Lars T Lih, the CPGB, and Kautskyism

[Die Neue Zeit]

Unlike the Permanent Revolution critique ("Debating Kautsky's Legacy"), this Trotskyist critique is lengthier and addresses both Lars Lih and Mike Macnair in a single go:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34666014/Lars-T-Lih-The-CPGB-and-Kautskyism

[I don't agree with the critique for obvious reasons, of course.]

[The Idler]

Its worth pointing out it is published by the International Trotskyist Current a.k.a. Socialist Fight.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In other words, Gerry Downing's sectlet. He's the guy who wrote a Trotskyist counter-article to Jack Conrad's critique of "Trotskyite economism" ("Programmatic masks and transitional fleas").

[Tower of Bebel]

I don't like reading these muddled texts. Those big words like method, perspectives, etc!

Lenin’s old slogan “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” which the April Theses repudiated in favour of the essence of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution I'm posing two questions here. One, didn't Lenin reconcile his formula with Permanent Revolution in his "On the Two Lines in the Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/nov/20.htm)" (1915)? And two, why does the author write "the essence of Trotsky's Permanent Revolution"?

The point is, "Permanent Revolution" is already visible in Marx' and Engels' writings since the 1850's. There's no point in claiming that Lenin came to Permanent Revolution because of Trotsky; the principles, the "essence", it was all there before the 1905 revolution. The thing is, Lenin and Trotsky differed tactically, not strategically. And Lenin attacked Trotsky for his alleged mistakes. There's no point in mentioning "Trotsky's" because Trotsky was by far not the only one. You could say he had the best interpretation of it, but Lenin didn't think so.

Lars T Lih doesn't want to prove where Lenin got his "Permanent Revolution" from, he just wanted to prove that Lenin still looked at the old teachings of Kautsky. Lenin probably read Kautsky and thought he could fill in that unknown variable Kautsky mentioned in his text (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker2/index.php?action=viewarticle&article_id=1002036). Lenin supported a flexible, strategic formula and the concrete implementation of it would depend on a balance of forces. (Will the peasants rise, how will the proletariat relate itself to the party, will Europe rise up?)

If you look at Lenin's "Two Lines" you'll see he makes a move against Trotsky's "theory" (think of it as "phrases") because "life has been bypassing this splendid theory". Life, concrete conditions that is, and Lenin validates his reasoning by explaining how he came to his conclusions (which is not the result of a theory but the result of a decent analysis): "the antagonism between the peasantry, on the one hand, and the Markovs, Romanovs and Khvostovs, on the other, has become stronger and more acute. This is such an obvious truth that not even the thousands of phrases in scores of Trotsky’s Paris articles will “refute” it".

Another example of why Lenin attacked Trotsky's "theory": "The war crisis has strengthened the economic and political factors that are impelling the petty hourgeoisie, including the peasantry, to the left". Lenin was able to sum up the conditions that compelled him to interpret his own formula this or that way. Where does he got his formula from? Why did he say that "this [Lenin's "perspective"] was admitted before the war by all influential socialists in all advanced countries"? That was what Lars T Lih tried to prove! Well, according to Lars T Lih, Lenin wrote all this because he based himself on the marxist traditions of Kautsky (et al)! As a matter of fact even Trotsky based his 1906 work partially on the "perspectives" of Kautsky.

I'm not attacking Trotsky here, he was in many ways a hero, but I just cannot agree with that article.

[A.R.Amistad]

Not to bring down this thread, but what exactly are Lih's opinions on Kautsky and Kautskyism? It kind of seems like he's trying to say that people have misunderstood Kautskyism. I've read through Lenin Rediscovered and liked it, but I didn't read all of it and focused mainly on WITBD itself. I also don't own the book. Can someone clarify this for me please?

[chegitz guevara]

Basically, the ortho-Leninist position is that while Lenin was originally a follower of Kautsky, it's only because he had stars in his eyes, and didn't really understand that Kautsky was a mechanical Marxist and reformist. That even as early as WItbD?, Lenin was subconsciously breaking with Kautsky. Lih argues, on the contrary, Lenin is the consummate Kaustkist, and he attacks Kautsky because Kautsky abandons his own politics. Kautsky is a renegade because he abandons Kaustkism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So how come you've repeated the line of Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs of Kautsky being "mechanical" when you criticized me for my "mechanical" party approach in the PCF thread? ;) :p

[A.R.Amistad]

Basically, the ortho-Leninist position is that while Lenin was originally a follower of Kautsky, it's only because he had stars in his eyes, and didn't really understand that Kautsky was a mechanical Marxist and reformist. That even as early as WItbD?, Lenin was subconsciously breaking with Kautsky. Lih argues, on the contrary, Lenin is the consummate Kaustkist, and he attacks Kautsky because Kautsky abandons his own politics. Kautsky is a renegade because he abandons Kaustkism.

so, is the take tht Kausty was in fact not mechanical? The mechanical materialism of Kautsky was always something I was never fond of.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Kautsky was never "mechanical," contrary to what was written about him by that unholy trio of Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs.

[A.R.Amistad]

Kautsky was never "mechanical," contrary to what was written about him by that unholy trio of Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs.

Can you elaborate? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just hoping you could expand on the topic, particularly on Kautsky's views of Historical Materialism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Kautsky's most important political contribution, even more than outlining the Marxist theory of imperialism mis-credited to Lenin, was the distinction between a revolutionary period and a non-revolutionary period. In the latter, comrades need to focus on alternative cultures and the rest of the pre-war SPD and inter-war USPD models as outstanding role models for left politics today, thereby paying attention "to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics." One of the decisive factors leading to the former is the existence of such a party-movement.

I've laid out a Kautskyan argument in my History thread on the PCF, for example, and how it wouldn't be selling out if a Kautskyan party with no majority political support encouraged striking French workers back to work in 1968 instead of foolishly continuing their spontaneous action; it has to do with the party program, and nobody has yet countered my hypothetical scenario.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/pcfs-role-may-t138705/index.html


Notwithstanding the PCF's reformist program, I'd like to ask exactly how in other aspects did the PCF sell out the French working class in May 1968, when considering that France did not have a genuinely revolutionary situation. Yes, there was mass hostility between the state and the workers, and there was a collapse in the French executive and bureaucracy, but there was no mass political party-movement organizing the wildcat strikes and gaining political support from the workers.

In other words, nobody in that thread answered "how in other aspects did the PCF sell out."

[Lenina Rosenweg]

My understanding is that France was in a revolutionary situation in May, 68. Workers were occupying plants and factories. DeGaulle in a panic flew to Germany and there was at least the possibility of NATO troops occupying France. The PCF defused the revolutionary situation by confining the struggle within parliamentarianism. The situation could have played out much differently.

The Goddard film, "Tu Va Bien", while it takes place a few years later, references the events of 68 and the treason of the PCF.

[Zanthorus]

Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs.

To be honest I've never thought much of either of the three. I don't know about anyone else but I've never been able to actually understand what Korsch or Lukacs were talking about. Lukacs did make a modicum of sense but Korsch just seems to use "dialectic" as a contentless codeword. The only reason Gramsci is popular is because the Eurocommunists didn't want to embrace any revolutionary anti-stalinist politics and they could never water down Bordiga in the same way.

However I do think it's undeniable that Kautsky distorted Marx in several ways.

[S.Artesian]

To be honest I've never thought much of either of the three. I don't know about anyone else but I've never been able to actually understand what Korsch or Lukacs were talking about. Lukacs did make a modicum of sense but Korsch just seems to use "dialectic" as a contentless codeword. The only reason Gramsci is popular is because the Eurocommunists didn't want to embrace any revolutionary anti-stalinist politics and they could never water down Bordiga in the same way.

However I do think it's undeniable that Kautsky distorted Marx in several ways.

Outstanding. I agree on all three, except I think Lukacs is the worst of the bunch, representing a giant step backward, a "hermeticizing" of Marx, divorcing it, Marxism, from concrete analysis of the actual conditions of capitalist reproduction and the prospects for the overthrow of that reproduction. Lukacs made Marxism an alienated labor.

But you are spot on regarding Korsch and Gramsci.

[S.Artesian]

Kautsky was never "mechanical," contrary to what was written about him by that unholy trio of Gramsci, Korsch, and Lukacs.


No, he just equivocated when it came to opposing capitalism, to actually counterposing the proletariat to the bourgeoisie at the most critical juncture in the history of class struggle, the initiation of World War 1.

