Reflection: Why did the Soviet Union create a privileged class?

We can find the answer to this question in a book

The author is Professor An Zhou of Johns Hopkins University. He is a famous left-wing scholar. He is studying why the Soviet Union He has profound knowledge on the issue of transformation and cultivation. He also wrote a book called "The Rise of the Red Engineers", which has almost become a classic work of Western political economics.

The general content of the book is that the post-war bourgeoisie of various countries have learned from the lessons of revisionism in the Soviet Union that engineers and technical intellectuals should be given high treatment, so that they can make suggestions but have no decision-making The conclusion of the high-paid think tank.

We who have read Marx’s works all know that the owners of the means of production have two decisive characteristics. One is that they have the right to distribute the wealth created by the entire unit (under capitalism, the company), and allocate it to the cost (where Including wages (including labor costs) is profit. The second is the decision-making power to guide the production process and decide how you operate. As for the election of officials, that is also a must.

Socialism advocates public ownership of the working class, which means that all workers have distribution and guidance rights. The former is not difficult, just vote. During Stalin's time, Soviet workers were able to take secret ballots to decide on how long the factory would open for the next phase and what model it would adopt. With the development of information circulation on the Internet, this is simpler today. Allende once conceived of workers' adjudication. of cybernetic democratic production mechanisms.

But the latter is troublesome. Workers don’t know how to direct operations, especially with the social division of labor. This requires professional knowledge training, commonly known as engineers. This is where the privileges stolen by the Soviets from workers' democracy (the word Soviet means "autonomous democratic assembly" in Russian) come from. Because the predecessor of the Soviet Union was Tsarist Russia, which was known as "the most crotchless member of imperialism." After the war, the invasion of American and British imperialism loomed overhead. To carry out industrialization, it was impossible to let workers guide production. Training such workers was very time-consuming. Therefore, we had to use senior technicians from the Tsarist Russia era, and these people became think tanks enjoying special supplies.

This is a last resort to win the war against imperialist aggression, but the price is also high. The infamous Great Famine in Ukraine is one of them, because of course the technical elite had to falsely report in order to exaggerate their KPIs, and local privileges also conspired. Stalin himself must have known it, but it is a pity that you still have to go along with it. Apart from these guys, you can't industrialize. Familiar, right, that workers have long had to vote between options offered by these technocratic elites? This is the worst election in America today. Gradually, as workers lost their democratic consciousness, the technical elite successfully tricked workers into handing over democratic power to managers.

But Stalin did not intend to use them for a long time. He did want to solve this problem after the war. In 1944, when the war situation was determined, Stalin proposed that "from now on, the Bolshevik Party will serve as an administrative and planning organization, and legislative and other rights will be completely transferred to the Soviet Democratic Assembly." It's a pity that it was rejected. It's very simple. The privileged group wants to continue to control power, but they don't know how to guide it. The old technical elite is unwilling to be left aside and the new technical workers cancel their special provisions. So the two sides hit it off, one with the privilege. The elements held power, and the old technical elite's conglomerate managed to devour the Soviet Union.

Then, during the Soviet revisionist era, the Soviet Union has always encouraged the myth of "higher academic qualifications, higher treatment", and strictly blocked the acquisition of high-tech knowledge, and provided them with very generous treatment. The purpose is to tie them to their own interests. The technical elites they continue to cultivate have no power but very generous treatment. To this day, Russia still maintains this mechanism, which is the same as the Bonaparte mechanism in the Soviet revisionist era.

In fact, we can see that this routine was used by many right-wing authoritarian and even totalitarian countries at the same time. South Korea during the era of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, and Spain when Franco was in power. Although the important positions in the country are all taken by the military junta, they all have a group of economists as think tanks. This is how the saying "Kim Jae-ik helps Chun Doo-hwan supplement economics" comes from.

The high treatment of technical personnel in Western countries today also comes from this, they must be separated from the workers. Once they enter the worker group and spread their knowledge widely, the right to guide is no longer theirs. Unique, then, that ghost is right in front of you.

In fact, not only the extreme left but also the extreme right are troubled by this. The important positions in the military government of the National Society were held by G?ring's Air Force Officer Corps, and the SS was responsible for municipal administration. When this group of new military aristocrats from petty bourgeoisie personally took charge, German military production was like squeezing toothpaste. It wasn't until Keitel squeezed Goering out of the Air Force Officer Corps and activated Speer's think tank (don't ask me why Keitel, a field marshal, became the head of the Air Force Officer Corps) that Germany's military industry was in a state of affairs.

Then look at the following information:

Brezhnev: Metallurgical Engineer

Ustinov: Naval Artillery Engineer

Podgorny: Food Process Engineer

Suslov: Economics Researcher

Gromyko: Economics Researcher

Kosygin: Textile Engineer

Did you see the similarities? At the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, the core power strata of the Soviet revisionists were replaced by a large number of technical elites.

We know that the state machine is a tool of the ruling class, and Lenin once mentioned in "State and Revolution" that trust monopolies have actually given rise to the possibility of a centralized planned economy. Although it is dominated by capitalists, at least there is one Initial template for the idea.

Then it will be clearer if we compare it to the Soviet Union. The Soviet revisionist power group is a very subtle existence. They are different from those in Western democratic countries, but they can still be compared. The think tanks of Western governments benchmark companies. They are responsible for planning and execution but have no decision-making power. The parliamentary votes that reflect the quarrels of various groups are the voice of shareholders. Although the working class sometimes allows the enemy to retreat, the overall situation is still The dominant class dominates.

