Bureaucratic collectivism

Bureaucratic collectivism is a theory of class society. It is used by some Trotskyists to describe the nature of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and other similar states in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere (such as North Korea).

A bureaucratic collectivist state owns the means of production, while the surplus or profit is distributed among an elite party bureaucracy (nomenklatura), rather than among the working class. Also, most importantly, it is the bureaucracy—not the workers, or the people in general—which controls the economy and the state. Thus, the system is not truly capitalist, but it is not socialist either. In Trotskyist theory, it is a new form of class society which exploits workers through new mechanisms. Theorists, such as Yvan Craipeau, who hold this view believe that bureaucratic collectivism does not represent progress beyond capitalism—that is, that it is no closer to being a workers' state than a capitalist state would be, and is considerably less efficient. Some even believe that certain kinds of capitalism, such as social democratic capitalism, are more progressive than a bureaucratic collectivist society.

George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a fictional society of "oligarchical collectivism". Orwell was familiar with the works of James Burnham, having reviewed Burnham's The Managerial Revolution prior to writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Oligarchical collectivism was a fictionalized conceptualization of bureaucratic collectivism, where Big Brother and the Inner Party form the nucleus of a hierarchical organization of society professing itself as "English socialism" because of its revolutionary origins, but afterwards only concerned with total domination by the Party.

...
Wikipedia