capitalism and welfare capitalism and they have still

survived in post-capitalist society.

II

I would like to start this second lecture with a stricter re-definition

of the subject of our discussion.

I am not interested in the general history of bureaucracy, nor do I want

to give a description of the varieties and modalities of bureaucratic

rule that can be found in history. The focus of my subject is this. What

are the factors that have historically been responsible for the

political power of bureaucracy? What are the factors that favour the

political supremacy of bureaucracy over society? Why so far has no

revolution succeeded in breaking down and destroying the might of the

bureaucracy? On the morrow of every revolution, regardless of its

character and the ancien régime which preceded it, a state machine rises

like phoenix from the ashes.

In my first lecture I pointed out – with some over-emphasis – the

perennial factor working in favour of bureaucracy, namely, the division

of labour between intellectual work and manual labour, the gulf between

the organisers and the organised. This contradistinction is in fact the

prologue to class society; but in further social development that

prologue becomes as if submerged by the more fundamental division

between the slave owner and the slave, between the serf owner and the

serf, between the man of property and the property-less.

The real massive ascendancy of bureaucracy as a distinct and separate

social group came only with the development of capitalism, and it did so

for a variety of reasons: economic and political. What favoured the

spread of a modern bureaucracy was market economy, money economy and the

continuous and deepening division of labour of which capitalism is

itself a product. As long as the servant of the state was a tax farmer,

or a feudal lord, or an auxiliary of a feudal lord, the bureaucrat was

not yet a bureaucrat. The tax collector of the sixteenth, seventeenth or

eighteenth centuries was something of an entrepreneur; or he was a

servant of the feudal lord or part of his retinue. The formation of

bureaucracy into a distinct group was made possible only by the spread

and the universalisation of a money economy, in which every state

employee was paid his salary in money.

The growth of bureaucracy was further stimulated by the breaking down of

feudal particularisms and the formation of a market on a national scale.

Only on the basis of a national market could national bureaucracy make

its appearance. By themselves these general economic causes of the

growth of bureaucracy explain only how bureaucracy in its modern form

became possible, but they do not yet explain why it has grown and why in

some definite historical circumstances it has acquired its political

importance. To these questions one should seek an answer not in economic

changes but in socio-political structures. We have, for instance, the

striking fact that England, the country of classical capitalism, was the

least bureaucratic of all capitalist countries, while Germany, until the

last quarter of the nineteenth century the underdeveloped capitalist

country, was the most bureaucratic. France, which held a middle

position, held also a middle position with regard to the strength of

bureaucracy in the political life.

If one were to seek certain general rules about the rise and decline of

bureaucratic influence in capitalist society, one would find that the

political power of bureaucracy under capitalism has always been in

inverse proportion to the maturity, the vigour, the capacity for

self-government of the strata constituting a given bourgeois society. On

the other hand, when in highly developed bourgeois societies class

struggles have reached something like a deadlock, when contending

classes have lain as if prostrate after a series of exhausting social

and political struggles, then political leadership has, almost

automatically, passed into the hands of a bureaucracy. In such

situations the bureaucracy establishes itself not only as the apparatus

regulating the functioning of the state, but also as the power imposing

its political will on society. The real cradle of modern bureaucracy,

was, of course, the pre-bourgeois absolute monarchy – the Tudors in this

country, the Bourbons in France, or the Hohenzollerns in Prussia – the

monarchy which was maintaining the uncertain equilibrium between a

decaying feudalism and a rising capitalism. Feudalism was already too

weak to continue its supremacy, capitalism was still too weak to

establish its domination; a stasis in the class struggle, as it were,

between feudalism and capitalism left the room for the absolute monarchy

to act as the umpire between the two opposed camps.

