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Title: 1905
Author: Anarcho
Date: July 16, 2008
Language: en
Topics: russian revolution, Rosa Luxemburg
Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=102
Notes: Overview of the 1905 Russian revolution, plus an analysis of why Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the mass strike is wrong about anarchism.

Anarcho

1905

This January marked the 100^(th) anniversary of the Russian Revolution

of 1905. The revolt started on January 22 when a peaceful, mildly

reformist, protest march in St. Petersburg was shoot at by troops with

more than 1,000 killed or injured. This day became known as “Bloody

Sunday.” Rather than squelch the protests, the repression fanned the

flames of rebellion.

All across Russia, different sections of the people moved into active

protest. The peasants and workers joined with the middle classes,

intelligentsia and (minority) national groups against the absolutism and

oppression of the Tzarist monarchy. Each class had different aims

however. However, the two forces which played the leading part in the

revolution were the workers and peasants, who raised economic and

political demands while the middle-classes sought mostly the latter.

Unrest was spread as the year progressed, reaching peaks in early summer

and autumn before climaxing in October. There were naval mutinies at

Sevastopol, Vladivostok and Kronstadt, peaking in June, with the mutiny

aboard the Battleship Potemkin. Strikes took place all over the country

and the universities closed down when the whole student body complained

about the lack of civil liberties by staging a walkout. Lawyers, doctor,

engineers, and other middle-class workers established the Union of

Unions and demanded a constituent assembly.

In the countryside, there were land-seizures by the peasantry (including

the looting the larger estates) and a nation-wide Peasant Union was

created. In the towns, the workers act of resistance was the strike.

There was a general strike in St. Petersburg immediately after Bloody

Sunday. Over 400,000 workers were involved by the end of January. The

strikes spread across the country and continued throughout the year. In

the process new forms of working class self-organisation were created.

These were councils made up of workers delegate, the famous “soviets.”

While the soviets were created by workers to solve their immediate

problems (for example winning the strike, the eight-hour day, working

conditions) their role changed. They quickly evolved into an organ of

the general and political representation of workers, raising political

demands. Needless to say, their potential as a base for political

agitation were immediately recognised be revolutionaries, and although

they were not involved in the early stages both the Bolsheviks and

Mensheviks attempted to gain influence in them. However, as Kropotkin

put it, the general strike was the key development as “the working men

again threw the weight of their will into the contest and gave quite a

new turn to the movement. A strike of bakers broke out at Moscow in

October, and they were joined in their strike by the printers. This was

not the work of any revolutionary organisation. It was entirely a

working men’s affair, but suddenly what was meant to be a simple

manifestation of economical discontent grew up, invaded all trades,

spread to St. Petersburg, then all over Russia, and took the character

of such an imposing revolutionary manifestation that autocracy had to

capitulate before it.”

The first soviet (which is Russian for council) was established in

Ivanovna-Voznesensk during the 1905 Textile Strike. It began as a strike

committee but developed into an elected body of the town’s workers. Over

the next few months Soviets of Workers Deputies were established in

around 60 different towns. On October 13^(th), the more famous St.

Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was created out of the ‘Great

October Strike’ on the initiative of the printers’ strike committee in

order to better co-ordinate the strike.

This was Russia’s first political general strike, lasting from September

to October 30^(th). Although strikes had been common in Russia in the

years leading up to 1905, this powerful weapon of direct action

effectively paralysed the whole country. The October strike started in

St. Petersburg and quickly spread to Moscow and soon the railwaymen

strike paralysed the whole Russian railway network. “A new weapon, more

terrible than street warfare, had thus been tested and proved to work

admirably,” observed Kropotkin.

The soviets had challenged the power of Nicholas II and the general

strike forced him to issue the October Manifesto, with its parliament,

freedom of the press, assembly and association. They failed to remove

him from power and he quickly reneged on his promises. By December,

Trotsky and the rest of the executive committee of the St. Petersburg

Soviet were arrested (a Bolshevik putsch in Moscow that month failed as

it was disorganised and uncoordinated). The revolt was over. Tsarism was

to remain in power until February 1917 when a similar wave of mass

protests finally drove it from power.

Anarchism, Marxism and 1905

On the face of it, the 1905 Russian Revolution was a striking

confirmation of key anarchist ideas. The use of direct action, the

general strike, the creation of organs of working class self-management

in the form of soviets were all practical examples of what anarchists

had been arguing for decades. While the actual numbers of anarchists

involved was small, the events themselves were a spontaneous

confirmation of anarchist theory.

Unsurprisingly, Marxists disagree. Rather than confirm anarchist ideas,

they stress the opposite. To see whether this is true or not, we need to

look at what anarchists had to say about the general strike and the

soviets. Once we do, we discover that 1905 had far more in common with

anarchism than Marxism. Moreover, as well as confirming anarchist ideas

it was only the anarchists who drew the correct conclusions from it,

conclusions which Marxists only came to in 1917.

