12.09.2001

Intentions and reality

Eddie Ford defends the October revolution from anarchist attacks

According to our anarchist comrade, Iain McKay, Bolshevism is irredeemably tainted - unlike anarchism, we presume. Leninism and Bolshevism inevitably lead to Stalinism. Due to Lenin?s world outlook and methods, the Russian Revolution was doomed to totalitarianism. Organisations like the Socialist Workers Party and the CPGB are ?the representatives of the dying tradition of Bolshevism?.

Comrade McKay?s charge sheet against the Bolsheviks appears well founded. They ?disbanded the opposition-controlled soviets and repressed the subsequent wave of working class protests and revolts?. Similarly, continues comrade McKay, ?the Bolsheviks also eliminated democracy in the armed forces as well as in industry. The soldiers? committees and elected officers were abolished in March 1918 by Trotsky ? Officers were appointed from above by the government. Lenin argued against workers? self-management of production, supporting (appointed from above) ?one-man management? invested with ?dictatorial powers? in early 1918. By 1920, Trotsky was advocating the ?militarisation of labour? and implemented his ideas on the railway workers.?

Comrade McKay thus concludes: ?Clearly, Bolshevism is hardly democratic.?

The examples cited above do indeed sound damning. But in reality, the comrade is playing games with the Russian Revolution and the history of Bolshevism in general. In fact, he takes a typically conservative approach to the truth. Content with the mere surface appearance of things, anarchist comrades like Iain McKay prefer to revel in the obvious shortcomings and failures of the October revolution rather than confront its complexities.

It is noticeable that in his sweeping condemnation of the Bolsheviks? anti-democratism, comrade Iain McKay fails to mention - quite incredibly - the civil war and the wars of intervention. These led to a virtual ?kill or be killed? situation. Given the appalling realities of war and invasion, the Bolsheviks were locked into a spiral of permanent ?crisis management? and never-ending emergency measures. Most anarchists imply - or sometimes even boldly state - that the desperate measures and suspension of ?normality? in post-revolutionary Russia somehow represents the essence of Bolshevism or Leninism. Communists, on the other hand, realise that the ?anti-democratism? which comrade McKay almost celebrates was forced upon the Bolsheviks, not pursued as an aim in and of itself.

Contrary to anarchist insinuations, the Bolshevik programme was democratic - in terms of theory and intention. But under the devastating impact of White terror and imperialist intervention - and thus isolation - democracy effectively collapsed and in the subsequent chaos the Bolsheviks - yes - had no real answer to the awesome problems facing Russia. But then neither did anyone else who claimed to defend the revolution - neither the Menshevik Internationalists, nor the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, nor the tiny forces of anarchism.

In 1918 the concrete choice facing revolutionaries of all hues was - stay in power using all necessary means or give up. By hanging on to power the Bolsheviks retained the hope of spreading the revolution and hence eventually giving Russia a chance to break out of its isolation. In short, the role of Russia was to light the spark that would ignite the revolution in the advanced capitalist states - most notably, Germany.

At that time communists of all persuasion - including JV Stalin of course - agreed that socialism required the worldwide overthrow of capitalism. No form of national socialism was sustainable.

However, as we know, the revolutionary wave (1918-23) that swept Germany, Hungary, Bavaria, Finland, Austria, etc, was brutally crushed - primarily thanks to the venal treachery of the social democratic leaders. If comrade McKay wants to point the finger of accusation at the real culprits, there they are - the social democratic tops who worked overtime to ensure the isolation of the Russian Revolution. As Hal Draper comments, the German social democrats who yesterday had been Kaiser-socialists were ?keeping the German socialist revolution chloroformed? (Hal Draper The dictatorship of the proletariat from Marx to Lenin New York 1987, p116).

The material conditions confronting backward Russia were daunting. As Rosa Luxemburg commented, ?It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy ... The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics? (quoted in ibid p116).

Once the revolutionary surge subsided, Lenin knew only too well that the consequences of defeat would be far-reaching and negative: ?Our banking on the world revolution, if you can call it that, has on the whole been fully justified.? But its slowness ?has landed us with immeasurable difficulties?.

