Bourgeois layer dedicated to the management of the state apparatus
The bureaucracy in Europe
In most European countries the bureaucracy of today's state capitalism is the direct heir -literally in many cases- of the managers of the absolutist state characteristic of the long decadence of feudalism. In France or Great Britain, it is not difficult to find among the "senior civil service" or the diplomatic corps long lineages of bureaucrats who represent elements of continuity of the state apparatus between the ruling classes of feudalism and capitalism.
All the more so in Spain or Portugal, where the bourgeoisie did not come to power in a revolutionary way, but as a result of a process of fusion with other exploiting layers: aristocracy, landowners, etc. This process culminates late, already in the 20th century and at the very moment when capitalism as a whole enters into decadence. And it does so precisely around the state of the Restoration and its bureaucrats, to form the basis of the state capitalism we know today.
As a result of its own situation in the state and its stability as a group, the bureaucracy continues today to be a very important link in the political articulation of the bourgeoisie, a connecting link between the managing bourgeoisie, both corporate and financial, and the political leaders.
The Stalinist bureaucracies
The state capitalism consolidated with the counter-revolution in Russia was a particular, extreme and yet defining case of capitalist decadence. With the proletarian revolution in Russia isolated, drowned in a sea of millions of small agrarian proprietors (petty bourgeoisie), and the proletariat that had made the revolution scattered by hunger and the mobilization of the civil war, production was consciously reconstituted as a state capitalism under the control of very weakened soviets.
Real power soon fell to a bureaucratic layer whose future was linked to the reconstruction of national capital. Its political expression would be stalinism, its first slogan "socialism in one country", its main enemy the revitalization of the world revolution and its legacy the long breath of the counter-revolution, a new imperialist world war and an ultra-bureaucratic model of state capitalism that, with different variants, marked the twentieth century.
In all this, what kind of property relations did the October Revolution establish? Certainly not socialist ones. That revolution was made by true communists, but they had no other aim than the permanent revolution (Lenin in the April Theses), waiting for the proletariat of the developed countries to come to their aid.
Even the tactics of the Bolsheviks before the seizure of power were entirely inspired by that perspective, which is enough to reject them at the present hour. After the magnificent attempt called war communism, which, far from responding only to the urgencies of the civil war, pointed directly to the disappearance of wage labor, there was a turn towards state capitalism as Lenin conceived it: capitalist relations of production and distribution, but real political power of the proletariat, based on the soviets.
The effective preservation of that power was, in Lenin's eyes, the only guarantee of a future socialist development; it would allow them to wait for the victory of other revolutions in industrialized countries and to move on together to the transitional society and to communism. It can be said today that the only truly socialist thing that existed in the former Soviet Union was, despite its defects, political power.
Once the power of the soviets had disappeared and the Bolshevik party had been corrupted, nothing remained but state capitalism pure and simple, which went on consolidating itself and recognizing itself as such from the NEP to the five-year plans. The relations of property, production and distribution were brought back to the most rigorous capitalist norms.
Thus a counter-revolution was carried out such as history had never known, and whose main concern is to prevent any proletarian revolution in the world. Is further proof needed after the surrender of power to Hitler in 1933, after the crushing of the Spanish revolution, not by Franco, but by the Russian government and its Spanish stalinists, after the imperialist policy of national resistance and all the reactionary work of Moscow and its parties since the postwar period?
"Critique of the Draft Manifesto for a New Workers' Party of the Workers' League of England", 1961
The bureaucracy as a group with its own interests and perspectives within the ruling class
Being a product of the state, the bureaucracy has its own characteristics that reflect its logic within the ruling class. These characteristics become all the more central the further decadence advances.
Unlike the corporate bourgeoisie, which still claims to be a reflection of the entrepreneurial myth and a product of the market, and unlike the political leaders, tied to the democratic myth, the bureaucracy understands the extra-economic nature of its power as the main guarantee of the preservation of the social order.
It is therefore a fundamentally conservative group that will place the emphasis on the procedural and the normative, that is, on the regulation of disputes between factions of the ruling class and on the regimentation and, if necessary, repression of the class struggle.
The bureaucracy presents and understands itself as the guarantor of the conditions of accumulation and is called upon to play a greater political role as the contradictions within and around state capitalism become more acute: from its participation as ministers to the "judicialization" of political conflicts, from "technocratic" governments to military juntas.