Trotsky & Spanish Civil War [Archive]

Rooster

2nd June 2011, 01:04

Yup

Originally posted by Trotsky

Role of the Anarchists

The Anarchists had no independent position of any kind in the Spanish revolution. All they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism. More precisely, the Anarchist workers instinctively yearned to enter the Bolshevik road (July 19, 1936, and May days of 1937) while their leaders, on the contrary, with all their might drove the masses into the camp of the Popular Front, i.e., of the bourgeois regime.

The Anarchists revealed a fatal lack of understanding of the laws of the revolution and its tasks by seeking to limit themselves to their own trade unions, that is, to organizations permeated with the routine of peaceful times, and by ignoring what went on outside the framework of the trade unions, among the masses, among the political parties, and in the government apparatus. Had the Anarchists been revolutionists, they would first of all have called for the creation of soviets, which unite the representatives of all the toilers of city and country, including the most oppressed strata, who never joined the trade unions. The revolutionary workers would have naturally occupied the dominant position in these soviets. The Stalinists would have remained an insignificant minority. The proletariat would have convinced itself of its own invincible strength. The apparatus of the bourgeois state would have hung suspended in the air. One strong blow would have sufficed to pulverize this apparatus. The socialist revolution would have received a powerful impetus. The French proletariat would not for long permitted Leon Blum to blockade the proletariat revolution beyond the Pyrenees. Neither could the Moscow bureaucracy have permitted itself such a luxury. The most difficult questions would have been solved as they arose.

Instead of this, the anarcho-syndicalists, seeking to hide from “politics” in the trade unions, turned out to be, to the great surprise of the whole world and themselves, a fifth wheel in the cart of bourgeois democracy. But not for long; a fifth wheel is superfluous. After Garcia Oliver and his cohorts helped Stalin and his henchmen to take power away from the workers, the anarchists themselves were driven out of the government of the Popular Front. Even then they found nothing better to do than jump on the victor’s bandwagon and assure him of their devotion. The fear of the petty bourgeois before the big bourgeois, of the petty bureaucrat before the big bureaucrat, they covered up with lachrymose speeches about the sanctity of the united front (between a victim and the executioners) and about the inadmissibility of every kind of dictatorship, including their own. “After all, we could have taken power in July 1936 ...” “After all, we could have taken power in May 1937...” The Anarchists begged Stalin-Negrin to recognize and reward their treachery to the revolution. A revolting picture!

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power.

No one could have prevented the Anarchists after the conquest of power from establishing the sort of regime they deem necessary, assuming, of course, that their program is realizable. But the Anarchist leaders themselves lost faith in it. They hid from power not because they are against “every kind of dictatorship” – in actuality, grumbling and whining, they supported and still support the dictatorship of Stalin-Negrin – but because they completely lost their principles and courage, if they ever had any. They were afraid of everything: “isolation,” “involvement,” “fascism.” They were afraid of France and England. More than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses.

The renunciation of the conquest of power inevitably throws every workers’ organization into the swamp of reformism and turns it into a toy of the bourgeoisie; it cannot be otherwise in view of the class structure of society. In opposing the goal, the conquest of power, the Anarchists could not in the end fail to oppose the means, the revolution. The leaders of the CNT and FAI not only helped the bourgeoisie hold on to the shadow of power in July 1936; they also helped it to reestablish bit by bit what it had lost at one stroke. In May 1937, they sabotaged the uprising of the workers and thereby saved the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Thus anarchism, which wished merely to be anti-political, proved in reality to be anti-revolutionary and in the more critical moments – counter-revolutionary.
The Anarchist theoreticians, who after the great test of 1931-37 continue to repeat the old reactionary nonsense about Kronstadt, and who affirm that “Stalinism is the inevitable result of Marxism and Bolshevism,” simply demonstrate by this they are forever dead for the revolution.

You say that Marxism is in itself depraved and Stalinism is its legitimate progeny? But why are we revolutionary Marxists engaged in mortal combat with Stalinism throughout the world? Why does the Stalinist gang see in Trotskyism it chief enemy? Why does every approach to our views or our methods of action (Durruti, Andres, Nin, Landau, and others) compel the Stalinist gangsters to resort to bloody reprisals. Why, on the other hand, did the leaders of Spanish anarchism serve, during the time of the Moscow and Madrid crimes of the GPU, as ministers under Caballero-Negrin, that is as servants of the bourgeoisie and Stalin? Why even now, under the pretext of fighting fascism, do the Anarchists remain voluntary captives of Stalin-Negrin, the executioners of the revolution, who have demonstrated their incapacity to fight fascism?

By hiding behind Kronstadt and Makhno, the attorneys of anarchism will deceive nobody. In the Kronstadt episode and the struggle with Makhno, we defended the proletarian from the peasant counterrevolution. The Spanish Anarchists defended and continue to defend bourgeois counterrevolution from the proletariat revolution. No sophistry will delete from the annals of history the fact that anarchism and Stalinism in the Spanish revolution were on one side of the barricades while the working masses with the revolutionary Marxists were on the other. Such is the truth which will forever remain in the consciousness of the proletariat!source: The Lessons of Spain (1937) (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm)

Sorry for the wall of text.

Also

Trotsky's collected writings on Spain (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/spain/index.htm)

Jose Gracchus

2nd June 2011, 04:02

syndicat

2nd June 2011, 19:38

Trotsky merely shows himself to be an ignoramus...an ignoramus who pontificates arrogantly about what he doesn't really know about.

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,”

this was an excuse concocted after the fact by those leaders who presided over Popular Front collaboration. at the big meeting of delegates of the CNT in Catalonia in July 1936 to decide what to do in the wake of the defeat of the army, Garcia Oliver made the case for overthrowing the Generalitat and carrying out their libertarian communist program...the position that was put forward at that meeting by the unions of Baix Llobregat (a gritty industrial region south of Barcelona).

There was in fact an internal debate and struggle in the CNT over what course to take. But in Sept 3 1936 at a national delegate conference they agreed to propose that the working class take power through a joint Defense Council and workers congress that would be set up by the UGT and CNT unions. The proposed regional and national worker congresses would consist of delegates elected from the base assemblies. Roughly similar to the idea of a soviet.

For local governance they proposed "free municipalities" based on assemblies of residents in villages and urban neighborhoods...a proposal carried out in the villages of Aragon, where they also constructed a worker congress & workers defense council.

But when the UGT & Left-Socialist leadership veto'd the proposal for a national defense council, the delegates in the CNT divided as to what to do. Some followed Durruti in proposing that the unions take power in the regions where the CNT was the majority and had the power to do so...and as they did in Aragon. But this course did not get the support of the majority. The majority lacked the audacity to pursue such a course but decided to capitulate to the UGT leadership and join the Popular Front.

As to the bit about "avoiding politics", that is crap. It's just a coded way of referring to their advocacy of autonomy for the mass working class movement, avoiding its subordination to a party. Since ALL the Marxist parties in Spain were even more slavish towards the Popular Front than the CNT, Trotsky's assumption that only the presence of a "true" Bolshevik party was the failing is lacking in evidence. That's because there were two Leninist parties and both were in the Popular Front. What reason is there to suppose that a Leninist party of any significance in Spain at the time would not have been inclined to join the Popular Front, given Leninism's partyist emphasis on gaining state power?

Thirsty Crow

2nd June 2011, 19:55

He soils what could've been an interesting internationalist, revolutionary Marxist polemic against some anarcho-syndicalists which his need for Marxian snobbery and sad apologetics for his own dirty laundry.
Especially seen in the claim that "more than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses", which is better suited for cheap Stalinist agitation than for a supposed oppositional Marxist text. What a pity.

RedTrackWorker

3rd June 2011, 05:14

Since ALL the Marxist parties in Spain were even more slavish towards the Popular Front than the CNT, Trotsky's assumption that only the presence of a "true" Bolshevik party was the failing is lacking in evidence. That's because there were two Leninist parties and both were in the Popular Front. What reason is there to suppose that a Leninist party of any significance in Spain at the time would not have been inclined to join the Popular Front, given Leninism's partyist emphasis on gaining state power?

Really? Your argument is that since two parties that claim label X failed the test, what reason is there to think that another party could lead the way that claimed label X with an analysis of why the other two claim the label but negate the content? If shifting through what politics can lead the workers to power to remake society were so easy, I could not understand how the working class has not overthrown capitalism and built socialism yet.

But let's dig deeper. First, I don't understand how the POUM was more slavish to the Popular Front than the CNT--when the POUM only justified joining it because the CNT did?
Second--and key--is this idea the claim that there's no reason to think that a Leninist party would not have joined the Popular Front because 1) the two existing parties did and 2) because of Leninism's emphasis on "gaining state power."

I find it hard to understand this assertion. I'm not sure exactly what syndicat thinks happened in the Russian revolution--but the Bolsheviks did not join the popular front of the Mensheviks and the capitalist ministers and I'm sure syndicat knows that so I find it hard to understand this claim that Leninism has an inherent drive to join the popular front.

Further, I know syndicat is at least somewhat familiar with Trotsky's critique of the POUM's joining the Popular Front--how to explain that? To say "because there were two Leninist parties and both were in the Popular Front" is to avoid the question when the claim is precisely that those parties are Leninist in name only. To be sure, in quite different ways: the Stalinist party lead the bourgeois counterrevolution with a consistent and intentional policy (though disguised) whereas the POUM formed the left flank of the Popular Front through a contradictory policy that had results contrary to the intentions of the leadership and even more, the ranks.

But syndicat would alibi the anarchist leadership from Trotsky's critique by pointing to their ideas...but ends up admitting they "decided to capitulate to the UGT leadership and join the Popular Front". But that is precisely the core of Trotsky's critique!

Especially seen in the claim that "more than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses", which is better suited for cheap Stalinist agitation than for a supposed oppositional Marxist text. What a pity.

Did the CNT leadership not fully display this fear in the May Days? How else would you characterize their actions in calling the workers back from the barricades--thereby giving a much freer hand to the growing bourgeois counterrevolution?

Os Cangaceiros

3rd June 2011, 06:36

The Anarchists had no independent position of any kind in the Spanish revolution. All they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism.

B.S. if I've ever read it. Here's (http://libcom.org/library/towards-fresh-revolution-friends-durruti) one example of why.

More precisely, the Anarchist workers instinctively yearned to enter the Bolshevik road (July 19, 1936, and May days of 1937) while their leaders, on the contrary, with all their might drove the masses into the camp of the Popular Front, i.e., of the bourgeois regime.

This is a bit more accurate.

Thirsty Crow

3rd June 2011, 12:38

Did the CNT leadership not fully display this fear in the May Days? How else would you characterize their actions in calling the workers back from the barricades--thereby giving a much freer hand to the growing bourgeois counterrevolution?
The point is, it is godawfully simplistic, and outright dishonest in relation to the absolute necessity of thouroughgoing political analysis, to frame the matter in such terms. Don't get me wrong, I think that the actions of the leadership were in many ways problematic, but it is important to understand that the conditions for these actions and political lines were created by the decision of UGT and the Left Socialists. It's easy to understand the fear of possible consequences of outright armed rebellion when the concrete relationship between forces involved is carefully examined.

