Power and Money Power and Money A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy • ERNEST MANDEL VERSO London · New York First published by Verso 1992 ©Ernest Mandel 1992 All rights reserved Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIV 3HR USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001-2291 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 0 86091 321 X ISBN 0 86091 548 4 (Pbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Times by York House Typographic Ltd, London Printed in Finland by Werner Soderstrom Oy To my dearest Anne, Whose inspiration, love and care Make it all so much sunnier. Contents Introduction 1 1 Bureaucracy and Commodity Production 11 2 Organization and the Usurpation of Power 59 3 Substitutionism and Realpolitik: The Politics of Labour Bureaucracies 103 4 Administration and Profit Realization: The Growth of Bourgeois Bureaucracies 153 5 Self-administration, Abundance and the Withering Away of Bureaucracy 195 vii Introduction I The death agony of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe, together with the break-up of the Soviet Union, have posed in the sharpest possible way the problem of their social nature and place in history-a problem largely identical with that of the specific nature of the bureaucracy in these societies. Events have been rather cruel to most of the theories offered in answer to this question. For example, right-wing ideologues - and pseudo-left ones like Cornelius Castoriadis - consistently maintained that the Stali nist and post-Stalinist regimes were 'totalitarian', in the sense that they could not be shaken internally and would reproduce themselves for an indefinite length of time. The events of 1989 to 1991 have refuted that thesis. For their part, a number of Marxists like Paul Sweezy argued that it was impossible to call a regime 'transitional' when it had lasted for seventy years. But what about a regime which is shaken to its foundations after seventy-two years? Could that not be transitional after all? The question of the restoration of capitalism is now posed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet lands - and that is exactly how the matter is understood by all social and political forces, both nationally and internationally. Those who identified the USSR with state capitalism are thus left in a quandary: how can capitalism be restored if the state is already under capitalism? It is of no avail to argue that state capitalism is different from private capitalism. For ifthe difference is qualitative, what is the point of calling them both capitalism? And if the difference is only quantitative, it becomes impossible to explain how such minor changes