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Title: Anarchist Analysis of The Russian Revolution Date: September 30, 2018 Language: en Topics: Russian Revolution, revolution, 1917, Russia, analysis Source: https://rageagainstcapital.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/anarchist-analysis-of-the-russian-revolution/
The Russian Revolution was perhaps the most important event in the
history of revolutionary socialism and the struggle against capitalism.
For the first time in October of 1917 workers took power on a grand
scale and eventually the change in regime inaugurated by the revolution
lead to Stalinism and it’s export around the world to countries such as
China, Vietnam, Cuba, Germany, and North Korea, which captured the
imaginations of radicals for most of the 20th century and today is used
as an argumentative stick to beat anti-capitalists over the head with.
An understanding of this all important event can not be overlooked by
revolutionary socialists. Different Leninist sects from Stalinists to
Trotskyists celebrate the Russian Revolution every year with dogmatic
allegiance to what they proclaim “the greatest moment in human history”.
Anarchists should analyze this historical event, from our
anti-authoritarian perspective as opposed to Leninist worship of Trotsky
and Lenin, and determine it’s implications for radical politics today.
In 1905 a bread riot organized primarily by women stirred a pot of
social forces which would become fully unleashed in February 1917.
Russia under the Czar was an autocracy which republicans had been
struggling against for decades. Lenin’s brother was put to death for
attempting a terrorist act in pursuit of this goal. It’s economic set up
was primarily feudal with a small but developing capitalist economy in
the urban areas largely dominated by foreign capital. All though there
was a mass of workers there was an even larger mass of peasantry. This
peasantry was subject to feudal exploitation by the landed gentry. To
compound matters Russia had involved itself in World War One which was
sapping resources from the country and killing it’s people. This
combination of autocratic semi-feudal oppression and opposition to the
war lead to the outbreak of the revolution.
In February 1917 the masses of people rose up against the Czarist regime
and forced the Czar to flee the country leading to the smashing of the
Czarist state. New organizations of class struggle sprung up called
“soviets” (Russian for “council”). A liberal “provisional government”
was created that eventually came under the leadership of a man called
Alexander Kerensky. Meanwhile the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(the Russian Marxist party) had split in two on the question of the
revolution. The reformist and stageist faction were known as the
“Mensheviks”. They argued that the Russian Revolution would need to
establish a liberal republic before transitioning through reform to a
socialist society. The revolutionary socialist faction known as the
“Bolsheviks” argued instead that the Russian Revolution should carry out
the “bourgeois revolution” against semi-feudal social set ups (the
purpose of the liberal republic argued for by the Mensheviks) and then
immediately carry out the socialist revolution. Menshevik Leon Trotsky
would develop a theory called “permanent revolution” which argued that
the socialist revolution could itself carry out the tasks of the
“bourgeois revolution” which Lenin would end up signing on to leading to
Trotsky joining the Bolsheviks.
One of the main impetuses behind the revolution was opposition to
Russian involvement in the war. The provisional government never pulled
back from the war and continued to wage it. This lead to the idea that
the provisional government was not the hoped for change the Russian
Revolution was to bring about. Meanwhile on the ground the Soviets had
grown to include workers, peasants, and soldiers. The soviets were
federal councils organized to wage the revolution through democratic
means via the self-organization of the producers and soldiers. They were
a revolutionary form of organization because they allowed workers to
organize directly for control over society within militant class
struggle. In addition to the soviets organizations at the point of
production for workers’ were set up called “factory committees”. They
were worker organized groups that fought for better conditions and in
some cases took over production itself and kicked out the capitalist
owners bringing it under direct worker control. The factory committees
were revolutionary in that they were self-organized organs of class
struggle for workers to fight against the bosses and take control of
production themselves.
The Bolsheviks took up the popular slogan created by Anarchists of “all
power to the soviets” given the strength of the soviets as revolutionary
organizations. In reality the Bolsheviks (as with other groups such as
the Mensheviks) treated the soviets as a means for mobilization under
their influence looking to elect Bolshevik majorities within them. When
the time came to dethrone the provisional government the Bolsheviks
refused to wait for a democratic mandate from the congress of soviets
and Lenin declared that the congress had nothing to offer the Russian
people. “the Congress will give nothing and can give nothing. ….. First
defeat Kerensky, then call the Congress”. The Bolsheviks as such began
pushing for the overthrow of the provisional government. This was not a
hard sell since the liberal republic of Kerensky could not,
fundamentally, resist the need to continue the disastrous war as like
the Czarist autocracy it was a nation-state vying for military and
economic power in the global order. On October 25, 1917 (November 7 on
the western calendar) the working class rose up against the provisional
government, forced Kerensky to flee like the Czar before him, and took
over Russian cities, leading to working class power on an unprecedented
scale. The hope of all socialists was that this revolution would lead to
a new society controlled and organized by the masses of workers’ and
peasants. This dream quickly died.
