How the Russian Revolution was lost
Michael Gavin
Stalinist bureaucracy, which on one level seems to revolve around the
question of whose ideas were responsible for teh rise of Stalinism,
those of Lenin or those of Stalin.
The Trotskyist movement has always stressed the material constraints on
the isolated revolution due to teh failure of teh revolution to spread
from a backward country to the advanced capitalist countries (most
particularly Germany).
And indeed it was touch and go for a while during the period 1919-1923
but ultimately the German REvolution failed, at least in part due to the
weakness of the leadership of the revolutionary movement, both
theoretically and organisationally.
To provide some basis for a more productive debate I'm going to post an
article on the degeneration and ultimate failure of the Russian
Revolution which AFAIK isn't as yet available on the Net. The article
was written by Chris Harman, currently editor of the British Socialist
Worker, in 1967 and was originally published in International Socialism,
No.30, Autumn 1967. Since then it has been republished many times as a
pamphlet and in various collections of articles, as well as being
translated into a number of other languages.
I'll be posting it in three parts over the next few days attached to
this thread.
Michael Gavin
Revolution was lost"
- text -
Chris Harman
How the Revolution was Lost
1. The Two Revolutions
The period between the two revolutions of February and October 1917 was
moulded by two concurrent processes. The first occurred in the towns,
and was a very rapid growth of working-class consciousness. By the July
days, the industrial workers at least seem to have arrived at an
understanding of the different interests of the classes in the
revolution. In the countryside, a different form of class
differentiation took place. This was not between a propertied class and
a class that could not even aspire to individual ownership of property.
Rather it was between two property-owning classes. On the one hand the
landowners, on the other the peasants. The latter were not socialist in
intention. Their aim was to seize the estates of the landowners, but to
divide these upon an individualistic basis. In this movement even
Kulaks, wealthy farmers, could participate.
The revolution could not have taken place without the simultaneous
occurrence of these two processes. What tied them together was not
however an identity of ultimate aim. Rather it was the fact that for
contingent historical reasons the industrial bourgeoisie could not break
politically with the large landowners. Its inability to do this pushed
the peasantry (which effectively included the army) and the workers into
the same camp:
'In order to realise the soviet state, there was required the drawing
together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to
completely different historic species: a peasant war - that is a
movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development - and a
proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline.' [1]
The urban insurrection could not have succeeded but for the sympathy
of the largely peasant army. Nor could the peasants have waged a
successful struggle unless led and welded together by a centralised,
external force. In Russia of 1917 the only possible such force was the
organised working class. It was this possibility of drawing the
peasantry behind it at the crucial moment that made it possible for the
workers to hold power in the towns.
The bourgeoisie and its land-owning allies were expropriated. But the
classes which participated in this expropriation shared no simple
long-term common interest. In the towns was a class whose very existence
depended upon collective activity. In the countryside a class whose
members would only unite even amongst themselves momentarily to seize
the land, but would then till it individually. Once the act of seizure
and defence of that seizure was over, only external inducements could
bind them to any State.
The revolution, then, was really a dictatorship of the workers over
other classes in the towns - in the major towns the rule of the majority
in Soviets - and a dictatorship of the towns over the country. In the
first period of the division of the estates this dictatorship could rely
upon peasant support, indeed, was de-fended by peasant bayonets. But
what was to happen afterwards?
This question had preoccupied the Russian socialists themselves long
before the revolution. The realisation that a socialist revolution in
Russia would be hopelessly lost in the peasant mass was one reason why
all the Marxists in Russia (including Lenin, but excluding Trotsky and
at first Parvus) had seen the forthcoming revolution as a bourgeois one.
When Parvus and Trotsky first suggested that the revolution might
produce a socialist government, Lenin wrote
'This cannot be, because such a revolutionary dictatorship can only
have stability ... based on the great majority of the people. The
Russian proletariat constitutes now a minority of the Russian
population.'
He maintained this view right up to 1917. When he did come to accept
and fight for the possibility of a socialist outcome for the revolution,
it was because he saw it as one stage in a world-wide revolution that
would give the minority working class in Russia protection against
foreign intervention and aid to reconcile the peasantry to its rule.
Eight months before the October revolution he wrote to Swiss workers
that 'the Russian proletariat cannot by its own forces victoriously
complete the socialist revolution.' Four months after the revolution (on
7 March 1918) he repeated, 'The absolute truth is that without a
revolution in Germany we shall perish.'
2. The Civil War
The first years of Soviet rule seemed to bear out the perspective of
world revolution. The period 1918-19 was characterised by social
upheavals unseen since 1948. In Germany and Austria military defeat was
followed by the destruction of the mon-archy. Everywhere there was talk
of Soviets. In Hungary and Bavaria Soviet Governments actually took
power - although only briefly. In Italy the factories were occupied. Yet
the heritage of fifty years of gradual development was not to be erased
so rapidly. The old Social-Democratic and trade-union leaders moved into
the gap left by the discredited bourgeois parties. The Communist. Left
on the other hand still lacked the organisation to respond to this. It
acted when there was no mass sup-port; when there was mass support it
failed to act.
Even so the stabilisation of Europe after 1919 was at best
precarious. In every European country, the social structure received
severe threats within the subsequent fifteen years. And the experience
of both the Communist Parties and the working class had put them into a
far better position to understand what was happening.
The Russian Bolsheviks did, not however, intend to wait upon the
revolution abroad. The defence of the Soviet Republic and incitement to
revolution abroad seemed inseparable. For the time being anyway, the
tasks at hand in Russia were determined, not by the Bolshevik leaders,
but by the international imperialist powers. These had begun a 'crusade'
against the Soviet Republic. White and foreign armies had to be driven
back before any other questions could be considered. In order to do
this, every resource available had to be utilised.
By a mixture of popular support, revolutionary ardour, and, at times,
it seemed, pure will, the counter-revolutionary forces were driven out
(although in the Soviet Far East they continued to operate until 1924).
But the price paid was enormous.
This cannot be counted in merely material terms. But in these alone
it was great. What suffered above all was industrial and agricultural
production. In 1920, the production of pig iron was only 3 per cent of
the pre-war figure; of hemp 10 per cent; flax, 25 per cent; cotton, 11
per cent; beets, 15 per cent. This implied privation, hardship, famine.
But much more. The dislocation of industrial production was also the
dislocation of the working class. It was reduced to 43 per cent of its
former numbers. The others were returned to their villages or dead on
the battlefield. In purely quantitative terms, the class that had led
the revolution, the class whose democratic processes had constituted the
living core of Soviet power, was halved in importance. In real terms the
situation was even worse. What remained was not even half of that class,
forced into collective action by the very nature of its life situation.
Industrial output was only 18 per cent of the pre-war figure, labour
productivity was only one third of what it had been. To keep alive,
workers could not rely on what their collective product would buy. Many
resorted to direct barter of their products - or even parts of their
machines - with peasants for food. Not only was the leading class of the
revolution decimated, but the ties linking its members together were
fast disintegrating. The very personnel in the factories were not those
who had constituted the core of the revolutionary movement of 1917. The
most militant workers had quite naturally fought most at the front, and
suffered most casualties. Those that survived were needed not only in
the factories, but as cadres in the army, or as commissars to keep the
administrators operating the State machine. Raw peasants from the
countryside, without socialist traditions or aspirations, took their
place.
But what was to be the fate of the revolution if the class that made
it ceased to exist in any meaningful sense? This was not a problem that
the Bolshevik leaders could have foreseen. They had always said that
isolation of the revolution would result in its destruction by foreign
armies and domestic counter-revolution. What confronted them now was the
success of counter-revolution from abroad in destroying the class that
had led the revolution while leaving intact the State apparatus built up
by it. The revolutionary power had survived; but radical changes were
being produced in its internal composition.
3. Soviet Power to Bolshevik Dictatorship
The revolutionary institutions of 1917 - above all, the Soviets - were
organically connected with the class that had led the revolution.
Between the aspirations and intentions of their members and those of the
workers who elected them, there could be no gap. While the mass were
Menshevik, the Soviets were Menshevik; when the mass began to follow the
Bolsheviks, so did the Soviets. The Bolshevik party was merely the body
of coordinated class-conscious militants who could frame policies and
suggest causes of action alongside other such bodies, in the Soviets as
in the factories themselves. Their coherent views and self-discipline
meant that they could act to implement policies effectively - but only
if the mass of workers would follow them.
Even consistent opponents of the Bolsheviks recognised this. Their
leading Menshevik critic wrote:
'Understand please, that before us after all is a victorious uprising
of the proletariat - almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin and
expects its social liberation from the uprising ...' [2]
Until the Civil War was well under way, this democratic dialectic of
party and class could continue. The Bolsheviks held power as the
majority party in the Soviets. But other parties continued to exist
there too. The Mensheviks continued to operate legally and compete with
the Bolsheviks for support until June 1918.
The decimation of the working class changed all this. Of necessity
the Soviet institutions took on a life independently of the class they
had arisen from. Those workers and peasants who fought the Civil War
could not govern themselves collectively from their places in the
factories.
The socialist workers spread over the length and breadth of the war
zones had to be organised and coordinated by a centralised governmental
apparatus independent of their direct control - at least temporarily.
It seemed to the Bolsheviks that such a structure could not be held
together unless it contained within it only those who wholeheartedly
supported the revolution - that is, only the Bolsheviks. The Right
Social Revolutionaries were instigators of the counter-revolution. The
Left Social Revolutionaries were willing to resort to terror when they
disagreed with government policy. As for the Mensheviks, their policy
was one of support of the Bolsheviks against the counter-revolution,
with the demand that the latter hand over power to the Constituent
Assembly (one of the chief demands of the counter-revolution). In
practice this meant that the party contained both supporters and
opponents of the Soviet power. Many of its members went over to the side
of the Whites (e.g. Menshevik organisations in the Volga area were
sympathetic to the counter-revolutionary Samara government, and one
member of the Menshevik central committee, Ivan Maisky - later Stalin's
ambassador - joined it). [3] The response of the Bolsheviks was to allow
the party's members their freedom (at least, most of the time), but to
prevent them acting as an effective political force - e.g. they were
allowed no press after June 1918 except for 3 months in the following
year.
In all this the Bolsheviks had no choice. They could not give up
power just because the class they represented had dissolved itself while
fighting to defend that power. Nor could they tolerate the propagation
of ideas that undermined the basis of its power - precisely because the
working class itself no longer existed as an agency collectively
organised so as to be able to determine its own interests.
Of necessity the Soviet State of 1917 had been replaced by the
single-party State of 1920 onwards. The Soviets that remained were
increasingly just a front for Bolshevik power (although other parties,
e.g. the Mensheviks, continued to operate in them as late as 1920). In
1919, for instance, there were no elections to the Moscow Soviet for
over 18 months. [4]
Notes:
1. Trotsky, "The Russian Revolution", p.72.
2. Martov to Axelrod, 19 November 1917, quoted in Israel Getzler,
"Martov", Cambridge, 1967.
3. Israel Getzler, op. cit., p.183.
4. Ibid., p.199
yanicktoutain
i stock the reference
you can read an analysis at
http://site.voila.fr/sociologiehistorique
(I have also problems of translation)
Yours for the revolution
Yanick Toutain
* Sent from AltaVista http://www.altavista.com Where you can also find related Web Pages, Images, Audios, Videos, News, and Shopping. Smart is Beautiful
wen...@my-deja.com
This thread certainly has a misleading title. Was the October 1917
revolution the start of the world revolution, as Lenin believed, or was
it just some national 'aberration'?
Trotsky considered that the revolution was betrayed, but nevertheless
the struggle must go on. He considered the founding of the Fourth
International to be the most important work of his life. IOW, Trotsky
considered the October revolution as the start of WORLD REVOLUTION.
wensin
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Michael Gavin
I agree with Trotsky that the October Revolution was the start of
the world revolution. Unfortunately, as is quite clear now nearly
75 years later is that we ultimately lost that round of the
revolution, not because of some aberration but because of a
mixture of objective and subjective forces contesting in the
class struggle on a world scale.
