The old middle class and new classes in the theory of Anton Pannekoek, the Group of International Communists and Spartacusbond
By Aníbal and Fredo Corvo
Table of Contents
1. Marx’s objective and subjective understanding of class.
2. Pannekoek and the ‘new middle class’.
The middle class, a century later.
3. The revolution in Russia and the contradictions of the Soviet state.
4. Ciliga: from Trotskyism and Stalinism to a “new” ruling and exploiting class.
5. GIC 1940: new class, bureaucracy against bourgeoisie, private against state capitalism.
State capitalism and private capitalism.
6. Bureaucracy and the split between Stalin and Tito.
1. State and bureaucracy with Marx.
For giving the trigger to write this essay, we thank our comrades in Brazil, Portugal, and Spain, who have given their different views on theories of new classes from multiple perspectives and backgrounds. They prompted us to investigate further. In doing so, we encountered weaknesses and errors in the analyses by the KAPD-GIC current of council communism, to which we are close. This led us to critique the conception of some new classes that Pannekoek, in particular, thought he had discovered. This critique is of practical importance for understanding all sorts of recent “inter-class” movements, from the “squares movement” and the “Arab Spring,” through the “Yellow Shirts” to the current protests against Chador duty in Iran, all movements that we will not discuss here.[1] For the moment, we just want to say that from the point of view of council communism, the proletariat only organizes itself on class basis and for its proper immediate and historic interests. Only on this condition, and in specific situations, the proletariat can give force to interclass movements, and the proletariat and these movements may march the same way, for a delimited time. However by diluting themselves in these movements, the workers will serve interests of other classes.
The “squares movement,” the “Arab Spring,” the “Yellow Vests” in France, and the protests against the Chador duty in Iran, all these movements show differences between them. But they are all movements in which members of multiple classes participate, including workers. The question for Marxists is to what extent these classes succeed in translating their interests into demands, objectives and methods of struggle and organization. No practical answer to this question is possible without also examining the dynamics of struggle, especially the shifts that occur during a multi-class movement in the mutual relations of force between classes.
For the workers, this raises questions of autonomy as a proletarian class regarding the organization, tactics and goals of struggle. What are the conditions for forging alliances or forming fronts with other classes? And even the elementary question arises as to what classes are and what classes exist in capitalism. In answering such questions, Marxists often fall back on Marx and Engels and the historical succession of organizations from the League of Communists to the present. we also follow this method here, with the note that Marxist analyses of the class struggle can only advance the workers’ struggle by always investigating real social changes from the viewpoint of the core of historical materialism. To avoid indulging in the arbitrary picking of quotations, we will give the historical and social context when choosing texts by Marx and Engels, the KAPD, and the GIC.
For a critique of the view that the young Marx spoke of a bureaucratic class, we refer to the Appendix State and Bureaucracy in Marx.
The problems outlined above that arise in the aforementioned interclass movements, and that will arise in future situations where power relations are in favor of the working class, make it necessary to start from a dual concept of class as Marx and the GIC used it. They spoke of a class in the objective sense and a class in the subjective sense. While the working class has existed objectively since the rise of capitalism, it has only sporadically been able to elevate itself to a “conscious being” as a revolutionary class, holding the future of a communist society. These rare moments in which history showed an opening were the German-French war that led to the Paris Commune of 1871 and World War I, which brought workers in Russia, Hungary and Germany to organize their revolutionary council power. Members of other classes then individually joined the revolutionary working class. Despite fine words, there was no alliance of workers with the peasants in 1917-1923. To their shame and in contradiction to their interests, throughout history, workers participated in all kinds of movements of other classes. Apparently, the objective existence of the working class does not automatically and straightforwardly lead to revolutionary subjectivity. Therefore, at the level of study, relying solely on objective class concepts is necessary but not sufficient. In terms of analysis and political orientation, one must consider the subjective level and the possibilities of concordance or contradiction between objective and subjective reality.
1. Marx’s objective and subjective understanding of class
Marx and Engels distinguish within capitalism two main classes, or rather two historical classes, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. These classes are characterized by the possession or non-possession of means of production. Thereby, the bourgeoisie, as the possessing class, represents the existing bourgeois or capitalist society, and the working class, the class owing no means of production, represents the historical perspective of a communist society where the means of production are owned and managed in a collective way by the association of free and equal producers.
In his critique of political economy, Marx characterizes the capitalist class or bourgeoisie as the ruling and exploiting class that implements capital’s impersonal, blind laws. The proletariat is the oppressed and exploited class that is merely a factor of production for capital, a supplier of labor power, and producer of the surplus value that accumulates capital and makes the capitalist class live in luxury.
According to his 1867 preface [2] Marx describes in Capital the role – a stage term – of the capitalists according to the character mask [3] they wear, as “persons insofar as they are the personification of economic categories, bearers of certain class relations and interests.” Using an analogy with stagecraft allows Marx to describe the historical classes of capitalist society according to their objective place in bourgeois relations of production. Objective in a double sense, independent of subjectivity, of what the individuals themselves think of their situation, independent of their actual behavior. Second, objective in the sense that personal relations are hidden behind the appearance of only business and nature-necessary relations of exchange, market, commodity, and money. Marx calls this fetishization of social relations and the socialized nature of labor. Objectification is characteristic of capitalism; in prior exploitative societies, the relations of production immediately appeared as personal relations, e.g., between landlord and tenant. Objectification in capitalism is thus not merely a theoretical abstraction from reality. It is – to use a term of the early Marx – a real alienation of society and man from himself. The overthrow of objectification in capitalism, therefore, can only take place in reality, by the only class that holds a historical future, the working class, the first revolutionary class that is not an exploiting class, but an exploited class, which therefore has a personal interest in abolishing the alienation of labor by reconquering and socializing the means of production, and thereby also putting an end to the oppression of one man by another. The development of revolutionary subjectivity, of proletarian consciousness of the objective exploitation and subjugation of labor in capitalism, coincides with the development of the proletariat’s class struggle, the subject-object of the revolution, which not only reverses conditions but also changes itself.
The dynamic nature of Marx’s concept of class is revealed when he states:
“Economic relations have turned the mass of the population into workers. The rule of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. Thus this class is already a class against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle (…) this mass finds itself together, forms itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.” [4]
In the workers’ struggle, the proletariat develops from a class that exists only objectively – indifferent to what members of that class subjectively think of themselves or their interests – to a class “für Sich” – a proletariat that is subjectively aware of its class interests, organizes itself according to them, and conducts struggles at an ever higher level. In that struggle, in an uneven process of organizational unification, the working class overcomes its divisions according to profession, industry, nationality, religion, etc., and overcomes bourgeois ideology in all its forms that shackles it to capitalism. How different sections of the proletariat participate in the class struggle – leading or lagging behind, more or less conscious and militant – and their contributions to the whole are different each time with the various regional, historical, and cultural conditions in which the struggle takes place. Especially in his non-economic writings, Marx, like Engels, analyzed “this organization of the proletarians into class, and thus into political party.” [5]
We thus note that Marx understands the working class in its dynamic development of struggle and organization from only objectively existing class – “a class opposed to capital” (Marx) – determined by its place in the relations of production to a class that also subjectively understands its class interests and fights for them. The subjective understanding of class is thus expressed on a scale whose extremes are ‘entirely unaware of its class interests’ and ‘completely conscious of them’. By analogy with Marx’s Klasse für Sich (he did not explicitly speak of “Klasse an Sich”), here we distinguish class as a double concept, as an objective class, and as class in the subjective sense.
As an exploited and oppressed class, the proletariat has great difficulty struggling to rise to class for itself and shed the mask of submissiveness and lack of self-confidence. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, as a class – with individual exceptions – has no interest in shedding its character mask of the insensitive executor of the impersonal, blind laws of capital. The additionally present bourgeois ideological character masks of professional ethics, abstract human rights, and other ideological frills are thrown off when the individual bourgeois position and especially when bourgeois rule as a whole is in danger. The latter is when the working class threatens bourgeois relations of production through its struggles. At that historically unique moment, the bourgeoisie halts its ongoing internal struggle of interests, sheds its ideological masks, and forms a counterrevolutionary body of terror against the proletariat. See, for example, the Paris Commune of 1872, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in Russia, those of 1918 in Germany and Hungary, and most recently, in January 2022, the workers’ revolt in Kazakhstan.[6] Except in such exceptional situations, the mutually conflicting bourgeois interests of mainly enterprises, industries, countries, and imperialist blocs of countries emerge. These interests produce different and conflicting conceptions of the common interest of the several capital groups. Eventually, after short or longer struggles among themselves, the dominant capital, through the state and imperialist alliances, imposes its view on the capital groups that lose out, with or without compensation. Thus, the development of the bourgeoisie as a subjective class is not without its problems either.
Besides the historical classes in capitalism, bourgeoisie, and proletariat, Marx also speaks of the middle class – in the sense of petty bourgeoisie – that has no historical significance because it is not the bearer of a past, a present, or a future form of society, such as the artisans. In Marx’s time, the objective class position within the relations of production of the artisans, the small industrialists, merchants, and the land owning part of the peasants is determined by their possession of means of production. Objectively the petty bourgeoisie is a sub-class of the bourgeoisie. In the 19th century, the way different strata and sectors of this middle classe [7] participate in the class struggle, their attitudes and ideas, are different each time in relation to the various regional, historical and cultural conditions in which the struggle takes place. In 1848, for example, Marx and Engels analyze with regard to the bourgeois revolution expected in Germany:
“Of all the classes now opposed to the bourgeoisie, only the proletariat is a truly revolutionary class. The other classes degenerate and decay with big industry; the proletariat is their own product.
