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Title: Romancing the Revolution Author: Iain McKay Date: Spring, 2018 Language: en Topics: russian revolution, analysis, Great Britain, UK, Bolshevik Party, communist party, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, ASR Source: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #73, Spring, 2018, page 34
This is a very interesting and useful work. It takes you back to when
Lenin and Trotsky were unknown and how this changed as the British left
tried to understand developments in the Russian Revolution. Inspired by
C.B. Macpherson's claim that the USSR while not a democratic system of
government could be viewed as representing a "Non-Liberal Democracy" as
it aimed to eliminate classes, Ian Bullock's book utilizes an impressive
array of primary sources to show "the myth of soviet democracy in the
early appeal of the Russian Revolution." (5) As such, it should be of
interest for libertarian socialists as well as scholars, particularly as
it is full of interesting facts: for example, the Scottish section of
the Independent Labour Party (ILP) voted to join the Communist
international and for prohibition at its January 1920 conference.
(194-5)
The remit of the book is wide insofar as it covers socialists who were
initially supportive of the revolution but not explicitly
libertarian—although he does include those influenced by syndicalism,
such as guild socialists, the shop steward movement and the de Leonist
Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it concentrates on
the main parties and mentions the more diffuse syndicalist tendencies
less. There is little mention of anarchists other than in passing,
perhaps unsurprisingly given the size of the movement in Britain at the
time but he does note that it "is perhaps not surprising that...the
anarchist supporters of soviet democracy...seem to have been most
resilient" (365) and that in the early 1920s the (by then) council
communist Workers' Dreadnought started to reprint anarchist reports and
critiques of the Bolsheviks. However, there is much in Romancing the
Revolution which libertarian socialists will gain from.
After a survey of the British left at the time—including the ILP, the
SLP, the British Socialist Party, the unfortunately named National
Socialist Party (formed by BSP members who, like its leader Henry
Hyndman, supported the Allies), the syndicalist and Shop Steward
movements as well as the Guild Socialists and the Workers' Socialist
Federation (WSF)—Bullock turns to the matter at hand, with a chapter on
the June 1917 Leeds "Soviet" Congress in which these tendencies
expressed their support for the Russian Revolution which had ended the
Tsarist autocracy along with opposition to the war and which ended with
the call to form soviets in the UK.
He then charts the evolution of these parties and tendencies and how
they reacted to developments in Russia such as the October Revolution,
the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the civil war and the
changing nature and rhetoric of the new regime. The book recounts how
the original meaning of the word soviet—Russian for "council,"
specifically one elected by workers and peasants—was lost and used
solely in relation to the USSR, how the soviets were "the only clear
example during the twentieth century—as an alternative to Macpherson's
liberal democracy—a distinctly different functioning form of democratic
government." (4) He sketches the process by which the promise of a wider
democracy became replaced by party dictatorship—in his words, "The
Dictatorship of the Proletariat: From Class to Party" (312)—for many on
the left.
Of course, many of the earliest critics of the Bolshevik regime
counterpoised bourgeois democracy to the soviet system, yet this is not
the only possible critique. Thankfully, Bullock includes those who
criticized Bolshevism from the left as well, It is this aspect of the
book which makes it of particular note to libertarians today. Indeed,
the problems facing the British left also faced subsequent generations,
including ours, faced with revolutions and the regimes that spring forth
from them—how to be supportive of a revolution but also critical,
particularly of any state structures involved.
Part of the problem was the lack of reliable information from Russia,
not to mention the deliberate lies spread by the capitalist media. There
was also an understandable desire "to give the Bolsheviks the benefit of
the doubt wherever possible." (149) The Bolshevik's opposition to the
war helped them gain an audience in Britain but it also meant that myths
were readily accepted, particularly if they chimed with the hopes of the
audience. So, for example, it was reported that while British workers
were "demanding the democratic control of industry" the Russian workers
"have it," according to a 1918 article in the ILP's newspaper the Labour
Leader. (149-50) As we have known for some time, the Bolshevik regime
was then already in the process of crushing any embryonic developments
towards this in favor of one-man management and centralized planning.
As with any revolution, many on the left wanted to believe the best. As
Bullock notes, many dismissed negative accounts due to bourgeois
hostility and trying to reconcile what originally attracted them to the
Revolution and the regime that it produced. Yet enough was available—not
least from eye-witness accounts as well as interviews with, articles
from and speeches by leading Bolsheviks themselves. Bullock indicates
this steady flow of warning signs, such as Zinoviev proclaiming that the
dictatorship of the proletariat was the same as the dictatorship of the
Communist Party at the second congress of the Communist International in
1920, (313) Lenin's defense of "dictatorial" one-man management (185,
204) as well as his comment that it was "natural that revolutionary
workers execute Mensheviks." (205) Some managed to accept Lenin's
advocacy of dictatorship because they believed it reflected working
class support but Bullock, rightly, quotes Bertrand Russell (186) from
his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism on the fallacy of this:
Friends of Russia here [in Britain] think of the dictatorship of the
proletariat as merely a new form of representative government, in which
only working men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly
occupational, not geographical. They think that 'proletariat' means
'proletariat,' but 'dictatorship' does not quite mean 'dictatorship.'
