WeeklyWorker

29.08.2024
Kamenev, Lenin, Trotsky celebrate second anniversary of revolution: was everything already lost?

Historical and methodological differences

Because revolutions have failed, that does not mean they were bound to fail. Steve Bloom continues his exploration of revolutionary strategy and history

This is the companion article I promised in my submission titled ‘In search of a synthesis’,1 which focuses on one strategic disagreement I have with Mike Macnair, but in a context of considerable convergence on other matters relating to revolutionary strategy.

Here we will focus on some of the historical and methodological issues on which Mike and I disagree - these are quite extensive. I once again want to stress at the outset, therefore, that our general convergence on a range of strategic and programmatic questions remains central in my view. This is the context in which I undertake this historical investigation. The ability of people with historical and theoretical disagreements to converge on questions of programme and strategy is, or should be, decisive in terms of finding unity in common revolutionary organisations.

The points I raise here, extensive as they are, by no means exhaust the difficulties I have with Mike’s exposition in his book titled Revolutionary strategy.2 They do, however, cover what to me seem like the most important points - with two exceptions that we will simply note at the end.

1. Expiration

What was the expiration date of the Russian Revolution? Mike writes:

In 1917 the Bolsheviks led the soviets to take political power - a gamble on the Russian Revolution triggering a generalised socialist revolution in central and western Europe. The gamble failed. In all probability, it had already failed by January 1918. At that point it was clear that Red Guards and fraternisation attempts were unable to stop the renewed German advance, let alone trigger the German revolution. As a result the March 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk destroyed both majority support for the Bolshevik government in Russia, and any serious prospect of a German revolution before the military victory of the Entente powers on the western front. Certainly it had failed by 1921. (pp8-9)

And then:

Once the gamble on the European revolution had failed by 1921, the outcome which actually materialised - the bureaucratic dictatorship, itself irreversibly on the road back to capitalism, and standing as a road-block against the working class taking power in the central capitalist countries - was by a long way the most probable outcome of the Bolsheviks’ decision to attempt to hold on to political power. (p10)

See point 4 below regarding the question of historical gambles. Here I will focus on the date 1921, which Mike relies on throughout his book as the basis for an assessment of subsequent events. His conclusion - that the obituary of the Russian Revolution could have been written by 1921 - runs like a thread through his entire analysis.

But give me the victory of the Spanish revolution, which was not definitively defeated until 1939, and I will assert that the entire history of the world, including of the USSR - in the process of degeneration, yes, but of a degeneration that was still reversible - would almost surely have turned out differently. In the 1920s and 30s there were revolutionary events in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and elsewhere. Give me a revolutionary victory in any one of these struggles and I can make the same statement.

So, no, the USSR was not “irreversibly on the road back to capitalism” by 1921, not even ‘most probably’ on that road. Mike commits the common fallacy of mistaking the beginning of a process for its conclusion - something that is easy for us to do when we already know the conclusion. I will insist, however, that the degeneration of the USSR to the point where even the Stalinist remnants of 1917 were overthrown was far from a fait accompli in 1921.

I will also dispute Mike’s assertion that “the March 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk destroyed ... majority support for the Bolshevik government in Russia”. The victory of the new revolutionary power in the civil war that raged from 1918 to 1921 totally contradicts this assessment. A victory in this civil war would have been impossible, had the Bolshevik government been unable to maintain and, more importantly, actively mobilise massive popular support from the workers and peasants of the USSR during this period.

