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Title: When Kropotkin met Lenin Author: Ruth Kinna Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: Lenin, Pëtr Kropotkin, history Source: Retrieved on 2020-05-05 from https://www.academia.edu/35056447/When_Kropotkin_met_Lenin Notes: Also published in Socialist History 52 edited by Kevin Morgan.
In 1970 the left libertarian Maurice Brinton presented a novel version
of the victor’s history thesis in an attempt to show why historical
analysis of the Russian revolution remained an urgent task. Brinton was
not interested in exposing the partiality of Soviet narratives of the
revolution or in presenting an ideologically driven critique of past
events or decisions. Instead he wanted to recover the revolution’s
conceptual history. He argued that, like it or not, post-revolutionary
socialism was impregnated with the ‘ethos, traditions and organisational
conceptions of Bolshevism.’[1] Perhaps we were not all Bolsheviks then
but we nonetheless inhabited the conceptual world that they had shaped.
Failing to appreciate how profoundly the languages of socialism had been
moulded in the course of past revolutionary struggles led modern
political activists to formulate their politics imprecisely and feebly.
Instead of interrogating the meaning of principles bequeathed by their
revolutionary idols, the critics lazily repeated their old demands as if
their sense was clear. History had been reduced to a vehicle for
toothless finger-wagging and critical energy was diverted into the
confirmation of deeply-rooted anti-Bolshevik positions.
Brinton’s argument resonated with a charge made by the anarchist Voline
much earlier: that the Bolsheviks had used propaganda to hijack slogans
popularised by political rivals in order to advance policies that were
entirely out of kilter with the opposition’s proposals.[2] However
Brinton was interested the content of the ideas, not their cynical
manipulation. These critiques were not mutually exclusive, but he
identified Voline as one of the purveyors of the reductive history he
was attacking. Brinton’s particular concern was to probe revolutionary
demands for workers’ control and show how the campaign spearheaded by
the Factory Councils between 1917 and 1921 had been effectively halted
by Bolshevik institutionalisation. Observing that the demand for
workers’ control remained a watchword of the post-68 European left —
social democrats and socialist revolutionaries alike — he distinguished
the management of production from its control. Management meant the
‘total domination of the producer over the production process’[3] and it
entailed the assumption of all managerial functions by the working
class. Control, on the other hand, signalled a mere change in the
ownership of the means of production – for example, the transfer from
private to state ownership – and it was therefore consistent with the
consolidation of bureaucratic power. Having made this distinction,
Brinton explained the instigation of Bolshevik state control and the
demise of workers’ management not only with reference to the opposition
that the Factory Councils faced, but also by its internal shortcomings.
The Factory Councils movement had been ‘unable to proclaim its own
objectives ... in clear and positive terms.’ Reaching the end of
history, albeit temporarily, has helped some recast Soviet communism as
a romantic foil for neoliberalism. Yet even stalwart critics find it
less easy to argue that the Bolshevik legacy in any of its forms now
saturates socialism as it once did. Indeed, histories of modern
libertarianism plot a dramatic reversal of Bolshevism’s fortunes and the
resurgence of anarchism, its nemesis. Seemingly outsmarted by Marxists
in the two great nineteenth-century socialist internationals, crushed at
Kronstadt and defeated during the Makhnovist campaigns in the Ukraine
–then finally Spain — anarchism has emerged anew to capture the heart of
the alterglobalisation movement. The ‘battle for Seattle’ affirmed the
ascendancy of anarchist sensibilities in social movement politics and
the ‘anarchist turn’ in radical political theory has cemented
anarchism’s revival. So is there any point in mulling over Russian
revolutionary history? My view is that Brinton’s project, namely to try
and understand what ‘the forces in conflict really represented,’[4]
rather than judge sets of historical actions from the vantage point of
the present, is as instructive today as it was 50 years ago.
Brinton linked the tendency to ahistoricism amongst socialists to an
anti-intellectual bias. Ironically, he felt that this had been
encouraged by left intellectuals who had most to hide and most to lose
from a historically informed critique. Discouraging conceptual
questioning by throwing a blanket over the past most suited those keen
to assert their ideological dominance over the revolutionary movement.