Since we are analyzing the revolution from an Anarchist perspective we
should document the far too often overlooked part Anarchists played in
the Russian Revolution. As mentioned earlier Anarchists created the
slogan “all power to the Soviets”. Anarchists and Anarcho-syndicalists
organized the Kronstadt soviet. The Russian Anarchist movement was
critical to the February and October Revolutions. Anarchist Communists
set up revolutionary communes and Anarcho-syndicalists set up factory
councils. Later when the white army and western forces would attack the
young Soviet regime Anarchists fought in it’s defense. The Russian
Anarchist movement so critical to the Russian Revolution would be torn
to shreds by the Bolshevik counterrevolution that destroyed the dream of
a revolutionary Russia under worker and peasant control.
Almost immediately after the October victory the soviets and factory
committees were assaulted. The soviets were simply integrated into the
state as bureaucratic state organizations for the carrying out of low
level political affairs. From then on the Soviet Union was only “soviet”
in name. The factory committees were promised a national congress by the
Bolsheviks and attempted to organize into a national federation. The
promised congress never happened and the factory committees were
essentially abolished and what was left of them integrated into the
state central planning organs. Mensheviks and Left Social
Revolutionaries who campaigned for the soviets and factory committees as
independent revolutionary and class organizations were assassinated.
Political repression of opposing groups whether or not they were left
wing/working class became a main fixture of Bolshevik rule early on.
Even dissident Bolsheviks were assassinated. The Anarchist movement that
was indispensable to the revolution, that viewed the Bolsheviks as
comrades and fellow revolutionaries, was deconstructed with Czarist like
methods of repression. Anarchists were vanished, arrested, thrown in
jail, executed, and had their newspapers shut down. As a result of this
political intolerance and reactionary attack on a revolutionary movement
the remainder of the Russian Anarchists languished in Stalin’s gulags.
So why had the Bolsheviks turned on a dime from revolutionaries to
policemen? There are two major reasons. The first is that the Bolsheviks
never saw the emancipation of the working class as the task of the
workers themselves. Their idea of proletarian power was that political
representatives from the working class would form a revolutionary party
(the Bolshevik party) that rules the state in the interests of the
working class. Much earlier Lenin had written in “What Is To Be Done”
that in all countries the working class by itself would never reach true
social democratic (read Marxist) revolutionary consciousness without
guidance from the social democratic party. He argued that the theory of
socialism didn’t come out of the struggles of the working class, but out
of the minds of the intellectuals of the “propertied classes”.[1] These
points of view put forward the notion that the party must guide the
workers to power rather than the workers taking power for themselves.
This gives a justification and motive for repression of real working
class control and left-wing political opposition. There was however more
than just an ideological element. Equally as important is the second
major reason for the Bolshevik counterrevolution. Instead of the workers
and peasants taking over production for themselves it was nationalized
by the Bolshevik state. This recreated the capitalist relation of
private property where the vast majority of people have no control over
the production process and thus no inherent means to attain the
consumption goods necessary for survival. Thus the mass of people sold
their ability to work to the state for a wage that allowed them to
purchase items of consumption so they could subsist. The state took the
bulk of what was produced and realized it as profit for itself by
selling it on the market. This meant the capitalist economy with it’s
wage labor, money and markets, private property, class division, and
state machine were all preserved. The working class and peasants
remained the exploited laboring population that generated capital and
profit for a capitalist class who owned and controlled the production of
wealth. As such the Bolshevik party was the capitalist class that
imposed it’s rule, exploitation, and oppression of workers through it’s
capitalist state with the ideological justification that the Bolsheviks
as revolutionaries represented the working class. In accordance with the
class nature of the newly minted Soviet Union the Bolsheviks crushed
strikes which occurred after the Russian Civil war killing anywhere from
over 2 to 3,000 people.
