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A critical reassessment of the history of the Russian Revolution – both the greatest revolution of our time and the most terrible bureaucratic counterrevolution.
We have before us the immeasurable historical laboratory of the Russian Revolution. The working class fought, won, seized power, and expropriated the capitalists: a remarkable anti-capitalist feat. But it was then politically expropriated by the bureaucracy—that “tissue of practical illusions” which became a “political class”, degenerated the character of the state into a bureaucratic one, and blocked the socialist transition. This experience is ours to grasp and draw radical conclusions from. Socialist transition is a social, economic, and political process, in which real workers’ power is essential to lead the way.
Roberto Sáenz is an Argentinian militant, writer and Marxist theorist. He is the Founder and leader of the Nuevo MAS of Argentina and the International Current Socialism or Barbarism. He is a son of Holocaust survivors who dedicated his work to the study of the 20th century, especially the process of workers’ revolution and bureaucratic counter revolution.
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
1 Marx and Stalinism
2 Bureaucratisation: An Unforeseen Phenomenon
3 Bureaucracy and Statised Ownership
4 A Historically Original Revolution
5 The Jacobin Element in the Revolutionary Party
Part 1 State, Exploitation and Alienation
2 The Theory of the State in Classical Marxism
1 The State in Marx and Engels: Class Expression and Separate Form
2 The Historically Shifting Relations between State and Society
3 State and Political Regime under Capitalism and the Transition
4 Proletarian Dictatorship as Semi-state (Lenin)
3 Alienation, Fetishism and the Socialist Transition
1 Alienation
2 Fetishism
3 Althusser ‘corrects’ Marx
4 An Egalitarian Freedom
5 Bread and Freedom
Part 2 Revolution, Bureaucracy and Statised Ownership
4 The USSR’s Experience: From Revolution to Bureaucratisation
1 A ‘state with bureaucratic deformations’
2 A State that Does Not Wither Away
3 ‘Bureaucratic vermicelli’
4 From Revolutionary Politics to Bureaucratic Administration
5 Politics and Administration; Society and Bureaucracy
5 The Bureaucracy as a ‘Political Class’
1 Christian Rakovsky: A New Definition for a New Phenomenon
2 A Non-schematic Marxist Assessment of Bureaucracy
3 The Statisation of the Categories of Political Economy
4 Stalinism: An Anti-socialist Bureaucratic Regime
6 Ownership in the Socialist Transition
1 Ownership in General
2 An Excursus on Private Ownership as an Absolute Form
3 Statised Ownership as a Political-economic Form
4 Right, Ownership and the Law of Value
5 From the Ruling over People to the Administration of Things
Part 3 The Theory of Revolution After Bureaucratisation
7 Methodological Notes on Stalinist Forced Collectivisation
1 An Anti-socialist Collectivisation
2 Socialist Modes of Activity
3 An Attack on the Entire Peasantry
4 The Dismantling of Bourgeois-democratic Revolution Conquests
5 Bastard Forms of State Ownership
8 A Critique of ‘Objective Socialist’ Revolutions
1 An Unexpected Phenomenon
2 Tasks, Subjects and Methods in the Socialist Revolution
3 The False Equation of Anti-capitalism and Socialism (before and after the Post-war Period)
Part 4 Party and Revolution
9 The Historical Specificity of the Socialist Revolution
1 A Universal Class: General Grounds
2 A Critique and Vindication of the French Revolution
3 Post-war Anti-capitalist Revolutions
4 An Outline of Anti-Stalinist Revolutions Post-war
10 The Working Class in Power
1 The Elevation of the Working Class to Historical Class
2 Revolution as the Work of the Great Masses
3 Strategy and Party
4 Dual Power, Party and ‘Jacobinism’ in the Revolution
Bibliography
Index