The stronger the opposition of feudal and bourgeois interests and the

more paralysing the stalemate between them, the more scope was there for

the bureaucracy of the absolutist monarchy to play the role of the

arbiter. Incidentally, England (and also the United States) was the

least bureaucratic of all capitalist countries, precisely because very

early in history that feudal – capitalist antagonism was resolved

through the gradual merger of the feudal and capitalist interests. The

feudal-bourgeois notables, the great aristocratic English families

assumed some of the functions which on the continent were exercised by

bureaucracy. In a sense, the embourgeoisés feudal elements administered

the state without becoming a distinct and separate social group. The

United States too was in its history free from that strife between

feudal and capitalist interests, the strife which acted as a stimulus

for the growth of bureaucracy.

Quite a different and peculiar case was Russia, where the great power of

state and bureaucracy resulted from the underdevelopment of both social

strata: neither the feudal element nor the bourgeoisie was ever strong

enough to manage the affairs of the state. It was the state that, like

the demiurge, created social classes, now inducing their formation and

expansion, now impeding and thwarting it. In this way its bureaucracy

became not only an umpire but also the manipulator of all social

classes.

If I were to give a subtitle to my further remarks it would probably be

a very general one: on bureaucracy and revolution. Here I would like to

clear some confusion, and I fear that in the process I shall clash with

several established historical schools. As this is anyhow unavoidable, I

shall pose the problem in its most provocative form. Was the English

Puritan revolution a bourgeois revolution? Was the Great French

Revolution bourgeois in character? At the head of the insurgent

battalions there were no bankers, merchants or ship-owners. The sans

culottes, the plebs, the urban paupers, the lower-lower middle classes

were in the forefront of the battle. What did they achieve? Under the

leadership of ‘gentlemen farmers’ (in England) and lawyers, doctors and

journalists (in France), they abolished the absolutist monarchy and its

courtier bureaucracy and swept away feudal institutions which were

hindering the development of bourgeois property relations. The

bourgeoisie had become strong enough and sufficiently aware of its power

to aspire to political self-determination. It no longer wanted to accept

the tutelage and the dictates of the absolutist monarchy; it wanted to

rule society by itself. In the process of the revolution the bourgeoisie

was driven forward by the plebeian masses – on the morrow the

bourgeoisie attempted by itself to rule society at large.

The process of the revolution with all its crises, antagonisms, with the

constant shifting of power from the more conservative to the more

radical and even to the Utopian wings of the revolutionary camp – all

these lead to a new political stalemate between the classes which came

freshly to the fore: the plebeian masses, the sans culottes, the urban

poor are tired and weary; but the victorious, now dominant class – the

bourgeoisie – is also internally divided, fragmented, exhausted after

the revolutionary struggle and incapable of governing society. Hence in

the aftermath of bourgeois revolution we see the rise of a new

bureaucracy somewhat different in character: we see a military

dictatorship which outwardly looks almost like the continuation of the

pre-revolutionary absolutist monarchy or an even worse version of it.

The pre-revolutionary regime had its centralised state machine – a

national bureaucracy. The revolution’s first demand was the

decentralisation of this machine. Yet this centralisation had not been

due to the evil intentions of the ruler, but reflected the evolution of

the economy which required a national market, and this ‘national soil’,

as it were, fed the bourgeois forces which in their turn produced the

revolution. The aftermath of the revolution brings renewed

centralisation. This was so under Cromwell; this occurred under

Napoleon. The process of centralisation and national unification and the

rise of a new bureaucracy was so striking that Tocqueville, for example,

saw in it nothing more than the continuation of pre-revolutionary

tradition. He argued that what the French revolution had done was merely

to carry further the work of the ancien régime and, had the revolution

not taken place, this trend would have gone on all the same. This was

the argument of a man who had his eyes fixed on the political aspect of

the development only and completely ignored its social background and

deeper social motives; he saw the shape but not the texture or the

colour of society.

Political centralisation after the revolution went on as before, yet the

character of the bureaucracy had completely and thoroughly changed.