Only in Russia did the working class succeed in seizing and
holding power. But in the process of defending the revolution the
working class was objectively destroyed and the subjective
revolutionaries were unable to hang on indefinitely before they
were destroyed by a counter-revolution from within which drew on
all the remnants of the old society that the revolutionaries had
of necessity had to use to bolster up their ability to administer
the area under their control.
This is the sense in which I mean that Russian Revolution was
lost ultimately, but nevertheless we can and should learn from
the heroic struggle of the Russian revolutionaries, both in its
initial victory and in the struggle against its degeneration.
As for Trotsky's contribution after he was expelled from Russia I
would agree with him that this was the most important
contribution that he made to the revolutionary movement, a
contribution that was indispensable for the survival of the
genuine Marxist tradition through the midnight of the century (as
Victor Serge called it).
Nevertheless there were problems and mistakes made in this
process and none of the surviving Trotskyist leaders after
Trotsky's murder had the theoretical resources and the experience
to cope with the post-war world, which turned out to be radically
different from Trotsky's predictions.
This however isn't the topic of the current thread. Earlier in
the year there was a thread in which I posted Alex Callinicos's
little study "Trotskyism", which attempts to analyse what
happened from a non-sectarian although aligned perspective. If
you do a Deja.com search on my name I'm sure you'll have no great
difficulty finding the thread. If you need any more pointers I'll
point you in the right direction. In the meantime I would suggest
that you look at the article I'm posting, where many of the
things I'm trying to say about the degeneration of the
revolution are stated far more concisely than I have done so
here.
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Vicente Balvanera
wen...@my-deja.com wrote:
>wensin
>
absolutely; also, the discussion was not about "whose ideas caused the
process of bureaucratization", as Gavin scholasts, but rather on how the
class character of the leadership reflected the relationship of forces
in the international class struggle.
The October Revolution has not been defeated, it continues to be the
most important force of the epoch, the force all bourgeois propaganda is
aimed against, always, on a world scale.
The misnomer of the thread is no accident, since Gavin seems to agree
with redflag, that the October Revolution has been defeated. Both have
lost the horizon of the historic mission of the international working
class.
==
Vicente Balvanera
v_bal...@usa.net
for the CIOS (Comité Iniciativa Obrera Socialista)
(Socialist Worker Iniciative Committee)
http://www.geocities.com/trotskist_1999/
textos en español: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/1602/
Vicente Balvanera
Vicente Balvanera
v_bal...@usa.net
for the CIOS (Comité Iniciativa Obrera Socialista)
(Socialist Worker Iniciative Committee)
http://www.geocities.com/trotskist_1999/
textos en español:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/1602/
Michael Gavin
>
> wen...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >In article <397FDB85...@planet-interkom.de>,
> > Michael Gavin <michae...@planet-interkom.de> wrote:
> >> There has been an inconclusive debate going on about the
> origins of
> >teh
> >> Stalinist bureaucracy, which on one level seems to revolve
> around the
> >> question of whose ideas were responsible for teh rise of
> Stalinism,
> >> those of Lenin or those of Stalin.
> >>
> >> The Trotskyist movement has always stressed the material
> constraints
> >on
> >> the isolated revolution due to teh failure of teh revolution
> to spread
> >> from a backward country to the advanced capitalist countries
> (most
> >> particularly Germany).
> >>
> >
> >Trotsky considered that the revolution was betrayed, but
> nevertheless
> >the struggle must go on. He considered the founding of the
> Fourth
> >International to be the most important work of his life. IOW,
> Trotsky
> >considered the October revolution as the start of WORLD
> REVOLUTION.
> >
>
> absolutely; also, the discussion was not about "whose ideas
> caused the process of bureaucratization", as Gavin scholasts,
> but rather on how the class character of the leadership
> reflected the relationship of forces in the international class
> struggle.
>
read or is it that you're blinded by your sectarian prejudice?
Read what I say, not what you'd loved me to say.
My reference to ideas was a negative reference to the dominant
tenor of the debate so far - particularly as posed by redflag.
Just in case you're too lazy to go back and read what I wrote
here it is (including any typos): "There has been an inconclusive
debate going on about the origins of teh Stalinist bureaucracy,
which on one level seems to revolve around the question of whose
ideas were responsible for teh rise of Stalinism, those of Lenin
or those of Stalin."
Note what I say: "inconclusive debate" which "on one level"
revolves "around the question of whose ideas were responsible". I
didn't say everybody was talking about ideas and neglecting
material circumstances - merely that as far as I could see this
was the dominant element, at least in the sense that redflag, who
IIRC initiated this discussion, keeps coming back to basically
the same idealist position.
I then go on to point out: "The Trotskyist movement has always
stressed the *material* constraints on the isolated revolution
due to teh failure of teh revolution to spread from a backward
country to the advanced capitalist countries (most particularly
Germany)." (emphasis added)
The problems of the revolution arose from *material* reality not
ideas and that is precisely why I am critical of the essentially
bourgeois "great man" version of the degeneration of the
revolution being put forward by redflag.
> The October Revolution has not been defeated, it continues to
> be the most important force of the epoch, the force all
> bourgeois propaganda is aimed against, always, on a world
> scale.
>
I suppose this is one way of looking at it. Certainly the ideas
of the Russian Revolution and the inspiration it gives to
revolutionaries are still very much alive today. But I do think
it is a bit much not to recognise that a whole revolutionary
generation was wiped out and effectively destroyed by the
combination of Stalinism and fascism.
The Paris Commune was defeated by bloody repression, but it lives
on as an inspiration. The 1905 Revolution went down in blood, but
it lived on to inspire the Bolsheviks in 1917 and still inspires
revolutionaries today. The German Revolution 1919-23, the
Hungarian Revolution 1918-19, the Chinese Revolution 1926-27, the
Spanish Revolution 1931-39, the Hungarian Revolution 1956, to
name but a few, went down under waves of bloody repression but
they still inspire us today.
The Stalinist counter-revolution suppressed the revolutionary
movement in the USSR bloodily - a river of blood, as it has been
rightly called - wiping out anybody who had even marginally been
"tainted" by the experience of the October Revolution. Why was
this not a defeat? Or is there some mystical sense in which the
Russian Revolution transcends its bloody counter-revolutionary
repression?
This sort of position has more in common with religion than with
dialectical materialism, a philosophy which require us to look
reality in the face, not hide behind myths.
> The misnomer of the thread is no accident, since Gavin seems to
> agree with redflag, that the October Revolution has been
> defeated. Both have lost the horizon of the historic mission of
> the international working class.
>
This is utter crap. The working class has risen up on numerous
occasions since the first traces of a modern proletariat emerged
in the Italian city states in the late Middle Ages. Time and
again it has been thrown back, often drowned in blood.
Nevertheless, because of the material conditions under which the
working class exists in capitalist society it is forced again and
again, even after the most devastating defeats, to continue to
fight against exploitation and oppression.
As the Communist Manifesto says capitalism creates its own grave
digger, the proletariat. This international class will rise again
and again against the capitalist system until it finally breaks
through and overthrows the capitalist system. Or if it is unable
to do so, we will stand before the other fate posed by Marx and
Engels at the beginning of the Manifesto, the mutual ruin of the
contending classes. The alternative is socialism or barbarism as
Rosa Luxemburg, paraphrasing Engels, put it.
The historic mission of the working international working class
is the overthrow of the capitalist system. This has been its
historic mission since its origins and it remains so. But
refusing to look reality in the face, belief in the mystical
force of the Russian Revolution - its supposed ability to survive
despite a bloody counter-revolution - has little in common with
Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism or with Marxism - or indeed
with materialism of any kind - and is ultimately a hindrance to
the building of the kind of revolutionary party necessary
to coordinate and organise the overthrow of capitalism by the
working class.
Vicente likes to preach about the necessity of an international
revolutionary party of the working class, but his essentially
idealist approach - in some cases even what appears to be his
mystical reverence for the Russian Revolution and the
revolutionary programme - means that he is always talking about
it, but never seems to do anything about it.
Michael Gavin
RemarQ and once from Deja.com? - it seems a bit excessive to me,
especially given the intrinsic worth of what you had to say.
Michael Gavin
-text -
4. Kronstadt and the NEP
Paradoxically, the end of the Civil War did not alleviate this
situation, but in many ways aggravated it. For with the end of the
immediate threat of counter-revolution, the cord that had bound together
the two revolutionary processes - workers' power in the towns and
peasant uprisings in the country - was cut. Having gained control over
the land, the peasants lost interest in the collectivist revolutionary
ideals of October. They were motivated by individual aspirations arising
out of their individualistic form of work. Each sought to maximise his
own standard of living through his activities on his own plot of land.
Indeed, the only thing which could now unite peasants into a coherent
group was opposition to the taxes and forcible collections of grain
carried out in order to feed the urban populations.
The high point of this opposition came a week before the tenth party
Congress. An uprising of sailors broke out in the Kronstadt fortress,
which guarded the approaches to Petrograd. Many people since have
treated what happened next as the first break between the Bolshevik
regime and its socialist intentions. The fact that the Kronstadt sailors
were one of the main drives of the 1917 revolution has often been used
as an argument for this. Yet at the time no one in the Bolshevik Party -
not even the workers' opposition which claimed to represent the
antipathy of many workers to the regime - had any doubts as to what it
was necessary to do. The reason was simple. Kronstadt in 1920 was not
Kronstadt of 1917. The class composition of its sailors had changed. The
best socialist elements had long ago gone off to fight in the army in
the front line. They were replaced in the main by peasants whose
devotion to the revolution was that of their class. This was reflected
in the demands of the uprising: Soviets without Bolsheviks and a free
market in agriculture. The Bolshevik leaders could not accede to such
demands. It would have meant liquidation of the socialist aims of the
revolution without struggle. For all its faults, it was precisely the
Bolshevik party that had alone whole-heartedly supported Soviet power,
while the other parties, even the socialist parties, had vacillated
between it and the Whites. It was to the Bolsheviks that all the best
militants had been attracted. Soviets without Bolsheviks could only mean
Soviets without the party which had consistently sought to express the
socialist, collectivist aims of the working class in the revolution.
What was expressed in Kronstadt was the fundamental divergence of
interest, in the long run, between the two classes that had made the
revolution. The suppression of the uprising should be seen not as an
attack on the socialist content of the revolution, but as a desperate
attempt, using force, to prevent the developing peasant opposition to
its collectivist ends from destroying it. [5]
Yet the fact that Kronstadt could occur was an omen. For it
questioned the whole leading role of the working class in the
revolution. This was being maintained not by the superior economic mode
that the working class represented, not by its higher labour
productivity, but by physical force. And this force was not being
wielded directly by the armed workers, but by a party tied to the
working class only indirectly, by its ideas, not directly as in the days
of 1917.
Such a policy was necessary. But there was little in it that
socialists could have supported in any other situation. Instead of being
'the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the
interest of the immense majority,' the revolution in Russia had reached
the stage where it involved the exploitation of the country by the
towns, maintained through naked physical force. It was clear to all
groups in the Bolshevik party that this meant the revolution must remain
in danger of being overthrown by peasant insurrections.
There seemed to be only one course open. This was to accept many of
the peasant demands, while maintaining a strong, centralised socialist
State apparatus. This the New Economic Policy (NEP) attempted to do. Its
aim was to reconcile peasants to the regime and to encourage economic
development by giving a limited range of freedom to private commodity
production. The State and the State-owned industries were to operate as
just one element in an economy governed by the needs of peasant
production and the play of market forces.
5. The Party, the State and the working class 1921-8
In the period of the NEP the claim of Russia to be in any way
'socialist' could no longer be justified either by the relationship of
the working class to the State it had originally created or by the
nature of internal economic relations. The workers did not exercise
power and the economy was not planned. But the State, the 'body of armed
men' that controlled and policed society was in the hands of a party
that was motivated by socialist intentions. The direction of its
policies, it seemed, would be socialist.
