Abstract
The answers most frequently given to this question can be divided into two major categories, each of which includes a number of variants. The first holds that there is indeed a ruling class in the USSR, but there is no general agreement as to its nature and attributes. Some say it is a capitalist class, basically like the ruling classes in the developed capitalist countries though differing from them in relatively minor respects and degrees. Others maintain that there is a ruling class but that it is of a new type, differing in essentials from hitherto existing ruling classes. The second major category of answers holds that there is no ruling class in the USSR, arguing instead that state power is in the hands of a “bureaucracy,” but once again there is no consensus on the meaning of the term.
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Notes
My understanding of this theory comes partly from more than 40 years of active interest and participation in discussions and debates over the interpretation of the Soviet experience, and more specifically from three published works: (1) Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), cited from the 1945 Pioneer Publishers edition;
(2) Trotsky, “The U.S.S.R. In War,” The New International, November 1939; and
(3) Ernest Mandel, “The Nature of the Soviet State,” New Left Review, No. 108, March—April 1978.
For a fuller exposition of this version of the Marxist theory of the state, see Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), chapter, 13. I should note, however, that it was presented there, at least by implication, as a theory specifically applicable to advanced capitalism and not as a universal theory of the state.
This is not to say that there were no serious differences among Marxists in that period on the theory of the state. But they related not to the role of classes and the centrality of the property system but rather to whether the revolutionary class could take over and utilize for its purposes the existing state (thesis of the reformists) or would have to smash the existing state and replace it with a new one (thesis of the revolutionaries). There is no doubt, as Lenin conclusively proved in The State and Revolution, that Marx himself held to the revolutionary thesis, which explains why he and the Bolsheviks generally applied the label “revisionist” to those adhering to the reformist thesis. But this dispute, despite its prominence and bitterness, should not be allowed to obscure the far-reaching agreement between the two factions on the basic meaning of revolution as the replacement of one property system by another.
Emphasis added.
“On the Nature of the Soviet State”, New Left Review, March-April, 1978, p. 43.
A by no means exhaustive list includes Russia after Stalin (1953), Russia in Transition (1957), and Ironies of History (1966). The last-named is a collection of essays containing reprints from the 1957 volume plus other relevant writings of the same period.
II Manifesto, ed., Pouvoir et Opposition dans les Sociétés Post-Revolutionnaires, Paris, Seuil 1978, p. 39.
There remain important differences, of course, about this and other aspects of Soviet development. See my essays in the following issues of Monthly Review: November 1974, January 1975, March 1976, May 1977 (reply to Bernard Chavance), and October 1977.
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Sweezy, P.M. (1979). Is There a Ruling Class in the USSR?. In: Laski, K., Matzner, E., Nowotny, E. (eds) Beiträge zur Diskussion und Kritik der neoklassischen Ükonomie. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67326-9_18
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