Alexander Bogdanov and the Theory of a "New Class"
1990; Wiley; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/130153
ISSN1467-9434
Autores Tópico(s)Political Economy and Marxism
ResumoThe theory that in certain circumstances state socialism could degenerate into a system in which power was exercised by a bureaucratic elite or by a has its origins in Mikhail Bakunin's famous critique of Marx written during the years 1870-1873. In 1905 the theory acquired a lease of life in the writings of Jan Waclaw Makhaisky. In Western historiography the application of such theories to the development of socialism in the Soviet Union has usually been associated with the Left Oppositions of 1923 and, above all, with Leon Trotsky's celebrated denunciation of Stalinism, The Revolution Betrayed (1937).2 As Ivan Szeleny and Bill Martin have written in their recent survey of new class theories, most of the (Marxist) bureaucratic theories could be traced back to the work of Leon . . .: for while Trotsky himself was of course not a New Class theorist ... the first comprehensive theories that described the Soviet Union as a society dominated by a bureaucratic were developed by former Trotskyists.3 In the Soviet Union during the 1920s Marxist theories of bureaucratic degeneration were by no means associated exclusively with the political thought of Trotsky. In October 1926 the leading theoretician of the Communist Party, Nikolai Bukharin, in an article devoted to the ques-
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