RedTrackWorker

3rd June 2011, 20:30

The point is, it is godawfully simplistic, and outright dishonest in relation to the absolute necessity of thouroughgoing political analysis, to frame the matter in such terms. Don't get me wrong, I think that the actions of the leadership were in many ways problematic, but it is important to understand that the conditions for these actions and political lines were created by the decision of UGT and the Left Socialists. It's easy to understand the fear of possible consequences of outright armed rebellion when the concrete relationship between forces involved is carefully examined

Point me to the political analysis of how it is good for a revolutionary leadership to join a bourgeois government and not break with its actions in putting down a working class uprising because of the political lines of other coalition members and "the fear of possible consequences of outright armed rebellion when the concrete relationship between forces involved is carefully examined". I will read it as long as the analysis makes clear when exactly a revolution by the working class is justified--and if it was not justified and possible in Catalonia in 1937, I find it hard to understand when it could ever be.

Without the above, you are simply justifying the failure of the existing leaderships in Spain to stop the counterrevolution while slandering real analysis with terms like "dishonest".

syndicat

3rd June 2011, 20:42

Really? Your argument is that since two parties that claim label X failed the test, what reason is there to think that another party could lead the way that claimed label X with an analysis of why the other two claim the label but negate the content?

you miss the point. my point is that partyism as a strategy tends to place an emphasis on getting the party leaders into goverment power. it tends to lead away from an emphasis on mass action and mass democracy...except to the extent this can further the leaders gaining control of a hierarchical state apparatus. and this is indeed what happened in the Russian revolution. the Bolshevik party in power had declining use for worker democracy of the soviets. that's why when they lost the elections to the soviets in 19 cities in the spring of 1918, they overthrew them by military force, or used force to refuse to leave office.

First, I don't understand how the POUM was more slavish to the Popular Front than the CNT--when the POUM only justified joining it because the CNT did?

completely wrong. the POUM was a part of the Left Front -- the Popular Front in Catalonia -- in the elections of Feb 1936. when Durruti and Garcia Oliver were called in to see Companys on July 20th 1936, and he proposed the CNT join a Popular Front government, he had reps of those parties waiting in the next room. And the POUM had a representative there. this is BEFORE the debate in the CNT on July 21 on whether to overthrow the Generalitat.

But syndicat would alibi the anarchist leadership from Trotsky's critique by pointing to their ideas...but ends up admitting they "decided to capitulate to the UGT leadership and join the Popular Front". But that is precisely the core of Trotsky's critique!

the usual Trot bullshit. who are "the anarchist leadership? as a Trotskyist you believe that world history depends on which "leaders" are in control. this means you don't really believe in the self-emancipation of the masses, because that assumes they have the capacity to chart their own course, collectively. in short, the trot view is an excuse for hierarchy.

the CNT was a mass organization. anarchists were the dominant influence within it. in particular, the activists who were the elected workshop delegates or shop stewards were the dominant influence. among these people, however, there were three different anarchist tendencies. but RedTrackWorker, in usual trot fashion, doesn't differentiate them.

the Treintistas had supported participation in the Popular Front from the beginning of the revolution. the revolutionaries, such as Durruti and others involved in the militias and a number of influential CNT journalists at the two big dailies in Madrid and Barcelona, were staunchly opposed to the Popular Front and were advocates of overthrowing the government and replacing it with Defense Councils, a unified militia, and worker congresses elected from base assemblies.

and then there were those FAIstas, including key intellectuals on the Peninsular Committee, such as Montseny, Carrasquer, De Santillan, who tended to waver between these two positions. in late August, early Sept they supported the revolutionaries and thus the CNT took a position at that time against the Popular Front, and in favor of the Defense Councils. this was the program that was carried out in Aragon.

but when Largo Caballero and the other Left Socialists in the leadership of the UGT veto'd the CNT's proposal, there was a division in the FAI between the people i call the revolutionaries and the centrists in the FAI such as Montseny & co.

so the de facto leadership...the rank and file shop stewards...were divided and the revolutionaries only had the support of a minority. that is why the CNT capitulated to the Popular Front.

but the CNT was much more reluctant moving in this direction than the Marxist parties in Spain. and the statism and partyism of Marxism were obviously contributing factors. this is why I think LRP's position is unrealistic. they want to keep the statism and partyism but reject the strong tendency in this strategy to do just what the Spanish Marxist parties did, and what most Marxist parties do.

by May 1937 the moment for revolution had passed. the problem was that the CNT movement had committed itself to a certain course, of an alliance with the UGT, including the leadership of the latter, and it was much harder for the revolutionary minority in the CNT to draw the bulk of the membership to an independent position. They really needed to have taken an independent direction in Aug-Sept 1936. for one thing, they could then have blocked 70 percent of Spain's gold going to Moscow, which happened at the end of Sept. things were still fluid in the CNT movement in Aug-Sept and had not yet committed itself to the Popular Front course.

during the May Days events the Friends of Durruti, who had about 3,000 activists from the revolutionary wing in Catalonia, had support in the neighborhood defense organizations and the CNT militia, but did not have the support of a majority of the shop stewards. If they had the workshop delegates behind them, they could have easily ousted the collaborationist regional committee.

RedTrackWorker

4th June 2011, 06:16

you miss the point. my point is that partyism as a strategy tends to place an emphasis on getting the party leaders into goverment power.

If that's what you meant to say, then I don't disagree with you per se (though I would put it very differently), I just don't think you can deal with the problem by avoiding creating a party (or constructing an ideology that says you're not building a party or whatever). But that's not what you said:

What reason is there to suppose that a Leninist party of any significance in Spain at the time would not have been inclined to join the Popular Front, given Leninism's partyist emphasis on gaining state power?

You try to back this claim up by saying:

this is indeed what happened in the Russian revolution. the Bolshevik party in power had declining use for worker democracy of the soviets. that's why when they lost the elections to the soviets in 19 cities in the spring of 1918, they overthrew them by military force, or used force to refuse to leave office.

But that fails to explain why the Bolsheviks didn't join the Popular Front government--which is precisely your original claim ("What reason is there to suppose that a Leninist party of any significance in Spain at the time would not have been inclined to join the Popular Front"). Was it some super-sophisticated power-grabbing manuever: "We realize the masses will turn against this government because of its continuing the war and stopping the land occupations, so we'll not join this particular government in crushing democracy and instead wait to put forward these policies so we can later seize power!"

completely wrong. the POUM was a part of the Left Front -- the Popular Front in Catalonia -- in the elections of Feb 1936. when Durruti and Garcia Oliver were called in to see Companys on July 20th 1936, and he proposed the CNT join a Popular Front government, he had reps of those parties waiting in the next room. And the POUM had a representative there. this is BEFORE the debate in the CNT on July 21 on whether to overthrow the Generalitat.

On the elections, from what I read, the CNT didn't campaign against voting for the Popular Front--and that was a conscious decision because of its popularity and the whole "freeing prisoners" thing that were the exact reason the POUM called for a vote for it. I disagree with the POUM's decision but I would hardly call it "slavish" (they immediately left the Front after the election).

On joining the government, what do you mean they had a representative there? If you mean that the POUM joined the government before the CNT--I'd like to see a reference because either my memory's left me or I've never seen (even in pro-anarchist sources) such a claim. If you don't mean that, what's your point?

As for the rest of your post syndicat, I don't know what to say. We have differences, but I fail to see how your response helps clarify them. Like claiming that I don't believe in the "self-emancipation of the masses" because I used the term "leadership" and then claiming that I didn't "differentiate" between the anarchist tendencies in "usual trot fashion."

I was writing short posts to respond to very specific points. Nowhere did I claim that the anarchists in their ranks or elements of leadership had nothing to offer the working class. Further, we've discussed this issue and you know I know about the Friends of Durruti and have a good opinion of them--so you know I can differentiate and have differentiated but yet you start in with this "Trot bullshit" and "trot view is an excuse for hierarchy." How does this help clarify the tasks facing the working class in its self-emancipation?

I've been doing more reading about the Spanish revolution and have yet to do a more indepth study of the Friends, and after I do so, would like to have a conversation/debate with you (and others) here about it. You can still throw out unfounded generalizations and such if you'd like--but I don't think it really helps anyone.

I want to take up one more particular claim though:

by May 1937 the moment for revolution had passed.

Can you point me to a more developed analysis of this point? Certainly it can't be said for sure either way--but it does seem clear the workers could've taken Barcelona, which could have and hopefully would have been inspired and created the conditions for halting the bourgeois counterrevolution and seen the workers contend for power.

syndicat

4th June 2011, 19:50

Can you point me to a more developed analysis of this point? Certainly it can't be said for sure either way--but it does seem clear the workers could've taken Barcelona, which could have and hopefully would have been inspired and created the conditions for halting the bourgeois counterrevolution and seen the workers contend for power.

they did take Barcelona...until the 5,000 national guard troops were brought in. if CNT militia units had been brought back from the front (and some tried to do this), they probably could have defeated the national guard. it's easy to imagine where that would have led....

the thing is, the Friends didn't have the support of the majority in the workplaces in May 1937. many of their old leaders who had a past history of revolutionary activism...particularly those who took government positions...refused to break with the Popular Front course.

as I said, the majority of the rank and file leadership, at that point in time, were not prepared to take the course of continuing the conflict, as promoted by the neighborhood defense groups and the Friends. they weren't prepared to repudiate their old leaders like Garcia-Oliver and the others.

It would have been much easier to take an indpendent course in Sept 1936 before the CNT had committed to the Popular Front, and when the daily CNT papers were criticizing the Popular Front and proposing to replace it with the Defense Councils. during Sept-Oct Solidaridad Obrera in Catalonia was constantly beating the drum for replacing the Popular Front with the National Defense Council (that is, an exclusively working class power).

Rowan Duffy

4th June 2011, 21:48

the usual Trot bullshit. who are "the anarchist leadership? as a Trotskyist you believe that world history depends on which "leaders" are in control. this means you don't really believe in the self-emancipation of the masses, because that assumes they have the capacity to chart their own course, collectively. in short, the trot view is an excuse for hierarchy.

the thing is, the Friends didn't have the support of the majority in the workplaces in May 1937. many of their old leaders who had a past history of revolutionary activism...particularly those who took government positions...refused to break with the Popular Front course.

So is leadership just an excuse made up by Trots, or was it also an important factor? :crying:

syndicat

5th June 2011, 22:50

So is leadership just an excuse made up by Trots, or was it also an important factor?

"leadership" is a slippery and ambiguous term, which some use as an excuse to justify hierarchical, bureaucratic structures. it can refer to influence or it can refer to a form of formal, structural decision-making authority over others.