The middle class, the small industrialist, the small merchant, the artisan, the peasant, they all fight the bourgeoisie to save their existence as a middle class from destruction. So they are not revolutionary, they are conservative. More than that, they are reactionary, they are trying to turn back the wheel of history. If they are revolutionary, they are so with a view to the transition to the proletariat that lies ahead; if they are revolutionary, they are defending not their present but their future interests; if they are revolutionary, they are abandoning their own position in order to place themselves on that of the proletariat.
The lumpenproletariat, this passive rot of the lower strata of the old society, will be thrown into the movement by a proletarian revolution in certain places; in accordance with its whole state of life, it will rather be ready to be bribed for reactionary machinations.” [8]
In “The Class struggle in France 1848 to 1850.” [9] Marx puts more emphasis on the economically determined interests of the petty bourgeoisie. In addition, the significance of the balance of power between the classes for the attitudes of the middle classes comes to the fore. In his 1895 preface, Engels summarizes this relationship as follows:
“A bourgeoisie divided into two dynastic-monarchist factions, which, however, demanded above all peace and security for its financial transactions, and against it a defeated, but still threatening proletariat, around which more and more petty bourgeois and peasants gathered – the constant threat of a violent outburst ….” [10]
The European revolutions of 1848 were bourgeois revolutions in which the petty bourgeoisie sought to use the proletariat for its ends. In contrast, Marx and Engels proposed that the workers organize independently and on a mass basis to be immediately capable of turning against the bourgeoisie and starting the proletarian revolution if the bourgeois revolution was victorious. In this regard, Marx emphasized that the ideals that emerged in the “socialism” of the “party of anarchy” (so named by the big bourgeoisie as to terrify the petty-bourgeois) represented the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie.
In summary, in addition to the historical classes of capitalism, bourgeoisie, and proletariat, Marx and Engels distinguished the middle class or petty bourgeoisie on the basis of its possession of means of production as a subclass of the bourgeoisie. During the bourgeois revolutions around 1848, this middle class tried to use the proletariat for its conservative and even reactionary petty-bourgeois goals against the big bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels supposed (as we will see, incorrectly) this middle class would gradually disappear with the advance of industry and the concentration of capital.
2. Pannekoek and the ‘new middle class’
In the period following the passing of Marx and Engels, German social democracy grew into a kind of “state within the state” (Peter Nettl [11]). An army of bourgeois social scientists,[12] aimed their arrows at Marxism with the goal of strengthening the reformist and revisionist tendencies within the SPD and the Freie Gewerkschaften. This included Marx’s thesis of the concentration of capital and the disappearance of the middle classes, which we already know from the Communist Manifesto. In “Der Untergang des Kleinbetriebs,” Pannekoek showed, among other things with statistical material, that small business did decline to big business and that although the number of self-employed increased, the number of wage workers increased even more.[13]
In his article “The New Middle Class,” Pannekoek distinguished three categories in the old middle class. First, the industrial middle class of small capitalists that had long since given way to big industry. The rural middle class of landowning peasants had become subservient to capitalism without losing its means of subsistence. Finally, when in 1909 there was talk of the disappearance of the middle class, it referred only to the commercial middle class of small merchants and shopkeepers, recently threatened by branch stores and mail-order businesses. Pannekoek pointed out that with the disappearance of this old middle class based on ownership of means of production, a buffer protecting the capitalists from the proletariat was disappearing.
Herman Gorter, in his Open Letter to Lenin (1920), had already pointed out the different importance of the poor peasants for the revolution in Russia and Germany. In Russia in the majority compared to the workers, the poor peasants were landless and virtually serfs. They could be won over to the revolution by the Bolshevik slogan “the land to the peasants.” In Germany the number of peasants owning middle and small farms was small in number compared to the millions of workers, but they owned the land which they laboriously cultivated and they identified with the great owners. In Germany, the proletariat stood alone against all other classes.
Bourgeois social scientists claimed that a “new middle class” was emerging. As evidence, they relied on the middle income of salaried intellectuals and highly paid workers in industry. Pannekoek pointed out that for Marxists, the criterion is not relative incomes but the existence of classes and their function. The economic function of the “new middle class” was different from that which predominated previously, that of small owners of productive means. They are no longer possessors of the means of production but are obliged to sell their labor power. Admittedly a higher skilled labor power, than that of the actual proletariat, which explains their higher income. Pannekoek underlined that for Marxism income differences are no criterion for class. Income differences also exist within the working class, without detracting from its objective existence as a class. Pannekoek comes to the preliminary conclusion that based on its wage dependence alone, the new middle class has no interest in the continued existence of private property.[14]
What does Pannekoek understand by the new middle class? First, an ironic Pannekoek mentions the inventors of this concept, the professors. Second, he mentions the “immense army of intermediating functionaries: overseers, skilled workers, engineers, managers of departments, bosses, etc. They formed a complete hierarchy of officials; they were the officers and subalterns of the industry army, an army in which the great capitalists are the generals and the workingmen the common soldiers.[MU1] “ Third, the members of the so-called “free” professions.
Pannekoek’s interest, however, went beyond the objective concept of class. He also wondered whether the new middle class could be part of the trade union struggle and the fight for socialism.
Wage dependence was not a sufficient criterion for Pannekoek to include members of the new middle class among the working class. Meanwhile, in capitalism, the rise of share capital brought about a separation between ownership and management of the enterprise. In the article “Co-owners,” Pannekoek qualified Carnegie’s proposal to solve the “working-class problem” by the share ownership of workers as misleading.[15] In 1910, Pannekoek wrote of a “new bourgeoisie,” owning only shares, with no control in the enterprises, alongside the major shareholders who rule over business life. From this, he concluded:
“To the ruling class can now be counted only those who actually control economic life and thus also rule the state: lords of the trusts, banking magnates, financial kings, and magnates. The new bourgeoisie is no longer a ruling class, but only a possessing and exploiting class.” [16]
For terminological clearness, Pannekoek better had not called these shareholding bourgeois without real influence a new class. These parasites are objectively a subclass of the bourgoisie, and they understand this subjectively very well.
Based on his insight that the essential criterion is not stock ownership but the actual control of business life, Pannekoek continued his examination in The New Middle Class with “the real position of this new class, its actual function in our social organism” [17] However, next, objective and subjective factors of class come up interchangeably: their higher average income, their division into hierarchically arranged strata with different incomes and positions, their individualism, their careerism, and cowardice.
Because of their division into hierarchically ranked strata with different incomes and positions, Pannekoek speaks of a gradual transition from capitalist to proletarian, where in the middle segment, there is no sharp dividing line and the “middle class” lacks spiritual unity.
With few exceptions, Pannekoek did not consider the “new middle class” able and willing to unite in trade unions. And for socialism, Pannekoek counted on them even less since they were “set over the workers as superintendents, overseers, bosses, etc. In these capacities they are expected to speed up the workers, to get the utmost out of them. So, representing the interest of capital in relation to labor, they naturally assume a position a bitter enmity to the proletariat and find it almost impossible to stand shoulder to shoulder with them in the struggle for a single goal.”
Furthermore, their bourgeois origins, their education, and their fear of “leveling out,” according to Pannekoek, made:
“(…) a hundred causes separate this new middle class from Socialism. Its members have no independent interest which could lead them to an energetic defense of capitalism. But their interest in Socialism is equally slight. They constitute an intermediate class, without definite class ideals, and therefore they bring into the political struggle an element which is unsteady and incalculable.
In great social disturbances, general strikes, e. g., they may sometimes stand by the workers and so increase their strength; they will be the more likely to do this in cases in which such a policy is directed against reaction. On other occasions they may side with the capitalists. Those of them in the lower strata will make common cause with a ‘reasonable’ Socialism, such as is represented by the Revisionists. But the power which will overthrow capitalism can never come from anywhere outside the great mass of proletarian.[18] (Bold by F.C.)
Back to class as a double concept, as an objective and subjective class, we notice:
- In connection with the development of share capital and big industry, Pannekoek widens the objective criterion from the possession of means of production to that of the power of disposal of the means of production when it comes to the ruling class.
- He prioritizes the real social functioning for his analysis of the “new middle class,” representing the interest of capital versus labor, more specifically, the managerial function of its members and, in the case of the “liberal” professions and that of the “professors,” their ideological function for capital.
- Pannekoek adopts a mechanical conception of the relationship between objective and subjective class position, where he assumes that social functioning unilaterally determines action in wage struggles and revolutionary struggles. Downright sloppy is his argument, where objective and subjective factors are mixed. The lack of a clear dividing line between capital and proletariat in the “new middle class” tempts Pannekoek to adopt this bourgeois notion, and he counts parts of the proletariat, such as head workers and skilled workers, as the “new middle class,” without making it clear whether he means this in objective or subjective terms.
- In the objective sense, there is no reason to call what bourgeois ideology presents as the “new middle class” a class. The “new bourgeoisie” is a subclass of the bourgeoisie and this also goes for bigger parts of the “new middle class”. Pannekoek provides sufficient arguments not to speak of middle class but of middle strata, for example.