He had no such problems, no equivocation when it came to attacking the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, but hey those are just technicalities.

Equivocate on WW1, no problem.

Attack the only workers' struggle to actually seize and maintain its class power in the face of a civil war and imperialist isolation, not to worry.

As long as we don't mistakenly slander KK as "mechanical..."





"Notwithstanding the PCF's reformist program, I'd like to ask exactly how in other aspects did the PCF sell out the French working class in May 1968, when considering that France did not have a genuinely revolutionary situation. Yes, there was mass hostility between the state and the workers, and there was a collapse in the French executive and bureaucracy, but there was no mass political party-movement organizing the wildcat strikes and gaining political support from the workers."

In other words, nobody in that thread answered "how in other aspects did the PCF sell out."



That's because all other aspects are derived from, secondary to, follow from its reformist program.

[Zanthorus]

Outstanding. I agree on all three, except I think Lukacs is the worst of the bunch, representing a giant step backward, a "hermeticizing" of Marx, divorcing it, Marxism, from concrete analysis of the actual conditions of capitalist reproduction and the prospects for the overthrow of that reproduction. Lukacs made Marxism an alienated labor.

But, crucially, he made some sense. I mean "What is Orthodox Marxism?" and the idea that the fundamental thing it not Marx's individual pronouncements but his method. That made sense. It was something a babbling three year old could've worked out. But it made sense. I also managed to work out from the rest of History and Class Consciousness that his ideas had something to do with "totality" and the idea that class consciousness actually has nothing to do with the real consciousness of the working class. Those are both shit ideas, but I can understand them.

Now if you asked me what Korsch had wrote, I'd just stare at you blankly.

[Die Neue Zeit]

To be honest I've never thought much of either of the three. I don't know about anyone else but I've never been able to actually understand what Korsch or Lukacs were talking about. Lukacs did make a modicum of sense but Korsch just seems to use "dialectic" as a contentless codeword. The only reason Gramsci is popular is because the Eurocommunists didn't want to embrace any revolutionary anti-stalinist politics and they could never water down Bordiga in the same way.

However I do think it's undeniable that Kautsky distorted Marx in several ways.

The only relevant things Lukacs said are the phrases "class in itself" and "class for itself."

Gramsci is popular also because of his cultural hegemony stuff. He tried to replace False Consciousness with Ideology, but now that I've elaborated on the Crises of Consciousness, there's no reason not to turn back to Kautsky's contribution, even at the expense of Gramsci.


No, he just equivocated when it came to opposing capitalism, to actually counterposing the proletariat to the bourgeoisie at the most critical juncture in the history of class struggle, the initiation of World War 1.

He had no such problems, no equivocation when it came to attacking the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, but hey those are just technicalities.

Although I'm not a dialectician (see "dynamic materialism" instead or dyna-mat), Lenin thought of Kautsky as a master dialectician. The distinction between a non-revolutionary period and a revolutionary period was display of such mastery.

He wrongly attacked the Russian Revolution, but like Luxemburg he also criticized the Bolsheviks in all the wrong areas. The former screamed "Cheka!" while the latter screamed "Constituent Assembly! Universal Suffrage!"

Nobody made a scathing attack on the anti-soviet Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918. Nobody advocated a 1920 overthrow of the Bolsheviks themselves by a much more spineful coalition of Menshevik-Internationalists and Left-SRs, that brief timeframe when it was geopolitically safe for the workers to entertain that possibility.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

To be honest I've never thought much of either of the three. I don't know about anyone else but I've never been able to actually understand what Korsch or Lukacs were talking about. Lukacs did make a modicum of sense but Korsch just seems to use "dialectic" as a contentless codeword. The only reason Gramsci is popular is because the Eurocommunists didn't want to embrace any revolutionary anti-stalinist politics and they could never water down Bordiga in the same way.

However I do think it's undeniable that Kautsky distorted Marx in several ways.

Interesting-you might be right. What I got out of Lukacs was how bourgeois philosophy as exemplified in Hegel had reached a dead end. Korsch was similar to Lukacs (a bit easier to understand, at least for me). Unlike Lukacs he remained more of a left communist. Lukacs seems to have buckled under to Stalinism-he came out against or at least did not support the Hungarian worker's councils in '56.

Korsch supposedly taught Marxism to Bertolt Brecht (which probably isn't saying all that much). He criticized the mechanism of the Marxism of the Second International and the "Orthodox Marxism" of Stalinism. For obvious reasons he became politically isolated. I'm actually a bit surprised that S. Artesian and Zanthrorus don't like him.

Gramsci's ideas were distorted by Eurocommunists and post-modernists but he seems to have been an honest revolutionary.

This is the first time I've come across real Marxists who don't like these guys, but then it is possible I should try to get out more.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

To be honest I've never thought much of either of the three. I don't know about anyone else but I've never been able to actually understand what Korsch or Lukacs were talking about. Lukacs did make a modicum of sense but Korsch just seems to use "dialectic" as a contentless codeword. The only reason Gramsci is popular is because the Eurocommunists didn't want to embrace any revolutionary anti-stalinist politics and they could never water down Bordiga in the same way.

However I do think it's undeniable that Kautsky distorted Marx in several ways.

My understanding is that Korsch was critiquing Lenin's use of Hegel. This is from KK's critique of Materialism & Empirio-Citicism

Lenin as Philosopher
The recent publication by the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Institute of Lenin’s philosophical papers dated from 1914 et seq. shows the first germs of that particular significance which during the last phases of Lenin’s activity and after his death the philosophical thought of Hegel assumed in Lenin’s “materialistic philosophy.” A belated revival of the whole of the formerly disowned idealistic dialectics of Hegel served to reconcile the acceptance by the Leninists of old bourgeois materialism with the formal demands of an apparently antibourgeois and proletarian revolutionary tendency. Whilst in the preceding phases historical materialism still had been conceived, though not with sufficient clearness, as different from the “previous forms of materialism” the emphasis was now shifted from “historical” materialism to dialectical materialism or, as Lenin said in his latest contribution to the subject, to “a materialistic application of Hegelian (idealistic) dialectics”. Thus the whole circle not only of bourgeois materialistic thought but of all bourgeois philosophical thought from Holbach to Hegel was actually repeated by the Russian dominated phase of the Marxist movement, which passed from the adoption of 18th century and Feuerbachian materialism by Plekhanov and Lenin in the pre-war period to Lenin’s appreciation of the “intelligent idealism” of Hegel and other bourgeois philosophers of the 19th century as against the “unintelligent materialism” of the earlier 18th century philosophers. [7]

[Die Neue Zeit]

This is the first time I've come across real Marxists who don't like these guys, but then it is possible I should try to get out more.

You can start with the pre-1910 works of Karl Kautsky. ;)

[Lenina Rosenweg]

You can start with the pre-1910 works of Karl Kautsky. ;)

The Road To Power is on my reading list. I downloaded it a month ago. I'm starting with the "heretics" first.I will get to Kautsky, promise.

I have read the Mike McNair book.Interesting stuff. I'm not sure if I agree with it but then I still have a lot more reading to do. As I understand he (and the CPGB) advocates a non-statist Kautskyism. That's what I got out of it, in a nutshell.

[Die Neue Zeit]

We advocate a re-emulation of the pre-war SPD model. I extend this polemically to include the inter-war USPD and purposefully denounce the formation of the ultra-left KPD.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Kautsky's most important political contribution, even more than outlining the Marxist theory of imperialism mis-credited to Lenin, was the distinction between a revolutionary period and a non-revolutionary period. In the latter, comrades need to focus on alternative cultures and the rest of the pre-war SPD and inter-war USPD models as outstanding role models for left politics today, thereby paying attention "to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics." One of the decisive factors leading to the former is the existence of such a party-movement.

In other words, nobody in that thread answered "how in other aspects did the PCF sell out."

Interesting question. My understanding is that the situations were different in 1919 Germany and 1968 France.

Possibly the Comintern made a mistake with the 21 Demands or whatever it was, they misjudged the possibility of revolution. Hobsbawm and McNair think so. Still , I don't see how the USPD could be a model exactly. Didn't they have both Kautsky (after he "fell apart" ) and Bernstein in the same organization? Germany was experiencing armed revolution. There were worker's armies into the early 20s.

The PCF limited the possibility of socialist revolution by basically being the PCF. They limited the struggle to "parliamentary cretinism". The function of Stalinist parties was to act to stabilize capitalism.


thereby paying attention "to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics." One of the decisive factors leading to the former is the existence of such a party-movement.