The anti-intellectual ahistorical prejudice he observed in the 1970s has
outlived the collapse of the Soviet empire, even if the priority given
to activism over history reflects a commitment to anti-power and an
eagerness to decouple political movements from their white, male,
hetero-normative, Eurocentric pasts. But while historical detachment is
now driven by motives diametrically opposed to those that Brinton
detected, it still leaves open questions about the history of the
revolution which deserve to be addressed. The issue I consider here
revolves around the construction of the concept of revolution.
While the idea of revolution survives in contemporary theory and
practice, in anarchist/ic circles ‘prefigurative politics’ has become
the more popular idiom for change. Broadly describing a commitment to
render the means and ends of change consistent, prefiguration is equally
associated with institution-building, horizontal organisation and
ethical behavioural practices. Expressing different forms of activism,
prefiguration is difficult to pin down precisely. Yet it expresses two
strong ideas. One is a rejection of old-style Leninist vanguardism,
class dictatorship and party rule. In this sense prefiguration frames a
means-end relationship that distinguishes anarchism as a politics of
direct action and grass-roots organising. In another sense,
prefiguration implies the rejection of forms of action associated by
turns with class struggle, violence and cataclysmic emancipatory
moments. Here it extends beyond the critique of Leninism to link a
commitment to realise transformative change with forms of rebellion and
disobedience that exclude big R revolution.
Kropotkin’s meeting with Lenin discussed below shows how these themes
rely on concepts of revolution that have been historicised through the
Russian experience. This fleeting single encounter also draws out a
contrast between anarchist and Bolshevik ideas.[5] The risk of returning
to Russian revolutionary history to re-examine anarchist and Bolshevik
concepts of revolution is that it encourages a misleadingly bipolar
narrative. However, the point is neither to deny the complexity of the
revolution nor to show what divided anarchists from Bolsheviks, still
less Marxists – as if there were no greys in this relationship. Rather
it is to consider what Kropotkin’s analysis of revolution, advanced in
the course of a revolutionary struggle, represented, and where
prefigurative ideas elaborated thereafter stand in relation to it.
Kropotkin ended 36 years of near-continuous exile in Britain when he
returned to Russia in June 1917. His meeting with Lenin in May 1919, two
years before his death, was arranged by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich,
department head of the Council of People’s Commissars. Kropotkin was
then a marginalised figure, alienated from most European revolutionary
socialists on account of his decision to back the Allies in their war
against the Central Powers. This decision had sparked an angry debate
about Kropotkin’s understanding of revolution, and whether in fact he
was a revolutionary at all. Trotsky summed up a widely-held view when he
charged the ‘superannuated’ Kropotkin with disavowing ‘everything he had
been teaching for almost half a century.’[6] This damning judgment
strongly resonated with the anarchist Errico Malatesta’s critique of
Kropotkin’s ‘anarcho-chauvinism.’ Both argued that in backing the war
Kropotkin had turned his back on revolution.
A second contrasting view recently advanced by Sergey Saytanov equally
suggests that Kropotkin renounced revolution. This paints Kropotkin as
an anarchist Eduard Bernstein – the leading revisionist Marxist within
the Second International – who embraced gradualism in place of
revolution. Confirming Trotsky’s conclusion that Kropotkin had reversed
his youthful position, Saytanov reads late Kropotkin as a principled
reformist anarchist, not a revolutionary.[7] This view similarly
forecloses discussion of Kropotkin’s late revolutionary politics.
Two other evaluations keep the lines of inquiry open. Lenin’s critical
assessment painted Kropotkin as a disreputable revolutionary. Having
described Kropotkin as an anarchist-patriot who hung on the coat-tails
of the bourgeoisie during the war, Lenin met him in 1919 to talk about
the principles and character of revolution. At the end of their
encounter he floated the idea of publishing Kropotkin’s The Great French
Revolution, pitching the project as a contribution to socialist
enlightenment. He had earlier run the proposal past Bonch-Bruevich, this
time sharing his earnest assessment of the book’s educational value:
releasing a hundred thousand copies to libraries and reading rooms
across the country would enable the masses to ‘understand the
distinction between the petty bourgeois anarchist and the true communist
world view of revolutionary Marxism.’[8] If Lenin was Machiavellian, he
perhaps held Kropotkin’s anarchism to be consistently petit bourgeois.
