This isn't true, unless you have a different conception of what "class" is from Marx and Marxists. The State is the only path to a stateless society, in that the state disappears once all property is publicly owned and planned, and thus the "state" whithers away, leaving government behind.

For Marx, the State is chiefly the instruments of government that reinforce class society, like Private Property Rights, not the entire government.

[–] lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

So the bolshevik state bureaucracy wasn't a new ruling class giving themselves privileges others didn't have?

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] blade_barrier@lemmy.ml -1 points 6 hours ago

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.

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