What were these ?immeasurable difficulties?? Russia was in a ruined state. Between 1914 and 1921 famine, epidemic and war had cut the population by a staggering 13.5 million. It was equally bleak on the economic front. Even in 1913 national income per capita was about eight to 10 times less than the United States. After world war, revolution and civil war, industry (apart from arms production) had virtually disappeared - agricultural production had fallen by a staggering 50%.

As well as ?banking? on world revolution, Lenin recognised that, having seized power in a backward country, it would be necessary for the proletariat to develop it culturally and economically - an important, though entirely subsidiary, contribution to world revolution in its own right. Lenin wrote: ?Since soviet power has been established, since the bourgeoisie has been overthrown in one country, the ? task is to wage the struggle on a world scale, on a different plane: the struggle of the proletarian state surrounded by capitalist states. The situation is an entirely novel and difficult one ? since the rule of the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, the main task is to organise the development of the country.?

However, for classical Marxism - and hence Bolshevism - it had been assumed that socialism proceeds from the most advanced level of capitalism. Therefore it was naturally thought that the socialist regime would have the active support of the overwhelming majority of the population. The reality of Russia could not be more different. Surrounded by a peasant sea, the proletariat constituted at most 10% of the population - a figure which shrunk with post-revolution economic dislocation, internal and external wars.

What is more, after the civil war came to a close, the working class had been effectively declassed. It was decimated by death in battle and by a forced return to peasant life, given the economic collapse. There were 3.5 million industrial workers in 1913; by 1922 there were only 1,118,000 left. Moscow and Petrograd experienced a massive haemorrhaging of population to the countryside - Moscow lost 44.5% and Petrograd 57.5%. Worse, at least in the opinion of Lenin, the proletariat had declined even more in quality than in quantity. That is, the best workers were siphoned off into full-time positions in the Red Army, the administrative machine and the Communist Party - ie, became part of the state-party bureaucracy. Numerically, the Communist Party may have grown by leaps and bounds - from 240,000 in August 1917 to 730,000 by February 1921 - yet an increasingly small percentage belonged to factory cells - only 18% in 1923. And politically the Party had shrunk - in terms of cadre and theory.

It was this combination of a literally shrinking proletariat but an expanded Communist Party which led Lenin to write that ?the dictatorship of the proletariat would not work except through the Communist Party?, and to add: ?If we do not close our eyes to reality, we must admit that at the present time the proletarian policy of the Party is not determined by the character of its membership, but by the enormous individual prestige enjoyed by a small group called the old guard of the Party? (quoted in Jack Conrad From October to August London 1992, p24). It should be obvious that Lenin was not celebrating this regrettable fact, even though comrade McKay implies that he was.

Left high and dry by the tardiness of the world revolution, devastated economically and politically, with the Communist Party substituting for the decimated proletariat, the society inaugurated by the Russian Revolution did not match the Marxist textbooks. A not inaccurate description was penned by the French Eurocommunist author, Jean Ellenstein, who wrote: ?In 1923 the Soviet Union was a country where neither freedom of speech, nor freedom to hold meetings and belong to associations nor free elections existed, where power was in the hands of a small group of men (a few thousand at most), and where the political police remained all-powerful, where neither democratic traditions nor institutions existed, because of the very conditions under which the revolution triumphed? (The Stalin phenomenon 1976, p50).

Not a desirable outcome - that?s right, anarchist comrades!

Surely one question we should pose to the serious anarchists is - if they had by some fluke come to lead the revolution in the Russia of 1917, how would they have fared? Either they would have had to betray their own principles in order to see the revolution through to victory, or if they had stayed true to their principles the revolution would have been drowned in an orgy of bloodletting. Kornilov and Denkin carried out a Nazi-like campaign of exterminating ?reds and yids? during the civil war. If they had captured Petrograd and Moscow there would have been a slaughter of genocidal proportions. To abolish state power under such circumstances was to surrender.

Of course, anarchists have no right whatsoever to claim any ?moral? superiority over Bolshevism. After all, large sections of anarchism ?failed the test? when it came to World War I - by supporting the imperialist slaughter in defence of their own nation. Anarchism and syndicalism split along national chauvinist lines just like official social democracy did. In that sense, pre-1914 anarchism and syndicalism died on the battlefields of Tanneberg and the Somme.

