Why one party and why a command economy? [Archive]

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Lyev

11th February 2010, 22:51

Why did China and Russia go down this road? There is a sure dichotomy between Marx and Stalin; Marx obviously wanted an economy democratically run by the workers from the bottom upwards, not by bureaucrats running the economy from the top downwards. The whole point of Marx and Engels socialism was that it was a new type of socialism, posited as a direct anti-thesis to the elitist, "socialism-from-above" espoused by utopians like Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen.

Also why one party? What did Marx and Engels say on the subject of other parties running against communist ones, after communist, worker upheaval? (I'm not too sure about how true this "one-party" thing actually is; I read somewhere that some Bolsheviks wanted there to be other parties running against the CP or something like that).

Anyway, sorry if my questions seem rather silly, thanks folks.

bailey_187

11th February 2010, 23:28

Neither Marx and Engels nor Lenin for the most part considered how a modern economy would be planned.

Marxist Socialism was viewed as different from the Utopians, not because of some new way of what socialism would be like, but that it was put on a scientific level through the materialist conception of history etc

To say that the Chinese economy was purely top down commands from bureacrats is wrong though:
In factories and other workplaces, traditional forms of “one-man management” were dissolved. New “three-in-one” combinations of rank-and-file workers, technicians, and Communist Party members took responsibility for day-to-day management of factories and other types of work. Workers spent time in management and managers spent time working on the shop floor -Stephen Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
As Dong Ping Han notes in The Unknown Cultural Revolution page 121:
"It became normal practice during the cultural revolution decade to hold a mass meeting in early spring to discuss the production goals and plans of the year"

sorry for text sizes, cba to change it

KlÃ©ber

11th February 2010, 23:39

There are some other parties in the PRC but they are virtually powerless. The CCP's victory in the civil war in 1949 was a political change that did not affect production relations. The PRC bought out or nationalized industrial enterprises in the mid-late 50's, and since the 1980's there has been a trend toward privatization. Despite the leadership of a nominally Marxist party, the PRC has essentially always been a bourgeois state.

As for the USSR, it wasn't intended to be a one-party state. Two parties took part in the October Revolution that founded the RSFSR, the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Left SR's staged a failed uprising to try and overthrow the Bolsheviks in 1918, and they were suppressed as a result, leaving only one party. Anarchists like the "The Bell" group also tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks using terrorism and assassinations, so they were also suppressed. Factions started to form within the CPSU, with the Left Opposition calling for political freedom and industrialization, and the Right Opposition who wanted market reforms. Stalin led the centrists who allied with the Right against the Left, accused them of being traitors, wreckers, etc., crushed their group and exiled their leader (Trotsky). Then Stalin adopted some Left Opposition demands like collectivization, industrialization, etc. and he turned on the Right and destroyed them, and executed their leader (Bukharin). From 1937-41, especially in 1937 and 1938, virtually any socialist who had ever been part of a rival party, a Bolshevik opposition group or independent faction, was executed. The victims of those purges were unanimously tortured and pressured to sign false confessions in order to save their families. Some resisted, refused to confess, and were shot anyway or died in mysterious circumstances in prison.

In 1938, after the entire socialist opposition had been wiped out or jailed and slated for destruction, Stalin published an essay that socialist construction was victorious, and socialism now existed in the USSR.

scarletghoul

11th February 2010, 23:55

One thing Kleb doesn't mention in his balanced overview of Soviet history is the 1936 constitution which gave everyone the right to secret votes in contested elections. Obviously this was not developed to the full, but it shows that the ideas were around and being acted on.

More recently the Nepal Maoists like Bhattarai have been exploring ideas for a multi-party socialism.

RadioRaheem84

12th February 2010, 00:24

Zeus the Moose

12th February 2010, 01:49

More recently the Nepal Maoists like Bhattarai have been exploring ideas for a multi-party socialism.

During a speech Prachanda gave at the New School back in 2008, he suggested that had Lenin lived a few more years, he would have advocated a more multi-party system in the Soviet Union. Now, this might have been a way to help justify participating in the Nepali elections and potentially a multi-party government (though considering more recent developments, I don't think this is the case), but it does give some indication that it might just be more than Bhattarai suggesting multi-party socialism as well.

leninwasarightwingnutcase

12th February 2010, 06:48

The Russian Civil War was the most brutal in history - over 9 million people died. The revolution was attacked by the white army - a western proxy which France, Britain and America all sent troops to fight alongside. They were utterly merciless - sample orders from their top brass read “it is forbidden to arrest workers, the orders are to shoot and hang them” and instructed regional commanders to “decimate the population”. They ordered their troops to systematically rape women as a means of demoralising the population. Much of their propaganda centred around antisemitism and in the Ukraine alone over 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms.

The Russian Revolutionary Movement was extremely diverse. It is often equated with he Bolshevik party because this served the propaganda of both sides in the cold war, however this is not the truth. I would say that the Russian Revolutionary Movement represented the strongest and most effective opposition to centralised power the world has ever seen. However, the trauma and climate of fear generated by the Civil War as well as the "Its necessary for the war effort" line enabled the Bolshevik party to opportunistically entrench its power until it was strong enough to destroy the revolutionary movement by violence. The resistance was phenomenal, but ultimately overcome. For a few (there are many, many more) examples look up the Tambov uprising, the Kronsdadt mutiny and the Makhnovist Movement. I am really serious about this, major violence does so much to push any society towards totalitarianism. Considering, say, the pitiful ease with which Italian, German and French democracy fell to fascism, the tenacity with which the Russian Revolutionary Movement defended freedom truly awes me.

For an eyewitness account of, exactly how, Revolutionary Russia went, from the greatest hope for a free humanity the world has ever seen, to a totalitarian state, Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist Movement is unbeatable. Online here:
http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/arshinov/index.htm

If you don't have the time to read a book this may answer some specific questions you might have:
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/append4.html

Hope this helps.

EDIT: The Chinese 'civil war' (lots of western assistance to the non-communist side) was pretty brutal too and lasted much longer than the Russian one.

KlÃ©ber

12th February 2010, 07:42

Tambov uprising, the Kronsdadt mutiny and the Makhnovist MovementThe reason that I can't sympathize with any of those is because they took armed action against the Bolshevik-led Soviet government while it was still fighting the Whites and interventionists. Their demands were largely well-intentioned but impossible to implement; the conditions of that war required iron labor discipline and terror against the peasants, the only alternative was surrender. If the Left SR's and anarchists had not staged those pointless uprisings, they could have remained in the workers' government and been part of a stronger anti-bureaucratic opposition after the war.

FSL

12th February 2010, 08:14

Sometimes it seems like the best reason for a revolution is to make one so we'll simply annoy the crap out of anarchists, Trotskyists and the rest of the gang.

In Soviet Russia the parliament votes on dissolving you.

And on a slightly more serious note, there was workers' participation in planning, anyone who thinks the opposite is doing it because they didn't bother to actually read stuff about the Soviet Union, outside what is readily available in Wikipedia.

Also, since all the other parties sided with the rulling class during the civil war, they were banned for obvious reasons. People who swear over multi-party democracy as some kind of necessity should stop projecting things they have been taught to any societal model. Banning communist parties in times of revolutionary upheaval is a common practice among capitalist states and it's perfectly fine if a worker's state chooses to do so as well if it needs to. On the question of other workers' parties, for example why not have a Trotskyist party, the answer is even simpler. There aren't many worker's parties. There can be parties made up of workers that are "infected" (for a lack of a better word) by petty bourgeois ideology -just like trotskyism is. In this case, once more, the previous rule can apply.

What was made obvious in the Soviet Union isn't that banning reactionary parties doesn't work, but that it doesn't work by itself. Class struggle or inner-class conflicts will find a way to manifest themselves after all, even through the communist party itself. Essentially, attention needs to always be payed to advancing the productive forces as well as the production relations to ensure the success of the revolution.

KlÃ©ber

12th February 2010, 08:45

there was workers' participation in planning, anyone who thinks the opposite is doing it because they didn't bother to actually read stuff about the Soviet UnionWhat is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm)

Sometimes it seems like the best reason for a revolution is to make one so we'll simply annoy the crap out of anarchists, Trotskyists and the rest of the gang.Stalin and Kamenev were against taking power until Lenin and Trotsky showed up.

Chambered Word

12th February 2010, 10:09

Martin Blank

12th February 2010, 13:39

I would say that it comes down to a question of which class actually ruled in these countries.

In Russia, the October Revolution was carried out by workers, but its coincidental leadership, the Bolshevik Party, was predominantly petty-bourgeois in its cadres -- and as much as Lenin and others talked about "de-classed" leaders, intellectuals and such, the reality was that they had not broken from the consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie.

There were, in the beginning of the Soviet republic, factory-shop committees that sought to organize and directly control production. Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control outlines in great detail the relationship between these bodies, the Soviets and the Bolsheviks. Brinton shows how the Bolsheviks systematically undermined the factory-shop committees throughout 1918 and 1919 because they could not be brought under the control of the Soviet government and its corps of "specialists" resurrected from among the ranks of the old tsarist functionaries -- in effect, a resurrection of the old state apparatus themselves.

Initially, the factory-shop committees had problems with fulfilling their role. On the one hand, few workers had any experience with administration of a workplace. On the other hand, the few who did have a sense of administration were being pulled by the Bolsheviks out of the factories and either put in state administration or sent off to die in the unfolding Civil War. When the "specialists" were first put into the economy, they did have an overall positive effect on the committees, since they taught workers how to carry out basic administration and management. But the more the factory-shop committees asserted their rights over control of the workplace floor, the more that the "specialists" turned to the Bolsheviks for backup ... and the more the Bolsheviks sided with the "specialists" against the workers.

By 1919, the factory-shop committees were being liquidated into the trade union apparatus. By 1920, there was no more direct workers' control at the workplace, with one-person (state) management in the person of the "specialists" as the dominant framework for production. By 1921, the local Soviets were the only remaining locus of power for the working class, which is why the Soviet government began a process of liquidating them. By 1931, with the end of wage equalization and the separation of the state from the local Soviets, the process of the petty bourgeoisie separating its state from the working class had passed the point of qualitative transformation. Five years later comes the bourgeois Stalin Constitution.

Politically, the pattern was similar. Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks in Power, which goes through the first year of the Soviet republic, shows how the Bolshevik Party only agreed to a coalition after October because they could not hold state power without it. But as the Civil War began, and the divisions over Brest-Litovsk broke into the open, the Bolsheviks took on more of a siege mentality. They believed that Germany was prepared to overrun the Soviet republic (even though their own agents reported that tens of thousands of German soldiers, guns and cannons had been taken off the front line and moved west for the 1918 Spring Offensive) if they did not accept Berlin's terms.

The misplaced fears of the Bolshevik leadership in the Council of People's Commissars -- that the struggling of the factory-shop committees to organize production, the lack of educated cadre to handle public (state) services, the disintegration of the old army, the open divisions over Brest-Litovsk, the growing anger over the actions of the Cheka, the resistance of sections of the trade unions to state oversight, etc., could cause the Soviet republic to collapse -- caused them to engage in what can only be described as a series of provocations that led to unnecessary outcomes.

I mentioned what happened with the factory-shop committees already, but that was part of an overall move by the CPC and Bolshevik-led Soviets to begin resurrecting elements of the old tsarist state apparatus as "specialists" to help with running the government. What ended up happening, though, is that they drew in so many willing "specialists" that, instead of a case where formerly-dispossessed elements of the old state consulted on the basic administrative functioning done by others, they assumed direct responsibility for those functions ... and became the "new" state apparatus.

Old ministry functionaries went right back to their jobs, now with the title of "Commissar". Agents and support staff for the old Okhrana went to work for the Cheka. Former bosses and managers driven out of the factories by the insurgent proletariat were reintroduced into them by the Bolsheviks as "economic specialists", and later returned to their old positions as part of state-run one-person management.

The thought of a German offensive in 1918 led the CPC to turn to the junior officer corps (most of the senior corps had either fled overseas or joined the Whites) to resurrect the standing army. The first thing these newly-christened "red commanders" of the embryonic Red Army did was use the workers' militias as cannon fodder against the Whites -- effectively wiping out not only the most dedicated and experienced layer of fighting forces outside of the old tsarist army, but also decimating the very vanguard (in every sense of the term) of the Russian working class. In the end, this left the former tsarist officers in control of "Trotsky's Red Army".

These provocations understandably led to sharp political divisions in the Soviet government and the Bolshevik Party itself. Bukharin's "Left" Communists, the Left Social-Revolutionaries, those anarchists and syndicalists who initially supported the Bolshevik-led Soviet government (including the suppression of the Constituent Assembly) now began to raise opposition. In response, the CPC organized provocations against each of them, with an eye to pushing them out of power.

The attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918 by an individual member of the Left SRs was used to push the entire party into opposition against the CPC, which soon after became an excuse to ban them outright. The "Lefts" were shut down internally. The anarchists and syndicalists were driven from their positions, and either arrested or assassinated (or both in succession). Pro-independence union leaders were bureaucratically removed from their positions and expelled from the unions they had led into the Revolution.

By the beginning of 1919, the hothouse conditions of "war communism" and the series of provocations the year before had effectively purged the proletarian revolution of most of its proletarian class content. Those workers who, at the end of 1917, were brought into the state administration had lost all of their connection with their class, and were nevertheless swamped by the petty-bourgeois "specialists" who now dominated the political and economic arenas, and ruled them. Those workers who still believed in the proletarian revolution, workers' control of production and the rule of the workers' Soviets were either already out of any position of power or isolated to the point where removal was only a matter of time -- generally speaking, that time was when the transition from "war communism" to the NEP began, in 1921. By then, though, to speak of the Soviet republic as a place where workers' ruled was to engage in either delusion or deception.

China is much simpler to understand. That was never a proletarian revolution to begin with, but a peasant uprising against the "cosmopolitan" centers, thus it was from the outset a petty-bourgeois movement.

Unlike the proletariat, that can have both a wide diversity of opinion within its ranks and an organic unity when needed, the petty bourgeoisie needs a singular, monolithic unity and hierarchy. Organizationally, it achieves this through bureaucracy. Politically, it achieves this through the imposition of a "line", strict adherence to which is the measure of loyalty. The "line" is not so much based on principle, but on a string of actions taken by the bureaucracy. They become "litmus tests" of loyalty and are, in all reality, devoid of any real political content. To put it another way, politics becomes secondary to policy.

Political questions -- the revolution, the proletarian party, the relationship of class and organization, the overthrow of capitalist rule, etc. -- are reorganized behind bureaucratic policy, turned on their heads and transformed into exercises in squaring the circle. The petty bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union even attempted to define their rule as a new mode of production between capitalism and communism: "Socialism -- from each according to their ability, to each according to their work". How "work" was to be defined, and what kinds of "work" were above or below others, was defined by ... the bureaucracy, the petty bourgeoisie itself.

This turned all of Marxism on its head. No longer was the future society to be one of generalized freedom, where one contributes what they can and receives all they need (and, eventually, want). Now, the future society, run by the petty bourgeoisie, was to be one of organized (and even fabricated) scarcity, where one contributes all they can and receives what the bureaucracy deems appropriate. In this latter society, you cannot have the luxury of open opposition -- even housebroken "loyal" opposition, since that would potentially breed not-so-loyal dissent among layers of society not easily controlled. The bureaucracy is the focal point, even for its highest echelons. The class is everything, even among the organizers of exploitation.

Social being determines consciousness, Marx wrote. Like all classes, members of the petty bourgeoisie are conditioned from birth to function as members of that class -- as managers, bureaucrats, small business owners, independent producers, professionals, officers, etc. Unless they are removed from those conditions for a long period of time and integrated into a new social being, this consciousness continues to persist. The idea of "de-classing" is an idealistic concept stemming from Weberian bourgeois sociology, not Marxian communist theory. It rejects a definition of class based on social relationships and relations to the means of production in favor of contradictions in Weber's convoluted construct of wealth, power and prestige -- i.e., relations to the (classless) market.

In the end, the answer to the question, "Why one party and why a command economy?", asks another: Why are these elements allowed places in the workers' movement, to say nothing of positions of political and organizational leadership, in the first place?

btpound

12th February 2010, 18:18

I think that the idea behind the one party state is less theory than necessity. In theory, i guess, the idea is that since capitalism means competition, this also means competition between political parties. If you have "eliminated capitalism" and have implemented the "dictatorship of the prol." then you just need one party. "We are all workers here. Why would we debate?" I think it was certainly a mis-step on their part, and I don't think it would be repeated.

As for the command economy, again, capitalism is competition. With socialism, you are integrating all of society under on organ of control, the state. By doing this, you can plan how much of what product you need to produce. Food, steel, wood, clothes, etc. You cannot leave it up to the free market anymore, because it is no longer progressive.

ComradeOm

13th February 2010, 15:26

Why did China and Russia go down this road?Long story short - the failure of both revolutions

In terms of the one-party state, Gramsci mentioned that the party is much more than a simple political organisation but is the "germ" of a future socialist society. It is this single vision that unites the party and gives it purpose. Different interests (ie, class interests) tend to produce different parties. This holds true for an analysis of the Russian Revolution. With some exceptions (notably on the ultra-left fringe) most militant and revolutionary workers did rally to the Bolshevik banner in 1917. By October 1917 the latter was clearly the party of the Russian proletariat. More to the point, it was largely isolated in this position in that no other party shared the same platform (large elements of all other socialist parties did of course defect to the Bolsheviks) and the same vision for a future socialist society. Should the Bolsheviks have compromised for the sake of making friends? I don't believe so

Its also worth questioning the need for a political party in the post-revolution period at all. One often overlooked fact is that the Bolshevik party organisation itself virtually collapsed post-October as its members moved onto the task of constructing the Soviet state (or at least desperately defending it). It was not until mid-late 1918 that the party was revived, in a suitably different form, in the midst of a desperate economic crisis and growing civil war

The benefits of a command economy are more obvious. I'll simply restrict myself to noting that it remains to date the only major experimentation with a non-market economy. Obviously there is much that needs to be changed but I remain convinced that economic planning can provide the basis for a socialist society

In Russia, the October Revolution was carried out by workers, but its coincidental leadership, the Bolshevik Party, was predominantly petty-bourgeois in its cadres -- and as much as Lenin and others talked about "de-classed" leaders, intellectuals and such, the reality was that they had not broken from the consciousness of the petty bourgeoisieAn assumption that is clearly false. Even if we leave aside the party leaders (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1548675&postcount=12), its rank and file were overwhelmingly of proletarian or, to a lesser degree, proletarian. The idea of the Bolshevik party as a party of intellectuals (or professional revolutionaries for that matter) is a myth

Brinton shows how the Bolsheviks systematically undermined the factory-shop committees throughout 1918 and 1919 because they could not be brought under the control of the Soviet government and its corps of "specialists" resurrected from among the ranks of the old tsarist functionaries -- in effect, a resurrection of the old state apparatus themselvesBrinton's work has serious flaws, some of which I've elaborated on here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1573437&postcount=41) and can hardly be considered a work of serious history. Above you have provided a perfect example - the assumption that there was some rivalry between the Bolsheviks and the FCs. This is almost entirely a matter of projecting ideological disputes back into history. The reality is that the most militant members of FCs were generally Bolsheviks and the most militant Bolsheviks (excluding perhaps the Military Organisation) were often FCs. In short, it is a false dichotomy to present these as competing bodies. Where there were divisions they were generally between Bolshevik trade unionists, Bolshevik soldiers, Bolshevik FCs, the various Bolshevik political organisations, etc

If you've read Rabinowitch you'll know that the idea of some monolithic Bolshevik organisation (an implicit assumption in such critiques of Bolshevik attitudes towards the FCs) is another myth. For more information on the Russian labour movement in 1917-1918 (particularly the FCs) I'd recommend the excellent Red Petrograd by a real historian (SA Smith)

Initially, the factory-shop committees had problems with fulfilling their role. On the one hand, few workers had any experience with administration of a workplace. On the other hand, the few who did have a sense of administration were being pulled by the Bolsheviks out of the factories and either put in state administration or sent off to die in the unfolding Civil WarAgain, the most militant and capable workers found themselves gravitating (not "pulled") towards Soviet work because they were the closest to the Bolsheviks - more often than not they were Bolshevik members themselves (Smith) - and believed that the Bolshevik programme was worth fighting for. Its also highly disingenuous to fail to mention that the Bolshevik party apparatus itself suffered from exactly the same plight and was almost completely atrophied during this first year due to the mass flight of its most able members into Soviet work

And really, you are criticising the Bolsheviks for fighting the Civil War? As if it was a deliberate and costly policy to send workers "off to die"?