The General Strike

The anarchists embraced the general strikes in Russia as a confirmation

of their long held ideas on revolutionary change. Marxists had a harder

task as such ideas were alien to mainstream Social Democracy. Yet faced

with the success and power of a general strike, the more radical

Marxists (like Rosa Luxemburg) had to incorporate it into their

politics.

Yet they faced a problem. The general strike was indelibly linked with

such hearsays as anarchism and syndicalism. Had not Engels himself

proclaimed the nonsense of the general strike in his (diatribe) “The

Bakuninists at work”? Had his words not been repeated ad infinitum

against anarchists (and radical socialists) who questioned the wisdom of

social democratic tactics, its reformism and bureaucratic inertia?

The Marxist radicals knew that Engels would again be invoked to throw

cold water over any attempt to adjust Social Democracy politics to the

economic power of the masses as expressed in mass strikes. The Social

Democratic hierarchy would simply dismiss them as “anarchists.” This

meant that Luxemburg was faced with the problem of proving Engels was

right, even when he was wrong.

She did so in an ingenious way. Like Engels himself, she simply

distorted what the anarchists thought about the general strike in order

to make it acceptable to Social Democracy. Her argument was simple. Yes,

Engels had been right to dismiss the “general strike” idea of the

anarchists in the 1870s. But today, thirty years later, Social Democrats

should support the general strike (or mass strike, as she called it)

because the concepts were different. The anarchist “general strike” was

utopian. The Marxist “mass strike” was practical.

To discover why, we need to see what Engels had argued in the 1870s.

Engels, mocked the anarchists (or “Bakuninists”) for thinking that “a

general strike is the lever employed by which the social revolution is

started.” He accusing them of imagining that “one fine morning, all the

workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world,

stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit

within four weeks at most, or to attack the workers, who would then have

the right to defend themselves and use the opportunity to pull down the

entire old society.”

He stated that at the September 1 1873 Geneva congress of the anarchist

Alliance of Social Democracy, it was “universally admitted that to carry

out the general strike strategy, there had to be a perfect organisation

of the working class and a plentiful funds.” He noted that that was “the

rub” as no government would stand by and “allow the organisation or

funds of the workers to reach such a level.” Moreover, the revolution

would happen long before “such an ideal organisation” was set up and if

they had been “there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a

general strike” to achieve the goal.

Rosa Luxemburg repeated Engels arguments in her essay “The Mass Strike”

in order to show how her support for the general strike was in no way

contrary to Marxism. Her “mass strike” was different from the anarchist

“general strike” as mocked by Engels as it was dynamic process and could

not be seen as “one act, one isolated action” which overthrows the

bourgeoisie. Rather, the mass strike to the product of the everyday

class struggle within society, leads to a direct confrontation with the

capitalist state and so it was “inseparable from the revolution.”

The only problem with all this is that the anarchists did not actually

argue along the lines Engels and Luxemburg claimed. Take, for example,

Bakunin who saw the general strike as a dynamic process for as “strikes

spread from one place to another, they come close to turning into a

general strike. And with the ideas of emancipation that now hold sway

over the proletariat, a general strike can result only in a great

cataclysm which forces society to shed its old skin.” He raised the

possibility that this could “arrive before the proletariat is

sufficiently organised” and dismissed it because the strikes expressed

the self-organisation of the workers for the “necessities of the

struggle impel the workers to support one another” and the “more active

the struggle becomes ... the stronger and more extensive this federation

of proletarians must become.” And so strikes “indicate a certain

collective strength already” and “each strike becomes the point of

departure for the formation of new groups.”

Bakunin also rejected the idea that a revolution could be “arbitrarily”

made by “the most powerful associations.” Rather they were produced by

“the force of circumstances.” Nor did he think that all workers needed

to be organised, arguing that a minority (perhaps “one worker in ten”)

needed to be organised and they would influence the rest so ensuring “at

critical moments” the majority would “follow the International’s lead.”

Which is what happened in 1905. Clearly Bakunin’s ideas are totally at

odds with Engels assertions on what anarchist ideas on the general

strike were about.

But what of the “Bakuninists”? Again, Engels account is false. Rather

than the September 1873 Geneva congress being, as he claimed, of the

(disbanded) Alliance of Social Democracy, it was (in fact) a meeting of

the non-Marxist federations of the First International. Contra Engels,

anarchists did not see the general strike as requiring all workers to be

perfectly organised and then passively folding arms “one fine morning.”

The Belgian libertarians who proposed the idea at the congress saw it as

a tactic which could mobilise workers for revolution, “a means of

bringing a movement onto the street and leading the workers to the

barricades.” Moreover, anarchists rejected the idea that it had “to

break out everywhere at an appointed day and hour” with a resounding

“No!” In fact, they did “not even need to bring up this question and

suppose things could be like this. Such a supposition could lead to

fatal mistakes. The revolution has to be contagious.”

