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Title: The Two Octobers
Author: Pjotr Arshinov
Date: 1927
Language: en
Topics: Nestor Makhno, Russian Revolution, Ukraine, Libertarian Communist Review
Source: Retrieved on 27th October 2021 from http://struggle.ws/russia/arshinov_2_oct.html
Notes: Translated by Nick Heath for North London Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists for Libertarian Communist Review No. 1 Winter 1976

Pjotr Arshinov

The Two Octobers

The victorious revolution of the workers and peasants in 1917 was

legally established in the Bolshevik calendar as the October Revolution.

There is sane truth in this, but it is not entirely exact. In October

1917 the workers and peasants of Russia surmounted a colossal obstacle

to the development of their Revolution. They abolished the nominal power

of the capitalist class, but even before that they achieved something of

equal revolutionary importance and perhaps even more fundamental. By

taking the economic power from the capitalist class, and the land from

the large owners in the countryside, they achieved the right to free and

uncontrolled work in the towns, if not the total control of the

factories. Consequently, it was well before October that the

revolutionary workers destroyed the base of capitalism. All that was

left was the superstructure. If there had not been this general

expropriation of the capitalists by the workers, the destruction of the

bourgeois state machine — the political revolution — would not have

succeeded in any way. The resistance of the owners would have been much

stronger. On the other hand, the objectives of the social revolution in

October were not limited to the overthrow of capitalist power. A long

period of practical development in social self-management was before the

workers, but it was to fail in the following years.

Therefore, in considering the evolution of the Russian socialist

Revolution as a whole, October appears only as a stage — a powerful and

decisive stage, it is true. That is why October does not by itself

represent the whole social revolution. In thinking of the victorious

October days, one must consider that historical circumstance as

determined by the Russian social revolution.

Another no less important peculiarity is that October has two meanings —

that which the working’ masses who participated in the social revolution

gave it, and with them the Anarchist-Communists, and that which was

given it by the political party that captured power from this aspiration

to social revolution, and which betrayed and stifled all further

development. An enormous gulf exists between these two interpretations

of October. The October of the workers and peasants is the suppression

of the power of the parasite classes in the name of equality and

self-management. The Bolshevik October is the conquest of power by the

party of the revolutionary intelligentsia, the installation of its

‘State Socialism’ and of its ‘socialist’ methods of governing the

masses.

The workers October

The February Revolution caught the different revolutionary parties in

complete disarray and without any doubt they were considerably surprised

by the profound social character of the dawning revolution. At first, no

one except the anarchists wanted to believe it. The Bolshevik Party,

which made out it always expressed the most radical aspirations of the

working-class, could not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois

revolution in its aims. It was only at the April conference that they

asked themselves what was really happening in Russia. Was it only the

overthrow of Tsarism. or was the revolution going further — as far as

the. overthrow of capitalism? This last eventually posed to the

Bolsheviks the question of what tactics to employ. Lenin became

conscious before the other Bolsheviks of the social character of the

revolution, and emphasised the necessity of seizing power. He saw a

decisive advance in the workers’ and peasants’ movement which was

undermining the industrial and rural bourgeoisie foundations more and

more. A unanimous agreement on these questions could not be reached even

up to the October days. The Party manoeuvred all this time in between

the social slogans of the masses and the conception of a

social-democratic revolution, from where they were created and

developed. Not opposing the slogan of petit- and grand-bourgeoisie for a

Constituent Assembly, the Party did its best to control the masses,

striving to keep up with their ever-increasing pace.

During this time, the workers marched impetuously forward, relentlessly

running their enemies of left and right into the ground. The big rural

landowners began everywhere to evacuate the countryside, fleeing from

the insurgent peasantry and seeking protection for their possessions and

their persons in the towns. Meanwhile, the peasantry proceeded to a

direct re-distribution of land, and did not want to hear of peaceful

co-existence with the landlords. In the towns as well a sudden change

took place between the workers and the owners of enterprises. Thanks to

the efforts of the collective genius of the masses, workers’ committees

sprang up in every industry, intervening directly in production, putting

aside the admonishments of the owners and concentrating on eliminating

them from production. Thus in different parts of the country, the

workers got down to the socialisation of industry.