By 1919, the factory-shop committees were being liquidated into the trade union apparatusThe language is telling. I can only assume that by "liquidated" you mean "voluntarily subordinated". The fate of the FCs was theirs alone - they were not forced into a marriage with the unions but rather voted for it themselves

By 1920, there was no more direct workers' control at the workplace, with one-person (state) management in the person of the "specialists" as the dominant framework for productionWhich ignores the fact that as late as the Stalinist reforms there existed in most Soviet workplaces a governing triad (treugol'nik) - the FC (as the representative of the unions), the management, and the local party cell. (Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System). The relative weakness of one-person management (edinonachalie) is an example of the gap that often existed between government proclamations and reality on the ground. When Lenin began to advocate "dictatorial" management in the face of economic crisis in 1918 he was simply ignored by the actual workers and people on the ground (Smith)

They believed that Germany was prepared to overrun the Soviet republic (even though their own agents reported that tens of thousands of German soldiers, guns and cannons had been taken off the front line and moved west for the 1918 Spring Offensive) if they did not accept Berlin's terms.You are aware that the Germans came within touching distance of Petrograd after capturing vast swathes of territory in a matter of months? The reason that Lenin was so eager to conclude peace with the Germans was that the new Soviet state was almost defenceless

The first thing these newly-christened "red commanders" of the embryonic Red Army did was use the workers' militias as cannon fodder against the WhitesSource, I know that's not in Rabinowitch. The reality of course is that the Red Army retained a sizeable percentage proletarian elements (can't recall the exact figure that Lincoln's Red Victory gives, may be from 30-60%) which formed its core. With one or two exceptions, the elite formations in the Red Army were those drawn from the cities. Its worth pointing out (again!) that these losses were similarly Bolshevik losses - those workers on the front line were almost invariably those who were the most motivated, politically educated, and Bolshevik-inclined

Which is not to deny the validity of the point that the Civil War decimated the Russian proletariat (albeit losses in combat is of far less importance than the famine that stalked the cities) but its ridiculous to ascribe these to deliberate Bolshevik strategy or to suggest that the Civil War should not have been fought. I can disagree with plenty of the decisions made by the Bolsheviks but it would be blinkered in the extreme to ignore the circumstances in which they were made or to discern some sinister and shadowy conspiracy lying behind them

The same pretty much goes for the rest of your post. I've spent enough time on this

Dimentio

13th February 2010, 15:40

Die Neue Zeit

13th February 2010, 15:40

They become "litmus tests" of loyalty and are, in all reality, devoid of any real political content. To put it another way, politics becomes secondary to policy.

I think you have it the wrong way around with the words: policy became secondary to "politics." In political discourse, "policy" refers to the things "politics" used to be before prolific lobbying and bribery on the one hand, and on the other equally prolific but petty, scandalous, personalized shit.

Across The Street

13th February 2010, 16:24

If the Left SR's and anarchists had not staged those pointless uprisings, they could have remained in the workers' government and been part of a stronger anti-bureaucratic opposition after the war.

Highly doubtful^

Dimentio

13th February 2010, 17:01

I could try to answer the title questions.

When a new ruling class is arising, it tend to amass power and control over the means of production, in one way or another.

Martin Blank

15th February 2010, 16:11

Apologies for letting this sit for a couple days. Yesterday was an anniversary for me and my wife, and I spent all day with her. The rest of the time has been party work.

Now then:...

An assumption that is clearly false. Even if we leave aside the party leaders (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1548675&postcount=12), its rank and file were overwhelmingly of proletarian or, to a lesser degree, proletarian. The idea of the Bolshevik party as a party of intellectuals (or professional revolutionaries for that matter) is a myth

This is a baseless angular argument. I did not say that the Bolshevik Party as a whole was "a party of intellectuals". What I did say is that they were "predominantly petty-bourgeois in its cadres". That is, among its theoreticians, writers and propagandists, the petty bourgeoisie dominated -- certainly politically, and in some places (though not all, and perhaps not even most) numerically. Men like Kamenev, Sverdlov and Nogin may have been sons of workers, but most of the leadership wasn't. They were the children of either peasants (rural petty bourgeoisie) and/or part of the intelligentsia (urban petty bourgeoisie). And for that matter, even most of those sons of workers did not join the working class; they entered into the emigre intelligentsia, and took on the consciousness of their social being.

That said, its base was largely proletarian -- certainly disproportionate to the numbers of proletarians in Russia as a whole. But that proletarian base traditionally deferred to their leaders on questions of theory and program. I am reminded of examples from both Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution of how workers conveyed the Bolsheviks' positions in street arguments.

Brinton's work has serious flaws, some of which I've elaborated on here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1573437&postcount=41) and can hardly be considered a work of serious history. Above you have provided a perfect example - the assumption that there was some rivalry between the Bolsheviks and the FCs. This is almost entirely a matter of projecting ideological disputes back into history. The reality is that the most militant members of FCs were generally Bolsheviks and the most militant Bolsheviks (excluding perhaps the Military Organisation) were often FCs. In short, it is a false dichotomy to present these as competing bodies. Where there were divisions they were generally between Bolshevik trade unionists, Bolshevik soldiers, Bolshevik FCs, the various Bolshevik political organisations, etc

I take Brinton's work for what it is: a political exposition. I know it is not a complete work, but it does contain important facts that cannot be dismissed simply because the presenter of those facts has a political opinion. If you did that, you would have to dismiss virtually all writers on the subject, in spite of the fact that even some of the worst of them (Schapiro, Medvedev, etc.) presented facts that were indisputable.

And again, you are using a baseless angular argument. I did not imply any kind of "rivalry" between the Bolsheviks and the factory-shop committees. If there was any kind of rivalry existing at that time, it was between the "specialists" and the factory-shop committees, stemming from the fact that those "specialists" were the managers and bosses dispossessed by the insurgent working class in 1917. I am willing to concede in advance that the Bolsheviks were, in many respects, caught in between a rock and a hard place on this issue, as with many others, attempting to just keep things together and survive.

But for me this is not the point here. We can sit here and act like little more than an historical society or re-enactors' club, or we can attempt to draw lessons from historical experience and learn what not to do. I choose to do the latter; it seems you'd rather waste your time doing the former.

If you've read Rabinowitch you'll know that the idea of some monolithic Bolshevik organisation (an implicit assumption in such critiques of Bolshevik attitudes towards the FCs) is another myth. For more information on the Russian labour movement in 1917-1918 (particularly the FCs) I'd recommend the excellent Red Petrograd by a real historian (SA Smith)

Yet again, another baseless angular argument. At no time did I say anything about the Bolsheviks being "monolithic". In fact, quite the opposite. I mentioned specifically the "Lefts" of 1918 in what I wrote above. I also know there were numerous other trends still in the Bolshevik Party of this time. But there was a leadership that continued to carry out policies. Neither the Central Committee nor its Bureau were paralyzed by these divisions, and were thus able to commit the party to specific actions.

As for Red Petrograd, what I have been able to read of it tells me that Smith is not as much of a one-sided apologist for the Bolsheviks as you present him ... and as you are yourself.

Again, the most militant and capable workers found themselves gravitating (not "pulled") towards Soviet work because they were the closest to the Bolsheviks - more often than not they were Bolshevik members themselves (Smith) - and believed that the Bolshevik programme was worth fighting for. Its also highly disingenuous to fail to mention that the Bolshevik party apparatus itself suffered from exactly the same plight and was almost completely atrophied during this first year due to the mass flight of its most able members into Soviet work

Actually, Rabinowitch points out that when many of the district Soviets told the CPC or commissariats that the transfer of people from their area would cause a collapse in their administration over local services, the orders were simply repeated until they were fulfilled. That sounds like "pulled" to me. Moreover, when those members of the Bolshevik Party did finally concede to accepting the transfer, the concrete result was that the district Soviets were compelled to turn to the dispossessed tsarist functionaries they were supposed to be replacing.

And, yes, a similar dynamic developed within the Bolshevik Party, too, as the relatively few workers who understood basic administrative tasks were moved into "Soviet work" ... soon replaced either by untrained workers or former tsarist functionaries (usually the latter).

And really, you are criticising the Bolsheviks for fighting the Civil War? As if it was a deliberate and costly policy to send workers "off to die"?

I am not criticizing the Bolsheviks fighting the war. I am criticizing how they conducted their side of the fight, especially in the early months of the revolution.

The language is telling. I can only assume that by "liquidated" you mean "voluntarily subordinated". The fate of the FCs was theirs alone - they were not forced into a marriage with the unions but rather voted for it themselves

Yeah, much like the Workers' Councils in Hungary "voluntarily subordinated" themselves to Kadar's government after the collapse of the 1956 Revolution.

Which ignores the fact that as late as the Stalinist reforms there existed in most Soviet workplaces a governing triad (treugol'nik) - the FC (as the representative of the unions), the management, and the local party cell. (Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System). The relative weakness of one-person management (edinonachalie) is an example of the gap that often existed between government proclamations and reality on the ground. When Lenin began to advocate "dictatorial" management in the face of economic crisis in 1918 he was simply ignored by the actual workers and people on the ground (Smith)

Oh, yes. Moshe Lewin is such an objective source for information! That's like Moissaye Olgin for an objective opinion on Trotskyism, or Max Shachtman for an objective balance sheet of "official Communism". This is the problem with your arguments. They are as biased as you accuse others of being -- the difference being they are slanted in the opposite direction, toward apology for the actions of the Bolsheviks instead of criticism thereof.

When it comes to the liquidation of the factory-shop committees as independent bodies, it was a liquidation and in much the same way as with the Hungarian Workers' Councils after 1956. The Bolshevik members in the trade unions and committees were under discipline to vote for the "voluntary subordination". You know as well as I do that centralist discipline was exercised and enforced in that decision, and the fact that workers attempted to ignore the imposition of one-person management after 1918 shows that the subordination of the committees to the unions was far from "voluntary" ... as far as the workers were concerned, anyway.

You are aware that the Germans came within touching distance of Petrograd after capturing vast swathes of territory in a matter of months? The reason that Lenin was so eager to conclude peace with the Germans was that the new Soviet state was almost defenceless

This question could be a thread all by itself, because so much can be said about the abject failure of Bolshevik military policy in the first year of the revolution.

Yes, German soldiers were able to advance close to Piter in the time between October 1917 and the signing of Brest-Litovsk, but much of this was because of the fear of the Bolshevik leadership. To put it in an appropriate American context, Lenin became McClellan. That is, he overestimated his opponents manpower and capabilities, and acted based on those assumptions, not the concrete intelligence he had in his hand. As a result, his fears became self-fulfilling prophecies. McClellan did the same with Johnston's (and then Lee's) rebel army during the Peninsula and Seven Days Campaigns in 1862. And certainly the Germans, like the southern rebels, picked up on this and played it to the hilt.

In many areas of the "great German advance" in the winter and early spring of 1918, the German forces were no stronger than squad or company strength. Even in places where local workers' militia outnumbered the advancing Germans 10:1 or 20:1, the Military Revolutionary Committee issued retreat orders. As a result, the Germans literally walked into village after village without firing a shot.

And, no, the Soviet republic was not "virtually defenseless" -- at least, not due to a lack of armed personnel willing to defend the Soviets. German probing was able to turn into miles of advances because the Bolsheviks at the head of the MRC were taking their orders from the CPC, and the Bolsheviks at the head of the CPC did not trust their own members on the ground providing them information,

Moreover, after the 1917 revolution, much of the Bolshevik agitation in the trenches either did not change to reflect the new situation (e.g., "You have something to fight for now, comrades!") or simply stopped altogether. Even many of those who supported the revolution in the trenches fell into inactivity due to a lack of political direction from Piter.

I understand that the Bolsheviks were attempting to fulfill the equivalent of a campaign promise, but, I'll say it, it was a stupid move. They should have known what would happen when they limited their agitation to "the war is over". If there was one thing that the old officer corps did correctly warn them about, it was that demobilization could not be organized within their time frame, and that the result would be soldiers simply walking away by the millions -- that "demobilization" would take the form of a disorganized, disorderly crowd moving east through the snows of the Russian winter.

Source, I know that's not in Rabinowitch. The reality of course is that the Red Army retained a sizeable percentage proletarian elements (can't recall the exact figure that Lincoln's Red Victory gives, may be from 30-60%) which formed its core. With one or two exceptions, the elite formations in the Red Army were those drawn from the cities. Its worth pointing out (again!) that these losses were similarly Bolshevik losses - those workers on the front line were almost invariably those who were the most motivated, politically educated, and Bolshevik-inclined

Among others, Trotsky's How the Revolution Armed describes the use of existing militia as "first wave" troops by certain "red commanders" in early Civil War battles, even though they had trained Red Army regiments. There was a clear lack of respect among some of these "red commanders" for the workers' militia (a holdover from their tsarist training), and they demonstrated that lack of respect by using them in situations where higher-than-acceptable casualties might be expected.

You prove my point when you write that "those workers on the front line were almost invariably those who were the most motivated, politically educated, and Bolshevik-inclined". If there was any group that needed to be protected from certain death, these workers were it! Especially after the first units of the Red Army were shipped out to the fronts, these units of workers' militia should have been withdrawn and demobilized, with the workers reintegrated into the factories and shops they came from to carry out the work of improving and expanding workers' control of production.

No, comrade, I do not see a value to sending these workers to their death, as much as they may have wanted to go themselves. If there was ever a time to enforce a little discipline, it would have been to tell these workers, "You are needed in your factories and shops to build up a new mode of production."

But that would have required a Bolshevik political leadership that saw the inter-relationship between the development of productive forces and the social relations within them, not just one side of it.

Which is not to deny the validity of the point that the Civil War decimated the Russian proletariat (albeit losses in combat is of far less importance than the famine that stalked the cities) but its ridiculous to ascribe these to deliberate Bolshevik strategy or to suggest that the Civil War should not have been fought. I can disagree with plenty of the decisions made by the Bolsheviks but it would be blinkered in the extreme to ignore the circumstances in which they were made or to discern some sinister and shadowy conspiracy lying behind them

And once again, a baseless angular argument. I never said it was "deliberate Bolshevik strategy" any more than I suggested the Civil War should not have been fought. You are welcome to your own opinions on what I said, but you are not entitled to your own facts. And that goes for this entire discussion. I pointed out a number of times, in my original post and here, that I thought the Bolsheviks were initially squeezed between two irreconcilable class forces. Ultimately, they had to give way in one direction or the other. Unfortunately, they gave way in the direction against the historic interests of the proletariat. It was no more deliberate than it was conscious. Nevertheless, it did happen.

One can certainly argue that material circumstances played a major role in the decisions made by the Bolsheviks. And one would be correct to do so. However, objective circumstances alone do not account for many of the decisions made; there is a subjective factor that has to be included.

The Bolsheviks had historically shown a willingness to compromise on the class question. Lenin, adopting the neo-Weberianism that Kautsky had integrated into the "Marxist" wing of pre-WW1 social democracy, came to reject the Marxian communist view about social being determining consciousness, putting in its place the idealist concept of "de-classing". That idealism, combined with a mechanical view on the role of productive forces (i.e., seeing it one-sidedly as the path to "socialism"), allowed for the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to accept the introduction of whole sections of the old tsarist bureaucracy and state apparatus into the Soviet system, without understanding in advance the effect that would have.

None of this takes away from the October 1917 revolution, or the leading role the Bolsheviks played in it. However, it does provide ample lessons for those of us who want to organize a workers' revolution where we are today. For the most part, those lessons are negative; they are lessons in what not to do in the course of building a proletarian party fighting for a proletarian revolution.

I am not interested in attempting to justify decisions made by the Bolsheviks that were patently wrong and unprincipled -- that went against communist principles. That is nothing more than an exercise in political dishonesty. We must be willing to submit such attempts at proletarian revolution to the most withering of criticism, for our own sake and for the sake of our class. If not, we're disarming our class and arming our enemies.

That is, ultimately, your failure in this argument. You want to hide behind "bad circumstances", as if that justifies all of the mistakes, missteps and, yes, betrayals made by the Bolsheviks in power. You fail to see how each of the decisions made by the Bolsheviks affected others, and how it was not any one decision that led to the betrayal and defeat of the workers' republic, but a series of actions that established a dynamic that carried the Soviet system from being the high-water-mark of the revolutionary workers' movement to its lowest ebb.

... and left you desperately paddling in the mud with nothing but a series of baseless angular arguments to propel you.

Lyev

15th February 2010, 17:14

ComradeOm

16th February 2010, 14:27

This is a baseless angular argument. I did not say that the Bolshevik Party as a whole was "a party of intellectuals". What I did say is that they were "predominantly petty-bourgeois in its cadres". That is, among its theoreticians, writers and propagandists, the petty bourgeoisie dominated -- certainly politically, and in some places (though not all, and perhaps not even most) numerically. Men like Kamenev, Sverdlov and Nogin may have been sons of workers, but most of the leadership wasn't. They were the children of either peasants (rural petty bourgeoisie) and/or part of the intelligentsia (urban petty bourgeoisie) I have shown in that post (and a more through one here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalinism-right-wing-t114369/index.html?p=1520153&highlight=kamenev#post1520153)) that the highest level of the Bolshevik party was simply not "predominantly petty-bourgeois". In that second link I show that of the nine full CC members elected (always worth stressing that) in April 1917 only Lenin can be said to have hailed from a traditionally petit-bourgeois background. The remainder, excepting Fedorov who remains an unknown to me, either hailed from proletarian or peasant backgrounds. The latter can not be simply dismissed as "rural petty bourgeoisie"... not without entirely recasting Russia's class composition at least. I'd even hesitate to attach this tag to Trotsky's small farmer background.

The predominance of peasant backgrounds is of course entirely understandable given the young nature of Russia's industrial base. Its also worth noting, again, that this is at the very highest level of the party. Go down the ranks - into the "cadres" and regional/city leadership - and the class character of the Bolshevik organisations was overwhelmingly proletarian

And for that matter, even most of those sons of workers did not join the working class; they entered into the emigre intelligentsia, and took on the consciousness of their social being.To which I will simply point out that the vast bulk of the Bolshevik activists (including a number of its top leadership) did not simply decamp and join Lenin in exile. This is particularly true of its 'cadre' members

Now if you can demonstrate that any of the above is false then I'll reconsider. Otherwise I'd ask you to admit that the Bolshevik party was not "predominantly petty-bourgeois" at any level. Either that or you've devised your own definition of petit-bourgeois

I take Brinton's work for what it is: a political exposition. I know it is not a complete work, but it does contain important facts that cannot be dismissed simply because the presenter of those facts has a political opinion. If you did that, you would have to dismiss virtually all writers on the subject, in spite of the fact that even some of the worst of them (Schapiro, Medvedev, etc.) presented facts that were indisputableThere is an interesting discussion here that is probably beyond the scope of this topic. In short, there are degrees of political bias that informs every work of history. Brinton's work is a particularly egregious example of extreme bias - it was written by a libertarian socialist for a libertarian socialist organisation in opposition to Soviet (or 'Leninist') orthodoxy. There is almost no chance that a work written under such conditions could be in anyway even-handed towards the Bolsheviks or resist casting them as the villains. As such is it a highly compromised piece of work and really should not be used when there are far more complete (read: recent) and balanced accounts out there

In that linked thread I already pointed out one glaring distortion introduced by Brinton's political bias (if it was a simple error then it raises even more questions) in which a "fact" was deliberately misinterpreted to score points against the Bolsheviks. It is ridiculous to hold this political pamphlet up as a work of serious history

I did not imply any kind of "rivalry" between the Bolsheviks and the factory-shop committeesMy mistake then. This is a constant thread that runs through Brinton's work (and derivatives) that I just abhor. The idea that there was substantial friction between the Bolsheviks and FCs is bullshit

But for me this is not the point here. We can sit here and act like little more than an historical society or re-enactors' club, or we can attempt to draw lessons from historical experience and learn what not to do. I choose to do the latter; it seems you'd rather waste your time doing the formerI am, like all Marxists I suppose, conscious in the extreme of the lessons provided to us by history and how this is relevant to current/strategy. Which is why I am so insistent that the lessons drawn from part events (particularly Russia) are the correct ones. Today the Russian Revolution is the defining point of reference for almost the entire leftist spectrum and yet it remains one of the most poorly misunderstood (or deliberately mythologised) events of the 20th C. If the last century has taught us anything its that the wrong lessons of Russia can be used to justify any programme, no matter how petty or anti-worker. Clearing up this historical mess is an important step towards getting our house in order

So I entirely reject your either/or proposition. Bad history informs (or excuses) bad practice. How the hell can you hope to evaluate the Bolsheviks as an organisation, or the general revolutionary mass movement, if you don't know what you're talking about?

But there was a leadership that continued to carry out policies. Neither the Central Committee nor its Bureau were paralyzed by these divisions, and were thus able to commit the party to specific actionsAnd this "leadership" was entirely united and of one mind? I suppose it takes a special sort to view an organisation's ability to overcome internal differences and "commit... to specific actions" as a disadvantage. This was certainly not the view of contemporaries

As for Red Petrograd, what I have been able to read of it tells me that Smith is not as much of a one-sided apologist for the Bolsheviks as you present him ... and as you are yourselfAnd when did I pretend that he was? I would not have recommended a work if it was a political hack job :glare:

The same applies to my attitudes towards the Bolsheviks. I can disagree with many of their actions while defending them from the ridiculous profiles/charges so often levelled at them. The latter are actually just as common from the Stalinist right as the ultra-left. But then I'd like to think that its much easier to understand history without delving into a sectarian taking of sides

Take a look at the reading list in my sig. Tell me how many of those authors are "one-sided apologists for the Bolsheviks"

Actually, Rabinowitch points out that when many of the district Soviets told the CPC or commissariats that the transfer of people from their area would cause a collapse in their administration over local services, the orders were simply repeated until they were fulfilled. That sounds like "pulled" to meYou've either misunderstood Rabinowitch or make an artificial distinction. There was a general shortage of talent post-October but it was the district soviets that benefited from both the collapse of Tsarist authority and the mass exodus from the Bolshevik cadres. The "Soviet work" that the latter moved into, despite the constant drain from the top, was often into the local soviets. Unfortunately we know much less about this lower level activity

Yeah, much like the Workers' Councils in Hungary "voluntarily subordinated" themselves to Kadar's government after the collapse of the 1956 RevolutionReally, I expected better. Baseless does not begin to describe this pathetic comparison

How about you actually deal with the point I raised? Or perhaps the FCs voting to merge with the trade union movement (with no external pressure) does not fit with your preferred narrative. If, by some chance, you are actually interested in the debate between FCs and unions post-October (essentially a debate about the role of organised labour in a revolutionary society) then try Red Petrograd

When it comes to the liquidation of the factory-shop committees as independent bodies, it was a liquidation and in much the same way as with the Hungarian Workers' Councils after 1956. The Bolshevik members in the trade unions and committees were under discipline to vote for the "voluntary subordination".Well at least we get some flesh to this argument. Unfortunately there are two points that seriously undermine it

1) The FC movement voted to merge with the union movement (not "liquidation"). This is fact. Whether or not the majority of the movement was comprised of Bolsheviks does not and should not detract from this. It does however raise the important point that by October 1917 the FCs were a Bolshevik stronghold. They voted for Bolshevik measures and elected Bolsheviks to their own bodies. Yet we are led to believe that the Bolsheviks set out to destroy this movement almost immediately after the transfer of power to the Soviet?

