this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
871 points (98.8% liked)
Memes
48707 readers
1328 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So the bolshevik state bureaucracy wasn't a new ruling class giving themselves privileges others didn't have?
In the Marxist notion of "class," no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.
Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.
Soviet Union bureaucracy was not the proletariat, they didn't use the mop to produce commodities, so they didn't have proletarian class consciousness. Whatever interests they had, it was not working class interests. Lenin, Trotsky and Sverdlov were one nobleman and two petty bourgeoisie.