As anti-Bolshevik communists, the Socialist Party has discovered that the trouble with critiques of the Russian Revolution from the Left is that they sound ever so plausible since their numbers are full of academics with PhDs in the minutiae of political history. Their analysis is usually based on "the lie of omission", the purposeful ignoring of events and over-emphasis of others to bolster their interpretations and political bias.
The contribution of the Socialist Party of Great Britain with its analysis of the nature of the Russian state is deliberately over-looked. The SPGB was probably the earliest Marxist political party to declare the regime as non-socialist and over the years has been the most consistent critics of the proponents of Bolshevism.
Some on the Left assert that workers' rule was not be able to last due to isolation and backwardness but what should be emphasised is that the rapid time-table of the Bolsheviks reveal they had no intention of having workers' rule but only party rule and such apologies as presented by Leninists and Trotskyists cuts no ice .
"... just four days after seizing power, the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars (CPC or Sovnarkom) "unilaterally arrogated to itself legislative power simply by promulgating a decree to this effect. This was, effectively, a Bolshevik coup d'etat that made clear the government's (and party's) pre-eminence over the soviets and their executive organ. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks relied upon the appointment from above of commissars with plenipotentiary powers, and they split up and reconstituted fractious Soviets and intimidated political opponents...the Bolsheviks immediately created a power above the soviets in the form of the CPC. Lenin's argument in The State and Revolution that, like the Paris Commune, the workers' state would be based on a fusion of executive and administrative functions in the hands of the workers' delegates did not last one night. In reality, the Bolshevik party was the real power in "soviet" Russia...." [Neil Harding, Leninism,]
Once Bolshevik power was established the soviets simply became an emasculated rubber stamp for party rule. Within a month of taking power they had dissolved one soviet, and dissolved another 17 days later. The Bolsheviks had no problem at all with their "worker's state" suppressing workers' expressions of power. When it was beneficial to the Bolsheviks, they said "All power to the Factory Committees" but 9 days after taking power, they subordinated the factory committees to the trades unions and congresses which were effectively under the control of the Bolsheviks, and to the state itself under the direct control of the Bolsheviks. When the Mensheviks and SRs won majorities in soviets, the offending soviets were disbanded, then their papers were closed down, their members harrassed, exiled and shot .The Constituent Assembly to which all parties of the Russian revolutionary Left worked towards, even the Bolsheviks, and which was elected on the basis of the first free vote in that country , was abolished after only one day in session because the Bolsheviks were in the minority. Lenin helped not only impose such conditions but deliberately smeared left critics as counter-revolutionaries to tie them in with those who were taking up arms against the Bolshevik government. The Cheka, which was set up within a few weeks of October yet the Commissar of Justice was Steinberg, a member of the Left SRs, could never get control of the Cheka because the Cheka only answered to the Bolshevik party central committee.
Trotsky said in History of the Russian Revolution that "The party set the soviets in motion, the soviets set in motion the workers, soldiers, and to some extent the peasantry." In other words, the soviets existed to allow the party to influence the workers. But what if the workers reject the decisions of the party? What happens when the workers refuse to be set in motion by the party but instead set themselves in motion and reject the Bolsheviks? What then for the soviets? The soviets were marginalised and undermined by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and neutered of any power simply because they often did reflect the wishes of the working class and not those of the Bolshevik Party. A Left S R said "The Bible tells us that God created the heavens and the earth from nothing . The Bolsheviks are capable of no lesser miracles, out of nothing, they create legitimate credentials."
Some take a more nuanced view and blame the authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks upon its roots in the authoritarianism of the Social Democratic 2nd International. And did the "authoritarianism" of Julius Martov and the Left Mensheviks also arise from their roots in the 2nd International. Was Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin and his Blanquism not from her roots in the 2nd International ? Was Karl Kautsky's defence of the democractic social revolution not rooted in the 2nd International? The tradition of the Bolsheviks is not based on the 2nd International [which indeed possessed many failings] but rather on the Narodnik principle of a professional revolutionary organisation. The Bolsheviks created their particular, typically Russian type of political organism. Tkachev, sometimes known as "the First Bolshevik", said “Neither now nor in the future is the people left to itself, capable of accomplishing the social revolution. Only we, the revolutionary minority, can and must accomplish the revolution and as soon as possible...The people cannot help itself. The people cannot direct its own fate to suit its own needs. It cannot give body and life to the ideas of the social revolution....This role and mission belong unquestionably to the revolutionary minority.”
