Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy

261 Pages·1992·5.83 MB·English

by  Ernest Mandel

Power and Money

Power and Money
A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy
•
ERNEST MANDEL
VERSO
London · New York
First published by Verso 1992
©Ernest Mandel 1992
All rights reserved
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIV 3HR
USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001-2291
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 0 86091 321 X
ISBN 0 86091 548 4 (Pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Times by York House Typographic Ltd, London
Printed in Finland by Werner Soderstrom Oy
To my dearest Anne,
Whose inspiration, love and care
Make it all so much sunnier.

Contents
Introduction 1
1 Bureaucracy and Commodity Production 11
2 Organization and the Usurpation of Power 59
3 Substitutionism and Realpolitik:
The Politics of Labour Bureaucracies 103
4 Administration and Profit Realization:
The Growth of Bourgeois Bureaucracies 153
5 Self-administration, Abundance and
the Withering Away of Bureaucracy 195
vii

Introduction
I
The death agony of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe,
together with the break-up of the Soviet Union, have posed in the
sharpest possible way the problem of their social nature and place in
history-a problem largely identical with that of the specific nature of the
bureaucracy in these societies.
Events have been rather cruel to most of the theories offered in answer
to this question. For example, right-wing ideologues - and pseudo-left
ones like Cornelius Castoriadis - consistently maintained that the Stali
nist and post-Stalinist regimes were 'totalitarian', in the sense that they
could not be shaken internally and would reproduce themselves for an
indefinite length of time. The events of 1989 to 1991 have refuted that
thesis. For their part, a number of Marxists like Paul Sweezy argued that
it was impossible to call a regime 'transitional' when it had lasted for
seventy years. But what about a regime which is shaken to its foundations
after seventy-two years? Could that not be transitional after all?
The question of the restoration of capitalism is now posed in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet lands - and that is exactly how the matter
is understood by all social and political forces, both nationally and
internationally. Those who identified the USSR with state capitalism are
thus left in a quandary: how can capitalism be restored if the state is
already under capitalism? It is of no avail to argue that state capitalism is
different from private capitalism. For ifthe difference is qualitative, what
is the point of calling them both capitalism? And if the difference is only
quantitative, it becomes impossible to explain how such minor changes