From this perspective, Kropotkin’s support for the Allied campaign was
part and parcel of his degraded anarchist revolutionism. Emma Goldman,
who had been deeply saddened by Kropotkin’s wartime stance, added a
different twist to Lenin’s assessment of his consistency. Visiting
Kropotkin in Russia, she compared her growing disillusionment with ‘the
Revolution and in the masses’ with his enduring belief in its
significance, undiminished even by the October coup.[9] Quietly
unhooking the pro-war/anti-revolution link which other anti-war
revolutionaries invoked to expose Kropotkin’s betrayal, Goldman also
challenged Lenin’s critique of Kropotkin’s petit bourgeois tendencies as
a mischaracterisation of his anarchism. By her reckoning Kropotkin,
though wrong about the war, had nevertheless remained a committed
anarchist and revolutionary. The support he lent to the co-operative
movement and anarcho-syndicalism was not only consistent with his
pre-war anarchist theorising it also flowed from a practical concern to
re-energise the forces that Bolshevik terror had succeeded in
paralysing.[10] As Goldman noted, it stemmed directly from continuing
engagement in revolutionary struggles and his desire to learn from them.
For his part, Kropotkin presented his views not as a rejection of
revolution but as an alternative conception. His insistence that Lenin
appoint a co-operative to print cheap editions of his literary output
and his refusal to take 250,000 roubles from the State Publishing
Company when the currency ‘still stood well’ was a not-so-small measure
of the resilience of his anarchist ethics.[11] When he and Lenin met he
invoked the means-ends distinction to suggest that they disagreed only
about methods. This was perhaps disingenuous; but he was frank in his
defence of revolution against Lenin’s Bolshevik concept.
It seems unlikely that Kropotkin would ever have approved of what he had
heard of Lenin’s commitment to the withering away of the state, or that
he would have mistaken Engels’ slogan to be one of Marx’s most important
and original contributions to state theory, as Bonch-Bruevich claimed.
Always opposed to Marxism and never even temporarily ‘dazzled’ by the
‘glitter of Bolshevism,’ (as Goldman admitted that she had been),
Kropotkin dubbed Lenin a Jacobin before the war and continued to do so
when he spoke to Goldman in March 1920.[12] Bolshevism, he told her, was
the use of mass terror for the achievement of ‘political supremacy.’[13]
Kropotkin was perhaps more inclined to suggest to Lenin that they had
more in common than this candid opinion indicated because he wanted to
wrench concessions from him; to ease the pressure on the local co-ops in
his home town Dmitrov, which party officials were busily closing down.
Certainly, the exchanges with Lenin turned on their predicament.
The meeting opened with a discussion about the composition of the
co-ops. Did they provide sanctuary to would-be capitalists – kulaks,
landowners, merchants and the like? The disagreement between them on
this question revealed a deeper tension about socialist education, the
nature of authority and the destruction of capitalism. None of these
issues was tackled directly. Lenin led the exchanges throughout,
determining the major themes and shaping the course of the discussion.
But he did not dominate the debate because Kropotkin met his points
obliquely.
To summarise: Kropotkin countered Lenin’s plan to deploy party workers
in order to enlighten the masses with a warning about the poisonous
effects of unenlightened authority and authoritarianism; he responded to
Lenin’s appeal to pass on information about recalcitrant individuals in
the co-ops with a promise to report bureaucratic power abuses; he
followed Lenin’s blunt advocacy of civil war with a comment about the
need to avoid the intoxications of power and the domination of workers
by party non-workers. Talking past Kropotkin in a similar way, Lenin
greeted Kropotkin’s critique of authority with a reflection on the
inevitability of errors or, as he put it, the impossibility of wearing
white gloves while waging revolution. He countered Kropotkin’s
enthusiastic assessment of the revolutionary potential of west European
co-operatives and industrial unions by rejecting syndicalism and
relating the counter-power of the co-ops to the enormous armed might of
capitalist states. Lenin responded to Kropotkin’s endorsement of
struggle, ‘desperate struggle,’ as an essential ingredient of
revolutionary change by contrasting the uselessness of anarchist tactics
– individual acts of violence — with the energy and power of ‘massive
red terror.’ Lenin’s reply to Kropotkin’s critique of party-workers in
workers’ organisations was to reiterate the need to enlighten the
illiterate, backward masses. This final return prompted Lenin’s offer to
publish Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution.
