PEN-L message, Re: Roy Medvedev interview (on Putin)

In a message dated 5/14/2004 7:52:28 AM Central Standard Time, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx writes:

> Actually, Gorbachev says the same thing. So does 90% of the population.
>
> Gorby adores Putin.

90 percent? That cinches it. I will now have to defer to what they
think, just as I defer customarily to what the 90th percentile of the
American population thinks about undocumented workers, gay marriage, the Cuban revolution, etc.

Comment

Why fight staw men when the economic questions loom large. The Medvedev Interview provided information with an economic content. Since no one disputes that Putin is a representative and guardian of bourgeois property . . . what is the strife?

The economic and class content of bureaucracy and how leaders of classes and the classes respond to material bureaucracy is interesting. Consider all the ideological proclamations by the neo-cons about welfare in America. The welfare bureaucracy is a . . . bureaucracy or contains its own economic logic. On the one hand attempts to cut the food stamp program provokes resistence from a section of capital - money, tied to agricultural production. A small but politically powerful section of capital says, "the people are hungry and want food" and the major food distributors join in this out cry.

I am speaking of the major chains like A&P, Farmer Jack, Walmart and the likes. Bureaucracy is not an abstraction.

On the other hand the bureaucratic structure that is the federal - nationwide, administrative apparatus that is welfare is composed of millions of real people that go to work everyday and make wages . . . that is this bureaucracy is made up of working proletarians and seek to perpetuate itself as an economic entity. This bureaucracy - we are talking about real people, receiving money and spending money or helping to drive reproduction and the realization of surplus value - profits. No amount of sloganeering on the part of politicians is going to destroy the bureaucracy because it embody profound economic interest.

A massive amount of welfare money is used simply to drive the bureaucracy and herein lies the economic or rather class and property relations. Why should the old Soviet bureaucracy . . . or any bureaucracy for that matter be any different in its class and economic content?

To pose matters as ideological equations prevent the unraveling of the economic and class content of the bureaucracy that one is so upset about. The Medvedev interview mentions various aspects of the bureaucracy and goes to inordinate length to show that Putin is not surrounding by just the intelligence sector of the bureaucracy. The economists around Putin are no different from the economists in America in the sense that they are men and women being paid money and part of the societal bureaucracy, characteristic of every industrial society.

All the ideological screaming about bureaucracy blind sides everyone from ascertaining its class and economic content in modern society. No one is every going to defeat the bureaucracy in any country on earth because of its economic reality. For all his pronouncements, George W, if he wins the upcoming election, is going to expand the bureaucracy because human will and politics is not going to defeat an economic imperative.

The shape of the bureaucracy as organizations of men and women is altered on the basis of technological changes that revolutionize distribution (information flow, planning and accounting) and every bureaucracy distributes "something."

Putin is not going to defeat the bureaucracy. George W. is not going to defeat the bureaucracy and without question Mr. Stalin did not and could not defeat the bureaucracy. The reason is that the bureaucracy does not arise from politics, but rather from the division of labor in society - at least in its genesis. The idea that the old Soviet bureaucracy arose as police action - an assertion of political and ideological Trotskyism, is not very well thought out because Soviet society and Russia today is an industrial society (in transition) with certain indispensable functions tied to the reproduction process.

The unfolding "class struggle" in America is going to be an exceptionally complex process involving entrenched economic interest, overcoming the force of habit, and without question confronting the bureaucratic order and this bureaucratic order is not going to be abolished because it is not possible. The bureaucratic order can be placed on a different property basis and slowly - a thousand years, begin withering.

Here is the economic and class content of the withering away of the state.

Melvin P.