2. Method

Let us now deal with questions of method; first, hindsight and the bridge-collapse analogy. Mike acknowledges that his entire assessment is based on historical hindsight:

The use of hindsight is justifiable and necessary, because the point of the whole exercise is to study history for what it can tell us about where we are now, how we got here and where we should (try to) go next. In this sense it is loosely analogous to the sort of exercise that has to be undertaken if a bridge falls down. Why did the bridge fall down? If it was hit by a meteorite, we may well rebuild it in exactly the same form. But if the collapse was caused by problems which will predictably recur in future (like severe storms or an increased weight of traffic), we should redesign the bridge, in the light of hindsight, to meet these problems. The fact that the problems which caused the collapse may not have been originally predictable affects the moral responsibility of the original designers, but it does not in the least alter our present tasks. (p20)

This is OK so far as it goes, but like any analogy it has its limits. Mike acknowledges this when he uses the word “loosely”. But he then far exceeds the actual limits of his ‘loose’ analogy, writing as if he is indeed an engineer designing a new bridge, able to assess the collapse of the old one with pinpoint precision. Let us consider a few difficulties with this approach:

Our historical hindsight regarding political processes is not at all like engineering hindsight after a bridge collapses. Any conclusions we draw about future expectations/actions must be far more qualified. Yet Mike draws absolute and sweeping generalisations from his hindsight, which are completely unwarranted. It is this, not the use of hindsight per se, that leads to a series of historical and methodological mistakes in my judgment.

3. Potential

Next we have the historical potential for political revolution in the USSR. Mike writes:

Under the Soviet-style bureaucratic regimes there was no objective tendency towards independent self-organisation of the working class. Rather, there were episodic explosions; but, to the extent that the bureaucracy did not succeed in putting a political cap on these, they tended towards a pro-capitalist development. The strategic line of a worker revolution against the bureaucracy - whether it was called ‘political revolution’, as it was by the orthodox Trotskyists, or ‘social revolution’ by state-capitalism and bureaucratic-collectivism theorists - lacked a material basis. (p7)

The material basis for the strategic concept of political revolution in the USSR was twofold:

(a) The power of the mass mobilisation that had been central to the Russian Revolution itself in 1917. This remained alive through the 1920s and 30s, even the 40s and 50s, when the generation that made the revolution was alive and very much a factor in social life. I would suggest that this power was still alive even until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, though in a weaker and weaker form as time passed.

(b) The historical tendency of human beings to rebel against oppressive regimes.

Stalin understood the power of these two material factors quite well, especially point (a), which is why he erected the Gulag and a secret police apparatus specifically targeted, at least initially, against those who had been active participants in 1917. Think of the Moscow Trials of 1938, in which the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee that helped to lead the October Revolution was framed up and executed, thereby neutralising these individuals as a nucleus around which an opposition to Stalin’s rule could develop.

And, while it is a relatively minor point, let us note that the “episodic explosions” Mike refers to were not “capped” by the bureaucratic regime - a word that implies cooptation or having their immediate demands met. They were, rather, suppressed with Soviet tanks and/or a massive police-state repression.

An empirical look at the actual history also fails to sustain Mike’s assertion that such rebellions against bureaucracy “tended towards a pro-capitalist development”. Neither the Hungarian uprising in 1956 nor the Prague Spring in 1968 - the two most important of these “explosions” - represented “pro-capitalist” developments. They were consciously revolutionary socialist. Even into the 1970s opposition voices continued to be heard within the USSR which counterposed a democratic pro-socialist perspective to Stalinism. The one major event which definitively moved in a pro-capitalist direction came quite late, in Poland, with the rise of Solidarność. Even here, however, although this formation ended up as a major tool in the process of capitalist restoration, a struggle with consciously pro-socialist voices was required before that outcome could be achieved.

4. Lessons

What lessons can we properly draw from historical gambles that fail? Mike writes: “Given the failure of the gamble, the Trotskyist account does not explain why any attempt to repeat a revolution in the image of 1917 would not end in the same way” (p9). And then:

The ‘victory of the Russian Revolution’ on its own, or the course of the revolution after late 1917-early 1918, can no longer be taken as evidence for Bolshevik strategy as a package. What it led to was not a strategic gain for the world working class, but a 60-year impasse of the global workers’ movement and the severe weakness of this movement at the present date. (p10)

Mike’s assessment that the Bolshevik revolution was a historical gamble which failed is indisputable. His conclusion - that this failure proves the gamble was a political mistake from which we can generalise no useful lessons for the future - is not.