Instead of the courtier-bureaucracy of the ancien régime, France now had

the bourgeois bureaucracy recruited from different layers of society.

The bourgeois bureaucracy established under Napoleon survived the

Restoration and in the end found its proper head in the Citizen King.

The next phase in which we see another rise of bureaucracy and a further

promotion of centralistic tendencies of the state occurs again at a

moment of political paralysis of all social classes. In 1848 we find a

situation in which different class interests are again opposed to each

other; this time it is the interest of the established bourgeoisie and

that of the nascent proletariat. To this day nobody has described this

process of mutual exhaustion better than Karl Marx, especially in the

Eighteenth Brumaire. He also demonstrated how the prostration of all

social classes secures the triumph of the bureaucracy, or rather of its

military arm, under Napoleon III. This situation was characteristic at

the time not only of France but also of Germany, especially of Prussia,

where the deadlock was many-sided: between the feudal and semi-feudal

interests of the Junkers, the bourgeoisie and the new working class. And

in Prussia it resulted in the rule and dictatorship of Bismarck’s

bureaucracy. (Incidentally, Marx and Engels described Bismarck’s

government as a ‘Bonapartist’ regime, although outwardly there was, of

course, very little or nothing of the Bonaparte in Bismarck.)

III

I am well aware that because of the vastness of the subject I can do no

more than indicate schematically the main points which need further

elaboration. I should perhaps warn you that I am not going to deal with

reformist socialism and bureaucracy. This, important though it is

politically, especially in this country, presents from my viewpoint very

little theoretical interest. To my mind it is part of ‘capitalism and

bureaucracy’. The bulk of the economy remains capitalist whether 15 per

cent or even 25 per cent of industry is nationalised, and here quantity

decides also the quality. The whole background of social life is

capitalist and an ordinary capitalist bureaucratic spirit permeates all

industries including the nationalised ones. We hear a lot of grumbling

about ‘bureaucracy on the railways’ or in the coal mines. During the

recent strike we were presented on television some railwaymen who told

us: ‘Things are not as they used to be’: before the nationalisation of

the railways they could maintain a more personal relationship between

themselves and their employers, while now the industry has become so

anonymous that there is no personal link between the working-men and

this vast nation-wide enterprise. This ‘personal link’ was, of course, a

figment of the worker’s imagination. What sort of a personal

relationship was there between the footplateman and the boss of one or

another of the five huge railway companies? But politically it was

important that this railwayman really believed that in the Southern or

Midland or Western Railway he was more than a mere cog. Now he felt

‘alienated’ from that vast entity into which he had to fit, for which he

had to work. And this ‘alienation’, as the word goes, is a problem

common to all sorts of bureaucratic establishments, no matter what is

their broader social framework, and I would be the last to deny that

there are certain common features between bureaucracy in a capitalist

and in a post-capitalist system.

Now I should like to touch upon those special problems of bureaucracy

which arise in a fully nationalised industry after a socialist

revolution, under a regime which, at least in its beginnings, is in

every sense a proletarian dictatorship. Clearly this problem affects

one-third of the world, so it is weighty enough; and I am pretty sure

that many of you will still see it acquire validity at least over

two-thirds of the world.

One of the observations that occurred to me as I looked through some of

the classical Marxist writings on bureaucracy was how relatively

optimistically – one might say, lightmindedly – Marxists approached it.

To give you one illustration: Karl Kautsky once asked himself the

question whether a socialist society would be threatened with all the

evils of bureaucracy. You may remember, if you have read The Foundations

of Christianity, that Kautsky discusses the process by which the

Christian Church was transformed from a faith of the oppressed into a

great imperial bureaucratic machine. This transformation was possible

against the background of a society which lived on slave labour. The

slaves of antiquity, devoid of any active class consciousness, were

liable to become slaves of bureaucracy. But the modern working class,

mature enough to overthrow capitalism, maintained Kautsky, will not

allow a bureaucracy to rise on its back. This was not just an individual

judgement of Kautsky, who for over two decades between Engels’ death and

the outbreak of the First World War was the most authoritative spokesman

of Marxism and was considered a real successor to Marx and Engels.

