A fetish for bureaucracy is not a substitute for revolutionary politics, argues Joey X.
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”– G, Deleuze & F, Guattari, 1972
While there has already been ample response to Comrade Kisherian’s critique of Partyism, these responses have largely confined themselves to defending Partyism theoretically against attack. I instead wish to go on the offensive against a conception of communism which, despite its repeated failure to liberate humanity, continues to linger on the agenda — sustained chiefly by internet forums and nano-celebrities preaching in its name. It is a conception steeped in the fundamentally bourgeois ideologies of moralism, political realism, and humanism. Like Geryon in Inferno, it bears the face of Marxism while the rest is serpent and all. It is, in essence, the Marxism of fraud.
Power and Structure
“Power Corrupts.” Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.
This single phrase at the beginning of the critique lays all its cards on the table. Power is no longer understood chiefly as a social relation mediated through institutions, practices, and their own material reproduction, but as a form of moral revelation. The state ceases to appear as a contradictory historical form and instead becomes a mirror reflecting the hidden essence of those who wield it. Politics is thus reduced to characterology: “proletarian” power — whatever that may mean — expresses proletarian virtue, while bourgeois power expresses bourgeois vice.
Yet the bureaucracy of both the Eastern Bloc and bourgeois democracies drew much of its personnel from the proletariat itself, for proletarianization is a fundamental tendency of the capitalist mode of production. Unfortunately for Kisherian, there exists no immutable human essence hidden beneath class society. Classes are structural relations, not moral substances. Individuals oscillate between contradictory interests, occupy multiple determinations simultaneously, and frequently act against their immediate class position.
Layers of privilege emerging within a class develop structural incentives to preserve those privileges. Considering that Kisherian is a member of Red Ant — a tendency which places the question of the labour aristocracy so centrally — it is strange logic indeed that the same dynamics which render workers within skill monopolies less inclined toward anti-imperialist struggle cannot also apply to bureaucracies whose institutional position grants them a vested interest against the self-government of the working class. The critique of the soviet bureaucracy does not stem from a personal hatred of the individual Stalin, rather Stalin represented much more than his own being and the influence he commanded, anyone could have served the role of Stalin, the sickness lies in the structure.
Anti-Domination and the State
The title of the second section of Kisherian’s critique, “How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love the Bureaucracy,” while clearly exaggerated in tone, nonetheless reveals just how far we have strayed from what Marx’s project was actually about.
Marxism, at its core, is a politics of non-domination: against the political domination of the proletariat by the state; against the objective domination of the worker within the labour process; against the impersonal domination of the market which weighs upon every commodity producer. The only path out of this hell is the self-emancipation of the working class, which “must be conquered by the working classes themselves”1. The movement through which the proletariat undertakes this world-historic task is communism itself, whose aim is to sublate the despotism of capital through “the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.”2
For those unfamiliar with the contemporary scholarship surrounding the development of Marx’s political thought, the invocation of republicanism may appear surprising. Yet it is crucial for understanding Marxism both in its historical context and in its contemporary implications. Marx drew heavily from English Chartism and radical republican traditions; a conception of freedom understood not merely as formal liberty or the actualization of the individual, but as non-domination. It is precisely this emancipatory core of Marxism that has been almost entirely buried beneath the history of the twentieth century.
The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of ‘social republic’, with which the February Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic. – Marx, The Civil War in France, 1871
What then, is there to love about bureaucracy? Mike Macnair has already dealt with the claim that the soviet bureaucracy was a major factor in its downfall being “unfalsifiable”. What I am interested in is Comrade Kisherian’s conception of the state.
Kisherian repeatedly attempts to reduce the critique of bureaucracy to a liberal moral panic about “corruption”, as though the Marxist critique of the bureaucratic state amounted to a cliche that “power corrupts”. This misses the entire substance of the critique. Marx was not critical of bureaucracy because its officials were morally impure individuals, but because bureaucracy implies a separation of social relations, between the political and the social, the existence of a bureaucratic layer, especially in a so-called workers state, implies that the proletariat is not governing its own affairs, but that its sovereignty has become alienated within a caste. When Marx stated that “[t]he bureaucracy considers itself the ultimate aim of the State”3. He is making a structural argument about the tendency of administrative apparatuses to acquire interests which necessitate their own self-reproduction, becoming an autonomous entity from the rest of society. Likewise, when Marx argues that the working class “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery”4 the problem is not merely the class origin of the staffers but the form of the apparatus itself.
The “antiquated obsession” for a worker’s militia is nothing but the natural conclusions of these politics of self-emancipation and non-domination, a standing army necessitates a vast bureaucratic apparatus under autocratic control. The claim that this demand is impossible to realize, utilizing the United States as an example: a country which does not have a worker’s militia, is nothing but inane especially considering the ample historical material to draw from regarding the demand for a worker’s militia.
