this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
807 points (98.9% liked)
Memes
48671 readers
1807 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This isn't true, unless you have a different conception of what "class" is from Marx and Marxists. The State is the only path to a stateless society, in that the state disappears once all property is publicly owned and planned, and thus the "state" whithers away, leaving government behind.
For Marx, the State is chiefly the instruments of government that reinforce class society, like Private Property Rights, not the entire government.
So the bolshevik state bureaucracy wasn't a new ruling class giving themselves privileges others didn't have?
In the Marxist notion of "class," no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.
Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.