Trotskyists have a tendency to take it in a static way. I would argue that the process of class formation....the change in the class form class in itself to class for itself...would be indicated by a wider spread of active participation, growing knowledge about the system and struggle among working people, and other aspects of "leadership skills." when information and skills are monopolized there is a tendency for this to harden into bureaucracies...as in bureaucratic trade unions.

but Trotskyism and Leninism in general do not appreciate this problem nor do they advocate the building up of the rank and file's leadershp skills, the spreading of these capacities among more rank and file workers. rather they sort of take it for granted there is simply leaders and led, and they want to make sure the leaders are people with their ideas.

RedTrackWorker

6th June 2011, 00:36

"leadership" is a slippery and ambiguous term, which some use as an excuse to justify hierarchical, bureaucratic structures. it can refer to influence or it can refer to a form of formal, structural decision-making authority over others.

Trotskyists have a tendency to take it in a static way. I would argue that the process of class formation....the change in the class form class in itself to class for itself...would be indicated by a wider spread of active participation, growing knowledge about the system and struggle among working people, and other aspects of "leadership skills." when information and skills are monopolized there is a tendency for this to harden into bureaucracies...as in bureaucratic trade unions.

but Trotskyism and Leninism in general do not appreciate this problem nor do they advocate the building up of the rank and file's leadershp skills, the spreading of these capacities among more rank and file workers. rather they sort of take it for granted there is simply leaders and led, and they want to make sure the leaders are people with their ideas.

As for as today's Trotskyist and Leninists go, the LRP has no basic argument with this idea: see for example the section Middle Class Marxism (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/intro.html#g) in our book on Stalinism.

But you imputed that position to me, the LRP and to Trotsky's writing on the Spanish civil war. Based on what?

As for "they sort of take it for granted there is simply leaders and led, and they want to make sure the leaders are people with their ideas", when you wrote "the thing is, the Friends didn't have the support of the majority in the workplaces in May 1937. many of their old leaders who had a past history of revolutionary activism...particularly those who took government positions...refused to break with the Popular Front course", is that not admitting there are "leaders and led" and it would've been better for the leaders to have your ideas? Seeing the leaders as a static bureaucratic layer is wrong, but does not the Spanish revolution show the importance of parties and what program they follow.

Trotsky wrote (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm):

Naturally, the “condition of class forces” supplies the foundation for all other political factors; but just as the foundation of a building does not reduce the importance of walls, windows, doors, roofs, so the “condition of classes” does not invalidate the importance of parties, their strategy, their leadership. By dissolving the concrete in the abstract, our sages really halted midway. The most “profound” solution of the problem would have been to declare the defeat of the Spanish proletariat as due to the inadequate development of productive forces. Such a key is accessible to any fool.

He goes on to say that "there are not the least grounds for expecting conditions more favorable" for a revolution in terms of the class and its struggle. If it was a failure of the class itself, what hope is there for revolution? If it was the failure of the workers to have built a party (or whatever you want to call it)--an organization that expressed and fought for their interests--not as a layer separated by a thousand walls from the workers but as a part of the class becoming a class-for-itself, then we can start going somewhere--and you seem to implicitly admit that with your writings on the Friends, so how is that so different than what Trotsky is saying and what I am saying? What is so fundamentally different that I'm talking about "Trot bullshit" about leaders being in control and you're talking about the workers liberating themselves?

syndicat

6th June 2011, 04:07

As for "they sort of take it for granted there is simply leaders and led, and they want to make sure the leaders are people with their ideas", when you wrote "the thing is, the Friends didn't have the support of the majority in the workplaces in May 1937. many of their old leaders who had a past history of revolutionary activism...particularly those who took government positions...refused to break with the Popular Front course", is that not admitting there are "leaders and led" and it would've been better for the leaders to have your ideas? Seeing the leaders as a static bureaucratic layer is wrong, but does not the Spanish revolution show the importance of parties and what program they follow.

look, in my analysis i say that the influence of the revolutionary wing of the CNT was not adequate for the CNT to exhibit in that situation the kind of audacity that their ideas & the situation called for. It follows that I am saying it would have been better for the revolutionary wing to have more influence within that movement.

I, and my organization, are dual organizational anarcho-syndicalists. We disagree with those who see no need for a revolutionary political organization. This is in part precisely because the revolutionaries do need to develop influence for the revolutionary course they propose. But from a libertarian socialist point of view, this critically involves building more capacity and independence and, indeed, "leadership skills" among rank and file workers. Leninists have never emphasized this latter point. And my hypothesis is that this is do the differences between us in what we see as the role of the revolutionary organization. We do not see its role as becoming the "manager" of the movement. There is a difference between being an influence and trying to concentrate control over the movement in your hands, via, say, concentrating formal positions in the movement in the hands of a directing body.

this was expressed, for example, in the debate at the founding conference of the Red Trade Union International between Trotsky and Angel Pestana over union automomy vs subordination to the party.

6th June 2011, 06:17

this was expressed, for example, in the debate at the founding conference of the Red Trade Union International between Trotsky and Angel Pestana over union automomy vs subordination to the party.

Or Trotsky vs. Lenin...

RedTrackWorker

6th June 2011, 12:56

look, in my analysis i say that the influence of the revolutionary wing of the CNT was not adequate for the CNT to exhibit in that situation the kind of audacity that their ideas & the situation called for. It follows that I am saying it would have been better for the revolutionary wing to have more influence within that movement.

And so again I ask, how is that so fundamentally different than what Trotsky says, the LRP says and what I am saying that we're ignorant bullshitters and you're leading the workers in liberating themselves?

from a libertarian socialist point of view, this critically involves building more capacity and independence and, indeed, "leadership skills" among rank and file workers. Leninists have never emphasized this latter point. And my hypothesis is that this is do the differences between us in what we see as the role of the revolutionary organization. We do not see its role as becoming the "manager" of the movement. There is a difference between being an influence and trying to concentrate control over the movement in your hands, via, say, concentrating formal positions in the movement in the hands of a directing body.

On the the claim that "Leninists have never emphasized this latter point"--I'm reading Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom in which she amply supplies documentation showing how wrong that conception is. But it is a powerful conception due to the legacy of Stalinism indeed.
The LRP stands against "managing" movements--in theory and in practice. We have a record. You're welcome to actually offer evidence to support your claim rather than make generalizations about Leninists and Trotskyists.

Rowan Duffy

6th June 2011, 13:21

B0LSHEVIK

6th June 2011, 16:54

they did take Barcelona...until the 5,000 national guard troops were brought in. if CNT militia units had been brought back from the front (and some tried to do this), they probably could have defeated the national guard. it's easy to imagine where that would have led....

the thing is, the Friends didn't have the support of the majority in the workplaces in May 1937. many of their old leaders who had a past history of revolutionary activism...particularly those who took government positions...refused to break with the Popular Front course.

Right but isn't that what Trotsky says in the above quote? That the brass of the trade unions essentially betrayed the rank and file worker who did want a revolution instead of bourgeois nonsense? And didn't the brass of the CNT actually quell and eventually, as Trotsky notes, hand power back bit by bit? I think Trotsky nailed that dead on.

When he quotes that 'we could've taken power but...' to me, 75 odd years after, even I've heard that from people like Montseny and other popular front anarchists say something like this. And if I remember correctly the CNT did endorse the popular front in the February elections right?

syndicat

6th June 2011, 22:40

However, it's nearly as bad to take that confusion and repeat it by insisting that the conflation is acceptable and claiming that leadership does not play an important role. You then have a fundamental problem when you attempt to explain things later in terms of leadership.

this has no bearing on what i said. you'd need to quote what i said and point to something you are referring to.

syndicat

6th June 2011, 22:50

Right but isn't that what Trotsky says in the above quote? That the brass of the trade unions essentially betrayed the rank and file worker who did want a revolution instead of bourgeois nonsense? And didn't the brass of the CNT actually quell and eventually, as Trotsky notes, hand power back bit by bit? I think Trotsky nailed that dead on.

sorry but this view is crap. if that is what Trotsky was saying, he was wrong. as i said, the people with the dominant influence in terms of day to day working of the CNT were the workplace delegates, workers who had been elected by their assemblies. they were not paid staff or paid officials of the union.

you're confusing the rank and file shop stewards with some sort of trade union bureaucracy when you use terms like "the brass of the trade unions." the CNT was not a conventional trade union.

moreover, the decision to back off from the defense council & workers congress proposal at the end of October 1936 was made via plenaries of these rank and file delegates. there was no "quelling" of the rank and file by any bureaucracy.

now, it's true that in the May Days events, Garcia Oliver and Montseny went on the radio and asked CNT members to stand down from their armed general strike mobilization against the police. and the Regional Committee of the CNT, which had already been elected to pursue a Popular Front course, backed them up. Garcia Olive & Montseny were not officials of the union but political activists who represented the CNT in the Popular Front government. As such they had no formal power in the union, but were able to get their way due to continued loyality of the majority of the union activist base to their old leaders.

It's true that the neighborhood defense groups and the CNT militia were ready to continue the fight. But they did not have the support of the majority within the CNT. they were themselves only a minority. so if you want to describe getting them to stand down, and getting the ranks to back off, as a "quelling", then it's necessary to point out that the majority of the ranks in the CNT did not support the position of the Friends of Durruti. so it wasn't a "quelling" of the ranks but of a certain activist minority who wanted to continue the fight.

the rank and file delegates were elected by, and repoted to the assemblies, and if the assemblies wanted a different course than Popular Front collaboration, they could have elected new delegates and then the collaborationist Regional Committee would have been toast. but there is no evidence that the majority in the CNT in Catalonia were ready and willing to contest a violent struggle for conquest of control at that time.

as i said before, the real time to pursue a different direction would have been in Sept-Oct. that's when the real failure of nerve took place. a failure of leadership, yes, in the informal sense of leadership as influence.

RedTrackWorker

6th June 2011, 23:22

the rank and file delegates were elected by, and repoted to the assemblies, and if the assemblies wanted a different course than Popular Front collaboration, they could have elected new delegates and then the collaborationist Regional Committee would have been toast. but there is no evidence that the majority in the CNT in Catalonia were ready and willing to contest a violent struggle for conquest of control at that time.

as i said before, the real time to pursue a different direction would have been in Sept-Oct. that's when the real failure of nerve took place. a failure of leadership, yes, in the informal sense of leadership as influence.

Trotsky (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm):

A “false policy of the masses” is explained by the “immaturity” of the masses. .... Just what the false policy consisted of, and who were its initiators: the masses or the leaders – that is passed over in silence by our author. By means of a tautology he unloads the responsibility on the masses.

So you attack Trotsky for suggesting a "failure of leadership" by the anarchists lead to the debacle of the Spanish revolution because "they could have elected new delegates" and then say, well, yes they failed in Sept 36. But since that failure then was not "opposed" by the masses through elections of new delegates (only instead opposed in action by the workers taking over Barcelona in May 37!), then it's "crap" to blame the anarchist leadership at that point.

