31. How the bureaucracy relates to the ruling class is more than a matter of origins. 32. Absolutism was required by the ruling class in order to maintain its domination during the spread of commodity production and exchange and the consequent transition in the social formation. 33. Have they become a ruling elite or even a new ruling class? 34. The debate about whether the bureaucrats of communist regimes have emerged as a new ruling class has largely centred on the relationship between state functionaries and collectivized property. 35. Where there is such a controlling stratum it must become socially and politically dominant and therefore a ruling class. 36. Bureaucratic power thus becomes the foundation for a new ruling class. 37. Not all bureaucrats are in the ruling class -- there are bureaucrats at all levels of Soviet society -- but the ruling class is predominantly composed of bureaucrats. 38. Nor should the bureaucratization of society as a whole be confused with the emergence of the bureaucracy as a ruling class. 39. Another rich son come to sniff around the daughters of the ruling class and propagate the Protestant elite. 40. Alone among recent writers, Hilton suggests that the rising may have deterred the ruling class from further local attempts at repression. |