2) Regarding "centralist discipline", you should know from reading Rabinowitch (particularly the Bolsheviks Come to Power) just how much of a myth this is. Within the Bolshevik organisation the various fractions and organisations had considerable autonomy and input into CC decisions. The same was true of Bolshevik representation in labour organisations - Smith notes a couple of significant examples of Bolshevik unions (the woodturners spring to mind) resisting initiatives from the centre. Again, we come up against the fact that the Bolshevik party was not one in which orders from on high were followed blindly. Smith has more on this in relation to the labour organisations

You know as well as I do that centralist discipline was exercised and enforced in that decision, and the fact that workers attempted to ignore the imposition of one-person management after 1918 shows that the subordination of the committees to the unions was far from "voluntary" ... as far as the workers were concerned, anywayI've dealt with the "centralist discipline" above but there are again problems here. In the first place your comparison is baseless - "one-person management" is not the same as merging with the unions (as such the comparison is entirely flawed). Secondly, the fact that directives from the centre (and Lenin no less) could simply be ignored in practice indicates that the power of the central government or party was much, much weaker than has often been supposed

The latter point is actually pretty important. Most who have written about the Revolution, including Brinton, have done so from the vantage point of the centre. Essentially they have been more concerned with what Lenin said than the reality on the ground. This is natural given the balance of available materials but inevitably leads to a distorted view. It is much more important (and this is why I am a particular fan of Rabinowitch, Smith, Keep, etc) to study the social base - ie, what was actually happening on the ground. And this is the whole thrust of my approach to the Revolution

Oh, yes. Moshe Lewin is such an objective source for information!I'm sorry, am I wrong? Is this a figment of Lewin's imagination? Or did he sneakily twist facts to represent his political position? I honestly don't know but I expect you to enlighten me

And BTW - pot, kettle, black

Yes, German soldiers were able to advance close to Piter in the time between October 1917 and the signing of Brest-Litovsk, but much of this was because of the fear of the Bolshevik leadershipAn exceedingly harsh judgement and one that I feel is largely without merit. As you point out, the tremendous German advance was made with relatively little effort (compare to the millions of men used by the Nazis to capture less land) but it did so not in the face of Bolshevik cowardice but the complete disintegration of the forces at their disposal. The Tsarist Army was simply no more and the scattered militias, almost entirely confined to urban areas, were entirely incapable of holding back any determined German assault. Nor should they have been expected to meet such a challenge

If I am fairly convinced that Lenin's assessment was correct then the alternative (I don't even rate Trotsky's international showboating as a real option) proposed by the party's left - nothing short of a revolutionary war that would eventually thrust deep into Europe - was nothing short of fantasy. The Soviet state simply didn't have the resources to wage war on Germany

That's my reading at least. I'd be very interested in any sources that suggest otherwise

If there was one thing that the old officer corps did correctly warn them about, it was that demobilization could not be organized within their time frame, and that the result would be soldiers simply walking away by the millions -- that "demobilization" would take the form of a disorganized, disorderly crowd moving east through the snows of the Russian winterThe problem being of course that this was a process that had begun long before October and would have been extremely difficult to halt. The problem was not lack of direction so much as lack of influence amongst the peasant soldiers. It is very unrealistic to expect the latter to stick it out on the front line when the 'black repatriation' was taking place at home. The Bolsheviks, IMO, should have prevented the latter (or at least got their peasant politics badly wrong) but again had very little influence or room for manoeuvre

You prove my point when you write that "those workers on the front line were almost invariably those who were the most motivated, politically educated, and Bolshevik-inclined". If there was any group that needed to be protected from certain death, these workers were it! Especially after the first units of the Red Army were shipped out to the fronts, these units of workers' militia should have been withdrawn and demobilized, with the workers reintegrated into the factories and shops they came from to carry out the work of improving and expanding workers' control of productionI agree entirely. What I do not believe is that these formations were needlessly sent to their deaths. As I say, the Red Army retained a strong proletarian core and the loss of these units would have seriously undermined the war effort

Probably not as significant a factor in the liquidation of the proletariat as the next point though

No, comrade, I do not see a value to sending these workers to their death, as much as they may have wanted to go themselves. If there was ever a time to enforce a little discipline, it would have been to tell these workers, "You are needed in your factories and shops to build up a new mode of production."What factories? Russia was in the throes of advanced economic disintegration at the point when power was transferred to the Soviets. The cities were emptying (IIRC Petrograd's population fell by roughly 75%) and factories were closing at an alarming rate. Ironically the outbreak of peace was a major blow to the countless employed in the war industry. It is extremely difficult to speak of any sort of national economy during the Civil War years. Any decision made by the government during this period cannot be divorced from this grim reality. But then its easy to criticise from an armchair

That is, ultimately, your failure in this argument. You want to hide behind "bad circumstances", as if that justifies all of the mistakes, missteps and, yes, betrayals made by the Bolsheviks in power. You fail to see how each of the decisions made by the Bolsheviks affected others, and how it was not any one decision that led to the betrayal and defeat of the workers' republic, but a series of actions that established a dynamic that carried the Soviet system from being the high-water-mark of the revolutionary workers' movement to its lowest ebb.I suggest you point out where I suggested otherwise. Where do I put forward a "one decision" that changed everything?

In contrast your mistake is to assume that these were decisions for the Bolsheviks alone or that the party can be considered separately from the revolutionary movement that gave rise to it. You'll note that I have made few, if any, references to theories or personalities above. This is not because I consider the Bolsheviks to be entirely at the whim of events but because I consider these factors to be of much less importance than the social revolution itself. The "dynamic" was not that of the Bolsheviks to set, although it would obviously be stupid to disregard their input, but the product of a complex series of interactions, be they political, social, or economic. Call it a view of the base rather than the summit. This is in contrast to the idealistic belief that all you need is the right theory or structure to 'organise a revolution'

Finally, it goes without saying that none of this is an excuse for bad history. If you believe that the Bolshevik party in 1917 was anything but a mass revolutionary organisation with strong democratic structures then you have learnt the wrong lessons. If you believe that the Bolshevik party was this but still “betrayed” the working class then you have to explain why/how

And would we all agree that direct workers control dissolved at around the 1919/1920 period? Or was it intact (at least in part) till Stalins later, mid 1930 reforms?Workers self-management (different from "control") was always a non-starter. The Russian economy was never transformed by a great wave of workers occupying factories and taking production entirely into their own hands. This did happen in some cases but its scope was limited, to particularly around the Urals IIRC, and it was never complete. The majority of factories taken into worker ownership (in Petrograd at least) were due to worker fears about capitalist sabotage rather than syndicalist ambitions. In most of the country it wasn't until the nationalisation wave of 1918 that the management were actually kicked out

I'm not sure of a timeline of worker supervisions. It, along with the factory committees, did continue on in some forum until the late twenties. Probably far to say though that it was with decreasing influence and certainly nowhere near the dreams of syndicalists in 1917

Talking of lessons to learned from the 1917 upheaval period, what would you folks say to Stalin and Bukharin* entering a coalition (or at least backing (?) I can't remember the detailed facts) with the Kerensky government, before the actual October upheaval and the relevance it is today? As in trying to work with capitalists? And what were their motives for such a seemingly reactionary move?It was the wrong move but, as Miles has pointed out above, the Bolsheviks were still in the process of pulling away from the Second International mentality. It was not until Lenin's arrival (one of two decisive actions during that summer) that the party leadership came to view the soviets as not just temporary bodies but the basis of a possible socialist society

Also what would people have to say about war communism and Lenin's authoritarian streak (perhaps as in a Luxemburg-ist, left-communist critique of his methods), and any other feasible alternatives in the hostile environment?War Communism is interesting but it will probably never be clear whether it was an ideological or necessary choice. Probably a combination of both. I'd be interested in seeing where it led but then it did run into the great barrier of peasant resistance

By and large I'd agree with Lenin's criticisms of the ultra-left during this period but I would stress that they can be easily exaggerated and that Lenin's own position was pragmatic in the extreme. Many would say the latter was overly so. To be honest, I'm less interested in what Lenin said than what he did, and his treatment of the KAPD in illuminating

Martin Blank

16th February 2010, 21:31

I have shown in that post (and a more through one here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalinism-right-wing-t114369/index.html?p=1520153&highlight=kamenev#post1520153)) that the highest level of the Bolshevik party was simply not "predominantly petty-bourgeois". In that second link I show that of the nine full CC members elected (always worth stressing that) in April 1917 only Lenin can be said to have hailed from a traditionally petit-bourgeois background. The remainder, excepting Fedorov who remains an unknown to me, either hailed from proletarian or peasant backgrounds. The latter can not be simply dismissed as "rural petty bourgeoisie"... not without entirely recasting Russia's class composition at least. I'd even hesitate to attach this tag to Trotsky's small farmer background.

That's the problem. You want to minimize, dismiss or ignore the fact that these elements were petty bourgeois. To do so would be to concede the point I made, that the Bolshevik Party was predominantly petty-bourgeois in its leadership, and that consciousness affected its program and activity, both before and after October 1917. Even Trotsky called his own class background petty bourgeois.

This hesitation on your part to accept that the peasantry is petty bourgeois reflects a fundamental departure from communist theory and principle. Most of those called peasants are independent producers and/or peddlers of their own produced commodities. In Russia, these peasants were the ones able to send their children to school to learn how to read and write, not the poorest "peasants", who were in fact the equivalent of sharecroppers or tenant farmers. And the social being of that existence is fundamentally different from that of a proletarian.

The predominance of peasant backgrounds is of course entirely understandable given the young nature of Russia's industrial base. Its also worth noting, again, that this is at the very highest level of the party. Go down the ranks - into the "cadres" and regional/city leadership - and the class character of the Bolshevik organisations was overwhelmingly proletarian

It is true that the farther down from the leadership you go, the more proletarian the party was. I never said otherwise. But numerical superiority does not translate automatically into political superiority. If it did, we'd all be living in workers' republics today. The non-proletarian leadership of the Bolshevik Party did have an effect on its program and practice, in spite of the fact that most of those carrying out the actions on the ground were workers (or former peasants who joined the working class in the cities).

To which I will simply point out that the vast bulk of the Bolshevik activists (including a number of its top leadership) did not simply decamp and join Lenin in exile. This is particularly true of its 'cadre' members

But those "cadre" members also were not the ones setting the conditions or parameters of their work. That was the exiled leadership that met in the Congresses and wrote their newspapers. Those who remained in Russia could do little more than carry out their decisions as much as they could.

Now if you can demonstrate that any of the above is false then I'll reconsider. Otherwise I'd ask you to admit that the Bolshevik party was not "predominantly petty-bourgeois" at any level. Either that or you've devised your own definition of petit-bourgeois

I haven't "devised my own definition", I've chosen to use Marx's definition. I know that's not fashionable among "Marxist-Leninists" these days, but since I'm not a "Marxist-Leninist", I figure that's fine.

There is an interesting discussion here that is probably beyond the scope of this topic. In short, there are degrees of political bias that informs every work of history. Brinton's work is a particularly egregious example of extreme bias - it was written by a libertarian socialist for a libertarian socialist organisation in opposition to Soviet (or 'Leninist') orthodoxy. There is almost no chance that a work written under such conditions could be in anyway even-handed towards the Bolsheviks or resist casting them as the villains. As such is it a highly compromised piece of work and really should not be used when there are far more complete (read: recent) and balanced accounts out there

I disagree. Rather than turning away from the information Brinton has provided, his work should be taken for what it is, and placed in that context -- as with numerous other "Sovietologists" and writers on the subject (including pro-Soviet writers). Even your much-vaunted Smith takes that approach, quoting favorably comments by Brinton that criticize Lenin's view of the transition from capitalism to communism, and not simply "disappearing" his critique from the discussion.

In that linked thread I already pointed out one glaring distortion introduced by Brinton's political bias (if it was a simple error then it raises even more questions) in which a "fact" was deliberately misinterpreted to score points against the Bolsheviks. It is ridiculous to hold this political pamphlet up as a work of serious history

Here is where we get into a more fundamental difference between us. I do not create a hierarchy of historical work, where "academic" writings are naturally assumed to be higher than "political pamphlets". The "academics" have their biases, as do the "politicians", and both need to be put in the balance. It is naive, at best, to believe that "academics" are more "serious" in their writings than "political" authors like Brinton. On the contrary, I've found that the "academic" writings of "Sovietologist" historians are often more littered with inaccuracies and "political bias" than the pamphleteers. The most recent "biography" of Leon Trotsky, written by the "academic" Robert Service, is a more extreme example of what I'm talking about, but also serves to prove my point.

This belief that the "academic" works are inherently more "serious" or trustworthy stems directly from the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie itself, which seeks to "specialize" society and make it dependent on professional "experts" in all areas, instead of promoting the development of knowledgeable, critically-thinking and self-acting people who can provide a "serious" explanation of this or that field without possessing a university degree.

I am, like all Marxists I suppose, conscious in the extreme of the lessons provided to us by history and how this is relevant to current/strategy. Which is why I am so insistent that the lessons drawn from part events (particularly Russia) are the correct ones. Today the Russian Revolution is the defining point of reference for almost the entire leftist spectrum and yet it remains one of the most poorly misunderstood (or deliberately mythologised) events of the 20th C. If the last century has taught us anything its that the wrong lessons of Russia can be used to justify any programme, no matter how petty or anti-worker. Clearing up this historical mess is an important step towards getting our house in order

So I entirely reject your either/or proposition. Bad history informs (or excuses) bad practice. How the hell can you hope to evaluate the Bolsheviks as an organisation, or the general revolutionary mass movement, if you don't know what you're talking about?

You deliberately misrepresent what I am saying to make your point. My "either/or proposition", as you put it, requires that "bad history" on all sides be placed in its proper context. Sometimes you can learn more from "bad history", in the sense that you can understand how a confluence of actions came together to remove uncomfortable facts from the argument. It's a matter of looking behind and beyond the words -- of looking at the dynamics that motivated the author(s) and their viewpoint. This, in my opinion, is part of the process of sorting through what is misunderstood and what is mythologized, without engaging in any of it ourselves. To put it another way, how can you know what you're talking about if you prejudicially dismiss in advance as "bad history" ancillary information and facts that are relevant to your field of study?

And this "leadership" was entirely united and of one mind? I suppose it takes a special sort to view an organisation's ability to overcome internal differences and "commit... to specific actions" as a disadvantage. This was certainly not the view of contemporaries

I did not say it was a "disadvantage" that the Bolshevik leadership was able to make decisions. I was pointing out that, in spite of the divisions that did exist, they were able to make decisions, and those decisions had an effect on what happened. You really need to learn to not use angular arguments. They make you sound like an ass and distract from your actual point.

And when did I pretend that he was? I would not have recommended a work if it was a political hack job :glare:

The same applies to my attitudes towards the Bolsheviks. I can disagree with many of their actions while defending them from the ridiculous profiles/charges so often levelled at them. The latter are actually just as common from the Stalinist right as the ultra-left. But then I'd like to think that its much easier to understand history without delving into a sectarian taking of sides

The problem I see in your method is exposed here. You begin from the standpoint of wanting to "defend" the Bolsheviks from "ridiculous profiles/charges". That's a poor patch of ground to stand on, not because such a task is itself ignoble, but because that is the very essence of what you call "bad history". By definition, you are "taking sides" in the dispute, and cannot step back far enough and long enough to take in a more objective view.

What you may not realize is that I began from the same standpoint as you. When I began my own research into the question, it was for the same reasons and on the same patch of ground. But I realized that if I wanted to get a better understanding, I had to let go of the idea of "defending" the Bolsheviks. More to the point, I had to shift who I was "defending", from the Bolsheviks to the working class. It was when I made that shift things changed. From that point on, the central question was no longer, "Were the Bolsheviks or their critics right about X or Y?" It was, "Were the Bolsheviks acting as the instrument of the working class when they did X or Y?"

In my opinion, this is the basis on which our analysis -- and criticisms -- should be made. The Bolsheviks claimed to be a workers' party, to be acting as the political representative of the most politically active and advanced layers of the proletariat, to be creating a working people's republic as the transition to a classless communist society. They should be weighed on those criteria, or else all pretense of them being such should be dismissed in advance and they should be considered little more than a radical petty-bourgeois democratic party calling itself "socialist" or "communist".

Class matters here -- more than anywhere else, especially since the party called itself and led a revolution that described itself as proletarian.

Take a look at the reading list in my sig. Tell me how many of those authors are "one-sided apologists for the Bolsheviks"

I can tell that your view on the Russian Revolution is influenced much more than by the works of that handful of professional historians. If there is anything telling about your list, it is that those real influences are omitted.

You've either misunderstood Rabinowitch or make an artificial distinction. There was a general shortage of talent post-October but it was the district soviets that benefited from both the collapse of Tsarist authority and the mass exodus from the Bolshevik cadres. The "Soviet work" that the latter moved into, despite the constant drain from the top, was often into the local soviets. Unfortunately we know much less about this lower level activity

How exactly do you see the district Soviets (by which I mean the subdivision below the city), and more importantly the workers in those Soviets, "benefiting" from having to rely on former tsarist functionaries to continue administering local services because the workers who could have done the tasks were drawn up into the higher echelons of the Soviet government?

How about you actually deal with the point I raised? Or perhaps the FCs voting to merge with the trade union movement (with no external pressure) does not fit with your preferred narrative. If, by some chance, you are actually interested in the debate between FCs and unions post-October (essentially a debate about the role of organised labour in a revolutionary society) then try Red Petrograd

You might see the Hungary analogy as a false argument, but I do not. Both reflected the consolidation of petty-bourgeois management over the working class -- and, in fact, the experience of 1918-19 served as a justification and, in a sense, model for 1956-57. To say there was no "external pressure" is to turn a blind eye to reality. More on this below.

Well at least we get some flesh to this argument. Unfortunately there are two points that seriously undermine it

1) The FC movement voted to merge with the union movement (not "liquidation"). This is fact. Whether or not the majority of the movement was comprised of Bolsheviks does not and should not detract from this. It does however raise the important point that by October 1917 the FCs were a Bolshevik stronghold. They voted for Bolshevik measures and elected Bolsheviks to their own bodies. Yet we are led to believe that the Bolsheviks set out to destroy this movement almost immediately after the transfer of power to the Soviet?

Here we get angular argument combined with formalism. Yes, there was a formal vote to "merge" the factory-shop committees with the trade unions. What is not said is that there was a concentrated internal campaign by the Bolsheviks among workers who participated in the committees and among the workforce in general. In many respects, it reminded me of how the bosses are able to get a union to decertify within a relatively short period of time after it is established.

The Bolsheviks knew there had been a relatively high level of turnover in the workplaces that continued to function after the revolution, with most of the workers who fought for control of the workplaces having either moved into position in the Soviet government or on to the front lines in the Civil War. The workers who replaced them were either ex-soldiers or dispossessed peasants coming in from the countryside. These workers did not have the same level of consciousness about the factory-shop committees that their predecessors did; most of them only understood the role of the Soviets and the Bolsheviks in the revolution. Thus, for what it's worth, they were more inclined to accept the Bolsheviks' position than to fight for the committees' independence.

One can say a lot of things about this. One can be like Brinton and see in this a dirty little trick played on workers who had little connection to how the revolution unfolded in the cities. Or, one can be like you and see this from a formalistic perspective, alibiing the Bolsheviks' actions and attempting to pass off the factory-shop committees of 1918-19 as being the same as those of 1917 (much like some anarchists attempt to pass off the Kronstadt of 1921 as being the same as 1917). I take a position in the middle, and admittedly shaped by my own experiences: The Bolsheviks took advantage of the turnover to advance their own views on "workers' control", which were, in fact, anathema to real workers' control.

It wasn't so much a conscious screw job as it was a coincidental move at an advantageous time.

2) Regarding "centralist discipline", you should know from reading Rabinowitch (particularly the Bolsheviks Come to Power) just how much of a myth this is. Within the Bolshevik organisation the various fractions and organisations had considerable autonomy and input into CC decisions. The same was true of Bolshevik representation in labour organisations - Smith notes a couple of significant examples of Bolshevik unions (the woodturners spring to mind) resisting initiatives from the centre. Again, we come up against the fact that the Bolshevik party was not one in which orders from on high were followed blindly. Smith has more on this in relation to the labour organisations

But the Bolsheviks of 1917 were not the same as the Bolsheviks of 1918-19, which you would have to admit if you were more careful in your reading of Rabinowitch, Smith and others. Or do you not think that the shifting of personnel out of the workplaces and into the Soviet government (and ranks of the Red Army), and their subsequent replacement by ex-soldiers and peasants who were more accepting of party decisions, had an effect on the effectiveness of the implementation of those decisions? This is the problem I see with many of your arguments. You consistently compartmentalize each issue and analyze it in a vacuum. You are not willing to step back and see how each of these points are part of a broader dynamic that was created in the months following the October Revolution.