You're accusing Trotskyism of dividing the world into "leaders and led" and Trotsky says this (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm):

One must understand exactly nothing in the sphere of the inter-relationships between the class and the party, between the masses and the leaders in order to repeat the hollow statement that the Spanish masses merely followed their leaders.
and

The historical falsification consists in this, that the responsibility for the defeat of the Spanish masses is unloaded on the working masses and not those parties which paralyzed or simply crushed the revolutionary movement of the masses

Syndicat says it was only an "activist minority"--this is incredible! Would there have ever been sit-down strikes in the auto plants if they took a poll? No! Would there have been war-time strikes in auto in WW2 if they had taken a poll? They did take a poll--the workers voted against striking during the war...and then proceeded to do it. Syndicat says the CNT workers did not vote for a revolutionary policy, so when the masses rose up in a second revolution in May 37...they were an "activist minority" and it's "crap" to criticize the "leadership" for suppressing it. He thinks since the CNT didn't have a formal bureaucracy with formalized institutionalization it had no "brass"--what idealism! And Gaddafi has no "formal" control over Libya so stop criticizing him for the Libyan government's actions!

How is that kind of thinking a guide to revolutionary action? How does it explain the world?

The only political tendency that fought for a workers' revolution consistently from the beginning--including when syndicat correctly says it would've been easier (Sept-Oct 1936)--is the Trotskyist tendency. Yet it is this tendency which is "ignoramus", "pontificating," "bullshit," and "crap." Strange political evaluation that.

Jose Gracchus

7th June 2011, 00:30

I think the USSR circa 1918-1924 would have quite a lot to say on the topic of "Trotskyists" for "workers' revolution" and against bifurcation between "leaders" and "led", see Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-24: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite.

I say this with some affection for the LRP as for as Trots go, I mean their analysis of the Soviet state is pretty spot on aside from the typical Trot handwaving magic of believing the Soviet state only became reactionary when the Trots were repressed in 1928.

Also, what "Trotskyist tendency" in Spain? My impression was Trotsky disowned the Spanish Left Oppositionists when they joined with the Bukharinists to form the anti-Stalinist POUM. Trots have a bad habit of imagining Trotsky's pen could magically conjure socialism, if only enough people were to listen to Isaac Deutscher's "prophet".

RedTrackWorker

7th June 2011, 01:14

Also, what "Trotskyist tendency" in Spain? My impression was Trotsky disowned the Spanish Left Oppositionists when they joined with the Bukharinists to form the anti-Stalinist POUM. Trots have a bad habit of imagining Trotsky's pen could magically conjure socialism, if only enough people were to listen to Isaac Deutscher's "prophet".

There were a small number of organized Fourth Internationalists in Spain. Two-thirds of them died defending Madrid in 1936. When the columns went out from Catalonia, the first casualty was a Fourth Internationalist (Cid). They--besides the Friends of Durruti--were the only organization on the barricades of May 1937 to argue for continuing the second workers' uprising.

See the account of Bortenstein in How the Popular Front Opened the Gates to Franco (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain2/index.htm). He led the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists after the arrests of Munis and others. He escaped to France and tried to get to Mexico but was arrested and ended up dieing in Auschwitz. It's an amazing and humbling book.

Also, Trotsky and the Fourth International didn't "disown" the POUM when it was formed but tried to go "through the experience" with the Spanish section though they disagreed with it. The first break was only the joining the Popular Front electoral bloc, but then after the uprising, the Trotskyists again attempted a collaboration--recognizing the situation had changed and because none of them thought a "pen could magically conjure socialism" (though I agree too many think that now). The decisive break was the POUM joining the Popular Front government in Catalonia.

syndicat

7th June 2011, 01:16

So you attack Trotsky for suggesting a "failure of leadership" by the anarchists lead to the debacle of the Spanish revolution because "they could have elected new delegates" and then say, well, yes they failed in Sept 36. But since that failure then was not "opposed" by the masses through elections of new delegates (only instead opposed in action by the workers taking over Barcelona in May 37!), then it's "crap" to blame the anarchist leadership at that point.

no. you've scrambled what i said. i'm not going to reproduce the same thing I've said countless times just because you have a hard time following an argument. what you say about is not what i said. i've said countless times that the majority of the rank and file leadership ended up capitulating to the UGT & PSOE leadership and thus the Popular Front.

but that's not what Bolshevik attributes to Trotsky above. and Trotsky didn't differentiate the different tendencies in the CNT. and Bolshevik above confuses the CNT with some topdown bureaucratic trade union where the formal, entrenched hierarchy opposes what the masses are preferring. there is no evidence of the latter in the case of the CNT.

if the revolutionary wing in the CNT did have a viable course independent of Popular Front, a course that would have led to worker power, then his bombast about "the bankruptcy of anarchism" is empty sectarian posturing.

B0LSHEVIK

7th June 2011, 02:09

no. you've scrambled what i said. i'm not going to reproduce the same thing I've said countless times just because you have a hard time following an argument. what you say about is not what i said. i've said countless times that the majority of the rank and file leadership ended up capitulating to the UGT & PSOE leadership and thus the Popular Front.

but that's not what Bolshevik attributes to Trotsky above. and Trotsky didn't differentiate the different tendencies in the CNT. and Bolshevik above confuses the CNT with some topdown bureaucratic trade union where the formal, entrenched hierarchy opposes what the masses are preferring. there is no evidence of the latter in the case of the CNT.

if the revolutionary wing in the CNT did have a viable course independent of Popular Front, a course that would have led to worker power, then his bombast about "the bankruptcy of anarchism" is empty sectarian posturing.

1) So for the benefit of us all, can you explain here how the CNT WAS structured?

2) When you say there is no proof that the rank-and-file wanted something different than the 'leadership' well, Montseny and other 'leadership' anarchists actually confess to that in this spanish made documentary (its 95 mins):

zIyvEQUJhHc

RedTrackWorker

7th June 2011, 02:38

if the revolutionary wing in the CNT did have a viable course independent of Popular Front, a course that would have led to worker power, then his bombast about "the bankruptcy of anarchism" is empty sectarian posturing.

Okay. I can agree the formulation is incomplete or imprecise. Perhaps it's even put in a sectarian form but that's not the core of what he's saying--it's not even of secondary importance. The important thing is how could the workers have won. If a harsh and possibly imprecise formulation can blind you to that important issue...I don't know what to say. You've yet to say anything in the various threads on this issue that is a fundamental criticism of the "line of march" the Trotskyists fought for--and by admitting the "revolutionary wing" of the CNT didn't consistently fight for such an independent course, you're admitting the Fourth International was the only political organization preparing ahead of time for the necessary struggle and that consistently fought for it. Yet you persist in constantly using terms like "ignoramus," "bullshit" and "crap" to describe Trotskyist writings on the subject--and your defense has been generalizations about "Leninism" without any evidence baring on the Trotskyists' fight in Spain or the LRP's fight now. How does any of that help the workers prepare for revolution and transforming society?

Devrim

7th June 2011, 07:31

There were a small number of organized Fourth Internationalists in Spain. Two-thirds of them died defending Madrid in 1936. When the columns went out from Catalonia, the first casualty was a Fourth Internationalist (Cid). They--besides the Friends of Durruti--were the only organization on the barricades of May 1937 to argue for continuing the second workers' uprising.

There were eight members of the Trotskyist organisation in Spain. None of them died of them died on the Madrid front in 1936.

Devrim

RedTrackWorker

7th June 2011, 13:04

There were eight members of the Trotskyist organisation in Spain. None of them died of them died on the Madrid front in 1936.

Devrim

Devrim's right about Madrid--I was confusing the Fourth Internationalists who had entered the POUM. The Spanish Bolshevik-Leninist group had eight members (or so, I've seen varying figures but tiny) but many more Fourth Internationalists participated in the revolution than that. For example, Robert (not Cid--got the name confused)--who died in the columns--was a Fourth Internationalist who volunteered to fight but wasn't part of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninist section, whereas Cid I believe was a Spanish section member who was killed in the May days uprising.

syndicat

7th June 2011, 20:23

by admitting the "revolutionary wing" of the CNT didn't consistently fight for such an independent course,

i never admitted any such thing. again, you're not paying attention to what i do say. you want, like Trotsky and trots generally, to suppose that it is anarchism as such or the entire "anarchist leadership" who account for the capitalustion to the Popular Front. but i defined the revolutionary wing as those who did not capitulate in that way, but fought for the path that involved replacing the Republican government institutions with the CNT's program of defense councils, unified militia, and worker congresses and free municipalities. anarcho-syndicalism did provide a path to worker power and the revolutionary wing pursued that path...but the majority of the organization did not agree with them at the crucial moment, and lacked the nerve to act according to their own program.

a failure of nerve may be a "failure of leadership" -- of part of the leadership -- but it isn't explained by the anarcho-syndicalist politics, contrary to what Trots always claim.

baring on the Trotskyists' fight in Spain

what trotskyists? Munis' tiny grouplet?

RedTrackWorker

7th June 2011, 21:48

you want, like Trotsky and trots generally, to suppose that it is anarchism as such or the entire "anarchist leadership" who account for the capitalustion to the Popular Front.

Where did I say that?

but i defined the revolutionary wing as those who did not capitulate in that way

well, if you definite it that way, sure, it did consistently fight for that, but what I meant by you admitting (implicitly obviously) is that there was no "wing" is a sense of organizational continuity that consistently fought for such day-in, day-out.

what trotskyists? Munis' tiny grouplet?

Sure. The ones that didn't have a failure of nerve and that consistently fought for a revolutionary course.

syndicat

7th June 2011, 22:00

well, if you definite it that way, sure, it did consistently fight for that, but what I meant by you admitting (implicitly obviously) is that there was no "wing" is a sense of organizational continuity that consistently fought for such day-in, day-out.

but i never admitted that at all. the revolutionary wing did consistently fight for the program I referred to. and there was certainly continuity. during Sept-Oct 1936 the daily papers Castilla Libre and Solidaridad Obrera were constantly beating the drum for the National Defense Council and the rest of that program. when the CNT flipflopped at end of October and agreed to join the Popular Front, the managing editor, Liberto Callejas, of Solidariad Obrera refused to go along, as did most of the writers, including Jaime Balius. as a result they were fired by the regional committee. a few months later Baliuus and Callejas helped form the Friends of Durruti Group to continue to promote the same program. the program of FoD was the program of the CNT in early Sept 1936. and the FoD had about 3,000 activists in Catalonia. FoD was formed to organize among the rank and file of CNT for a return to the revolutionary program of Sept 1936.

