consumption goods in conditions where there are not enough of such goods to satisfv the basic needs of working people.
This leads to social conflicts and to the resulting need for a policeman inside a workers state to regulate this conflict. Thus the material basis of a bureaucratic state machine as a repressive torce tes in the sphere of consumption - its power derives from this, not from the 'ownership of the means of production. it Is not a ruling class in Marxist terms Against the Trotskyist analysis of the role of the bureaucracy, the Stalinists nave alwavs arqued mat me bureduc racy was necessary because it played a vital role in produchon. it deveroped the Soviet economy in the 1930s, and enabled it to resist German imperialism in the Second World War.
Now what about the Soviet economy? Within it there is no pattern of competing private capitals to create a arive to accumulation and economic growth. In fact there is no compulsion towards economic growth within the mode ot production at all. The public ownership of the means of production means that the only driving force towards accumulation is the consciously plannea manage ment of the production of different groups of workers in different factories. It is this basic feature of the mode ot production in the USSR which leads revolutionary marxists to caracterise it as a sociansea mode of prounction Does this mean that the type of Red Weekly's enthusiastic welcome for the victory of the NLF in Vietnam was shared by Socialist Worker-quite against the logic of state capitalism or ole change.
Red Weekly 29 July 1976