I've dealt with the "centralist discipline" above but there are again problems here. In the first place your comparison is baseless - "one-person management" is not the same as merging with the unions (as such the comparison is entirely flawed). Secondly, the fact that directives from the centre (and Lenin no less) could simply be ignored in practice indicates that the power of the central government or party was much, much weaker than has often been supposed

You are right that the liquidation of the factory-shop committees into the trade union structure was not the same as the imposition of one-person management. It was my mistake to conflate the two in the course of this debate. That said, the "merger" of the committees with the trade union structure -- a structure that was modeled on the bureaucratic unions of Europe (primarily Germany) and North America -- meant that they were no longer under the control of workers themselves, but rather controlled by the union officials (i.e., the Bolsheviks). That subordination made one-person management possible, because it removed the one "check and balance" workers could have had over the management of their workplace.

The latter point is actually pretty important. Most who have written about the Revolution, including Brinton, have done so from the vantage point of the centre. Essentially they have been more concerned with what Lenin said than the reality on the ground. This is natural given the balance of available materials but inevitably leads to a distorted view. It is much more important (and this is why I am a particular fan of Rabinowitch, Smith, Keep, etc) to study the social base - ie, what was actually happening on the ground. And this is the whole thrust of my approach to the Revolution

But here is also where your argument falls apart. Unlike the Soviet government, which often found itself ineffectual or even non-existent outside of its immediate periphery, the trade unions were, in fact, quite effective and present. In many respects, this is why the Bolsheviks so prioritized gaining leadership and control of the trade unions (including those previously controlled by the SRs and anarchists); the unions offered the Bolsheviks a "natural" path to reaching those workers that the Soviet government could not. Now, I'm not saying this was an incorrect approach; on the contrary, it was the right thing to do. But when the Bolsheviks moved to change what "workers' control" meant on the ground, they used the trade unions as an ersatz arm of the Soviet government.

I'm sorry, am I wrong? Is this a figment of Lewin's imagination? Or did he sneakily twist facts to represent his political position? I honestly don't know but I expect you to enlighten me

The problem with Lewin is not so much in the facts he presents as the "truth" he attempts to divine from them. Lewin presents the "triad" of union-state-party control as some kind of evidence that "workers' control" existed as late as the 1930s, in spite of the fact that the unions, the state and the party were all controlled by ... the petty bourgeoisie. Lewin's mistake -- and it is a mistake that many made then, and continue to make today -- is the idea that when the petty bourgeoisie is in control, they cannot act on their own behalf as a class. This allows Lewin (and Trotsky, and Stalin, and Lenin!) to pass off the Soviet government as "socialist" or a "workers' state" or a "proletarian dictatorship", when in fact the only class "dictating" was the petty bourgeoisie ... and most of them were only a few years before functioning "at the pleasure of His Highness, the Tsar of All Russias". So, yes, there is some fact-twisting going on here; I don't ascribe "sneakiness" to it, but there is deception in the air about it.

An exceedingly harsh judgement and one that I feel is largely without merit. As you point out, the tremendous German advance was made with relatively little effort (compare to the millions of men used by the Nazis to capture less land) but it did so not in the face of Bolshevik cowardice but the complete disintegration of the forces at their disposal. The Tsarist Army was simply no more and the scattered militias, almost entirely confined to urban areas, were entirely incapable of holding back any determined German assault. Nor should they have been expected to meet such a challenge

In many cases, especially in the approaches to Piter, the squad and company-sized units could have easily been repulsed by battalion and regiment-sized militia from the outlying areas that were close by and could have been mobilized for a counter-offensive with a single telegraph message. But the CPC was fearful that these German units were merely advance elements of whole divisions (not the case), so in many cases the superior-numbered forces of the workers' militias were withdrawn back. The remnants of the tsarist army were not needed to check the German advance in many areas, and the Germans would have had to stop their advances in other locations if they had wanted to reinforce against holding actions by the militias (actions that could have been carried out with minimal loss of life, if any at all, and preserved thousands of square miles of territory).

If I am fairly convinced that Lenin's assessment was correct then the alternative (I don't even rate Trotsky's international showboating as a real option) proposed by the party's left - nothing short of a revolutionary war that would eventually thrust deep into Europe - was nothing short of fantasy. The Soviet state simply didn't have the resources to wage war on Germany

I'm not an advocate of the "revolutionary war" position of the "Lefts". However, there was more merit to the military policy behind the "neither war nor peace" position of Trotsky than he is given credit for. The weakness of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1918 allowed for the calculated use of the existing workers' militia from concentrated defensive positions. They may have lost swathes of territory in the Ukraine, but they also could have prevented the loss of Rostov, Orel and other key locations.

That's my reading at least. I'd be very interested in any sources that suggest otherwise

Ludendorff's writings on the Eastern Front in 1918 are illuminating in that they talk of exactly how weak the German Army had become after the General Staff had stripped it for the Spring Offensive along the Western Front. There are several books on the 1918 Intervention that talk about the disposition of forces prior to the insertion of British and American soldiers, including the capability of the Soviet forces prior to and after Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky's How the Revolution Armed also provides insight on the morale and development of both the militias and Red Army in 1918 -- how the easy German advances (and panicked Soviet withdrawals) demoralized the workers; how each step back made any kind of counter-offensive more difficult.

The problem being of course that this was a process that had begun long before October and would have been extremely difficult to halt. The problem was not lack of direction so much as lack of influence amongst the peasant soldiers. It is very unrealistic to expect the latter to stick it out on the front line when the 'black repatriation' was taking place at home. The Bolsheviks, IMO, should have prevented the latter (or at least got their peasant politics badly wrong) but again had very little influence or room for manoeuvre

Actually, the Bolsheviks had more influence among the soldiers than they realized. Most soldiers held to their posts following the revolution, as evidenced by both the fact that the months immediately following the seizure of power were marked by victory after victory of the Soviet forces, and that, even after the Germans began their advance on February 17, it was not until after the March 2 decree dissolving the old army that the Germans make significant gains -- meaning, in both cases, that the Russian soldiers kept Germany in check.

That decree was what turned a possible short war of defense into a long Civil War. The dissolution of the old army, even after the Red Army had been organized and established, meant the loss of millions of workers and peasants under arms. The post-March 2 rout from the Ukraine handed over the bulk of Russian arms to the Germans, gave the Czechs confidence to stage their mutiny and allowed for the loss of the Ukraine to Skoropadsky.

I agree entirely. What I do not believe is that these formations were needlessly sent to their deaths. As I say, the Red Army retained a strong proletarian core and the loss of these units would have seriously undermined the war effort

As I said above, calculated defensive actions could have maintained the integrity and morale of the workers' militia, while at the same time building up experienced military commanders. This could have rendered the need for "military specialists" in these areas moot, meaning that these new "red commanders" would not have been allowed to exercise their prejudices against the militias, which led to unnecessary deaths.

Admittedly, I am playing with "what ifs" a lot in this discussion. If the Bolsheviks had listened to their intelligence gatherers, if they had not dissolved the units of the old army but rather integrated them directly into the new Red Army, and if the CPC had approved the military policy of "neither war nor peace" while continuing to negotiate the Treaty with Germany, the sacrifice of these workers would have been even more unnecessary than it was. Units of the new Red Army could have easily overwhelmed the advancing German forces, kept the Czechs in ... check, and maintained the integrity of the November 22 (December 5), 1917, armistice line.

What factories? Russia was in the throes of advanced economic disintegration at the point when power was transferred to the Soviets. The cities were emptying (IIRC Petrograd's population fell by roughly 75%) and factories were closing at an alarming rate. Ironically the outbreak of peace was a major blow to the countless employed in the war industry. It is extremely difficult to speak of any sort of national economy during the Civil War years. Any decision made by the government during this period cannot be divorced from this grim reality. But then its easy to criticise from an armchair

It is also easy to cheerlead from an armchair. Thankfully, I do neither.

While industrial output did drop dramatically, especially after the revolution, the factories themselves did not simply disappear. That the factories fell into disuse and disrepair is due in no small part to the fact that workers were being taken out of them by the Soviets. It was not just munitions plants that closed, but also factories that could have been easily converted to deal with the immediate needs of the workers in the cities. Textile plants that made uniforms, canning facilities that made rations for soldiers and vehicle production plants could have been converted to use for the Soviet republic. Moreover, many of the munitions and arms production factories were so basically (crudely) designed that conversion to peacetime needs would have been relatively simple. "Conversion" -- what we call the "peace dividend" these days -- would not have been a difficulty ... if they had kept the skilled workers in Piter and not shipped them off to the front.

This, again, is a failure of the Bolsheviks, but this failure goes back to before the revolution. While the Bolsheviks talked about the need for workers to take control of the factories, they did nothing to actually prepare workers for that task. Rather, they adopted the European social-democratic mantra about trade unions being "schools of communism", and ignored the need for a wider education of workers in the basic administrative and coordinating skills needed to exercise workers' control (regardless of whether this was through factory-shop committees or the trade unions). Between February and October, there was plenty of time to consider this question and others related to how a workers' republic would have to function. But little, if any, was done in this regard.

One can argue that the Bolsheviks had their hands plenty full with other tasks, but I cannot imagine that, even in such a time, they could not have found a few comrades who could have developed at least a small educational pamphlet or handbook on the basics of workers' control -- especially given how often that slogan was raised, and Lenin's own flirtation with the "all power to the factory-shop committees" slogan -- to be circulated among workers throughout Piter and the rest of Russia.

I suggest you point out where I suggested otherwise. Where do I put forward a "one decision" that changed everything?

You don't suggest anything at all, but you also don't present yourself as someone who sees these points as interconnected, as influencing each other and part of a motion in a given direction. It's that compartmentalizing that suggests the belief in a singular event -- a "one decision" -- that "changed everything". If I'm wrong, then that provides an excellent opportunity for you to tell all of us your analysis of the USSR experience.

In contrast your mistake is to assume that these were decisions for the Bolsheviks alone or that the party can be considered separately from the revolutionary movement that gave rise to it. You'll note that I have made few, if any, references to theories or personalities above. This is not because I consider the Bolsheviks to be entirely at the whim of events but because I consider these factors to be of much less importance than the social revolution itself. The "dynamic" was not that of the Bolsheviks to set, although it would obviously be stupid to disregard their input, but the product of a complex series of interactions, be they political, social, or economic. Call it a view of the base rather than the summit. This is in contrast to the idealistic belief that all you need is the right theory or structure to 'organise a revolution'

First, the "right theory or structure" alone does not organize a revolution. But it does help with it, by giving direction and teaching lessons.

Second, it is neither the "base" nor the "summit" I concentrate on, but the mountain as a whole. Neither independently gives an adequate picture of what it is we seek to understand, though each can provide significant details when placed into their context. A raging rapids or waterfall on the summit may be little more than a babbling brook at the base, or vice versa. But if we compartmentalize it, concentrating only on the superficial snapshots from a given moment in time, and fail to put them in their proper contexts, we are left with a false understanding of what is in front of us.

A social revolution by the proletariat is a conscious act. It seeks to make a conscious rupture with all previously existing social relationships, in order to make a transition away from those old ways of relating to each other. This means that ideas matter, but only insofar as they are given material form. It is not idealism to study the effect that the decisions made by the Bolsheviks had on the development of the Soviet republic. Why? The Bolsheviks had state power. They had not only control of the Soviets, but also of the all the various organizations and forces that had the ability to shape Russian society, including the allegiance of large sections of the working class and poor peasantry. And while there were contradictions between "base" and "summit" on a number of occasions, it was the application of the decisions of those on the "summit" that did win out, and not the other way around (unfortunately, in many cases).

The objectivist approach you're taking limits your ability to be objective. You get lost among the contradictions and, in the end, take the sides most comfortable to your own ideas. The inconvenient facts, the relationship between objective and subjective, the interconnection between events and developments, the movement of history through time -- these are "off-camera" in your analysis, as you admit above. But the problem is that without a balanced application of all of these points, you inevitably do yourself a disservice. It is clear that you want to seriously study this question; if that is so, then study all of it as a system.

Finally, it goes without saying that none of this is an excuse for bad history. If you believe that the Bolshevik party in 1917 was anything but a mass revolutionary organisation with strong democratic structures then you have learnt the wrong lessons. If you believe that the Bolshevik party was this but still “betrayed” the working class then you have to explain why/how

I believe it was that in 1917, but became something else through a combination of objective and subjective development -- changes at the "base" and "summit", to use your terms. And I have explained why/how, here and in other writings. And I will continue to do so.

On a final note, let me say that, even though we have our disagreements here, I appreciate your arguments and am glad you're doing this. I can only hope you feel the same way.

Martin Blank

16th February 2010, 21:59

So it seems the post-revolutionary, Bolshevik-led movement did not have an awful of room for maneuvering, bargaining or compromise; after the revolution, followed military intervention by fourteen foreign powers in aid of the Whites. There was the Civil War which, as mentioned, lead to the death of some 9 million people. There was also the famine of 1921-22, and the threat of Germany looming over Russia from that 1917-18 period. It seems that, given the circumstances, there wasn't much else Lenin at el. could do.

I would disagree that "there wasn't much else" that Lenin, et al., could have done. What I would agree with is that, the more the Bolsheviks implemented the decisions they did, the farther they backed themselves into a corner, and by 1920 they were more or less in a position where they had little or no options.

And would we all agree that direct workers control dissolved at around the 1919/1920 period? Or was it intact (at least in part) till Stalins later, mid 1930 reforms?

Any meaningful attempts at workers' control were gone by 1920. The subordination of the factory-shop committees to the trade unions, the imposition of "labor discipline" and one-person (top-down, state-run) management removed workers from any avenue of control over production. It would be another decade or so before workers were removed from the bodies that (nominally) controlled the state, through the end of wage equalization and the separation of the Soviet government from the Soviets themselves.

Talking of lessons to learned from the 1917 upheaval period, what would you folks say to Stalin and Kamenev entering a coalition (or at least backing (?) I can't remember the detailed facts) with the Kerensky government, before the actual October upheaval and the relevance it is today? As in trying to work with capitalists? And what were their motives for such a seemingly reactionary move?

It was "orthodoxy" being placed over reality. The "orthodox" view was that the democratic revolution would be led by the bourgeoisie. Several Congresses of the RSDLP even codified their approach to a revolutionary-democratic provisional government coming to power. So, since February was considered to be a democratic revolution, some of the leading elements of the Bolsheviks thought it logical to support the Provisional Government, and, as ComradeOm, pointed out, saw the Soviets as a temporary phenomenon. Ironically, seeing the Soviets as anything more than temporary, and especially seeing them as a basis for a democratic dictatorship of the working class, was often labeled "Trotskyism" (even though Trotsky himself never actually said anything specific on the subject when this epithet was being thrown around).

In short, the material reality outstripped the "orthodox" positions the pre-1917 Bolsheviks had both adopted and perceived as the course of the Russian Revolution, and some Bolshevik leaders did not recognize that fact.

Also what would people have to say about war communism and Lenin's authoritarian streak (perhaps as in a Luxemburg-ist, left-communist critique of his methods), and any other feasible alternatives in the hostile environment?

"War Communism" is one of those examples of how successive mistakes put the Bolsheviks in a corner. The loss of the Ukraine, a result of the implementation of a foolish military policy, led to the loss of millions of acres of farmland, causing numerous food shortages and accelerating the desertion of the cities for the countryside. It would have been wholly unnecessary if other actions by the Bolsheviks had not led to disastrous conclusions. And without "War Communism", the NEP ("New Exploitation of the Proletariat") would not have been the "necessary" next step.

ComradeOm

20th February 2010, 12:24

That's the problem. You want to minimize, dismiss or ignore the fact that these elements were petty bourgeois. To do so would be to concede the point I made, that the Bolshevik Party was predominantly petty-bourgeois in its leadership, and that consciousness affected its program and activity, both before and after October 1917. Even Trotsky called his own class background petty bourgeois

This hesitation on your part to accept that the peasantry is petty bourgeois reflects a fundamental departure from communist theory and principle. Most of those called peasants are independent producers and/or peddlers of their own produced commodities. In Russia, these peasants were the ones able to send their children to school to learn how to read and write, not the poorest "peasants", who were in fact the equivalent of sharecroppers or tenant farmers. And the social being of that existence is fundamentally different from that of a proletarian There are two problems with this:

1) Your characterisation of the Russian peasantry is simply incorrect. According to Davies et al (The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union) no more than 40% of peasant produce was sold on the market. This figure, actually one of the higher ones that I have seen, should make clear that the vast majority of the Russian peasant agriculture was concerned with feeding the peasants themselves and not the production/sale of commodities. This subsistence farming was one of the hallmarks of the Russian peasantry*. What was not a notable feature of the latter is sharecropping or tenant farming – the substantial majority of Russian peasants were part of a commune which, regardless of technicalities, was the effective owner of the land. So I cannot classify the peasantry as anything but a distinct class

(Ironically here you are approaching the Bolshevik analysis of strata within the peasantry, an analysis that I have never agreed with and that the Bolsheviks themselves were forced to back away from during the Civil War)

2) The definition of peasants as simply a "rural petit-bourgeoisie", or other subset of the petit-bourgeoisie, is really very, very simplistic. It is certainly not derived from Marx – whose writings continually refer to the peasantry and distinguish between them and the small farmers – and I know of no commentator of similar stature, be they contemporary or modern, that would draw the same conclusions as yourself. To be clear – you are arguing that over 80% of the Russian population in 1917 was petit-bourgeois! That's stretching a term to the point of meaningless

Now you are perfectly within your rights to formulate your own definition of just what comprises the petit-bourgeoisie. I'm not going to argue that with you on that. What I would ask however is that you make it perfectly clear when you are using a definition of your own creation in conversation. For example, "the Bolshevik leadership was overwhelmingly of petit-bourgeois background… but I am including the peasantry in my definition of petit-bourgeois". Otherwise you'll just cause confusion, particularly so given that very few would accept your own idiosyncratic view of what comprises the petit-bourgeois

Just a side note on Trotsky, its perfectly acceptable for himself to claim a petit-bourgeois background given that his family were prosperous small farmers and not peasants. In the previous links provided I attempted to distinguish between small farmers, craftsmen, etc, and peasants where possible. I strongly suspect, but can only confirm in a few cases (such as Kamenev IIRC), that most of these sons of peasants had migrated to the cities as either the children of migrant workers or first generation workers or themselves. Certainly very few would have come into contact with Bolshevik ideas in the villages or been privileged enough to attend university

*Incidentally this is one of the reasons for the catastrophic collapse in agricultural production following the seizure and division of the large estates by the peasantry

But those "cadre" members also were not the ones setting the conditions or parameters of their work. That was the exiled leadership that met in the Congresses and wrote their newspapers. Those who remained in Russia could do little more than carry out their decisions as much as they could.Nope. The Bolshevik party was not a homogenous organisation in which instructions were simply passed down to the activists from on high. Rather it was a collection of relatively isolated bodies that organised on a region/city basis – a series of interlocking groups such as the Petersburg Committee, Moscow Committee, All-Russian Bureau, etc, etc – each of which jealously maintained its own independence and privileges. It was these bodies (not all of which even acknowledged the Menshevik-Bolshevik split!) that were responsible for the day to day activities and policies of the party, ie providing practical leadership, while those notables in foreign exile concerned itself with abstract 'high policy' and internecine squabbles

This divide did not disappear entirely in 1917 but while the CC retained very limited influence amongst the regional organisations, the latter were in a position to strongly influence the party leadership. Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks Come to Power notes the important role that the Petersburg Committee, probably the most influential of the regional organisations, played in forming CC policy. Rabinowitch also notes the relative independence of the various party fractions, each of which had the right to vote and reject a CC motion.

So to relegate the role of the party activists to merely "carrying out the decisions" of those exiled abroad is to both do them a gross disservice and to mischaracterise the nature of the Bolshevik party. It was far more responsive to pressures 'from below' than you give it credit for

I disagree. Rather than turning away from the information Brinton has provided, his work should be taken for what it is, and placed in that context -- as with numerous other "Sovietologists" and writers on the subject (including pro-Soviet writers). Even your much-vaunted Smith takes that approach, quoting favorably comments by Brinton that criticize Lenin's view of the transition from capitalism to communism, and not simply "disappearing" his critique from the discussion.Brinton is/was perfectly entitled to his views and its perfectly acceptable to contrast these with those of Lenin. This work's primary value (and I'm not for a minute pretending that it is completely devoid of useful research) is in providing the typical libertarian socialist critique of the Bolsheviks. That is different from accepting The Bolsheviks and Workers Control as a proper work of history

Here is where we get into a more fundamental difference between us. I do not create a hierarchy of historical work, where "academic" writings are naturally assumed to be higher than "political pamphlets". The "academics" have their biases, as do the "politicians", and both need to be put in the balance. It is naive, at best, to believe that "academics" are more "serious" in their writings than "political" authors like Brinton. On the contrary, I've found that the "academic" writings of "Sovietologist" historians are often more littered with inaccuracies and "political bias" than the pamphleteers. The most recent "biography" of Leon Trotsky, written by the "academic" Robert Service, is a more extreme example of what I'm talking about, but also serves to prove my point.