Yet the situation was more complex than this. First, the State
institutions that dominated Russian society were far from identical with
the militant socialist party of 1917. Those who had been in the
Bolshevik Party at the time of the February revolution were committed
socialists who had taken enormous risks in resisting Tsarist oppression
to. express their ideals. Even four years of civil war and isolation
from the working masses could not easily destroy their socialist
aspirations. But in 1919 these constituted only a tenth of the party, by
1922 a fortieth. In the revolution and Civil War, the party had
undergone a continuous process of growth. In part this reflected the
tendency of all militant workers and convinced socialists to join in.
But it was also a result of other tendencies. Once the working class
itself had been decimated, the party had had to take it upon itself to
control all Soviet-run areas. This it could only do by increasing its
own size. Further, once it was clear who was winning the Civil War, many
individuals with little or no socialist convictions attempted to enter
the party. The party itself was thus far from being a homogeneous
socialist force. At best, only its leading elements and most militant
members could be said to be really part of the socialist tradition.
This internal dilution of the party was paralleled by a corresponding
phenomenon in the State apparatus itself. In order to maintain control
over Russian society, the Bolshevik party had been forced to use
thousands of members of the old Tsarist bureaucracy in order to maintain
a functioning governmental machine. In theory the Bolsheviks were to
direct the work of these in a socialist direction. In practice, old
habits and methods of work, pre-revolutionary attitudes towards the
masses in particular, often prevailed. Lenin was acutely aware of the
implications of this:
'What we lack is clear enough,' he said at the March 1922 Party
Congress. 'The ruling stratum of the communists is lacking in
culture. Let us look at Moscow. This mass of bureaucrats - who is
leading whom? The 4,700 responsible communists, the mass of
bureacrats, or the other way round? I do not believe you can honestly
say the communists are leading this mass. To put it honestly, they
are not the leaders but the led.'
At the end of 1922, he described the State apparatus as 'borrowed
from Tsarism and hardly touched by the Soviet world ... a bourgeois and
Tsarist mechanism.' [6] In the 1920 controversy over the role of the
trade unions he argued
'Ours is not actually a workers' state, but a workers' and peasants'
State ... But that is not all. Our party programme shows that ours is
a workers' state with bureaucratic distortions.' [7]
The real situation was even worse than this. It was not just the case
that the old Bolsheviks were in a situation where the combined strength
of hostile class forces and bureaucratic inertness made their socialist
aspirations difficult to realise. These aspirations themselves could not
remain forever uncorrupted by the hostile environment. The exigencies of
building a disciplined army out of an often indifferent peasant mass had
inculcated into many of the best party members authoritarian habits.
Under the NEP the situation was different, but still far from the
democratic interaction of leaders and led that constitutes the essence
of socialist democracy. Now many party members found themselves having
to control society by coming to terms with the small trader, the petty
capitalist, the *kulak*. They had to represent the interests of the
workers' State as against these elements - but not as in the past
through direct physical confrontation. There had to be limited
co-operation with them. Many party members seemed more influenced by
this immediate and very tangible relationship with petty bourgeois
elements than by their intangible ties with a weak and demoralised
working class.
Above all the influence of the old bureaucracy in which its members
were immersed penetrated the party. Its isolation from class forces
outside itself that would sustain its rule meant that the party had to
exert over itself an iron discipline. Thus at the Tenth Party Congress,
although it was presumed that discussion would continue within the
party, [8] the establishment of formal factions was 'temporarily'
banned. But this demand for inner cohesion easily degenerated into an
acceptance of bureaucratic modes of control within the party. There had
been complaints about these by opposition elements in the party as early
as April 1920. By 1922 even Lenin could write that 'we have a
bureaucracy not only in the Soviet institutions, but in the institutions
of the party.'
The erosion of inner-party democracy is best shown by the fate of
successive oppositions to the central leadership. In 1917 and 1918 free
discussion within the party, with the right of different groups to
organise around platforms, was taken for granted. Lenin himself was in a
minority in the party on at least two occasions (at the time of his
"April Theses" and nearly a year later during the Brest Litovsk
negotiations). In November 1917 it was possible for those Bolsheviks who
disagreed with the party taking power alone, to resign from the
government so as to force its hand without disciplinary action being
taken against them. Divisions within the party over the question of the
advance on Warsaw and over the role of the trade unions were discussed
quite openly in the party press. As late as 1921 the Programme of the
Workers' Opposition was printed in a quarter of a million copies by the
Party itself, and two members of the opposition elected to the Central
Committee. In 1923 when the Left Opposition developed, it was still
possible for it to express its views in "Pravda", although there were
ten articles defending the leadership to every one opposing it.
Yet throughout this period the possibilities of any opposition acting
effectively were diminished. After the tenth Party Congress the Workers'
Opposition was banned. By 1923 the opposition 'Platform of the 46' wrote
that 'the secretarial hierarchy of the Party to an ever greater extent
recruits the membership of conferences and congresses.' [9] Even a
supporter of the leadership and editor of "Pravda", Bukharin, depicted
the typical functioning of the party as completely undemocratic:
'... the secretaries of the nuclei are usually appointed by the
district committees, and note that the districts do not even try to
have their candidates accepted by these nuclei, but content
themselves with appointing these or those comrades. As a rule,
putting the matter to a vote takes place according to a method that
is taken for granted. The meeting is asked: "Who is against?" and in
as much as one fears more or less to speak up against, the appointed
candidate finds himself elected ...' [10]
The real extent of bureaucratisation was fully revealed when the
'triumvirate' that had taken over the leadership of the Party during the
illness of Lenin split. Towards the end of 1925 Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Krupskaya moved into opposition to the party centre, now controlled by
Stalin. Zinoviev was head of the party in Leningrad. As such he
controlled the administrative machine of the northern capital and
several influential newspapers. At the fourteenth Party Congress every
delegate from Leningrad supported his opposition to the centre. Yet
within weeks of the defeat of his opposition, all sections of the Party
in Leningrad, with the exception of a few hundred inveterate
oppositionists, were voting resolutions supporting Stalin's policies.
All that was required to accomplish this was the removal from office of
the heads of the City Party administration. Who controlled the
bureaucracy controlled the Party. When Zinoviev controlled it, it was
oppositional. Now that Stalin had added the city to the nation-wide
apparatus he controlled, it became an adherent of his policies. With a
change of leaders a Zinovievist monolith was transformed into a
Stalinist monolith.
This rise of bureaucracy in the Soviet apparatus and the Party began
as a result of the decimation of the working class in the civil war. But
it continued even when industry began to recover and the working class
began to grow with NEP. Economic recovery rather than raising the
position of the working class within the 'workers' state' depressed it.
In purely material terms the concessions made to the peasant in the NEP
worsened the (relative) position of the worker.
'Everywhere acclaimed under war communism as the eponymous hero of
the dictatorship of the proletariat, he was in danger of becoming the
step-child of the NEP. In the economic crisis of 1923 neither the
defenders of the official policy nor those who contested it in the
name of the development of industry found it necessary to treat the
grievances or the interests of the industrial worker as a matter of
major concern.' [11]
But it was not only vis-a-vis the peasant that the status of the
worker fell; it also fell compared with that of the directors and
managers of industry. Whereas in 1922, 65 per cent of managing personnel
were officially classified as workers, and 35 per cent as non-workers, a
year later these figures were almost reversed, only 36 per cent being
workers and 64 per cent non-workers. [12] The 'red industrialists' began
to emerge as a privileged group, with high salaries, and through
'one-man management' in the factories, able to hire and fire at will. At
the same time widespread unemployment became endemic to the Soviet
economy, rising to a level of one and a quarter millions in 1923-4.
Notes:
5. See Trotsky, "Hue and Cry over Kronstadt".
6. Quoted in Max Shachtman, "The Struggle for the New Course", New
York, 1943, p. 150.
7. Lenin, "Collected Works", Vol. 32, p. 24.
8. See Lenin's response to Riazanov's demand that the habit of
different groups within the Party putting forward 'platforms' be
prohibited: 'We cannot deprive the Party and the members of the
central committee of the right to appeal to the Party in the event
of disagreement on fundamental issues. I cannot imagine how we can
do such a thing!' Lenin, "Collected Works", Vol. 32, p. 261.
9. Appendix to E.H. Carr, "The Interregnum", p. 369.
10. Quoted in Shachtman, op. cit., p. 172.
11. E.H. Carr, op. cit., p. 39.
constantin
SENT TO HELL.
-VIVA THE 91 REVOLOUTION.
-VIVA YELTSIN LIBERATOR.
-VIVA PUTIN .
-VIVA E.U.
-VIVA THE RESTOIRING OF FREEDOM TO BUY AND SELL.
VIVA THE LOST OF 10% OF THE LEFT FORCES IN THE LAST ELECTIONS.
Paracelsus
<ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> THANK GOD THAT THE COMMIES AND THE SOVIET UNITED HELL HAS BENN
> SENT TO HELL.
> -VIVA THE 91 REVOLOUTION.
> -VIVA YELTSIN LIBERATOR.
> -VIVA PUTIN .
> -VIVA E.U.
> -VIVA THE RESTOIRING OF FREEDOM TO BUY AND SELL.
>
> VIVA THE LOST OF 10% OF THE LEFT FORCES IN THE LAST ELECTIONS.
>
You may as well say, "VIVA INTERNATIONAL PROFIT MAKING BY ALL THAT EXPLOIT
THE RUSSIAN WORKING CLASS", since basically that's what it amounts to.
2 years ago workers were starving due to the effects of Capitalism in
Russia. Are you going to "VIVA" that, or are you going to start maturely
recognizing that your system is little more than a heap of crap?
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Got questions? Get answers over the phone at Keen.com.
> Up to 100 minutes free!
> http://www.keen.com
--
To email me, remove "NOSPAM" from my address.
constantin
every moument
Handgunner
news:sorcer-E-280...@ip-216-222-14-29.salmoninternet.com...
> In article <0002ec4d...@usw-ex0104-025.remarq.com>, constantin
> <ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
> > THANK GOD THAT THE COMMIES AND THE SOVIET UNITED HELL HAS BENN
> > SENT TO HELL.
> > -VIVA THE 91 REVOLOUTION.
> > -VIVA YELTSIN LIBERATOR.
> > -VIVA PUTIN .
> > -VIVA E.U.
> > -VIVA THE RESTOIRING OF FREEDOM TO BUY AND SELL.
> >
> > VIVA THE LOST OF 10% OF THE LEFT FORCES IN THE LAST ELECTIONS.
> >
>
> You may as well say, "VIVA INTERNATIONAL PROFIT MAKING BY ALL THAT EXPLOIT
> THE RUSSIAN WORKING CLASS", since basically that's what it amounts to.
>
> 2 years ago workers were starving due to the effects of Capitalism in
> Russia. Are you going to "VIVA" that, or are you going to start maturely
> recognizing that your system is little more than a heap of crap?
>
> >
When's the last time you were in Russia, Dragqueen??? Speaking as someone
who's father has been there for months at a time (working in the oil
industry) over the past 11 or so years, I can tell you....it's much better
now that it was!!
Hell, at least when they stand in line for eight hours to get toilet
paper/bread/milk/ or anything else, there actually *IS SOME* at the end of
the line! Quality *western* brands, too!! Hell, you could always get
Marborlos there, but try getting Charmin!!
I would say that's an improvement...not a great one, but one none-the-less.
--
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell `em.
--Louis Armstrong
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
No Regards for the Stupid,
Handgunner
Vicente Balvanera
wrote:
>Is it strictly necessary to post your stuff twice, once from
>RemarQ and once from Deja.com? - it seems a bit excessive to me,
>especially given the intrinsic worth of what you had to say.
>
>
>
>Got questions? Get answers over the phone at Keen.com.
>Up to 100 minutes free!
>http://www.keen.com
>
>
don't get your scholastic feathers ruffled: remarq server went
down just as I was posting, so just wanted to make sure the post
got through, if you don't mind.
sorry you don't like my stuff.
Vicente Balvanera
v_bal...@usa.net
for the CIOS (Comité Iniciativa Obrera Socialista)
(Socialist Worker Iniciative Committee)
http://www.geocities.com/trotskist_1999/
textos en español:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/1602/
Vicente Balvanera
wrote:
The fact that redflag posits the debate in idealistic terms is no
surprise. The fact that you accept those terms of debate... comes
as no surprise either.