Sure. The ones that didn't have a failure of nerve and that consistently fought for a revolutionary course.

all 50 of them. BFD.

moreover the Spanish Trotskyists had a slavish mentality towards Trotsky and the Russian revolution. their advoacy of Russian style soviets is an example of this. this had no basis in the Spanish revolutionary tradition, which was revolutionary syndicalist. Moreover, in the context of Spanish society at the time, this would have dis-enfranchised most women. for local goverance the CNT movement advocated the free municipalities, based on general assemblies of residents of neighborhoods and villages...a type of governance formation that would enroll the participation of women, people from the informal sector, older people, etc.

the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists advocated a dual governance system based on both residence and workplaces.

RedTrackWorker

7th June 2011, 22:24

I was returning here to edit my last post because I don't think it helps advance the fundamental political discussion regarding these events.

I will say that even if the demand for soviets was wrong (and I don't think the discussion is so simple as syndicat puts it)--that is a far cry from the Spanish Trotskyists having a "slavish mentality" to Trotsky or the Russian revolution--a pretty serious and deep accusation for people who--many of them--sacrificed their lives for the workers' revolution and based on everything I read, showed immense ability to think independently and seriously about that fight...so serious they would join a "big fucking deal" tiny "grouplet" because they thought its ideas represented the way forward for the working class (which syndicat has yet to produce a single piece of evidence or argument to show was in any way fundamentally wrong). And these people have a "slavish mentality"?

Again, I don't understand how such unsupported accusations help clarify the tasks of the workers' movement.

syndicat

7th June 2011, 22:38

B0LSHEVIK

8th June 2011, 02:18

the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists advocated a dual governance system based on both residence and workplaces.

Can you elaborate on this? There are very few sources on how things actually worked in revolutionary Catalonia.

Also, I dont see much argument here, more repetition actually. Trots point out how the CNT capitulated to the popular front, which is historically true. Synd says that the revolutionary wing did not intend to do so, which is also historically true.

But isnt that what Trotsky says in the opening post to this thread?????????

syndicat

8th June 2011, 03:20

But isnt that what Trotsky says in the opening post to this thread?????????

like RedTrackWorker, Trotsky gave no credit to the revolutionary wing, in fact didn't even know about its existence apparently.

dual governance meant both base assemblies of workers in workplaces and of residents in urban neighborhoods and villages. this latter idea of free municipalities was only carried out in Aragon, which is also the only place where the anarchosyndicalists carried out their program of defense councils and worker congresses.

Jose Gracchus

8th June 2011, 11:39

syndicat

23rd June 2011, 05:08

So like the free municipalities would be grouped into an urban commune in the big cities? Would the governing authority be elected from the workers' assemblies and/or neighborhood assemblies? What about the larger regionally, and nationally, integrated congresses (presumably this would expand to international had the social revolution been advanced to Portugal, France, Morocco, Maghreb)? Would they be separate regional workers' and people's congresses? To which would the defense councils and democratic militia be responsible to?

yes. in cities, the idea was that the neighborhood assemblies would elect delegates to a city-wide council. they would not be paid representatives (tho might be compensated for time on council) and directly accountable to the assembly. these organizations were intended to be in charage of forumlating demands & plans for public goods, such as housing, education, child care etc.

there would also be regional worker congresses, which would consist of the delegates elected from the workplace assemblies.

it seems that they're views on who would be responsible for defense shifted. I think the Zaragoza program envisions the militia accountable to the residence assemblies. but in Sept 1936 they modified the program to put the worker congresses in charge of defense & thus the militia.

i think they seemed to have envisioned both people's congresses, elected from the residence assemblies, and worker congresses elected from the workplaces, but I'm not sure about that. they envisioned each type of assembly based structure as having a role in planning. but a problem is that they never specified clearly what the relationship between them would be. the british guild socialists had envisioned this sort of dual goverance structure in the World War 1 era but they envisioned some process of negotiation between them in regard to determining what goods & services are produced. but the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists did not have this conception.

A Marxist Historian

1st July 2011, 19:53

no. you've scrambled what i said. i'm not going to reproduce the same thing I've said countless times just because you have a hard time following an argument. what you say about is not what i said. i've said countless times that the majority of the rank and file leadership ended up capitulating to the UGT & PSOE leadership and thus the Popular Front.

but that's not what Bolshevik attributes to Trotsky above. and Trotsky didn't differentiate the different tendencies in the CNT.

[That's just plain wrong. Trotsky, not being on the scene, didn't do a breakdown on different CNT tendencies, he didn't have the on-the-spot info to do it accurately. But the Spanish Trotskyists sure did. They oriented to the Friends of Durruti, the revolutionary anarchists, and denounced the sellout anarchists, i.e. just about all the others. -M.H.-]

and Bolshevik above confuses the CNT with some topdown bureaucratic trade union where the formal, entrenched hierarchy opposes what the masses are preferring. there is no evidence of the latter in the case of the CNT.

[Wrong. Plenty of evidence. Do you really think the rank and file CNT fighters*liked* that their leaders were joining the government, against all anarchist principles, and repressing the radicals, side by side with the Stalinists and the liberal capitalists? I kinda doubt it. -M.H.]

if the revolutionary wing in the CNT did have a viable course independent of Popular Front, a course that would have led to worker power, then his bombast about "the bankruptcy of anarchism" is empty sectarian posturing.

[And if pigs had wings they could fly. -M.H.-]

A Marxist Historian

1st July 2011, 20:05

and the traditionally bombastic and sectarian posturing of Trotskyists, in their comments on Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, also don't help clarify or contribute to any reasonable discussion....that is, for the activists & organizers who built a mass revolutionary workers movement of 2.5 million members, which seized 18,000 companies and 14 million acres of farmland in Spain, built vast systems of worker direct management of production, and built a workers militia with tens of thousands of members....and many of whom were murdered by the fascists.

The whole point of the Trotskyist critique is to differentiate between the anarcho-syndicalist rank and file, who were exactly as you describe, and their sellout leaders, who were traitors, except for Durruti. Leadership is everything in a revolutionary movement.

Unfortunately since their were only eight of them, they weren't in a position to do much about it.

Why were there only eight? Was this because Spanish workers weren't interested in the ideas of Trotsky? Nothing could be further from the truth.

It was because of that arrogant idiot Andres Nin who screwed everything up. But that is another story, and a sad one. Nin died a heroic death, and we should honor him for that. But he is also the single individual most responsible, ultimately, for Franco winning instead of the workers, by his destruction of Spanish Trotskyism, which in the early 1930s had a whole lot more support in Spain than did the tiny irrelevant Spanish Communist Party.

-M.H.-

S.Artesian

1st July 2011, 20:19

The whole point of the Trotskyist critique is to differentiate between the anarcho-syndicalist rank and file, who were exactly as you describe, and their sellout leaders, who were traitors, except for Durruti. Leadership is everything in a revolutionary movement.

Unfortunately since their were only eight of them, they weren't in a position to do much about it.

Why were there only eight? Was this because Spanish workers weren't interested in the ideas of Trotsky? Nothing could be further from the truth.

It was because of that arrogant idiot Andres Nin who screwed everything up. But that is another story, and a sad one. Nin died a heroic death, and we should honor him for that. But he is also the single individual most responsible, ultimately, for Franco winning instead of the workers, by his destruction of Spanish Trotskyism, which in the early 1930s had a whole lot more support in Spain than did the tiny irrelevant Spanish Communist Party.

-M.H.-

Right, as opposed to the great man theory of history, we now have the idiot theory of history. One man, that "idiot Nin" screwed "everything up." Why, if it weren't for him, the Spanish Civil War would have turned out differently. Somebody should have gotten rid of............wait a minute, the Stalinists did get rid of him and the whole civil war turned around right after that, didn't it?

Leadership isn't everything. It's a product of everything going on in the class struggle, but it is not everything... unless of course one wants the workers to be led; to follow this or that "great man." If that's what you want, then quit your whining when the workers follow someone you think is an idiot, but the class regards as "great."

And that-- "Leadership Is Everything"-- is precisely why I'm not a Trotskyist, and precisely why the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union was outmaneuvered, and smashed.

A Marxist Historian

1st July 2011, 23:04

Originally Posted by The Marxist Historian
"The whole point of the Trotskyist critique is to differentiate between the anarcho-syndicalist rank and file, who were exactly as you describe, and their sellout leaders, who were traitors, except for Durruti. Leadership is everything in a revolutionary movement.

Unfortunately since their were only eight of them, they weren't in a position to do much about it.

Why were there only eight? Was this because Spanish workers weren't interested in the ideas of Trotsky? Nothing could be further from the truth.

It was because of that arrogant idiot Andres Nin who screwed everything up. But that is another story, and a sad one. Nin died a heroic death, and we should honor him for that. But he is also the single individual most responsible, ultimately, for Franco winning instead of the workers, by his destruction of Spanish Trotskyism, which in the early 1930s had a whole lot more support in Spain than did the tiny irrelevant Spanish Communist Party.

-M.H.-"

--------------------------------------------------------
Right, as opposed to the great man theory of history, we now have the idiot theory of history. One man, that "idiot Nin" screwed "everything up." Why, if it weren't for him, the Spanish Civil War would have turned out differently. Somebody should have gotten rid of............wait a minute, the Stalinists did get rid of him and the whole civil war turned around right after that, didn't it?

-------------------------------------------------------

(M.H.) Sorry to have to burst your bubble here, but things are the way they are, whether you or me like them or not.

If Lenin and Trotsky had been assassinated, would the Russian Revolution have succeeded? Of course not.

If Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been assassinated, would the German Revolution have succeeded?

Um, come to think of it, they were assassinated, and the German Revolution failed, and Hitler came to power.

As for Andres Nin, the problem with him was that he *was* the Spanish equivalent of Lenin or Rosa, and he totally screwed up. If he had listened to what Trotsky was telling him, instead of telling him to MYOB, then yes, everything would have been different. That's the facts, Jack!

As Trotsky put it, the crisis of mankind in this era is the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

----------------------------------------------------------

Leadership isn't everything. It's a product of everything going on in the class struggle, but it is not everything... unless of course one wants the workers to be led; to follow this or that "great man." If that's what you want, then quit your whining when the workers follow someone you think is an idiot, but the class regards as "great."

-------------------------------------------------------------

(M.H.)

OK, I oversimplified a bit to hammer the point across. That's exactly it, leaderships are the product of the whole history leading behind them leading up to their creation. Revolutionary workers didn't follow Lenin because he was a movie star or Rosa because she was a perfect 10. They followed those leaders as they had discovered over time that they were the people who could best put forward and explain the best thoughts and ideas of *the workers themselves!*

The objective position of workers in capitalist society is that their objective class interests correspond to world socialism. They have nothing to lose except their chains, as someone once said.

But, as Marx explained in that Communist Manifesto, you have a division in society between handwork and brainwork, with workers discouraged by every possible means from thinking, and bombarded with racism, national chauvinism and the whole panoply of bourgeois ideology. So socialist ideas, as Marx explained, have to be brought into the working class from the outside, by the best elements of the bourgeois intelligentsia, which is almost exactly how Marx put it.

