[Marxism] bureaucracy (was Mao, etc.) 3

[S. Artesian]

Waistline may be correct here, but that, the "leap" to communism is not the 
issue.  The issue is the transition, the organization of the transition, the 
agent and the agency of that transition.

And the problem with comrade Waistline's formulation is that there is no way 
of making the transition, there is no agent or agency of transition. 
Things-- that is social relations, become "inevitable" based on certain 
level of technology.  This infuses his analysis with a certain passivity, 
where inevitability replaces historical necessity, as necessity is no longer 
the product of the conflict between means and social relations.

For Marx, it is not the development of the productive forces, this "passive" 
substrate that is ALONE the determinant.  It is the conflict in that 
development with the existing social relations driving both the development 
of the productive forces and the reproduction of the property relations.

Waistline's discussion really does hinge on a particular interpretation of 
the adage that the proletariat cannot do away with capitalism, with its own 
exploitation, without doing away with itself at the same time as a 
proletariat.

Well, we know that.  But how do we DO that?  We require mechanisms, agencies 
of transition, and the proletariat requires itself to the agent in those 
organizations.   Dispossession of the proletariat from those "political" 
mechanisms and agencies is first and foremost a response to the legacy, the 
enduring physical legacy, of  international CLASS social relations, which 
takes its physical form in the prior backward conditions of agriculture, in 
the devastation of the industrial base, and of the living standards, by the 
counterrevolution.

It is not industrial mode of production that "limits" the proletariat's 
ability to emancipate itself-- to shrink, overcome, dispense with 
bureaucracy.  Continued success of the revolutionary process does not 
require a "leap" to "economic" communism on the day after, or the day after 
plus X days, the seizure of power.

Continued success requires utilization of the means of production, 
industrial, agricultural for USE, for need, for social use and social need. 
A bureaucracy is not a neutral formation, it is the compression and 
composition of the pre-revolutionary legacy directly inside the 
revolutionary expropriation of prior property forms.  History has pretty 
much made it clear how incapable, structurally incapable, the Soviet, and 
Chinese, bureaucracies were/are at maintaining production for use, need.

Certainly we can say this failure is the result of the pressure of the world 
markets.  But that's not enough.  The failure is not just that the 
bureaucracies are not "democratic enough,"  but that the bureaucracies are 
NOT revolutionary enough; that the bureaucracies are indeed NOT a class; do 
not possess the cohesion, and the specific relation to a specific form for 
the organization of labor, a specific property, that can overcome the 
legacies of the pre-revolution.

I don't usually go around quoting Lenin, disagreeing as I do with his 
analysis of imperialism.  He got that wrong, IMO. But when push came to 
shove,  Lenin got the most important thing right.  And IMO again he 
continued to get it right when he offered two concentrated expressions of 
what the proletarian revolution requires to make that critical transition:

1.  soviets plus electrification

2.  every cook can govern


We will know the transition is successful when every governor can, and does, 
cook.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Waistline2 at aol.com>
To: <sartesian at earthlink.net>
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] bureaucracy (was Mao, etc.) 3