>I then go on to point out: "The Trotskyist movement has always
>stressed the *material* constraints on the isolated revolution
>due to teh failure of teh revolution to spread from a backward
>country to the advanced capitalist countries (most particularly
>Germany)." (emphasis added)
>
>The problems of the revolution arose from *material* reality not
>ideas and that is precisely why I am critical of the essentially
>bourgeois "great man" version of the degeneration of the
>revolution being put forward by redflag.
>
You say you are critical of it, but as we see from the following,
you are completely blind to the October Revolution as a concrete,
material force in the internatinal class struggle today.
>> The October Revolution has not been defeated, it continues to
>> be the most important force of the epoch, the force all
>> bourgeois propaganda is aimed against, always, on a world
>> scale.
>>
>I suppose this is one way of looking at it. Certainly the ideas
>of the Russian Revolution and the inspiration it gives to
>revolutionaries are still very much alive today. But I do think
>it is a bit much not to recognise that a whole revolutionary
>generation was wiped out and effectively destroyed by the
>combination of Stalinism and fascism.
>
First of all, I am not talking about _inspiration_, although
certainly inspiring it was. Here you apply automatically an
idealist analysis of what I am saying.
I am talking about the October Revolution not having been
defeated, and the material base for this is that the Leninist
analysis of the objective crisis of capitalism still holds:
CAPITALISM HAS NOT STABILIZED, THERE STILL EXIST THE SAME
OBJECTIVE MATERIAL REVOLUTIONARY CONDITIONS!
This is what you are trying to hide.
The fact that the revolutionary Marxist cadre was severely
damaged by stalinism and by fascism and by formal
democratic capitalism (you ommit this last detail) is part of the
explanation for the failure of the world socialist revolution
following world war II, and for the degeneration of the Fourth
International, and for the betrayals made; this is why
revolutionary Marxists must call for the reconstruction of the
Fourth International.
But it by no means may be used as an argument for the supposed
defeat of the October Revolution.
Every bourgeois politician, spokesman, boss, and trade union
bureaucrat, in every speech he or she makes MUST TAKE THE OCTOBER
REVOLUTION INTO ACCOUNT. And does. Analyze Nader's texts, or the
texts of any trade union bureaucrat, the texts of the AFL-CIO:
you can see the anti-Communism, the need to portray the October
Revolution as being dead, "long gone". Handgunner on this very
newsgroup used those very words. Ask Constantin, for example, if
he thinks the October Revolution is dead.
>The Paris Commune was defeated by bloody repression, but it
lives
>on as an inspiration. The 1905 Revolution went down in blood,
but
>it lived on to inspire the Bolsheviks in 1917 and still inspires
>revolutionaries today. The German Revolution 1919-23, the
>Hungarian Revolution 1918-19, the Chinese Revolution 1926-27,
the
>Spanish Revolution 1931-39, the Hungarian Revolution 1956, to
>name but a few, went down under waves of bloody repression but
>they still inspire us today.
>
So I think I have made it clear I am not talking about
petty-bourgeois "inspiration": I am talking of the
international class struggle.
The international class struggle which gave rise to the
Bureaucratized and Deformed Worker States in Eastern Europe, in
Vietnam, in Cuba, the Bolivian Revolution in 1952, the failed
African Revolution, the failed Salvadorean and Nicaraguan
revolutions, etc., etc., etc., the pro-socialist, working class
led anti-Stalinist revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe.
All of this, for Gavin, was "religious, mystical inspiration"!
No, Gavin, concrete sparks of the international workers' October
Revolution, which, going through various stages, we will struggle
to make victorious.
>The Stalinist counter-revolution suppressed the revolutionary
>movement in the USSR bloodily - a river of blood, as it has been
>rightly called - wiping out anybody who had even marginally been
>"tainted" by the experience of the October Revolution. Why was
>this not a defeat? Or is there some mystical sense in which the
>Russian Revolution transcends its bloody counter-revolutionary
>repression?
>
You are the mystic: how can you call yourself a Trotskyist and be
attempting (lamely) to refute Trotsky's analysis of the
correlation of forces on a world scale, following WWII, as
outlined, for example, in the Transitional Program?
Trotsky knew about the "rivers of blood", but he looked beyond
the quantitative attack on cadre in order to be able to make an
analysis: he analyzed the international class struggle itself,
and said that capitalism would come out of WWII worse than it
went in, that the period following WWII would be a period of wars
and revolution, a revolutionary period: AND HE WAS RIGHT.
In the CIOS, we do think that the failure of the anti-Stalinist
political revolution in the former USSR and in the Bureaucratized
Worker States, and its necessary outcome, as outlined in the
Transitional Program, the fall of the former Soviet Union; we do
think this gives rise to a period in which world capitalism has
the iniciative, and continues to strip away working class gains.
But not for a moment do we think this has signified the _defeat_
of the October Revolution: that is nothing less than capitulation
to bourgeois lies, to petty-bourgeois demoralization.
>This sort of position has more in common with religion than with
>dialectical materialism, a philosophy which require us to look
>reality in the face, not hide behind myths.
>
>> The misnomer of the thread is no accident, since Gavin seems
to
>> agree with redflag, that the October Revolution has been
>> defeated. Both have lost the horizon of the historic mission
of
>> the international working class.
>>
>This is utter crap. The working class has risen up on numerous
>occasions since the first traces of a modern proletariat emerged
>in the Italian city states in the late Middle Ages. Time and
>again it has been thrown back, often drowned in blood.
>Nevertheless, because of the material conditions under which the
>working class exists in capitalist society it is forced again
and
>again, even after the most devastating defeats, to continue to
>fight against exploitation and oppression.
>
Yes, the working class continues to fight against exploitation
and oppression, as it does in Argentina after the defeat
signified by the failure to stop the Labor Reform.
But you are taking the subjective factor alone, the consciousness
of the working class at this moment, and trying to use this as
part of an argument that the October Revolution, as an objective
force in the international class struggle, is "long gone".
This is not only idealistic, in that it turns a
Bolshevik-leninist analysis on its head, but is also extremely
myopic.
Prianikoff attacked me for calling the failure to stop the Labor
Reform law in Argentina a "defeat", and pointed to a series of
protests and demonstrations, which have culminated in a recent
"publicity stunt" demonstration against the foreign debt led by
the now Peronist politician, Moyano, and a fizzled, separate
"march" led by the traitors of the CTA, who are trying to form a
so-called workers party, as a fuse for the bourgeoisie in case
the Alianza deteriorates too rapidly.
But the CIOS calls this a defeat since it shows that
international capitalism still has the iniciative in the
correlation of forces in the class struggle: but the class
struggle itself will give rise to more and more protests, and the
working class can gain the upper hand, historically, as levels of
consciousness rise and revolutionary workers parties are built.
The reason we can affirm this, is precisely because the October
Revolution is still a concrete force in this class struggle.
Once again, the Red Tide insinuation that anyone who participates
in this forum necessarily isn't active politically.
That is, the fact that someone is writing, means necessarily that
he is not "doing anything".
Gavin used to be above this Kevin Murphy and Bob Dahlgren kind of
approach.
But I guess program is thicker than water.
Vicente Balvanera
v_bal...@usa.net
for the CIOS (Comité Iniciativa Obrera Socialista)
(Socialist Worker Iniciative Committee)
http://www.geocities.com/trotskist_1999/
textos en español:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/1602/
wen...@my-deja.com
Michael Gavin <michaelgav...@planet-interkom.de.invalid> wrote:
> As for Trotsky's contribution after he was expelled from Russia I
> would agree with him that this was the most important
> contribution that he made to the revolutionary movement, a
> contribution that was indispensable for the survival of the
> genuine Marxist tradition through the midnight of the century (as
> Victor Serge called it).
You seem keen on Victor Serge. Are you trying to blend Marxism with
Anarchism? It's been tried before but without much success.
Anyhow, I still don't consider the October revolution as lost. Battles
are still going on all the time even in Russia itself.
Has all the land and industry in Russia been privatised? Are all the
welfare and political reforms gained in the west on the back of the
October revolution now overturned? Have all the national liberation
movements of the ex-colonies been defeated?
It seems to me that you concede defeat too easily.
Stephen R. Diamond
> Anyhow, I still don't consider the October revolution as lost. Battles
> are still going on all the time even in Russia itself.
You have to realize Gavin thinks the revolution was completely defeated
circa 1928, and that the propertly forms became "state capitalist."
srd
Bert Byfield
Battles
> > are still going on all the time even in Russia itself.
> You have to realize Gavin thinks the revolution was completely
defeated
> circa 1928, and that the propertly forms became "state capitalist."
Well, that *was* the year that Stalin achieved total control of the
Soviet government. It would have been news to Stalin and the Old
Bolsheviks that they were capitalists, though, since they were jailing
and shooting the capitalists at the time.
David Callaghan
m>, Paracelsus <sorc...@NOSPAM.mailcity.com> writes
>In article <0002ec4d...@usw-ex0104-025.remarq.com>, constantin
><ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>> THANK GOD THAT THE COMMIES AND THE SOVIET UNITED HELL HAS BENN
>> SENT TO HELL.
>> -VIVA THE 91 REVOLOUTION.
>> -VIVA YELTSIN LIBERATOR.
>> -VIVA PUTIN .
>> -VIVA E.U.
>> -VIVA THE RESTOIRING OF FREEDOM TO BUY AND SELL.
>>
>> VIVA THE LOST OF 10% OF THE LEFT FORCES IN THE LAST ELECTIONS.
>>
>
>You may as well say, "VIVA INTERNATIONAL PROFIT MAKING BY ALL THAT EXPLOIT
>THE RUSSIAN WORKING CLASS", since basically that's what it amounts to.
>
>2 years ago workers were starving due to the effects of Capitalism in
>Russia. Are you going to "VIVA" that, or are you going to start maturely
>recognizing that your system is little more than a heap of crap?
Well said comrade.
and I *mean* that
--
Callaghan
Michael Gavin
>
> Michael Gavin <michaelgav...@planet-interkom.de.invalid>
> wrote:
> >Vicente Balvanera wrote:
> >>
> The fact that redflag posits the debate in idealistic terms is
no
> surprise. The fact that you accept those terms of debate...
comes
> as no surprise either.
>
I've been arguing . My starting point is my complete rejection of
the idealist position positied by redflag.
But since you've decided that a priori I must have the same
position as redflag then it must be so regardless of what I say.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
> >I then go on to point out: "The Trotskyist movement has always
> >stressed the *material* constraints on the isolated revolution
> >due to teh failure of teh revolution to spread from a backward
> >country to the advanced capitalist countries (most
particularly
> >Germany)." (emphasis added)
> >
> >The problems of the revolution arose from *material* reality
not
> >ideas and that is precisely why I am critical of the
essentially
> >bourgeois "great man" version of the degeneration of the
> >revolution being put forward by redflag.
> >
>
> You say you are critical of it, but as we see from the
following,
> you are completely blind to the October Revolution as a
concrete,
> material force in the internatinal class struggle today.
>
It depends on what you mean by a material force. If you mean that
the bourgeoisie dreads the possibility of a workers' revolution
then that is certainly a material force in the international
class struggle today. But it was also a material force in the
class struggle before 1917. Indeed it has been a material force
in the class struggle since the working class first appeared as
an independent actor on the political stage in the Revolutions of
1848. As Marx and Engels said at the time: "A spectre is haunting
Europe. the spectre of Communism." (Incidentally, according to
your criteria this is a dangerously idealist statement!) The
October Revolution was just a highpoint, the highest point so
far, in this struggle.
If you mean it in any other way I'm afraid that you're living in
Cloud Cuckoo Land.
> >> The October Revolution has not been defeated, it continues
to
> >> be the most important force of the epoch, the force all
> >> bourgeois propaganda is aimed against, always, on a world
> >> scale.
> >>
> >I suppose this is one way of looking at it. Certainly the
ideas
> >of the Russian Revolution and the inspiration it gives to
> >revolutionaries are still very much alive today. But I do
think
> >it is a bit much not to recognise that a whole revolutionary
> >generation was wiped out and effectively destroyed by the
> >combination of Stalinism and fascism.
