The Intelligentsia in the Class Structure of State-Socialist Societies

The paper describes the class structure of East European state-socialist societies, positing the existence of a class dichotomy between the working class and the intelligentsia. This thesis challenges those theories which claim that the importance of class conflicts declined under state socialism and that therefore such societies should be described as containing nonantagonistic classes or strata. It also challenges the critical theories which acknowledge the existence of a new dominant class in Eastern Europe, but which describe that class as the bureaucracy or technobureaucracy. This paper attempts to base its class analysis on the exploration of the mechanisms and institutions of expropriation of surplus under state socialism. It is suggested that in contemporary Eastern Europe private ownership and market mechanisms of expropriation have been replaced by central planning and redistribution of the economic surplus. All those who have vested interests in the maximization of redistributive power are members of a new dominating class. If we define the new class this way it will include more than just the bureaucracy; potentially, it includes the whole intelligentsia. The paper describes the new dominant class of intelligentsia as a class in statu nascendi. The formation of this class takes a whole historical epoch. In the first stage of state-socialist development the Djilas thesis is basically accurate: under Stalinism and in the early post-Stalinist years the bureaucracy had the monopoly of power. During the last two decades, on the other hand, the social base of power holders has broadened, especially in those countries which experimented with economic and political reforms. The formation of a new dominant class which incorporates the whole of the intelligentsia is now under way.