Engels himself in various of his works, especially in Anti-Dühring,

committed himself to a view which almost ruled out in advance the

existence of bureaucracy under socialism: ‘The proletariat seizes the

state power and transforms the means of production in the first instance

into state property. But in doing this it puts an end to itself as

proletariat, it puts an end to all class antagonism...’ [3] Former

societies needed the state as an organisation of the exploiting class,

as a means of holding down the class that was exploited – slaves, serfs

or wage labourers. In socialism the state, when it becomes really

representative of society as a whole, makes itself superfluous. And with

the full development of modern productive forces, with the abundance and

superabundance of goods, there will be no need to keep men and labour in

subjection.

I think it was Trotsky who used a very plain but very telling metaphor;

the policeman can use his baton either for regulating traffic or for

dispersing a demonstration of strikers or unemployed. In this one

sentence is summed up the classical distinction between administration

of things and administration of men. If you assume a society in which

there is no class supremacy, the bureaucracy’s role is reduced to the

administration of things, of the objective social and productive

process. We are not concerned with the elimination of all administrative

functions – this would be absurd in an industrially developing society –

but we are concerned with reducing the policeman’s baton to its proper

role, that of disentangling traffic jams.

When Marx and Engels analysed the experience of the Commune of Paris,

they were as if half-aware of the bureaucratic threat that could arise

in the future and they were at great pains to underline the measures

that the Commune had taken in order to guarantee a socialist revolution

against the recrudescence of a bureaucratic power. The Commune, they

stressed, had taken a number of precautions which should serve as a

pattern and a model for future socialist transformations: the Commune

was elected in a general election and established an elected civil

service, every member of which could be deposed at any time at the

demand of the electorate. The Commune abolished the standing army and

replaced it by the people at arms; it also established the principle

that no civil servant could earn more than the ordinary worker. This

should have abolished all privileges of a bureaucratic class or group.

The Commune, in other words, set the example of a state which was to

begin to wither away as soon as it was established. It was no matter of

chance that only a few weeks before the October Revolution Lenin made a

special effort to restore this, by then almost forgotten, part of

Marxist teaching about state, socialism and bureaucracy. He expressed

his idea of the state in that famous aphorism: under socialism or even

in a proletarian dictatorship the administration should become so

simplified that every cook should be able to manage state affairs.

In the light of all the painful experience of the last decades it is all

too easy to see how very greatly the representatives of classical

Marxism had indeed underrated the problem of bureaucracy. There were, I

think, two reasons why this was so. The original founders of the Marxist

school never really attempted to portray in advance the society which

would emerge after a socialist revolution. They analysed revolution, so

to say, in the abstract, in a way in which Marx in Das Kapital analysed

not any specific capitalist system, but capitalism in the abstract,

capitalism per se; they also thought of socialist or post-capitalist

society in the abstract. If one considers that they carried their

analysis so many decades before the actual attempt, their method was

scientifically justified. The other reason is, so to say, psychological.

They could not help viewing the future revolution on the pattern of the

greatest revolutionary experience in their own life, that of 1848. They

saw it as a chain process of European revolutions, as 1848 was,

spreading at least over Europe more or less simultaneously. (Here was

that germ of the idea of permanent revolution which was in this respect

not the original creation of Trotsky; it was indeed very deeply embedded

in the thought of classical Marxism.) An all-European socialist

revolution would have been relatively secure immediately after its

victory. With very little social tension there would be hardly any civil

strife, and without wars of intervention there would have been no need

for the re-creation of standing armies which are an important factor of

bureaucratisation. They also assumed that at least in the highly

industrialised societies of Western Europe, the very considerable

proportion of the working class would provide a strong mass support for

the revolutionary government. They also trusted that once the majority

of the European working class would be won for the revolution, it would,

as it were, remain faithful and loyal to the revolution. This, together

with the existing democratic tradition would form the strongest

guarantee against any revival or formation of a new bureaucratic

machine.