We can understand the Bolsheviks more by accepting that they made choices that other Marxists were not prepared to make. The Bolsheviks thought it possible for an active minority, representing the vague aspirations of the workers, to gain political power before the capitalist revolution itself had been completed. What would happen if such a minority gained a political victory over the capitalist classes? Marx himself answers this question in clear-cut terms in his article, “Moralising Criticism”. Briefly stated, his answer is the following: In those circumstances, the minority become merely the tools of the capitalist class, which has not been virile enough to gain or hold power. Such a minority finds itself in the position of having to develop and run capitalism for a class unable, at the time, to do it successfully itself. Hence, let it be remembered, in running capitalism, the minority will be compelled to use its power to keep the working class in its slave position.
"...Says Marx ' its victory will only be a point in the process of the bourgeois (capitalist) revolution itself, and will serve the cause of the latter by aiding its further development. This happened in 1794, and will happen again as long as the march, the movement, of history will not have elaborated the material factors that will create the necessity of putting an end to the bourgeois methods of production and, as a consequence, to the political domination of the bourgeoisie'....It appears therefore that Marx admitted the possibility of a political victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie at a point of historic development when the previously necessary conditions for a socialist revolution were not yet mature. But he stressed that such a victory would be transitory' " wrote Julius Martov
We see the real content and meaning of the Russian Revolution. It was “only a point in the process of the capitalist revolution itself”. The Bolsheviks, finding Russia in a very backward condition, were obliged to do what had not been done previously, i.e. develop capitalism.The Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie.The Marxist theory adopted by them was nothing more than an ideological garb cloaking it anti-working class actions.
The Russian Revolution was inevitably capitalist, and so the issue then as framed by Kautsky, Martov etc. was to make it democratic, something that was not possible in the Bolshevik scheme of a "proletarian" minority seizing power. The point of a revolutionary movement in a pre-revolutionary situation is to ensure the growth of proletarian power and the defence of the class. The Bolsheviks failed to do so, emasculating what workers organisations existed, sacrificing their independence and strength to the altar of their One Party Rule. A choice was made by Bolshevism, nothing was inevitable. One of the basic questions being missed is was the October Revolution by the Bolsheviks actually inevitable or necessary regardless of whether it is described as a coup or popular uprising, and that there was no alternative .
This article by a Trotskyist is refreshingly candid.
"During the whole period I was active in the Trotskyist movement, I accepted the view that the revolution of October 1917 was a great leap forward on the road to socialism, and that the regime it established was a healthy workers’ state until it started degenerating from 1923-24 onwards with the ascendancy of Stalinism and the defeat of the Trotskyist opposition. Since then a closer examination of the actual history of the revolution has led me to question this view. As early as the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks had lost the support of large sections of the working class and of the peasantry, and were ruling dictatorially...
...The disillusion of the workers was expressed in a declaration by the striking workers at the Sormovo factory in June 1918: "The Soviet regime, having been established in our name, has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the workers socialism, but has brought them empty factories and destitution." A workers’ protest movement, the Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives, was formed in March 1918 with a membership of several hundred thousand at the height of its influence in June.
The response of the Bolsheviks was to nationalise the factories, replace workers’ control by one-man management, and dissolve the oppositional Soviets. By the summer of 1918 with the departure of the Left SRs from the government and the suppression of their uprising, and the Red Terror unleashed by the Cheka, the Bolshevik one-party dictatorship was in place. Any popular control from below of the Soviets or the government had disappeared.
In addition, there is ample evidence that the hard core of devoted self-sacrificing Bolshevik party cadres were already being swamped by careerists and corrupt elements in the party and Soviet institutions. In September 1919, a report landed on Lenin’s desk showing that the Smolny was full of corruption.
In the light of these facts, one can no longer uphold the Trotskyist thesis that from 1917 to 1923-24 the Soviet Union was a "healthy" workers’ state, and that the degeneration into bureaucratic dictatorship took off only afterwards...
...All one can say is that the "workers’ state" that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism.
My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once said to me: "It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred."
What factors or actions by the participants might have resulted in the non-occurrence of October and a different outcome? Assuming that nothing is inevitable until it has happened, and that "men make their own history", there are three possibilities.
Firstly, that Lenin’s April Theses that set the Bolshevik party on the road to the October insurrection had been rejected by the party. Let us recall that up till Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, the Bolshevik leadership was pursuing a policy of critical support for the Provisional government. They felt this was consistent with the view that since the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of bringing about a bourgeois revolution, this task would have to be carried out by the proletariat supported by the peasantry, but that the revolution could not go immediately beyond the stage of establishing a bourgeois republic. In February, the Petrograd proletariat had carried out this "bourgeois revolution" with the support of the peasant soldiers. Now that the bourgeois republic was in place, the next stage was not the immediate struggle for working-class power, but a relatively prolonged period of bourgeois democracy. Lenin now abandoned this view which he had himself defended under the slogan of "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", and argued for no support for the Provisional Government, and for agitation for power to the Soviets. He swung the Bolshevik party to this policy. But it was not inevitable that he should have done. The Bolshevik party might have continued its policy of critical support for and pressure on the February regime.
