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Title: Myth of the Party
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1976, Fall
Language: en
Topics: Russian Revolution, bolshevism, communist party,Lenin,Trotsky,Kronstadt,repression,Fifth Estate #272
Source: Fifth Estate #272, May 1976, retrieved December 31, 2020 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/272-may-1976/myth-party/

Murray Bookchin

Myth of the Party

Social revolutions are not “made” by parties, groups, or cadres; they

occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that

activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely (as

Trotsky argued) because the “masses” find the existing society

intolerable, but also because of the tension between the actual and the

possible, between “what is” and “what could be.”

Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not,

it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized

struggle to survive.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain of the living like a

nightmare because it was largely a project of “intolerable conditions,”

of a devastating imperialistic war. Whatever dreams it had were

pulverized by an even bloodier civil war, by famine, and by treachery.

What emerged from the revolution were the ruins not of an old society,

but of whatever hopes existed to achieve a new one.

The Russian Revolution failed miserably; it replaced Tsarism by state

capitalism. The Bolsheviks were the tragic victims of their ideology and

paid with their lives in great numbers during the purges of the

Thirties. To attempt to acquire any unique wisdom from this scarcity

revolution is ridiculous.

What we can learn from the revolutions of the past is what all

revolutions have in common and their profound limitations compared with

the enormous possibilities that are now open to us.

Spontaneous Revolution

The most striking feature of the past revolutions is that they began

spontaneously. Whether one chooses to examine the opening phases of the

French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune,

the 1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917, the

Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the French general strike of 1968, the

opening stages are generally the same: a period of ferment that explodes

spontaneously into a mass upsurge.

Whether the upsurge is successful or not depends on its resoluteness and

on whether the State can effectively exercise its armed power–that is,

on whether the troops go over to the people.

The “glorious party,” when there is one, almost invariably lags behind

the events. In February,1917, the Petrograd organization of the

Bolsheviks opposed the calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the

revolution which was destined to overthrow the Tsar. Fortunately, the

workers ignored the Bolshevik “directives” and went on strike anyway.

In the events which followed, no one was more surprised by the

revolution than the “revolutionary” parties, including the Bolsheviks.

As the Bolshevik leader Kayurov recalled: “Absolutely no guiding

initiatives from the party were felt…the Petrograd committee had been

arrested and the representative from the Central Committee, Comrade

Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming day.”

Perhaps this was fortunate: before the Petrograd committee was arrested,

its evaluation of the situation and its role were so dismal that, had

the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful if the revolution

would have occurred when it did.

The Hierarchy of Command

Scene from the 1956 Hungarian revolution: Russian tank commanders, the

heirs of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. (Photo from Hungary ’56 by Andy

Anderson)

As the party expands, the distance between the leadership and the ranks

invariably increases. Its leaders not only become “personages”, but they

lose contact with the living situation below. The local groups, which

know their own immediate situation better than any remote leader, are

obliged to subordinate their insights to directives from above.

The leadership, lacking any direct knowledge of local problems, responds

sluggishly and prudently. Although it stakes out a claim to the “larger

view”, to greater “theoretical competence”, the competence of the

leadership tends to diminish the higher one ascends the hierarchy of

command.

The more one approaches the level where the real decisions are made, the

more conservative is the nature of the decision-making process, the more

bureaucratic and extraneous are the factors which come into play, the

more considerations of prestige and retrenchment supplant creativity,

imagination, and a disinterested dedication to revolutionary goals.

Scenes from the 1956 Hungarian revolution: the revolutionary proletariat

destroying mystification. (Photo from Hungary ’56 by Andy Anderson)

The result is that the party becomes less efficient from a revolutionary

point of view the more it seeks efficiency in hierarchy, cadres, and

centralization. Although everyone marches in step, the orders are

usually wrong, especially when events begin to move rapidly and take

unexpected turns–as they do in all revolutions.

The party is efficient in only one respect: in molding society in its

own hierarchical image if the revolution is successful. It creates

bureaucracy, centralization, and the State. It fosters the very social

conditions which justify this kind of society. Hence instead of

“withering away”, the State controlled by the “glorious party” preserves

the very conditions which “necessitate” the existence of a State–and a

party to “guard it”.

