This will be my last message in this thread. It doesn't seem to be making any progress.
Charles B. writes:> Yes, Marshall Sahlins wrote that the politics of the university is feudal or something like that. You sketch out more of the details, although, I think you might want to get the lords and serfs in there too.< The relationship between lords and serfs involves the direct application of force by the former against the latter to extort surplus-labor. That doesn't fit with academia well at all. (We do rely on the reserve army of academic labor, so that there is coercion of the common capitalist sort.) CB:>So, professors are a combination of residually feudal and somewhat corporate, but no doubt also government, bureaucrats. >I don't think the use of " bureaucrat" works even here. It is a reification, a kind of intellectual filler term.< I agree and in fact this was my point: I don't think it's accurate to call the academic hierarchy "bureaucratic." (However, the administrators -- who _are_ bureaucrats -- and the corporate types are pushing to make the system more bureacractic.) CB writes:>What characterizes the university situation , like the corporate and government situation is that a small percentage of total personnel of the "bureaucracy" are powerful: the President, the Deans and the Department heads, and the tenured profs. The rest of the "bureaucracy" , non-tenured profs, secretaries, teaching fellows, graduate students, students, do not have equal power, except in smaller issues.< I think that formulation focuses too much on degrees of power and thus misses the qualitative dimension. CB:>The point is that "bureaucracy" includes in the same group people who should be analyzed as in different sections. It's like calling everybody at a corporation "the company" and not distinguishing between bosses and workers.< I don't understand your point, since I don't think it's accurate to call academic "bureaucratic." In fact, that was my point: it's not bureaucratic (though it does have tendencies in that direction). I wrote:>>But K's victory over Malenkov _et al_ (and Breshnev's later victory) wasn't decided democratically, but as a matter of bureaucratic in-fighting. << CB:>I don't agree that you have established that there is such a thing as "bureaucracies" that have an inherent characteristic of "infighting". It is not a real phenonmenon. < I never said that bureaucracy had "infighting" as an _inherent_ characteristic of bureaucracy. (It might be an inherent characteristic of all social organization, for all I know, but it's clearly not a defining characteristic of bureaucracy.) Rather, I see bureaucracy as a real-world phenomenon. Following Weber, it's a way that an elite can control the operations of an organization. But unlike Weber, there are centrifugal forces within bureaucracies, as individuals fight to defend their little "empires" and form coalitions, both horizontally and vertically. A real-world bureaucracy has both tendencies toward "getting the job done" (as my late father, a bureaucrat, used to say) and toward in-fighting, "politics," red tape, expansionism, etc. The real world bureaucracy represents the results of these conflicting forces. If you think that that bureaucratic in-fighting isn't a real phenomenon, you haven't had much contact with bureaucracies or haven't studied them. CB:> What do you mean by decided democratically ? Direct vote of the whole population ?< The idea of having contested elections seems a necessary -- though not sufficient -- condition for having democracy. The elections in the old USSR were not contested and thus not democratic. The CPSU had a political monopoly. I had written:>>As I've noted, I reject the monolithic conception of bureaucracy in which all decisions are made at the top and then implemented. Competition within the bureaucracy is crucial.<< CB:>But isn't competition inherent in democracy in which there is more than one candidate in a vote ? Isn't competition inherent to a voting system ? So, "competition" is inherent in democracy, no ? Why is competition a sign of lack of democracy to you ? It should be a sign that there is democracy. You should be saying that lack of competition in the "bureaucracy" would be a sing of lack of democracy. Please give me an example of where you think there is democracy but no competition. < There are several kinds of competition. Democratic competition is different from bureaucratic competition which is different from capitalist competition which is different from competition among petty producers which is different from feudal competition ... (There are no democracies without competition; it's just a different kind than in other social organizations.) Democratic competition is the kind we want, not those other sorts. I wrote that:>the ruling stratum of the USSR wasn't democratic, feudal, slave-driving, or capitalist. How else does one describe a small elite that monopolizes political power -- often with force -- and then dictates to both the political system and the economic system about what should be done?< CB:>How else does one describe it , or name it ? One could name it the U.S. ruling class. The description " a small elite that monopolizes political power -- often with force -- and then dictates to both the political system and the economic system about what should be done? " sounds like the US ruling class to me < You are absolutely right that there were lots of similarities between the old Soviet ruling class and that of the U.S. (including authoritarianism and expansionism). But the fact is the old Soviet elite didn't rule the U.S., so it can't be equated with the ruling elite of the U.S. More fundamentally, the political economies of the two systems were very different. That's why I have a very hard time thinking of the Soviet system as "state capitalism" and the Soviet elite as "state capitalist." I wrote:>>All societies after "primitive communism" have hierarchies and not all of them are "bureaucratic," so merely calling it hierarchical won't do. Should we call the old USSR "despotic" instead?<< CB:>I'd call it a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's what it had aimed to be. "Despotic" implies a "despot" , a single individual. The Soviet Union had a collective or group dictatorship.