Introduction – The Bolshevik Revolution (1905-1923)

In Partisan Magazine N° 8 we republished a three-part article which originally appeared in our Party paper in 1997 (Partisan N°s 123-125) which describes what the Russian Revolution represented in the form of a living political chronology. The social history of the Russian Revolution continues to go largely unstudied and barring the following complementary notes it remains barely unaltered.

As the article was the object of controversy in our ranks at the time, especially its concluding paragraph, here we feel it necessary to explain the interest of the article and its shortcomings.

Four key points of interest of this article :

 The first point of interest is that the article presents the Russian Revolution in all of its extraordinary complexity, with the chain of events leading on unpredictably from the Revolution to the NEP, via the Civil War and War Communism. As Mao Zedong went on to write : “A revolution is not a dinner party” (Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28). It is not a previously mapped out path and a foreseeably radiant future : it is a permanent and fierce class struggle taking place within an unknown, ever-changing and open-ended context.

As such, the article breaks with a highly ‘romanticised’ vision of the Russian Revolution led by a shrewd Lenin, adopting instead a historical perspective much closer to what actually happened, with Lenin finding himself caught up in the turmoil of a revolution yet to be invented, in a context which he had not even foreseen…

And suddenly the Revolution has far more significant lessons to offer us today. There is no point in trying to predict the exact details or the concrete programme of the revolution in a context about which we know nothing. It allows us to better understand the task ahead of us as Communists today, namely to build the vanguard, train cadres, set out the main axes of a programme based on a general critique of imperialism and its social relations in order to able, when the time comes, to find the immediate and tactical responses necessary, rooted in a general understanding of society.

While the current context and the tasks which lie before us today are very different, the goal remains the same. Even if we do not know the details of what the future may hold, we cannot allow ourselves to be carried along by events as they unfold and the general ‘movement’ when the time arrives. Instead, we must provide ourselves with a theoretical, strategical and tactical framework in the present to serve as a guide when the time comes.

 The second point on interest of the article is the fact that it addresses the key question of what is referred to as ‘power’, underlining the contradictions and the different ideas behind this concept.

On the one hand, power can be taken to mean ‘seizing power locally’, with a range of scattered control centres and dispersed, competing local powers due to the inability to define a central priority for the country as a whole to be used later as the guiding thread running through all of the remaining isolated priorities. This represents the petty bourgeois concept of self-management which was so widespread among the peasantry and largely taken up by the anarchists who were always strong in Russia, both amongst the urban working class and in the countryside.

Alternatively, there is the Leninist or Bolshevik concept of the need to centralise power in a new kind of State in order to be able to properly address all of the contradictions within society and thereby map out the general priorities of the Revolution, which are more than just the sum of the isolated local priorities. In a short text dated 1921 entitled On the Kronstadt Revolt (Collected Works Vol. 36, p. 538.), Lenin wrote : “there are only two kinds of government possible in Russia—a Government by the Soviets or a Government headed by a tsar”.

That being so, there still remains, of course, a political contradiction between centralisation and decentralisation, with the State power playing the main role and the Soviets playing a secondary role in a dialectic where a failure to properly address the secondary level can jeopardise the primary level.

 The third interest of the article, leading on from the latter, lies in the description of the way the contradictions within the Party, the State and the Government and the masses organised in the Soviets evolved. While not proposing a definitive analysis and a conclusive assessment of these contradictions of an extraordinarily interrelated complexity within the context at the time, the article describes how things evolved over time and the difficulties encountered by the revolution in order to reveal the gradual erasure of the proletariat as the key political player, the complacency towards the rich peasantry, the emergence of a new bourgeoisie during the NEP in both the economy and the State administration who gradually reseized power and led to the return of Capitalism, albeit with a new guise, i.e. State Capitalism.