The secret of Soviet revisionism is that the planning think tank and the decision-making authority are the same existence. But this is actually not important. What is important is the economic model. The ownership of the means of production can determine how the wealth created by workers is distributed (distributed into profits and labor costs), and also determines how to control production guidance. And this is the root of the deterioration of the Soviet Union.

Marx was clearly aware of the huge efficiency difference between mental labor and physical labor as early as in the "Critique of the Gotha Program". Therefore, he believed that the essence of "distribution according to work" is still a capitalist economy. This is proven by the degeneration of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was formerly the Tsarist Empire, which was the “weakest link in imperialism” and accounted for 80% of the illiterate rural population. Facing the imperialist invasion that may come at any time, rapid industrialization is necessary.

At this time, the results of the difference in brain-body efficiency are reflected. As productivity becomes more and more developed, the intensity of knowledge required for professional production and operation planning is also getting higher and higher. Traditional labor was unable to complete the task. In the end, Stalin decided to use the technical elite of the Tsarist Russia era to cultivate the labor's own intellectuals. As a result, the Soviet Union began to gradually complete its real historical mission, but this also meant the inevitable destruction of the Soviet Union.

The emerging technical elite, who have the expertise, in production voting, manual workers face the same situation as the American election in which the higher man is chosen between the two inferior solutions. But they have no choice. The performance gap between mental and physical work makes the technical elite despise physical work. As the technical elite slowly seized the power to decide and distribute plans in this way, eventually, the ownership of the means of production also changed. As a result, a new group was born: a new class that combines the three powers of decision-making, distribution and planning, and has the dual identities of think tank and power holder, that is, the privileged class.

In fact, we see that this phenomenon is inevitable in today’s traditional Western countries. Capitalists, as owners of the means of production, no longer have the ability to plan production. They can only spend money to hire technical elites as think tanks, but they still rely on the power to decide on wealth distribution and final plans to treat the technical elite as a labor aristocracy. As long as they are on their side, the capitalist system can continue to exist. In the Soviet Union, it was a different situation. The workers' aristocracy was cultivated, but soon they were no longer workers, but a privileged class.

In fact, this problem was encountered not only in the Soviet Union, but also in right-wing countries at the same time. Nazi Germany's early policies, from planning to decision-making, were all directed by the new military aristocrats from the petty bourgeoisie, the Air Force Officer Corps, who were in power. The result was that Germany's various administrations were extremely inefficient. It wasn't until Keitel squeezed out Goering, leaving the air force officers to retain only the decision-making power, and the specific planning was gradually transferred to Speer's professional think tank, that Germany's military production was on track.

Earlier, Mussolini’s military government activated economic think tanks early, which was one of the reasons for Italy’s economic boom in the early 1920s. This set of policies was followed by almost all subsequent military governments, including the famous economic designer Kim Jae-ik during the Chun Doo-hwan period, the economic experts employed by Franco, Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys” and Suharto’s American economy. Top students.

So, is there a way to eliminate the restoration of the old economy caused by this difference? Yes, that is, physical labor has almost been indirectly replaced by mental labor, and the product of this is high-intensity automation. You don't have to do everything yourself, it's all done by intelligent robots. You only need to be the one who specifies instructions. In that situation, the differences between the brain and the body may begin to disappear.

The emergence of artificial intelligence is indeed in response to the climax of the post-war left-wing movement. In order to expand profits, but also to appease workers who resist violently again and again, new technologies and new productivity must be developed. In fact, the birth of new technologies is itself the result of labor's constant resistance forcing capitalists to find other ways. As a negative case, we can see that the weak resistance of the Japanese Empire caused capitalists to still stop at profits from cheap labor.

And the Soviet Union’s task only lies here, to force the capitalist productive forces to continue to develop and continue to develop towards the critical development of capitalism before it completely deteriorates. But when the historical tasks of this stage were completed, the Soviet Union itself could no longer sustain itself. Every labor revolt promotes a period of development of productive forces, but as a result of the development of productive forces, old interest groups fear that their power will be weakened.

The development of science and technology has made mental work gradually disappear from physical work. Mental work places a smaller load on workers, but is more efficient.

This means that labor costs are smaller than profits. This is a way for capitalists to expand profits and face resistance from workers. However, the price is that mental workers have planning capabilities that capitalists do not have, which means that in fact they are quite The ability of workers to resist was stronger than that of the old manual workers, and the power of workers was further expanded.

But the Soviet revisionists did not take this step. On the one hand, the privileges only stop at squeezing manual workers (if the number of cheap labor is sufficient, the overall efficiency will still overwhelm artificial intelligence), and cultivate a large number of mental workers. Meaning the old privileges will lose some power. From the perspective of hyper-industrialization caused by the threat of imperialism, it is inevitable that the red faction will degenerate, and its complete destruction in the 1990s is also inevitable, because he is only a product of the key points in the first stage, and it is not up to him to complete the tasks of the new era.

The Soviet Union was more premature than degenerate. Whether it is Stalin's "One Nation", Trotsky's "World Revolution" or the European revolution envisioned by Lenin in his early days, this problem cannot be solved. Because the artificial intelligence revolution broke out after World War II, even if the Soviet Union conquered Europe, the differentiation between mental and physical labor would inevitably occur during the construction process, because the early full numerical control technology that emerged in the 1960s could barely blur the boundaries between the two.

Even if the Soviets throughout Europe really cultivated a large number of highly educated workers, under the circumstances that still require a lot of manual labor, differentiation will inevitably occur. After all, at that time when manual manufacturing factories still accounted for the majority, the solution was to continuously develop productivity. However, due to different incentive mechanisms and professional differentiation, where each person specialized in one position, technicians would gradually become separated and become a new privilege. Lenin himself was not unprepared for this. After all, his expectation during the civil war was that surviving the Paris Commune would be considered a success.