> >
>
> First of all, I am not talking about _inspiration_, although
> certainly inspiring it was. Here you apply automatically an
> idealist analysis of what I am saying.
>
> I am talking about the October Revolution not having been
> defeated, and the material base for this is that the Leninist
> analysis of the objective crisis of capitalism still holds:
> CAPITALISM HAS NOT STABILIZED, THERE STILL EXIST THE SAME
> OBJECTIVE MATERIAL REVOLUTIONARY CONDITIONS!
>
There is a difference between saying that the objective material
basis for revolution exists and drawing the conclusion from that
that the October revolution hasn't existed. Such conditions
existed in 1917 and would have existed whether the Bolsheviks had
cocked up the revolution or not. Indeed Trotsky devotes quite a
bit of time in his magnificent "History of the Russian
Revolution" to the question of what might have happened if Lenin
had been killed by a falling slate before his decisive
interventions and comes to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks
would have fucked it up (my paraphrase of Trotsky's more
considered discussion of the matter).
> This is what you are trying to hide.
>
BTW are you implying that exactly the same objective material
revolutionary conditions have existed continuously since 1917?
> The fact that the revolutionary Marxist cadre was severely
> damaged by stalinism and by fascism and by formal
> democratic capitalism (you ommit this last detail) is part of
the
> explanation for the failure of the world socialist revolution
> following world war II, and for the degeneration of the Fourth
> International, and for the betrayals made; this is why
> revolutionary Marxists must call for the reconstruction of the
> Fourth International.
>
I admit that I omitted formally democratic capitalism - but I was
stressing more the physical elimination of the revolutionary
cadre both by the Stalinists and by the fascists. Even during
McCarthyism there weren't mass executions of Communists in the
USA although there were a number of show trials and executions.
> But it by no means may be used as an argument for the supposed
> defeat of the October Revolution.
>
> Every bourgeois politician, spokesman, boss, and trade union
> bureaucrat, in every speech he or she makes MUST TAKE THE
OCTOBER
> REVOLUTION INTO ACCOUNT. And does. Analyze Nader's texts, or
the
> texts of any trade union bureaucrat, the texts of the AFL-CIO:
> you can see the anti-Communism, the need to portray the October
> Revolution as being dead, "long gone". Handgunner on this very
> newsgroup used those very words. Ask Constantin, for example,
if
> he thinks the October Revolution is dead.
>
See above.
> >The Paris Commune was defeated by bloody repression, but it
> lives
> >on as an inspiration. The 1905 Revolution went down in blood,
> but
> >it lived on to inspire the Bolsheviks in 1917 and still
inspires
> >revolutionaries today. The German Revolution 1919-23, the
> >Hungarian Revolution 1918-19, the Chinese Revolution 1926-27,
> the
> >Spanish Revolution 1931-39, the Hungarian Revolution 1956, to
> >name but a few, went down under waves of bloody repression but
> >they still inspire us today.
> >
>
> So I think I have made it clear I am not talking about
> petty-bourgeois "inspiration": I am talking of the
> international class struggle.
>
So the "spectre of communism" is petty-bourgeois idealism?
> The international class struggle which gave rise to the
> Bureaucratized and Deformed Worker States in Eastern Europe, in
> Vietnam, in Cuba, the Bolivian Revolution in 1952, the failed
> African Revolution, the failed Salvadorean and Nicaraguan
> revolutions, etc., etc., etc., the pro-socialist, working class
> led anti-Stalinist revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe.
>
Well, I'm on record as believing that the "Bureaucratized and
Deformed Worker States in Eastern Europe" were no such thing and
nothing you or Paris or any other "orthodox" Trotskyists have
ever said has given me any reason to doubt my position, but be
that as it may. The class struggle didn't go away because of the
ultimate defeat of the Russian Revolution, any more than it went
away after the defeats of the working class in 1848, 1871 or
1905. The other struggles you list would probably have arisen
sooner or later in one form or another whether the October
Revolution had initially succeeded or not.
BTW could you be a bit more specific about who or what you mean
by "the pro-socialist, working class led anti-Stalinist
revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe"? A few names or
organisations might be helpful.
> All of this, for Gavin, was "religious, mystical inspiration"!
>
> No, Gavin, concrete sparks of the international workers'
October
> Revolution, which, going through various stages, we will
struggle
> to make victorious.
>
This is simply rhetoric. Of course, we will struggle to carry out
the successful world socialist revolution - but this doesn't
require us to have a mystical vision of the working class
struggle ever onwards and upwards - such a vision has more in
common with Stalinism, particularly in its Maoist variant.
We have to recognise that the working class has on occasions
suffered setbacks, often serious setbacks and the degeneration
and ultimate defeat of the Russian Revolution at the hands of the
Stalinist bureaucracy, the "enemy from within" if you like, was
perhaps the most serious of these setbacks since it paved the way
for the victory of Hitler and the destruction of the German
working class movement, the largest and best organised working
class movement the world has seen to date.
> >The Stalinist counter-revolution suppressed the revolutionary
> >movement in the USSR bloodily - a river of blood, as it has
been
> >rightly called - wiping out anybody who had even marginally
been
> >"tainted" by the experience of the October Revolution. Why was
> >this not a defeat? Or is there some mystical sense in which
the
> >Russian Revolution transcends its bloody counter-revolutionary
> >repression?
> >
>
> You are the mystic: how can you call yourself a Trotskyist and
be
> attempting (lamely) to refute Trotsky's analysis of the
> correlation of forces on a world scale, following WWII, as
> outlined, for example, in the Transitional Program?
>
Have you ever actually read the Transitional Programme? Or are
you a bit like the traditional Catholic who never actually read
the bible. preferring to accept it pre-digested by the priest?
Making statements like the above would seem to indicate that you
haven't (or at least that you've forgotten some of Trotsky's
prognoses). How about the following from the first section of the
TP?
"Mankind's productive forces stagnate. Already new inventions and
improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth.
Conjunctural crises under the conditions of social crisis of the
whole capitalist system inflict ever heavier deprivations and
sufferings upon the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn,
deepens the financial crisis of teh state and undermines the
unstable monetary systems. Democratic regimes, as well as
fascist, stagger on from one bankruptcy to another."
I could go on but this is sufficient. This is an accurate
description of the world in the 1930s. It is also a relatively
accurate description of the present. But to call this an accurate
description of the world in the 1950s or early 1960s is purest
fantasy.
In the period from about 1947 to the onset of the world crisis in
1974 capitalism experienced a period of expansion more prolonged
and greater than at any time in its previous history.
Unemployment became negligible in the advanced capitalist
countries, which led to a massive labour shortage that could only
be alleviated by bringing more and more married women into the
workforce (in contradiction to the dominant ideology of the time)
and by massive recruitment of immigrant or guest workers from
underdeveloped countries. Workers' wages and living standards
reached unprecedented levels not just in the advanced capitalist
countries but also in many newly industrialising countries.
And then near the end of the TP Trotsky says of the reformist and
Stalinist organisations: "All of these organisations are not
pledges for the future but decayed survivals of the past. The
epoch of wars and revolutions will raze them to the ground." That
would have been nice, but unfortunately it was not to be. The
reformist and social democratic organisations came out of the War
strengthened and indeed in many countries they reached their
highest points after the war.
So don't give me any bullshit about Trotsky's programme
accurately describing the post-war world. Indeed it was precisely
this dissonance between the prognoses in the programme and the
developments in the real world that provoked the crisis in the
Trotskyist movement in the first place.
> Trotsky knew about the "rivers of blood", but he looked beyond
> the quantitative attack on cadre in order to be able to make an
> analysis: he analyzed the international class struggle itself,
> and said that capitalism would come out of WWII worse than it
> went in, that the period following WWII would be a period of
wars
> and revolution, a revolutionary period: AND HE WAS RIGHT.
>
So, what's surprising about that? Lenin described imperialism as
a period of wars and revolutions and whatever else it was the
post-war world was dominated by the imperialist powers. For a
response to the rest of the rhetoric see above.
> In the CIOS, we do think that the failure of the anti-Stalinist
> political revolution in the former USSR and in the
Bureaucratized
> Worker States, and its necessary outcome, as outlined in the
> Transitional Program, the fall of the former Soviet Union; we
do
> think this gives rise to a period in which world capitalism has
> the iniciative, and continues to strip away working class
gains.
>
> But not for a moment do we think this has signified the
_defeat_
> of the October Revolution: that is nothing less than
capitulation
> to bourgeois lies, to petty-bourgeois demoralization.
>
This is pure rhetoric. A defeat is a defeat, even if you call it
a victory. And if it was a victory it was a Pyrrhic victory, i.e.
a victory that destroyed the victorious movement!
More rhetoric.
I sometimes suspect that you have difficulties reading or
understanding English. What I actually said about you was the
following: "he is always talking about it, but never *seems* to
do anything about it". I said "seems" because I have seen no
evidence here so far that you have ever participated in any
workers' struggle whatsoever.
I certainly don't think that all people who write here are
inactive in the outside world, although it holds for many
regulars. I know a number of participants personally and I know
that they are far from inactive. There are also others I don't
know personally but who from their contributions are steeped in
the struggle.
From you I haven't got any whiff of involvement in the struggle
going on in Argentina at the moment. IIRC you had to be prompted
to even comment on the movement you criticise above.
Michael Gavin
the Revolution was lost":
- text -
6. The divisions in the party 1921-29
Men make history, but in circumstances not of their own making. In the
process they change both those circumstances and themselves. The
Bolshevik Party was no more immune to this reality than any other group
in history has been. In attempt-ing to hold together the fabric of
Russian society in the chaos of civil war, counter-revolution and
famine, their socialist intentions were a factor determining the course
of history; but the social forces they had to work with to do this could
not leave the Party members themselves unchanged. Holding the Russia of
the NEP together meant mediating between different social classes so as
to prevent disruptive clashes. The revolution could only survive if the
Party and State satisfied the needs of different, often antagonistic,
classes. Arrangements had to be made to satisfy the individualistic
aspirations of the peasants, as well as the collectivist democratic aims
of socialism. In the process, the Party, which had been lifted above the
different social classes, had to reflect within its own structure their
differences. The pressures of the different classes on the Party caused
different sections of the Party to define their socialist aspirations in
terms of the interests of different classes. The one class with the
capacity for exercising genuinely socialist pressures - the working
class - was the weakest, the most disorganised, the least able to exert
such pressures.
7. The Left Opposition
There can be no doubt that in terms of its ideas, the Left Opposition
was the faction in the Party that adhered most closely to the
revolutionary socialist tradition of Bolshevism. It refused to redefine
socialism to mean either a slowly developing peasant economy or
accumulation for the sake of accumulation. It retained the view of
workers' democracy as central to socialism. It refused to subordinate
the world revolution to the demands of the chauvinistic and reactionary
slogan of building 'socialism in one country.'
Yet the Left Opposition could not be said to be in any direct sense
the 'proletarian' faction within the Party. For in the Russia of the
twenties, the working class was the class that less than any other
exerted pressure upon the Party. After the civil war, it was rebuilt in
conditions which made its ability to fight for its own ends weak.
Unemployment was high; the most militant workers had either died in the
civil war or been lifted into the bureaucracy; much of the class was
composed of peasants fresh from the countryside. Its typical attitude
was not one of support for the opposition, but rather apathy towards
political discussions, which made it easily manipulable from above - at
least most of the time. The Left Opposition was in the situation, common
to socialists, of having a socialist programme for working-class action
when the workers themselves were too tired and dispirited to fight.
But it was not only the apathy of the workers that created
difficulties for the opposition. It was also its own recognition of
economic realities. Its argument emphasised that the objective lack of
resources would make life hard whatever policies were followed. It
stressed both the need to develop industry internally and the necessity
for the revolution to spread as a means to doing this. But in the short
term, it could offer little to the workers, even if a correct socialist
policy was followed. When Trotsky and Preobrazhensky began to demand
increased planning, they emphasised that this could not be done without
squeezing the peasants and without the workers making sacrifices. The
unified opposition of 'Trotskyists' and 'Zinovievists' in 1926 demanded
as first priority certain improvements for the workers. But it was also
realistic enough to denounce as utopian promises made to the workers by
Stalin that far exceeded its own demands.