The PCF was not this party. The USPD were confused and wishy washy. Trotsky somewhere had a good critique of them, the "Two and a half International".

[S.Artesian]

But, crucially, he made some sense. I mean "What is Orthodox Marxism?" and the idea that the fundamental thing it not Marx's individual pronouncements but his method. [emphasis added-sa]That made sense. It was something a babbling three year old could've worked out. But it made sense. I also managed to work out from the rest of History and Class Consciousness that his ideas had something to do with "totality" and the idea that class consciousness actually has nothing to do with the real consciousness of the working class. Those are both shit ideas, but I can understand them.


Actually, it's that emphasized bit that is the real weakness, IMO, in Lukacs' idealist recuperation of Marx. I mean what would Marx's method amount to if the analysis itself was fundamentally mistaken? If it were impossible to find concrete validation of Marx's analysis in the actual metabolism of capital?

Well according to Marx himself it would mean he was full of hot air, and that his materialism wasn't quite that material; that his "condensation" of or abstraction from the concrete to identify the determinants of capitalist reproduction was mistaken.

Lukacs may have been trying to refute the bourgeois economists who tried to take Marx to task based on their own incomprehension of Marx, but Lukacs, rather than explore that incomprehension and contrast it with Marx's actual analysis of capitalist reproduction, decides instead to make Marxism a "leap of faith"-- a catechism.

As such, it didn't surprise me one bit that Lukacs capitulated so easily, readily, and enthusiastically to the advance of Stalinism, having already rejected Marx's materialism in favor of religious cant.
____________________________________



Although I'm not a dialectician (see "dynamic materialism" instead or dyna-mat), Lenin thought of Kautsky as a master dialectician. The distinction between a non-revolutionary period and a revolutionary period was display of such mastery.

He wrongly attacked the Russian Revolution, but like Luxemburg he also criticized the Bolsheviks in all the wrong areas. The former screamed "Cheka!" while the latter screamed "Constituent Assembly! Universal Suffrage!"

Nobody made a scathing attack on the anti-soviet Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918. Nobody advocated a 1920 overthrow of the Bolsheviks themselves by a much more spineful coalition of Menshevik-Internationalists and Left-SRs, that brief timeframe when it was geopolitically safe for the workers to entertain that possibility.

Huh? Master dialectician with the distinction between revolutionary and non-revolutionary period being a display of that mastery? Well, I'm no master dialectician, but I do know that a dialectic would establish the connection between the revolutionary and the non-revolutionary period period, would show how the revolutionary exists within the non-revolutionary; how the non-revolutionary is the appearance, while the contradictions that will push the essential revolutionary conflict into manifestation build, accumulated-- actually are built and accumulated by the activities of the classes party to the conflict themselves.

So... a master dialectician would embrace a critical moment of historical recognition when the irresolvable conflict has emerged in all its brutality, and it is imperative to push forward the independent, organized opposition of the class that can eliminate the contradiction, and the brutality.

Somehow the master dialectician never made that recognition, that transition, that mediation, which Lenin and Trotsky and Luxemburg and so many others did. When push came to shove, some collapsed [like Lukacs did over later events]. Some shoved-- to their eternal credit and honor.

Short version... World War 1 when your "master dialectician" was revealed to be woefully inadequate to the tasks of that era; when your wizard of Oz was shown to be a huckster, a carnival barker, with a hot air balloon kept afloat by his own hot air.

Funny how you keep missing that minor flaw.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Huh? Master dialectician with the distinction between revolutionary and non-revolutionary period being a display of that mastery? Well, I'm no master dialectician, but I do know that a dialectic would establish the connection between the revolutionary and the non-revolutionary period

That connection is class struggle. However, this distinction is important because different tactics are needed.

Have you ever read my posts on "class struggle defencism"? It's completely nuts to advocate under today's circumstances troops on all sides marching on their own capitals, which is the premise of revolutionary defeatism. This is part of the bigger hot potato of inter-imperialist war outside a revolutionary period. In today's circumstances, that definitely means supporting those imperialist power(s) what would go to war with the US, like China reclaiming Taiwan:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/q-what-is-a-platypus-a-an-american-eustonite/#comment-47353


Although the back-and-forth debate between Proyect and the Platypus group focuses on “anti-imperialism,” let me reintroduce a hot potato dating from Engels and WWI: class-struggle defencism in an *inter-imperialist war* … *outside a revolutionary period*.

See, revolutionary defeatism (soldiers on both sides marching on their own capitals) made sense only because the global worker movement was in a revolutionary period by the time the belligerents in WWI shed blood, and only because the war became protracted.

What are the conditions for a revolutionary period?

1) Open state hostility to the working class
2) Party-movement of the working class in opposition to the regime
3) Majority political support (“political” “electoral) given by the working class to said party-movement
4) Internal regime crisis within the bureaucracy, police, army, etc.

[I paraphrased the above from Kautsky's conditions in The Road to Power.]

Now, what if WWI had occurred much earlier, say in the late 1890s or very early 1900s? Class-struggle defencism demanded a German victory (while preparing to backstab the German bourgeoisie and Junkers), with all other socialist agitation outside for the centrist “peace without annexations or indemnifications.”

Contemporarily speaking, much has been said about “anti-Americanism” being the “anti-imperialism of fools.” However, that may not be so in the case of *inter-imperialist war* … *outside a revolutionary period*. The pyrrhic ascendancy of the EU and BRIC at the expense of the US is to be welcomed, thereby weakening the EU and BRIC bourgeoisie and knocking some senses into the US working class.

Re. the more typical imperialist interference, I've stated before, for example, my support for the Iranian regime itself having nukes.

[S.Artesian]

And this explains Kautsky's own inability to find that link, class struggle, at the single most important moment in the history of that struggle, how?

That's the issue. If you just took head on the issue of Kautsky's position in WW1 you might have an argument that warrants consideration. But since you don't, and you obviously won't-- everything you offer winds up being an evasion.

Here's an example of such an evasion:



Now, what if WWI had occurred much earlier, say in the late 1890s or very early 1900s? Class-struggle defencism demanded a German victory (while preparing to backstab the German bourgeoisie and Junkers), with all other socialist agitation outside for the centrist “peace without annexations or indemnifications.”

What bunk. First you ignore the experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when Engels pushed, almost enthusiastically for support for Prussia by the 1st International, but Marx was much much much more cautious, limiting himself, and the 1st International to expressions of support ONLY for a defensive war by Prussia-- and even that position was problematic as there's no such thing as capital waging a defensive war. All capitalist wars are wars of appropriation.

And you ignore the later results of that equivocation when certain socialists wind up endorsing programs of Bismarck's government, and authorizing expenditures for same. What does Karl M. say? He says the first principle of "our party" [party, get that?] is "not a farthing for this government."

Now to take that caution that Marx displayed and, 20 years later throw it to the wind because of some misplaced notion of defencism, to ignore the transformation of capital itself into the party, not of transforming any pre-existing relations of land, landed labor etc., but rather buttressing those pre-existing, archaic forms-- the plantation, the hacienda, the landed estates of Russia--and more than buttressing, actually absorbing them into as units of production in the world markets, is.... well it's actually Kautskyism all dressed up with only one place to go, the one place it did go which is right into the hands and pockets of the bourgeoisie.

PS: Oh yeah, that's some real ascendancy you got there of the EU and the BRIC bourgeoisie. Sure they're ascendant. That's worse than bunk. That's tripe.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In line with comrade Rakunin's earlier remarks on "permanent revolution" and mine on the brief anti-Bolshevik revolutionary opportunity in 1920, I noted some very interesting comments on Libcom by one Alexander Roxwell:

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/socialist-bourgeois-revolution-03052010?page=8


I think that the critical question we must ask ourselves to resolve the "Russian Question" is the question that began this thread: What was the nature of the Russian revolution to begin with.

Trotskyists like to pretend that the question begins in the 1920s or 1930s when the Russian "workers state" rotted into something they liked to call a "degenerated workers state" and that this was something that began with the rise of Joseph Stalin. The "two sides" are Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" and Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution."

I disagree. I think it begins with the question of what happens when an underdeveloped nation cannot move forward towards full fledged capitalism because the bourgeoisie is tied to the international imperialist bourgeoisie which is tied to the pre-capitalist system. I believe, on the basis of what has occurred since World War II that the result is "peasant war" which, if successful, creates a "bourgeois revolution against the bourgeoisie" such as occurred in China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and Cuba.