We saw above that in 1909, Pannekoek had little confidence that the intellectuals would side with socialism. In 1914, after the outbreak of World War One, he stated in sharper terms:
“(…) ‘imperialism’ controls nowadays to a greater or lesser extent, the political life of all nations and the mental attitude of the bourgeoisie. It has given to the possessing classes, who hitherto had nothing to oppose to the Socialist ideals of the working class, a new ideal: to make the fatherland great and mighty among the peoples of the earth. The intellectuals, who had formerly flirted with Socialism, now became the enthusiastic supporters of the bourgeoisie; the old ideals of world peace, progress and democracy were supplanted by the ideals of world power, patriotism, race prejudice, the admiration of force and brutality. All doubt as to the ability of capitalism to persist indefinitely, and in full vigor, has disappeared, while Socialism is now regarded by them as feeble humanitarian sentimentalism, which unfortunately puts the working class in opposition to national aims.”[19]
Pannekoek and the GIC saw a similar imperialist stance among intellectuals in the run-up to World War Two. We will see how Pannekoek, even then, distinguishes a “new middle class,” a “class of intellectuals,” which, however, unlike 1909, does produce an imperialist class ideal, just as it did in 1914.
The middle class, a century later
Meanwhile, we are more than 100 years away from the first phenomena of the “new middle class.” The continuing development of capitalism did not make disappear the old middle class, that is, the means of production-owning small bourgeoisie, but it continues to exist and even has grown. As Pannekoek noted in 1909 regarding the peasants, the small bourgeoisie exists as subordinate to the big bourgeoisie.
In addition, the “new middle class” has also grown, so-called because the strata and sectors identified for this purpose were often wage-dependent but enjoyed a middle income and occupied a middle position in the social hierarchy.
We lack the space here to go into the functions performed by these different parts of petty bourgeois and non-possessive strata and sectors in capitalism. In general parlance, these functions are referred to by terms such as marketing, finance, government and semi-government, etc. These bourgeois concepts are entirely inadequate for a Marxist analysis in terms of, for example, productive and unproductive labor and surplus value creation. Of course, such an analysis should be substantiated as much as possible with statistical data. For examples of such an analysis by Aníbal, we refer to Appendix 2. Statistical data show that most of this co-called new middle class do not function as proletarians producing surplus value, but are in service of capital with the task to maintain the objective rules of capitalist accumulation. This makes them objectively part of the bourgeoisie.
However, such a Marxist analysis of the objective class position of what is called the “middle class” does not relieve us of the need to examine how these strata and sectors define their interests subjectively. That is, in thought and action, word and deed, and this in different situations of class struggle, including the possibilities in a revolutionary situation. An interesting example of such an analysis of objective and subjective factors in the case of engineers has been undertaken by Nick Chavez.[20]
Here it suffices to note that the bourgeoisie has, for the time being, succeeded in counteracting the “division of society” it had feared. It did so with innumerable interventions in the division of labor in companies, between sectors and countries, with differentiation in wages and other conditions of employment, the replacement of labor contracts with subcontracts by ostensibly self-employed workers, the bureaucratic subordination of sectors such as health care and education. This success is heavily related to the economic growth that the bourgeoisie, since World War II, has been able to achieve, despite the stubbornly held view of many supporters of the Communist Left that capitalism would be in “decline” or in “permanent crisis.” The fragmentation of the working class into a mass of atomized individuals and far-reaching individualism has reached a point where the working class exists almost only in the objective sense of the word, and there are hardly any manifestations of defensive struggles for its class interests. In the current situation where “globalization” is giving way to the importance of imperialist blocs visible around the war in Ukraine, it is all the more vital that we use class as a double concept of class in the objective and the subjective sense. After decades of decline in real and social wages, the determining contradictions of capital are now imposing a drastic decline of living standards not only on the working class but also on parts of the petty bourgeoisie and on the middle strata that partly mirror themselves to the big bourgeoisie and capitalism. As the peasant protests and the inter-class movement in Iran, for example, show, this brings dangers and opportunities for class independence in organization and the immediate and historical interests of the workers.
Petty-bourgeois ideology, not only mentally or abstractly, influences the proletariat. The proletariat is not only a passive consumer of the ideological streams that mass media and new media spread. Millions and millions of members of the petty bourgeoisie, with their yearnings, despairs, illusions, and concrete interests, manifest themselves in social reality as an opposition force against the higher echelons of the bourgeoisie. Hence the tremendous persistence of petty-bourgeois indignant movements, woman’s movements, peasants’ movements, environmental movements, etc., all promoting interclassism and citizenship. Proletarians actively participate as individuals in these oppositional movements. These activities explain why the proletariat accepts these movements’ petty-bourgeois political and economic meanings and orientation as ‘its own.’
Presently, the petty bourgeoisie consists of a platoon of small entrepreneurs in production and distribution, the salaried sectors without ownership of means of production but fulfilling bourgeois functions, and the self-employed professional, intellectual and scientific-technological sectors (exercising what is called “liberal professions”). These petty-bourgeois strata and sectors are so numerous and essential in class struggles that they organize according to various political positions, from leftist to conservative and from liberal, populist, nationalist to socialist.
These are all the more reasons for the proletariat to organize independently from these petty-bourgeois influences and for immediate working-class demands and its historical program for communism.
Let’s have a closer look at the movements of national liberation, of the populist front, of the Maoist four-class alliance, of two-class socialism (allegedly non-bourgeois) of Stalin and co (manual workers and intellectuals in the m-l manuals and texts), in the new movements of citizen indignation, of the New Left and its expressions of fragmentary and “intersectional” social corporatism. Furthermore, there are the liberal professionals’ expressions, not of a movement of struggle but of corporate dynamics based on private, associated, and state capital. In all these cases, we are not dealing with a new class but with the petty-bourgeois section of the bourgeois class. This petty bourgeoisie is very numerous. Compared to the superior layers of the bourgeoisie, it has more objective and real material and social motives for fighting and mobilising.
This sector of the petty bourgeoisie is notoriously a source of economic and cultural-ideological innovations, which are selectively and opportunistically appropriated by big capital. Leftist factions are an important functional base of red state capitalism, and rightist ones for fascist capitalism and similar openly dictatorial right-wing modalities. A broad social-democratic or liberal political middle layer prefers more or less statified or privatized or practically hybridized liberal democratic regimes.
Of course, in all these cases, the proletariat is the class generating surplus value for the accumulation of capital and assuring the petty bourgeoisie its comfort and social status, generally better wages than the proletariat, especially the low-skilled proletariat.
3. The revolution in Russia and the contradictions of the Soviet state
In the first chapter, in our presentation of class as a double concept, we stopped for brevity at the period of the European bourgeois revolutions. Marx and Engels never mentioned current or future bourgeois revolutions after that. This also had implications for their assessment of the attitude of the proletariat toward the big bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the various classes among the peasantry. With the historical experience of the Paris Commune of 1872, Marx and Engels also declared some of the revolutionary measures proposed in 1848 obsolete.[21] They also formulated lessons from the Commune in positive terms, such as the concrete forms of mass organization that they had previously understood only abstractly, as “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the content of the revolution, the liberation of labor.
The revolutionary movements at the end of and after World War I in Russia, Hungary, and Germany made possible, in a similar way to the Paris Commune, a concretization of what had previously remained relatively abstract: the form of organization of the revolution. Lenin, in 1918, in his “State and Revolution,” referred to Marx in 1871:
“The Commune is the form ‘at last discovered’ by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labor can take place.
The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form ‘at last discovered’, by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced.
We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work of the Commune and confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis.” [22]
Lenin was the first to recognize – with his own reformist limitations [23] – in the Workers’ Councils the Commune form.
It is generally assumed that the differences of view between Bolshevists and Bordigists, on the one hand, and the council communists, on the other, concerned organizational forms such as the councils, the party and the German “Arbeiterunionen.” This is true of Rühle’s analyses that are limited to the bureaucratic structure that the Social Democratic party and trade union movement had taken in Germany. The bourgeois sociologist, a syndicalist socialist and later fascist, Robert Michels, absolutized this historical phenomenon into the iron law of oligarchy.[24] With Rühle and his supporters we find this thesis of an inevitable bureaucratization.[25]
After the Paris Commune of 1871, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in Russia gave rise to further concretizations of Marxist conceptions of state and bureaucracy. From the earliest beginnings of the Bolshevik party dictatorship, it was confronted with what it saw as bureaucratic excesses of the “workers’ state”. Unable to end these excesses, the various factions in the party, notably Stalin’s and Trotsky’s, used the bureaucracy as a scapegoat for and distraction from their responsibility for the crimes of the state they led. Before picking up this thread with the views of the GIC, we follow Jan Appel’s interesting reflections on bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
Within the KAPD, this phenomenon of bureaucracy in Russia did not go unnoticed. The revolutionary worker Jan Appel [26] published “The Russian Reconstruction Program” under the pseudonym Hempel in Proletarier in 1926.[27] From one of Stalin’s many denunciations of the parasitic attitude of the bureaucrats, he quoted the following:
“For some communists it is also no great trouble to enter the garden of the state like pigs and root around there or show their generosity at the expense of the state.”
Appel then commented as follows, in a brilliant confirmation of Marx’s remarks on the state bureaucracy (see Appendix):
“If the Bolsheviks declare that they will attack this ‘pig economy’ by all means, they will succeed only to a limited extent because they cannot attack its breeding ground. The state and its economy, as long as they are based on exploitation, are a foreign body to the oppressed members of society. Each individual will then pursue his own advantage, and one will have to resign himself to the fact that much of the surplus product produced by the workers will end up in the fishing nets of the necessarily colossal bureaucratic apparatus.
Despite all this, some of the surplus value will remain that can be used for accumulation, for the expansion of industry. But what this new construction of factories and workshops, in which wage labor is once again exploited, can have in common with socialism remains the secret of the Bolsheviks …”
Appel explicitly rejects the argument still used today by groups invoking the Italian Communist Left:
“One cannot deprive the Bolsheviks (…) of all responsibility for their politics simply by referring to ‘circumstances.’ (…)
One must be blind not to recognize that in the economic doctrine of Bolshevism, in its conception of the organization of the national economy and the resulting economic policy, lies a straight line that ultimately leads to that new kind of system of exploitation that we call state capitalism.