< but since the proletariat didn't control the "collective or group dictatorship," it wasn't a dictatorship _of_ or _by_ the proletariat as much as a dictatorship _in the name of_ the proletariat, _over_ the proletariat, and sometimes _against_ the proletariat. JD:>> Just because something is "propaganda" doesn't mean it's not true.<< CB:> Yes, I agree that propaganda is political education, and can be true or false. However, the propaganda I am talking about regarding the use of "bureaucrats" is false propaganda. < Just because the propandists misuse the word "bureaucracy" doesn't mean that we should avoid the use of the word. Similarly, the word "capitalism" is regularly abused. Should we drop that term? JD:>>For example, the existence of open unemployment -- and the evils of that system -- in the "West" was emphasized in Soviet messages to their workers; it was true, while it told the workers "it could be worse," so you'd better start working harder. The old Soviet system didn't create much motivation to work.<< CB:> I think capitalism creates too much work. If the workers have power , as in the Soviet Union,< _how_ did the workers "have power"? what kinds of controls did they have over the CPSU, which officially ruled them in their name? Assuming that workers controlled the Soviet state and the CPSU, CB continues saying that > they would , by common sense, not work themselves as hard as capitalism would work them....< that doesn't wash. In practice, what was happening was that workers under the USSR were "pretending to work" (their phrase, not mine), often skipping work to go wait in line for commodities that were in short supply. That's hardly a matter of workers controlling the system and the hierarchy above them in order to give themselves leisure time. Instead, it seems pathological. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, it was illegal to skip work. So they were breaking the law. A law which you seem to be thinking they decided upon. >... that the growth rate of the Soviet Union was faster than all the hisortical growths of the capitalist countries in their industrializations.< This is a big topic, but I'll keep it short: the growth rate you point to was highly dependent on the existence of reserves of rural labor being sucked up into industry and on an abundance of raw materials to exploit. When these conditions disappeared, the growth miracle ground to a halt. This set the stage for Gorby... One thing that's well known is that the main source of Soviet growth was simple accumulation of fixed capital (not hard work). By dedicating a large percentage of the Gross Material Product to building machines, the economy grew faster. Unfortunately, the effeciency of the use of those machines (the ratio of GMP or GDP to the amount of machinery) fell drastically over time. >So, not only did the SU motivate people to work, actually, but you cannot demonstrate that the Soviet workers were not motivated exactly because they were working for themselves, [yeah, right] and realized that they had to work harder than they would have if there was a world wide socialist revolution, and no need to keep up militarily with the savage capitalist imperialist warmongering mass murderers who attacked the SU from the start.< I can see the self-defense justification for the USSR's system of bureaucratic rule. But that doesn't wash after a decade or two, when the ruling stratum would use its power to repress any challenge to its rule. CB:>My estimate is that the US propaganda descriptions of this were partial truths... < that's what I said. It's good that we agree. CB had said: >>> Evenhandedness in this context is unequal treatment.<<< I responded:>> why? both superpowers involved oppression of the powerless;<< CB:> Because you are in the superpower in which there is no comparison of the level of anti-Soviet propaganda and the anti-US propaganda. Americans are fully informed, and in fact mis-informed and exaggeratedly informed of the oppressions of the powerless in the Soviet Union. They are under informed as to how much the US is not better or as bad or worse than the SU. ...< Please don't talk to me as if I represent "Americans" in general thing. JD:>> both [superpowers] invaded countries that they dominated when the dominated countries revolted. < CB:>This is not at all comparable. The Eastern European countries had all been part of the Nazi invasion of the SU. You don't lose 20 million people to invaders and then just let them reorganize themselves. You put them on ice for a long time. You owe it to your people to guarantee that such an invasion does not happen again. It really makes me angry that Americans, who were not hardly touched by WWII the way the SU was have the nerve to say , oh you must by our liberal standards let those countries go back to capitalism if they want. No, capitalism was the source of fascism. Capitalism can generate fascism again. The Soviets had a right to insure no capitalism in the Eastern European countries for a long time. They had a right to defascize them over a long period of time. The U.S still has troops in Europe and Japan. The relationship of the SU to Eastern Europe is not at all comparable to the countries that the US has invaded or run terrorist armies in its colonies. < So the move toward democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was something that _should have_ been suppressed using tanks. You must love Ariel Sharon and his followers, who justify what they do to the Palestinians by what the Nazis did to the Jews. >> What's the point of siding with one kind of oppression against another? Why choose typhoid over dysentery - or vice-versa? Let's oppose all disease. << CB:> The two are not the same....< did I say that typhoid and dysentery were the same? no. > CB: And a father of that literature [on bureaucracy] is Weber, whom I mentioned in my very first post on this issue. I may know and show I know a lot more about the academic literatue on "bureaucracy" than you are realizing. Anthropology and sociology are "cousins" you know. < I thought you were a lawyer. > What I am saying is that "bureaucracy" is one of those social scientific concepts like "middle class" that are distorting and misleading....< this is getting repetitious. I've acknowledged this point many times. But just because people abuse a concept doesn't mean that the concept should be jettisoned. Hitler called himself a (national) "socialist": does that mean that the concept of socialism should be flushed down the toilet? gotta go... JD