Take the French Conf?d?ration G?n?rale du Travail, one of the strongest and most respected workers? organisation. Year after year, the French syndicalist leaders proclaimed that they would respond to a declaration of war with a revolutionary general strike. But when war was actually declared, they immediately joined the union sacr?e in defence of the French imperialist state. CGT leader L?on Jouhaux preached ?hatred of German imperialism? - speaking, so he said, for ?those who are going off to war?.

The anarchist ?prince? and hero, Peter Kropotkin, came out openly in support for Britain, France and Russia against the Central Powers. The proponent of the solidarity of the human community at once became indistinguishable from the most rabid British or French chauvinist. Even a highly sympathetic biography acknowledges that ?all Kropotkin did, like any militarist, was to talk of bigger and better cannons, to exhort his friends to ?defend themselves like wild beasts?, and to repeat the current exaggerated atrocity stories of the Germans ?fighting like devils and trampling on all the rules of humanity?? (G Woodcock and I Avakumovic The anarchist prince 1950). The old Russian populist and anarchist had become a governmental-anarchist on the grounds that a military alliance with Britain and France would result in a ?strengthening of the liberalising forces in Russia?.

Obviously, anarchists would never turn against the masses. Yet somehow the leading intellectual lights of the anarchist movement in France - Jean Grave, Charles Malato, Paul Reclus - did precisely that and came out in defence of their ?own? capitalist state. The Austrian anarchist scholar, Max Nettlau, a recognised authority on Bakunin?s life and writings, likewise supported the war, in his case on the side of the Central Powers (the rabidly anti-Germanist Bakunin would have spun in his grave).

Of course, the genuinely revolutionary anarchists split with their former comrades. The founding of the Communist International in 1919 not only polarised the socialist parties, whose best elements sought to become communists (while the worst would make a career of anti-communism up to and including the physical liquidation of revolutionaries). It had a similarly fundamental effect on the anarchists and syndicalists - the revolutionary elements either rallied to the side of the October revolution (eg, Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer). Or found themselves abruptly marginalised as mere footnotes to history.

To explain their own conversion to Bolshevism, anarchists created in their heads a Bolshevik conversion from Marxism to anarchism (in many ways a mirror image of Lenin?s supposed ?break? from old Bolshevism and conversion to Trotskyism in April 1917). The anarchist, Gregory Raiva, enthusiastically wrote in September 1917: ?From the standpoint of Marxism, of ?scientific socialism?, the most consistent Marxists are undoubtedly the Menshevik social democrats ? And it is entirely natural that the social democrats, cleaving to the views of Marx, should regard the present Russian Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. It is entirely natural that the social democratic Marxists should be consistently striving for a coalition, striving to establish ties with the bourgeoisie. For, according to the Marxist programme, the time for a social revolution has not yet arrived ?

?It stands to reason that the Bolsheviks, as revolutionaries, are dearer and closer to us anarchists. For, in point of fact, their intransigent revolutionary position is due not to their rigid adherence to the teachings of Marx, but to the fact that they have shed the scholasticism of their apostle and adopted a revolutionary - that is, anti-Marxist - point of view?

?We rejoice that it is the Bolsheviks and not the Mensheviks who are everywhere on the rise. But we regret that the Bolsheviks have not yet shaken the dust of Marxism from their feet. The Bolsheviks are at the crossroads: Marxism or anarchism?? (quoted in Paul Avrich (ed) The anarchists in the Russian Revolution 1973).

Unsurprisingly, faced by the reality of revolution, Russian anarchism fractured. Some anarchists joined the Communist Party, others fought in the Red Army or Cheka. On the other hand, there were those who lined up against the Soviet regime and turned to counterrevolution and terrorism.

One of the most celebrated of the latter was the Ukrainian peasant-based army of Nestor Makhno, which was responsible for vicious anti-semitic massacres (hence carrying on the fine Bakuninite tradition of anti-semitism) and which also collaborated with the White armies. For some reason, Makhno is still a much romanticised figure in the anarchist pantheon. Anti-semitism is, of course, no longer respectable - even amongst fools.

True, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolsheviks the Russian Revolution made many mistakes. But its impact has been phenomenal. Because of it, we still live in an epoch of transition - the transition from moribund capitalism to immanent communism.