Whereas the Trotskyists think that Russia was the "model" and that China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam were "deviations" of that model I think that China and Vietnam were the models with Yougoslavia and Cuba as minor deviations and Russia was a large deviation of that model. This deviation was an important one: proletarian revolution occurred alongside peasant war in Russia.

What occurred in Russia was a "dual revolution" - two revolutions occurred simultaneously; the proletarian revolution took place in the industrial cities while peasant war took place in the countryside. The Bolsheviks were based in the proletarian industrial centers and had almost no influence in the vast agricultural areas of Russia made up of peasants. Their initial seizure of power was nominally a Leninist "dual dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" with the Bolsheviks representing the proletariat and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and random anarchists representing the peasantry. The Bolsheviks took only 4 months to blow this coalition out of the water by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk causing a major revolt in the peasantry and a significant revolt in the proletariat and even within the Bolshevik Party. This was closely followed by the lunacy of "War Communism" and the rejection of any united front in the Civil War. By the end of the Civil War the Bolsheviks did do a retreat to the NEP, which was a very wise concession to the peasants but it was not to their "class partners" but to an "enemy class" that happened alongside an authoritarian rule by the Bolshevik Party as a free agent.

Lenin was right when he wrote "Two Tactics" and if he later embraced Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution" (which it appears he did at least fundamentally) it was a fatal error.


Lenin's theory is outlined in his Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution where he contrasts this view with the one held by the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks actually still adhered to Engels outdated theory as articulated in his Peasant War in Germany where he dismissed peasant uprisings as resulting in overthrowing the old order only to dissipate and go home and allow a new order to come to power led by some other class. It was Trotsky who piggybacked on this theory to say that the Peasant War would help the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie but would not be class participants in the successor regime. Lenin disagreed. That is why he called for a "dual dictatorship" of both the proletariat and the peasantry.

The real proof in the pudding is the Chinese Revolution. The proletariat, as a class, played no role whatsoever in the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The "Communist" Party based itself solely on the peasantry and seized power as a representative of that class, thoroughly disproving Engels thesis in the Peasant War in Germany.

[...]

There was never any "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Russia. What existed, such as it was, between the October Revolution and the March signature on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (4 months / 5 months?) was a "dual dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." After that date you had a bonapartist bureaucracy standing in for the minority proletariat carrying out raids against the peasant’s food supplies to support the Civil War. This was the Civil War.

[Dave B]

Lenin's; Economic Dislocation and the Proletariat’s Struggle Against It

First published in Pravda No. 73, June 1917


The point is that people who have turned Marxism into a kind of stiffly bourgeois doctrine evade the specific issues posed by reality, which in Russia has in practice produced a combination of the syndicates in industry and the small- peasant farms in the countryside. They evade these specific issues by advancing pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless, arguments about a "permanent revolution", about "introducing" socialism, and other nonsense.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm)



.

[S.Artesian]

Lenin's; Economic Dislocation and the Proletariat’s Struggle Against It

First published in Pravda No. 73, June 1917



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm)



.


Gee, that would be devastating except... except for the full text which says:



We are publishing in this issue the resolution on economic measures for combating dislocation, passed by the Conference of Factory Committees.[1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm#fwV25E024)

(http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm#fwV25E024)
The main idea of the resolution is to indicate the conditions for actual control over the capitalists and production in contrast to the empty phrases about control used by the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois officials. The bourgeoisie are lying When they allege that the systematic measures taken by the state to ensure threefold or even tenfold profits for the capitalists are “control”. The petty bourgeoisie, partly out of naïveté, partly out of economic interest, trust the capitalists and the capitalist state, and content them selves with the most meaningless bureaucratic projects for control. The resolution passed by the workers lays special emphasis on the all-important thing, that is, on what is to be done I) to prevent the actual “preservation” of capitalist profits; 2) to tear off the veil of commercial secrecy; 3) to give the workers a majority in the control agencies; 4) to ensure that the organisation (of control and direction), being “nation-wide” organisation, is directed by the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies and not by the capitalists.
Without this, all talk of control and regulation is either sheer bunkum or outright deception of the people.



Now it is against this truth, as plain as can be to every politically-conscious and thinking worker, that the leaders of our petty bourgeoisie, the Narodniks and Mensheviks (Izvestia, Rabochaya Gazeta), are up in arms. Unfortunately, those who write for Novaya Zhizn, and who have repeatedly wavered between us and them, have this time sunk to the same level.
Comrades Avilov and Bazarov try to cover up their descent Into the swamp of petty-bourgeois credulity, compromise, and bureaucratic project-making by Marxist-sounding arguments.



Let us look into these arguments.



We Pravda people are said to be deviating from Marxism to syndicalism just because we defend the resolution of the Organising Bureau (approved by the Conference). Shame on you, Comrades Avilov and Bazarov! Such carelessness (Or such trickery) is fit only for Rech[2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm#fwV25E025) and Yedinstvo[3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm#fwV25E026)! We suggest nothing like the ridiculous transfer of the railways to the railwaymen, or the tanneries to the tanners.



What we do suggest is workers’ control, which should develop into complete regulation of production and distribution by the workers, into "nation-wide organisation" of the exchange of grain for manufactured goods, etc. (with "extensive use of urban and rural co-operatives"). What we suggest is "the transfer of all state power to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies".



Only people who had not read the resolution right through, or who cannot read at all, could, with clear conscience, find any syndicalism in it.
And only pedants, who understand Marxism as Struve and all liberal bureaucrats “understood” it, can assert that "skipping state capitalism is utopian" and that "in our country, too, the very type of regulation should retain its state- capitalist character".



Take the sugar syndicate or the state railways in Russia or the oil barons, etc. What is that but state capitalism? How can you “skip” what already exists?



The point is that people who have turned Marxism into a kind of stiffly bourgeois doctrine evade the specific issues posed by reality, which in Russia has in practice produced a combination of the syndicates in industry and the small- peasant farms in the countryside. They evade these specific issues by advancing pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless, arguments about a "permanent revolution", about “introducing” socialism, and other nonsense.



Let us get down to business! Let us have fewer excuses and keep closer to practical matters! Are the profits made from war supplies, profits amounting to 500 per cent or more, to be left intact! Yes or no? Is commercial secrecy to be left intact? Yes or no? Are the workers to be enabled to exercise control? Yes or no?



Comrades Avilov and Bazarov give no answer to these practical questions. By using “Struvean” (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/s/t.htm#struve-peter) arguments sounding “near-Marxist”, they unwittingly stoop to the level of accomplices of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie want nothing better than to answer the people’s queries about the scandalous profits of the war supplies deliverers, and about economic dislocation, with “learned” arguments about the “utopian” character of socialism.



These arguments are ridiculously stupid, for what makes socialism objectively impossible is the small-scale economy which we by no means presume to expropriate, or even to regulate or control.



What we are trying to make something real instead of a bluff is the "state regulation" of which the Mensheviks, the Narodniks and all bureaucrats (who have carried Comrades Avilov and Bazarov with them) talk in order to dismiss the matter, making projects to safeguard capitalist profits and orating to preserve commercial secrecy. This is the point, worthy near-Marxists, and not the “introduction” of socialism!



Not regulation of and control over the workers by the capitalist class, but vice versa. This is the point. Not confidence in the “state”, fit for a Louis Blanc, but demand for a state led by the proletarians and semi-proletarians—that is how we must combat economic dislocation. Any other solution is sheer bunkum and deception.



Bottom line, all power to the soviets. Bottom line is that the Mensheviks and bureaucrats are using "socialist-type language" to obscure their real allegiance and capitulation to the bourgeoisie.

Transfer of all state power to the soviets for the regulation of production and exchange.

That is exactly what the social content of permanent revolution, the telescoped revolution, driven by uneven and combined development, is.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You're reducing substance to one particular form. The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasantry can't be reduced to the council form.

[Dave B]

For post 29

What exactly is it that you are saying?

That Lenin in the same breath as saying that the permanent revolution theory is "pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless" he then goes on to advocate it?

And that he either didn’t understand it (no shame in that in my opinion) it or was lying.


Lenin didn’t appear to be too keen on the idea at the turn of 1916 either;

On the Two Lines in the Revolution

Sotsial-Demokrat No. 48, November 20, 1915.



This task is being wrongly tackled in Nashe Slovo by Trotsky, who is repeating his "original" 1905 theory and refuses to give some thought to the reason why, in the course of ten years, life has been bypassing this splendid theory.