When we are tempted to reproach the founders of the Marxist school with

underrating the dangers of bureaucracy in post-revolutionary society, we

must bear in mind the fact that they took the abundance of goods as the

first condition, a precondition and raison d’être of a socialist

revolution. ‘The possibility of securing for every member of society,

through social production, an existence which is not only fully

sufficient from a material standpoint... but also guarantees to them the

completely unrestricted development and exercise of their physical and

mental faculties – this possibility now exists... it does exist’, stated

Engels emphatically in Anti-Dühring nearly 90 years ago. [4] It is only

in the middle of this century that we are faced with some attempts at

socialist revolution in countries where a desperately insufficient

production makes any decent material existence quite impossible.

There was undoubtedly in Marxism an ambivalent attitude towards the

state. On one hand – and this Marxism had in common with anarchism – a

conviction based on a deeply realistic historical analysis that all

revolutions are frustrated as long as they do not do away with the

state; on the other, the conviction that the socialist revolution has

need of a state for its purpose, to smash, to break the old capitalist

system and create its own state machine that would exercise the

proletarian dictatorship. But that machine, for the first time in

history, would represent the interests not of a privileged minority but

of a mass of toilers, the real producers of society’s wealth. ‘The first

act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of

society as a whole’ – the taking possession of the means of production –

‘is at the same time its last independent act as a state.’ [5] From then

on the interference of the state in social relations becomes

superfluous. The government of persons is replaced by the administration

of things. The political function of the state disappears; what remains

is the direction of the process of production. The state will not be

abolished overnight, as the anarchists imagine; it will slowly ‘wither

away’.

The reality of the Russian revolution was in every single respect a

negation of the assumptions made by classical Marxism. It was certainly

not the revolution in the abstract – it was real enough! It did not

follow the 1848 pattern, it was not an all-European upheaval; it

remained isolated in one country. It occurred in a nation where the

proletariat was a tiny minority and even that minority disintegrated as

a class in the process of world war, revolution and civil war. It was

also a country extremely backward, poverty stricken, where the problem

immediately facing the revolutionary government was not to build

socialism, but to create the first preconditions for any modern

civilised life. All this resulted in at least two political developments

which invariably led to the recrudescence of bureaucracy.

I have described how the political supremacy of bureaucracy always

followed a stalemate in the class struggle, an exhaustion of all social

classes in the process of political and social struggles. Now, mutatis

mutandis, after the Russian revolution we see the same situation again.

In the early 1920s all classes of Russian society, workers, peasants,

bourgeoisie, landlords, aristocracy are either destroyed or completely

exhausted politically, morally, intellectually. After all the trials of

a decade filled with world war, revolution, civil wars and industrial

devastation no social class is capable of asserting itself. What is left

is only the machine of the Bolshevik party which establishes its

bureaucratic supremacy over society as a whole. However, cela change et

ce n’est plus la même chose: society as a whole has undergone a

fundamental change. The old cleavage between the men of property and the

property-less masses gives place to another division, different in

character but no less noxious and corrosive: the division between the

rulers and the ruled. Moreover, after the revolution it acquires a far

greater force than it had before when it was as if submerged by class

distinction and class discord. What again comes to the fore is the

perennial, the oldest split between the organisers and the organised.

The prelude to class society appears now as the epilogue. Far from

‘withering away’ the post-revolutionary state gathers into its hands

such power as it has never had before. For the first time in history

bureaucracy seems omnipotent and omnipresent. If under the capitalist

system we saw that the power of bureaucracy always found a counterweight

in the power of the propertied classes, here we see no such restrictions

and no such limitations. The bureaucracy is the manager of the totality

of the nation’s resources; it appears more than ever before independent,

separated, indeed set high above society. Indeed far from withering away

the state reaches its apotheosis which takes the form of an almost

permanent orgy of bureaucratic violence over all classes of society.