On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vulnerable in periods

of repression. The bourgeoisie has only to grab its leadership to

virtually destroy the entire movement. With its leaders in prison or in

hiding, the party becomes paralyzed; the obedient membership has no one

to obey and tends to flounder. Demoralization sets in rapidly. The party

decomposes not only because of its repressive atmosphere but also

because of its poverty of inner resources.

The foregoing account is not a series of hypothetical inferences; it is

a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past

century–the Social Democrats, the communists, and the Trotskyists…

To claim that these parties ceased to take their Marxian principles

seriously merely conceals another question: why did this happen in the

first place? The fact is that these parties were co-opted into bourgeois

society because they were structured along bourgeois lines. The germ of

treachery existed in them from birth.

The Bolshevik Party was spared this fate between 1904 and 1917 for only

one reason: it was an illegal organization during most of the years

leading up to the revolution. The party was continually being shattered

and reconstituted, with the result that until it took power it never

really hardened into a fully centralized, bureaucratic, hierarchical

machine.

Moreover, it was riddled by faction. This intense factional atmosphere

persisted throughout 1917 into the civil war, nevertheless the Bolshevik

leadership was ordinarily extremely conservative, a trait that Lenin had

to fight throughout 1917–first, in his efforts to reorient the Central

Committee against the Provisional Government (the famous conflict over

the “April Theses”), later in driving this body into insurrection in

October. In both cases, he threatened to resign from the Central

Committee and bring his views to the “lower ranks of the party.”

The Centralized Party

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Bolsheviks tended to

centralize their party to the degree that they became isolated from the

working class. This relationship has rarely been investigated in

latter-day Leninist circles, although Lenin was honest enough to admit

it. The Russian Revolution is not merely the story of the Bolshevik

Party and its supporters. Beneath the veneer of official events

described by Soviet historians there was another, more basic

development–the spontaneous movement of the workers and revolutionary

peasants, which later clashed sharply with the bureaucratic policies of

the Bolsheviks.

With the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917, workers in virtually

all the factories of Russia spontaneously established factory

committees, staking out an increasing claim in industrial operations. In

June 1917, an all-Russian Congress of Factory Committees was held in

Petrograd which called for the “organization of thorough control by

labour over production and distribution.” The demands of this Conference

are rarely mentioned in Leninist accounts of the Russian Revolution,

despite the fact that the Conference aligned itself with the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky, who describes the factory committees as “the most direct and

indubitable representation of the proletariat in the whole country,”

deals with them peripherally in his massive, three-volume history of the

revolution. Yet so important were these spontaneous organisms of

self-management that Lenin, despairing of winning the soviets in the

summer of 1917, was prepared to jettison the slogan “All Power to the

Soviets” for “All Power to the Factory Committees.”

This demand would have catapulted the Bolsheviks into a completely

anarcho-syndicalist position, although it is doubtful that they would

have remained there very long.

An End to Workers’ Control

With the October Revolution, all the factory committees seized control

of the plants, ousting the bourgeoisie and completely taking control of

industrial operations. In accepting the concept Of workers’ control,

Lenin’s famous decree of November 14, 1917, merely acknowledged an

accomplished fact; the Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workers at this

early date. But they began to whittle down the power of the factory

committees.

In January, 1918, a scant two months after “decreeing” workers’ control,

the Bolsheviks shifted the administration of the factories from the

committees to the bureaucratic trade unions. The story that the

Bolsheviks “patiently” experimented with workers’ control, only to find

it “inefficient” and “chaotic” is a myth.

Their “patience” did not last more than a few weeks. Not only did they

end direct workers’ control within a matter of weeks after the decree of

November 14, but even union control came to an end shortly after it had

been established.

By the spring of 1918, virtually all Russian industry was placed under

bourgeois forms of management. As Lenin put it, the “revolution

demands…precisely in the interests of socialism that the masses

unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labour

process.” Workers’ control was denounced not only as “inefficient,”

“chaotic,” and “impractical,” but as “petty bourgeois!”

The Left Communist Osinsky bitterly denounced all of these spurious

claims and warned the party:

“Socialism and socialist organization must be set up by the proletariat

itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set

up–state capitalism.” In the “interests of socialism,” the Bolshevik

Party elbowed the proletariat out of every domain it had conquered by

its own efforts and initiative.