Lenin fleshed this all out with his theory of a *vanguard* party of the working class, where the most advanced workers fuse with the most honest intellectuals and together "lead" the backward parts of the working class, the Archie Bunkers, in liberating the whole human race.

So leadership is key, not followship.

As for workers following idiots instead of people who have the right ideas, well, that is the current situation, and that is why we are all pretty fucked. If you think that is OK, then the sensible attitude is eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we are toast.

I don't like the idea that the human race is looking doomed to destruction, and I will continue to whine about it, whether you like it or not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

And that-- "Leadership Is Everything"-- is precisely why I'm not a Trotskyist, and precisely why the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union was outmaneuvered, and smashed.

-------------------------------------------------------------

No, it was smashed for two reasons. Firstly, because Russia was an isolated, economically and socially backward country. Building socialism in one country is impossible anywhere, that's basic Marxism, but especially in a country like Russia. But for practical people like Stalin, it just looked much more sensible than shooting for world revolution, and most Russian workers pretty much agreed with him after the German Revolution of 1923 failed. And then you had a long string of more failures, which Stalin was often responsible for, but each one of which made his ideas more plausible to tired and demoralized Russian revolutionaries.

And secondarily because Trotsky screwed up quite a bit himself in the mid '20s, while figuring out this brand new unprecedented situation himself. Hey, nobody's perfect, there are no plaster saints to worship like idols.

Lenin made the mistake of supporting Stalin as general party secretary in spring 1922, but figured out almost immediately, just a few months later, that Stalin had to go. Unfortunately he had a stroke and died.

Trotsky was not as clear on that. Plus he was bending over backwards because everybody knew Stalin and Trotsky hated each other, so Trotsky didn't want to look like a power greedy maneuverer operating on the basis of his own personal prejudices.

But by 1927, by which time in tactical terms it was too late, he had figured it all out, and left behind him a priceless legacy in written form of what not just he himself, but a hundred years of socialist struggle by the working class had taught him and many other people. And it has been buried, and now we have to unearth it, what with capitalism truly in crisis now.

-M.H.-

syndicat

2nd July 2011, 00:18

"Leadership Is Everything"--

for Trotsky "leadership" means giving orders, who's in charge. this is inconsistent with the idea that the working class en masse creates its own liberation. as the Internationale put it, "We don't need condescending saviors to rule us from a judgment hall."

if by "leadership" one means the more active and influential members of the CNT, it is simply false to say that they all went over to the position of capitulation to the Popular Front. that was a path that got majority support at a crucial moment, but there was a sizeable minority -- thousands of CNT activists, writers, militia participants -- opposed to this direction. moreover, it wasn't a question of "leaders" imposing a decision because the delegates were directly accountable to the assemblies and if the delegates wanted the regional and national committees to not pursue Popular Front collaboration, they could have easily voted them out at a plenary.

A Marxist Historian

2nd July 2011, 01:14

for Trotsky "leadership" means giving orders, who's in charge. this is inconsistent with the idea that the working class en masse creates its own liberation. as the Internationale put it, "We don't need condescending saviors to rule us from a judgment hall."

Well, I was being a little one sided here, as all the anarcho-blah blah I hear here was getting me a little irritated.

Yes, we don't need any condescending saviors. Everything Trotsky had to say was stuff he had learned from experience, often being taught by ordinary rank and file workers with more life experience than he had. And he screwed up a number of times himself. But he knew how to learn from his mistakes, something that is incredibly rare on the Left these days.

You have to have a division of labor. Leadership like any other skill gets better with experience. And it is not basically more worth while than any other skill, it's just the one we happen to need right now.

And the most important skill in leadership is not knowing how to snap out orders, handy in the military, which Trotsky happened to be good at, but otherwise often counterproductive.

The skill in leadership is knowing how to listen to and *follow* what the masses want, and even more *what the masses deep down realize they need,* even if they don't quite consciously realize that yet. Like Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want, but you find sometimes you get what you need. By the way, Durruti had figured that one out too, though he was twice as bossy as Trotsky ever was.

On the one hand you *absolutely* have to have democracy, with the leaders listening to the rank and file and give them the final say. With the horrible situation in Russia in 1921 some short cuts had to be made in that, no way to avoid it. But the consequences were bad, pretty tough to avoid that too. Trotsky figured out from that something Marx had already said half a century before, that you couldn't build socialism in one country.

Unless the revolution spreads, sooner or later everything goes south no matter what you do. And that's exactly what happened.

-M.H.-
-----------------------------------------------------------

if by "leadership" one means the more active and influential members of the CNT, it is simply false to say that they all went over to the position of capitulation to the Popular Front. that was a path that got majority support at a crucial moment, but there was a sizeable minority -- thousands of CNT activists, writers, militia participants -- opposed to this direction. moreover, it wasn't a question of "leaders" imposing a decision because the delegates were directly accountable to the assemblies and if the delegates wanted the regional and national committees to not pursue Popular Front collaboration, they could have easily voted them out at a plenary.

-------------------------------------------------------------

And just why did the majority of the CNT activists decide to go along with joining the government and giving up on all anarchist principles, flushing them down the toilet? Because that's what they really wanted deep in their hearts?

No. It was because the most influential and popular anarchists told them to do so. They didn't *impose* the decision, it was all very democratic I have no doubt. But the anarchist masses had faith in their anarchist leaders, just like the socialist masses in their socialist leaders, etc. etc.

That's the way things work in the real world, and if that doesn't fit with anarchist doctrine and self-image, well, that's the way life is sometimes.

In short, it was a failure of leadership, as usual. You seem to want to blame the anarchist masses for the horrible mistake of supporting the Popular Front instead of pursuing the revolution.

I think that is very unfair to the rank and file anarchist workers, whose perfectly natural faith in the leaders they had followed for so many years was terribly abused, pushing the blame onto them off of where it belongs, on the leaders who weren't doing their jobs.

The IRA has a great song about this, "The Patriot's Game."

Best line: "I think that our leaders are mostly to blame..."

-M.H.-

S.Artesian

2nd July 2011, 04:48

We should all take a moment and realize we're arguing with a Spartacist troll. It's like getting your weight told by a fortune telling machine. Doesn't matter what you weigh, the future has already been read.

syndicat

2nd July 2011, 05:34

yeah, spart troll indeed. he simply ignored the two different senses of "leadership" i distinguished.

On the one hand you *absolutely* have to have democracy, with the leaders listening to the rank and file and give them the final say.

and you show you don't know what actual democracy is. it means that the rank and file, the ordinary person, gets to discuss and make the decision. not just when you (an authoritarian party hierarchy) let them. it doesn't mean that the real decision-makers -- the authoritarian party hierarchy -- merely "listen" to the ranks. it means the ranks make the decisions.

A Marxist Historian

2nd July 2011, 07:02

yeah, spart troll indeed. he simply ignored the two different senses of "leadership" i distinguished.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Can't answer the argument, so you two fools redbait. And you call me a troll? What else is new.

-M.H.-

---------------------------------------------------------------

and you show you don't know what actual democracy is. it means that the rank and file, the ordinary person, gets to discuss and make the decision. not just when you (an authoritarian party hierarchy) let them. it doesn't mean that the real decision-makers -- the authoritarian party hierarchy -- merely "listen" to the ranks. it means the ranks make the decisions.

Of course they, do, they always do, one way or the other. Your point is?

If you find the rank & file listening to us "Spart trolls," I have a funny feeling all your chatter about democracy and listening to the rank & file would disappear so fast it'd make everybody's head spin.

-M.H.-

syndicat

2nd July 2011, 21:28

If you find the rank & file listening to us "Spart trolls," I have a funny feeling all your chatter about democracy and listening to the rank & file would disappear so fast it'd make everybody's head spin.

this sentence is ungrammatical and nonsensical. what are you on?

A Marxist Historian

3rd July 2011, 11:03

this sentence is ungrammatical and nonsensical. what are you on?

Yawn.

End of discussion I suppose. I have better things to do with my time than a stupid flame war. Since you have run out of things to actually say, you are, simply, trolling. And calling me a troll of course.

Get back under your bridge.

-M.H.-

Crux

3rd July 2011, 12:26

if by "leadership" one means the more active and influential members of the CNT, it is simply false to say that they all went over to the position of capitulation to the Popular Front. that was a path that got majority support at a crucial moment, but there was a sizeable minority -- thousands of CNT activists, writers, militia participants -- opposed to this direction. moreover, it wasn't a question of "leaders" imposing a decision because the delegates were directly accountable to the assemblies and if the delegates wanted the regional and national committees to not pursue Popular Front collaboration, they could have easily voted them out at a plenary.
And for you this is the failure of the masses of CNT, save for the FOD, coupled with "the revolution was already over anyway"?

syndicat

3rd July 2011, 17:36

And for you this is the failure of the masses of CNT, save for the FOD, coupled with "the revolution was already over anyway"?

no. the revolution was certainly not "over" in Sept-Oct 1936 when the internal struggle over direction took place within the CNT. it was a failure of both the masses and the active leading elements within them, that is, a failure of that movement.

According to Frenando Claudin, it can be explained due to lack of preparation of the rank and file around concrete steps for the organized workers to take over political control of the society. In his recent discussion of the revolution (in a review of "The Anarchists & Power" by Cesar Lorenzo) he points out that the workers themselves...both ranks and local "leadership"...impelled the massive seizure of the economy. But their movement had discussed this and preached this for decades. It was part of the general understanding of the revolutionary syndicalist politics of the CNT. But the program for defense councils, unified militia, and worker congresses, which would involve not only the CNT but also the UGT, had been developed by revolutionaries in the CNT only in the course of the revolution itself, and did not have a long history of advocacy by Spanish anarchists.

A Marxist Historian

3rd July 2011, 20:53

no. the revolution was certainly not "over" in Sept-Oct 1936 when the internal struggle over direction took place within the CNT. it was a failure of both the masses and the active leading elements within them, that is, a failure of that movement.

According to Frenando Claudin, it can be explained due to lack of preparation of the rank and file around concrete steps for the organized workers to take over political control of the society. In his recent discussion of the revolution (in a review of "The Anarchists & Power" by Cesar Lorenzo) he points out that the workers themselves...both ranks and local "leadership"...impelled the massive seizure of the economy. But their movement had discussed this and preached this for decades. It was part of the general understanding of the revolutionary syndicalist politics of the CNT. But the program for defense councils, unified militia, and worker congresses, which would involve not only the CNT but also the UGT, had been developed by revolutionaries in the CNT only in the course of the revolution itself, and did not have a long history of advocacy by Spanish anarchists.

At this point, for me to try to discuss further with syndicat isn't too useful, much more heat than light.

But I can't help noticing that he is proving my point, as our moderator Majakovskii has noticed also.