From the Bolsheviks Trotsky’s original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed "repudiation" of the peasantry’s role. The peasantry, he asserts, are divided into strata, have become differentiated; their potential revolutionary role has dwindled more and more; in Russia a "national" revolution is impossible; "we are living in the era of imperialisnu," says Trotsky, and "imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation."


Here we have an amusing example of playing with the word "imperialism". If, in Russia, the proletariat already stands contraposed to the "bourgeois nation", then Russia is facing a socialist revolution (!), and the slogan "Confiscate the landed estates" (repeated by Trotsky in 1915, following the January Conference of 1912), is incorrect; in that case we must speak, not of a "revolutionary workers’" government, but of a "workers’ socialist" government! The length Trotsky’s muddled thinking goes to is evident from his phrase that by their resoluteness the proletariat will attract the "non-proletarian [!] popular masses" as well (No. 217)!

Trotsky has not realised that if the proletariat induce the non-proletarian masses to confiscate the landed estates and overthrow the monarchy, then that will be the consummation of the "national bourgeois revolution" in Russia; it will be a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry!


A whole decade—the great decade of 1905-15—has shown the existence of two and only two class lines in the Russian revolution. The differentiation of the peasantry has enhanced the class struggle within them; it has aroused very many hitherto politically dormant elements. It has drawn the rural proletariat closer to the urban proletariat (the Bolsheviks have insisted ever since 1906 that the former should be separately organised, and they included this demand in the resolution of the Menshevik congress in Stockholm).


However, the antagonism between the peasantry, on the one hand, and the Markovs, Romanovs and Khvostovs, on the other, has become stronger and more acute. This is such an obvious truth that not even the thousands of phrases in scores of Trotsky’s Paris articles will "refute" it. Trotsky is in fact helping the liberal-labour politicians in Russia, who by "repudiation" of the role of the peasantry understand a refusal to raise up the peasants for the revolution!


That is the crux of the matter today. The proletariat are fighting, and will fight valiantly, to win power, for a republic, for the confiscation of the land, i.e. to win over the peasantry, make full use of their revolutionary powers, and get the "non-proletarian masses of the people" to take part in liberating bourgeois Russia from military-feudal "imperialism" (tsarism). The proletariat will at once utilise this ridding of bourgeois Russia of tsarism and the rule of the landowners, not to aid the rich peasants in their struggle against the rural workers, but to bring about the socialist revolution in alliance with the proletarians of Europe.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/nov/20.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/nov/20.htm)

Sort that out for me!

Anyway


The kind of state regulation of production I think Lenin was on about at around the time of his June 1917 dismissal of the "pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless" permanent revolution theory, was state capitalism.


And we can see I think how that idea evolved.

V. I. Lenin

The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. (B.) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/index.htm#6)

APRIL 24–29 (MAY 7–12), 1917




Monopoly capitalism, which has been developing into state-monopoly capitalism in a number of advanced countries with especial rapidity during the war, means gigantic socialisation of production and, consequently, complete preparation of the objective conditions for the establishment of a socialist society.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf2/6.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf2/6.htm)

The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It



For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm)

Revision of the Party Programme




War and economic ruin have forced all countries to advance from monopoly capitalism to state monopoly capitalism. This is the objective state of affairs. In a revolutionary situation, during a revolution, however, state monopoly capitalism is directly transformed into socialism.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/06.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/06.htm)

Session of the All-Russia C.E.C. April 29 1918


What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm)

Are state capitalism and the permanent revolution the same thing then?

.

[S.Artesian]

You're reducing substance to one particular form. The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasantry can't be reduced to the council form.


There was no "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry." That's the point. That's why the slogan was all power to the soviets. And the soviets that counted were in the urban areas, among the concentration of workers. Soviets in the rural areas were weak, to say the least.

For Dave B:

What Lenin is denouncing is the petti-fogging going on with the Mensheviks and SRs in and allied with the PRG using "revolutionary language" to avoid answering concrete questions and trying to obscure the content of the Bolshevik proposal by casting it as syndicalism.

Trotsky wasn't making a big deal about the theory of permanent revolution, but the workers of Petrograd understood exactly what Trotsky's original exposition meant, and showed it by electing him as head of the Petrograd soviet for a second time.

What is the kernel of Trotsky's analysis: 1) the dominant relations of production in Russia are backward relations of landed property and landed labor; of backward agriculture 2) in the midst of these "archaic" "pre-capitalist" rural relations there are centers of intense and large scale industrial production 3) the bourgeoisie, the "local" "national" bourgeoisie are fatally "compromised," structurally, politically, economically, socially incapable of transforming those rural relations, of providing the groundwork for the "free" development of "modern capitalism" 4) the petit-bourgeois, who provided such energy to the French Revolution do not in Russia possess anywhere near the economic density necessary to reprise that role 5) the peasantry, which undergoes continuous differentiation, moving from countryside to city as proletarians, or aligning itself with the capitalists, is incapable of organizing itself as a class to take power, or hold power, since power means organizing the entire economy 6) no matter what anyone thinks about the "ripeness" of Russia for capitalism or proletarian revolution, the revolution itself could only be led by the proletariat which once in power could not introduce capitalist development, and consequently would require the assistance, i.e. the "completion" of its seizure of power by the proletariat in the advanced countries.

What is not explicit in Trotsky's analysis is the fact that the "backwardness" of Russia's agricultural relations was backwardness that was being adapted to the world market, and that the backward "uncapitalist" relations of agricultural production were themselves an index to international capitalism's internal, self-limiting, conflict between the means of production --requiring the expansion of the expropriation of surplus value through the organization of wage-labor, which organization requires detaching, dispossessing labor from the land, from agriculture--- and the relations of production, that is to say, private property; private property in land, private property in agriculture.

Now if you don't think the Russian Revolution confirms that analysis of Trotsky then you need to account for the fact that the Russian Revolution did not follow the path, say, of the Mexican Revolution; that the bourgeoisie did not, and could not, maintain power in Russia; that the revolution required the expropriation of the bourgeoisie; that the peasantry did not demonstrate the cohesion required to organize and economy-- and indeed, how could they, unless you think subsistence production, or "subsistence +" production is a viable mode.

Trotsky's analysis is the political representation, the "strategic manifestation" of uneven and combined development.. and the fact that the proletarian revolution supported, advocated, the confiscation of large estates does not make the revolution bourgeois, or national, but uneven and combined... The issue of "state capitalism" in Russia is simply another representation of uneven and combined development, the fact that the proletarian revolution faced the legacy of the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie, of capitalist development in Russia.

[Dave B]

You stated that;


the fact that the proletarian revolution faced the legacy of the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie, of capitalist development in Russia.

That is in fact incorrect according to orthodox Marxism and should have been;


"the bourgeois revolution faced the legacy of the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie".



My thesis is that the bourgeois intelligentsia ie the Bolsheviks made up for that inadequacy by becoming and acting out the role of the capitalist class by introducing state capitalism and becoming the state capitalist class themselves.

So whilst I feel I am under no obligation to agree with all of Otto Rühle’s analysis I can broadly agree with his stagist analysis.

Otto Rühle From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution 1924




But the proletariat stood under the political leadership of intellectuals who had been schooled in the spirit of west-European social democracy. They were socialists and wanted socialism. Now the seizure of state power in Russia seemed to them to offer the chance for the realisation of the socialist idea.

The surrounding world was faced with a sensation: the Russian Revolution, recently still an overdue, feeble bourgeois revolution, turned in an instant into a proletarian revolution. Beginning and end of the bourgeois revolution came together in one.

Was that reality or illusion?........

From the beginning, the Russian Revolution - in accordance with its historical conditions - could only be a bourgeois revolution. It had to get rid of tsarism, to smooth the way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie in to the saddle politically.

Through an unusual chain of circumstances the bourgeoisie found itself in no position to play its historical role. The proletariat, leaping on to the stage in its place, did make itself in a moment master of the situation by an unprecedented exertion of energy, daring, tactical readiness and intelligence, but fell in the following period into a fatal predicament.

According to the phraseological pattern of development as formulated and advocated by Marx, after feudal tsarism in Russia there had to come the capitalist bourgeois state, whose creator and representative is the bourgeois class.

But government power from 1917 was occupied not by bourgeois, but by proletarians who repudiated the bourgeois state and were ready to institute a new economic and social order following socialist theory.
Between feudalism and socialism yawned a gap of a full hundred years, through which the system of the bourgeois epoch fell unborn and unused.
The Bolsheviks undertook no more and no less than to jump a whole phase of development in Russia in one bold leap.