There is no space here to discuss the various platforms produced by
the Left Opposition. But in outline they had three interlinked central
planks.
1 - The revolution could only make progress in a socialist direction
if the economic weight of the towns as against the country, of industry
as against agriculture, was increased. This demanded planning of
industry and a policy of deliberately discriminating against the wealthy
peasant in taxation policy. If this did not happen the latter would
accumulate sufficient economic power to subordinate the State to his
interests, thus producing a Thermidor, internal counter-revolution.
2 - This industrial development had to be accompanied by increased
workers' democracy, so as to end bureaucratic tendencies in the Party
and State.
3 - These first two policies could maintain Russia as a citadel of
the revolution, but they could not produce that material and cultural
level that is the prerequisite of socialism. This demanded the extension
of the revolution abroad.
In purely economic terms, there was nothing impossible in this
programme. Indeed its demand for planning of industrialisation and a
squeezing of the peasant was eventually carried out - although in a
manner which contradicted the intentions of the Opposition. But those
who controlled the Party from 1923 onwards did not see the wisdom of it.
Only a severe economic crisis in 1928 forced them to plan and
industrialise. For five years before this they persecuted the Left and
expelled its leaders. The second plank in the programme they never
implemented. As for the third plank, this had been Bolshevik orthodoxy
in 1923 [13], only to be rejected by the Party leaders for good in 1925.
It was not economics that prevented the Party accepting this programme.
It was rather the balance of social forces developing within the Party
itself. The programme demanded a break with a tempo of production
determined by the economic pressure of the peasantry. Two sorts of
social forces had developed within the Party that opposed this.
8. The 'Right' and the 'Centre'
The first was the simplest. This was made up of those elements who did
not see concessions to the peasant as being detrimental to socialist
construction. They consciously wanted the Party to adjust its programme
to the needs of the peasant. But this was not just a theoretical
platform. It expressed the interest of all those in the Party and Soviet
institutions who found cooperation with the peasants, including the
Kulaks and capitalist farmers, and NEPmen, congenial. They found their
theoretical expression in Bukharin, with his injunction to the peasants
to 'enrich themselves'.
The second drew its strength as much from social forces within the
Party as outside. Its ostensible concern was to maintain social
cohesion. As such it resisted the social tensions likely to be
engendered, were there to be conscious effort to subordinate the country
to the town, but did not go as far in its pro-peasant pronouncements as
the Right. In the main, it was constituted by elements within the Party
apparatus itself, whose whole orientation was to maintain Party cohesion
through bureaucratic means. Its leader was the chief of the Party
apparatus, Stalin.
To the Left Opposition at the time, the faction of Stalin seemed like
a centrist group that oscillated between the traditions of the Party
(embodied in the Left programme) and the Right. In 1928 when Stalin
suddenly adopted the first plank of the opposition's own programme,
turning on the Right as viciously as he had only months before attacked
the Left, and beginning industrialisation and the complete expropriation
of the peasantry (so-called 'collectivisation'), this interpretation
received a rude shock. Stalin clearly had a social basis of his own. He
could survive when neither the proletariat nor the peasantry exercised
power.
If the Left Opposition was the result of groups motivated by the
socialist and working-class traditions of the Party attempting to embody
these in realistic policies, and the Right opposition a result of
accommodation to peasant pressures on the Party, the successful
Stalinist faction was based upon the Party bureaucracy itself. This had
begun life as a subordinate element within the social structure created
by the revolution. It merely fulfilled certain elementary functions for
the workers' Party. With the decimation of the working class in the
civil war, the Party was left standing above the class. In this
situation the role of maintaining the cohesion of the Party and State
became central. Increasingly in the State and then in the Party, this
was provided by bureaucratic methods of control - often exercised by
ex-Tsarist bureaucrats. The Party apparatus increasingly exercised real
power within the Party - appointing functionaries at all levels,
choosing delegates to conferences. But if it was the Party and not the
class that controlled the State and industry, then it was the Party
apparatus that increasingly inherited the gains the workers had made in
the revolution.
The first result of this in terms of policies was a bureaucratic
inertness. The bureaucrats of the apparatus offered a negative
resistance to policies which might disturb their position. They began to
act as a repressive force against any group that might challenge their
position. Hence their opposition to the programmes of the Left and
their refusal to permit any real discussion of them. While the
bureaucracy reacted in this negative way to threats of social
disturbance, it quite naturally allied itself with the Right and
Bukharin. This concealed its increasing existence as a social entity in
its own right, with its own relationship to the means of production.
Its repression of opposition in the Party seemed to be an attempt to
impose a pro-peasant policy on the Party from above, not to be a part of
its own struggle to remove any opposition to its own power in State and
industry. Even after its proclamation of socialism in one country, its
failures abroad seemed to flow more from bureaucratic inertia and the
pro-peasant policies at home than from a conscious counter-revolutionary
role.
Yet throughout this period the bureaucracy was developing from being
a class in itself to being a class for itself. At the time of the
inauguration of the NEP, it was objectively the case that power in the
Party and State lay in the hands of a small group of functionaries. But
these were by no means a cohesive ruling class. They were far from being
aware of sharing a common intent. The policies they implemented were
shaped by elements in the Party still strongly influenced by the
traditions of revolutionary socialism. If at home objective conditions
made workers' democracy non-existent, at least there was the possibility
of those motivated by the Party's traditions bringing about its
restoration given industrial recovery at home and revolution abroad.
Certainly on a world scale the Party continued to play its revolutionary
role. In its advice to foreign parties it made mistakes - and no doubt
some of these flowed from its own bureaucratisation - but it did not
commit crimes by subordinating them to its own national interests.
Underlying the factional struggles of the twenties is the process by
which this social grouping shook off the heritage of the revolution to
become a self-conscious class in its own right.
9. Counter-Revolution
It is often said that the rise of Stalinism in Russian cannot be called
'counter-revolution' because it was a gradual process (e.g. Trotsky said
that such a view involved 'winding back the film of reformism'). But
this is to misconstrue the Marxist method. It is not the case that the
transition from one sort of society to another always involves a single
sudden change. This is the case for the transition from a capitalist
State to a workers' State, because the working class cannot exercise its
power except all at once, collectively, by a clash with the ruling class
in which, as a culmination of long years of struggle, the latter's
forces are defeated. But in the transition from feudalism to capitalism
there are many cases m which there is not one sudden clash, but a whole
series of different intensities and at different levels, as the decisive
economic class (the bourgeoisie) forces political concessions in its
favour. The counter-revolution in Russia proceeded along the second path
rather than the first. The bureaucracy did not have to seize power from
the workers all at once. The decimation of the working class left power
in its hands at all levels of Russian society. Its members controlled
industry and the police and the army. It did not even have to wrest
control of the State apparatus to bring it into line with its economic
power, as the bourgeoisie did quite successfully in several countries
without a sudden confrontation. It merely had to bring a political and
industrial structure that it already controlled into line with its own
interests. This happened not 'gradually,' but by a succession of
qualitative changes by which the mode of operation of the Party was
brought into line with the demands of the central bureaucracy. Each of
these qualitative changes could only be brought about by a direct
confrontation with those elements in the Party which, for whatever
reason, still adhered to the revolutionary socialist tradition.
The first (and most important) such confrontation was that with the Left
Opposition in 1923. Although the Opposition was by no means decisively
and unambiguously opposed to what was happening to the Party (e.g. its
leader, Trotsky had made some of the most outrageously substitutionist
statements during the trade-union debate of 1920; its first public
statement (the Platform of the 46) was accepted by its signatories only
with numerous reservations and amendments), the bureaucracy reacted to
it with unprecendented hostility. In order to protect its power the
ruling group in the Party resorted to methods of argument unheard of
before in the Bolshevik party. Systematic denigration of opponents
replaced rational argument. The control of the secretariat of the Party
over appointments began to be used for the first time openly to remove
sympathisers of the opposition from their posts (e.g. the majority of
the Komsomol Central Committee were dismissed and sent to the provinces
after some of them had replied to attacks on Trotsky). To justify such
procedures the ruling faction invented two new ideological entities,
which it counterposed to one another. On the one hand it inaugurated a
cult of 'Leninism' (despite the protests of Lenin's widow). It attempted
to elevate Lenin to a semi-divine status by mummifying his dead body in
the manner of the Egyptian pharaohs. On the other, it invented
'Trotskyism' as a tendency opposed to Leninism, justifying this with odd
quotations from Lenin of ten or even twenty years before, while ignoring
Lenin's last statement (his 'Testament') that referred to Trotsky as
'the most able member of the Central Committee' and suggested the
removal of Stalin. The leaders of the Party perpetrated these
distortions and falsifications consciously in order to fight off any
threat to their control of the Party (Zinoviev, at the time the leading
member of the 'triumvirate' later admitted this). In doing so, one
section of the Party was showing that it had come to see its own power
as more important than the socialist tradition of free inner-Party
discussion. By reducing theory to a mere adjunct of its own ambitions,
the Party bureaucracy was beginning to assert its identity as against
other social groups.
The second major confrontation began in a different way. It was not
at first a clash between members of the Party with socialist aspirations
and the increasingly powerful bureaucracy itself. It began as a clash
between the ostensible leader of the Party (at the time, Zinoviev) and
the Party apparatus that really controlled. In Leningrad Zinoviev
controlled a section of the bureaucracy to a considerable extent
independently of the rest of the apparatus. Although its mode of
operation was in no way different from that prevailing throughout the
rest of the country, its very independence was an obstacle to the
central bureaucracy. It represented a possible source of policies and
activities that might disturb the overall rule of the bureaucracy. For
this reason it had to be brought within the ambit of the central
apparatus. In the process Zinoviev was forced from his leading position
in the party. Having lost this, he began to turn once more to the
historical traditions of Bolshevism and to the policies of the Left
(although he never lost fully his desire to be part of the ruling bloc,
continually wavering for the next ten years between the Left and the
apparatus). With the fall of Zinoviev, power lay in the hands of Stalin,
who with his unrestrained use of bureaucratic methods of control of the
Party, his disregard for theory, his hostility to the traditions of the
revolution in which his own role had been a minor one, his willingness
to resort to any means to dispose of those who had actually led the
revolution, above all epitomised the growing self-consciousness of the
apparatus. All these qualities he exhibited to their full extent in the
struggle against the new opposition. Meetings were packed, speakers
shouted down, prominent oppositionists likely to find themselves
assigned to minor positions in remote areas, former Tsarist officers
utilised as *agents provocateur* to discredit oppositional groups.
Eventually, in 1928, he began to imitate the Tsars directly and deport
revolutionaries to Siberia. In the long run, even this was not to be
enough. He was to do what even the Romanoffs had been unable to do:
systematically murder those who had constituted the revolutionary Party
of 1917.
By 1928 the Stalinist faction had completely consolidated its control
in the Party and State. When Bukharin and the Right wing split from it,
horrified by what they had helped to create, they found themselves with
even less strength than the Left Oppositions had. But the Party was not
in control of the whole of Russian society. The towns where real power
lay were still surrounded by the sea of peasant production. The
bureaucracy had usurped the gains of the working class in the
revolution, but so far the peasantry remained unaffected. A mass refusal
of the peasants to sell their grain in 1928 brought this home sharply to
the bureaucracy.
What followed was the assertion of the power of the towns over the
countryside that the Left Opposition had been demanding for years. This
led certain oppositionists (Preobrazhensky, Radek) to make their peace
with Stalin. Yet this policy was in its spirit the opposite of that of
the Left. They had argued the need to subordinate peasant production to
worker-owned industry in the towns. But industry in the towns was no
longer worker-owned. It was under the control of the bureaucracy that
held the State. Assertion of the domination of the town over the country
was now the assertion not of the working class over the peasantry, but
of the bureaucracy over the last part of society lying outside its
control. It imposed this dominance with all the ferocity ruling classes
have always used. Not only Kulaks, but all grades of peasants, whole
villages of peasants, suffered. The 'Left' turn of 1928 finally
liquidated the revolution of 1917 in town and country.