Let us now go back for a moment to the Marxist analysis of the

revolution in the abstract and see where and in what way the picture of

post-revolutionary Russia contradicts this analysis. Had there been a

European revolution in which proletarian majorities would have won

swiftly and decisively and spared their nations all the political and

social turmoil and slaughter of wars and civil strife, then very

probably we would not have seen that fear-inspiring apotheosis of the

Russian state. Nevertheless the problem would still have existed to a

degree which the classical Marxism did not envisage. To put it in a

nutshell: it seems that the thinkers and theoreticians of the nineteenth

century tended to telescope certain stages of future development from

capitalism to socialism. What classical Marxism ‘telescoped’ was the

revolution-and-socialism as it were, whereas between the revolution and

socialism there was bound to lie a terribly long and complicated period

of transition. Even under the best of circumstances that period would

have been characterised by an inevitable tension between the bureaucrat

and the worker. Some prognosis of that tension can be found in Marxism,

however. In their famous Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx and Engels

speak about two phases of communism, the lower and the higher one. In

the lower one there still prevails the ‘narrow horizon of bourgeois

rights’ with its inequality and its wide differentials in individual

incomes. [6] Obviously, if in socialism society, according to Marx,

still needs to secure the full development of its productive forces

until a real economy of wealth and abundance is created, then it has to

reward skill and offer incentives. The bureaucrat is in a sense the

skilled worker and there is no doubt that he will place himself on the

privileged side of the scale.

The division between the organisers and the organised acquires more and

not less importance, precisely because the means of production having

passed from private to public ownership, the responsibility for the

running of the national economy rests now with the organisers. The new

society has not developed on its own foundations, but is emerging from

capitalism and still bears all the birthmarks of capitalism. It is not

yet ripe economically, morally and intellectually, to reward everyone

according to his needs and as long as everyone has to be paid according

to his work, the bureaucracy will remain the privileged group. No matter

what the pseudo-Marxist terminology of present Russian leaders, Russian

society today is still far from socialist – it has only made the very

first step on the road of transition from capitalism towards socialism.

The tension between the bureaucrat and the worker is rooted in the

cleavage between brain work and manual labour. It simply is not true

that today’s Russian state can be run by any cook (although all sorts of

cooks try to do it). In practice it proved impossible to establish and

maintain the principle proclaimed by the Commune of Paris which served

Marx as the guarantee against the rise of bureaucracy, the principle

extolled again by Lenin on the eve of October, according to which the

functionary should not earn more than the ordinary worker’s wage. This

principle implied a truly egalitarian society – and here is part of an

important contradiction in the thought of Marx and his disciples.

Evidently, the argument that no civil servant, no matter how high his

function, must not earn more than an ordinary worker, cannot be

reconciled with the other argument that in the lower phase of socialism

which still bears the stamp of ‘bourgeois rights’ it would be utopian to

expect ‘equality of distribution’. In the post-revolutionary Russian

state with its poverty and its inadequate development of productive

forces the scramble for rewards was bound to be fierce and ferocious,

and because the abolition of capitalism was inspired by a longing for

egalitarianism, the inequality was even more revolting and shocking. It

was also inequality on an abysmally low level of existence, or rather

inequality below subsistence level.

Part of the Marxist theory of the withering away of the state was based

upon a certain balance between its centralistic organisation and the

universal element of decentralisation. The socialist state was to have

been a state of elected communes, local municipal councils, local

governments and self-governments, yet they were all to form a unified

organism which was necessary for a rational nationalised mode of

production. This concept also presupposed a highly developed society

which Russia at the beginning of the century was not.