Overall, two different conceptions of revolution can be seen in this
encounter. Each was informed by active engagement in struggle: Lenin’s
was shaped by the demands to co-ordinate collective action against
global capitalism while Kropotkin’s was informed by the desire to build
alliances with grass roots institutions, self-organising for local
sustainability in a period of revolutionary upheaval. Kropotkin’s
critique provides modern anarchists with plenty of ammunition against
Leninism but it is less easy to see how his concept of revolution
dovetails with the models embedded in prefiguration.
When Brinton rebuked anti-Bolsheviks for reproducing ‘finger-wagging
history,’ he failed to consider how traditions of opposition had also
framed the conceptual worlds that revolutionary socialists inhabited
after the revolution. Perhaps it was easier for anarchists to construct
this tradition than it was for non-anarchist anti or non-Bolshevik
revolutionaries. For while the tensions created by the realignment of
the revolutionary left with the founding of the Comintern were also felt
in anarchist circles, events like Kronstadt, the Makhnovist campaign and
Goldman’s disillusionment forcefully sharpened anarchism’s anti-Marxist
alignment. The breaks-in-continuity thesis that attempted to drive a
wedge between Leninism and Stalinism, advanced by Victor Serge, Isaac
Deutscher and others, hardly troubled anarchists. Indeed, anarchists
supported histories that combined versions of the Jacobin critique that
Kropotkin pioneered to argue that Bakunin’s break with Marx anticipated
the later anarchist analysis of Leninist revolutionary organisation. The
vanguard party, democratic centralism, proletarian dictatorship and
one-party rule are integral to this history and provide the foil for
anarchist transformation. Horizontalism, direct action and
decentralisation – the linchpins of anarchist politics – represent the
reverse of Bolshevik methods.
Brinton also overlooked the extent to which the legacy of war left its
mark on anarchism. If anarchism, like other oppositional currents, was
impregnated with the ethos, traditions and organisational conceptions of
Bolshevism, it was as a determinedly anti-war revolutionary movement.
Nazi aggression reignited an anarchist debate about war and revolution,
but its impact was trivial compared to the fall-out in 1914. By 1939,
the anti-war/anti-revolution juxtaposition that had prevailed against
Kropotkin grounded anarchist politics. This shift historicised
revolution as the violent seizure of power, exemplified in the Russian
revolution and the Bolshevik coup. In this understanding, anarchist
revolution involves the rejection of Leninism’s organisational trappings
and the deployment of violence.
Two models of anarchist change can be distilled from these critical
histories of the Russian experience. Each assesses anarchist revolution
by the internal consistency of ends and means and rejects Leninism and
war-mongering in the name of prefigurative change. Their lineages are
often traced to one of Kropotkin’s two most vocal anti-war critics. The
Malatestan version advocates collective class-struggle against
capitalism while rejecting proletarian dictatorship. The Goldman
variation calls for creative cultural transformation. The Malatestan
concept legitimises class violence for anti-capitalist ends while the
Goldman principle excludes violence as an expression of dictatorship.
Even though it bears some resemblance to the broad anti-Bolshevik
historical conceptualisation, the idea of revolution that emerges from
Kropotkin’s encounter with Lenin contrasts with both models.