Before the colony of St Augustine (1565) and Jamestown (1607) were founded, all initial attempts of Europeans to colonise North America failed. Following Mike Macnair’s method of analysis, the failure of these first attempts should have caused others to conclude that the very concept of colonising North America was fatally flawed and ought never to be tried again.

Suppose slaves in Haiti had consulted Mike Macnair about whether they should revolt in 1791. If they followed the logic he suggests they would, surely, have taken a look at centuries of failed slave revolts, been unable to see any reason why theirs “would not end in the same way”, and concluded that such an undertaking would not be prudent.

(What, by the way, is the “material basis” for slave revolts, since there is no “objective tendency towards independent self-organisation” of slaves? The answer is, of course, the same one that we gave in terms of the “material basis” for political revolution above. There is a subjective tendency toward the self-organisation of slaves: the inborn tendency of human beings to rebel against enslavement.)

Every revolution, or attempted revolution, is a gamble. Most of these gambles fail. The Paris Commune was another revolutionary gamble that failed. Che and Fidel succeeded with their revolutionary gamble in Cuba, but Che then failed with the same gamble in Bolivia, and tens of thousands perished in the failed effort to duplicate the Cuban success elsewhere in Latin America. This is the flipside of understanding that we cannot declare all gambles of a particular type wrong because the first one failed. In this case we cannot declare all gambles of a particular type correct because the first one succeeded.

The question of whether a particular historical gamble is strategically justified depends on the odds. This is obvious if we consider gambles of a different type. Let us say there is a lottery with a prize of $1 million. Whether it is right or wrong to buy a $1 ticket depends on the odds. If the odds are 10 million to one, then it is a fool’s choice. If the odds are a million to one then it is even money. If the odds are 100 to one then you should enter every time, even though you will still lose your bet 99 times out of 100.

In my judgment the odds for the gamble the Bolsheviks took in 1917 were far closer to 100 to one in a million dollar lottery than they were to 10 million to one. It was correct to take the gamble, even though this happened to be one of the 99 times out of 100 when the gamble failed to pay off.

And then there are the historical gambles that are taken simply because the pressure cooker of social oppression decides this is the moment when things explode, when the oppressed classes rebel (because that is what they have to do at the moment) without ever stopping to calculate the odds - and, by the way, without asking permission from whatever conscious revolutionary political forces might exist. That, too, is an experience history has gone through over and over again, sometimes even leading to a revolutionary success (once again we can point to Haiti).

What conscious revolutionaries do during such moments cannot guarantee that there will be a success despite the odds. But we should still do whatever we can to increase the potential for success, because revolutionaries who fail to act in this way have discarded any hope of ever influencing masses of people in the future. Those masses who, on their own and without consulting first, make the choice to gamble will simply discard any and all ‘revolutionaries’ who fail to join their revolt.

Mike may object to everything I say in this section by asserting that the difficulty he cites is not so much the initial gamble of 1917 as it is the decision of the Bolsheviks to hold onto power after 1921. Leaving aside the deep historical irony of a choice by the Bolsheviks to give up power immediately after winning a traumatic civil war to maintain it, I can only refer you to points one and three above.

5. Soviets

In my previous article I promised to revisit Mike’s characterisation of the slogan, ‘All power to the soviets’ as “illusory” (p119). This, too, is an essential building block of his entire historical analysis. The approach is summed up in the following passage:

Subsequent history confirms this judgment. Workers’ councils and similar forms have appeared in many strike waves and revolutionary crises since 1917. In none have these forms been able to offer an alternative centre of authority, an alternative decision-making mechanism for the whole society. This role is unavoidably played by a government - either based on the surviving military-bureaucratic state core, or on the existing organisations of the workers’ movement ... The point is simply that the problem of decision-making authority is not solved by the creation of workers’ councils arising out of a mass strike movement. (p44)

The choice should not, however, be formulated as being between soviet power or power exercised by political parties. What is needed is soviet power and power exercised by parties. Both elements are essential.