Secondly, even after his steering the party on its new course, Lenin had to fight again in October to commit the party to insurrection against the opposition of Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. It is not inconceivable that Zinoviev and Kamenev might have carried the day. Then there would have been no October.
Thirdly, even after October there was, as I have pointed out, a very real possibility of a coalition Bolshevik-Menshevik-SR government, based either on the Soviets or a combination of the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets as organs of local power and administration. This possibility foundered against the mutual intransigence of the Bolshevik hardliners on one side and the Menshevik and SR right-wing on the other. But in both camps there were conciliatory wings, the Menshevik Internationalists and some Left SRs and the Bolshevik "moderates" – Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, etc. A coalition government of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs, having a much broader based support than a purely Bolshevik one, would have been able to confront the White Armies more successfully, and thus shortened the Civil War, and reduced the destruction of the economy.
It can also be argued that the attitudes and actions of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, their leaderships and individuals, were themselves determined by the whole of their past histories and ideological roots, and they could not have acted otherwise than they did. That what happened was inevitable. But this is to look at events from a distance and with the hindsight of 1997. What happened happened. But in 1917-18, these parties, leaderships and individuals did have a choice of actions....".
Take the question of peace or war. True, the Bolshevik government signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty which ended the war with Germany in March 1918. But any other government would have been obliged sooner or later to sue for peace – even if only because of the disintegration of the Russian armies. After all, the World War itself ended in November 1918 for all belligerents.
The assumption that the only alternative to Bolshevik rule would be a military dictatorship was based on the overall assumption that capitalism, internationally, was in terminal crisis. Therefore the development in Russia of a capitalist economy under a parliamentary democracy was impossible. Was the assumption of the impossibility of a post-1917 parliamentary democracy in Russia mistaken?
Could anything have been worse than that which actually occurred following October 1917; the Civil War, the Cheka terror, the gulags, the forced collectivisations, the deportations, the famines, the Stalinist purges – ultimately ending in the collapse back into mafia-capitalism of a Russia, controlled by oligarchs? The unforgiveable crime of doing this in the name of socialism and thus discrediting the very idea of socialism. Indeed, it would have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred!
It is a lie that the Bolsheviks had no other choices to make but to impose party control over the State. The soviets were marginalised and undermined by the Bolsheviks and neutered of any power simply because they often reflected the wishes of the working class but not those of the Bolshevik Party. The soviets would have to be tamed by whatever means possible in favour of party power. From 1917 all vestiges of democratic self reliance by the working class was removed piece by piece. "Soviet power" became a sham, and Bolshevik party functionaries took total control. A Left S R said "The Bible tells us that God created the heavens and the earth from nothing. The Bolsheviks are capable of no lesser miracles, out of nothing, they create legitimate credentials."
Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The term "dictatorship of the proletariat" is used to refer essentially to the institutions through which the exploited and excluded bring about a revolutionary change in the structure of society. It does not necessarily refer to a party dictatorship.
It is noticeable that Lenin's Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism written in 1913 before he abandoned the accepted social democratic stageist theory of going through the bourgeois democratic revolution contained no mention of the phrase or Lenin's particular conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat but of course after the October Revolution it became by 1918 for Lenin “the very essence of Marx's teaching” as he described it in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, .
Lenin used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean much the same as party dictatorship but for Marx the phrase meant nothing more than the political domination of the working class majority during the period of the socialisation of capitalist property. Marx took the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" from the French revolutionaries he met when he lived in Paris in the mid-1840s. Only, whereas they saw this as being a minority dictatorship supposedly on behalf of the working class Marx gave it a democratic content and saw it as the unlimited exercise of political power by the working class by and on its own behalf.
What Marx envisaged was a period between the end of capitalist political rule and the establishment of socialism when political power would be exercised by the majority working class within a democratic context. He envisage democracy and freedom of speech for all people under his interpretation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Engels referred to the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
Although we say that the working class should still organise to win control of political power and use it in the course of establishing socialism - and would call this the "dictatorship of the proletariat", we don't envisage this as lasting for any length of time and think the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to be so open to misunderstanding as to be now counter-productive.
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