Perhaps this is why Engels did not bother to quote a single anarchist

when recounting theory on this matter (as in so many others!)? The real

question must be when will Marxists realise that quoting Engels does not

make it true?

Clearly, the “anarchist” strategy of overthrowing the bourgeoisie with

one big general strike exists only in Marxist heads, nowhere else. Once

we remove the distortions promulgated by Engels and repeated by

Luxemburg, we see that the 1905 revolution and “historical dialectics”

did not, as Luxemburg claim, validate Engels and disprove anarchism.

Quite the reverse as the general strikes in Russia followed the

anarchist ideas of a what a general strike would be like quite closely.

Little wonder, then, that Kropotkin argued that the 1905 general strike

“demonstrated” that the Latin workers who had been advocating the

general strike “as a weapon which would irresistible in the hands of

labour for imposing its will” had been “right.” However, without

becoming an insurrection, the limits of the general strike were exposed

in 1905. Unlike the some of the syndicalists in the 1890s and 1900s,

this limitation was understood by the earliest anarchists. Consequently,

they saw the general strike as the start of a revolution and not as the

revolution itself. Thus Kropotkin recognised the general strike as “a

powerful weapon of struggle” about also stressed the need for the

soviets to function as “battle organisations” rallying the workers and

peasants for “the insurrectionary general strike.”

The Soviets

The soviets were the other key development in the 1905 revolution. They

were composed of democratically elected workers from factories, subject

to instant recall if they did not carry out their mandated tasks. They

were born from the momentum of the struggle itself and played a crucial

role in extending and developing the strike wave. Although most soviets

only functioned for a short period, their importance should not be

underestimated. Created by the workers themselves, they were their first

taste of direct democracy and self-government. The bourgeois democracy

of the Duma paled in comparison to them.

This aspect of the revolution also confirmed anarchist ideas. Since the

1860s Bakunin had argued that “the Alliance of all labour associations”

would “constitute the Commune.” The “Revolutionary Communal Council”

would be made up of “delegates ... invested will binding mandates and

accountable and revocable at all times.” These would federate by

“delegat[ing] deputies to an agreed place of assembly (all ... invested

will binding mandated and accountable and subject to recall), in order

to found the federation of insurgent associations, communes and

provinces.” In other words a system of workers’ councils created by the

revolution itself was at the core of Bakunin’s anarchism.

Unsurprisingly, Russian anarchists greeted the soviets with enthusiasm

as non-party, non-ideological battle organisations of the working class.

Kropotkin argued that anarchists should take part in the soviets as long

as they “are organs of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the

state, and not organs of authority.” In this, they shared common ground

with many Marxists who also saw them as organs of struggle.

However, unlike Marxists, anarchists when further and saw these

organisations created by the struggle against oppression as being the

framework of a free society. One anarchist group likened them, as

non-party mass organisations, to the central committee of the Paris

Commune of 1871. Another related “the institution of the Soviet to the

organisation of the ‘revolutionary commune’ as the anarchists perceived

it.” Another group concluded in 1907 that the revolution required “the

proclamation in villages and towns of workers’ committees with soviets

of workers’ deputies ... at their head.” Clearly the Russian anarchists

saw the soviets as a concrete example of Bakunin’s revolutionary ideas

and had no hesitation in placing them at the heart of their

revolutionary vision.

Marxists, on the other hand, had a difficult time grasping the soviet’s

wider significance. Nothing like the soviets could be found in the

writings of Marx and Engels. Orthodox Marxism looked at the conquest of

state power by means of a bourgeois republic by universal suffrage. At

best, Marxists argued that an insurrection to create a republic was

acceptable. Faced with the soviets, while seeing them as some sort of

trade union body, no Marxist theoretician argued that they could provide

the framework of a socialist society.

This can be seen from Lenin. When the anarchists applied to November

1905 to the Executive Committee of the Soviet to be represented along

the socialist parties, they were rejected. The EC argued that “in the

whole of international practice, congresses and socialist conferences

have never included representatives of the anarchists, since they do not

recognise the political struggle as a means for the achievement of their

ideals” and because “only parties can be represented, and the anarchists

are not a party.” Lenin considered this “to be in the highest degree

correct.” However, “if we were to regard the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies

as a workers’ parliament or as an organ of proletarian self-government,

then of course it would have been wrong to reject the application of the

anarchists.” For Lenin, the soviet “is not a labour parliament and not

an organ of proletarian self-government, nor an organ of self-government

at all, but a fighting organisation for the achievement of definite

aims.”