As early as 1917, Lenin outlined the basic lines of this new economic organization in his writing ‘State and Revolution,’ and the policy of the Bolsheviks to this day is a consistent continuation of the path once embarked upon, which naturally takes on its specific practical face in the flow of life. Lenin demands as the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat the organization of the entire economy ‘on the model of a state capitalist trust’.”
In 1927, Appel expanded on this critique of “State and Revolution.” [28]
He continues The Russian Reconstruction Program with an analysis somewhat similar to that of Bordiga in The Economic and Social Structure of Contemporary Russia [29] insofar as the continued existence of a private economy is emphasized [30]:
“In practice, however, it appears that the state can only summarize and manage the economy as it is, i.e., an economy which is to a large extent directly private, which – because the exchange of goods cannot be achieved by state bureaucratic means – requires a free market, and which, in the absence of any other economic regulation, is based on the exploitation of ‘free’ wage labor.
Insofar as in this system private economy exists and will continue to exist, the surplus product of the exploited labor power passes into the hands of the private users of the foreign labor power. The surplus product of the workers in the state enterprises is at the disposal of the state itself, which again is not a chimera but is given the real face by the bureaucracy that holds and exercises power. Stalin has given us telling examples of how the bureaucracy deals with this.
The economic considerations of the state cannot be different from those of the private capitalists. …
How are the interests of the producer, of the wage worker, represented in this development? The Moscow supporters are never shy of answering, referring, for example, to the reports of the workers’ delegations to Russia, which knew how to tell mainly about rest homes and other state social services. What is deliberately overlooked here, however, is that it is mainly the state bureaucracy that provides for its own needs and those of its servants in this way, and that in this area, too, a social dichotomy necessarily occurs.” [31]
Appel anticipates in his conclusion what the GIC will publish as Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution[32] as follows:
“If M a r x summarizes the task of the proletarian revolution as the return of the means of production to the producers expropriated by capital, then state socialism is diametrically opposed to it. The disposition of the means of production is taken away from the workers and placed entirely in the hands of the state. But the state, which pompously presents itself as the state of workers and peasants, as a centralized state economic apparatus acquires the character of domination over society, whose extent of power eclipses even the great capitalist trusts.
If the proletarian revolution is to lead to communism, it must give the workers the actual disposal of the means of production, for only then is the proletariat able to determine its own destiny. In the KAPD and the General Workers’ Union, for the first time in the history of the labor movement, the path of achieving the greatest independence and self-government of the groups as the core of the matter, and thus achieving unity, has been practically taken. What lives here in the first initial stage in the class-conscious proletariat must become the basic characteristic of the communist economy. (…)
It will be our task in other places to set forth in detail the main features of this economic order.”
Appel thus made clear that the Bolsheviks cannot fight the bureaucracy because they cannot attack its breeding ground, capitalism, and the exploitation of the workers. Second, against the state capitalist vision of Bolshevism, Appel posits the perspective that the workers conquer the actual disposition of the means of production.[33] The elaboration of this in a communist economy deprives the bureaucracy of its reason of existence. There is no question of a bureaucratic class with Appel. His analysis is entirely in terms of the historical main classes, capital, and labor, as the introduction to the article shows:
“… most of industry and transportation are under state control. Here all government measures have a direct effect. On the other hand, the private ownership of peasants, craftsmen and the remaining part of industry. Moreover, as a result of its economic backwardness, Russia is highly dependent on the capitalist environment. If Russian economic policy derives from these actual conditions of production, the embedding of state production in peasant or other private enterprises must be examined in order to put the Bolsheviks’ economic program, the forced NEP policy, in its proper perspective.”
Where Appel points to Russia’s strong dependence on the capitalist environment, we encounter a contradiction between, on the one hand, the widely shared view at the time (from Lenin to Rühle) of the wholly or partially bourgeois character of the revolution in Russia, and, on the other, the imperialism view of Rosa Luxemburg, Herman Gorter, the KAPD and the GIC that put forward the completed division of the world into capitalist spheres of influence and the consequent impossibility of national liberation and bourgeois revolutions that not became part of inter-imperialist confrontations. Proletarian support of these bourgeois movements always subjected them to their enemy class.. We refer the interested reader to two articles on this subject.[34]
The next chapter deals with the thesis that a new class would have emerged in the Soviet Union, the “bureaucratic” class, this time in the sense of a ruling and exploiting class that would have replaced the bourgeoisie. Anticipating this, we have seen that in 1926 Jan Appel noted the presence of private and state capitalism in the Soviet Union, as did the later Bordiga who pointed to cooperative ownership, especially the kolkhozes. In agreement with the young Marx, Appel concluded that it was futile to fight the bureaucracy because it was fed by the capitalist mode of production and state. Against the state-capitalist conception of Lenin, Appel posited the reconquest of the means of production by workers’ councils and the economic liberation of labor.
4. Ciliga: from Trotskyism and Stalinism to a “new” ruling and exploiting class
In 1938 and 1947, two articles by Anton Ciliga appeared in the magazine Radencommunisme published by the GIC: Soviet Bourgeoisie (Excerpt from “Au pays du grand mensonge” by Ciliga)[35] and The Peasant Question[36], interesting to the GIC because for them this was the key issue of the revolution in Russia, to which they paid much attention in the Fundamental Principles and the pamphlet Ontwikkelingslijnen in de landbouw, 1930. We have already seen what Pannekoek said about this in 1909. We refer in more detail to the different attitudes of Bolsheviks and the GIC on the peasant question, plus a current analysis of peasant protests.[37]
Ciliga went to Russia as a member of the left faction of the Yugoslav Communist Party. He meets opposition groups and joins them. He is arrested and learns about Russian prisons. And that is where he finds out best what is going on with the Russian workers. Not only because these are present in the most diverse tendencies and from the most diverse milieus, but because it is the only place in Russia where one can speak and debate freely. Initially joining the Trotskyist group, he understands the meaning of Trotskyism and Leninism and joins the far-left groups. The struggle between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the politics of the party and its leadership; for both, the proletariat was merely a suffering object.
On the other hand, the communist groups of the far-left were mainly interested in the position and role of the working class, in what it was in Soviet society, and it had to become in a society that would set itself the task of building socialism. The ideas and political life of those groups opened up Ciliga to a new perspective. They raised questions unknown to the Trotskyist opposition: how should the proletariat cope to conquer the means of production, effectively control the party and the government, introduce workers’ democracy, and preserve the revolution from bureaucratic degeneration.
In 1940, Radencommunisme also published a review of Ciliga’s book “The Russian Enigma” (English title). The first sentence aptly captures what the GIC – and Pannekoek[38] – saw in Ciliga’s book:
“Very many books have come out about the Soviet Union, but none of the writers of those books, in his assessment, mainly applied the yardstick: to what extent do the workers in the u.s.s.r. have power in their own hands?
It is therefore, to Ciliga’s great credit that he does.”
Here is the quote relevant to Ciliga’s theory of the new class:
“It was a new aristocracy of ‘new rich.’ I knew that these people represented the new privileged class, but it was new to me that they were completely aware of this and were completely imbued with a caste spirit.
These families were, for the most part, workers or artisans by birth. Their members, descended from the people, retained in their language, their manners, facial expression the characteristics of their origin. However, how cold and haughty was their attitude toward the workers?
They had regard only for those who held high positions in society. He, who ‘with us’ in Soviet Russia, failed to work his way up, was a creature of inferior rank, a worthless human being. A person’s worth could be measured by the comfort of his country home, his rooms, his furniture, his clothes, and his place on the administrative ladder. Invisible to the eye, the newly privileged again formed different strata, which were very well taken into account. It was not just a pure hierarchy. The people who belonged to the same hierarchical stratum were distinguished according to different characteristics: according to age, according to their career development, according to their social and political life. The solidarity, which united these layers, was directed only against the lower classes; within the privileged class the groups waged a fierce and insidious struggle.” [39]
The question we must ask is: Has Ciliga discovered a new class, as he believes, or is he describing the bourgeoisie that openly manifested itself in Russia during the Stalin period? We recognize in his description many characteristics of the bourgeoisie, its relative prosperity, its place in the hierarchy, its mentality, the stratification between them, the differences within a stratum, and especially their contempt toward the workers. One difference is that after the October Revolution, it recruits its members amongst others from the working class and peasants, as it does in the West. If we ask what position it occupies in capitalist relations of production, the “new” class has economic life at its disposal in three ways: through the state, through private property, and through cooperatives.
This was also the case under Tsarism, except for the specific form of the Kolkhozes. Even before and during World War I, Tsarism was forced to impose a war economy on private capital through the state, just as was the case in Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S. That Lenin saw socialism in the war economy because he had not sufficiently broken with reformist ideas in this regard is no reason to deny its capitalist character. That Ciliga followed the lead of the far-left political prisoners he encountered in the Russian camps, called the bureaucracy a “new” ruling, and exploiting class was an advance over the Trotskyist conception of the “bureaucratized workers’ state.” But the break was insufficient because he failed to recognize that this so-called “new class” was a continuation of the bourgeoisie, that is, the ruling and exploiting class that implements the economic laws of capitalism. To my knowledge, without being aware of it, Ciliga thereby theoretically opened the possibility that this so-called new class represented a new mode of production that was neither capitalist, socialist nor communist. Unfortunately, the GIC would follow Ciliga on this point.
