The interesting thing about state socialist societies is that, when they’re built by vanguardists, it’s assumed that with the abolition of private property, class will be abolished as well. With the decline of Maoist China and the Soviet Union, that has not been the case at all. Class extends far beyond property ownership, and concerns not only who owns property, but also your occupation, how you’re paid for your work, whether or not you travel (for work), and a host of other factors. One example that explains this is the difference in class interests between a salesperson earning commission, and one who does not, with the former incentivized to sell more, and the latter only caring about making his quota. Just the difference in how they’re paid changes a great deal about how they behave in the workplace, and when you take into consideration other factors in other examples, you begin to realize that workers are not a coherent group on their own at all. Workers have a great variety of interests and incentives, based on many different things. Claiming to abolish class interests when you’ve only abolished private property is insufficient: an oversimplification that ignores leftover problems. The fact that the vanguardists of Marxist-Leninist countries have never seemed to recognize this, is probably less a failure of their awareness and more just the result of a group taking on (and subsequently falling prey to) new respective class interests. Because material conditions determine social conditions, perhaps the best critique against totalitarian socialism is that after the vanguard group takes power, its members, gaining new material conditions, simply inherit the class interests from the rulers they had overthrown, dooming their original mission with tragic irony.
While almost the entirety of the working population in America are working class, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still social status sub-strata therein. The Marxist idea of determining class upon whether you’re a worker, an owner, or a degenerate is overly simplistic, and the problem with holes in theory is that when it’s applied to politics, mismanagement and inefficiencies arise. DMSG has taken interest in the North Korean concept of Songbun before, a system in which one’s social credit under the regime was based on the occupations they worked in, the occupations their family worked in, their revolutionary involvement, nationality, and so on. Unlike classic Marxist theory, Songbun was created by the state to determine citizens’ respective loyalty based on their background. Unlike classical Marxist theory’s origins as philosophy, Songbun was intended to be a tool used by a totalitarian state to evaluate people, and because of that it’s a lot more comprehensive, accurate, and interesting to look into. More than that, it should be noted that while Marx bothered to mention the difference between the petit-bourgeois and the bourgeois, he never bothered to socially stratify the proletarians. This is primarily because Marx, a non-worker who associated himself with bourgeois and petit-bourgeois intellectuals, didn’t have much interaction with workers beyond picking up a coffee at the 19th-century equivalent of Starbucks in the morning. For Marx, the workers bore no differences in their interests and lifestyles because he wasn’t familiar enough with them, just as a speaker of another language would find it hard to discern words in English.
To give you an impression of its diversity, the working class is the societal equivalent of a vibrant coral reef, with thousands of occupational niches filled by different people of differing interests and backgrounds. A pharmaceutical representative who makes too much a year selling drugs to doctors working ten hours a week has very different class interests than the doctor in a clinic, the janitor in a school, and the construction worker on a high-rise across the street. The working class is not a hive mind with the same interests, and in the case of professions like police officers and intelligence agents, battling against their fellow workers is part of their job. The reason possibly why socialism was more heavily implemented in feudal countries like Tsarist Russia is that at the time, modern industries like manufacturing, electrical utilities, and railways were still undeveloped or absent, and the working class was composed mostly of people who lacked an education and worked primarily in manual labor on farms. As the proportion of agricultural workers relative to the workforce decreased over decades and centuries, an incredible increase in the variety of new jobs was created out of necessity by industrial society, as the economy grew more complex and faceted. In countries like America, where the largest sector of employment described by the government is “Miscellaneous,” the variety of the proletariat’s interests and aims have potentially posed a genuine hurdle in advancing us, as the breadth of careers available to us has expanded. When we take all of this into context, understanding how as society develops, the working class only becomes more stratified and varied in what they want, claiming that class abolition and private property abolition go hand in hand begins to appear crazy.
When the Soviet Union solidified its control over Russia in the 1920s, it was said that class had been abolished with the nationalization of all property. It caused a great stir within the Soviet leadership when Trotsky pointed out the conflict of class interests Soviet bureaucrat-elects too would take on, and would probably seek, in their own greed, to re-privatize the economy. From a Dialectical Materialist perspective, Trotsky proved to be absolutely right, and perfectly predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in the coming decades. This was referred to as “perestroika,” where the leadership corruptly began to sell state assets to each other for pennies on the dollar, using loans doled out to them through their all-too-chummy connections at state banks who just happened to be in charge of the privatization process. In not acknowledging the existence of class in post-private property societies, the Soviets ironically paved the way for monopolistic feudalism to take hold again after their collapse, during which entire industries became personal fiefdoms of CCCP leaders. While the Soviet Union had a very strong and capable economy during the 1980s, taboo-to-talk-about class interests had rotted the behemoth of state socialism to its core. At the end of the day, relying on underdeveloped Marxist theory that made out all workers to have monolithic interests, the Soviets failed to identify and prevent many obvious sources of corruption and conflicts of interest within their society.