This belief that the "academic" works are inherently more "serious" or trustworthy stems directly from the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie itself, which seeks to "specialize" society and make it dependent on professional "experts" in all areas, instead of promoting the development of knowledgeable, critically-thinking and self-acting people who can provide a "serious" explanation of this or that field without possessing a university degreeLike I said, this is a much larger topic. I will limit myself to noting that I shun all accounts that have open political biases. It’s the reason that I don't consider Trotsky's works to be more than a primary source. Finding works that do not have such overt distortions - and there is a world of difference between background bias, be it liberal, academic, etc, and the political activitism of Brinton and others – is a lot easier with specialist academic works. That said, you are perfectly correct to point out the likes of Service or 'cold warriors' such as Pipes. I would not recommend the latter to anyone either

To put it another way, how can you know what you're talking about if you prejudicially dismiss in advance as "bad history" ancillary information and facts that are relevant to your field of study?I don't dismiss, I evaluate. My personal judgement is that Brinton's work is 'bad history' that misinterprets (both accidentally through lack of information and deliberately through political bias) events. I do not dismiss works/theories without reading them* first or solely on the basis of their author's politics. To give an example, I give a quick favourable review to both Paul Avrich's, and much less so to Orlando Figes, in the bibliography in my sig. Neither is sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, to say the least

If I had read Brinton's work and not noted any issues/inaccuracies then I would have commended him for overcoming his political background (probably an impossible task given the circumstances in which the pamphlet was written) and producing a good history. As I've done with Avrich in the past. Unfortunately I can't do that and as a result of errors observed – in the linked thread with Devrim I noted a particularly bad misinterpretation that I can only assume was deliberate – I have absolutely no confidence in the work and would not recommend it to anyone as anything but a political hack job

As a final note here, I am just as quick to come down on those who insist that the model of the Bolsheviks as a small unified and tightly-knit group of professional revolutionaries is something worth emulating. It was to dispel that particular myth that I wrote the essay in my sig. This perception of the professional 'vanguard party' is a perfect example of how bad history can have serious and dreadful consequences

*Or another from the same author. Having wasted time on one Pipes book I don't really feel the need to pick up another

The problem I see in your method is exposed here. You begin from the standpoint of wanting to "defend" the Bolsheviks from "ridiculous profiles/charges". That's a poor patch of ground to stand on, not because such a task is itself ignoble, but because that is the very essence of what you call "bad history". By definition, you are "taking sides" in the dispute, and cannot step back far enough and long enough to take in a more objective viewIf you look through the history forum over the past few years I'm sure you'll find many threads in which I have "defended" countless parties against bad history. Some notable examples that spring to mind would include Stalin, Hitler, feudalism, the KPD, and many others. Each of which I have also criticised strongly (the first two in particular) on a number of occasions. My interest in these situations is not to uncritically support but to attempt to dispel inaccurate charges. Again, if something is to be criticised (or lessons learnt) then it must be from the basis of sound history. That is my bugbear

Now I am of course open to charges of favouritism towards the Bolsheviks because they are different from the above in that I, largely though my readings of their history, do hold them in high regard. I have to be honest about that and it is something that I do worry about on occasion. On the other hand, I've never claimed to be a professional historian and I would like to think that I am far from uncritical about their actions and policies. With regards the latter, I have criticised the Bolsheviks a number of times in this thread and in fact largely, if not entirely, agree with you in stressing the malignant influence of the Second International on their thinking

Where I differ is in not assuming that the Bolsheviks pursued an actively anti-working class line or were somehow capitalist conspirators/infiltrators (the latter a particularly common charge from anarchists). Everything I have read indicates that the Bolsheviks and the Russian proletariat only drew closer throughout 1917, which is really the point I was making previously in reference to the FCs, but then this may be getting even further off topic

I can tell that your view on the Russian Revolution is influenced much more than by the works of that handful of professional historians. If there is anything telling about your list, it is that those real influences are omitted.Accusations of dishonesty. Well, they had to crop up sooner or later

Tell you what though, why don't you look through this thread and count the number of times I've referenced Lenin or Trotsky. For that matter have a look through my posting history on these forums and count the number of times I've taken to quoting from these, or Marx, to support my arguments. You won't find too many given that I generally refuse to use MIA or official Soviet works as historical sources. So if I am secretly a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist who reads the Collected Works every night before bed I'd like to think that I'm a pretty covert one

(For the record, I'm currently reading The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record by Sukhanov… a man not noted for his warm attitudes towards the Bolsheviks. Even then I treat this as it is – a primary source and not a work of history)

How exactly do you see the district Soviets (by which I mean the subdivision below the city), and more importantly the workers in those Soviets, "benefiting" from having to rely on former tsarist functionaries to continue administering local services because the workers who could have done the tasks were drawn up into the higher echelons of the Soviet government?Again, I address the point that these capable workers were not simply sucked into some sort of limbo where they were suspended in meaningless bureaucratic stasis*. Where do you think they were going to? The most capable workers were needed to build some semblance of a national state apparatus, exporting revolution to the countryside, and fighting the Civil War. I don’t see how any of these actions were not crucial to the survival of Soviet power

As for the "former tsarist functionaries", didn't you agree in an above post as to their beneficial effects on the economic situation? Their inclusion was hardly ideal but such expertise was necessary to both staving off complete economic collapse and actually running the country. No one less possessed the required skills, as pretty much all contemporaries were agreed on. The problems occurred when the structures overseeing these specialists were weakened and compromised, for a variety of reasons

*One interesting observation in The Bolsheviks in Power was the degree to which the bureaucratic explosion post-October was driven by the regions as much as the centre. How many layers of government were there in Petrograd alone? Probably five or six when you include the various regional bodies. The soviets themselves rapidly sprouted sections and sub-sections. This growth of bureaucracy, which did unquestionably occupy too much time/effort, was less a product of Moscow's policies than the natural period of adjustment as various bodies were formed or stepped in to fill the power vacuum

Here we get angular argument combined with formalism. Yes, there was a formal vote to "merge" the factory-shop committees with the trade unions. What is not said is that there was a concentrated internal campaign by the Bolsheviks among workers who participated in the committees and among the workforce in general. In many respects, it reminded me of how the bosses are able to get a union to decertify within a relatively short period of time after it is establishedLeaving aside another false and unnecessary analogy, what part of the above passage troubles you? Let's recall that the Bolsheviks in the FCs were not party functionaries or 'entryists' but included the leading lights of the FC movement. If they had influence amongst their comrades it was the result of being the most revolutionary and the most militant sections of the workforce. The truth that you are attempting to avoid here is that no "concentrated internal campaign" was needed to convince the FCs to follow the Bolshevik line – the entire movement was already a Bolshevik stronghold

You can call this formalism if you want, I'd call it democracy. Had the anarcho-syndicalists or Mensheviks been in a majority amongst the FCs then perhaps things would have been different. But they weren't.

(Which is not to say that there were not disagreements amongst the Bolshevik FCs or between the latter and the party centre but I've dealt with this in an above post)

One can say a lot of things about this. One can be like Brinton and see in this a dirty little trick played on workers who had little connection to how the revolution unfolded in the citiesShow me a smoking gun and I'll accept this view. Really. Otherwise I see no reason not to dismiss it as conspiratorial. For example, Brinton charges (IIRC) that Lenin's rather radical 'Draft Decree on Workers Control' was really just a façade to gain FC support for the transfer of power – ignoring that the Bolsheviks already possessed this and that Lenin's proposals were actually to the left of those of the ARCFC (All-Russian Committee of Factory Committees, IIRC)!

The Bolsheviks took advantage of the turnover to advance their own views on "workers' control", which were, in fact, anathema to real workers' controlAgain, I point out that the leading FC organisations were, by October 1917, generally Bolshevik strongholds and not nearly as syndicalist as often made out. We have to talk here not about 'workers control' as an abstract concept (the Bolsheviks were never syndicalist) or a modern theory but what the Russian workers at the time understood it to mean. I think its safe to say that definitions as to this were fairly confused but I don't see any great evidence to suggest that the Bolsheviks were significantly to the right of the masses on this issue

My own opinion is that Lenin did support worker control (again without being syndicalist) in the context of a socialist state around October. I simply see no reason (again, no smoking gun) to question his motives on this issue. What is pretty clear is that he had moved to the right during the winter of 1917-1918. Not entirely sure if I agree with that move, although I can understand the circumstances, but it was ignored on the ground anyway

But the Bolsheviks of 1917 were not the same as the Bolsheviks of 1918-19, which you would have to admit if you were more careful in your reading of Rabinowitch, Smith and othersThis is a very true point and one that I am extremely conscious of. It is probably the biggest question, possibly the biggest lesson, of the period. Having accepted, as I do, that the Bolsheviks in 1917 were a mass democratic organisation with strong proletarian roots, then how did this movement degenerate into a despotic one-party state?

That's a question I still can't answer satisfactorily. I suspect it has a great deal to do with the dissolution of the Russian proletariat, due to the 1918 economic collapse, but that's too broad an answer for my liking. The 'militarisation' of the party during the Civil War years, as you suggest, is often given as a factor but I'm unsure as to the weight to give it. Nor was The Bolsheviks in Power particularly satisfying in that regard. Unfortunately there are few modern works available that study the evolution of the Bolshevik party (or indeed the Soviet state) during these crucial later years. At least excluding those suspect ones from the likes of Ulam or Pipes (or indeed Brinton). Any recommendations?

So I draw the lessons that I can from the Russian Revolution but I've never pretended that I know them all or that there's nothing left for me to learn

Almost forgot, with regards the FCs the point about the changing nature of the Bolshevik organisation is pretty irrelevant. The vote to join the unions was taken at a point where the character of the party was certainly not conductive to a centrally directed and enforced campaign of tactical voting. The FCs voted themselves into the unions at a time when the influence of the Bolshevik CC was still very limited and indeed when the Bolshevik party was in an advanced state of decay. If anything new FC members would have been even less likely to be members of the party

This is the problem I see with many of your arguments. You consistently compartmentalize each issue and analyze it in a vacuum. You are not willing to step back and see how each of these points are part of a broader dynamic that was created in the months following the October Revolution.This is a product of the medium in which we are having this discussion. Point by point (or quote by quote) rebuttals are never conductive to discussions that deal with complex matters with significant interplay of factors

If I'm further unwilling to get pulled into a general discussion of the overarching dynamic its because I do want to focus on those specific areas in which I, to be blunt, think that your version of events is simply incorrect. That and I'm just lazy. These posts take time to write and my workload is not particularly light ATM

If you are interested in a discussion on broader issues then I'd suggest a thread in the history forum where we can start again without all this clutter

You are right that the liquidation of the factory-shop committees into the trade union structure was not the same as the imposition of one-person management. It was my mistake to conflate the two in the course of this debate. That said, the "merger" of the committees with the trade union structure -- a structure that was modeled on the bureaucratic unions of Europe (primarily Germany) and North America -- meant that they were no longer under the control of workers themselves, but rather controlled by the union officials (i.e., the Bolsheviks). That subordination made one-person management possible, because it removed the one "check and balance" workers could have had over the management of their workplace.

But here is also where your argument falls apart. Unlike the Soviet government, which often found itself ineffectual or even non-existent outside of its immediate periphery, the trade unions were, in fact, quite effective and present. In many respects, this is why the Bolsheviks so prioritized gaining leadership and control of the trade unions (including those previously controlled by the SRs and anarchists); the unions offered the Bolsheviks a "natural" path to reaching those workers that the Soviet government could not. Now, I'm not saying this was an incorrect approach; on the contrary, it was the right thing to do. But when the Bolsheviks moved to change what "workers' control" meant on the ground, they used the trade unions as an ersatz arm of the Soviet government.A few notes on the unions then.

In the first place, the comparison with trade unions in the West is common but not, I feel, particularly accurate. The Russian trade union movement, having been outlawed prior to 1917, was a pretty revolutionary one that had not stagnated like those in other countries. IIRC some unions (particularly the Bolshevik metallurgy union) were calling for calling for the abolition of the Provisional Government in mid-summer 1917. They were also organised along industry lines, as opposed to craft unions, were immensely popular (with at least 2 million members by October, Keep), and pretty effective in representing the workers. So I'm very hesitant to write them off like so many, not necessarily yourself, do. If they were arguably less democratic than the FCs then it was more due to the sheer size of these organisations than anything else

Despite this the absorption of the FCs was not simply a one way street. They did not cease to exist or function. Yes, they were integrated into the union apparatus but still retained some degree of autonomy and, indeed, effectively replaced the union representation in the factories.

You are, perhaps ironically, correct on one point though – the Bolsheviks did prioritise the unions but the converse is that the party leadership never really concerned themselves with the FCs. They simply didn't pay much attention to the latter. IIRC the minutes of the Bolshevik CC during the summer of 1917 refer to the FC movement no more than half a dozen times. Far from being some threat that had to be crushed, the FCs were just not an issue. That they largely ended up controlling these bodies anyway is more due to the militancy of the workers who sat on them

Its also worth noting that there was a very serious debate amongst contemporary revolutionaries that is often overlooked in the argument about the "liquidation" of the FCs. Namely, how can FCs and unions (which have significant duplication of tasks) coexist in a socialist society? This in turn was related to the discussion as to the relations of both with a socialist state. This was the context of the vote to join the unions. I'm not for a minute suggesting that we have this discussion now but it does lend a more nuanced shade to the proceedings of 1917 than the idea of the Bolsheviks sweeping in and "liquidating" FCs

The problem with Lewin is not so much in the facts he presents as the "truth" he attempts to divine from them. Lewin presents the "triad" of union-state-party control as some kind of evidence that "workers' control" existed as late as the 1930s, in spite of the fact that the unions, the state and the party were all controlled by ... the petty bourgeoisie. Lewin's mistake -- and it is a mistake that many made then, and continue to make today -- is the idea that when the petty bourgeoisie is in control, they cannot act on their own behalf as a class. This allows Lewin (and Trotsky, and Stalin, and Lenin!) to pass off the Soviet government as "socialist" or a "workers' state" or a "proletarian dictatorship", when in fact the only class "dictating" was the petty bourgeoisie ... and most of them were only a few years before functioning "at the pleasure of His Highness, the Tsar of All Russias". So, yes, there is some fact-twisting going on here; I don't ascribe "sneakiness" to it, but there is deception in the air about it.Fair enough. I knew that Lewin was on the left of the spectrum (didn't he live in Russia during the 30s or 40s) but I had attached no obvious bias to him beyond that. Cheers for the heads up

Admittedly, I am playing with "what ifs" a lot in this discussion. If the Bolsheviks had listened to their intelligence gatherers, if they had not dissolved the units of the old army but rather integrated them directly into the new Red Army, and if the CPC had approved the military policy of "neither war nor peace" while continuing to negotiate the Treaty with Germany, the sacrifice of these workers would have been even more unnecessary than it was. Units of the new Red Army could have easily overwhelmed the advancing German forces, kept the Czechs in ... check, and maintained the integrity of the November 22 (December 5), 1917, armistice line.That's my problem. It assumes that everything goes swimmingly and that the CPC had access to perfect information. Your point is taken but then hindsight (including the access to the diaries of the German High command!) always makes everything so obvious

While industrial output did drop dramatically, especially after the revolution, the factories themselves did not simply disappear. That the factories fell into disuse and disrepair is due in no small part to the fact that workers were being taken out of them by the SovietsNow this I cannot agree with

The workforce of Russia's cities was not simply conscripted into the Red Army or soviets and significant unemployment blighted urban areas throughout 1918. Keep (whom I happen to have on hand) records an official figure, probably an underestimate, of over 300K unemployed from Jan-Apr 1918 and notes that 10% of the Moscow workforce was unemployed in April of that year. This is in addition to the countless who had begun to flee the cities during the winter of 1917-1918 – the population of Petrograd alone dropped from 2.5 to 1.5 million by spring 1918 with a 'mere' 300K fleeing Moscow in the same period. So the factories remained standing but the struggle to keep them open and producing (in the face of urban famine and a worthless currency) was a lost one

This, again, is a failure of the Bolsheviks, but this failure goes back to before the revolution. While the Bolsheviks talked about the need for workers to take control of the factories, they did nothing to actually prepare workers for that task. Rather, they adopted the European social-democratic mantra about trade unions being "schools of communism", and ignored the need for a wider education of workers in the basic administrative and coordinating skills needed to exercise workers' control (regardless of whether this was through factory-shop committees or the trade unions). Between February and October, there was plenty of time to consider this question and others related to how a workers' republic would have to function. But little, if any, was done in this regardHow could skills that take years to acquire be imparted in months? And who would teach these – the specialists whose jobs were about to be abolished? All this during a period when the Bolsheviks were themselves either a tiny, if growing, sect or an illegal party? What do you really expect them to have done during these months? Be realistic here – it is not a matter of simply producing a pamphlet explaining how to become an engineer (never mind the operation of specific factory lines!) or an accountant

I'd also note that Lenin was not entirely blind to this problem but simply took what some would judge to be the wrong course of action – putting his faith in the creative forces of the masses and implicitly assuming that everything would work out post-revolution

You don't suggest anything at all, but you also don't present yourself as someone who sees these points as interconnected, as influencing each other and part of a motion in a given direction. It's that compartmentalizing that suggests the belief in a singular event -- a "one decision" -- that "changed everything". If I'm wrong, then that provides an excellent opportunity for you to tell all of us your analysis of the USSR experienceYou have my opinion on a catalogue of events and factors above. It should be fairly clear that I do not subscribe to the "singular event" theory but rather stress the relations between classes and organisations. So I believe that I do the exact opposite of what you suggest. My reading of the Revolution is almost entirely one of "interconnected points" – between classes, organisations, events, policies – that comprise a social revolution. It is exactly this that leads me to relegate the Bolsheviks (or, more accurately, the various Bolshevik personalities, organisations, policies, etc) to merely one factor, albeit a hugely important one, in this revolutionary stew

A social revolution by the proletariat is a conscious act. It seeks to make a conscious rupture with all previously existing social relationships, in order to make a transition away from those old ways of relating to each other. This means that ideas matter, but only insofar as they are given material form. It is not idealism to study the effect that the decisions made by the Bolsheviks had on the development of the Soviet republic. Why? The Bolsheviks had state power. They had not only control of the Soviets, but also of the all the various organizations and forces that had the ability to shape Russian society, including the allegiance of large sections of the working class and poor peasantry. And while there were contradictions between "base" and "summit" on a number of occasions, it was the application of the decisions of those on the "summit" that did win out, and not the other way around (unfortunately, in many cases)Ah but my emphasis is on the processes that went into the formation of these policies. The directives themselves are there on MIA (and I have read more than a few of them over the years) but what is incomparably more important, in my opinion, is the process of their creation and their eventual impact. You cannot take a Bolshevik policy and simply study its impact – to do so leads to the Brinton school of criticism – but also must consider the organisation that developed it, the pressures that led to it, and the reality of its implementation. This is my interest and it develops from a simple understanding of history – the Bolsheviks were no abstract entity passing policies entirely according their ideology but were themselves historical actors subject to pressures of the time and influence from below. Obviously the whole process is something of a closed feedback loop (conditions lead to policy which leads to new conditions which leads to new policy) but it’s the process that interests me.

There were interventions from the top (Lenin's role is often grossly overstated but remains decisive) but in a social revolution its the 'base' that is the driving force. The Bolshevik CC, the same goes for any party/organisation during the period, was subject to pressures both from its lower levels and the streets themselves. I've already noted, a number of times, the Bolshevik composition of the leading labour organisations but this was not a one-way street and attitudes/ideas did pass back up through the organisation. In a way I almost, if not quite, reject the idea of studying the Bolsheviks outside of the wider revolutionary movement

And this idea of the Bolsheviks as subject to historical pressures is, I'm sad to say, probably what is the 'freshest' about my conception of the Revolution. Personally I think its obvious but you'd be amazed at the number of people that seriously contend that the Bolsheviks had some near-divine mission, passed down from Lenin, or were really capitalist agents infiltrating the workers movement. That is the sort of history that I defend the Bolsheviks from – I don't see them are inherently right or inherently wrong but fundamentally human. That's probably the most important single lesson that I would take from the whole affair

On a final note, let me say that, even though we have our disagreements here, I appreciate your arguments and am glad you're doing this. I can only hope you feel the same way.I know my tone can get somewhat polemical at times but it has been good to just sit back and indulge in my interest in the Revolution with a healthy debate. Its conversations like these that really put personal theories to the test, deepen understanding my understanding of events, and force me to look at things in a new light

None of which excuses the propagation of bad history though ;)

Martin Blank

21st February 2010, 02:22

It's probably going to be Tuesday before I can get to this. But, trust me, I will get back to this.

RED DAVE

21st February 2010, 02:56

During a speech Prachanda gave at the New School back in 2008, he suggested that had Lenin lived a few more years, he would have advocated a more multi-party system in the Soviet Union.This might well be true. But it is highly unlikely that this multi-party system would have included alien class forces such as the Russian bourgeoisie.

Now, this might have been a way to help justify participating in the Nepali elections and potentially a multi-party governmentThat's exactly what it was. Consider that a so-called Marxist party assumed the prime ministership in a government based on bourgeois social relations and then, surprise, surprise, got betrayed by other members of the government.