It would be odd to discover that in 1920 Kropotkin did not draw on the
anti-Marxist critique he had rehearsed before the revolution when given
the opportunity to discuss policy with Lenin; his general analysis of
state socialism is clear in his denunciation of the Bolsheviks’ use of
torture and hostage-taking.[14] Yet his quarrel with Lenin had a
different focus to the later historical critique of Leninism. Kropotkin
pressed his arguments about the rejection of bureaucracy, party control
and the corruptions of power in response to Lenin’s claims about
proletarian education. Kropotkin rejected these claims and similarly
disputed the necessity of charging party officials with the
responsibility of weeding out class enemies. And when Kropotkin
contacted Lenin again later, taking seriously Lenin’s ambiguous
invitation to prolong their exchange, he also referred to the damaging
effects of the influx of ‘ideological communists’ into local non-party
committees and their detachment from the soviets. Contained within
Kropotkin’s organisational critique of Bolshevik party policy was a
defence of self-government which resembled the idea of management that
Brinton defended. In addition, in contesting Bolshevik social
engineering, Kropotkin tied anarchist self-government firmly to local
co-operation, detaching anarchist revolution from the harmonisation of
class interests. Kropotkin’s revolutionaries were not to be moulded into
communists, nor were they anarchist activists.
Violence was not central to Kropotkin’s concept of revolution, though it
was core for Lenin (as it is, in different ways, in debates about
prefigurative politics, too). Fastening on the global effects of
micro-political changes, Kropotkin downplayed the idea of revolution as
class war, while also suggesting that Lenin was right to dispense with
‘white gloves.’ His analysis of revolution turned on social, economic
and political dislocation. He saw it as replete with dangers and
potential harms, yet offering an opportunity for the oppressed to rid
themselves of their masters and take direct control of their own
affairs. As Alexander Berkman later noted, this view committed
‘Kropotkinists’ to reject the institutionalisation of violence ‘in the
hands of the Tcheka,’ but also to prefer pragmatism over abstract
theorisation.[15] The ‘desperate struggle’ of revolution pitted ordinary
workers against their old and would-be new oppressors in conditions of
social breakdown. The concerns Kropotkin expressed to Lenin were that
the Party’s suppression of local forces greatly contributed to the
looming threat of famine and threatened further to disrupt the meagre,
already interrupted supplies of firewood, spring seed and soap. His
conviction was that Tsarist White Terror had spread ‘utter contempt for
human life’ and induced ‘habits of violence’ amongst those now battling
to sustain themselves. These pressures would likely intensify habitual
aggression on the ground.[16] Kropotkin believed that the duty of
revolutionaries therefore was to support the constructive efforts of
local people to provide for their wellbeing and help mitigate the worst
deprivations revolution entailed. The combined impact of multiple small
movements was never calculable but was always potentially revolutionary.
On this view, big R revolution was a regressive move intended to channel
local forces through the imposition of laws. Had he lived to see it,
Kropotkin might have pointed to primitive socialist accumulation as an
example. Revolution was a process driven by re-construction of everyday
life in the absence of authority. ‘Anywhere you look,’ Kropotkin told
Lenin, ‘a basis for nonauthority flares up.’[17]
[1] Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917–1921. The
State and Counter-Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose, 1975 [1970]), p.
iii.
[2] Voline, pseud. Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eichenbaum, The Unknown
Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose, 1975 [1947]), p. 210.
[3] Brinton, p. vii.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Taken from P.A. Kropotkin, Selected Writings on Anarchism and
Revolution, ed. Martin A. Miller (Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 1970), pp.
334–340.
[6] Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution: Vol. II, trans
Max Eastman (Ann Arbor, 1957), p. 230.
[7] Sergey V. Saytanov, The Argumentation of Peter Kropotkin’s
Anarcho-Reformism in his Social-Political Anarchist Views (According to
Russian Materials), trans. Natalia I. Saytanonva, (Moscow: Ontoprint,
2014).
[8] In Miller ed. p. 326.
[9] Emma Goldman, Living My Life vol. II (New York: Dover, 1970 [1931]),
p. 863.
[10] Ibid. p. 864.
[11] Ibid., p. 770.
[12] Ibid., pp. 755; 770.
[13] Ibid., p. 864.
[14] In Miller, pp. 338–9. For an analysis of Kropotkin’s libertarian
anti-state theory see David Shub, ‘Kropotkin and Lenin,’ The Russian
Review, 12: 4 (October 1953), pp. 227–234.
[15] Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, Diary 1920–22 Extracts
(London: Virus, n.d. [1925]), p. 28.
[16] P.A. Kropotkin, The Terror in Russia: An Appeal to the British
Nation, (London: Methuen, 1909), p. 8.
[17] In Miller, pp. 328–9.