 Finally, the article addresses the question of the working class over time in a country largely dominated by the traditional petty bourgeoisie (the peasantry), revealing the special character of the working class in Russia, highly concentrated in three places, before going on to show how it gradually disappeared over the events of the revolution (the Civil War) and how the new bourgeoisie was able to take over the political and ideological leadership.

For those of us living in an imperialist country where the resistance to exploitation is dominated socially, politically and ideologically by the wage-earning petty bourgeoisie, the lesson is clear : precedence must be given to the workers as the leading class players, which cannot be built up upon empty discourse and rhetoric, but on the ground, on the shop-floor and in the neighbourhoods. If there is a failure to build up the proletariat, then the petty bourgeoisie will inevitably impose its own points of view, be they self-managed or State-centred, with its vision of the reform of Capitalism with a human face but which continues to maintain the exploitation of humankind and nature.

Shortcomings of the article

The flaws affect the closing paragraph of the text entitled The role of the proletariat in the Russian Revolution : Myths and Realities, which we have nevertheless decided to retain in deference to the author.

Broadly speaking, according to the author, bearing in mind the context at the time the Russian Revolution was an “impossible endeavour”, incapable of building “the economic foundations of a Socialist regime”, laying instead the foundations for the “economic foundations of State Capitalism”. In other words, it was doomed to fail from the outset.

The first mistake we encounter here involves considering it essential for “the necessary conditions to be united from the very beginning” in order to carry out a successful revolution according apparently to Labeil. However, the task for Communists and Maoists is to undertake a concrete analysis of the concrete conditions in order to be able to fray a path amongst the complexity of contradictions, making it possible to advance along the road to Communism, even if that involves detours : the conditions cannot be forced if they do not exist, instead one must seize any opportunity and avail oneself of the means to unite the conditions. It that sense, one can say that the conditions of the Russian Revolution were indeed “extremely unfavourable”, but that the role of the Bolsheviks was precisely to take their bearings within that context. That is the task of the Communists : to light the route towards a goal. Here we see the wholly unpredictable nature of the revolutionary path, with unforeseen events which arise and confound the initial plan… The Bolsheviks dared embark upon that path, and if they failed in their endeavour, it was not because of the context but because of their mistakes and their insufficient understanding of Capitalism and its deep nature. But by daring in the first place, they made huge strides towards world revolution… Hence the importance of understanding the unfavourable conditions, the mistakes made and to take stock, as Marx did with regards to the Paris Commune. Today, thanks to the Chinese Revolution which helped towards assessing the construction of Socialism in the USSR, we have come some way since then (see Partisan Magazine N°s 4 and 5).

The second mistake concerns the highly ambiguous phrase “building the foundations of a Socialist regime” which does not concur with the positions defended by the OCML Voie Prolétarienne. For us, Socialism is not a fixed state which can be “built”, but merely a transitional phase between Communism and Capitalism, involving an unstable State cut through by the class struggles, pulled between the return to the old regime and the shift towards Communism with “politics in command”. In our view there is no such thing as a Socialist mode of production.

As such, the phrase is unclear and open to conflicting interpretations. We acknowledge that socialist production relations must be set in place as an integral part of the economic foundations which evolve in a society in transition. That is precisely what defines the march towards Communism : “Each according to their work” and “Those who do not work shall not eat”, the dwindling of the rural/urban dichotomy and the gulf between manual and intellectual labour, the elimination of all parasitic and bureaucratic tasks, the reduction of income inequalities, the dissolution of the production process involving the elimination of assembly lines and night shifts, recognising and encouraging the class struggle, etc.

This begs a reflection regarding the state of the Revolution in the early Twenties and the nature of the production relations in a society amidst a Civil War and War Communism, while production itself (notably large-scale industrial production) had almost completely ground to a halt.
It is, therefore, easy to say that in 1923, barely two years after the end of the Civil War, with the NEP in full swing with all of its ambiguities “the economic basis of a Socialist regime had not been built”. But that much is self-evident.