(though considering more recent developments, I don't think this is the case), but it does give some indication that it might just be more than Bhattarai suggesting multi-party socialism as well.What it is is Bhattarai laying the ground work for class collaboration and state capitalism (and, eventually, private capitalism).

RED DAVE

RED DAVE

21st February 2010, 03:37

Capitalism is a progress over feudalism.Thanks for being honest. Says it all for you Maoists. I wonder what Lenin would have said about this when he arrived at the Finland Station.

RED DAVE

RED DAVE

21st February 2010, 03:54

Thanks for being honest. Says it all for you Maoists. I wonder what Lenin would have said about this when he arrived at the Finland Station.
Do you deny that capitalism is progressive over feudalism?I deny that this issue in the 21st Century is capitalism vs. feudalism. This isn't 1789.

If this issue was capitalism vs. feudalism, please explain to me why Lenin didn't advocate replacing feudalism with capitalism and denounced those Bolsheviks, including Stalin, who were supporting the bourgeois Kerensky regime.

Maoist standard practice is what Lenin specifically denounced in the name of Marxism.

RED DAVE

RED DAVE

21st February 2010, 05:26

please explain to me why Lenin didn't advocate replacing feudalism with capitalism
Because Nepal is not Russia and Lenin is no longer with us and so we cannot know what he would have or would not have have done today.Well, Nepal is surely not Russia, but it is, like Russia in 1917, an underdeveloped country, with a mass of peasantry and a tiny working class. In that circumstance, Lenin did not call for the establishment of a capitalist regime because capitalism was progressive over feudalism. He knew that that capitalists were incapable of carrying out the bourgeois revolution and, therefore, he called for the working class the carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.

This is in direct contrast to what the Maoists call for, from China in the 1940s till now. To say that we can't know what Lenin would have done is to abandon the Marxist method.

and denounced those Bolsheviks, including Stalin, who were supporting the bourgeois Kerensky regime.
When did Stalin support the bourgeois Kerensky regime?I can't find a source, but I believe that until Lenin returned to Russia, the Bolsheviks, with Stalin leading under Lenin's absence, were in de facto support of the Kerensky regime, instead of calling for the overthrow of that regime.

In the 3rd and 4th of the April Theses, Lenin wrote:

3) No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.

4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.
As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.A little different from what Maoists call for.

RED DAVE

Wolf Larson

21st February 2010, 05:34

Because Nepal is not Russia and Lenin is no longer with us and so we cannot know what he would have or would not have have done today.

When did Stalin support the bourgeois Kerensky regime?

Another anarcho capitalist ^ I'm telling you guys....these people are like gremlins. Add water and they reproduce like mad. Only difference is instead of water these gremlins reproduce on the internet. Please go away lex luther.

Wolf Larson

21st February 2010, 06:05

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist or a capitalist of any kind, despite certain sectarian allegations.

Ya OK sure. Let me guess. You advocate "free association" and you think wage labor for a boss is free association. Correct?

RED DAVE

21st February 2010, 06:12

[Lenin]knew that that capitalists were incapable of carrying out the bourgeois revolution and, therefore, he called for the working class the carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.
Which is exactly what Maoists are calling for.Let's see.

The workers are to lead the revolution throughout New Democracy and socialism. Nowhere do Maoists call for bourgeois leadership.First of all, where did you come up with this New Democracy bullshit? Did the Bolsheviks come up with a schema of feudalism, New Democracy, socialism? What the Maoists advocate under this New Democracy bullshit is a bloc of classes, which includes the bourgeoisie, with results we know. Everywhere this system has been tried, it has led to the establishment of state capitalism and, eventually, to private capitalism. Maoists had political control of the most populous country in the world, and you blew it.

Secondly, when did the Maoists ever lead the working class to revolutionary victory and socialism? Certainly not in China or Vietnam. And now, in Nepal, under the guise of leading the workers to victory, the Maoists have entered a bourgeois regime.

I can't find a source, but I believe that until Lenin returned to Russia, the Bolsheviks, with Stalin leading under Lenin's absence, were in de facto support of the Kerensky regime, instead of calling for the overthrow of that regime.
It must be true since you believe it. Provide sources or withdraw your false statement.This is all I could find so far. What have your got that would assert that Stalin, in fact, anticipated Lenin's line in the April Theses?

In the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 (the first phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917), Stalin was released from exile. On March 25 he returned to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) and, together with Lev Kamenev and Matvei Muranov, ousted Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov as editors of Pravda, the official Bolshevik newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were still in exile. Stalin and the new editorial board took a position in favor of supporting the Provisional Government (Molotov and Shlyapnikov had wanted to overthrow it) and went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown. However, after Lenin prevailed at the April Party conference, Stalin and the rest of the Pravda staff came on board with Lenin's view and called for overthrowing the provisional government. At this April 1917 Party conference, Stalin was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee with the third highest total votes in the party.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin_in_the_Russian_Revolution,_Russian_C ivil_War,_and_Polish-Soviet_War#Role_during_the_Russian_Revolution_of_1 917

RED DAVE

Martin Blank

24th February 2010, 08:31

1) Your characterisation of the Russian peasantry is simply incorrect. According to Davies et al (The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union) no more than 40% of peasant produce was sold on the market. This figure, actually one of the higher ones that I have seen, should make clear that the vast majority of the Russian peasant agriculture was concerned with feeding the peasants themselves and not the production/sale of commodities. This subsistence farming was one of the hallmarks of the Russian peasantry*. What was not a notable feature of the latter is sharecropping or tenant farming – the substantial majority of Russian peasants were part of a commune which, regardless of technicalities, was the effective owner of the land. So I cannot classify the peasantry as anything but a distinct class

*Incidentally this is one of the reasons for the catastrophic collapse in agricultural production following the seizure and division of the large estates by the peasantry

(Ironically here you are approaching the Bolshevik analysis of strata within the peasantry, an analysis that I have never agreed with and that the Bolsheviks themselves were forced to back away from during the Civil War)

In other words, I am using an historically Marxian definition. One of the problems of the Bolsheviks in that time was that they "were forced to back away from" the communist principle and theory they advocated, due in no small part to the influence of the formerly tsarist functionaries they were absorbing into the Soviet government and Bolshevik Party, and turned increasingly to a neo-Weberian, petty-bourgeois (and bourgeois) doctrine on class.

Now then, while it may be the case that no more than 40 percent of the produce raised by Russian peasants made it to market, that does not mean that at least 60 percent of those peasants were the equivalent of sharecroppers or tenant farmers. The peasant economy was a mixture of economic models, and just because Ivan's wheat didn't make it to the market in Omsk doesn't mean he and his family consumed it themselves. More to the point, though, the one thing that drives through all of these differing models utilized by the Russian peasantry to sustain themselves is their relations to their means of production -- the land.

As you point out, the majority of Russian peasants were part of "communes", where they collectively owned the land and worked it. These communes were like co-operative businesses are: they are a limited form of private ownership. But unlike in industries, where the means of production requires collective labor to maintain it, these communes only required collective labor insofar as the land was joined. That is, unlike a co-operative business, the individual peasants could maintain their section of the land as they saw fit (meaning they had more control over it than a co-op worker has over his or her means of production), and even individually profit from it.

I reject the idea of classifying the peasantry as a separate class, distinct from all others in Russian society. The fact is that, by 1917, capitalism as a social system had already reached the countryside and transformed its relations. The abolition of serfdom in 1864 opened the floodgates for this development -- something even Marx saw in his lifetime. It did not take even 50 years for the peasants to be divided along more "modern" class lines. The bulk of the peasantry, whether they were producing for their families, as part of a commune or individually for their villages, or for the markets in the Russian cities, were individual producers and both the laborers and controllers of their means of production. In other words, they were petty bourgeois.

2) The definition of peasants as simply a "rural petit-bourgeoisie", or other subset of the petit-bourgeoisie, is really very, very simplistic. It is certainly not derived from Marx – whose writings continually refer to the peasantry and distinguish between them and the small farmers – and I know of no commentator of similar stature, be they contemporary or modern, that would draw the same conclusions as yourself. To be clear – you are arguing that over 80% of the Russian population in 1917 was petit-bourgeois! That's stretching a term to the point of meaningless

Actually, no. Again, you are using angular arguments. I did not say that all those considered peasants in Russian society were petty bourgeois. In fact, I distinctly said that some, such as landless peasants, were agricultural proletarians. I would also add that sharecroppers and tenant farmers could not be included in the same category as the bulk of the Russian peasantry, because they did not have control over their means of production. But what you are doing here is confusing Marx's conjunctural analysis of the Russian peasantry in the 1860s and 1870s -- i.e., just after the abolition of serfdom, before the full imposition of capitalist social relations in the countryside -- with Marx's general analysis of class and social relationships. By the turn of the 20th century, capitalist social relations were dominating the Russian countryside. Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia talks of the transformation of the Russian peasant from its distinctive pre-capitalist formation as a social class into distinct classes: rural proletarian, rural petty bourgeois, rural bourgeois -- all three still popularly referred to as "peasants". At that time (1899), Lenin calculated that the breakdown was no more than 40 percent rural proletarian, 40 percent rural petty-bourgeois and 20 percent rural bourgeois. One can certainly argue that these numbers shifted in the 18 years between Lenin's analysis and the outbreak of the revolution, but I would figure that the shifts favored the petty bourgeoisie, especially as rural proletarians either emigrated to the cities or were conscripted into the army at the beginning of the First World War.

While I am not one to consider myself a Leninist, I do not think there is much room to argue with the facts he presents in Development of Capitalism in Russia, and the facts confirm the transformation of class relations in the countryside between when Marx wrote and when Lenin wrote. There is something of an irony, though, in what Lenin presents in his 1899 book; you will find, comrade, that more "Leninists" will agree with you than they will with Lenin at this time, even though the facts (and communist method) are on Lenin's (and my) side.

Now you are perfectly within your rights to formulate your own definition of just what comprises the petit-bourgeoisie. I'm not going to argue that with you on that. What I would ask however is that you make it perfectly clear when you are using a definition of your own creation in conversation. For example, "the Bolshevik leadership was overwhelmingly of petit-bourgeois background… but I am including the peasantry in my definition of petit-bourgeois". Otherwise you'll just cause confusion, particularly so given that very few would accept your own idiosyncratic view of what comprises the petit-bourgeois

Strawman argument. Nevertheless, I understand that few accept the communist definition of class these days. The introduction of neo-Weberian class analysis into the self-described socialist and communist movement has caused havoc when it comes to this cornerstone of our theory. This is especially the case when it comes to the question of the "middle classes". Even Lenin was not immune to this, as evidenced by his later treatment of the petty bourgeoisie.

Just a side note on Trotsky, its perfectly acceptable for himself to claim a petit-bourgeois background given that his family were prosperous small farmers and not peasants. In the previous links provided I attempted to distinguish between small farmers, craftsmen, etc, and peasants where possible. I strongly suspect, but can only confirm in a few cases (such as Kamenev IIRC), that most of these sons of peasants had migrated to the cities as either the children of migrant workers or first generation workers or themselves. Certainly very few would have come into contact with Bolshevik ideas in the villages or been privileged enough to attend university

This, too, is a strawman argument. Just because there may have been proletarians present in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party does not mean they had a decisive influence on the actions of the Party itself. If history is any indication, these elements more often play an enabling role for the petty-bourgeois elements, since they are trained by them in their concepts of "leadership". At the same time, it has to be taken into account that Bolsheviks like Kamenev spent many years in exile, often outside of Russia, where their social being was that of an emigre intellectual, not a worker. That social being would have a qualitative effect on their consciousness. Given that isolating and distorting influence, one can rightly argue that, even if they did enter the revolutionary movement from a proletarian background, they could not maintain that original consciousness in the face of their fundamentally altered social being.

Nope. The Bolshevik party was not a homogenous organisation in which instructions were simply passed down to the activists from on high. Rather it was a collection of relatively isolated bodies that organised on a region/city basis – a series of interlocking groups such as the Petersburg Committee, Moscow Committee, All-Russian Bureau, etc, etc – each of which jealously maintained its own independence and privileges. It was these bodies (not all of which even acknowledged the Menshevik-Bolshevik split!) that were responsible for the day to day activities and policies of the party, ie providing practical leadership, while those notables in foreign exile concerned itself with abstract 'high policy' and internecine squabbles

Angular argument, again. While it is true that the RSDLP as a whole was more a collection of local and regional committees than a homogenous group, these "interlocking groups" also accepted the role of their exiled leaderships as the bodies that set the political and practical parameters for their work, even as they were the ones to carry it out. They accepted the idea that "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement", and, as you point out, it was up to "those notables in foreign exile" to concern themselves with "abstract 'high policy' and internecine squabbles". In other words, it is exactly as I pointed out.

This divide did not disappear entirely in 1917 but while the CC retained very limited influence amongst the regional organisations, the latter were in a position to strongly influence the party leadership. Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks Come to Power notes the important role that the Petersburg Committee, probably the most influential of the regional organisations, played in forming CC policy. Rabinowitch also notes the relative independence of the various party fractions, each of which had the right to vote and reject a CC motion.

You seem to forget that most of the Central Committee was also a part of the Petersburg Committee, and that the influence of the latter is due to this fact. These members of the C.C. had daily interaction with the members of the Petersburg Committee between February and October, so one could only expect that there would be a strong interplay between the two. But it is "bad history" to attempt to project that interrelationship in a period of revolution, with both entities literally standing on the same ground, to the entirety of the all-Russian organization throughout its entire history.

A more fitting example would be A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia, by Semen Kanatchikov. Kanatchikov writes about how local circles of the RSDLP, especially those that did not adhere to either the Bolshevik or Menshevik factions, tried their best to follow the confusing and sometimes mutually-contradictory instructions received from the two factions' leading bodies as part of their duty and responsibility as party members ... and how those circles left it to the exiles to sort out the contradictions while they simply followed instructions when given.

So to relegate the role of the party activists to merely "carrying out the decisions" of those exiled abroad is to both do them a gross disservice and to mischaracterise the nature of the Bolshevik party. It was far more responsive to pressures 'from below' than you give it credit for

On the contrary, I think you do them a disservice by attributing to them a freedom they simply did not have. During the periods of greatest repression, there was little that the local and regional circles could do but follow instructions from the emigres. It was only as the working class as a whole gained greater breathing space -- in the periods around the 1905 and 1917 revolutions -- that the local circles also found the freedom to question openly the decisions of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and that the leaderships of both could actually feel the pressures of their respective memberships. It was not until these periods that the "pressures 'from below'" could really be transmitted and received.

Like I said, this is a much larger topic. I will limit myself to noting that I shun all accounts that have open political biases. It’s the reason that I don't consider Trotsky's works to be more than a primary source. Finding works that do not have such overt distortions - and there is a world of difference between background bias, be it liberal, academic, etc, and the political activitism of Brinton and others – is a lot easier with specialist academic works. That said, you are perfectly correct to point out the likes of Service or 'cold warriors' such as Pipes. I would not recommend the latter to anyone either

I don't dismiss, I evaluate. My personal judgement is that Brinton's work is 'bad history' that misinterprets (both accidentally through lack of information and deliberately through political bias) events. I do not dismiss works/theories without reading them* first or solely on the basis of their author's politics. To give an example, I give a quick favourable review to both Paul Avrich's, and much less so to Orlando Figes, in the bibliography in my sig. Neither is sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, to say the least

*Or another from the same author. Having wasted time on one Pipes book I don't really feel the need to pick up another

I would argue that this is a very sterile and clinical approach to history -- an approach I reject out of hand. It is the method of the bureaucrat or functionary, and it purges the very thing that makes history from its subject: humanity. In your attempt to find "objectivity" in history, you seem to forget that history is made by those who are anything but objective. The historian is not an arbiter of what is and is not proper history; the historian realizes that his or her role is to understand all sides that went into making an historical event, as well as how those events re-made those who were its participants. This means that political analysis of political events (as revolutions are) represent the best history, since they are often most representative of those who made it -- and, in the case of the Russian Revolution, the histories of Reed and Trotsky are in every way the best history.

With Brinton and, to a lesser extent, Avrich, we get a dissenting view from that of Reed and Trotsky, as well as an ersatz representation of the views of participants. What we get from Brinton on the factory-shop committees is a view that, while perhaps not completely accurate, did reflect views held by those who opposed the seemingly inevitable fate of those bodies. The anarchists and libertarian communists of Soviet Russia saw the liquidation of these bodies in much the same way Brinton presents them, as expressed by dissident communist groups such as Myasnikov's Workers Group. So while it can be argued that Brinton is inaccurate in the exactitudes, his work is far from being "bad history" in the sense that it reflects a dissident current that really existed -- and operated -- during that time.

As a final note here, I am just as quick to come down on those who insist that the model of the Bolsheviks as a small unified and tightly-knit group of professional revolutionaries is something worth emulating. It was to dispel that particular myth that I wrote the essay in my sig. This perception of the professional 'vanguard party' is a perfect example of how bad history can have serious and dreadful consequences

The whole concepts of the "professional revolutionary" and "vanguard party" have been so maligned by the "Marxist-Leninists" of the 20th century that I can probably agree more with you on the subjects than I can with them.

If you look through the history forum over the past few years I'm sure you'll find many threads in which I have "defended" countless parties against bad history. Some notable examples that spring to mind would include Stalin, Hitler, feudalism, the KPD, and many others. Each of which I have also criticised strongly (the first two in particular) on a number of occasions. My interest in these situations is not to uncritically support but to attempt to dispel inaccurate charges. Again, if something is to be criticised (or lessons learnt) then it must be from the basis of sound history. That is my bugbear

The problem is that you combine the effort to defend the Bolsheviks with an approach toward history that does not allow for that. You roar loudly but actually say nothing, because you do not allow yourself to speak the language of your subject. You try to take sides ... without taking sides. You try to defend the a political act or political movement ... without speaking to the politics involved. In your effort to stand above the functionaries and bureaucrats ... you take on their characteristics in your selective acceptance of history. I can understand and appreciate correcting factual errors, even when it comes to those such as Stalin, Hitler, etc. And it is in that sense that I appreciate your factual corrections of Brinton. But to rely only on sterilized and sanitized "facts" when analyzing political events distorts history. It is, in short, the worst kind of "bad history".

Now I am of course open to charges of favouritism towards the Bolsheviks because they are different from the above in that I, largely though my readings of their history, do hold them in high regard. I have to be honest about that and it is something that I do worry about on occasion. On the other hand, I've never claimed to be a professional historian and I would like to think that I am far from uncritical about their actions and policies. With regards the latter, I have criticised the Bolsheviks a number of times in this thread and in fact largely, if not entirely, agree with you in stressing the malignant influence of the Second International on their thinking

Where I differ is in not assuming that the Bolsheviks pursued an actively anti-working class line or were somehow capitalist conspirators/infiltrators (the latter a particularly common charge from anarchists). Everything I have read indicates that the Bolsheviks and the Russian proletariat only drew closer throughout 1917, which is really the point I was making previously in reference to the FCs, but then this may be getting even further off topic

I agree with you that the Bolsheviks and the working class drew closer during the course of 1917. Rabinowitch and numerous other historians who have examined the events of that time have confirmed this. But things change over time, and the conjuncture of the Bolsheviks and the proletariat at that time did change as the revolution progressed, which is the point I was making in regards to the factory-shop committees. It's not that I see some great anti-working class conspiracy by capitalist infiltrators; what I see is a party that, through a series of theoretical and policy mistakes, maneuvered itself increasingly into a position where the petty bourgeoisie was able to take control and drive a wedge into the middle of that conjunctural unity ... and the decision on the factory-shop committees was an example of that maneuvering and driving of the wedge.

Accusations of dishonesty. Well, they had to crop up sooner or later

Tell you what though, why don't you look through this thread and count the number of times I've referenced Lenin or Trotsky. For that matter have a look through my posting history on these forums and count the number of times I've taken to quoting from these, or Marx, to support my arguments. You won't find too many given that I generally refuse to use MIA or official Soviet works as historical sources. So if I am secretly a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist who reads the Collected Works every night before bed I'd like to think that I'm a pretty covert one

(For the record, I'm currently reading The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record by Sukhanov… a man not noted for his warm attitudes towards the Bolsheviks. Even then I treat this as it is – a primary source and not a work of history)

It is not dishonesty that I am seeing here; if I felt you were being dishonest I would have said so (ask around and you'll see what I mean). But it does seem to me that your fundamental views did not begin with Smith and other "academics", but with the very people you leave off your bibliography as "primary source" writers. If there's any dishonesty going on here (and I am not making such a charge as it relates to your arguments with others), it would only be with yourself.

I can see from what you emphasize and seek to point out in conversations that your instincts are sound (and, in fact, very political). But you choose to exclude the political element from political history and treat it like an accountant treats last year's taxes. And it's that sense that led me to see something telling in your omission of politically-charged historical works and first-person-participant accounts. If I had to speculate, I would say that you were at one time involved in a political organization that made much of its "line" on the Russian Revolution, to the point where it was an article of confessional faith. That training had an effect on you, both positive and negative. When you left that doctrinaire group, you sought to learn more about the subject, but did not want to repeat the same mistakes they did -- i.e., did not want to limit yourself to any "line" writings on the subject; you wanted "just the facts".

By doing so, however, you ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Rejecting the political historical and primary-source works became a "line" in and of itself -- it became its own article of faith. In other words, you broke with the organization, but not its methodology. All you did is flip the coin over, put a minus where the group put a plus, but still attempted to stand on the same patch of ground as they did. The balance between quantitative and qualitative, which comes from understanding the relationship between politics and history in such an event, was nonexistent, making every exception seem more earth-shattering than it actually was and keeping an analysis of motion from being made, which makes it appear as if everything is being looked at as if compartmentalized and sterilized.