The party did not co-ordinate the revolution or even lead it; it

dominated it. First, workers’ control, later union control, was replaced

by an elaborate hierarchy, as monstrous as any structure that existed in

pre-revolutionary times. As later years were to demonstrate, Osinsky’s

prophecy became bitter reality with a vengeance.

The problem of “who is to prevail”–the Bolsheviks or the Russian

“masses”–was by no means limited to the factories. The issue reappeared

in the countryside as well as the cities. A sweeping peasant war had

buoyed up the movement of the workers. Contrary to official Leninist

accounts, the agrarian upsurge was by no means limited to a

redistribution of the land into private plots.

In the Ukraine, peasants influenced by the anarchist militias of Nestor

Makhno established a multitude of rural communes, guided by the

Communist maxim: “From each according to his ability; to each according

to his needs,” Elsewhere, in the north and in Soviet Asia, several

thousand of these organisms were established partly on the initiative of

the Left Social Revolutionaries and in large measure as a result of

traditional collectivist impulses which stemmed from the Russian

village, the mir.

It matters little whether these communes were numerous or embraced large

numbers of peasants; the point is that they were authentic popular

organisms, the nuclei of a moral and social spirit that ranged far above

the dehumanizing values of bourgeois society.

Communes Discouraged

The Bolsheviks frowned upon these organisms from the very beginning and

condemned them. To Lenin, the preferred, the more “socialist” form or

agricultural enterprise was represented by the State Farm: literally an

agricultural factory in which the State owned the land and farming

equipment, appointing managers who hired peasants on a wage basis. One

sees in these attitudes toward workers’ control and agricultural

communes the essentially bourgeois spirit and mentality that permeated

the Bolshevik Party–a spirit and mentality that emanated not only from

its theories, but from its corporate mode of organization.

In December, 1918, Lenin launched an attack against the communes on the

pretext that peasants were being “forced” to enter them. Actually,

little if any coercion was used to organize these communistic forms of

self-management. As Robert G. Wesson, who studied the Soviet communes in

detail, concludes: “Those who went into communes must have done so

largely of their own volition.” The communes were not suppressed but

their growth was discouraged until Stalin merged the entire development

in the forced collectivization drives of the late ‘Twenties and early

‘Thirties.

By 1920, the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves from the Russian working

class and peasantry. The elimination of workers’ control, the

suppression of the Makhnovtsy, the restricted political atmosphere in

the country, the inflated bureaucracy, the crushing material poverty

inherited from the civil war years–all, taken together, generated a deep

hostility toward Bolshevik rule.

With the end of hostilities, a new movement surged up from the depths of

Russian society for a “Third Revolution”–not a restoration of the past,

but a deep-felt desire to realize the very goals of freedom, economic as

well as political, that had rallied the “masses” around the Bolshevik

program of 1917.

The new movement found its most conscious form in the Petrograd

proletariat and the Kronstadt sailors. It also found expression in the

party: the growth of anti-centralist and anarcho-syndicalist tendencies

among the Bolsheviks reached a point where a bloc of oppositional

groups, oriented toward these issues, gained 124 seats at a Moscow

provincial conference as against 154 for supporters of the Central

Committee.

The Kronstadt Revolt

On March 2, 1921, the “Red sailors” of Kronstadt rose in open rebellion,

raising the banner of a “Third Revolution of the toilers.” The Kronstadt

program centered around demands for free elections to the soviets,

freedom of speech and press for the anarchists and Left Socialist

parties, free trade unions, and the liberation of all prisoners who

belonged to Socialist parties.

The most shameless stories were fabricated by the Bolsheviks to account

for this uprising, which in later years were acknowledged as brazen

lies. The revolt was characterized as a “White Guard plot,” this despite

the fact that the great majority of Communist Party members in Kronstadt

joined the sailors–precisely as Communists–denouncing the party leaders

as betrayers of the October Revolution.

As Robert Vincent Daniels observes in his study of Bolshevik

oppositional movements: “Ordinary Communists were indeed so

unreliable…that the government did not depend upon them, either in the

assault on Kronstadt itself or in keeping order in Petrograd, where

Kronstadt’s hopes for support chiefly rested. The main body of troops

employed were Chekists and officer cadets from Red Army training

schools. The final assault on Kronstadt was led by the top officialdom

of the Communist Party–a large group of delegates at the Tenth Party

Congress was rushed from Moscow for this purpose.”