It is true that workers’ councils do not, by their mere emergence, solve the problem of a decision-making authority. This is precisely the difficulty that the slogan, ‘All power to the soviets’, is designed to address. The slogan is premised on the idea that “this role is unavoidably played by a government”, and it therefore calls on the workers’ councils to become the governmental form through which “the existing organisations of the workers’ movement” can then “solve the problem of decision-making authority”.

Indeed, if we do not have a new governmental form, if we are talking simply about one or another of “the existing organisations of the workers’ movement” solving the question of power without a new governmental form, it is hard for me to see how we avoid ‘All power to the Communist Party’ as the outcome - a solution Mike refers to as “empty” in the same sentence on p119, where he characterises ‘All power to the soviets’ as “illusory”. In this case I essentially agree with Mike’s characterisation.

Mike also talks about another aspect that we should consider in relation to his assertion about the “illusory” nature of Soviet power: “Almost as soon as the Bolsheviks had taken power, they were forced to move from a militia to a regular army, and with it came logistics and the need for a state bureaucracy” (pp36-37).

But “the need for a state bureaucracy”, and even a standing army, is not in contradiction to “soviet power” any more than the need for a state bureaucracy and standing army in the USA is in contradiction to the constitutional power of the president and Congress. These things are, rather, the means through which the president and Congress exercise their power. Yes, our image of a proletarian revolution would dispense with the standing army at least, and rely on a militia.

If this is your response to what I just wrote, then please go back and reread point 2 above. Making revolution is not like building a bridge. Our blueprint changes, based on the actual experience as the revolution is in the process of construction. And it turned out that in the USSR after 1917 the construction of a standing army proved to be necessary.

The outcome Mike describes in terms of a declining soviet power in Russia after October 1917 was not the result of some inherent weakness in the idea of ‘All power to the soviets’. The specific conditions that imposed themselves on the new Soviet republic when the German revolution failed to materialise and come to its aid are what led to the state bureaucracy and standing army coming to dominate the soviets rather than the other way around. There is no basis for the kind of generalisation about what soviet power does and does not represent theoretically simply because of this specific historical result.

6. Tactics

We need to think about the question of strategy and tactics. In my last article I wrote:

Mike is using the term ‘strategy’ in his book to discuss a years-long process of constructing a mass working class opposition force that can become strong enough to take power when there is a crisis of bourgeois rule. In relation to this project, the mass strike can only be properly thought of as a tactic - something that comes into play at a particular moment - and a relatively fleeting moment at that (though also a decisive one). On the other hand, if we are considering just that moment of social crisis, it is perfectly reasonable to talk about the mass strike as the keystone in an insurrectionary ‘strategy’ ...

If we remain cognisant of the fact that, when the word ‘strategy’ is used by proponents of the mass strike, they are not using that term in the same way that Mike is in the title of his book, it should help us to avoid counterposing two ‘strategies’ that actually need to be combined, as we think about the nuts and bolts of a revolutionary process.

I am now thinking that this relationship might be reformulated more productively as follows: There are two interconnected aspects to a revolutionary strategy:

(1) Creating a party that can grow to reflect a large minority sentiment for ‘extreme democracy’.

(2) Merging that minority party with a social majority that begins to demand the redress of grievances, thereby generating a governmental crisis which allows us to engineer the actual insurrectionary moment, displacing the old state and replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Mike has focused intelligently on part one of that strategy. But part two remains undertheorised in his approach. What we need is a rounded revolutionary strategy that accounts theoretically for both elements.

Our conclusion remains essentially the same: the ‘mass strike’, ‘dual power’, ‘All power to the soviets’ (all elements of the solution to problem number 2) need to be understood in the context of a broader strategic synthesis, not rejected because by themselves they fail to solve problem number 1.