There can be no doubt that by 1928 a new class had taken power in
Russia. It did not have to engage in direct military conflict with the
workers to gain power, because direct workers' power had not existed
since 1918. But it did have to purge the Party that was left in power of
all those who retained links, however tenuous, with the socialist
tradition. When a reinvigorated working class confronted it again,
whether in Berlin or Budapest, or in Russia itself (e.g. Novo-Cherkassk
in 1962), it used the tanks it had not needed in 1928.
The Left Opposition was far from clear about what it was fighting.
Trotsky, to his dying day, believed that that State apparatus that was
to hunt him down and murder him was a 'degenerated workers' one. Yet it
was that Opposition alone which fought day by day against the Stalinist
apparatus's destruction of the revolution at home and prevention of
revol-ution abroad. [14] For a whole historical period it alone resisted
the distorting effects on the socialist movement of Stalinism and Social
Democracy. Its own theories about Russia made this task more difficult,
but it still carried it out. That is why today any genuinely
revolutionary movement must place itself in that tradition.
Notes:
12. Ibid.
13. Cf. Stalin, "Lenin and Leninism", Russian ed. 1924, p 40: 'Can the
final victory of socialism in one country be attained without the
joint efforts of the proletariats of several advanced countries? No,
this is impossible.' (Cited by Trotsky, "The Third International
after Lenin", p. 36.)
14. We do not deal here with the earlier oppositions, e.g. the Workers'
Opposition and the Democratic Centralists. Although these arose as a
response to the early bureaucratisation and degeneration of the
revolution, they were also partly a utopian reaction against
objective reality as such (i.e. the real strength of the peasants
and the real weakness of the working class). What survived and
mattered in the Workers' Opposition eventually became part of the
Left Opposition, while its leaders, Kollontai and Shlyapnikov,
capitulated to Stalin.
David Callaghan
<ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> writes
>better starve and be free , than starve and have the kgb on you
>every moument
Now they have the Mafia and the FSB (formerly KGB) on their backs, as
the case of Oleg Maksakov vividly portrays.
A year ago, the l3th march 1999, the workers leader Oleg Yurievich
Maksakov, co-chairman of the Union of the Workers Trade Union "Defense"
from the Astrakhan region, in Russia, was murdered.
Oleg Maksakov, whilst investigating the financial crimes of the
"Promstroy' enterprise managers, was shot by the back with a shotgun. Of
course the authorities have still not found, nor really sought the
murderers.
Oleg Maksakov was well known as the best strategist and organizer of
social protests. Oleg knew how to lead workers, the majority believed in
him and followed his lead. He was an audacious and brave fighter, who
without fearing, pointed out the way to workers.
Oleg always thought about his comrades security and was an effective
organiser of self defence squads in the Astrakhan region. For many
prominent figures Oleg's activity and that of the energetic union
"Defence" was a `fish bone in their throat'. Oleg's death is only useful
to the capitalists and the authorities in the region. His murder is a
treacherous and premeditated political murder.
It is a question of principle not to let this murder - as the murder of
any class brother/sister - remain without an exhaustive investigation.
His murderers and the instigators must be punished! We call all workers
and trade union organizations, all groups and parties of the workers
movement to organize together the largest protest campaign possible
demanding an immediate public enquiry into Oleg Maksakov's murder.
A modest step has already been taken. On March 11th in the Coordination
Council of the Movement for a Workers Party (DZRP), agreed to appeal to
all the workers and trade union organisations across Russia, the
Community of Independent States, and the whole world.
The aim is to build a massive collection of signatures from labour
movement organisations, from human rights groups and individuals -
demanding the public enquiry into Oleg's murder and co-ordinating the
actions with the comrades of "Defense" the Union of workers trade union
from the Astrakhan region.
We urge everyone to help. There is great danger now as severe repression
against the workers movement in Russia is deepening.
initial signatories:
"Defense' All-Russia Trade Union Alliance; Coordination Council of the
Movement for a Workers Party (DZRP); International Workers Party;
Committee for a Workers International; Kirov Committee of Union of
Marxists; Arzamas-I6 city Russian Workers Communist Party Committee,
Arzamas-I6 city Marxists Union; Moscow Committee "Centre Defense"; Trade
Union Kozlov E.A; Secretary of the Communists Regional Party;
Fighting Union for the Working Class Liberation; Ufa city "Defense -
Worker's Resistance" Trade union; Bashkortostan Republic Marxist Worker
Party Council; Komsomol Committee, Kiev city (Communists Youth Union);
O. Torbasov, CC Secretary from the Russian Union of Communist Youth
(Bolsheviks); "Workers Resistance" (CIO-Ukraine); Maoist Platform from
the Russian Union of Communist Youth (Bolsheviks) ...
ISWoR is organising for the petition overleaf, to be handed-in
simultaneously at the Russian Embassies of all European countries -
petition sheets available from IS...@aol.com
On May 17 this year an All-Russia day of action against Putin's new
draft Labour Code was called by a new generation of labour leaders. The
call was answered by 300,000 workers, forcing Putin to postpone the
passage of the new Labour Code in the Duma.
The new Labour Code includes anti-union laws which will abolish
collective bargaining as every worker will have to sign an individual
short term contract. A 56 hour week 12 hour day would be standard,
maternity rights slashed. Bosses would have virtually unlimited powers
over workers, backed up by state repression, with Putin's newly re-
unified and strengthened secret services, the FSB.
The emergent Russian ruling class are still weak and occasionally one
sees evidence of divisions and disunity. They are faced with a need to
subjugate the new militancy of a resurgent working class emerging from
the Stalinist paralysis and flexing their muscles, or face total
economic domination and loss of territory to a rapacious imperialism
intent on Caspian energy.
They are desperate to impose a devastating privatization process upon a
highly educated working class that though deeply confused, is undefeated
with its unions battered but intact.
Tycoon Berezovsky exposed divisions within the ruling class by openly
siding with the 89 regional governors against Putin. He then expressed
the fear that, "Opposition (to Putin) will doubtless appear and it will
do so from the left," adding that the left-wing movement has huge
potential in Russia.
His fears stemmed from the fact that on May 17 many of the trade union
speakers across Russia were talking not just about the Labour Code. No,
this time there was much talk of a new October, of the need for a
workers' revolution.
The present Labour Code which is being defended, provides Russian
workers with more rights and much better protection than their western
counterparts enjoy.
It is clear that workers in Russia are still defending the material
gains of the October Revolution, which, despite the long-winded
pronouncements of those "communists" who should open their eyes, and the
gloating of the bourgeoisie, was not defeated.
Those whose adherence to a flawed dogma leads them to declare the
Revolution defeated will inevitably find themselves in the camp of the
bourgeoisie and their rabid cheerleaders like the nitwit whose ranting
prompted this reply.
--
David Callaghan
Michael Gavin
>
> In article <0381a4d0...@usw-ex0105-034.remarq.com>,
> Michael Gavin
<michaelgav...@planet-interkom.de.invalid> wrote:
>
> > As for Trotsky's contribution after he was expelled from
> Russia I
> > would agree with him that this was the most important
> > contribution that he made to the revolutionary movement, a
> > contribution that was indispensable for the survival of the
> > genuine Marxist tradition through the midnight of the century
> (as
> > Victor Serge called it).
>
> You seem keen on Victor Serge. Are you trying to blend Marxism
> with Anarchism? It's been tried before but without much
> success.
>
witness to the great revolutionary upheavals in the aftermath of
World War I and the serious defeats the working class suffered
during the later 1920s and the 1930s. To admire this is not to
attempt to blend or amalgamate Marxism and anarchism.
I also think that Serge was a genuine recruit to the Bolshevik
cause and indeed he defended the actions of the Bolsheviks in the
course of the Civil War against his former anarchist comrades. It
is true that his interpretation of Marxism did have a libertarian
bent but that in no compromises the power of his wonderful
novels, which are filled with his great respect for the
creativity of the working class and its ability to overcome even
the most devastating defeats - something that is particularly
clear in his novels "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" and "Midnight
in the Century", from which I took my reference.
> Anyhow, I still don't consider the October revolution as lost.
> Battles are still going on all the time even in Russia itself.
>
> Has all the land and industry in Russia been privatised?
Equating state property with socialism, or even with some debased
form of socialism - which is essentially what the concept of a
"deformed workers' state" as used by "orthodox" Trotskyists
amounts to - is something that Engels warns against in
"Anti-Dühring". This is something that most "orthodox"
Trotskyists ignore in their discussions of the USSR - which, as
Tony Cliff once said, is actually four lies: it wasn't a union,
there weren't any soviets, it wasn't in any way socialist and it
wasn't a republic.
> Are all the
> welfare and political reforms gained in the west on the back of
> the October revolution now overturned?
The welfare and political reforms were won by working class
struggles in the various countries out of fear for the
revolutionary potential of the indigenous working class, not
generalised fear of the October Revolution. As Quentin Hogg said
in 1944 (the exact words escape me at the moment): "We had better
give them reform or they will give us revolution."
> Have all the national liberation
> movements of the ex-colonies been defeated?
>
Most of the decolonisation was as the result of changes in the
exact form of imperialist domination, the replacement of direct
military control by indirect control through local stooges and
economic pressure (e.g. the World Bank). Even those countries
that were freed as a result of a military struggle against this
or that colonial power have been unable to escape the constraints
of capitalism and imperialism.
> It seems to me that you concede defeat too easily.
>
No, I'm facing reality, not living in a dream world.
wen...@my-deja.com
The above seems pretty much like standard British SWP propaganda. You
can't help that if you are a member of that organisation, I suppose.
Is it just a coincidence that 'facing reality' is the same reality that
is perceived by the bourgeoisie? What I mean is that I know that the
objective world is the same for everyone, but the class interests of
the working class and the bourgeoisie makes them see that same world in
different ways. The way your organisation 'faces reality' just seems
the same as the bourgeoisie. Indeed, you even use their favourite
phrases (and those copied by the trade union bureaucracy).
Michael Gavin
>
<snip>
> > No, I'm facing reality, not living in a dream world.
>
> The above seems pretty much like standard British SWP
> propaganda. You can't help that if you are a member of that
> organisation, I suppose.
>
Bravo! So the penny has finally dropped. I've never hidden the
fact that I was a member of the IS/SWP for over 15 years. But it
might have escaped your notice that I no longer live in Britain,
but in Germany (as the .de in my address shows) where I have been
a member of the German organisation of the IST (currently called
"Linksruck") since my arrival.
> Is it just a coincidence that 'facing reality' is the same
> reality that
> is perceived by the bourgeoisie? What I mean is that I know
> that the
> objective world is the same for everyone, but the class
> interests of
> the working class and the bourgeoisie makes them see that same
> world in
> different ways.
This is.of course, basic Marxism and is blindingly obvious.
> The way your organisation 'faces reality' just seems
> the same as the bourgeoisie. Indeed, you even use their
> favourite phrases (and those copied by the trade union
> bureaucracy).
>
What a load of old cobblers. Would you care to justify that
charge with examples?
Have you ever read any of our analyses? Probably not, since IIRC
from my own experience of the SLL and its Irish offshoot in the
early 1970s, the for that period unfortunately named League for a
Workers' Vanguard, reading the press of other left groups was
frowned upon and heaven forbid (or should that be "Healy forbid")
if you should have a friend in another organisation.
And is it a coincidence that you still share the catastrophist
standpoint of the SLL/WRP/Healyite ICFI, in which the revolution
is always imminent and which led to such mindless hyperactivism
like that connected with bringing out a daily paper with a
relatively small membership.
Is it any wonder that people wonder where the money came from?
And indeed today the question is also valid: How can a tiny
organisation like the WRP/Newsline afford a daily paper that
hardly anybody buys? Anybody got any plausible answers?
constantin
all communist parties of the ex-soviet union should be made
illegal
>
>
>
>--
>David Callaghan
Paracelsus
<ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
Interesting how you try to ban opposition. Do you do this in the name of
"freedom", constantin, or are you honest about your intolerance of unliked
viewpoints and blatant opposition to the ability of the people of a nation
to choose whom they want to elect?