So weak was the regime internally that the elite had to do its own dirty

work.

Even more significant than the Kronstadt revolt was the strike movement

that developed among the Petrograd workers, a movement that sparked the

uprising of the sailors. Leninist histories do not recount this

critically important development. The first strikes broke out in the

Troubotchny factory on February 23, 1921.

Within a matter of days the movement swept in one factory after another

until, by February 28, the famous Putilov works–“crucible of the

revolution”–went on strike. Not only were economic demands raised but

workers raised distinctly political ones, anticipating all the demands

that were to be raised by the Kronstadt sailors a few days later.

On February 24, the Bolsheviks declared a “state of siege” in Petrograd

and arrested the strike leaders, suppressing the workers’ demonstrations

with officer cadets. The fact is that the Bolsheviks did not merely

suppress a “sailors’ mutiny,” they crushed by armed force the working

class itself. It was at this point that Lenin demanded the banning of

factions in the Russian Communist Party. Centralization of the party was

now complete–and the way was paved for Stalin.

We have discussed these events in detail because they lead to a

conclusion that our latest crop of Marxist-Leninists tend to avoid: the

Bolshevik Party reached its maximum degree of centralization in Lenin’s

day not to achieve a revolution or suppress a White Guard

counter-revolution, but to effect a counter-revolution of its own

against the very social forces it professed to represent.

Factions were prohibited and a monolithic party created not to prevent a

“capitalist restoration” but to contain a mass movement of workers for

soviet democracy and social freedom.

Means Replaced Ends

If it is true that in the bourgeois revolutions that “Phrase went beyond

the content,” in the Bolshevik revolution the forms replaced the

content. The soviets replaced the workers and their factory committees,

the Party replaced the soviets, the Central Committee replaced the

Party, and the Political Bureau replaced the Central Committee. In

short, means replaced ends.

This incredible substitution of form for content is one of the most

characteristic traits of Marxism-Leninism.

Only one force could have arrested the growth of bureaucracy in Russia:

a social force. Had the Russian proletariat and peasantry succeeded in

increasing the domain of self-management through the development of

viable factory committees, rural communes, and free soviets, the history

of the country might have taken a dramatically different turn.

There can be no question that the failure of socialist revolutions in

Europe after the First World War led to the isolation of the revolution

in Russia. The material poverty of Russia, coupled with the pressure of

the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militated against the

development of a consistently libertarian, indeed, a socialist society.

But by no means was it ordained that Russia had to develop along state

capitalist lines; contrary to Lenin’s and Trotsky’s expectations, the

revolution was defeated by internal forces, not by the invasion of

armies from abroad.

Had the movement from below restored the initial achievements of the

revolution in 1917, a multi-faceted social structure might have

developed, based on worker’s control of industry, on a freely developing

peasant economy in agriculture, and on a living interplay of ideas,

programs, and political movements. At the very least, Russia would have

not been imprisoned in totalitarian chains and Stalinism would not have

poisoned the world revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascism

and World War II.

The development of the Bolshevik Party, however, precluded this

development, Lenin’s or Trotsky’s “good intentions” aside. By destroying

the power of the factory committees in industry and by crushing the

Makhnovtsy, the Petrograd workers, and the Kronstadt sailors, the

Bolsheviks virtually guaranteed the triumph of the Russian bureaucracy

over Russian society.

The centralized party–a completely bourgeois institution–became the

refuge of counter-revolution in its most sinister form. This was the

covert counter-revolution that draped itself in the red flag and the

terminology of Marx. Ultimately, what the Bolsheviks suppressed in 1921

was not an “ideology” or a “White Guard conspiracy,” but an elemental

struggle of the Russian people to free themselves of their shackles and

take control of their own destiny.

For Russia, this meant the nightmare of Stalinist dictatorship: for the

generation of the Thirties it meant the horror of fascism and the

treachery of the Communist Parties in Europe and the United States.

Taken from the pamphlet Listen, Marxists! by the Libertarian Students

Federation. It can be found in whole in Murray Bookchin’s Post Scarcity

Anarchism.