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Understanding the Bureaucratic Left
Red Mole Substack analyzes a recurring problem in the revolutionary left: the substitution of bureaucracy for workers’ power. This takes many forms—Stalinism, campism, sectarianism—but they share a common logic: the belief that some bureaucratic apparatus (state, party, trend) can represent workers’ interests instead of workers organizing themselves.
This page explains that logic and how different left tendencies express it.
The Core Problem: Bureaucratic Substitution
The fundamental break between Trotskyism and Stalinism came down to one question: Who represents the working class?
Leninist answer: The working class itself, organized through democratic centralism and international coordination.
Stalinist answer: The bureaucracy (state, party leadership) represents workers’ interests and can make decisions on their behalf.
This shift from workers as agents to bureaucracy as substitute is the defining feature of Stalinism. Once accepted, it opens the door to all the deformations Red Mole tracks.
How Bureaucratic Logic Spreads
1. Stalinism: The Original Form
Stalinism began as the Soviet bureaucracy’s self-defense against working-class control. Key features:
Socialism in one country (abandon international revolution; protect the USSR state apparatus)
Class collaboration (alliances with “progressive” bourgeoisies and their states)
Hierarchy over spontaneity (bureaucratic control over workers’ self-organization)
Why it matters today: Stalinism didn’t die with the USSR. Its logic persists in:
Bureaucratic state regimes claiming socialist legitimacy (China, Vietnam, North Korea)
Left parties that prioritize institutional power over working-class organization
Any formation that asks workers to trust the bureaucracy instead of organizing themselves
2. Campism: Stalinism’s Geopolitical Form
Campism applies Stalinist logic to international relations: pick a “progressive” imperialist camp and defend it unconditionally.
The logic: If Russia (or China, or Iran) represents workers’ interests, then defending that state is equivalent to defending the working class. Workers’ actual interests become secondary to state interests.
Examples:
Supporting “anti-imperialist” regimes that brutalize their own workers
Refusing to criticize Russian imperialism in Ukraine because the US is also imperialist
Defending China’s state capitalism because it opposes US hegemony
Why it matters: Campism paralyzes the left by forcing a false choice: either support your imperialist bloc or support the other one. Revolutionary independence becomes impossible.
3. Economism: The Substitution of Economic Demands for Politics
Economism is the belief that workers will naturally become revolutionary through economic struggle alone—that the bureaucratic apparatus doesn’t need to engage in political struggle, support the oppressed or develop revolutionary consciousness.
The logic: Let economic grievances accumulate; the bureaucracy will manage them; revolution will happen automatically.
Why it fails: Economic struggles are necessary but not sufficient. Without political leadership connecting economic struggles to revolutionary transformation, workers get channelled into trade unionism, reformism, or accommodation with the state. And without political leadership, the organised labour movement remains on the edges while feminist, green, GBT and other movements get to work.
How it appears in Red Mole’s analysis:
Left organizations that try to write off anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist and LGBTQIA+ struggles as ‘woke’.
Unions that focus on wage negotiations rather than acting socially and thinking politically
Movements that win concessions but never challenge state power
4. Productivity: The Substitution of Output for Power
Productivity politics claims that producing more, organizing more, doing more is equivalent to building power. The bureaucracy measures itself by activity: more meetings, more literature, more members.
The logic: Organizational growth = revolutionary growth. If we’re busy, we’re winning.
Why it fails: Productivity divorced from political strategy becomes mere activism. The SWP can hold 1,000 meetings and still have zero influence on working-class power because those meetings aren’t connected to what workers are actually doing.
Why it matters: Productivity puts the cult in culture. It burns out activists and substitutes the appearance of movement for actual strategic impact.
5. Sectarianism: The Substitution of Organizational Purity for Workers’ Unity
Sectarianism applies bureaucratic logic within the left itself: the correct organization (the sect) represents the working class; all other organizations are counter-revolutionary or irrelevant.
The logic: Our organization is pure; theirs are compromised. Therefore, organizing ourselves separately is more important than uniting with other workers and revolutionaries.
Why it fails: Sectarianism isolates the left from actual workers, fragments revolutionary forces, and allows the right and center-left to dominate.
Examples:
Refusing to work with other left organizations on shared struggles
Spending more energy critiquing other left groups than fighting capitalism
Demanding ideological purity as a condition for united action
How These Connect
All five tendencies share the same underlying logic: substitution of bureaucracy for workers’ power.
BUREAUCRATIC SUBSTITUTION (Core Logic)
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├─ Stalinism (state apparatus represents workers)
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├─ Campism (imperialist state represents workers' interests)
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├─ Economism (apparatus/trade union represents political needs)
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├─ Productivity (party activity = revolutionary progress)
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└─ Sectarianism (party represents the working class)
Once you accept that some apparatus can substitute for workers’ actual power, you’ve accepted the Stalinist rupture. The question is just which apparatus and which substitution.
What Red Mole Tracks
Red Mole analyzes how these tendencies appear in contemporary left organizations:
How the SWP’s cadre productivity culture isolates it from actual movements
How the AWL’s campism (defending Ukraine’s state) overrides revolutionary strategy
How campist left formations paralyze resistance to imperialism
How ultra-left sectarianism fragments revolutionary forces
How left parties’ accommodation with the state bureaucracy betrays workers
The goal isn’t academic critique. It’s strategic clarity: helping activists recognize these patterns so movements can learn from past defeats and build differently.
The Alternative: Revolutionary Democracy
Against bureaucratic substitution, the Trotskyist tradition counterposed revolutionary democracy:
Workers organize themselves; organizations serve workers’ self-activity
International working-class coordination, not state loyalty
Political struggle connected to economic power
Strategy over productivity; impact over activity
Left unity in practice, not sectarian purity
Red Mole’s analysis aims toward that alternative: understanding what’s wrong with current practice so movements can build what’s needed.
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