> >
> >
> >
> >--
> >David Callaghan
> >
> >
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Got questions? Get answers over the phone at Keen.com.
> Up to 100 minutes free!
> http://www.keen.com
--
constantin
rest are simble logic....if the nazis are hanted down then.......
Paracelsus
<ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> communist killed 90 million whereas nazis only 7 ........the
> rest are simble logic....if the nazis are hanted down then.......
>
Simpleton logic. #1 How do you know the Communists killed 90 million? #2
How do you know these were true Communists, and could you please show
cites from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky supporting your claims without
clipping out essential parts? I expect you're a typical right-wing troll
who knows nothing about Communism, and has come here to troll some people
who are against everything Stalinism stands for, including the Maoist
variety.
constantin
>In article <1ab99311...@usw-ex0104-025.remarq.com>,
constantin
><ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>> communist killed 90 million whereas nazis only 7 ........the
>> rest are simble logic....if the nazis are hanted down
then.......
>>
>
>Simpleton logic. #1 How do you know the Communists killed 90
million?
from history
#2
>How do you know these were true Communists
there were the only communist in practice so they are de facto
representative of communism
, and could you please show
>cites from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky supporting your claims
without
>clipping out essential parts?
marx supported all the bloodthirsty revoloutionaries of the 1848
revoloutions in europe that cause the death of millions,lenin is
responcible with trosky for the death of millions in the pre-
stalinist ussr.
I expect you're a typical right-wing troll
>who knows nothing about Communism, and has come here to troll
some people
>who are against everything Stalinism stands for, including the
Maoist
>variety.
stalinism and maoism are both numerus times worst than
nazism..........at least nazism is he had stayed in the 40
policies now would have been a model system which creates
prosperity for its people.............communism not only killed
tenths of millions of itsOWN people but made the whole society a
living hell
Paracelsus
<ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> sorc...@NOSPAM.mailcity.com (Paracelsus) wrote:
> >In article <1ab99311...@usw-ex0104-025.remarq.com>,
> constantin
> ><ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> communist killed 90 million whereas nazis only 7 ........the
> >> rest are simble logic....if the nazis are hanted down
> then.......
> >>
> >
> >Simpleton logic. #1 How do you know the Communists killed 90
> million?
>
> from history
>
( He can't even give me a source. From what source do you get your
"history", constantin? I've never seen proof the "Communists" killed that
many. )
> #2
> >How do you know these were true Communists
>
> there were the only communist in practice so they are de facto
> representative of communism
>
What asshood. "They were the only Communist in practice". . . .but how do
you *know* they're Communist? You show no evidence they were Communist
and yet try to pass themselves off as their representative. Don't you
think you should have some hard evidence before you start mouthing off
that you know what the Communists are?
> , and could you please show
> >cites from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky supporting your claims
> without
> >clipping out essential parts?
> marx supported all the bloodthirsty revoloutionaries of the 1848
> revoloutions in europe that cause the death of millions,
Bloodthirsty revolutionaries? There weren't many of those, and those few
that were merely the precursors of Stalinism. They were never truly
dedicated to the goals and reasons for revolution . . . merely supporting
them to get power.
lenin is
> responcible with trosky for the death of millions in the pre-
> stalinist ussr.
Well, there was a Civil War in Russia during that time, and afterwards,
due to the destruction of industry caused by the Whites ( who were
die-hard Capitalists, BTW ) and the seizing of the Ukraine territories by
the same, the Bolsheviks had problems making sure that both the soldiers
and common citizens could get fed. To blame the Bolsheviks for a problem
caused by the Whites is to merely lie about history for the sake of
defaming a hated enemy. So, constantin, it seems you really don't know
your history, and you seem to basically end up playing only the measly
role of a troll here.
>
>
> I expect you're a typical right-wing troll
> >who knows nothing about Communism, and has come here to troll
> some people
> >who are against everything Stalinism stands for, including the
> Maoist
> >variety.
> stalinism and maoism are both numerus times worst than
> nazism..........at least nazism is he had stayed in the 40
> policies now would have been a model system which creates
> prosperity for its people
Did you just say Naziism creates prosperity for it's people? It's kind of
hard to decipher what you're saying. . . you don't talk clearly.
Also, since you're clueless, this newsgroup isn't about Stalinism or
Maoism; It's about Trotskyism. Your condemnations of it, while trying to
pass off these systems as Communism reminds one of another rightist troll
who still comes here, and has gained a reputation for being an illogical,
pseudo-intellectual wimp.
.............communism not only killed
> tenths of millions of itsOWN people but made the whole society a
> living hell
No proof that it's Communism. I asked you for it earlier and you wimped
out. You might notice quite a few other societies are living hells, not
due to Communism, but due to Capitalist domination.
uchural
<sorcer-E-100...@ip-216-222-14-45.salmoninternet.com>,
sorc...@NOSPAM.mailcity.com (Paracelsus) wrote:
In article <046cf020...@usw-ex0104-025.remarq.com>, constantin
<ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> sorc...@NOSPAM.mailcity.com (Paracelsus) wrote:
> >In article <1ab99311...@usw-ex0104-025.remarq.com>,
> constantin
> ><ckassinid...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> communist killed 90 million whereas nazis only 7 ........the
> >> rest are simble logic....if the nazis are hanted down
> then.......
> >>
> >
> >Simpleton logic. #1 How do you know the Communists killed 90
> million?
>
> from history
>
( He can't even give me a source. From what source do you get your
"history", constantin? I've never seen proof the "Communists" killed that
many. )
The Black Book of Communism. I recommend you read it. It is fully
annotated, with thousands of citations. It is mostly a listing of
just that, Dragon, numbers of the "many" killed by communists.
Page after page after page. It is numbing when read cover to
cover. I repeat my offer to buy you a new copy, or I'll send my
copy to any third party you name and he can send it on to you.
I think you should read it. I think every reader of apst should
read The Black Book of Communism, despite his politics, for his
own personal intellectual honor. You don't follow this, do you,
Dragon?
> #2
> >How do you know these were true Communists
>
> there were the only communist in practice so they are de facto
> representative of communism
>
What asshood. "They were the only Communist in practice". . . .but how do
you *know* they're Communist? You show no evidence they were Communist
and yet try to pass themselves off as their representative. Don't you
think you should have some hard evidence before you start mouthing off
that you know what the Communists are?
The called themselves Communists. I take them at their word. You
don't? Do you argue here that a man who calls himself a
metaphysicalist
magickian, occultist, sorcerer, alchemist, priest, physician, Satanist,
Marxist, Engelsist, Leninist, Trotskiiist, evoker of evil spirits,
mage,
wizard, censor, boycotter, killfiler, maker of death threats, brutalizer
of language, and embarrassment to his mother is none of the above?
I think he is all of the above. I take you at your word. I think you
think you can make yourself invisible, and I think you give thought
to the summoning of the demon Ose. I believe you are sincere. You
should grant the same deference to your debating opponents, Dragon.
The said they were "communists". They were communists. To argue
anything else is disingenuous. I believe you believe what you say,
but what you say is not what we are discussing here on apst. We
discuss history here. History says they were "communists". I am
beginning to think all this talk about Trotsky has the elements of
religious thinking in it. To interpret Trotsky as an innoculant to the
horrors of history is ahistorical and wrong. It is quaint
"sectarianism", I suppose, but not "real", Dragon. You live in a
fantasy world, in your life, your entertainment, and your politics.
It is all fantasy. None of it is "real". I can't imagine how strange
and alienated you must feel. You must feel alone and unappreciated,
stung by your mother's plaintive cry for you to change. It's not
easy being an unhappy dragon in today's world. I guess this explains
why you cut off your balls and took the name Paracelsus, huh?
> , and could you please show
> >cites from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky supporting your claims
> without
> >clipping out essential parts?
> marx supported all the bloodthirsty revoloutionaries of the 1848
> revoloutions in europe that cause the death of millions,
Bloodthirsty revolutionaries? There weren't many of those, and those few
that were merely the precursors of Stalinism. They were never truly
dedicated to the goals and reasons for revolution . . . merely supporting
them to get power.
Much blood was spilled. "Revolution" means different things to
different people. "Precursors of Stalinism" before Lenin? Original
Sin? If this gets too subtle for you, wave a white flag, or a red
one, whatever, and I'll dumb it down some more.
lenin is
> responcible with trosky for the death of millions in the pre-
> stalinist ussr.
Well, there was a Civil War in Russia during that time, and afterwards,
due to the destruction of industry caused by the Whites ( who were
die-hard Capitalists, BTW )
Many fought for the Romanov Monarchy, and thus could be called
"tsarists". Russia was proto-industrial, but in reality semi-feudal,
a nation of peasants, not industrial workers. You have not even
read a simple history of Russia. I'll bet you saw "Reds", though.
and the seizing of the Ukraine territories by
the same, the Bolsheviks had problems making sure that both the soldiers
and common citizens could get fed.
No. The food was stolen and the soldiers fed. The peasants died
of starvation. You would think the nation was composed of only
city dwellers by your description. The overwhelming percentage of
the population was rural and peasant. Read the Black Book, Dragon.
There is a chilling description of all of this. You should really read
it, as it is history. They stole the shoes from children.
To blame the Bolsheviks for a problem
caused by the Whites is to merely lie about history for the sake of
defaming a hated enemy. So, constantin, it seems you really don't know
your history, and you seem to basically end up playing only the measly
role of a troll here.
Dragon is a revisionist of history. He denies the Terror. He is the
equivalent of an Holocaust Denier in moral terms.
>
>
> I expect you're a typical right-wing troll
> >who knows nothing about Communism, and has come here to troll
> some people
> >who are against everything Stalinism stands for, including the
> Maoist
> >variety.
> stalinism and maoism are both numerus times worst than
> nazism..........at least nazism is he had stayed in the 40
> policies now would have been a model system which creates
> prosperity for its people
Did you just say Naziism creates prosperity for it's people? It's kind of
hard to decipher what you're saying. . . you don't talk clearly.
How's your Greek, Paracelsus? Do you speak any other language than
English? "That's two up against you the clock has." Your own
illiteracy includes your native tongue.
Also, since you're clueless, this newsgroup isn't about Stalinism or
Maoism; It's about Trotskyism.
alt.politics.socialism.trotsky. It is about politics and socialism,
with emphasis on Trotsky. Now, the historical period we are discussing
goes from about 1848 to the present. It is all about Stalin and Mao,
and Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, all the way up to Putin. It is
about all these people, people and events you have never studied.
Your condemnations of it, while trying to
pass off these systems as Communism reminds one of another rightist troll
who still comes here, and has gained a reputation for being an illogical,
pseudo-intellectual wimp.
Mind your manners, you punk. Your argument that there has never been
"true" communism is of little importance here. It is not even
considered worthy of discussion. We deal with history, the story of
what happened. In the name of "communism" they ruled. They spoke
of Marx and Engels, they spoke of Lenin. They were what communism
was then, not what you think theory would reflect in a utopian society.
Now, your worthy adversary is quite far from you in his politics, but
you haven't the foggiest idea where he is coming from, as you have
never travelled, you have never studied a foreign language, you have
never studied European History. You have never been there, Dragon.
He has. His politics comes from his own personal history. Your
politics comes from some strange yearning to be accepted by the
filthy and immoral, the insane and bigoted, the paranoid and odd, and
the goofballs on alt.magick.
.............communism not only killed
> tenths of millions of itsOWN people but made the whole society a
> living hell
No proof that it's Communism.
Men ruling despotic nation states and empires in one-party systems, who
called themselves "communists", who named as their inspiration Marx,
Engels, and Lenin. You deny history, Dragon. You look foolish, and
you look like one who would explain away the death of millions as
something other than what it was, sheer Terror. You are a revisionist
of history, and history itself has harsh comment on the likes of you.
I asked you for it earlier and you wimped
out. You might notice quite a few other societies are living hells, not
due to Communism, but due to Capitalist domination.
Yeh, like your life in Idaho is a "living hell". The best economy in
the history of our nation. Get an education, get a job. Life is
short.
uchural