The documents of the 10th Congress of the RCP(Bolsheviks) (1921)

These documents notably include the Report of the Central Committee, the conclusion to the Report and the closing speech delivered by Lenin HERE. These documents describe in detail the incredible economic difficulties at the time, analysing the mistakes committed by the Bolsheviks and the contradictions with the anarchists (including Kronstadt) and the Workers’ Opposition.

At the heart of the matter, something which the article fails to address, is the fact that War Communism was a success for the Bolsheviks, albeit only a fragile one, holding out many contradictions for the future, especially the mistakes regarding the relationship with the masses. While that much is quite clear, it nevertheless remained a success inasmuch as the enemy had been defeated and a new leaf had been turned. The analyses at the 10th Congress of the RCP(B) in 1921 are understandable, even when acknowledging the fact that they were highly one-sided and with far-reaching implications. Affirming this means putting politics in command, appraising the situation in its context based not unsubstantiated ideas or theoretic principles but on an objective and subjective reality which applies to everyone.

The article is, therefore, instilled with what could be referred to as “leftist economism” : economism in that its assessments are based primarily on economic rather than political grounds and leftist because it nevertheless points to the source of the deviations which were to come later.

When the article was first published in 1997, the Steering Committee of Voie Prolétarienne criticised it for failing to comply with the Organisation’s positions as expressed in its Platform document. The criticism was fair, albeit somewhat bureaucratic.

In our Platform document, the OCML VP states that the bourgeoisie had once again become the dominant class in the USSR in the 1930s. That is inaccurate and reflects both our flaws in the fields of historical and theoretical study as well as the political contradictions within the organisation. However, several versions clash regarding the use of the phrase “in the 1930s” :

 The version of the anarchists who believe that the Revolution had been lost as early as Kronstadt in 1921. Anarchists reject the role of the State, centralisation and the general interest of the people versus those of the individual. They are in favour of self-management, decentralised and scattered power in the hands of the people and are against the power of the State. They fail to grasp that at a certain point in time, the future of the Revolution depends essentially on the State and government (something which had, however, been understood by a such an outstanding anarchist as Emma Goldman who attempted to mediate at Kronstadt). They can see no further than their own horizon of self-management and for them that is where the Revolution ended.

That being said, and this is something we shall return to later, we have no difficulty in conceding that the violent repression which took place during the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921 was to have serious implications for the way the Russian Revolution unfolded and that the attitude of the Bolshevik Party and Lenin himself was clear-cut and ruthless.

 The version of “Khrushchev’s coup” in 1956 which holds that it was at that moment that Capitalism was restored in the USSR. This version effectively validates the period under Stalin at the head of the CPSU. The OCML VP holds that the take-over of power in the 1930s by the State capitalist bourgeoisie was the decisive factor, regardless of any positive role played by the Soviet regime in resisting Nazism. The Constitution of 1936 (see HERE, especially Articles 1-6) is eloquent in this respect, defining the State of the people as a whole, describing the eradication of Capitalism and the triumph of Socialism, are all clear indicators of having abandoned the class struggle, despite its central role in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

 The version (far more interesting and valuable for reflections regarding the future) which holds, as does the author of the article, that the Revolution was doomed to fail. Leftist economism and the ultra-left alike all put the economy rather politics in command. Let us be clear : while we agree that conditions were extremely unfavourable by the end of the Civil War, we also believe that anything could happen. The Bolsheviks had survived the Revolution, the Civil War and War Communism. The road ahead was still open. While History teaches us that they then failed (that much is indisputable), we believe that at that time nothing was a foregone conclusion.

The article is lively and interesting, for which reason we have republished it, detailing the reality of the contradictions at each moment. Which is why we can say that the conclusion it reaches stands in contradiction to the rest of the text.

We have decided to republish this article because it is very valuable and filled with information, detailing very well the contradictions at each moment. As we have said, we do not share the final conclusion but we hope to raise a debate which is neither concluded nor closed.

The Central Committee of the OCML Voie Prolétarienne