this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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drag refers to any Socialist system with a state as "State Capitalist," which is a misnomer I reject. I support the NEP and I support the PRC's Socialist Market Economy, I support Cuba, Vietnam, etc, but drag in particular is saying even a fully publicly owned economy is "state capitalist" if it has a government.
Well it certainly is capitalist if it's not democratic. You can have public ownership and worker control, or you can have public ownership and a dictatorship of people who are not workers. Like, bureaucrats, apparatchik, the nomenclatura, etc. Or the army. Or whoever who's not workers.
As such drag might operate under the Anarchist definition of state (which I, as an Anarchist, can't stand, because in it just causes pointless misunderstandings), which more or less bogs down to "hierarchical control", not "organisational structure of society". The latter definition is something perfectly neutral, the former is the face of evil itself.
For drag, any state running production is Capitalist. They denounce the PRC, USSR, Cuba, etc as Capitalist, despite robust democratic control.
Further, administrators of public property do not constitute a distinct class, just as managers within a company are not a distinct class from the workers. There exists intra-class hierarchy and inter-class hierarchy, and these are not the same.
You might want to calibrate your democracy-o-meter. At the very least, not conflate a disagreement about degrees of democracy in some specific state with a disagreement on principles.
Ah. So not revisionist enough to acknowledge the professional-manegerial class, I see. I mean it's not like the concept would break with Marxian analysis, it just re-analyses things with a more complete set of data points. So in this case you can choose between being a revisionist and giving up on materialism, I suggest the former.
I'm not conflating anything, drag quite clearly has stated that "Marx was an Anarchist." This is wrong.
As for the "Professional Managerial Class," it isn't a distinct class, but a subsection of the proletariat. You also see the term "Labor Aristocracy" used by Engels and Lenin, but crucially, you don't see the conflation of this substratum of a class with a class in and of itself. The insistence that managers make up a distinct class is more of an Anarchist thing than a Marxist one, as adopting such analysis would be similar to calling plumbers and electricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.
Absolutely.
Plumbers are not in a power hierarchy relationship to electricians so that's a strawman.
Class isn't "power hierarchy" in Marxist analysis, though. That's an Anarchist interpretation, one I won't say you can't hold personally as valid, but that's not the Marxist critique. Engels and Lenin specifically called managers Labor aristocracy as they are necessary aspects of large industry, and not a class in themselves. Class instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.
In the "Administration of Things," as Engels puts it, there are to be administrators, and production along a common plan. It's through this that large industry under Capitalism paves the way for the transition to Socialism, and then Communism, socialized production requires an informed plan.
And the managerial class doesn't have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people 'quit without cause' by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).
Is an Engineer a class? They make better money than assembly workers. The answer is no, Engineers are a substratum of the Proletariat, worthy of their own analysis, but not as distinct from the rest of the Proletariat. That's why Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc all viewed managers as proletarian, doing a separate kind of labor, and even distinct living conditions on average, but retaining the same labor relations to the Means of Production.
So you're saying that there's no difference in things like capital access. "Same relations" implying "no difference, nada, zilch". I don't find that assessment compatible with the material conditions we live under.
One proletarian has the strength of two average proletarians. Does he constitute his own distinct class, as he can leverage that for somewhat higher pay, and therefore eventually become petty bourgeois? No. Again, we can see specialized labor as a substratum, but to confuse it for a class in and of itself goes against the Marxist conception of class.
Now, if you define class as relations of hierarchy, there's no dissonance, and we can consider managers their own class. But at that point, we have to be careful not to trip over each other's understanding of class when discussing Marxism vs Anarchism.
That's a relationship to a crate or to barbells, not to capital or the means of production.
I already explained how this can cascade into a different relationship at a rate more advantageous than the average proletarian, as you already saw fit to distinguish classes.