The bureaucratization of the world

Marx believed that the Jacobins and sans-culottes during the French revolution were doomed to defeat, since society wasn´t yet ripe for socialism and workers power. The Jacobins "objectively speaking" acted as a violent battering ram for the bourgeoisie by exterminating the old aristocracy. Then, the Jacobins fell (and so did the sans-culottes), the French revolution being a bourgeois revolution ushering in capitalism. 

In my opinion, the role of the Bolsheviks and the working class during the Russian revolution was similar. The early, internationalist Bolsheviks were like the Jacobins. They used the working class (and themselves) as a battering ram against Czarist absolutism, and also against the bourgeoisie. But on behalf of what class? Answer: on behalf of the future state bureaucracy, which eventually created a new mode of production, based on a centralized planned economy. Thus, the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary workers "objectively speaking" acted as the violent stormtroopers of the "Stalinist" bureaucracy. In other nations, the bureaucracy took control from the beginning, sometimes using peasants as their shock troops, but usually tightly controlled by the bureaucratic center (Mao´s China). The bureaucratic mode of production is an alternative path to modernization (or attempted such) in nations where the national bourgeoisie was too weak to abolish semi-feudal conditions, this task instead falling to a nationalist intelligentsia which created a centralized "socialist" state apparatus. 

In the Western nations, the Social Democrats likewise represented an aspiring bureaucratic layer, using the organized and unionized working class as its lever. In contrast to the Communists, who wanted a bureaucratic revolution, the Social Democrats were seeking to transform the system through peaceful reform. This was eventually succesful, creating the typical alliance between Big Government, Big Labor and Big Business (and, I suppose, Big Banking). Later, the Social Democrats broke their connections to the organized working class, instead fusing completely with the state apparatus, which in its turn hybridized with the PMC version of capitalism (which isn´t hostile to state regulations, as long as it controls the state through "regulatory capture"). This hybrid system is probably going to collapse right before our very eyes during the 2020´s, perhaps replaced by an alliance of populist leaders, angry petit bourgeois, unorganized workers and rogue capitalists. What will come out of it, is anybody´s guess at this point. 

What is clear is that the working class failed to take power in its own name, and that this was (probably) inevitable. Marxism morphed into Social Democratic reformism within capitalism or the creation of a new "Stalinist" bureaucratic mode of production. Marxism "dialectically" transformed itself into the ideology of the new bureaucracy, which claimed to represent "the workers" or "the people", just as the bourgeoisie had claimed to represent the latter. Autistic Trots will tell us that we are "duty-bound to explain whether the new mode of production was historically progressive or not", to which we respond: no, Messr Trotskyites, we are not "duty-bound" to explain anything according to *your* specifications, since we are not Trotskyists nor Marxists! 

There isn´t any "progress" that moves inexorably onwards and upwards, no historical schema where capitalism is replaced by an even more advanced economic system which "develops the productive forces", und so weiter. Empirically (not metaphysically according to the Dialectic), democratic capitalism with a Social Democratic government was often better than Stalinoid really existing socialism, and so was Bukharinite-Titoist Communism (or Dengist Communism minus the economic free zones). This is therefore the "minimum program" worth striving for, not utopian pipe dreams about international Bolshevism or Trotskyism.

Perhaps the working class can´t take power in its own name. Or perhaps it could have done so, but such a system would have resembled anarcho-syndicalism more than Social Democracy or Communism. It´s difficult to see, however, how a modern economy could be "self-managed" in the syndicalist fashion, suggesting that such a system would quickly evolve into a more centralized one, if only to survive. And the moment that happens, the working class "as a whole" or "as a class" is no longer in power. A new managerial elite takes over. Marxists say that ancient slaves or medieval peasants couldn´t take and hold power. Maybe, maybe not, but the working class seems to belong to the same category of "exploited classes" incapable of overthrowing the system once and for all. 

Add to this the massive environmental destruction brought about by capitalism, and it´s no longer obvious if this system really is "historically progressive". Not only didn´t it produce its own grave-diggers, it might actually become humanity´s very own undertaker! 

With that, I close my reflections for today.