In the development of post-capitalist society the tension between the

worker and bureaucrat may yet prove to have some essentially creative

elements. The worker and the bureaucrat are equally necessary for the

transition towards socialism. As long as the working masses are still in

that stage of intellectual pauperism left over from the centuries of

oppression and illiteracy, the management of the processes of production

must fall to the civil servant. On the other hand, in a truly

post-capitalist society the basic social class are the workers and

socialism is the workers’ and not the bureaucrats’ business. The dynamic

balance between the official and the worker will find its counterpart in

the authority of the state and in the control of the masses over the

state. This will also assure the necessary equilibrium between the

principle of centralisation and that of decentralisation. What we have

seen in Russia has been an utter disequilibrium. As a result of

objective historic circumstances and subjective interests, the balance

swung heavily, decisively, absolutely to the side of bureaucracy. What

we have seen in Hungary and Poland in 1956 was a reaction against this –

Stalinist – state of affairs with an extreme swinging of the pendulum in

the other direction and the workers’ passionate, violent, unreasoning

revolt against bureaucratic despotism, a revolt no doubt justified by

all their experiences and grievances, but a revolt which in its

consequences led again to a grave and dangerous imbalance.

How then do I see the prospects and how do I see the further development

of that tension between the worker and the bureaucrat?

I have indicated earlier all the faults of the historical perspective in

the classical Marxist view of bureaucracy. Yet, I think that basically

and fundamentally this view helps to cope with the problem of

bureaucracy far better than any other that I have come across.

The question which we have to answer is this: has the bureaucracy, whose

apotheosis after the revolution I have described, constituted itself

into a new class? Can it perpetuate itself as a privileged minority?

Does it perpetuate social inequality? I would like first of all to draw

your attention to one very obvious and important but often forgotten

fact: all the inequality that exists in today’s Russia between the

worker and the bureaucrat is an inequality of consumption. This is

undoubtedly very important, irritating and painful; yet with all the

privileges which the bureaucrat defends brutally and stubbornly he lacks

the essential privilege of owning the means of production. Officialdom

still dominates society and lords over it, yet it lacks the cohesion and

unity which would make of it a separate class in the Marxist sense of

the word. The bureaucrats enjoy power and some measure of prosperity,

yet they cannot bequeath their prosperity and wealth to their children.

They cannot accumulate capital, invest it for the benefit of their

descendants: they cannot perpetuate themselves or their kith and kin.

It is true that Soviet bureaucracy dominates society – economically,

politically and culturally – more obviously and to a greater extent than

does any modern possessing class. Yet it is also more vulnerable. Not

only can it not perpetuate itself, but it has been unable even to secure

for itself the continuity of its own position, the continuity of

management. Under Stalin one leading group of bureaucrats after another

was beheaded, one leading group of managers of industry after another

was purged. Then came Khrushchev who dispersed the most powerful centre

of that bureaucracy: all the economic ministries in the capital were

scattered over wide and far-flung Russia. Until this day, the Soviet

bureaucracy has not managed to acquire that social, economic and

psychological identity of its own which would allow us to describe it as

a new class. It has been something like a huge amoeba covering

post-revolutionary society with itself. It is an amoeba because it lacks

a social backbone of its own, because it is not a formed entity, not an

historic force that comes on the scene in the way in which, say, the old

bourgeoisie came forth after the French revolution.

Soviet bureaucracy is also hamstrung by a deep inherent contradiction:

it rules as a result of the abolition of property in industry and

finance, as a result of workers’ victory over the ancien régime; and it

has to pay homage to that victory; it has to acknowledge ever anew that

it manages industry and finance on behalf of the nation, on behalf of

the workers. Privileged as they are, the Soviet managers have to be on

their guard: as more and more workers receive more and more education,

the moment may easily come when the managers’ skill, honesty and

competence may come under close scrutiny. They thrive on the apathy of

the workers who so far have allowed them to run the state on their

behalf. But this is a precarious position, an incomparably less stable

foundation than that sanctified by tradition, property and law. The

conflict between the liberating origin of bureaucracy’s power and the

use it makes of that power generates constant tension between ‘us’ the

workers and ‘them’ the managerial and political hierarchy.