This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speaks of a
dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the
proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian sense. He means the
'class-conscious' part of the proletariat, i.e. the Communist Party
The issue is that many on the revolutionary left somehow managed to
convince themselves of this nonsense—presumably by invoking that magical
word "dialectics" at some stage. This can be seen even from those who
later broke with Moscow to remain advocates of soviet democracy. Thus,
for example, the WSF's Workers' Dreadnought in July 1920 reported and
justified Bolshevik suppression of soviets—peasant ones, where the poor
peasants apparently voted for their rich neighbors in the "Left Wing
Social Revolutionary Party" (113) and published an article by a member
of the Aberdeen Communist Group which proclaimed that any Soviet system
"must come under the dictatorship of the Communist Party." (181) While
the WSF had just created the Communist Party (British Section of the
Third International) and later the same year helped form the
Moscow-approved Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), it finally
realized the error of its ways by early 1921.
They Were not alone. The book ends recounting how the ILP and the SLP
refused to merge into the CPGB, leaving the BSP as the core of its
membership—joined by various Guildsmen, syndicalists and others—while
the anti-Parliamentarian communists like the WSF's Sylvia Pankhurst
found freedom of discussion in the CPGB to be much less than originally
promised. The anti-Parliamentarian communists soon left and found the
German and Dutch council communists who had likewise become
disillusioned with Bolshevism, even promoting the original Fourth
International, but the Workers' Dreadnought had ceased publication by
1924.
As well as showing the slow evolution of many from defending the
revolution because it had produced a widening of (functional delegate)
democracy to defending the Bolsheviks and their dictatorship, the book
also charts the decline of the diversity of the pre-war left with
organization after organization disappearing (such as the WSF, the Guild
Socialists) or becoming completely marginal (SLP). Yet this diversity is
of note, given the wide range of views in the pre-war left. Libertarian
ideas on industrial or functional democracy had obviously spread quite
widely in the British left—not least with the Guild Socialists. Even
Ramsay MacDonald raised the possibility of replacing the House of Lords
with an industrial Parliament.
The first chapter also notes the differences in perspective on the left.
On the one hand, there were the technocratic Fabians who, in 1906, noted
that Democracy is a word with a double meaning. To the bulk of Trade
Unionists and labourers it means an intense jealousy and mistrust of all
authority, and a resolute reduction of both representatives and
officials to the position of mere delegates and agents of the majority.
(22)
Others on the left, not least the syndicalists, argued that "real power
would be put into the hands of the citizens—or members, in the case of
the unions—rather than an elected representative." (23) Needless to say,
the Fabians opposed such "primitive democracy."
Interestingly, these debates resurfaced during the debates on the
Russian Revolution. Bullock, as an example, quotes the chair of the
Russian Communist Party, Kamenev, on how his party rejected mandated
delegates and every delegate "must vote according to his own conscience,
and not according to the views he and others had formed before the
debates." This, as a British socialist noted at the time, ran counter to
the whole idea of the soviet system. (197) Sadly, Bullock fails to note
that Lenin in What is to Be Done? followed the Fabians in opposing
"primitive democracy," so perhaps the Social Democratic Federation,
which became the BSP, may not have been on "the far side of this" gulf
between the two perspectives (22) for in spite of all the pro-referendum
and recall comments Bullock lists in the pre-war left, they were in the
context a centralized, statist structure. This would make such reforms
far less democratic than they appear on paper—as seen in practice with
the Soviet state before the creation of the party dictatorship in
mid-1918.
As such, developments in Russia should not be viewed in isolation. The
Bolsheviks, as Social-Democrats, shared a similar ideological background
with much of the British left covered in this book. This means that the
BSP forming the core of the CPGB comes as no great surprise. It also
helps answer the question of how so many self-proclaimed socialists
managed to tolerate the twists and turns of Stalinism, for many had
already done so when Lenin and Trotsky ruled the roost.
Bullock's research is impressive and it makes fascinating reading to see
how the British left tried to make sense of Bolshevism at the time.
Obviously, hindsight is always 20/20, but by the early twenties enough
was known to see that the Bolshevik regime was a state-capitalist party
dictatorship. That so many on the left embraced this would suggest that
pre-war positions on democracy and socialism were not as robust as would
be imagined—as anarchists had long warned, what they thought of as
socialism was in fact simply state capitalism. Bullock, sadly,
concentrates mostly on the political rhetoric of the pre-war left rather
than their economic vision (the Guild Socialists being, unsurprisingly,
an exception). The book fails to address this critique but it can be
argued it falls outside its remit. This should not, however, detract
from an excellent contribution to our understanding of the period.