Simultaneously, all of revolutionary Russia was covered with a vast

network of workers’ and peasant soviets, which began to function as

organs of self management. They developed, prolonged, and defended the

Revolution. Capitalist rule and order still existed nominally in the

country, but a vast system of social and economic workers’

self-management was being created alongside it. This regime of soviets

and factory committees, by the very fact of its appearance, menaced the

state system with death . It must be made clear that the birth and

development of the soviets and factory committees had nothing do with

authoritarian principles. On the contrary, they were in the full sense

of the term organs of social and economic self-management of the masses,

and in no case the organs of state power. They were opposed to the state

machine which sought to direct the masses, and they prepared for a

decisive battle against it. “The factories to the workers, the land to

the peasants” — these were the slogans by which the revolutionary masses

of town and country participated in the defeat of the State machine of

the possessing classes in the name of a new social system which was

founded on the basic cells of the factory committees and the economic

and social soviets. These catch-words circulated from one end of

workers’ Russia to the other, deeply affecting the direct action against

the socialist-bourgeois coalition government.

As was explained above, the workers and peasants had already worked

towards the entire reconstruction of the industrial and agrarian system

of Russia before October 1917. The agrarian question was virtually

solved by the poor peasants as early as June — September 1917. The urban

workers, for their part, put into operation organs of social and

economic Self-management, having seized from the State and the owners

the organisational functions of production. The October Revolution of

the workers overthrew the last and the greatest obstacle to their

revolution the state power of the owning classes, already defeated and

disorganised. This last evolution opened a vast horizon for the

achievement of the social revolution putting it onto the creative road

to socialist reconstruction of society, already pointed at by the

workers in the preceding months. That is the October of the workers and

the peasants. It meant a powerful attempt by the exploited manual

workers to destroy totally the foundations of capitalist society, and to

build a workers’ society based on the principles of equality,

independence, and self-management by the proletariat of the towns and

the countryside. This October did not reach its natural conclusion. It

was violently interrupted by the October of the Bolsheviks, who

progressively extended their dictatorship throughout the country.

The Bolshevik October

All the statist parties, including the Bolsheviks, limited the

boundaries of the Russian Revolution to the installation of a

social-democratic regime. It was only when the workers and peasants of

all Russia began to shake the agraro-bourgeois order, when the social

revolution was proved to be an irreversible historical fact, that the

Bolsheviks began discussing the social character of the Revolution, and

the consequent necessity of modifying its tactics. There was no

unanimity in the Party on questions of the character and orientation of

the events which had taken place, even up to October. Furthermore, the

October Revolution as well as the events which followed developed while

the Central Committee of the Party was divided into two tendencies.

Whilst a part of the Central Committee, Lenin at its head, foresaw the

inevitable social revolution and proposed preparation for the seizure of

power, the other tendency, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, denounced as

adventurist the attempt at social revolution, and went no further than

calling for a Constituent Assembly in which the Bolsheviks occupied the

seats furthest to the Left. Lenin’s point of view prevailed, and the

Party began to mobilise its forces in case of a decisive struggle by the

masses against the Provisional Government.

The party threw itself into infiltrating the factory committees and the

soviets of workers’ deputies, doing its best to obtain in these organs

of self-management the most mandates possible in order to control their

actions. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik conception of, and approach to, the

soviets and the factory committees was fundamentally different from that

of the masses. While the mass of workers considered them to be the

organs of social and economic self-management, the Bolshevik Party

looked on them as a means by which it was possible to snatch the power

of the sinking bourgeoisie and afterwards to use this power to serve the

interests of the Party. Thus an enormous difference was revealed between

the revolutionary masses and the Bolshevik Party in their conceptions

and perspectives of October. In the first case, it was the question of

the defeat of power with the view of reinforcing and enlarging the

already constituted organs of workers and peasants self-management. In

the second case, it was the question of leaning on these organs in order

to seize power and to subordinate all the revolutionary forces to the

Party. This divergence played a fatal role in determining the future

course of the Russian Revolution.

The success of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution — that is to

say, the fact that they found themselves in power and from there

subordinated the whole Revolution to their Party is explained by their

ability to substitute the ides of a Soviet power for the social

revolution and the social emancipation of the masses. A priori, these

two ideas appear as non-contradictory for it was possible to understand

Soviet power as the power of the soviets, and this facilitated the

substitution of the idea of Soviet power for that of the Revolution.

Nevertheless, in their realisation and consequences these ideas were in

violent contraction to each other. The conception of Soviet Power

incarnated in the Bolshevik state, was transformed into an entirely

traditional bourgeois power concentrated in a handful of individuals who

subjected to their authority all that was fundamental and most powerful

in the life of the people — in this particular case, the social

revolution. Therefore, with the help of the “power of the soviets” — in

which the Bolsheviks monopolised most of the posts — they effectively

attained a total power and could proclaim their dictatorship throughout

the revolutionary territory. This furnished them with the possibility of

strangling all the revolutionary currents of the workers in disagreement

with their doctrine of altering the whole course of the Russian

Revolution and of making it adopt a multitude of measures contrary to

its essence. One of these measures was the militarisation of labour

during the years of War Communism — militarisation of the workers so

that millions of swindlers and parasites could live in peace, luxury and

idleness. Another measure was the war between town and country, provoked

by the policy of the Party in considering peasants as elements

unreliable and foreign to the Revolution. There was, finally, the

strangling of libertarian thought and of the Anarchist movement whose

social ideas and catchwords were the force of the Russian Revolution and

orientated towards a social revolution. Other measures consisted of the

proscription of the independent workers movement, the smothering of the

freedom of speech of workers in general. All was reduced to a single

centre, from where all instructions emanated concerning the way of life,

of thought, of action of the working masses.

