Soviet “Socialism” and Democratic Capitalism

Abstract

THERE ARE VERY FEW PEOPLE who are writing within the Marxist frame of reference in the United States these days. Even more scarce are writers who use for independent analysis of world problems. Most so-called Marxists are hacks associated with either the Communist Party or the Trotskyites, whose Marxism is confined to making the world conform to the current state of the party line. Max Shachtman is one of the rare exceptions to these observations. Although during his long political career, he at one time or another belonged to both the Communist and the Trotskyite movements, for more than twenty years he has been free of the kind of intellectual straitjacket which such membership involves. For most of the intervening period, he was head of his own dissident group known variously as the Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League, and always as the Shachtmanites. He is currently a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation. The present volumel reflects the evolution of Shachtman's thinking on one of the problems which has most concerned him over the years, the real nature of the Soviet regime. It is a compilation of articles on this subject which he published in his group's periodical The New International from 1940 until 1957, a fact which unfortunately makes the book somewhat repetitive, although it bears out the belief that Shachtman has been an important contributor to a better understanding of what kind of a system has been established in the U.S.S.R., and the true significance of changes in that system during the nearly half century of its existence. A preface brings the story up to date as of the time of the publication of the volume. Shachtman's analysis is within a Marxist frame of reference. By now it is not novel, although it was new and different at the time it was first elaborated in the Nineteen Forties and the early Fifties. According to Shachtman, the traditional Marxist belief that the only possible ruling classes in the present phase of human history are the capitalists or the workers has been proved erroneous. In the Soviet Union a new bureaucratic ruling class has evolved and come to dominate Soviet society to a degree never matched by the capitalists in bourgeois society. In other countries overrun by the Communists, the model of class rule first established in the U.S.S.R. was slavishly copied. 1 The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State. By Max Shachtman. New York: The Donald Press, 1962, 360 pp., $2.95.