Even if one admits that in doing so they reckoned on the world revolution which was to come to their aid and compensate for the vacuum in development within by support from the great fund of culture from outside, this calculation was still rashness because it based itself solely on a vague hope. Rash too was the experiment arising from this calculation

Parallel to this, in the same bourgeois tracks, ran the economic policy vis-à-vis industry. The Bolsheviks carried out the nationalisation of industry, of transport, banks, factories, etc., and thus awoke quite generally the belief that socialist measures were involved here. Nevertheless, nationalisation is not socialisation. Through nationalisation you can arrive at a large-scale, tightly centrally-run state capitalism, which may exhibit various advantages as against private capitalism. Only it is still capitalism.

And however you twist and turn it gives no way of escape from the constraint of bourgeois politics. So also in Russia, then, they came to make great concession to foreign capitalists, to whom mineral wealth and labour power have been handed over for exploitation - profit-sharing with the state. The stock exchange is open again. A host of dealers, entrepreneurs, agents, brokers, bankers, profiteers, speculators and jobbers has turned up again and settled in.


By the decree of 27 May 1921 the right of possession over factories and workshops, industrial and trading establishments, instruments and means of production, agricultural and industrial produce, financial stock; the right to inventions, copyright, trade marks; the right to take up mortgages or lend money, like the testamentary or legal right of succession, was expressly acknowledged again. With this the bourgeois order is established in its entirety and in all essential components.

Not last is a striking expression of bourgeois politics, the dictatorship of the Communist Party leaders set up in Russia, which is falsely described as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Behind this pseudo-revolutionary protective screen hides, as everyone knows, the omnipotence of a small handful of people who are the commanders of the authoritarian, centrally organised commissariat-bureaucracy. As inverted tsarism this party dictatorship is a completely bourgeois concern.


And as the best and most honourable of the fighters for a social revolution opposed this, the Bolshevik authorities did not shrink for a minute from throwing them by hundreds and thousands into prisons - quite in the bourgeois-capitalist-tsarist manner - sending them to Siberia, or condemning them to death. A Trotsky played the executioner of the Kronstadt sailors with the same cold-bloodedness as a Gallifet having French revolutionaries, or a Noske German revolutionaries slaughtered.

It was an historical error to believe that the Russian Revolution was the start of a social revolution. And it amounts to a demagogic fraud to awaken and maintain this belief in the heads of workers.

When the socialists in the Russian government, after the victory over tsarism, imagined that a phase of historical development could be skipped and socialism structurally realised, they had forgotten the ABC of Marxist knowledge according to which socialism can only be the outcome of an organic development which has capitalism developed to the limits of its maturity as its indispensable presupposition. They had to pay for this forgetfulness by a wide, troublesome and victim-strewn detour which brings them in a space of time to capitalism.

To institute capitalism and to organise the bourgeois state is the historical function of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian Revolution was and is a bourgeois revolution, no more and no less: the strong socialist admixture changes nothing in this essence. So it will fulfil its task by throwing away, sooner or later, the last remnants of its "War-Communism" and revealing the face of a real, genuine capitalism.

The struggles within the Bolshevik party are preparing this conclusion, and with it the end of the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The line of development - whether that of a party coalition which hastens and alleviates the launching phase of capitalism, or that of a Bonaparte who protracts and aggravates it - is not yet clear; both are possible.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1924/revolution.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1924/revolution.htm)


Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past

[Die Neue Zeit]

There was no "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry." That's the point. That's why the slogan was all power to the soviets. And the soviets that counted were in the urban areas, among the concentration of workers. Soviets in the rural areas were weak, to say the least.

You ignore the role played by congresses of peasants' deputies. Just as the soviets were paralleled in the cities by factory committees and tenant committees (hello "Right to the City" and David Harvey), the soviets were paralleled in the countryside by peasant organs.

[S.Artesian]

You ignore the role played by congresses of peasants' deputies. Just as the soviets were paralleled in the cities by factory committees and tenant committees (hello "Right to the City" and David Harvey), the soviets were paralleled in the countryside by peasant organs.


The peasant organs were very weak, and hardly capable of organizing production or defense. The urban soviets when they charged their agents with securing grain from the countryside [I'm talking about the Moscow soviet in particular] did not do so through the rural soviets, but through cooperatives and villages.

[S.Artesian]

That is in fact incorrect according to orthodox Marxism and should have been;


"the bourgeois revolution faced the legacy of the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie".



My thesis is that the bourgeois intelligentsia ie the Bolsheviks made up for that inadequacy by becoming and acting out the role of the capitalist class by introducing state capitalism and becoming the state capitalist class themselves.

Right. Clearly you think there was a bourgeois revolution in Russia, with the Bolsheviks representing the bourgeoisie, which means you reject both Lenin and Trotsky's analyses, theories, proposals etc. Which is OK, but I just think it would be better to get that out front, rather than producing quotes from Lenin against Trotsky, or vice versa.

Of course, for the Bolsheviks to be a class they had to have some unique relationship to production, some specific-to-themselves organization of property, of social relations, with some unique, specific capability of organizing labor in the image of that property like the bourgeoisie organizing labor as wage-labor, as a commodity.

And of course, if the Bolsheviks were a class with such a specific organization of property we then should see that class and that property germinating within the old relations of the economy of pre-revolutionary Russia... like we see a bourgeoisie developing in... oh England let's say with the yeoman farmers; or the merchants, a section of whom transformed themselves from commercial to manufacturing capitalists. Do we see that anywhere in the fSU?

We do see the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by a... state capitalist class? In Russia. But not anywhere else where this supposed state capitalism has taken hold during WW1. We don't see it in Germany, France, the UK, Austria, nor the USA with WW1 being one of its great moments in state-capitalist cooperation.

So how come in Russia, there has to be an expropriation of the bourgeoisie? But not anywhere else?


So whilst I feel I am under no obligation to agree with all of Otto Rühle’s analysis I can broadly agree with his stagist analysis.

Otto Rühle From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution 1924

Not surprised a bit. And does that still apply? Is stagism still necessary, historically necessary, for the development of the means of production in "less developed" capitalist countries? If so, then do you support that historical necessity?

I mean if I thought capitalism or state capitalism was necessary, or even might possibly, produce substantial economic development capable of resolving the contradictions, the backwardness of "pre-capitalism," I would certainly endorse it.

And if the answer is "no", why not? Why is it not necessary? Or why don't you support it if it is necessary?

The whole problem with theories of state capitalism is that they fall apart on the rock and the hard place of Marx's analysis of class.

[Dave B]

Well I don’t reject all of Lenin’s analysis.


I am inclined to agree that Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory is "pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless".


And that Bolshevik Russia was ‘state capitalist’.


I am not quite sure what you mean by ‘not surprised a bit’ re by my quotation of Otto, there are a few minor bits and pieces in it I might want to quibble over.


It was just a caveat in case you managed to guess them and throw them back in my face.


Broadening things out into an analysis of other more modern ‘revolutions’ would be interesting I admit.


But I thought at the moment we were taking the Russian revolution as a seminal example.


Becoming and being a member of the capitalist class is an economic category and has as much to do with opportunity as being born into it.

If you insist on looking at it a ‘sociological’ way then the capitalist class emerged from the kind of people who were the clever elitist bods spotting an opportunity of exploiting others.


As to;


Clearly you think there was a bourgeois revolution in Russia, with the Bolsheviks representing the bourgeoisie,


Yeah definitely up front about that, I thought I had spelled it out.

Although I would prefer fulfilling the historical role.

I think Lenin did something else on trotsky's permanent revolution theory around 1914 but i can't find it.

going to bed now

[S.Artesian]

Sleep well.

But it's not a "sociological viewpoint" I maintain re class, it's Marx's viewpoint, the historical origins, development, and function of class.

[Dave B]

There was a kind of economic/ "sociological" class analysis done on the "bureaucratic caste" or "state capitalist" class depending on your viewpoint in the 1930’s by various ‘Marxists’.

It gets a bit complicated so some of those terms are, shall we say, indefinite.

It started, if these kind of things have a definite beginning, with Bruno Rizzi in "1939" with his "The Bureaucratisation of the World" translated by the SPGB’s and the World Socialist Movement very own Adam Buick.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm)

(There may be a slightly earlier version and one maybe an abridged version of the other, but I am not sure really).

Trotsky had read it and commented on it somewhere, it caused a bit of a sensation at the time.