So syndicat is saying that the failure wasn't *only* that of the workers, they shouldn't take *all* the blame, but maybe the anarchist leaders should take some blame too. That's nice.

Me, I'm with the workers not their sellout leaders, whether they call themselves anarchists or socialists or Stalinists or whatever, even if they call themselves "Trotskyists," given what most of the so-called Trotskyists are like these days. Except the Spartacists.

-M.H.-

RedTrackWorker

4th July 2011, 14:47

According to Frenando Claudin, it can be explained due to lack of preparation of the rank and file around concrete steps for the organized workers to take over political control of the society.
[snip]
But the program for defense councils, unified militia, and worker congresses, which would involve not only the CNT but also the UGT, had been developed by revolutionaries in the CNT only in the course of the revolution itself, and did not have a long history of advocacy by Spanish anarchists.

Yet syndicat has spent the rest of this thread attacking the only political tendency that was organizing internationally around just that program that the Spanish anarchists "did not have a long history of advocacy".

RED DAVE

4th July 2011, 16:31

Except the Spartacists.I wouldn't go there if I were you.

RED DAVE

syndicat

4th July 2011, 17:28

Yet syndicat has spent the rest of this thread attacking the only political tendency that was organizing internationally around just that program that the Spanish anarchists "did not have a long history of advocacy".

wrong. Trotskyism is about the power being held by the party and issuing its orders thru a hierarchical state. in the Russian revolution the soviets ended up as merely a trampoline to get the party into control of a state.

Trots have never even shown any awareness of the CNT program of Sept 1936, of worker congresses, defense councils and a unified militia.

anarcho-syndicalists nowadays generally agree that the Popular Front participation was disastrous, a failure to carry out their program.

but what the trots don't acknowledge is that anarcho-syndicalism had a program for workers direct power, and a minority in the CNT continued to push this. while it is true that the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists had not advocated these particular steps for a long time, they did have "a long history of advocacy" of workers controlling the society. the May 1936 Zaragoza program, merely the latest in long line of similar ideas discussed by Spanish anarchist authors, did call for workers congresses and free municipalies...and also recognized the need for an alliance with the UGT. but the earlier program didn't have concrete steps suich as the formation of Defense Councils joiintly with the UGT.

S.Artesian

4th July 2011, 17:35

wrong. Trotskyism is about the power being held by the party and issuing its orders thru a hierarchical state. in the Russian revolution the soviets ended up as merely a trampoline to get the party into control of a state.

You can claim that, you can argue that, but the program that Trotsky and his followers proposed for the Spanish Revolution, that of workers councils, united working class defense, no participation in the popular front, was their explicit program.

What that means is that the organization of the workers as a class was the mediation by which all workers could have determined how "important" any party was, if the Trotskyists were really "statists" in councilist clothing.

Outside that program, and its specific application to rural sectors, there was no prospect for the victory of the Spanish Revolution.

Refusing to work in, with, for a program that unites the whole class because of objections, or suspicions of a specific organization, is the meaning of sectarianism, even if practiced on the basis of widespread support.

syndicat

4th July 2011, 17:46

Refusing to work in, with, for a program that unites the whole class because of objections, or suspicions of a specific organization, is the meaning of sectarianism, even if practiced on the basis of widespread support.

there were about 50 trotskyists in Spain. and what Trotsky advocated specifically were Russian-style soviets, which were contrary to the Spanish revolutionary tradition which was syndicalist.

what the CNT proposed in Sept 1936 was the dissolution of party militias into a unified people's militia, the creation by the unions, CNT and UGT, of worker congresses...delegate bodies by region and nationally...to elect the defense councils, which would direct the people's militia and the war effort.

their proposal for local goverance was not "soviets" but "free municipalities" which would be based on assemblies of residents in villages and neighborhoods.

the program of Sept 1936 was developed in the context of a debate over how to unify the defense and overcome the division of the militias into various party militias. the CP proposed the rebuilding of a conventional hierarchical army and the rebuilding of the authority of the Republican state. the CNT position was developed specifically as a counter to the position of the CP. in practice the CP worked behind the scenes to worm its people into the officer positions in the rebuilt hierarchical army and gained control of the new officer academy.

so it was the CNT that was proposing to unify the defense thru class institutions (congresses) that would be independent of party. and it was the two main Marxist parties, PSOE and PCE, that blocked this proposal.

once Largo Caballero (prime minister and head bureaucrat of UGT) had veto'd the CNT proposal, there was then an internal division of opinion in the CNT over the way forward. a radical minority in the CNT agreed with Durruti's proposal for the CNT itself to take power in the regions where it was the majority (and had the power to do so) and use this to force the hand of the UGT. but a majority did not agree...hence they agreed to accept Largo Caballero's offer of positions in the Popular Front government.

the original CNT proposal of Sept 1936 and the continued existence of a minority in the CNT pushing for it is what the Trots are ignorant of. as to why that program was abandoned at the end of October 1936, I think Claudin's proposed explanation is plausible...that is, that the program had not been discussed and committed to for a long time among the CNT rank and file, but had been developed recently by the revolutionary wing in the CNT.

RedTrackWorker

6th July 2011, 19:24

their proposal for local goverance was not "soviets" but "free municipalities" which would be based on assemblies of residents in villages and neighborhoods.

I don't understand if you think that was the key question if that was the issue, but what they said was "We stand for the formation of revolutionary councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. These councils should be democratically elected in each factory, village and company"--from the program of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain07l.htm).

syndicat

6th July 2011, 19:35

A Marxist Historian

6th July 2011, 20:03

a basic problem with Russian style soviets is that in that era in Spain itwould have disenfranchised women. besides, consumers and workers do not have the same perspective or immediate interests. the CNT 1936 prorgram saw the neighborhood and village assemblies as the channel for consumere input and local planning with respect to provision of public goods.

however, Aragon was the only area where the CNT built actual "free municipalities".

in a number of towns in revolutionary areas in Catalonia the CNT and the POUM-influenced unions initiated union controlled governments. their view was that the organized working class had to be in power. so they replaced the local government with revolutionary committees controlled by the local workplace or union assemblies. in the industrial city of Hospitalet the CNT socialized the entire economy of the town and equalized wages, and seized power with a union revolutionary committee.

the quote from the Spanish Trotskyists talks about "workers councils" but it's ambiguous as stated. that's because it could mean organizations to run particular workplaces. those did actually exist throughout the anti-fascist zone and in collectivized villages. but i take that statement to be referring to Russian-style soviets, which were not organizations formed to manage workplaces but initially as a kind of shadow government which then took over as the local government bodies, not workplace management bodies.

In Russia you had factory committees which often took control of factories and soviets or workers councils, which indeed were different and separate.

Factory committees do indeed disenfranchise women, unless of course the women are working in the factories. Soviets or workers councils, whether in Petrograd or Seattle 1919 or Berlin or Barcelona, can easily incorporate housewives, though whether they do or not is not automatic.

The CNT wanting to incorporate consumers in 1936 was good classic Bolshevism. Wanting to do it through bourgeois-democratic neighborhood and village assemblies, in which Republican businessmen and small capitalists could in theory at least participate too, and maybe dominate them, was not.

Seizure of power by self-appointed revolutionary committees was what the Bolsheviks sometimes did too, when you didn't have time for elections. Once the fighting was over they would give way to democratic elected Soviets.

-M.H.-

syndicat

6th July 2011, 20:26

The CNT wanting to incorporate consumers in 1936 was good classic Bolshevism. Wanting to do it through bourgeois-democratic neighborhood and village assemblies, in which Republican businessmen and small capitalists could in theory at least participate too, and maybe dominate them, was not.
calling them names ("bourgeois democratic") isn't an argument. "bourgeois democracy", in case you hadn't noticed, is election of unaccountable representatives to run a hierarchical state. when did the Bolsheviks show any interest in consumers having a say? they could have actually done this thru the Russian consumer coops which were quite large in 1917...but they did not.

Seizure of power by self-appointed revolutionary committees was what the Bolsheviks sometimes did too, when you didn't have time for elections. Once the fighting was over they would give way to democratic elected Soviets.
i guess you can't read. the revolutionary committees were subject to election by the union/workplace assemblies. they weren't some political party seizing power on its own initiative, and unaccountable to anyone.

it's true, tho, that the revolutionary committee in Hospitalet was considered a temporary expedient. their program meant they'd need to set up the system of neighborhood assemblies and delegates elected by them. they did hold some neighborhood assemblies in Hospitalet, but these were so the revolutionary committee could get feedback from the citizens. but in that situation their actual accountability was to the union assemblies...since it was only the CNT that held power. the UGT had been invited to participate but refused.

Jose Gracchus

6th July 2011, 20:30

syndicat

6th July 2011, 20:33

Jose Gracchus

6th July 2011, 20:41

I think the role of working-class neighborhood organization needs to be reemphasized, especially in light of post-70s neoliberal social model, with de-industrialization and the physical dispersion and cantonization in geographic terms of the working class. A lot of Trots run around as if some substantial percentage of the workforce is in gigantic industrial works and factories with 1500 guys to a shift. Its an anachronistic conception (not that I think workplace/shopfloor organizing is pointless, far from it, just you can feel the 1910s-1930s pretenses dripping from their presumptions and organizational conception).

syndicat

6th July 2011, 20:43

but i think since the '70s the tendency on the left has been just the reverse...to focus on "community organizing" rather than developing grassroots worker organization. but community organization has shown the same ability as the unions to develop problems of bureaucratic domination.

Jose Gracchus

6th July 2011, 21:01

I was just speaking of Trots' transhistorical conception of everything Russia 1917 as being a static model for all time.

As for the rest: how much of that community organizing was really ensconced in any explicitly class-strugglist basis? Though obviously there should be mass orgs. I don't know, I don't know the nitty-gritty history of struggles at home since the '70s, sadly. I'm pretty young, so "community organizing" has always looked to me from my vantage point as some liberal hobby or social work, totally captured by bourgeois foundations and the Democratic Party, before the liberals move on to some position in that apparatus, or some "ethical" business.

It is a real problem. Community organizing does not seem to be very successful at catalyzing class struggle, and the re-organization of the community and economy has basically left the old union models to bleed out. It comes back to the fact that a shitload of employees work basically vanity service and slave jobs for upper middle class consumers. We don't want the workers in all the MacDonald's to "expropriate them" and elect soviet delegates from each. We probably should shut most of them down. The "day after" the biggest issues are going to be reorganization of work, recreation of socially necessary and personally meaningful work, and reappropriation of labor-power to immediate needs that capital has laid fallow for years. A lot of office buildings are essentially useless, being merely ways competing monopolies shave fractions of a cent off their costs through this or that bean-counting. A lot of it is essentially non-productive.

S.Artesian

6th July 2011, 21:47

a basic problem with Russian style soviets is that in that era in Spain itwould have disenfranchised women. besides, consumers and workers do not have the same perspective or immediate interests. the CNT 1936 prorgram saw the neighborhood and village assemblies as the channel for consumere input and local planning with respect to provision of public goods..