Kisherian’s “much more Marxist” understanding of the state is more realist than Marxist. “States are fragile and can only survive by appeasing whichever classes possess the capacity to overthrow them; post-revolutionary states therefore rationally respond to proletarian pressure.” This is a radical break from a politics of self-emancipation into a cybernetic model of state stability and legitimacy. The question is no longer whether social relations of domination are being overcome, rather the question becomes whether the state successfully reproduces the social order while maintaining the consent of the proletariat.
This framework falls on its own terms. If privileged layers within the proletariat can develop distinct interests from the broader class, then there is no reason that administrative bureaucrats within post-revolutionary states would be uniquely exempt from similar tendencies toward their own self-preservation. Kisherian simply asserts that a bourgeoisie kept in check by the state guarantees proletarian responsiveness, but this does not follow. Administrative separation generates material interest.
In post-revolutionary communist states, it is primarily the proletariat that has the power to overthrow the state. AES states have a very strong incentive to set up democratic structures responsive to the proletariat and are highly motivated to root out corruption in order to secure state legitimacy. Labour strikes are common in AES countries, they always have been, and in many instances these strikes are met with compromise.
The deep irony is that Kisherian accuses Partyism of possessing a “bourgeois liberal understanding of the state” while quietly reproducing the most classical bourgeois conception imaginable: the state as a neutral mediator rationally balancing social pressure to maintain stability. The party-state bureaucracy of “AES” states proved to have all the vices that Marx identified in 1843 in the Prussian bureaucracy and in Hegel’s imagined bureaucracy as being a natural expression of “the general interest”. The reality is the opposite, they represent sectional interests and the result is a state eternally at odds with itself. The state is of the workers yet the working masses must be incentivized not to overthrow it with democratic structures, one cannot see this as being anything but a quiet admission that the working class in China is not in charge but must influence change by means of suffrage and strikes which will be met with fair compromise by the state. Nietzsche’s question lingers over the entire framework: Church, Army, State, none of these old dogs want to die, they survive because they are invested as immortal. Kisherian and the Marxism to which he belongs, mistake this survival for bare necessity, and in doing so reproduce the liberalism they wish to escape.
Liberalism at last
The positive claims made by Kisherian on the boons of bureaucracy and the achievements of “Actually Existing Socialism” are up to their neck in bourgeois ideology: an outlook concerned not with the abolition of alienated social relations, but with the gradual improvement of the human condition within them. Chinese socialism, Kisherian posits, is a success because it has lifted millions out of poverty, expanded healthcare provision, developed affordable housing, built extensive high-speed rail infrastructure, and maintained high levels of trust in government.
Yet the logic at work here is fundamentally misguided. The yardstick being used is no longer the possibility of communism as the transformation of social relations, but the optimization of life within existing forms of social mediation. What is being measured is development, efficiency, and welfare — criteria which are not only compatible with bourgeois society but are among its own self-justifications. The achievements cited do not distinguish communism from capitalism; they specify precisely the domain in which liberal modernity already evaluates itself.
Kisherian’s framework does not escape liberalism so much as it completes it: in the end, liberalism is a very simple operation. Like the evolutionary socialists of the 1890s there is a continual displacement of communism further and further on the horizon.
The new world? Why, it is already here, to some extent, in embryos to be preserved, in little buds to be tended: already existing democratic rights must be pushed further within an infinitely perfectible society – Gilles Dauve, 1999
The question which began this critique therefore returns in a more compressed form: why do men fight for their servitude as if it were their liberation? Kisherian’s framework remains within the horizon of this problem, insofar as it treats bureaucracy not as a historically specific form of social mediation but as a rational mechanism to be corrected, improved and ultimately desired. Fundamentally, there is a firm wedding of domination to the means by which we liberate ourselves. While I stated before that this idea of communism is only kept alive by internet trends, this is not the whole story. Communism, in the age defined by its almost complete absence, has manifested itself in many forms, desperately groping to find a way out of hell. There have been two broad trends born out of this. That which seeks a serious analysis of the past to map the future, and that which calls for a return to the past, where its organizational forms and strategies may still apply. The Marxism-Leninism of the 21st century, mediated by the internet, forms a branch of the latter. Creating a host of myths around itself, reconciling its historical twists and turns into something resembling a coherent totality; where histories grace thankfully left us China and its arms-length diplomacy with various right-wing autocracies, in the vain hope that one day the judgement will come and they will rise and do our job for us. It bears the face of Marxism, but its body is serpent and all.
Despite my harsh criticism, I commend Comrade Kisherian for writing out an actual critique, no matter how much it may fail to grasp what partyism actually is. A debate which can hash out these definitions and outline the positions which actually exist can only be good for the intellectual culture of the socialist movement.
PARTISAN! 
You must be logged in to post a comment.