Clearly, the development of the soviets were a striking confirmation of

anarchist theory on revolution. It was twelve years later that Marxists

came to the same conclusion anarchists had reached in the 1860s and had

seen confirmed by the 1905 Russian Revolution — but with significant

(and fatal) differences. Rather than see them as organs of popular

democracy, the Marxists saw them simply as a stepping stone to party

power. This perspective was evident in 1905.

The Bolsheviks

While Leninists have been analysing the 1905 revolution, its soviets and

general strike in some detail, one aspect of the revolution fails to be

discussed in such detail. This is the Bolshevik hostility to the soviets

and the fact that it was the Mensheviks who took the lead in supporting

them and, ultimately, gained the upper hand in them.

Indeed, if the Bolsheviks had got their way the soviets of 1905 would

have been a mere blip in the struggle. Opposing them because the soviets

pushed aside the party committee and thus led to the “subordination of

consciousness to spontaneity,” the Bolsheviks argued that “only a strong

party along class lines can guide the proletarian political movement and

preserve the integrity of its program, rather than a political mixture

of this kind, an indeterminate and vacillating political organisation

such as the workers council represents and cannot help but represent.”

Thus the soviets could not reflect workers’ interests because they were

elected by the workers!

The Bolsheviks gave the soviets an ultimatum: accept the programme and

leadership of the Bolsheviks and then disband as being irrelevant! The

soviets ignored them. This Bolshevik assault on the soviets occurred

across the country. Thus the underlying logic of Lenin’s vanguardism

ensured that the Bolsheviks played a negative role with regards the

soviets which, combined with “democratic centralism” ensured that it was

spread far and wide. Only by ignoring their own party’s principles and

staying in the Soviet did rank and file Bolsheviks play a positive role

in the revolution. This divergence of top and bottom would be repeated

in 1917.

Lenin, to his credit, opposed this once he returned from exile. However,

he did so only to gain influence for his party. In 1907 he concluded

that while the party could “utilise” the soviets “for the purpose of

developing the Social-Democratic movement,” the party “must bear in mind

that if Social-Democratic activities among the proletarian masses are

properly, effectively and widely organised, such institutions may

actually become superfluous.”

Unsurprisingly, few Leninists mention the Bolshevik hostility to the

soviets (at best, only in passing). Perhaps because the fundamentally

anti-democratic and elitist perspective it portrayed came to the fore

after the Bolsheviks had seized power in 1917 for, in 1918, the “strong

party” did indeed make the soviets “superfluous” — by systematically

disbanding any soviet elected with a non-Bolshevik majority.

Conclusion

Given the Bolshevik failure in 1905, perhaps it is unsurprising that

Leninists rewrite the history on it. Trotsky, for example while

admitting that the Bolsheviks “adjusted themselves more slowly to the

sweep of the movement” and that the Mensheviks “were preponderant in the

Soviet,” tries to save vanguardism by asserting that “the general

direction of the Soviet’s policy proceeded in the main along Bolshevik

lines.” Ironically he mocks the claims of Stalinists that Stalin had

“isolated the Mensheviks from the masses” by noting that the “figures

hardly bear [the claims] out.”

For all the Leninist accounts of the 1905 revolution claiming it for

their ideology, the facts suggest that it was anarchism, not Marxism,

which was vindicated by it. Luxemburg was wrong. The “land of Bakunin’s

birth” provided an unsurpassed example of how to make a revolution

precisely because it applied (and confirmed) anarchist ideas on the

general strike and workers’ councils. Marxists (who had previously

quoted Engels to dismiss such things) found themselves repudiating

aspect upon aspect of their dogma to remain relevant. When Rosa

Luxemburg tried to learn the lessons of the revolt, her more orthodox

opponents simply quoted Engels back. This required her, like Engels, to

grossly distort anarchist ideas to make acceptable to Social Democracy.

In 1917, Lenin did the same in “State and Revolution.”

Today’s Marxists, like Luxemburg, simply regurgitate Engels’ inaccurate

diatribe without bothering to see what anarchism actually argues for.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the 1905 revolution confirmed

anarchist theory just as much as, say, the one in 1917 or the descent of

Social Democracy into reformism. And perhaps it is the fact that the

anarchist analysis has been confirmed time and again (usually at the

expense of Marxism) is why Marxists so regularly distort our ideas?

One last thing. The Russian anarchists were badly organised and simply

not up to the task of influencing the mass strike movement in 1905.

Instead the socialist parties (primarily the Mensheviks) took the lead

and, consequently, lumbered the movement with Marxist dogmas (like the

idea that the workers had to aid the bourgeois in creating a capitalist

republic or that political action was the means of emancipation). It is

fair to say that faced with a mass protest movement today, the British

anarchist movement would be hard pressed to influence it even as it was

applying libertarian ideas in practice. That situation needs to change.

There is little point in being theoretically right when you cannot apply

those ideas in practice.