3. The concept of “class” has been quite trouble-
some to Marxist-Leninism particularly with Stalin's
declaration that a “classless” society had been intro-
duced in the Soviet Union with the adoption of its new
constitution of 1936. If the concept of “proletariat”
or “working class” is a polar one it implies, when
concretely used, a “capitalist class.” But if capitalism
is abolished and all social ownership is vested in the
community, who or which is the exploiting class? On
a functional conception of property, viz., the legal
right or power to exclude others from the use of things
and services in which property is claimed, critics have
argued that the social property of the Soviet Union
in effect belongs to the Communist Party considered
as a corporate body. And although there is no right
to individual testamentary transmission, so long as the
Communist Party enjoys the privileged position as-
signed to it in the Soviet Constitution, in effect, one
set of leaders, in the name of the Party, inherits the
power over social property from its predecessors, and
the differential use and privileges that power bestows.
Milovan Djilas, in his The New Class... (1957), on
the basis of his study and experience in Yugoslavia and
the Soviet Union argued that in current communist
societies the bureaucracy constituted a ruling elite
enjoying social privileges which justified calling it a
“class.” Subsequently other writers claimed that divi-
sions and conflicts within the ruling elite presented a
picture of greater class complexity (Albert Parry, The
New Class Divided, 1966). It is obvious that the
Marxist-Leninist concept of class cannot do justice to
the Soviet, not to speak of the Chinese experience, in
which peasants are often referred to as proletariat in
order to give some semblance of sense to the termi-
nological Marxist pieties of the Communist Party.
Actually the position of the worker is unique in the
Soviet Union, in that it corresponds neither to the
“association of free producers,” envisaged by Marx nor
to “the Soviet democracy” used by Lenin as a slogan
to come to power. Nor is it like the position of the
workers in modern capitalist societies, since the Soviet
workers cannot organize free trade unions independent
of the state, cannot without punitive risk leave their
jobs, cannot travel without a passport and official per-
mission, and cannot appeal to an independent judiciary
if they run afoul of the authorities. Oscar Lange, the
Polish communist economist, before his return to
Poland, and while he was still a left-wing Socialist,
characterized the Soviet economy as “an industrial
serfdom” with the workers in the role of modern serfs.
Like the phrases “state capitalism” and “state social-
ism,” which have also been applied to the Soviet
Union, this indicates that present-day communist eco-
nomics and class relationships require a new set of
economic and political categories to do justice to them.
Nonetheless, that its economy is distinctive, although
sharing some of the features of classical capitalism and
classical socialism, is undeniable.