5. GIC 1940: new class, bureaucracy against bourgeoisie, private against state capitalism
The GIC has been using the term new class as a designation for the Soviet bourgeoisie at least since March 1940 – that is, just before the German invasion of the Netherlands, when the group disbanded itself. The article The Working Class and the Revolution describes the behavior, mentality and lifestyle that seem borrowed from Ciliga’s book. A characteristic excerpt:
“On a certain day in one of the following years, it happened that large stores were opened in Moscow, where precious food and delicacies were displayed behind large mirrored windows, which had not been seen, at least not in public, in all the previous years of poverty and scarcity. And dance halls were opened, where in rich toilets appeared gentlemen and ladies, the high officials, the leaders of large agencies, directors of large factories, and the like, gazed at with astonishment by the ragged tramps in the streets, with astonished indignation by devoted party members. The new bourgeoisie! – so it went from mouth to mouth.
It was not a new bourgeoisie at all, of course. But it was a new ruling class!
When a new ruling class appears, the sobered revolutionary, to express his criticism, names that class by the name of the former ruling class.
Thus in the French Revolution the rich bourgeois were labeled with the name ‘new aristocracy.’
So now in Russia. The risen bureaucracy now dared to show itself in public as the new ruling class. Hitherto she had walked around in working-class clothes so as not to arouse suspicion and had only silently profited from her higher standard of living. Now she felt established, untouchable, and strong enough to show what she was, even in public.
What distinguishes this bureaucracy from the bourgeoisie is that it does not own the means of production personally but collectively, jointly. In name, the state is the owner, but the state is they, the officials who dispose of state power collectively. Just like in Western Europe, all surplus value comes into the hands of the bourgeoisie, Russian state capitalism flows into the pockets of the state. Just as the members of the bourgeoisie competed and fight with each other, by skill, by cunning, by luck, over the distribution of the total product, each seeking the largest share at the expense of the other, so the members of the bureaucracy compete with each other, by skill, by intrigue, by cunning, for the best and highest places and the largest share.” [40]
The apparent historical justification for the supposed disappearance of the bourgeoisie and the rise of a “new” class is striking. Indeed, the “new class” in the bourgeois French Revolution was not the aristocracy but the bourgeoisie. If, like the GIC, one holds the revolution in Russia to be a bourgeois revolution, then it would be consistent to call the “new class” bourgeoisie. If, however, one holds to the notion of a “new class” that cannot be called bourgeoisie, one can theoretically justify it only by regarding this revolution as neither bourgeois nor proletarian. It would be consistent to suggest that this revolution would lead to a third form of society that is neither capitalist nor communist, and that is controlled by an exploitative class of e.g. bureaucrats, intellectuals or managers.
In contrast, we argue that the revolution in Russia was part of a wave of attempts at proletarian revolution. In Russia, after Oct. 1917, the proletariat soon lost its council power to a bourgeoisie which, objectively from the position of wage workers, was hardly different from the bourgeoisie under Tsarism. That workers in Russia spoke of a “new bourgeoisie” is thus not as incorrect as the GIC assumed, although they would have better said: “again the bourgeoisie.”
State capitalism and private capitalism
The GIC article makes a correct analysis of how the surplus value extracted from the workers was distributed in the USSR, including to the bureaucracy. Among other peculiarities of capitalism in the USSR, this article incorrectly reserves the term bourgeoisie for those who fulfilled the needs of capital before October 1917. In connection with this, the article distinguishes two forms of capitalism, state capitalism, and private capitalism. This does not reflect that in the Soviet Union, three capitalist forms of ownership of means of production coexisted: state ownership, private ownership, and cooperative ownership. Relative to Jan Appel’s 1926 article, The Russian Reconstruction Program, this was a theoretical regression influenced by a theory of bureaucracy derived from Trotskyism, namely that the bureaucracy as a new class would control state capitalism.
In the wake of similar views, some theorists came up with the idea that “state capitalism” was a different mode of production, with different classes and different economic laws of motion. For example, James Burnham saw the emergence of a new society dominated by the “class of managers”.[41]
The distinction made by the GIC in 1940 between two types of capitalism and the two oppressive exploitative and oppressive classes had everything to do with the outbreak of World War II in 1940 due to the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In Nazi Germany, in the words of the GIC, the private property of the bourgeoisie had remained intact but mainly subject to the state.[42] In Russia, on the other hand, bureaucracy prevailed in a state capitalist society:
“Thus, the workers in their struggle for liberation face a more difficult task than it first appears if one thinks only of the two classes, the possessors and the non-possessors. For their liberation, the workers have to fight not only against the bourgeoisie, but also against the enemies of the bourgeoisie.
It is a struggle, not between two classes, but between three, between the workers, their old exploiters, and those who want to become their new exploiters. (…)
Private capitalism and state capitalism are two opposing forms of exploitation, although one sees transitions and intermediate forms in Germany. The bourgeoisie regards the communists, who want to expropriate their personal property and bring it to the state, as its meanest enemies, who must be fought with all their might. And the c.p. regards the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the administration of production by the state bureaucracy under its leadership as the abolition of exploitation and the beginning of a better world”.[43]
In the Netherlands, just before the German invasion, the conceptual distinction into state capitalism and private capitalism by the GIC only partially met the requirements of propaganda in a working-class dominated by the three ideologies of the warring camps: democracy, fascism and socialism in one country. By emphasizing the differences, the propaganda by the GIC failed to point out the equal capitalist relations of production that were the basis of the warring states and of their ideology.
Imperialism?
The article did not clearly address the character of World War II, which had begun with the invasions of Germany and Russia into Poland:
- Was World War II an inter-imperialist war like World War I?
- Was Russia not only (“state”) capitalist but also imperialist?
- Was a potential confrontation between Germany and Russia (which indeed took place with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941) motivated only by the opposing private and state capitalist interests put forward by the GIC or primarily by imperialist contradictions?
In the article The Second World War [44], published already in December 1939, the concept of imperialism is mentioned once and only in a very general sense.[45] It mainly discusses the contradictions between Germany and England and says little about the nature of Russian interests behind the German-Russian pact. The brochure “The World in Battle Order” by Groepen van Raden-Kommunisten, from 1939,[46] speaks of World War II as an “imperialist war” (p. 21) but fails to comment on Russia in its substantiation:
“Those who are used [in the war; F.C.] are the workers of all countries, against each other, for the interests of their national exploiters.
Only those who have power over the other can use the other. In capitalism, in fascist, soon-to-be-fascist capitalism, the workers have no more power over ‘their’ capitalists, as the soldiers in the trenches have power over ‘their’ general staff.”
These omissions by the GIC were blunders regarding the imperialist character of the “state-capitalist” Soviet Union, ruled by a “new class” of “bureaucrats.” However, these mistakes did not go so far as to cause the GIC to take sides in World War II. When asked “Should European workers defend Russia?” – for example, because the “Russian” revolution as a bourgeois revolution represented historical progress – the GIC answered with a clear “No” in an article of the same name.[47]
The class of intellectuals
In the article The Working Class and the Revolution, the GIC distinguished another class, that of the intellectuals:
“In recent years, the significance of the class of so-called intellectuals, the new middle class in modern capitalism, has been increasingly brought to the fore. It is the engineers, the department managers in the companies, the technicians, and the chemists, who are playing an increasingly important role in production in big business, a consequence of the fact that more and more science and its application are replacing the handed down methods of work. Also in administration; advertising, business management, more and more studied persons are coming, also in agriculture science and study is penetrating, all a proof of greater efficiency and control of nature in production. In addition, the liberal professions, and public services are increasing, as well as the interference of state bodies in production. Thus, as has been pointed out for years, these intellectuals are increasingly becoming a social class of their own. They may be a small minority compared to the workers, but they are increasing much faster, becoming relatively more important in number. And even more important because of the place they occupy as technical leaders in production.” [48]
The term intellectuals is used by the GIC in the sense of academically educated, and not of the 19th century broad, particularly philosophically trained academics with their “universal mind,” of which Theodor W. Adorno was the last known representative. To this “new class,” the article counts all sorts of diverse strata and sectors. When it comes to the objective concept of class, we see the same lack of Marxist analysis of the various functions they perform in capitalism that we already established in Pannekoek’s 1909 article on the “new middle class.” But even when it comes to class in the subjective sense, whereby in thought and action, the choice often falls on the interests of another class, the article was wrong in 1940, as it is now, to speak of a class of intellectuals. It seems more like an embarrassment of the GIC in which pointing out the source and bearers of bourgeois ideologies replace the lack of analysis of their material basis, capitalist relations of production, imperialist tensions, and relations of force between classes.
The GIC’s conclusion is remarkable in this sense, in that it emphasizes that there was:
“(…) increasing influence of the class of intellectuals, which wants to rule over the workers. They are the bearers of the social ideal of production planned from above, state socialism. According to differences in tradition and origin, this occurs in the form of different ideologies and detailed arrangements, such as social democracy, party communism, and national socialism. Not only these larger party organizations, but also all of the splintered small left opposition groups are, more or less consciously, aiming toward the goal of a social revolution, in which the strength of the working masses must overcome the bourgeoisie and – as a new ruling class – put the leaders of a state capitalist production at the helm.” [49]
What do we see here other than the simple analysis of Otto Rühle who attributed the betrayal of social democracy in World War I and the failure of proletarian revolutions to the bureaucracy in trade unionism and the party?
But the GIC does not forget the defeat of the working class – in an eerie parallel to the present situation – in the face of the general preparation for a new world war:
“… the working class lies powerless on the earth. Powerless to stand up for its class goals, that is, for its life interests.”
In other words, the proletariat exists only in an objective sense.