That fed into Burnhams Managerial Revolution taking the idea a bit further.


Orwell wrote an essay on it that was passable I thought but not read it for a while, below is a link to it I think.


http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh (http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh)

Incidentally it inspired his 1984

That led to Djilas' New Class which in its turn led to Parecon co-ordinating class theory.

There is a potential theoretical basis to it in Marxist theory with Karl’s analysis of ‘profit of enterprise’ in volume III and I suppose the profiteers of enterprise who he considered as a subset of the capitalist class.

As opposed to the "interest bearing capitalist class" who you could say in a country with "imperialist capital" were the absentee owners capital.


There is a theoretical conflict of interest between the two types of capitalist ie the profiteers of enterprise capitalists and the "interest bearing capitalists".


The ‘profiteers of enterprise’ as non owners of capital being economically opposed to, or having no economic interest in the private ownership of capital.


Although in Karl’s time the two theoretical groups were in practice fused together.

Djilas, or probably his more intellectual side kick, may have been aware of that connection as they were using terms like the new class being "the personification of capital" which looked to me like a straight lift from Volume III.

For interest Djilas entered into the state capitalist theory debate ie with Mandel;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm)

I am just putting this up for information and as a kind of discussion document as I haven’t got the energy at the moment to go into the detail.

And I am tired so please don’t lock me into any of the above.

[S.Artesian]

FWIW, I'd prefer to engage these issues in "chronological" order-- with the first issue being the theory of permanent revolution, and if it did accurately described the condition of capital in Russia, and the "immanent critique," i.e. the class forces capable, or not, of making a revolution, and then what the content of that revolution would be.

IMO, the issues of state capitalism and the bureaucracy as a "class" are derivative to that analysis, and can be better clarified after we've reached some understanding, one way or the other, in agreement or disagreement, about that theory and that practice of the revolution in Russia itself.

[Zanthorus]

Dave_B calls Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution "pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless", supposedly echoing Lenin.

What he neglects to mention is that the idea of a "revolution in permanence" was first thought up by the young Karl Marx and applied to Germany in 1848. Trotsky first picked up on the idea from Alexander Parvus when he went to Austria in 1904 to escape the factional squabbles in the RSDLP. He explicitly mentions Marx's original use of the concept in The Permanent Revolution. There were others who used the concept as well, although no names come instantly to mind. There is in fact a whole book "Witnesses to Permanent Revolution" (Or something along those lines) containing pre-Trotsky texts on permanent revolution.

The basic idea that Russia could skip the capitalist phase of development given proletarian revolution in the west was also outlined by Marx and Engels in the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto:


Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

So let's be clear that it's not just Trotsky that you're disagreeing with here.

As for state-capitalism and it's links to the PR theory. In Results and Prospects there are passages to the effect that if the proletarian revolution in the west doesn't occur then Russia will remain stuck in the bourgeois phase of development. Towards the end of his life Trotsky began to reconsider his position on Russia, and even said some things to the effect that if the Soviet Union lasted past world war two then it would be necessary to reconsider the whole question of it's class nature. His wife did eventually break with the fourth international and conclude that Russia was essentially bourgeois.

[Tower of Bebel]

I agree with you Zanthorus, but the problem is there's a theory of permanent revolution and it's bound with Trotsky's - and certainly the Trotskyist - conception of both revolution and the preparation for revolution. In my opinion Lenin had the advantage of being more flexible (according to popular speak in the CWI: vague). He saw permanent revolution as one possible outcome. Trotsky on the other hand stresses inner dynamics too much instead of patient party building.

[Dave B]

When I said "pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless" re Lenin’s description of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution theory, I wasn’t ‘supposedly echoing’ Lenin I was actually echoing Lenin.


On the 1882 preface thing, we actually discussed that on Libcom a few weeks ago so it’s a sense of Deja vue again.

Kautsky explained the situation in 1905.

Karl Kautsky Differences Among the Russian Socialists (1905)





Twenty-four years ago no one could assert with certainty that the Russian village communities might not become the starting point of a modern form of communism. Society as a whole can not leap over any stage of evolution, but single backward portions thereof can easily do this. They can make a leap in order to correspond with other and more advanced portions.

So it was possible that Russian society might leap over the capitalist stage in order to immediately develop the new communism out of the old. But a condition of this was that socialism in the rest of Europe should become victorious during the time that the village communities still had a vital strength in Russia.


This at the begining of the eighties appeared still possible. But in a decade the impossibility of this transition was perfectly clear. The revolution in Western Europe moved slower and the village communities in Russia fell faster than appeared probable at the beginning of the eighties, and therewith it was decided that the special peculiarity of Russia upon which the terrorism and the socialism of the Narodnaya Volya was founded should disappear, and that Russia must pass through capitalism in order to attain socialism and that also Russia must in this respect pass along the same road as had Western Europe.


Here as there socialism must grow out of the great industry and the industrial proletariat is the only revolutionary class which is capable of leading a continuous and independent revolutionary battle against absolutism.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1905/xx/rsdlp.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1905/xx/rsdlp.htm)

And that was Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks position also in 1905, as in his Two Tactics .


The decade after the early 1980’s where ‘therewith it was decided’ that time had passed the old idea by is probably laid out in;

On Social Relations In Russia by Engels Afterword (1894)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm)

I think the Leninist need to lay out at what point Lenin explicitly endorsed the permanent revolution theory and abandoned the stagist theory, just out of curiosity.


The introduction of state capitalism in Bolshevik Russia doesn’t of course negate the stagist theory but in fact endorses it, be it as a deliberate act or as an inevitable historical material necessity.


The fact that is was a conscious act of deliberate policy is in fact I think emphasised by the publication of a pamphlet quickly translated and provided to the British left in 1918 called ‘The Chief Task Our Times" which was printed by THE WORKERS' SOCIALIST FEDERATION, and the ILP we think.

Probably provided by;THE PEOPLE'S RUSSIAN INFORMATION BUREAU 152, Fleet Street, E.C.4.




The second part of which is a slightly amended version of;

V. I. Lenin SESSION OF THE ALL-RUSSIA C.E.C.

APRIL 29, 1918

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/SAR18.html (http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/SAR18.html)


The SPGB, traditionally scoffed at by the left for saying that Russia was state capitalist, had ‘naively’ read it and quoted from the following passage in the July edition of the Socialist Standard 1920.




For instance, the chief argument of the Communists of the Left against us is that in our policy there are signs of a tendency towards the Bolshevism of the Right, which, they say, will lead to State Capitalism. It is this evolution towards State Capitalism—this evil, this enemy, which we are anxious to fight against. When I read this kind of stuff in the Press of the Communists of the Left, I cannot help wondering what has made these people forsake reality for formulas. Reality says that State Capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about in Russia in a short time State Capitalism it would be a victory for us.



It is available at;

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spopen/message/11620 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spopen/message/11620)

Interestingly perhaps some of the "state capitalism"’s were substituted in the English edition for the more acceptable "state socialism" which weren’t in the original Lenin collected works version.


There is plenty of early Marx and Engels I would disagree with as did Marx and Engels themselves.


Eg on ‘vanguardism’ and ‘Blanquism’;


The Class Struggles In France Introduction by Frederick Engels 1895




And yet the movement was there, instinctive, spontaneous, irrepressible. Was not this just the situation in which a revolution had to succeed, led certainly by a minority, but this time not in the interests of the minority, but in the real interests of the majority? If, in all the longer revolutionary periods, it was so easy to win the great masses of the people by the merely plausible and delusive views of the minorities thrusting themselves forward, how could they be less susceptible to ideas which were the truest reflex of their economic position, which were nothing but the clear, comprehensible expression of their needs, of needs not yet understood by themselves, but only vaguely felt?


To be sure, this revolutionary mood of the masses had almost always, and usually very speedily, given way to lassitude or even to a revulsion to its opposite, so soon as illusion evaporated and disappointment set in. But here it was not a question of delusive views, but of giving effect to the very special interests of the great majority itself, interests, which at that time were certainly by no means clear to this great majority, but which must soon enough become clear in the course of giving practical effect to them, by their convincing obviousness………..


History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong………..



The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/intro.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/intro.htm)


.

[Dave B]

The ‘other’ reference to Trotsky’s permanent revolution by Lenin is available below, and not particularly interesting, which is probably why I didn’t archive and index it.

Even if it took me almost two hours to find it, again.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/x01.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/x01.htm)

There may be other stuff that I don’t know about as I haven’t gone through it all in a particularly systematic way especially the pre 1916 stuff.