But then, this is only speculation.

Again, I address the point that these capable workers were not simply sucked into some sort of limbo where they were suspended in meaningless bureaucratic stasis*. Where do you think they were going to? The most capable workers were needed to build some semblance of a national state apparatus, exporting revolution to the countryside, and fighting the Civil War. I don’t see how any of these actions were not crucial to the survival of Soviet power

*One interesting observation in The Bolsheviks in Power was the degree to which the bureaucratic explosion post-October was driven by the regions as much as the centre. How many layers of government were there in Petrograd alone? Probably five or six when you include the various regional bodies. The soviets themselves rapidly sprouted sections and sub-sections. This growth of bureaucracy, which did unquestionably occupy too much time/effort, was less a product of Moscow's policies than the natural period of adjustment as various bodies were formed or stepped in to fill the power vacuum

The problem here is primarily political. The Bolsheviks never took the concept of workers' self-emancipation too seriously, mostly because they did not see it as incredibly relevant for their activity. For the most part, they anticipated a bourgeois-democratic revolution ... and that's it. Not even after 1905 did they actually expect a situation where the workers themselves would be in control of the economy and society. Lenin may have written political pamphlets like Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, where he anticipated a measure of workers' participation in the leadership of the next revolution, but neither he nor the rest of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP took one concrete step to actually prepare workers for actual practical leadership themselves. They forgot (or ignored, depending on your point of view) the principle that, "The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". As a result, neither the Russian working class nor the worker-Bolsheviks were prepared for their tasks after October 1917. Honestly, I think this allowed the petty bourgeoisie, who were more conscious of their position in society and how it was going to be altered by the revolution, to take control of the Bolshevik Party after 1917.

As for the "former tsarist functionaries", didn't you agree in an above post as to their beneficial effects on the economic situation? Their inclusion was hardly ideal but such expertise was necessary to both staving off complete economic collapse and actually running the country. No one less possessed the required skills, as pretty much all contemporaries were agreed on. The problems occurred when the structures overseeing these specialists were weakened and compromised, for a variety of reasons

You can see above (and my previous post) for my view on the question of required skills. I would not agree that the tsarist functionaries were beneficial, and would not have said that. If anything, they made matters worse, especially in the long run. And the "variety of reasons" was really one reason: they let the foxes into the proverbial hen house.

Leaving aside another false and unnecessary analogy, what part of the above passage troubles you? Let's recall that the Bolsheviks in the FCs were not party functionaries or 'entryists' but included the leading lights of the FC movement. If they had influence amongst their comrades it was the result of being the most revolutionary and the most militant sections of the workforce. The truth that you are attempting to avoid here is that no "concentrated internal campaign" was needed to convince the FCs to follow the Bolshevik line – the entire movement was already a Bolshevik stronghold

The analogy is sound, in my opinion. It is only "false" in your view because here we have a case where the political has to be taken into account. I raise the question of formalism here because the question is not yes or no, but right or wrong. That is, was it the right thing for the revolution or not -- was it the right thing for the working class or not? One can call a campaign by the capitalists to convince workers to decertify a union formally "democratic", since a vote is taken and a majority decides to decertify. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it in the interests of the working class. That concentrated internal campaign ran counter to the interests of the working class; it stripped workers of their primary means of controlling production, and left them only the Soviets as a means of decisively influencing the course of development of the Soviet republic. If the Bolsheviks had been the same party politically as they were in 1917, I don't think they would have moved to subordinate the factory-shop committees to the trade unions, because they would have recognized the dangers inherent in that decision.

Show me a smoking gun and I'll accept this view. Really. Otherwise I see no reason not to dismiss it as conspiratorial. For example, Brinton charges (IIRC) that Lenin's rather radical 'Draft Decree on Workers Control' was really just a façade to gain FC support for the transfer of power – ignoring that the Bolsheviks already possessed this and that Lenin's proposals were actually to the left of those of the ARCFC (All-Russian Committee of Factory Committees, IIRC)!

I don't even accept this view, so how would I be able to provide you with a "smoking gun"? As I said, my view is in between Brinton's and yours, as I pointed out -- and you respond to below.

[QUOTE=ComradeOm;1677192]Again, I point out that the leading FC organisations were, by October 1917, generally Bolshevik strongholds and not nearly as syndicalist as often made out. We have to talk here not about 'workers control' as an abstract concept (the Bolsheviks were never syndicalist) or a modern theory but what the Russian workers at the time understood it to mean. I think its safe to say that definitions as to this were fairly confused but I don't see any great evidence to suggest that the Bolsheviks were significantly to the right of the masses on this issue

Here we begin to see some of those initially influential politics of yours begin to show themselves. Direct workers' control of production is not merely a "syndicalist" concept; workers' control represents the cornerstone of the transition from capitalism to communism, since it is how the free association of producers is built. If we agree that the goal of a workers' revolution is to establish a stateless, classless society, then the question of control of the economy and society is the central issue. Communists argue that workers' control represents the only viable way for genuinely democratic control over the development of society to begin. State control, at best, is an inefficient model and is fraught with numerous structural and cultural problems. It allows for the development of bureaucracies and ever-growing layers of officials and middle management, as do the existing trade union structures. Trade union control, if it stems from most existing models of trade unions, is not much better. Its distinction from the state and material grounding at the point of production may allow it to be more reflective of the working class, but it is also prone to the same problems of bureaucracy and officialdom that we see in state control (this was especially true in Russia, where many of them were modeled on the European and North American "business union" structure, which is especially susceptible to takeover by non-proletarian elements).

Workplace committees -- factory-shop committees -- offer a more flexible and grassroots structure for class organization at the point of production. Just as the Soviets, which were composed of workers from factories and shops, represented workers' political power, the factory-shop committees, which were themselves composed of workers within a factory or shop, represented workers' economic power. They were more than a union could be, because they represented a workers' offensive organization, as opposed to the defensive character of the union, in the economy. They, not the unions, were the "schools of communism".

If anything, the move to subordinate the factory-shop committees to the unions was more of a syndicalist act than would have been the development of a strong and independent all-Russian factory-shop committee organization, since it put the question of workers' control in the hands of the union apparatus, as opposed to the workers themselves.* This mistake was only compounded by the imposition of one-person management and state control.

* I imagine someone will want to try to say that this seems to contradict the position of the Workers Party in America on revolutionary industrial unionism. On the contrary, the workplace committee that is part of the overall RIU strategy is not subordinated to the Local Industrial Union, but operates alongside it through its own structures, including the workers' councils. Where the LIUs and up function to defend workers' daily interests, the workplace committees are the means by which the working class goes on the offensive in the economic arena by contending for control of production. In this sense, the workplace committees parallel in the economy what the party does in the political arena, and the connection between them is inherently more organic than that of the party and the broader union.

My own opinion is that Lenin did support worker control (again without being syndicalist) in the context of a socialist state around October. I simply see no reason (again, no smoking gun) to question his motives on this issue. What is pretty clear is that he had moved to the right during the winter of 1917-1918. Not entirely sure if I agree with that move, although I can understand the circumstances, but it was ignored on the ground anyway

It was ignored up to the point that the Bolshevik Party began to shift as well, and then concretized that shift through actions it took, including the subordination of the factory-shop committees.

This is a very true point and one that I am extremely conscious of. It is probably the biggest question, possibly the biggest lesson, of the period. Having accepted, as I do, that the Bolsheviks in 1917 were a mass democratic organisation with strong proletarian roots, then how did this movement degenerate into a despotic one-party state?

That's a question I still can't answer satisfactorily. I suspect it has a great deal to do with the dissolution of the Russian proletariat, due to the 1918 economic collapse, but that's too broad an answer for my liking. The 'militarisation' of the party during the Civil War years, as you suggest, is often given as a factor but I'm unsure as to the weight to give it. Nor was The Bolsheviks in Power particularly satisfying in that regard. Unfortunately there are few modern works available that study the evolution of the Bolshevik party (or indeed the Soviet state) during these crucial later years. At least excluding those suspect ones from the likes of Ulam or Pipes (or indeed Brinton). Any recommendations?

Honestly, this is something I've been working on for some time. I agree with you about the place of the Bolshevik Party in 1917; I've called the revolution itself the "high-water mark of the workers' movement in the 20th century" (On the Lessons of the USSR Experience, 2005). I've been looking to expand the analysis in that initial document into something more comprehensive, and have also been reading many of the same books and articles you have. I am hoping Rabinowitch continues his work and puts together a third book in the series that carries us through 1919 to Kronstadt and the NEP. I think it would probably be the most informative book on War Communism, if he was to do it on the same level as his last two.

All I can offer as to the question of why is the issue of the shift in class dominance in and around the Bolshevik Party after the revolution. All of my research and reading leads me to the conclusion that the loss of the grounding among industrial workers after the October Revolution, due to the seeming need for them in the Soviet government and on the front lines, the reconstitution of large sections of the former tsarist apparatus as "specialists", the pressures on the non-proletarian (and severed proletarian) leaders of the Bolshevik Party, and the simple fact that the Bolsheviks were now the party in power, fundamentally altered the collective consciousness of the Party and its members. The proletarian character was pushed and shoved out of the party to make room for that of the new "specialists" and functionaries who were now everywhere in the organization.

Almost forgot, with regards the FCs the point about the changing nature of the Bolshevik organisation is pretty irrelevant. The vote to join the unions was taken at a point where the character of the party was certainly not conductive to a centrally directed and enforced campaign of tactical voting. The FCs voted themselves into the unions at a time when the influence of the Bolshevik CC was still very limited and indeed when the Bolshevik party was in an advanced state of decay. If anything new FC members would have been even less likely to be members of the party

Then perhaps you can offer a reason for why the factory-shop committees would essentially dissolve themselves into the Bolshevik-led trade unions. The question seems an especially important one, given the role the Bolsheviks played in the maintenance of the factory-shop committees in 1917. It does not seem like those who were involved in the factory-shop committees thought them incapable of organizing workers' control. So where did the impulse come from?

This is a product of the medium in which we are having this discussion. Point by point (or quote by quote) rebuttals are never conductive to discussions that deal with complex matters with significant interplay of factors

If I'm further unwilling to get pulled into a general discussion of the overarching dynamic its because I do want to focus on those specific areas in which I, to be blunt, think that your version of events is simply incorrect. That and I'm just lazy. These posts take time to write and my workload is not particularly light ATM

I think you've tried your best to poke holes, but the problem is that those aren't holes in my argument. I have repeatedly pointed out where you've twisted or misrepresented my position in order to attempt to gain an advantage in the argument. You've repeatedly used angular and strawman arguments to try to make your point, and I've shown every time that your attempted interpretation of what I said was a falsification. On more than one occasion, you've already had to come back and admit this, and I expect you'll do so again with this contribution.

I agree, though, that these contributions are becoming time-consuming (I'm already at four hours writing time on this one alone). As well, I think we've long since went above and beyond what the original poster was asking for in this discussion. So, unless you want to have the last word, maybe we should end it here and look to the future for another round.

If you are interested in a discussion on broader issues then I'd suggest a thread in the history forum where we can start again without all this clutter

Jesus, you think that thread would be "without ... clutter"?! Up until the time between your last contribution and mine, we more or less had this thread to ourselves. I can just see all the doctrinaire idiots who troll the History forum mucking it up with long and useless quotations, and trying desperately to derail the discussion.

A few notes on the unions then.

In the first place, the comparison with trade unions in the West is common but not, I feel, particularly accurate. The Russian trade union movement, having been outlawed prior to 1917, was a pretty revolutionary one that had not stagnated like those in other countries. IIRC some unions (particularly the Bolshevik metallurgy union) were calling for calling for the abolition of the Provisional Government in mid-summer 1917. They were also organised along industry lines, as opposed to craft unions, were immensely popular (with at least 2 million members by October, Keep), and pretty effective in representing the workers. So I'm very hesitant to write them off like so many, not necessarily yourself, do. If they were arguably less democratic than the FCs then it was more due to the sheer size of these organisations than anything else

I think that, when it comes to the Russian unions, we have an example of a contradiction between form and content. I agree with you that the unions in 1917 were filled with revolutionary workers, and the industrial union structure was head and shoulders above the craft unionism that was especially common in the United States and Canada. At the same time, though, the forms that the workers who formed these unions adopted were modeled on the European and (albeit very few) North American industrial unions (but, strangely enough, not the IWW, which many of the Socialist Russian workers who were in the U.S. belonged to). Those forms of non-revolutionary industrial unions (we would call them business industrial unions today) were generally those run by Social Democrats in North America and Europe, and were thus the most "comfortable" structures for Russian radicals of all stripes. It was not so much as they were "less democratic" as they were less conducive to workers' democracy -- i.e., they were structures designed for capitalism, not the transition to communism.

Despite this the absorption of the FCs was not simply a one way street. They did not cease to exist or function. Yes, they were integrated into the union apparatus but still retained some degree of autonomy and, indeed, effectively replaced the union representation in the factories.

Again, form and content. In those cases where the factory-shop committee forms continued to function after the subordination, it was only because it was a more efficient vehicle. They did not have the same role in production that they had in 1917, especially after one-person management came into being. I would not confuse the union officials changing suits with them changing character.

You are, perhaps ironically, correct on one point though – the Bolsheviks did prioritise the unions but the converse is that the party leadership never really concerned themselves with the FCs. They simply didn't pay much attention to the latter. IIRC the minutes of the Bolshevik CC during the summer of 1917 refer to the FC movement no more than half a dozen times. Far from being some threat that had to be crushed, the FCs were just not an issue. That they largely ended up controlling these bodies anyway is more due to the militancy of the workers who sat on them

At the same time, though, Lenin's trend in the Bolsheviks did see something in the factory-shop committees, and wanted to cultivate its development. I tend to think there is a direct relationship between the intervention the Bolsheviks led in the Factory-Shop Committee Conference in June 1917, Lenin's mulling over of the slogan "All Power to the Factory-Shop Committees!", and the writing of The State and Revolution. If you want to analyze how the different tendencies of the Bolshevik Party related to the working class, the differing approaches to the trade unions, Soviets and factory-shop committees by each of the different trends in the party in between February and October is a good start.

Its also worth noting that there was a very serious debate amongst contemporary revolutionaries that is often overlooked in the argument about the "liquidation" of the FCs. Namely, how can FCs and unions (which have significant duplication of tasks) coexist in a socialist society? This in turn was related to the discussion as to the relations of both with a socialist state. This was the context of the vote to join the unions. I'm not for a minute suggesting that we have this discussion now but it does lend a more nuanced shade to the proceedings of 1917 than the idea of the Bolsheviks sweeping in and "liquidating" FCs

This is a key political question, and I think it is one where the Bolsheviks get hoisted up on their own petard. I've seen some of these arguments, but only in passing reference and short citation. Recommendations on more extensive documentation?

That's my problem. It assumes that everything goes swimmingly and that the CPC had access to perfect information. Your point is taken but then hindsight (including the access to the diaries of the German High command!) always makes everything so obvious

Hindsight is always 20/20, I know. But as my point here is to speak more of lessons to learn than anything else, I can use the benefit of hindsight. My only point here is that overestimating your opponent is just as dangerous as underestimating them.

Now this I cannot agree with

The workforce of Russia's cities was not simply conscripted into the Red Army or soviets and significant unemployment blighted urban areas throughout 1918. Keep (whom I happen to have on hand) records an official figure, probably an underestimate, of over 300K unemployed from Jan-Apr 1918 and notes that 10% of the Moscow workforce was unemployed in April of that year. This is in addition to the countless who had begun to flee the cities during the winter of 1917-1918 – the population of Petrograd alone dropped from 2.5 to 1.5 million by spring 1918 with a 'mere' 300K fleeing Moscow in the same period. So the factories remained standing but the struggle to keep them open and producing (in the face of urban famine and a worthless currency) was a lost one

What I note in the short set of statistics you offer here, and I've seen similar in other works, is that much of the mass flight from the cities and spiraling unemployment did not immediately begin with the October Revolution, but rather began a couple months later. The December armistice idled the munitions plants, which caused most of the workers who remained in those factories to either be unemployed or to flee to countryside for survival. There was no plan in place to deal with this question -- one aggravated by the fact that many of the workers who could have rallied the workforce in these plants had been removed to go to work in the Soviet government. There was no "Day One" preparation by the Bolsheviks or any other pro-Soviet political currents. It was as if they thought everything would just take care of itself and their actions had no implications whatsoever. So, yeah, by the time the hard winter of 1917-18 sets in, the lack of organization and preparation has doomed those workers. But none of that takes away from my point: the factories themselves did not disappear, and, if proper preparation had been organized and the necessary worker-Bolsheviks had not been removed from the workplace, "conversion" to meet the needs of the population was not out of the question.

How could skills that take years to acquire be imparted in months? And who would teach these – the specialists whose jobs were about to be abolished? All this during a period when the Bolsheviks were themselves either a tiny, if growing, sect or an illegal party? What do you really expect them to have done during these months? Be realistic here – it is not a matter of simply producing a pamphlet explaining how to become an engineer (never mind the operation of specific factory lines!) or an accountant

It does not take years to figure out how to organize production. Most workers, even today, instinctively fall into an organized pattern of operations when in a workplace. It does not take an incredible amount of effort to educate literate workers (and, yes, I know that many of them were not literate, but some were) on how to record shipments of materials and finished goods. It does not take an incredible amount of effort to put together instruction manuals that can be consistently used until they are no longer needed on such basic tasks as record-keeping and inventory control. Shit, if you can count, you can take inventory. It might not be as efficient at first, but it certainly is possible.

Moreover, on the question of "conversion", while it might take an engineer to design a machine (and there were engineers who were Bolsheviks), it takes workers to build it. And they had the workers to do that. Honestly, do you think that Russia imported all of its machinery, dies and presses? Moreover, it was not the engineers who were having their jobs eliminated; it was the managers, functionaries and bureaucrats who were being removed. If engineers decided to walk out of the factories, that was not because they were going to be eliminated, but because their class (or political) loyalties drew them out. However, many technicians did not walk out, but nevertheless found themselves out on the streets when the munitions plants were closed.

Yes, there would have been a value to reaching out to technicians before and after the revolution (and, IIRC, there actually was some of that going on). Unlike the managers and bureaucrats that the Bolsheviks ended up appealing to in 1918 to return to their positions, I can see a reason to employ those particular people as "specialists". Not only could they have helped with converting factories to peacetime production, they could have also helped with teaching workers to read and write, which would allow for more effective workers' control of production.

I'd also note that Lenin was not entirely blind to this problem but simply took what some would judge to be the wrong course of action – putting his faith in the creative forces of the masses and implicitly assuming that everything would work out post-revolution

Creativity is essential in many areas, but when it comes to organizing production, there is not a lot of room for creativity. Here is where education and organization are most effective; creativity is only effective when proper preparation for everything other contingency is not applicable. The problem was that the Bolsheviks made no proper preparations. Period.

You have my opinion on a catalogue of events and factors above. It should be fairly clear that I do not subscribe to the "singular event" theory but rather stress the relations between classes and organisations. So I believe that I do the exact opposite of what you suggest. My reading of the Revolution is almost entirely one of "interconnected points" – between classes, organisations, events, policies – that comprise a social revolution. It is exactly this that leads me to relegate the Bolsheviks (or, more accurately, the various Bolshevik personalities, organisations, policies, etc) to merely one factor, albeit a hugely important one, in this revolutionary stew

Fair enough. That is, admittedly, a tempting analysis, but I see it as too objectivist for the actual situation. It tends to let the Soviet government off the hook for many of consequences of the mistakes that were made.

Ah but my emphasis is on the processes that went into the formation of these policies. The directives themselves are there on MIA (and I have read more than a few of them over the years) but what is incomparably more important, in my opinion, is the process of their creation and their eventual impact. You cannot take a Bolshevik policy and simply study its impact – to do so leads to the Brinton school of criticism – but also must consider the organisation that developed it, the pressures that led to it, and the reality of its implementation. This is my interest and it develops from a simple understanding of history – the Bolsheviks were no abstract entity passing policies entirely according their ideology but were themselves historical actors subject to pressures of the time and influence from below. Obviously the whole process is something of a closed feedback loop (conditions lead to policy which leads to new conditions which leads to new policy) but it’s the process that interests me.

Generally speaking, I think this is a much healthier method than we often see these days. My main concern is that there is an automatic assumption of a harmony between the movement and the Bolshevik Party. What I mean is, while the movement was wholly proletarian, the Bolshevik Party was not. The introduction of non-proletarian elements into the proletarian movement -- not just by the Bolsheviks, but by virtually every "revolutionary" organization in Russia at the time -- did introduce new contradictions into its development, and did affect both the policy and the conditions. This I see lacking in your analysis: the role of shifting class relations and the "footprint" each class (proletarian and petty bourgeois) left on both the material conditions and the actions taken. In the end, I also think this is something that has created what seems like such a wide gulf between our points of view.