At the end of Chapter 2, we saw how Pannekoek, in his critical remarks of 1909, stated that the “new middle classes” lacked class ideals. In the period immediately before World War II, however, subjective characteristics were present in the “class of intellectuals,” according to him, the aspiration for their leadership of a planned production controlled from above, as expressed under ideological flags of National Socialism, Stalinism, Social Democracy and New Deal. Of course, these bourgeois political movements played an important role in preparing a war economy and in misleading and dividing the working class. But was there a “class of intellectuals”? Where is the objective basis of this so-called class? If we insist that in capitalism, we can speak of a class only based on the objective position of its members in bourgeois relations of production, not only based on the possession of means of production but in the sense of “actually controlling economic life and therefore ruling over the state” (Pannekoek in 1910 [50]) then we see that the “intellectuals” in 1940, as in 1910, belonged objectively in majority to the bourgeoisie, only in minority to the proletariat and that in their subjective expressions – their ideas, especially in their plan-“socialist” political ideals – they primarily aligned themselves with the bourgeoisie. We should also note that an overwhelming proportion of the “intellectuals” were unemployed in the economic malaise in Germany, and around the world by the depression of the 1930s. Nevertheless, they did not consider themselves part of the proletariat, or rather lumpenproletariat, but derived their self-image from the ruling positions to which they laid claim. Marx’s cautionary remark of 1848 about the lumpenproletariat, that these unemployed people drawn from the large and small bourgeoisie easily lend themselves to counterrevolutionary machinations [51] is fully applicable to the “intellectual” plan-socialist ideologues, from Herman de Man to Caetano, from Benito Mussolini to Walter Ulbricht, and from Albert Speer to Getúlio Vargas (of New Order, Brazil).
We now know that these subjective expressions, the plan-“socialist” political ideals, are historically obsolete, even if state capitalist tendencies exist in all countries.
6. Bureaucracy and the split between Stalin and Tito
At the end of World War II, Stalinist partisans led by Tito, with the help of Russian troops, captured the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. Tito came to power and invoked Marxism-Leninism. Already in 1948, there was a split between Yugoslavia and Russia, and Yugoslavia joined the “independent countries.” Ideologically, it began to oppose Marxism-Leninism by speaking of a bureaucracy prevailing in Russia. In industrial life in Yugoslavia, there was workers’ self-management, which meant little more than a right to participate in management through so-called workers’ councils. The economy remained capitalist, according to the “socialist market economy.” By exporting migrant workers to Western Europe and attracting Western tourists, the Tito regime had enough hard currency to guarantee a standard of living unprecedented for Eastern Europe.
In 1954, Milovan Djilas, who had led the ideological confrontation with Stalinism as a close associate of Tito since 1950, criticized the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its cadre of officials for being a “new class.” He was initially thrown out of the party and imprisoned for nearly a decade for “statements against Yugoslav interests.” [52]
A translation of Milovan Djilas’ book “The New Class” appeared in the Netherlands in 1957. The magazine of the Communistenbond ’Spartacus’ – now renamed Spartacusbond under Cold War pressure – “Spartacus,” published six articles by Cajo Brendel critically discussing the book. The whole thing appeared as a booklet in 1958.[53] Brendel shows that in The New Class, Djilas did not – as before – oppose Russia for reasons of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy, nor did he defend the ideology of Titoist “workers’ self-management.” Djilas spoke not only of bureaucracy (like Trotsky and even Stalin) but of a new class that collectively possesses means of production and exploits, oppresses, and ideologically misleads the workers. Like Ciliga’s analysis, this was a step forward from the Bolshevik analyses and simultaneously a source of confusion.
Brendel also refers to the analyses of the GIC on the survival of wage labor in Russia and its possible abolition, as explained in “Fundamental Principles ….” But in all the detailed critique of the non-Marxist character of Djilas’ analyses, Brendel accepts the idea of a “new” class just as uncritically as the GIC did earlier in 1940 regarding Ciliga. While the views of Rühle influenced the late GIC, Brendel was an explicit supporter. In doing so, Brendel even went so far as to call Spain 1936 a bourgeois revolution, against which the GIC contrasted the attitude of the Bolsheviks in the “Russian” revolution.[54] In this regard, the brochure contains another weak point. In the preface to the second edition of 1962, the Spartacusbond informs us that it had deleted a formulation that spoke of the spiritual weapons for the workers’ struggle found in the arsenal of Marxism. Instead, it was now said, “Marxism is the theoretical expression of the workers’ struggle.” Thus a fatal step was taken away from communism and toward retrospective analysis. Theory turned into a hobby without meaning for the workers’ struggle.
Summary
Marx understands the working class in its dynamic development of struggle and organization from an only objectively existing class – “a class opposed to capital” (Marx) – determined by its place in relations of production – , into a class that also subjectively understands its class interests and struggles for them. The subjective concept of class is thus expressed on a scale whose extremes are ‘completely unaware of its class interests’ and ‘completely conscious of these.’ By analogy with Marx, in this essay we distinguish class as a double concept, as an objective class and as a class in the subjective sense. With this dual concept, it becomes possible to analyze how members of a given class can act contrary to their objective interests.
In addition to the historical classes of capitalism, bourgeoisie, and proletariat, Marx and Engels distinguish the middle class or petty bourgeoisie as a means of production possessing class being a subordinate part of the bourgeoisie. They believe this middle class will gradually disappear with the advance of industry and the concentration of capital. During the bourgeois revolutions around 1848, this middle class tries to use the proletariat for its conservative and even reactionary petty-bourgeois goals against the big bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels also speak of petty-bourgeois sectors not owning means of production but exercising salaried functions of administration, supervision, and managerial control of economic, administrative, and social processes. These sectors, therefore, are not new creations produced when capitalism acquires a powerful international development but existed earlier in the initial period of capitalism. What happened is that quantitatively, and qualitatively they nevertheless went on to gain significant importance.
In our critique of Pannekoek’s 1909 article The New Middle Class, we use class as a double concept, as objective and subjective class. It is noteworthy here that in connection with the development of share capital and big industry, Pannekoek expands the objective criterion from the possession of the means of production to that of the power of disposal of the means of production, when it comes to the ruling class. He emphasizes actual social functioning in his analysis of the “new middle class,” representing the importance of capital versus labor, more specifically the managerial function of its members and, in the case of the “liberal” professions and that of the “professors,” their ideological function for capital. Pannekoek adopts a mechanical conception of the relationship between objective and subjective class position where he assumes that social functioning unilaterally determines action in wage struggles and revolutionary struggles. Downright sloppy is his argument, where objective and subjective factors are mixed up. The lack of a clear dividing line between capital and proletariat in the “new middle class” tempts Pannekoek to adopt this bourgeois notion. He counts parts of the proletariat, such as head workers and skilled workers, as part of the “new middle class,” without clarifying whether objectively or subjectively. In the objective sense, there is no reason to call what bourgeois ideology presents as the “new middle class” a class. Pannekoek provides sufficient arguments not to do so but to speak of middle strata, for example.
The historical experience of the Paris Commune of 1872 enabled Marx and Engels to analyze the concrete forms of mass organization and the content of the proletarian revolution, the liberation of labor, which they had previously understood only abstractly as “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The revolutionary movements at the end of and after World War I in Russia, Hungary, and Germany allowed a concretization similar to that of the Paris Commune. This concerns, first, the organizational form of the revolution: the “Commune organization” appeared as the workers’ councils. Less known is the concretization of the content of the revolution, the liberation of labor through the association of free and equal producers, which Marx already sketchily developed in the Critique of the Gotha Program. Jan Appel and the GIC elaborated on the experiences of the revolutions of 1917-1923 in Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution.
In the first article that initiated the Fundamental Principles, Jan Appel critiques Stalin’s and Trotsky’s limited view of the Soviet state as bureaucratized. Consistent with the theories of the young Marx (see Appendix), Appel argues that the Bolsheviks cannot fight bureaucracy because they cannot attack its breeding ground, capitalism, and the exploitation of the workers. Second, against Lenin’s state capitalist vision in State and Revolution, Appel considers that the workers conquer the actual disposition of the means of production. Appel also points to the continued existence of private property alongside state ownership of the means of production, to which we add cooperative property.
Even if it is an advancement over Stalinism and Trotskyism, Ciliga’s thesis that a new class would have emerged in the Soviet Union, the “bureaucratic” class, this time in the sense of a ruling and exploiting class that would have replaced the bourgeoisie, cannot stand up to Jan Appel’s analysis of the real production relations in the Soviet Union. Against the perspective offered by the Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, based on the experiences of 1917-1923, to the association of free and equal producers (Marx) or workers’ councils, the supporters of the idea of a bureaucratic class stand empty-handed. By failing to acknowledge that this so-called “new class” in Russia is a continuation of the bourgeoisie – that is, the ruling and exploiting class that implements the economic laws of capitalism – Ciliga theoretically opens up the possibility that this so-called new class represents a new mode of production that is neither capitalist nor socialist nor communist.
Unfortunately, the GIC has followed Ciliga in using the term new class as a designation for the Soviet bourgeoisie at least since 1940. The GIC mistakenly reserves the term bourgeoisie for those who fulfilled the needs of capital before October 1917. In connection with this, the GIC distinguishes two forms of capitalism, state capitalism, and private capitalism. This does not do justice to the fact that in the Soviet Union, three capitalist forms of ownership of means of production coexisted: state ownership, private ownership, and cooperative ownership of means of production. Relative to the 1926 article above by Jan Appel, this is a theoretical regression influenced by a theory of bureaucracy derived from Trotskyism. The distinction made by the GIC in 1940 between two types of capitalism and the corresponding two exploiting and oppressive classes has everything to do with the outbreak of World War II in 1940 due to the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In Nazi Germany, according to the terminology of the GIC, the private property of the bourgeoisie remains intact but mainly subject to the state. By contrast, in Russia, according to the GIC, bureaucracy reigns supreme in a state-capitalist society. This weakness in its class analysis makes GIC only partially meet the requirements of propaganda in a working-class dominated by the three ideologies of the warring camps: democracy, fascism, and socialism in one country. By emphasizing the differences in its propaganda, the GIC fails to point out the equal capitalist relations of production that were the basis of the warring states and of their ideology.