[S.Artesian]

Well there's that old story how after October 1917 Lenin supposedly said "Trotsky was right"-- but really, who gives a flying fuck at a rolling doughnout? Whether Lenin agreed or didn't agree doesn't matter, because history settled the issue-- power was taken, and taken in the cities by the only class capable of organizing itself as a revolutionary power, which was the proletariat.

The poor peasantry's support was just that... support. The peasantry had no class power, no ability to introduce an organization of production, of property, of labor, on a social scale to address the issues of city and countryside, of development.

There was no "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," and the "two tactics" came down to one tactic.. opposition to the Provisional Government through the organization of the workers, and soldiers, and sailors [Marx has a paragraph somewhere in his Economic Manuscripts of 1861-64 I think where he talks about soldiers being the first wage-laborers].

[Dave B]

yes



it was so easy to win the great masses of the people by the merely plausible and delusive views of the minorities thrusting themselves forward

[Die Neue Zeit]

I agree with you Zanthorus, but the problem is there's a theory of permanent revolution and it's bound with Trotsky's - and certainly the Trotskyist - conception of both revolution and the preparation for revolution. In my opinion Lenin had the advantage of being more flexible (according to popular speak in the CWI: vague). He saw permanent revolution as one possible outcome. Trotsky on the other hand stresses inner dynamics too much instead of patient party building.

And that, comrade, is why I suggest directional programs, directional measures, directional revolution (no plan to have this latter term in programmatic commentary), etc.


Towards the end of his life Trotsky began to reconsider his position on Russia, and even said some things to the effect that if the Soviet Union lasted past world war two then it would be necessary to reconsider the whole question of it's class nature. His wife did eventually break with the fourth international and conclude that Russia was essentially bourgeois.

And here's where Tony Cliff comes in. ;)

[S.Artesian]

The ‘other’ reference to Trotsky’s permanent revolution by Lenin is available below, and not particularly interesting, which is probably why I didn’t archive and index it.

Even if it took me almost two hours to find it, again.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/x01.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/x01.htm)

There may be other stuff that I don’t know about as I haven’t gone through it all in a particularly systematic way especially the pre 1916 stuff.


The reference to "permanent revolution" is just a "throwaway" remark, but this...


There is no “chaos” whatever in the struggle between the Marxists and the Narodniks. That, we hope, not even Trotsky will dare to deny. The struggle between the Marxists and the Narodniks has been going on for over thirty years, ever since Marxism came into being. The cause of this struggle is the radical divergence of interests and viewpoints of two different classes, the proletariat and the peasantry. [emphasis added].

...is not so uninteresting, and points to the "awkwardness" and unworkable nature of the so-called "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry."

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

"The dictatorship of the proletariat is a specific form of class alliance between the proletariat, the vanguard of the working people, and the numerous non-proletarian strata of the working people (petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, etc.), or the majority of these strata, an alliance against capital, an alliance whose aim is the complete overthrow of capital, complete suppression of the resistance offered by the bourgeoisie as well as of attempts at restoration on its part, an alliance for the final establishment and consolidation of socialism." - Lenin

[Zanthorus]

Well there's that old story how after October 1917 Lenin supposedly said "Trotsky was right"

Robert Service in his biography of Trotsky mentions that Lenin took some notes in private on Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution a short while after the 1905 revolution was cooling down which were actually grudgingly sympathetic to Trotsky's view. I didn't think to write it down or bookmark it at the time, unfortunately.


And here's where Tony Cliff comes in.

Cliff's theory of the law of value being enforced through military competition with western powers is terrible though. I think the main reason Cliff gets bandied around as the main representative of "state-capitalism" is because first of all it's a more convenient theory for Trots than those of Bordiga or the Council Communists because it doesn't suggest that state-capitalism actually began in the Lenin-era Soviet Union, and secondly because it serves as a useful cover for non-state-cappie trot's to dismiss all theories of state-capitalism.

Dunayevskyaya's theory of "state-capitalism" is probably the best from a "Trotskyist" perspective, even though she probably went a little too far to really be called a "Trotskyist".

[Die Neue Zeit]

"The dictatorship of the proletariat is a specific form of class alliance between the proletariat, the vanguard of the working people, and the numerous non-proletarian strata of the working people (petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, etc.), or the majority of these strata, an alliance against capital, an alliance whose aim is the complete overthrow of capital, complete suppression of the resistance offered by the bourgeoisie as well as of attempts at restoration on its part, an alliance for the final establishment and consolidation of socialism." - Lenin

Since when did the petit-bourgeoisie become mere "strata" of the "working people"? :confused:


Cliff's theory of the law of value being enforced through military competition with western powers is terrible though. I think the main reason Cliff gets bandied around as the main representative of "state-capitalism" is because first of all it's a more convenient theory for Trots than those of Bordiga or the Council Communists because it doesn't suggest that state-capitalism actually began in the Lenin-era Soviet Union, and secondly because it serves as a useful cover for non-state-cappie trot's to dismiss all theories of state-capitalism.

Dunayevskyaya's theory of "state-capitalism" is probably the best from a "Trotskyist" perspective, even though she probably went a little too far to really be called a "Trotskyist".

I already said earlier that Cliff's attempt at "state capitalism" is quite hollow. Then again, I don't think Bordiga was critical enough about the bureaucratic-state commodity production (http://www.revleft.com/vb/giving-up-some-t129907/index.html) underlying the maximum program of Revolutionary Social Democracy well before the Bolsheviks took power. ;)

[Zanthorus]

That probably because of Bordiga's reductionist belief in the essential invariance of the communist programme since 1848 which led on to his crippling inability to openly criticise Lenin. Criticising the "socialism" of the Second International would also mean criticising Lenin. I think his understanding of the real content of socialism is an implicit critique of both though.

[Dave B]

The Following



Well there's that old story how after October 1917 Lenin supposedly said "Trotsky was right"


FYI probably came from Trotsky himself;

Leon Trotsky My Life, CHAPTER XLII






Joffe told me of his conversation with Lenin – it took place in 1919, if I am not mistaken – on the subject of permanent revolution. Lenin said to him: “Yes, Trotsky proved to be right.” Joffe wanted to publish that conversation, but I tried my best to dissuade him. I could visualize the avalanche of baiting that would crash down upon him.

Joffe was peculiarly persistent, and under a soft exterior he concealed an inalterable will. At each new outburst of aggressive ignorance and political treachery, he would come to me again, with a drawn and indignant face, and repeat: “I must make it public.” I would argue with him again that such “evidence of a witness” could change nothing; that it was necessary to re-educate the new generation of the party, and to aim far ahead.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch42.htm

It would appear that it was not generally known.
.

[Serge's Fist]

Gerry Downing's attacks on the CPGB and Lars T Lih are largely misundertandings where he argues against what he thinks we are arguing for not what we are actually exploring or putting forward. I don't know whether this is a series of wilful mistakes or an issue with how we present our politics, though I a more inclined to think it is the former.

The discussion on Trotsky and Permanent Revolution is really interesting. It is almost taken as gospel that it was Trotsky's idea, especially in Britain where the sects tend to educate their cadres through distilled and skewed histories and rarely primary sources. Zanthorus is absolutely right, it was Parvus's strategy for social democracy east of the Rhine that is the most important push for Trotsky to pen his understanding of permanent revolution which are built upon Marx and Parvus etc.

[S.Artesian]

The Following

FYI probably came from Trotsky himself;

It would appear that it was not generally known.
.

Like I said, doesn't matter and nobody should care-- the issue is, does the analysis properly assess the relations of classes in Russia, the immanent tendencies toward revolution, and indicate the problems such revolution will face?

And does the theory "conform" to what we know to be the legacy of uneven and combined development?

[Serge's Fist]

Just remembered we put the partial voice files of Mike Macnair's talk on Permanent Revolution at Communist University 2010 up online, I have just listened to it as I was not at our school: link (http://cpgb.podbean.com/2010/08/08/mike-macnair-permanent-revolution/)

Hopefully we will have the videos up very soon :)

[Hater of Dilettantes]

I agree with Lenina, that France was in a revolutionary or at least pre revolutionary situation. While the paramilitary riot police the CRS and reserve police were mobilized against the workers and students, the army wasn't. Ever wonder why? President DeGaulle had the army confined to their bases because he wasn't completely sure that the conscript soldiers could be relied on the crush the worker-student rebellion.