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Introduction
This note was prompted by two messages Google found for me today, one at http://www.politcsforum.org/forum/ and another at http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr .Alliance is fine so long as the proletariat is the primary party as it is the only truly revolutionary group. You're falling into the anarchist camp when you start saying anyone can lead a revolution." The author of the first message wrote: "... The Soviet Union was classless according to Trotsky, it was a degenerated worker's state, but it was classless. To say otherwise is to contradict both Trotsky and Marx. It had a social caste or an elite, an entrenched bureaucracy, but there is no such thing as a managerial class, not unless you break with marxism and say that direct control is more important than ownership. ..." The author of the second message wrote: "...
Social Class Concept
This reminded me of two proverbs: (a) When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and (b) It is better to be a hammer than an anvil.
Referring to the first message , I wrote: " A society is a very large group of individuals. Like any other group of items, it can be subdivided into subgroups. Criteria for the subdivision are endless; some are useful and some are not, in the context of a problem at hand. The subdivision based on the ownership of means of production is one possibility; the subdivision based on the managerial power is another possibility. Why should the first one always be more important than the other? I am addressing the issue of understanding Stalinism."
The second message, by the way, needs to be corrected; the proletariat is a class, not a political party. It consists of those who are hired to do work by owners of means of production (by capitalists). Proletarians, wrote Marx, have nothing to lose but their chains. Most Russian proletarians were illiterate. Bolsheviks (and members of communist parties in other countries) claimed to be vanguards of the proletariat. That difference is important. Lenin, like most Bolsheviks, was from the middle class; Stalin was from a poor family but his father was a cobbler, the owner of means of production.
Ludwik Kowalski, the author of two FREE books:
1) "Hell on Earth: Brutality and violence under the Stalinist regime" :
2) Another short book, also free for on-line readers, is "Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality." The link is:
