How The Revolution Was Lost

[BurnTheOliveTree]

Hey guys, hope everyone is well.

I would like to know people's response to Chris Harman's article "How The Revolution Was Lost", which presents the most common Trotskyist analysis of why things degenerated after 1917, i.e. The civil war and the isolation of the revolution meant that the workers who had won the revolution were in large part destroyed in the conflicts, which meant that the society which developed could not have been socialist:


They had always said that isolation of the revolution would result in its destruction by foreign armies and domestic counter-revolution. What confronted them now was the success of counterrevolution from abroad in destroying the class that had led the revolution while leaving intact the State apparatus built up by it. The revolutionary power had survived; but radical changes were being produced in its internal composition.


of necessity the Soviet institutions took on a life independently of the class they had arisen from.

And also I would like any views on common anarchist critiques of this position:


The major problem with this assertion is simply that the Russian working class was more than capable of collective action throughout the Civil War period -- against the Bolsheviks. In the Moscow area, while it is "impossible to say what proportion of workers were involved in the various disturbances," following the lull after the defeat of the workers' conference movement in mid-1918 "each wave of unrest was more powerful than the last, culminating in the mass movement from late 1920." For example, at the end of June 1919, "a Moscow committee of defence (KOM) was formed to deal with the rising tide of disturbances . . . KOM concentrated emergency power in its hands, overriding the Moscow Soviet, and demanding obedience from the population. The disturbances died down under the pressure of repression." In early 1921, "military units called in" against striking workers "refused to open fire, and they were replaced by the armed communist detachments" who did. "The following day several factories went on strike" and troops "disarmed and locked in as a precaution" by the government against possible fraternising.

Harman's article -http://www.marxists.de/statecap/harman/revlost.htm

Anarchist critique - http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchism/writers/anarcho/revlost_critique.html

Sorry if this is quite a basic discussion to want to have, but I can't seem to get my views to settle on the matter. Peace.

[Jazzhands]

Although I'm really an anarchist, I respect the Trotskyist analysis of the Russian Revolution more than the anarchist one. Maybe the Bolsheviks planned to do this from the beginning, but I doubt it. The limitations on soviet power were a sad consequence of the Russian Civil War that were supposed to guarantee the unity necessary to fight a civil war, akin to Abraham Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War. The difference was that Lenin died before he could give back soviet power. Due to the numerous compromises with other parties and factions before and during the revolution, the Bolsheviks were now infested with people who had either no interest in returning soviet power or no understanding of what it was in the first place. On the other hand, the huge amount of power in the hands of authoritarian parts of the state like the Cheka even in Bolshevik strongholds was not necessary at all. Contrary to the name, Stalin was actually not the first Stalinist (where we assume Stalinist holds the Trotskyist analysis of the term as it is originally used). Dzerzhinsky was, and he had a lot more power than Stalin at the time. It would be wrong for anyone to blame the decay of the revolution on Stalin alone. The decay of the revolution resulted from a defect that was always there that compounded on the problems of fighting a Civil War and opened the way for someone like Stalin.

[syndicat]

The difference was that Lenin died before he could give back soviet power.

well, that's an idealist position that sees liberation handed down from above by "the great leader."

the civil war didn't begin til june 1918, and many of the moves that consolidated a bureaucratic control layer began earlier, such as subordination of the shop committees to the centralized union apparatus, creation from above of a state centralist planning council in Nov 1917, creation of a conventional army run by ex-czarist officers in spring of 1918.

also, the civil war was over by the end of 1920. and at the party congress in Mar 1921 the Workers Opposition, supported by Bukharin, demanded worker election of management boards. so the party had an opportunity to move back towards worker democracy. but Lenin and Trotsky fought bitterly against any such direction. the party not only banned all other political organizations in the working class, but also banned factions in the party.

a civil war doesn't have to mean destruction of worker democracy. in the Spanish revolution the anarcho-syndicalists set up workers management throughout whole industries, for example.

so, it's just an excuse. the problem is that it was a hierarchical party taking state power, and the party's fixation was on it having control of the government, not on participation by working people in controlling their own lives.

[Jazzhands]

well, that's an idealist position that sees liberation handed down from above by "the great leader."

the civil war didn't begin til june 1918, and many of the moves that consolidated a bureaucratic control layer began earlier, such as subordination of the shop committees to the centralized union apparatus, creation from above of a state centralist planning council in Nov 1917, creation of a conventional army run by ex-czarist officers in spring of 1918.

also, the civil war was over by the end of 1920. and at the party congress in Mar 1921 the Workers Opposition, supported by Bukharin, demanded worker election of management boards. so the party had an opportunity to move back towards worker democracy. but Lenin and Trotsky fought bitterly against any such direction. the party not only banned all other political organizations in the working class, but also banned factions in the party.

a civil war doesn't have to mean destruction of worker democracy. in the Spanish revolution the anarcho-syndicalists set up workers management throughout whole industries, for example.

so, it's just an excuse. the problem is that it was a hierarchical party taking state power, and the party's fixation was on it having control of the government, not on participation by working people in controlling their own lives.

I think you're right for the most part. I don't think Lenin "gave" soviet power, though, the workers took that for themselves. I think he just took it away as the head of the state. and he could do that because, well, he had guys with guns on his side. I don't believe power flows from any "great leader," I think we need to clarify that now.

[ComradeOm]

The impact of the Civil War can be over-stated. It was important, and played a crucial role in shaping (and militarising) the early Soviet state, but was not single-handily responsible for the near-dissolution of the proletariat as a class. To that we have to turn to the economic crisis that had begun in late 1916 and continually escalated. By October 1917 the economy was in a state of terminal collapse, ironically the Revolution hastened this by leading to a sharp drop in war orders, while the transportation network had effectively broken down entirely. This decline was not halted by the Revolution - some, including Paul Avrich, have suggested that the increasing power of the FCs contributed to the chaos but I wouldn't fully agree with that - but only worsened

The most important impact was that food, already scarce, simply stopped getting to the cities. It was famine, not the White Armies, that decimated the Russian proletariat. The statistics are truly frightening - I don't have exact figures on hand but Petrograd's population declined by over 75% in less than a year while Moscow's almost halved. This was repeated across the country as people either starved or fled to the villages. No Western nation has ever witnessed such an economic or social collapse

Results were that Soviet power, which rested on grassroots participation in soviet bodies (from district to city and regional), was effectively hollowed out almost immediately after its moment of triumph. Even if the Bolsheviks had been the evil cartoon villains that some would portray them as, they had arrived in power on the back of this incredibly vibrant and democratic movement. The soviets would not have tolerated any usurpation of their power had they been in a position to


the civil war didn't begin til june 1918I've brought you up on this before (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1773621&postcount=39). To quote:

"If you buy a book on the Russian Civil War and it doesn't start until June 1918 then please ask for your money back. The Volunteer Army was formed in December 1917 and there was fighting throughout the Don regions (ie, Red Army formations fought Volunteer Army formations) as early as January 1918. The Ice March was in February and Kornilov was killed in action while attempting to take Yekaterinodar in April"


...such as subordination of the shop committees to the centralized union apparatus...With the agreement of the FCs themselves. As witnessed by the Sixth Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees (Jan 1918) which accepted the merger and laid down the conditions for it. If this was "subordination" (and it was far more ambiguous than that) then it was voluntary


...creation from above of a state centralist planning council in Nov 1917...As demanded by the All-Russian Council of Factory Committees as early as October (old calender) 1917


...at the party congress in Mar 1921 the Workers Opposition, supported by Bukharin, demanded worker election of management boards. so the party had an opportunity to move back towards worker democracy...And if, as the WO argued in favour of, the unions (or the "centralized union apparatus") were given control of the economy, then what would stopped them becoming just another VSNKh? More to the point, if the unions were now a key component of the management structures then who would represent the interest of the workers against management?

The irony being that the WO, despite having perfectly laudable reasons, were proposing that the unions should 'turn their faces to production' as they would later do under the Stalinist economy

But then none of these nuances have any role in the typical syndicalist narrative that views the workers and the Bolsheviks as two fundamentally opposing forces. Small details - such as the fact that the FCs were more Bolshevik inclined than the unions and that congresses of the former regularly voted en masse for Bolshevik resolutions - are to be glossed over in order to construct a false dichotomy

[Blake's Baby]

I came to realise some years ago that the only factor that needs to be present is the isolation of the revolution.