7. Context

We need to place historical developments in their contemporary context. In this section we will consider three developments that unfolded during the 1920s and 30s: the early years of the Comintern, the emergence of the Trotskyist movement and (connected to the emergence of Trotskyism) the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.

Mike looks at each of these through the lens of his understanding that 1921 constituted a definitive and indisputable expiration date for the revolutionary potential that began with 1917. If we want to properly assess this history, however, we have to do so based on the reality that everything the Comintern and the Trotskyist movement did was premised by precisely the opposite appreciation of the period through which they themselves were living: that during the 1920s and 30s there was an ongoing potential for world revolution.

Any political disagreement we develop today with those who were active then has to be rooted in an appreciation of why they made the choices they did. Their actions were a direct response to the revolutionary times through which they believed themselves to be living.

Firstly, Comintern. Mike’s primary critique is that Comintern’s establishment represented an incorrect codification of the split in the international workers’ movement that took place in 1914: “The idea of the split itself ... started with the notion that organisational separation from the right, and the creation of a new type of International and a new type of party, would immunise the workers’ movement against repeating the right’s betrayals” (p60).

He adds:

This argument seeks a strategic split in two senses. On the one hand, the strategy of the regenerated movement is to be ‘revolutionary’ and not ‘reformist’. On the other, it is a strategic break from the Second International’s strategy of unity, discussed in chapter one. It is, indeed, the exact opposite. By splitting from the right, the left, which represents the working class, is to purge the workers’ parties of opportunists, to purify itself and ‘regenerate’ socialism as ‘revolutionary’”. (p80, emphasis in original)

And: “The idea that the workers’ movement can be purified from ‘reformism’/’social chauvinism’ by separation of the ‘revolutionaries’/’internationalists’ is illusory.”  (p81)

Mike is especially critical of the 21 “Conditions of admission to the Communist International”, adopted in 1920. But we cannot properly judge these 21 conditions unless we place the entire effort they represented, including the founding of the Communist International itself, in a context of the genuinely revolutionary times that the world was living through in the year 1920 - and continued to live through for the next two decades. Whatever the weaknesses of individual points - and Mike is right that some did attempt, incorrectly, to theorise what were in fact immediate pragmatic measures taken to maintain a Bolshevik government in the USSR - his overall critique is wrong, because he fails to understand that during these revolutionary times it was at least reasonable to attempt to build a genuinely revolutionary international. The goal was not to “purify” the revolutionary movement or “immunise” it against reformism: it was, simply, to build an explicitly revolutionary formation when doing that mattered, or at least seemed to matter, because making revolution was an immediate practical possibility in much of Europe.

Let us consider one example of how Mike’s failure to view the political approach of the Comintern in the context of the genuinely revolutionary times its founders believed themselves to be living through leads him to totally misunderstand a fairly simple and straightforward statement:

The most fundamental misunderstanding appears at the very beginning of the Comintern thesis. In some countries “the position of bourgeois society is particularly unstable and … the balance of forces between the workers’ parties and the bourgeoisie places the question of government on the order of the day as a practical problem requiring immediate solution”. In reality, in parliamentary regimes every general election poses the question of government - and every general round of local elections also poses it, since it indicates the electoral relationship of forces between the parties at national level. (In presidential regimes the question of government is formally only posed in presidential elections, but is indirectly posed in elections to the legislature)”. (p118)

The Comintern is posing the question of which class will be in control of the government (“the balance of forces between the workers’ parties and the bourgeoisie”). Macnair tells us that this is equivalent to the far more mundane question of which party representing the bourgeoisie will be in control of the government - the actual question posed “in parliamentary regimes [by] every general election”.

In part 2 of this article we will continue our assessment of the revolutionary movement during the 1920s and 30s in the context of these revolutionary times l

  1. Weekly Worker August 15: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1502/in-search-of-a-synthesis.↩︎

  2. M Macnair Revolutionary strategy: Marxism and the challenge of left unity London 2008.↩︎