Even worse, the GIC does not speak clearly about the character of World War II, which began with the German and Russian invasions of Poland. Is World War II an inter-imperialist war like World War I? Is Russia not only (“state”) capitalist but also imperialist? Is an eventual confrontation between Germany and Russia (which indeed took place with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941) motivated only by the opposing private and state capitalist interests put forward by the GIC or primarily by imperialist contradictions? History answered this question when, on 22-6-1941, the “private capitalist” Allies joined forces with the “state capitalist” Soviet Union against the equally “private capitalist” Germany.
In the article The Working Class and the Revolution, the GIC distinguishes another class, the intellectuals. This seems more like an embarrassment of the GIC in which pointing out the source and bearers of bourgeois ideologies replace the lack of analysis of their material basis, capitalist relations of production, imperialist tensions, and balance of forces between the classes. On the grounds of the objective position of “the intellectuals” in bourgeois relations of production, in the sense of “actually controlling economic life and thus also ruling the state” (Pannekoek in 1910 ), we see that the “intellectuals” in 1940 as in 1910 belong objectively in large part to the bourgeoisie, in a lesser extent to the proletariat. In their subjective expressions – their ideas, especially in their plan-“socialist” political ideals they largely align themselves with the bourgeoisie. A vast majority of the “intellectuals” were unemployed under the influence of the economic malaise in Germany and around the world of the depression of the 1930s. Despite this, they did not consider themselves part of the proletariat, or rather lumpenproletariat, but derived their self-image from the ruling positions to which they laid claim. Marx’s cautionary remark of 1848 about the lumpenproletariat that these unemployed people from the big and small bourgeoisie easily lend themselves to counterrevolutionary machinations is fully applicable to the “intellectual” plan socialist ideologues, from Herman de Man to Caetano, from Benito Mussolini to Walter Ulbricht and from Albert Speer to Getúlio Vargas (of New Order, Brazil). By now, we know that these subjective expressions, plan-“socialist” political ideals, are historically obsolete, even if state capitalist tendencies are present in all countries.
The GIC’s erroneous analyses of the “new class, or “bureaucratic class” in Russia, or the global “class of intellectuals” got another follow-up in Cajo Brendel’s review of Milovan Djilas’ book “The New Class” during the Cold War.
The development of capitalism has resulted in the old middle class – the small bourgeoisie possessing means of production – is not disappearing. Pannekoek’s note in 1909 with regard to the peasants, has shown to be true for the whole petty bourgeoisie owning means of production: it continues to exist, and even has grown and functions as subordinate to the big bourgeoisie. In addition, new middle strata have also grown, often wage-dependent, with middle incomes and occupying an intermediate position in the social hierarchy. Pannekoek already noted the need for a Marxist analysis of the functions performed by these different sections of petty bourgeoisie and non-possessive strata and sectors in capitalism, factually supported by statistical data. Unfortunately, Pannekoek did not carry out this analysis and swept everything into the heap of the “new middle class.” In addition to such a Marxist analysis of the objective class position of what is called the “middle class,” it is necessary to examine how these strata and sectors subjectively, that is, in thought and action, word and deed, define their interests, and this in various situations of class struggle, including the possibilities in a revolutionary situation. Should the workers’ councils capture the power and begin to transform the world of enterprise from capitalism to human needs-oriented production and service, such an analysis is a practical necessity for the broadest working masses.
Aníbal and Fredo Corvo, November 27th. 2022
Appendix
1. State and bureaucracy with Marx
Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law is among his youth works, sometimes wrongly contrasting with his later work as “immature.” Others applaud his early works precisely because of the dialectical turns of phrases in which Marx’s analysis moves. The latter makes it difficult for many to understand what Marx is saying. This problem and its associated dangers are all the greater because the text written between March and August 1843, which became known as “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” consists of handwritten notes by Marx to a selection of Hegel quotations. Marx quotes Hegel on the state and summarizes quotations, not always distinguishing between statements about the state that correspond to reality and statements that are ideological views of the bureaucracy about the state or that reflect Hegel’s conservative conception of the state.[55]
Nowhere in this text does Marx speak of the bureaucracy as a class. Not with Marx in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law, but with the Hegel quoted therein are formulations that at first glance come close to the notion of the bureaucratic class. In contrast, Marx shows that Hegel, in an idealistic formulation, states that the bureaucracy and government would be recruited from the “Mittelstand.” In this way, Hegel suggests an identity between the state and the people. Marx points out that, in addition, Hegel says that in the process, certain relatively independent circles are favored (the nobility, as we will see later with Engels) and that there is a “Beambtenwelt” (read: bureaucracy).[56]
Hegel and Marx used the German word ‘Mittelstand’, which, in the absolutist and semi-feudal Germany of the time, meant the urban citizen as a fourth group besides the clergy, the nobility, and the peasants. In translations of youth works by Marx and Engels, this term is translated as “middle class,” which can lead to confusion with the much more developed bourgeoisie and/or petty bourgeoisie in the England of those years.
As far as the individual bureaucrat is concerned, Marx notes, “the state purpose becomes his private purpose, a pursuit of higher positions, a pursuit of career.” [57] However, this is insufficient to declare the bureaucracy a class.
Anticipating some exciting statements by Engels, we show here that Marx distinguishes the bureaucracy in top and lower circles.
“The state ends turn into office ends or the office ends into state ends. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can jump. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowing. The top entrusts to the lower circles the understanding of individual cases, in contrast to which the lower circles entrust to the top the understanding of the general, and thus they mutually mislead each other.” [58]
Engels put forward as the importance of the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law Marx’s conclusion that the key to understanding the historical process of human development is to be found not in the state, but in bourgeois society to which Hegel paid hardly any attention.[59] This also applies to bureaucracy, which both Hegel and Marx in 1843 treated only as a state bureaucracy. Marx himself published his conclusions in 1844 in the Paris’ Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher as Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law – Introduction. In it Marx – still in dialectical formulations – identifies the proletariat as the class in bourgeois society that stands in all-sided opposition to the premises of German statehood.[60] Regarding the abolition of the bureaucracy, Marx already remarks in his notes to Hegel that it can only take place when the general interest becomes a special interest in reality and not, as with Hegel, only in thought or abstraction. With this special interest, Marx anticipates in his notes the class interest of the proletariat. In doing so, he points out that this proletarian class interest becomes the general interest.[61] For, as it says in the Introduction, “only in the name of the general rights of society can a special class claim for itself the general rule.” [62] We can therefore conclude that Marx does not speak of the bureaucracy as a class, and that according to him the bureaucracy can only be abolished when the proletariat seizes power over society.
If you love to prove your case with citations, it was Engels who spoke of the bureaucracy as a “third class.” Like Marx, according to Engels, this bureaucracy consists of an upper and a lower bureaucracy. Engels adds that the bureaucracy is recruited from the classes that were diametrically opposed in the German bourgeois revolution, the nobility and the petty bourgeoisie:
“The present constitution of Germany is nothing but a compromise between the nobility and the petty bourgeoisie, which amounts to placing government in the hands of a third class: the bureaucracy. In the composition of this class the two high confronting parties participate according to their mutual position. The nobility, representing the main sector of production, reserves the higher positions for itself; the petty bourgeoisie is content with the lower positions and brings candidates to the higher administration only by exception. Where the bureaucracy is subject to direct control, as in the rule of law states of Germany, the aristocracy and the petty bourgeoisie there divide in the same way, and that here, too, the aristocracy reserves the lion’s share for itself is easy to understand. The petty bourgeoisie can never overthrow the aristocracy, cannot even bring themselves on a par with it; they only succeed in weakening it. In order to overthrow the nobility, another class is needed with broader interests, greater possessions and more determined courage: the bourgeoisie.” [63]
Engels is thus concerned with describing the specific conditions of absolutist and semi-feudal Germany before the bourgeois revolutions of 1848. This situation determined how the state’s bureaucratic apparatus was recruited from the classes of rural nobility and urban petty bourgeoisie. Hegel and Marx in the same period spoke of “Stände” (Nobelty and Citizen) and the corporations in which these were organized, and which made that the bureaucracy was also organized as a corporation. Engels’ use of the term ‘class’ therefore can be understood more specific as ‘corporation’, or more general as part of a classification. Anyway, the two ‘classes’ balanced each other and another class, the German bourgeoisie strove to conquer this state and transform it to its own interests. In this endeavor, however, it was hampered in its fear of a new historical and revolutionary class that emerged simultaneously with capitalism, the proletariat.
Thus, for those who wish to engage in academic citatology, it is possible to derive an argument from Engels’ terminological negligence and by confusing statements of Hegel with those of Marx, especially if one takes it out of the context of the European bourgeois revolutions and transfers it to the twentieth century. In the same way, it is possible to draw the most idiotic conclusions from Marx’s use of the term race of factory workers. [64] and attributing to him anti-Semitic statements by others. [65]
2. Aníbal, on new classes
Articles
- Anton Pannekoek and the ” new middle class”. Errors and limitations (English and Spanish edition).
- Some ambivalences of Anton Pannekoek’s theoretical production.
- Critical Notes on the text Milovan Djilas and the New Class – Cajo Brendel (Spartacus, 1957).
- What are social classes? Truths and Lies about the Proletariat.