There is also another reason for the lack of stability and cohesion in

the managerial group no matter how privileged it has become. Over the

last decades the Soviet bureaucracy has all the time been in a process

of stupendous expansion. Millions of people from the working class and

to a lesser extent from the peasantry were recruited into its ranks.

This continuous expansion militates against the crystallisation of the

bureaucracy not only into a class but even into a cohesive social group.

I know, of course, that once a man from the lower classes is made to

share in the privileges of the hierarchy, he himself becomes a

bureaucrat. This may be so in individual cases and in abstract theory,

but on the whole ‘betrayal of one’s class’ does not work so very simply.

When the son of a miner or a worker becomes an engineer or an

administrator of a factory he does not on the next day become completely

insensitive to what goes on in his former environment, in the working

class. All surveys show convincingly that in no other country is there

such a rapid movement from manual to non-manual and to what the

Americans like to call ‘élite strata’ as there is in the Soviet Union.

We must also realise that the privileges of the great majority of the

bureaucracy are very, very paltry. The Russian administrator has the

standard of living of our lower middle classes. Even the luxuries of the

small minority high on the top of the pyramid are not especially

enviable, particularly if one considers the risks – and we all know now

how terrible these were under Stalin.

Of course, even small privileges contribute to the tension between the

worker and the bureaucrat, but we should not mistake that tension for a

class antagonism, in spite of some similarities which on closer

examination would prove only very superficial. What we observe here is

rather the hostility between members of the same class, between, say, a

skilled miner and an unskilled one, between the engine driver and a less

expert railwayman. This hostility and this tension contain in themselves

a tremendous political antagonism, but one that cannot be resolved by

any upheaval in society. It can be resolved only by the growth of the

national wealth in the first instance, a growth which would make it

possible to supply the broadest masses of the population with the

minimum needs, and more than that. It can be resolved by the spread and

improvement in education, because it is the material and intellectual

wealth of society that leads to the softening of the age-old division –

the renewed and sharpened division – between the organisers and the

organised. When the organised is no longer the dumb and dull and

helpless muzhik, when the cook is no longer the old scullion, then

indeed the gulf between the bureaucrat and the worker can disappear.

What will remain will be the division of functions not of social status.

The old Marxist prospect of ‘withering away’ of the state may seem to us

odd. But let us not play with old formulas which were part of an idiom

to which we are not accustomed. What Marx really meant was that the

state should divest itself of its oppressive political functions. And I

think this will become possible only in a society based on nationalised

means of production, free from slumps and booms, free from speculations

and speculators, free from the uncontrollable forces of the whimsical

market of private economy; in a society in which all the miracles of

science and technology are turned to peaceful and productive uses; in

which automation in industry is not hampered by fear of investment on

the one side and fear of redundancy on the other; in which working hours

are short and leisure civilised (and completely unlike our stultifying

commercialised mass entertainment!); and – last but not least – in a

society free from cults, dogmatism and orthodoxies – in such a society

the antagonism between brainwork and manual labour will really wither

away, as will the division between the organisers and the organised.

Then, and only then, it will be seen that if bureaucracy was a faint

prelude to class society, bureaucracy will mark the fierce ferocious

epilogue to class society – no more than an epilogue.

[1] Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), pp. 214–15. [Sine

ira ac studio – without anger or bias – MIA.]

[2] Friedrich Engels, ‘Der Ursprung der Familie’, Marx Engels Werke,

Volume 21 (1962), pp 165–66; The Origin of the Family (London, 1942),

pp. 194–95.

[3] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (London, 1943), p 308.

[4] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (London, 1943), p 311.

[5] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (London, 1943), p 309.

[6] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Critique of the Gotha Programme.