That is the October of the Bolsheviks. In it was incarnated the ideal

followed by decades by the revolutionary intelligentsia, initially

realised now by the wholesale dictatorship of the All-Russian Communist

Party. This ideal satisfies the ruling intelligentsia, despite the

catastrophic consequences for the workers; now they can celebrate with

pomp the anniversary of ten years of power.

The Anarchists

Revolutionary Anarchism was the only politico social-current to extol

the idea of a social revolution by the workers and peasants, as much

during the 1905 Revolution as from the first days of the October

Revolution. In fact, the role they could have played would have been

colossal, and so could have been the means of struggle employed by the

masses themselves. Likewise, no politico-social theory could have

blended so harmoniously with the spirit and orientation of the

Revolution. The interventions of the Anarchist orators in 1917 were

listened to with a rare trust and attention by the workers. One could

have said that the revolutionary potential of the workers and peasants,

together with the ideological and tactical power of Anarchism could have

represented a force to which nothing could be opposed. Unhappily, this

fusion did not take place. Some isolated anarchists occasionally led

intense revolutionary activity among the workers, but there was not an

Anarchist organisation of great size to lead more continuous and

co-ordinated actions, (outside of the Nabat Confederation and the

Makhnovchtina in the Ukraine). Only such an organisation could have

united the Anarchists and the millions of workers. During such an

important and advantageous revolutionary period, the Anarchists limited

themselves to the restricted activities of small groups instead of

orientating themselves to mass political action. They preferred to drown

themselves in the sea of their internal quarrels, not attempting to pose

the problem of a common policy and tactic of Anarchism By this

deficiency, they condemned themselves to inaction and sterility during

the most important moments of the Revolution.

The causes of this catastrophic state of the Anarchist movement resided

in the dispersion, the disorganisation and the absence of a collective

tactic — things which have nearly always been raised as principles among

Anarchists, preventing them making a single organisational step so that

they could orientate the social revolution in a decisive fashion. There

is no actual advantage in denouncing those who, by their demagogy, their

thoughtlessness, and their irresponsibility, contributed to create this

situation. But the tragic experience: which led the working masses to

defeat, and Anarchism to the edge of the abyss, should be assimilated as

from now. We must combat and pitilessly stigmatise those who in one way

or another, continue to perpetuate the chaos and confusion in Anarchism,

all those who obstruct its re-establishment or organisation. In other

words, those whose actions go against those efforts of the movement for

the emancipation of labour and the realisation of the

Anarchist-Communist society. The working masses appreciate and are

instinctively attracted by Anarchism, but will not work with the

Anarchist movement until they are convinced of its theoretical and

organisational coherence. It is necessary for everyone of us to try to

the maximum to attain this coherence.

Conclusions and Perspectives

The Bolshevik practice of the last ten years shows clearly the

counter-revolutionary [role] of their dictatorship of the Party. Every

year it restrains a little more the social-and political rights of the

workers, and takes their revolutionary conquests away. There is no doubt

that the ‘historic mission’ of the Bolshevik Party is emptied of all

meaning and that it will attempt to bring the Russian Revolution to its

final objective : State Capitalism of the enslaving salariat, that is to

say, of the reinforced power of the exploiters and at the increasing

misery of the exploited. In speaking of the Bolshevik Party as part of

the socialist intelligentsia, exercising its power over the working

masses of town and country, we have in view its central directing

nucleus which, by its origins, its formation, and its life-style has

nothing in common with the working class, and despite that, rules all

the details of life of the Party and of the people. That nucleus will

attempt to stay above the proletariat, who have nothing to expect from

it. The possibilities for rank and file Party militants, including the

Communist youth, appear different. This mass has passively participated

in the negative and counter-revolutionary policies of the Party, but

having come from the working-class, it is capable of becoming aware of

the authentic October of the workers and peasants and of coming towards

it. We do not doubt that from this mass will come many fighters for the

workers’ October. Let us hope that they rapidly assimilate the Anarchist

character of this October, and that they come to its aid. On our side,

let us indicate this character as much as possible, and help the masses

to reconquer and conserve the great revolutionary achievements.