- The international working class. ILO reports, graphs.
- Impoverished proletariat, rising unemployment and capitalism.
- The proletarian class: characteristics and conditions in the world.
- Criticisable aspects of the theory of the bureaucracy as a class.
- The “middle class” does not disappear. Realities.
- Suffering middle classes?….. Putting pressure on the proletarian class.
Data
On Viana and Movaut
- Capitalist state, bourgeoisie and bureaucracy in Nildo Viana. Reiterative distortion.
- Nildo Viana-Crítica Desapiedada (Brazil). Critical evaluation of his positions in relation to bureaucracy.
- Nildo Viana’s “Social Blocs and Class Struggle”. Critique of his most notorious fallacies.
- The imbroglio of Movaut (Brazil) with parties and classes.
Notes
[1] For a recent analysis, see Aníbal and Fredo Corvo, Iran: Oil and gas workers on the move. Regime strikes a conciliatory tone as repression continues.
[2] Marx, Preface to the first edition of Capital I, MEW, Bd. 23, p. 16. In the following, we refer to the GDR-editions of the Marx-Engels Werke. All translations into English are mine.
[3] Marx employs the term character mask in Chapter 1, the fragment on the fetish character of the commodity, MEW, Bd. 23, p. 91, and in Chapter 2, MEW, Bd. 23, pp. 99/100.
[4] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, MEW Bd. 4, p. 180/181. This fragment is identical to that of the GIC in Klassebeweging [deel 1], in Radencommunisme, August 1938.
[5] Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the communist party, MEW Bd. 4, p. 471. NB Willy Huhn On the doctrine of the revolutionary party pointed out that by “party” Marx meant the struggling working class, not its most conscious minority, like the League of Communists wanted to be.
[6] Kazakhstan: strikes and riots teeter the regime.
[7] In England “middle class” originally meant the bourgeoisie, and more specifically the big bourgeoisie or capitalist class, as a class between the ruling the aristocracy on the one hand and the peasants and plebs on the other. See Wikipedia, Middle class.
[8] Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the communist party, MEW Bd. 4, p. 471.
[9] MEW, Bd. 7, p. 9-107.
[10] MEW, Bd 22, p. 509-527.
[11] Peter Nettl, a.o. in The German Social Democratic Party 1890-1914 as a Political Model, in Past and Present, No. 30. (Apr., 1965), p. 78.
[12] Mainly organized in the Verein für Socialpolitik, which also included Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises. See Wikipedia, Verein für Socialpolitik.
[13] A. Pannekoek “Der Untergang des Kleinbetriebs”, in Zeitungskorrespondenz, Nr. 202, 17. Dezember 1911. “De ondergang van het kleinbedrijf” in De Tribune, 5e jg. (1911-1912), nr. 15 (6 januari 1912). All Zeitungscorrespondenz can be found at aaap.be.
[14] A. Pannekoek, The New Middle Class, 1909.
[15] Pannekoek, “Medebezitters”, in De Tribune, 2e Jg. (1908-1909), nr. 46 (14 augustus 1909). Pannekoek, “Mitbesitzer” in Zeitungskorrespondenz, Nr. 74, 3. July 1909.
[16] Pannekoek, “Die neue Bourgeoisie”, in Zeitungskorrespondenz, Nr. 136, 10. September 1910.
[17] A. Pannekoek, The New Middle Class, 1909. In doing so, Pannekoek places a note to clarify that in this article he is examining the role of the entire class of intellectuals in the general class struggle and not the role of individual intellectuals in the socialist movement. To the latter, Kautsky and Lenin attached a much greater significance than Luxemburg and Pannekoek.
[18] A. Pannekoek, The New Middle Class, 1909.
[19] Anton Pannekoek, The Downfall of the International, 1914.
20 Note left out.
[20] Nick Chavez, The Present and Future of Engineers, in Brooklyn Rail, oktober 2021.
[21] Preface to the second German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. MEW bd. 18, p. 95.
[22] Lenin, The State and Revolution, Ch. 3. Bold by F.C.
[23] See f.e. in idem, Ch. 5 on the “question of present-day politics, namely, the expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into workers and other employees of one huge ‘syndicate’–the whole state–and the complete subordination of the entire work of this syndicate to a genuinely democratic state, the state of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”
[24] Wikipedia, Iron law of oligarchy.
[25] For a critique of the idea of inevitable bureaucratization of unions, see, e.g. Roi Ferreiro, Essay: On unionism and its revolutionary overcoming. A contribution to a debate between council communists.
[26] See Jan Appel (1890-1985) and P.B. Lebenslauf Jan Appel, both incomplete and/or inaccurate on points.
[27] Hempel, Das russische Wiederafbauprogramm, in Proletarier, Jg. 1926, Heft 8/9 und 10, S. 151ff und 175ff.
[28] Hempel 1927 / GIC 1932, Marxism and state communism. The withering away of the state.
[29] Original: Bordiga, Struttura economica e sociale della Russia d’oggi (1955-57).
[30] As we shall see further on, the later GIC will characterize the economy of the Soviet Union in a highly oversimplified way as state capitalism and thus as a different form of capitalism from private capitalism.
[31] Hempel in Das russische Wiederafbauprogramm.
[32] GIC, Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, 2nd Ed. 1935.
[33] Pannekoek rejected “state socialist” views in social democracy even before World War I. In Dutch: Socialisme en staatsbeheer (1911), Staatsexploitatie en socialisme (1912), Staatsmonopolie en Socialisme (1914). In German: Sozialismus und Verstaatlichung (1911), Staatsmonopole und Sozialismus (1912), , Staatssozialismus, (1913).
[34] F.C., The fatal myth of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. A critique of Wagner’s ‘Theses on Bolshevism’, F.C., The inter-imperialist war in Ukraine.
[35] A. Ciliga, Sowjet-bourgeoisie. See also German translation 2021.
[36] A. Ciliga, Het boerenvraagstuk. See also German translation 2021.
[37] GIC, Ontwikkelingslijnen in de landbouw, 1930, German: Entwicklungslinien in der Landwirtschaft, 2021 and the articles based on it:Het agrarische vraagstuk, een gepasseerd station? and Een nieuwe boerenoorlog?
[38] See letter from Anton Pannekoek to A. Ciliga, 25 december 1946: Ciliga’s book brought great clarity to what was happening in Russia.
[39] Ciliga, “Sovjet-bourgeoisie. Fragment from “Au pays du grand mensonge”. Translated from Dutch. See also German translation from Dutch, 2021.
[40] De arbeidersklasse en de revolutie, part II, in Radencommunisme, March/April 1940. German translation, 2021.
[41] Wikipedia, James Burnham.
[42] Pannekoek distinguishes state capitalism and private capitalism as early as 1936 – probably in opposition to Paul Mattick. See the article State Capitalism and Dictatorship.
[43] GIC, De arbeidersklasse en de revolutie, deel III. German translation, 2021.
[44] De Tweede Wereldoorlog in Radencommunisme, December 1939.
[45] Idem “Class war and imperialist war, that is left only as the essence of capitalism. Destruction on a large scale, that is its only means of maintenance. Against this, the proletariat can act only by the revolution, which expropriates the dispossessed, destroys the destroyers and paves the way for a new social development by regulating society on a communist basis.”
[46] De wereld in slagorde, Groepen van Raden-Kommunisten, 1939.
[47] Moeten de Europese arbeiders Rusland verdedigen? in Radencommunisme, January 1939. See German translation, 2021.
[48] GIC, De arbeidersklasse en de revolutie, part IV. German translation, 2021.
[49] GIC, De arbeidersklasse en de revolutie, part IV. German translation, 2021.
[50] Pannekoek, “Die neue Bourgeoisie”, in Zeitungskorrespondenz, Nr. 136, 10. September 1910.
[51] Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the communist Party. MEW Bd. 4, p. 471.
[53] Spartacusbond/Cajo Brendel, Milovan Djilas en De Nieuwe Klasse.’
[54] See Ph. Bourrinet, Ph. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900-1968), Ch. 9, The Dutch Internationalist Communists and the Events in Spain (1936-37).
[55] MEW Bd. 1, p. 247.
[56] MEW Bd. 1, p. 256 and 273.
[57] MEW Bd. 1, p. 249.
[58] Idem.
[59] MEW Bd. 16, p. 362.
[60] MEW Bd. 1, p. 390/1
[61] MEW Bd. 1, p. 388.
[62] MEW Bd. 1, p. 250.
[63] F. Engels, [Der Status quo in Deutschland]; title assigned by the editors of the MEW. MEW Bd. 4, p. 44. From a handwriting for an article never published during Engels’ life. Translated from German by F.C., the German Klasse in a rather straightforward way as class. Ten pages on, Engels analyzes how the bureaucracy promotes petty-bourgeois interests against the bourgeoisie. Also in “Deutsche Zustände,” Letter III published in Northern Star,” MEW Bd. 2, p. 581, Engels employs the term of “a special class of administrative government officials, in whose hands the main power is concentrated, and which stands in opposition to all other classes.” Extra information: For Engels, [Der Status quo in Deutschland] see F. Engels, [F. Engels. The Constitutional Question in Germany] p. 79 and 88. For Engels’ letter III published in Northern Star see p. 30 of Collected Works, Part 6.
[64] F.e. in “Wage Labor and Capital”, 1849, MEW, Bd. 6, p. 397/423. The German word Race in Marx’s time referred both to a lineage of people, and to a particular type of people. Generally, by race of factory workers, Marx was referring to a particular mode of reproduction of the working class, that is, “from father to son.”
[65] Karl Marx, The Jewish Question, MEW, Bd. 1, p. 347/377.
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