There were interventions from the top (Lenin's role is often grossly overstated but remains decisive) but in a social revolution its the 'base' that is the driving force. The Bolshevik CC, the same goes for any party/organisation during the period, was subject to pressures both from its lower levels and the streets themselves. I've already noted, a number of times, the Bolshevik composition of the leading labour organisations but this was not a one-way street and attitudes/ideas did pass back up through the organisation. In a way I almost, if not quite, reject the idea of studying the Bolsheviks outside of the wider revolutionary movement

In a social revolution, the "base" can be a driving force only so long as there is a receptive element at the top. What I mean is, it's a two-way street at all levels and in all situations, and if that interrelationship does not exist, or is distorted by foreign objects, then the role and effectiveness of the "base" is itself distorted -- the timing is off, there are misfires and mis-starts. Yes, we need to understand the Bolsheviks in the context of the wider revolutionary movement, but we also need to understand that the wider movement was disrupted by the presence of elements that were only momentarily revolutionary or incidentally revolutionary ... or not even revolutionary at all, but simply caught in the ebb and flow of the revolution. The effect these elements had on the revolution is not often considered, because it leads to some uncomfortable realities for both the doctrinaire cheerleaders and critics of the revolution.

And this idea of the Bolsheviks as subject to historical pressures is, I'm sad to say, probably what is the 'freshest' about my conception of the Revolution. Personally I think its obvious but you'd be amazed at the number of people that seriously contend that the Bolsheviks had some near-divine mission, passed down from Lenin, or were really capitalist agents infiltrating the workers movement. That is the sort of history that I defend the Bolsheviks from – I don't see them are inherently right or inherently wrong but fundamentally human. That's probably the most important single lesson that I would take from the whole affair

Again, fair enough. I tend to see them similarly, with the aforementioned caveats.

I know my tone can get somewhat polemical at times but it has been good to just sit back and indulge in my interest in the Revolution with a healthy debate. Its conversations like these that really put personal theories to the test, deepen understanding my understanding of events, and force me to look at things in a new light

I know the feeling. I like a good, sharp political discussion. And I have to admit that this has been one of the best on this subject that I've ever had. I don't get challenged much these days on issues, but this one has, admittedly, taken me to my limits. I mean, I would not ever think of spending the hours I've spent on this discussion (five for this contribution alone!) if I did not think that the quality of the discussion and the person I was arguing with was worth the time and effort.

We definitely will have to do this again sometime (but not too soon; I have to catch up on some things now).

None of which excuses the propagation of bad history though ;)

Well, comrade, I'm not sure which is worse: bad history or bad methodology? :D

ComradeOm

8th March 2010, 19:03

Apologies for the delay and the fact that I’ve been unable to complete this post. Its been extremely busy at work and I’m shortly moving to an internet-free house. If I can finish this at a later date then I’ll try and do so but don’t hold your breath. As you note, these things consume a lot of time. Its been a good conversation though and I’m sorry to have to bring it to a pre-mature halt. Below is what I’ve got so far

In other words, I am using an historically Marxian definition. One of the problems of the Bolsheviks in that time was that they "were forced to back away from" the communist principle and theory they advocated, due in no small part to the influence of the formerly tsarist functionaries they were absorbing into the Soviet government and Bolshevik Party, and turned increasingly to a neo-Weberian, petty-bourgeois (and bourgeois) doctrine on classFirst of all, let's scotch the idea that there even was a "historically Marxian definition" of the peasantry. Neither Marx or Engels devoted much time to the peasant question, even less to the Russian peasantry, and nor did they come up with a single neat definition. Their writings on the subject, over half a century, tend to be contradictory and vague. For example, in what are probably some of his most detailed works on the peasantry, Engels uses the generic terms "small", "middle", and "big" peasantry in The Peasant Question in France and Germany and The Peasant War in Germany. None of these categories is shackled to an urban counterpart and, relevant to this discussion, he specifically includes the small subsistence farmer in the "small" category, alongside landless labourers

Ironically enough it was Lenin who developed, or at least cemented, the particular model of the land-owning peasantry as petit-bourgeois. But then I've never pretended to be anything but critical of Bolshevik agrarian policy and have taken particular umbrage with Lenin's conception of the Russian peasantry. If only because the Civil War years proved it to be largely bullshit. The Bolshevik 'turn' from their own theory was one forced of necessity – it had nothing to do with "formerly tsarist functionaries" and everything to do with the simple reality that the countryside had not erupted into class war as expected. This failure to meet expectations was partly because the peasant 'black repartition' had eased, rather than accentuated, class divisions but mostly because Bolshevik conceptions of the structures/divisions of peasant society bore little resemblance to reality

Now then, while it may be the case that no more than 40 percent of the produce raised by Russian peasants made it to market, that does not mean that at least 60 percent of those peasants were the equivalent of sharecroppers or tenant farmersOf course not. Luckily we are in a position to put real numbers to these categories. So let's have a quick look at the structure of the Russian agriculture and its peasantry then. Davies gives some nicely detailed tables but unfortunately I don't have it on hand. Figures are therefore taken from Waldron's The End of Imperial Russia

Most obviously, the 1897 census recorded a mere two million full time landless agricultural labourers. Even including seasonal labourers, probably another few million, this is a tiny percentage of the overall peasant population*. Hardly 40% of the peasant population. The number probably increased somewhat with the advent of the Stolypin reforms but would have similarly nosedived with the 'black repartition'. We can also estimate the number of peasants devoted to full time cottage industry – roughly seven million in 1910. Unfortunately I don't have figures for the number of landowners or small farmers (although I'm fairly sure that both are in Davies) but they could not be more than a few million (four or five, tops)

The remainder of the peasantry being the small peasant – those who owned little land, the average being below 5.5 hectares, and were primarily engaged in subsistence farming. As I stated above, "sharecroppers or tenant farmers" were not a notable feature of Tsarist agriculture and the vast majority of the peasantry were poor commune farmers. Most of the time they did not even own their own land, certainly not in any Western sense, as it belonged to the commune. The latter often engaged in redistributions of the village land in which the various strips/plots were shuffled and re-divided to ensure relative equality. Add to that the often crippling redemption payments to former landlords (only abolished in 1906) and I find it extremely hard to characterise this vast swathe of peasantry as petit-bourgeois. Not only did most of them not produce for the market, beyond selling what little surplus was leftover, but they often didn't even own the land itself. And these peasants alone, not including agricultural labourers, would have comprised well over 60% of the Empire's population

*I said that you were labelling 80% of the Russian population as petit-bourgeois. I was wrong. Excluding landless peasants means that only around 75% of the population were petit-bourgeois according to your definition

The abolition of serfdom in 1864 opened the floodgates for this development -- something even Marx saw in his lifetime. It did not take even 50 years for the peasants to be divided along more "modern" class linesWaldron concludes, and from other readings I'd have to agree, that Russian agriculture "failed to make the spectacular progress anticipated from changes to the framework of rural life". Indeed during most of the 19th C the Tsarist state only reinforced the largest single barrier to Russian agricultural development – the peasant commune. It was not until the Stolypin reforms that a distinctive caste of small farmers (with complete ownership of his land and often availing of hired labour) equivalent to that of Western Europe began to really emerge* from the communes. The reality, and this is where hindsight really helps, is that the (botched) abolition of serfdom did not greatly accelerate the development of Russian agriculture or significantly increase class tensions within the villages. It did help in both regards but it was not until the government set out to break the communes that real change was wrought

*Not that small farmers were completely alien to the Empire before this. They were particularly common in the western provinces

While I am not one to consider myself a Leninist, I do not think there is much room to argue with the facts he presents in Development of Capitalism in Russia, and the facts confirm the transformation of class relations in the countryside between when Marx wrote and when Lenin wrote. There is something of an irony, though, in what Lenin presents in his 1899 book; you will find, comrade, that more "Leninists" will agree with you than they will with Lenin at this time, even though the facts (and communist method) are on Lenin's (and my) side.Development of Capitalism in Russia is an interesting work, even if it has been some time since I read it. Certainly its one of Lenin's better books, although I would have infinitely more confidence in modern studies, but it cannot be divorced from the context in which it was written. This was of course the polemic with Maikhailovskii who accused the Russian Marxists of seeking to develop capitalism in Russia. Lenin's response, largely through Development of Capitalism was to argue that capitalism was already well established in Russia and that the peasantry were increasingly dividing into antagonistic classes. That is fair enough and on the whole, with the exception of the last point, Lenin was probably correct, if excessive optimistic

That does not excuse the major flaws of the book that undermine its usefulness as a historical study. These include the failure to contrast the statistics produced with pre-1860s date; the lack of distinction, one that you have failed to make yourself, between commodity production and subsistence farming; the surprising lack of detail on foreign investment; and, most importantly, the near-complete absence of the principal agricultural economic unit – the commune. Your characterisation of the commune as lacking any real 'co-operation or pooling of resources' is typical of a work that pretty much ignores the commune as a social or economic entity, thus providing the impression that the average Russian peasant household was an individual unit/producer on par with Western European farmers

So a useful work but by no means the last word on Russian agriculture during the period in question

Nevertheless, I understand that few accept the communist definition of class these days. The introduction of neo-Weberian class analysis into the self-described socialist and communist movement has caused havoc when it comes to this cornerstone of our theory. This is especially the case when it comes to the question of the "middle classes". Even Lenin was not immune to this, as evidenced by his later treatment of the petty bourgeoisie*Shrugs* So did Marx. So did Engels. So did Lenin. Not particularly bad company to find myself in. The 'peasantry' is a useful shorthand and does reflect the common peasant milieu that unites these various classes/castes/sub-classes/whatever

Just because there may have been proletarians present in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party does not mean they had a decisive influence on the actions of the Party itselfThen who did? I've already made clear that I consider the Bolshevik party to have an overwhelmingly proletarian base, an elected leadership largely drawn from the proletariat, and the requirement that its policies be ratified before a democratic congress. What more do you want?

At the same time, it has to be taken into account that Bolsheviks like Kamenev spent many years in exile, often outside of Russia, where their social being was that of an emigre intellectual, not a workerSmall point but I believe, off the top of my head, that Kamenev spent most of his time in Russia. He was not an émigré. Even if it was I don't accept the argument that this automatically means that he was somehow declassed or non-proletarian. Its only natural that the intellectuals should rise to leading positions in any party and particularly an illegal one operating against an extremely hostile state. Similarly its no surprise when it is these leading figures who are most prone to being arrested/exiled

But then I fail to see how a party's class composition can be judged solely, or primarily, from its summit. As I've said, lower down the party was overwhelmingly proletarian – not just the rank and file membership but also the next tier of leadership, such as the regional committees. Plenty of the leading Bolsheviks in 1917, particularly from the labour movement, were drawn straight from the ranks of the working class. It was these, along with the wider membership, that voted on and helped decide Bolshevik policies. So no, I see no grounds for insisting that the Bolsheviks were a party of intellectuals or the petit-bourgeoisie

Angular argument, again. While it is true that the RSDLP as a whole was more a collection of local and regional committees than a homogenous group, these "interlocking groups" also accepted the role of their exiled leaderships as the bodies that set the political and practical parameters for their work, even as they were the ones to carry it out. They accepted the idea that "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement", and, as you point out, it was up to "those notables in foreign exile" to concern themselves with "abstract 'high policy' and internecine squabbles". In other words, it is exactly as I pointed outEh, no. These various bodies accepted basic party doctrine because they had a direct role in formulating it. Similarly their acceptance of 'high policy' was an actual procedure – Bolshevik organisations and fractions could, and did, vote on whether to accept measures from the CC. Again, you seem to be faulting the Bolsheviks for being a functioning political party

You seem to forget that most of the Central Committee was also a part of the Petersburg Committee, and that the influence of the latter is due to this fact. These members of the C.C. had daily interaction with the members of the Petersburg Committee between February and October, so one could only expect that there would be a strong interplay between the two.The Petersburg Committee had at least 30+ members in 1917 and proved to be fiercely independent. On more than one occasion CC members, who did not normally sit with the PC, were forced to present to it on CC resolutions. They would then be grilled on the topic at hand before the PC would vote on whether or not to endorse the motion. This is not a sign of undue. Indeed by the beginning of October 1917 the positions of the CC and PC were very much opposed with the latter supporting Lenin over the former

But it is "bad history" to attempt to project that interrelationship in a period of revolution, with both entities literally standing on the same ground, to the entirety of the all-Russian organization throughout its entire historyThe Petersburg Committee is the most obvious example both due to its relative importance and the degree of research that has been devoted to affairs in Petrograd. The next most significant Bolshevik organisation was in Moscow where the local Bolsheviks were also often at odds with the CC and throughout 1917 pursued a fairly different line to that of the other capital. The story is repeated, to lesser degrees perhaps, throughout many of the Russian regional bureaus. As I said, you go far enough into the countryside and you'd find committees that didn't even acknowledge the Bolshevik/Menshevik split

It was only as the working class as a whole gained greater breathing space -- in the periods around the 1905 and 1917 revolutions -- that the local circles also found the freedom to question openly the decisions of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and that the leaderships of both could actually feel the pressures of their respective memberships. It was not until these periods that the "pressures 'from below'" could really be transmitted and receivedThere's possibly something in that but then I'm restricting myself to the Bolshevik party of 1917 (and onwards) for that very reason. In the oppressive atmosphere of the Tsardom it was simply impossible for a party to function in a democratic and unified manner. Particularly true of the war years (pre-1917) when the party apparatus was severely weakened by mass arrests and mobilisations

I'd also note of course that it was precisely this distance that permitted the growth of these independently minded organisations. When the leadership did return in 1917 it was greeted by those Bolsheviks who had been organising events on the ground for years and were in no mood to simply kowtow to the émigrés. I believe that there was a real distinction between those who remained in Russia (exile or activist) and those who had fled abroad

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I would argue that this is a very sterile and clinical approach to history -- an approach I reject out of hand. It is the method of the bureaucrat or functionary, and it purges the very thing that makes history from its subject: humanity. In your attempt to find "objectivity" in history, you seem to forget that history is made by those who are anything but objective. The historian is not an arbiter of what is and is not proper history; the historian realizes that his or her role is to understand all sides that went into making an historical event, as well as how those events re-made those who were its participantsOh, please. I'm the one on these forums who constantly has to draw attention away from the figureheads and towards the masses and processes that participated in events. Nor do I shun a good primary source. The reason I enjoy Reed and Sukhanov so much is that they succeed in conjuring up a sense of the chaotic excitement that comes from living in interesting times. Do you really think that I would spend so much time (and money :() on researching the Revolution if I did not find it an endlessly fascinating and gripping human drama?

The whole idea that being "objective" means ignoring the human element to proceedings is nonsense. What I set out to do is better understand the conditions that this drama was played out against. We all do this – some view the Revolution through the traditional Marxist-Leninist lens, others prefer anarchist narratives, or left communist interpretations, etc, etc. Me, I'm not satisfied with any of these. So I read, I draw my own conclusions, and, yes, I try to be as objective as possible. That is, without buying into any one romantic or tainted narrative of events

What we get from Brinton on the factory-shop committees is a view that, while perhaps not completely accurate, did reflect views held by those who opposed the seemingly inevitable fate of those bodiesI disagree. What you get from Brinton is how the Bolsheviks and FCs were viewed by 1960s libertarian socialists. Avrich on the other hand is capable of presenting contemporary anarchist views of the Bolsheviks but he will still criticise the former if need be. I disagree with a lot of Avrich's conclusions but he's a pretty decent historian. Certainly I would have no problem recommending him to anyone on those grounds

So if you want a view on the "dissident current" then I would recommend either a good historian (Avrich) or a relevant primary source. The true antidote to Trotsky is not Brinton but Goldman

The problem is that you combine the effort to defend the Bolsheviks with an approach toward history that does not allow for that. You roar loudly but actually say nothing, because you do not allow yourself to speak the language of your subject. You try to take sides ... without taking sides. You try to defend the a political act or political movement ... without speaking to the politics involved. In your effort to stand above the functionaries and bureaucrats ... you take on their characteristics in your selective acceptance of historyI'd like to think that I've achieved a dialectical understanding of history through these contradictions. Small joke there

Seriously though, I have no idea what you are saying above

I agree with you that the Bolsheviks and the working class drew closer during the course of 1917. Rabinowitch and numerous other historians who have examined the events of that time have confirmed this. But things change over time, and the conjuncture of the Bolsheviks and the proletariat at that time did change as the revolution progressed, which is the point I was making in regards to the factory-shop committees. It's not that I see some great anti-working class conspiracy by capitalist infiltrators; what I see is a party that, through a series of theoretical and policy mistakes, maneuvered itself increasingly into a position where the petty bourgeoisie was able to take control and drive a wedge into the middle of that conjunctural unity ... and the decision on the factory-shop committees was an example of that maneuvering and driving of the wedge.I think we are approaching the same question from different angles here. You perceive "a series of theoretical and policy mistakes" whereas I am more concerned with the material and social conditions that these decisions took place in. So when I look at the FC movement I'm not particularly concerned with Bolshevik policy towards this (as I noted earlier this was not a hot topic for the CC) but the interaction between the two groups and the degree to which they impacted each other. Stepping away from politics and examine what actually happened. Personally I'd like to think that mine is the more nuanced approach but they are probably irreconcilable

Which is not to say that I completely ignore Bolshevik policy in this or any case

It is not dishonesty that I am seeing here; if I felt you were being dishonest I would have said so (ask around and you'll see what I mean). But it does seem to me that your fundamental views did not begin with Smith and other "academics", but with the very people you leave off your bibliography as "primary source" writers. If there's any dishonesty going on here (and I am not making such a charge as it relates to your arguments with others), it would only be with yourselfWas I a complete political babe when I started reading up on Russia? Of course not. I think I described myself as a Leninist in my first post on this forum and it’s a label I still use. My conception of Leninism however has changed radically in the intervening years and this is something that I credit to my own reading of events in Russia almost a century ago. Some of my early arguments on Lenin are really entirely unsustainable in hindsight (although I'd like to think I was never a blind dogmatic) and I would have to disavow them completely if put in front of me today. I'd also like to think that I'd have gone through the same process, perhaps not to the same conclusions admittedly, had I approached the subject from a different political angle. But then maybe that's all just a vanity I hold

None of which was motivated by any bad experience with a 'party line' – really, I just find the Russian Revolution endlessly fascinating and unquestionably the defining event for the communist movement – but it is true that I have absolutely no time for those whose conception of history extends no further than regurgitating quotes from Lenin or Marx in the belief that these are somehow final authorities on history. Have a look through our local History Forum and I guarantee that a tiny minority of threads on Russia have any worthwhile content in them. People just argue and argue over quotes and throw their competing myths against each other. This I find staggering for the defining event of the 20th C and the lodestone for almost all communist currents today

So perhaps there is some truth to what you say but if I have gone too far in the other direction, which I still don't think I have, then it would be worth it to inject some sense and perspective into the discussion. Even if my contribution is simply pointing out that the various myths that people keeping arguing over and over are exactly that - myths

Incidentally, there's no primary sources on my bibliography simply because I never got round to updating the damn thing. I've not been too pushed to rectify that because everyone already knows Goldman, Trotsky, Reed, etc, but people do often ask for secondary works and have trouble finding good ones

The problem here is primarily political. The Bolsheviks never took the concept of workers' self-emancipation too seriously, mostly because they did not see it as incredibly relevant for their activityWhich is a roundabout way of stating the obvious – the Bolsheviks were not syndicalists. A lot of the criticism levelled at them (particularly from the likes of Brinton) ignores this fundamental point and proceeds from the assumption that the syndicalist argument is correct; ergo any deviation from this is paramount to betrayal

For the most part, they anticipated a bourgeois-democratic revolution ... and that's it. Not even after 1905 did they actually expect a situation where the workers themselves would be in control of the economy and society. Lenin may have written political pamphlets like Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, where he anticipated a measure of workers' participation in the leadership of the next revolution, but neither he nor the rest of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP took one concrete step to actually prepare workers for actual practical leadership themselves. They forgot (or ignored, depending on your point of view) the principle that, "The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". As a result, neither the Russian working class nor the worker-Bolsheviks were prepared for their tasks after October 1917. Honestly, I think this allowed the petty bourgeoisie, who were more conscious of their position in society and how it was going to be altered by the revolution, to take control of the Bolshevik Party after 1917An interesting point but for now I’ll just note that Sukhanov, who as I mentioned I’m currently reading, makes exactly the same point in his memoirs. I’m not going to discard the theory because of its origins (I do think there is something to the idea) but I’m currently undecided as to how much this is over-thinking, in typical Menshevik fashion, a movement that was flaying by the seat of its pants in true revolutionary manner

The obvious counterpoint here is that the very act of mobilising and organising – of forming soviets, FCs, Red Guards, etc – was an education in itself. The mistake that Sukhanov, and many following him, was to assume that the Bolsheviks were driving this movement forward when in reality its momentum and character were very much coming from below. Its also hard to see what concrete technical skills, that would actually be useful post-Revolution, the Bolsheviks could have provided when they were so lacking in them themselves. Obviously as well the ‘Marxist’ heritage of the Second International proved to be almost useless once the Bolsheviks had broken from this template

But then these are just idle thoughts. I’ll have to spend more time on this if I can

syndicat

8th March 2010, 20:25

And would we all agree that direct workers control dissolved at around the 1919/1920 period?

what do you mean by worker control? There were between 300 and 400 enterprises that had been expropriated from below and where there were elected worker committees in control. These were gradually eliminated once the civil war got under way in the summer of 1918 with the push for one-man management. By 1920 there were none left. In the 1919 party program a promise of eventual union management of the economy was included to pacify Communist Party trade union members who were highly dissatisfied by this trend towards re-imposition of boss control. This was the basis of the Workers Opposition proposal for elected industrial management boards and a Producers Congress in 1921. This is discussed in detail in "The Bolsheviks & Workers Control" by Brinton.