The Bolshevik state morphed further and further into a capitalist nation
state like any other, factions within the party were banned, the
Kronstadt uprising of sailors demanding workers’ control and political
democracy was mercilessly crushed, a secret police was set up that
carried out terror in imposing the regime’s rule, the remnants of the
Russian Revolution in the Ukrainian Anarchist insurrectionary movement
were stomped out, and a treaty was signed that allotted Russian land and
production to the German capitalist state. In the 1920s the Soviet one
man management system of strict hierarchy over workers in production was
established. Later in the decade Stalin would maneuver the established
party bureaucracy and repressive state mechanisms with the help of his
lackeys to come to dictatorial power. This involved the execution of the
remaining Bolsheviks (save for Stalin and his allies) on trumped up
charges. Stalin fully developed the USSR into a capitalist nation-state,
ideologically enshrining “socialism in one country” (a complete oxymoron
by the standards of the historical socialist movement) and building the
USSR up into a neo-colonial super-power with nuclear capability. This
model of Stalinism was exported throughout the world through Stalin’s
command of the Comintern and military expansion into Eastern Europe. The
Russian revolution was no more and on it’s ashes stood a number of
police states where capital continued to exploit labor. The Soviet Union
itself collapsed and China and Vietnam went through market reforms for
the installation of typical private capitalism and the deconstruction of
the state capitalist system of “socialism in one country”. The selling
off of Russian industry to foreign investors and Russian oligarchs has
accomplished the same there. The dissipation of the “socialist world”
and the failure of these regimes to produce a free and equal society has
haunted the left for generations. Communism is discredited as an
authoritarian failure.
So what are the lessons that Anarchists should take from the Russian
Revolution for the construction of a revolutionary movement today? The
first and fore most lesson is that the emancipation of the working class
is the task of the workers themselves. A socialist society is one where
production is governed freely through the cooperation of producers. This
can only be achieved through working class self-organization within the
class struggle. Vanguard parties and similar “leadership” formations are
categorical obstacles to socialism. The second is anti-statism. The
state is a top down organization used to coerce the majority of the
population under the rule of a small exploitative elite. The state will
always reproduce class divisions so long as it exists and prevent a
socialist society which is necessarily governed by the collective freely
associated producers. The third is the need for collectivized production
over nationalized production. Nationalized production simply puts
production under the control of the state bureaucracy reproducing the
relationship of private property which gives real control over
production to a small group of owners. Production needs to be seized
from the capitalist class and immediately made the collective property
of the workers and oppressed people, then operated through workers’
self-management to meet the needs of the population. Hopefully the next
great revolution can break through the barriers the Russian Revolution
faced and make the final leap from world capitalism to global free
socialism, or as a I call it, libertarian communism.
Notes:
1. “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic
consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them
from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class,
exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union
consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in
unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass
necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however,
grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories
elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by
intellectuals.”
2. A key factor in the failure of the Russian Revolution was the defeat
of revolutions in other parts of Europe and the isolation of the
Bolshevik regime. I ignored this in the article because Anarchists can’t
draw many “lessons” from it. The revolutions in Italy and Germany were
defeated by capitalism and this left the Bolsheviks surrounded by
hostile capitalist and reactionary forces. I mention it here both
because it’s an important aspect of the history and because it does
tells us about the need for an international revolutionary effort for
the abolition of global capitalism.
3. Despite the powerful Russian Anarchist movement Russian Anarchists
never successfully conceptualized the Bolsheviks as
counterrevolutionaries in order to defend themselves from repression.
Anarchists and Anarcho-syndicalists saw the Bolsheviks as their comrades
and collaborators in revolution. They thought, particularly after the
publication of Lenin’s book “State and Revolution” which gives lip
service to self-management and the Paris Commune, that the Bolshevik
idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would be the same thing as
direct working class power advocated by Anarchists. Even while the
Anarchists were being killed and imprisoned they never really began to
see the Bolsheviks as traitors, or enemies.
From The Russian Revolution of 1917 to Stalinist Totalitarianism,
Agustin Guillamon
Beyond Kronstadt; the Bolsheviks in power
How Lenin Lead To Stalin, Workers’ Solidarity Movement
The Importance of Russia, Workers’ Solidarity Movement
Anarchists In The Russian Revolution, Paul Avrich
The Persecution Of The Anarchists, Emma Goldman
No Gods No Masters, Part 2
Anarcho-Syndicalism In The 20th Century, Vadim D.
Did The Bolshevik Seizure Of Power Inaugurate A Socialist Revolution? A
Marxian Inquiry, Paresh Chattopadhyay
There Is No Communism In Russia, Emma Goldman