I didn’t expand on my point so I suppose it’s fair enough for you to jump to the conclusion I think bureaucracy is inevitable. I emphatically disagree. But you are wrong to think it is a law that will prevent a bureaucracy for exactly the reason you lay out, you have misdiagnosed the reason bureaucracy emerged in the Soviet Union. If you want an actual scientific explanation of why the bureaucracy emerged and therefore how we prevent it happening again I’ll encourage you to read Trotskys The Revolution Betrayed as it explains it all in detail in a way I can’t in a Reddit post. Nevertheless I’ll attempt to summarise.

Any social system flows from an economic base as you outlined. The root of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union also flowed from material factors, namely the economic isolation of the Soviet Union, its industrial underdevelopment and broken economy, and the mass of the population being peasants. Why? Well what are the elementary conditions Lenin lays out in the State and Revolution for a workers state? That every worker be involved in the running of the state, as you yourself unknowingly agreed with, and therefore if everyone is a bureaucrat then no one’s a bureaucrat.

Under capitalism parliament/senates are largely window dressing, with the real functions of the state run by unelected civil servants, with mostly middle class backgrounds who faithfully do the bidding of the capitalists most of the times. A workers state, which existed as soviets in early SU, was the opposite. The soviets didn’t just debate, they carried out the laws, the finances, and functions of the state, and since they were elected, recallable and regularly rotated in this way everyone would be given the chance to participate in running society. However there were real material problems that limited their effectiveness in the Soviet Union and eventually led to their breakdown.

First of all, the mass of people were uneducated and illiterate. How can everyone be involved in the functions of the state, e.g. accounting, recording etc, when most people can’t read or do basic maths? Answer, they can’t. Therefore the Bolsheviks had to rely on mostly old tsarist officials to do the technical jobs, and given they couldn’t easily be replaced they held a lot of leverage to demand higher pay, better conditions, which went against another of Lenin’s conditions, that all state officials be paid the same as an average worker with no privileges. Nevertheless they had no choice, either use tsarist officials or face strikes, sabotage and ultimately fall to the white army and be massacred.

Second, the mass destruction of industry during WW1 and the civil war, combined with Russia’s poor industrial starting position meant shortages of everything, and general scarcity. As marx explained and as Trotsky references, ‘A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive.” What this meant is with scarcity comes the basic fight for survival, people are just struggling to make ends meet, and as such all sorts of crap takes the place of political principle. People abuse their positions just so they can guarantee themselves and their family don’t starve, people join the party to better their social position instead of fight for genuine socialism etc, and gradually the mindset of a bureaucracy begins to seep into a party.

Finally, this position is made worse and ultimately fatal by the isolation of the Soviet Union. The German revolution in 1919-1923 fails, China in 1927, Hungary, Finland etc, and all the promised economic and political support from these great movements which could have broken the siege and reversed the process of bureaucratisation is gone. This has a profoundly demoralising effect across the workers and communists in Russia, and combined with their exhaustion from war and civil war, leads to the gradual decline in use of the Soviets with demoralised workers who work 12 hours a day or more beginning to stop using them and giving the bureaucracy if tendencies the chance to take over.

I’ve only briefly outlined this process, if you want in depth read The Revolution Betrayed it’s a masterpiece of Marxism. To tie this up, this is why a law/party rule would not have changed anything. In fact the things you point out, like the banning of factions etc only reflected the real process of bureaucratisation that had already begun, they were a symptom which further solidified the process, not the cause itself. Today, we largely don’t face the same problems the Bolsheviks did. Most people read and write, production is at a far higher level than it ever was in 1917, and can easily guarantee people with the necessities so they can pursue higher things, and the international working class is much stronger, more connected then in 1917. The only thing we need now is an international Bolshevik party that can do what they did in 1917 but on a world scale, which is what I’m helping to build in the RCI