Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Merit Publishers, 1965)
Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957)
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved’” - Max Weber
Nowhere do Weber’s moving concluding remarks on bureaucracy seem to be of more pertinence than in the state apparatus of the Soviet Union. Bureaucracy, an historically constructed ‘cage,’ here couched itself in the language of ‘the obtaining a level of civilization never before achieved.’ The extraordinary divergence between the professed ends of the communist revolution and the achieved ends the communist state in the Soviet Union, pose to us forcefully a question of origins. How did this bureaucratic, soulless state arise? Was it an aberration from, or the logically necessary result of, the Communist revolution? Two classic works address themselves to this question: Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed and Djilas’ The New Class.
I have chosen to organize my summaries and responses to the Grundrisse in the chronological order of their composition. Thus, the small section on Bastiat and Carey, relegated to an addendum by M. Nicolaus in his version of the Grundrisse will here be treated prior to the introduction proper. Dated July 1857, these few pages grapple with the two apparent exceptions to the end of original bourgeois political economic thought, Bastiat and Carey. Both Bastiat and Carey attempted to demonstrate the harmony of capitalist relations of production, although both did so in an “unhistorical and anti-historical” fashion. In the process of exploring these two political economists, Marx explores the global nature of capitalism as well as the ‘historicization’ of a standard item of capitalist propaganda.”The history of political economy ends with Ricardo and Sismondi,” Marx avers in his opening sentence to this piece. All subsequent writing on the subject is “altogether derivative.” (5) Subsequent political economists worked at refinement, popularization, synopsis and elaboration, but did not contribute any new development to bourgeois political-economic thinking.