Consider - if socialism in one country is impossible, which most of us agree it is, then no matter what policies the Bolsheviks pursued in power; no matter what alternative power structures might have been set up; no matter what other concept of revolution might have seized the Russian working class leading to what other outcome, the revolution must have been doomed if it failed to spread. To believe otherwise is to believe that a socialist transformation in an isolated territory is possible if only the 'right' policy is pursued, which is of course Stalinism.

So if this is true, then at best the policies of the Bolsheviks, or any alternative policies of the oppositions, the Anarchists or anyone else, could merely have accelerated or retarded, but not reversed, the decline of the revolution. They could change the shape, but not the fact, of irreversable decline.

It's like a trend-line on a graph that has to go from high to low. It might have wobbles in it, some lines might reach zero faster than other potential lines, but they're all going in the same direction. Some Trotskyists I suppose can get off the bus too at this point, because if you believe that a 'deformed workers' state' or whatever it was is a stable form that can last 70 years, then there's no reason to believe that the graph needs to tend downwards, you could just believe it spends 70 years flatlining. But to me that seems even more ludicrous than believing the graph is going up.

I don't believe the Civil War, the emptying of the soviets, the campaigns against the Anarchists, the banning of factions, the surpression of Kronstadt, the substitutionism of the Bolsheviks were irrelevent, but they weren't causal in the revolution's decline. Even without these things, if the revolution had remained isolated, it would still have declined.

So in the end the revolution was lost in the West, above all in Germany. Noske and the Freikorps murdered the Russian Revolution on the streets of Berlin. Over the period 1918-27, the world working class time and again raised its struggles and held out hope of rescue to Russia - in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Seattle, Winnipeg, Glasgow, and eventually Shanghai, where with the massacre in 1927 the revolutionary wave inspired by 1917 was brought to an end, drowned in blood. In the Soviet Union itself, by 1927 things were already pretty bad, but the possibility of world revolution held out hope that things could have turned round. The end of the revolutionary wave ended that possibility for another 40 years.

EDIT: of course this then begs the question, could alternative policies pursued by the Bolsheviks (or by anyone else) have been more effective in helping the revolutions in Europe and the rest of the world? And I think there the answer is undoubtedly 'yes they could'.

[ComradeOm]

EDIT: of course this then begs the question, could alternative policies pursued by the Bolsheviks (or by anyone else) have been more effective in helping the revolutions in Europe and the rest of the world? And I think there the answer is undoubtedly 'yes they could'.Which is really where your thesis falls down. Could the Bolsheviks have created a socialist society in isolation in Russia? No, of course not*. However a democratic Soviet regime bolstered and sustained by a strong and radical proletariat could have both halted the degeneration of its own revolution while simultaneously affecting the likelihood of similar uprisings throughout Europe

This is not to deny that the impact of Germany was of decisive importance but I find that simply condemning events in Russia to irrelevance is simply crass determinism

*Although whether the same applies to a Western nation at the time - ie a society that did not have to undertake of industrialisation or cope with the burden of the peasantry - is more debatable

[Lyev]

This thread -- mainly the debate between Miles and ComradeOm -- is very interesting and informative: http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-one-party-t129113/index.html. the debate is quite long so it's a bit cumbersome to repost it all here. ComradeOm (I don't know if he wants to elaborate on this here) argues that, contrary to some viewpoints, the Bolshevik party weren't all predominantly petit-bourgeois. Miles seems to think otherwise. I think the civil war obviously played a part: the most committed and capable party members were usually sent to high positions in the army, and therefore many of the most committed and capable died in the war. Also, I think perhaps some of the mistakes of the Bolsheviks snow-balled. An example of this being the loss of Ukraine, twinned with the famine of 1921 (although I don't know how inter-related these two events are) led to food shortages as industrial workers left the cities for countryside. I think there's also the factor of the FCs, and their severance from grassroots democracy and accountability (I think this is pretty much right, I'm not sure though, don't shoot me down if I am wrong), because I think I read somewhere that somewhere in that 1919-22 period the structure of trade-unions were bureaucratised, and FCs were taken away from management of the "troika" and were put under control of one-man management*. However, my knowledge is rather patchy in places (sorry if I sound really vague) so I could be hugely wrong in some facts and the "how the revolution was lost" is a very broad and complex topic.

*EDIT: no, sorry, it was that the factory-shop committees were absorbed into the trade-union structure.