It occurs to me that Rob did not have the reference to hand of the 18th
Brumaire - unless he is taking a holiday - and that possibly the passage
came from a secondary text criticising actual existing socialism. If so it
would fit into the emphasis Trotskyists place on "Bonapartism".
In writing my previous response it occurred to me that some critics of the
socialism that actually occurred, who come from a Trotskyist background,
may not just be making a point about the peasantry, they may be arguing
that the centralised socialist states became a bureacratic executive
standing over the working class too. By analogy these working class were
regarded as aggregate numbers of working class individuals, much as Marx
described the relationship of Bonaparte to the peasantry as that to a sack
full of potatoes.
Do Trotskyist critics of Soviet socialism extend the argument to accept
that the working class interacts in complex ways with one another through
the market. If they accuse the "Stalinist", or whatever, socialism that
emerged of being bureaucrat Bonapartist, the logic of the argument leads to
the alternative of market socialism.
Chris Burford
London
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