Except neighborhood and village assemblies were, as you say, channels for input, they were not direct control over the production floor, something you criticize the soviets for lacking. So in what respect can these assemblies be considered more "organic" than workers' councils that are organs of the collective, social power of the proletariat as a class, for governing all of society.

As for saying soviets did not afford input from consumers-- that is simply nonsense. Looking at the history of the soviets in Moscow, and Leningrad, the raions in the working class areas of Moscow in particular-- all these councils arranged for distribution of foodstuffs; all these councils were connected intimately with consumer coops, etc.

the quote from the Spanish Trotskyists talks about "workers councils" but it's ambiguous as stated. that's because it could mean organizations to run particular workplaces. those did actually exist throughout the anti-fascist zone and in collectivized villages. but i take that statement to be referring to Russian-style soviets, which were not organizations formed to manage workplaces but initially as a kind of shadow government which then took over as the local government bodies, not workplace management bodies.

[/QUOTE]

Of course there's ambiguity in it, not so much in the statement, but in the organization of soviets themselves. It took a while for the soviets in Petrograd and Moscow to respond to the petitions from the factory committees and raions to actually take power. Nevertheless the soviets were the mechanism for the class to execute that step.

A Marxist Historian

6th July 2011, 22:24

calling them names ("bourgeois democratic") isn't an argument. "bourgeois democracy", in case you hadn't noticed, is election of unaccountable representatives to run a hierarchical state. when did the Bolsheviks show any interest in consumers having a say? they could have actually done this thru the Russian consumer coops which were quite large in 1917...but they did not.

i guess you can't read. the revolutionary committees were subject to election by the union/workplace assemblies. they weren't some political party seizing power on its own initiative, and unaccountable to anyone.

it's true, tho, that the revolutionary committee in Hospitalet was considered a temporary expedient. their program meant they'd need to set up the system of neighborhood assemblies and delegates elected by them. they did hold some neighborhood assemblies in Hospitalet, but these were so the revolutionary committee could get feedback from the citizens. but in that situation their actual accountability was to the union assemblies...since it was only the CNT that held power. the UGT had been invited to participate but refused.

Well, tempers have cooled and we can have a rational discussion. Good.

The Bolsheviks were *extremely* interested in the consumer coops in 1917. Especially Lenin, who in his last writings was almost obsessed with the coops. The problem was tha in 1917 they were dominated by ultra right wing socialists and plain ordinary liberals, who often supported the Whites. After a long internal fight, the left wing, i.e. the Bolsheviks, kicked out or coopted the rightists and took the coops over, and incorporated them into the workings of the Soviet regime, where they initially played a vital role in economic affairs. E.H. Carr has good descriptions of this.

Yes indeed, consumer coops got to elect delegates to the Soviets, just like unions, factory committees etc. The perfect way to incorporate consumer concerns into economic administration.

This went away under the 1936 Stalin Constitution, which established "universal suffrage" on paper, though people who took voting seriously had bad things happen to them. You continued to have consumer coops playing an ever more subordinate economic role right up to the collapse in 1992.

And often they would get abused by the bureaucrats, like everything else. Especially housing coops, which were supposed to be for the workers but turned into a way for bureaucrats to get better housing than anyone else. After all, they were wage workers too, don't you know?

Accountability and instant recall is one of the essential distinctions of a regime of the lower classes from the ruling class version of "representative democracy" as in the USA. That's why Marx considered the Paris Commune, which on paper was just a standard municipal government, a workers' government. After all, in Paris the workers greatly outnumbered everyone else in 1871, the whole old machinery of the bourgeois state had been smashed, and the capitalists had fled to Versailles.

The Soviet structure, which *formalizes* accountability to working class organizations, and under which only the lower classes get to vote, is the best form, better than just using town and village assemblies from which the capitalists have not been excluded.

And this was a very big question in Republican Spain, with a Popular Front regime on top and the Stalinists getting a lot of their following exactly from the Republican small capitalists, and fighting for control of popular assemblies.

As for the anarchist revolutionary committees, you said they were "controlled" in your previous posting, not that they were elected. Now your description is that they were something in between, appointed by union officials (I prefer not to get into an argument as to whether "bureaucrat" is the better word here) but then subject to democratic control as soon as possible.

Pretty much the same was true for Bolshevik revolutionary committees too, except appointed by party officials instead of union officials.

-M.H.-

syndicat

6th July 2011, 22:26

Except neighborhood and village assemblies were, as you say, channels for input, they were not direct control over the production floor, something you criticize the soviets for lacking.

I think you don't under the dual governance model. this was unfortunately not fully & clearly worked out by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, but they had the beginnings of the idea.

You, on the other hand, think that all decisions should be concentrated in some big meeting of delegates representing the class as a whole...the soviets. That won't work. It won't be an efficient or effective economy.

Decisions do not all affect everyone equally. Decisions about the carrying on of the work in workplaces affects the people who work there most of all. that's why they need to have control over that workplace.

But individuals, households, communities also have desires for what they want produced. There is such a thing as self-management of their consumption, and this includes the budget for provision of social services. This includes people who are not working...such as disabled or elderly. This is why there needs to be a separate channel for decision-making about collective consumption. And this is the point of the neighborhood assemblies, their elected committees, and delegate bodies for larger areas such as a city.

If we conceive of a socialized economy as run thru negotiated coordination, this means there needs to be separate channels of decision making...in workplaces, for production, and in neighborhods, for consumption. People can't be self-managing if there aren't bodies through which the decisions that mainly affect them are made.

The overall system of production then can work through a socially interactive process of negotiation between the consumer-citizen-resident bodies and the worker bodies.

So in what respect can these assemblies be considered more "organic" than workers' councils that are organs of the collective, social power of the proletariat as a class, for governing all of society.

This idea that there should be one single body that makes all the decisions would make it impossible to have a genuinely self-managing society because that requires workers to self-manage their work and people in their role as consumers, and residents, to self-manage and plan for their consumption, that is, their requests to the production organizations.

As for saying soviets did not afford input from consumers-- that is simply nonsense. Looking at the history of the soviets in Moscow, and Leningrad, the raions in the working class areas of Moscow in particular-- all these councils arranged for distribution of foodstuffs; all these councils were connected intimately with consumer coops, etc.

i disagree. the big city soviets were hierarchist bodies controlled by the party intelligentsia. they tended to treat the plenaries of delegates as rubber stamps. they were concerned with their political power.

from the fact that they made decisions about distribution doesn't show there was any effective way for people as consumers to make their desires and priorities effective.

A Marxist Historian

6th July 2011, 22:33

I have no idea what M.H. thinks he's talking about. Russian soviets were geographically-based bodies, and the Bolsheviks only further refined them into more-and-more parliament-like organs. The Paris Commune similarly had geographically-organized elections to a municipal council. Was it "bourgeois democratic"? What is the essence of "bourgeois democracy"?

Sure they were geographical, they had to be, the Internet hadn't been invented yet. But the basic structure was industrial not geographic, though neighborhood committees often got integrated into them as well.

The peasant soviets of course were *purely* geographical, as how else could you possibly organize a peasant Soviet.

As to the Paris Commune, see my other posting.

Essence of bourgeois democracy is rule by the bourgeoisie. In a capitalist society dominated by money, the fact that they have the money is usually more than enough, no need for dictatorship. Money rules in America.

Until you successfully have created a socialist society and abolished both capitalism and money, the rule of money has to be countered politically by the rule of the working class, through what Marx called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." So if you just have pure abstract democracy, the people with the money will end up on top sooner or later.

I'm not sure if he was the one who coined the phrase, maybe it was Blanqui. But one thing Marx, a classic scholar, was totally aware of, that most people forget these days.

What is the difference between "dictatorship of the proletariat" and "democracy," linguistically speaking in the original Greek and Latin?

That one is from the Latin and one is from the Greek. And that's all.

Hal Draper pointed that out in a book he wrote a few decades ago. One of those little secrets that has been buried.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th July 2011, 22:39

S.Artesian

6th July 2011, 23:01

I think you don't under the dual governance model. this was unfortunately not fully & clearly worked out by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, but they had the beginnings of the idea.

Well, I think I certainly understand dual power. And the tragedy of the Spanish Revolution is that the CNT did not.

You, on the other hand, think that all decisions should be concentrated in some big meeting of delegates representing the class as a whole...the soviets. That won't work. It won't be an efficient or effective economy.

Unwarranted assumption. I've never said any such thing. The soviets existed at multiple levels during the Russian Revolution, from districts, to sitywide, to regions. I see no problem with maintaining, encouraging, defending that multiplicity of soviets. I see problems with coordinating all that, but the effort at coordination sure beats the hell out of the alternative-- which is disempowering soviets.

Decisions do not all affect everyone equally. Decisions about the carrying on of the work in workplaces affects the people who work there most of all. that's why they need to have control over that workplace.

What does that mean? What you describe is the precise limit to syndicalism, IMO. Can you give a concrete example, say in a specific industry or sector of what you mean. Let's say the railroads are considering a new signal system-- why do railroad workers have more of a stake in the integrity and functionality of the system than say the passengers who ride the trains? Or the trucks that will using the grade crossings? Or the people in the cities where the trains operate carrying the cargoes? Besides, doesn't this notion that those in the workplace have a special interest, superseding the interest of any and all outside the workplace run smack into and against your notion of necessary consumer inputs?

But individuals, households, communities also have desires for what they want produced. There is such a thing as self-management of their consumption, and this includes the budget for provision of social services. This includes people who are not working...such as disabled or elderly. This is why there needs to be a separate channel for decision-making about collective consumption. And this is the point of the neighborhood assemblies, their elected committees, and delegate bodies for larger areas such as a city.

See previous remarks. And so suppose the workers manufacturing wheelchairs don't want to adopt a change to the production process that will increase the output of wheelchairs to account for the aging population by 50%, but requires a 5% increase in labor hours. Now what?

If we conceive of a socialized economy as run thru negotiated coordination, this means there needs to be separate channels of decision making...in workplaces, for production, and in neighborhods, for consumption. People can't be self-managing if there aren't bodies through which the decisions that mainly affect them are made.

Actually, I think it means the opposite, not separate channels, but unified social channels of decision making.

The overall system of production then can work through a socially interactive process of negotiation between the consumer-citizen-resident bodies and the worker bodies.

Don't disagree with that. We'd have to see how it worked out in actual practice. May require more than coordination; it might require merging the consumer inputs with the production committees. As a matter of fact, I bet it will, since the revolution is going to unify the social processes of production and consumption.

This idea that there should be one single body that makes all the decisions would make it impossible to have a genuinely self-managing society because that requires workers to self-manage their work and people in their role as consumers, and residents, to self-manage and plan for their consumption, that is, their requests to the production organizations.

See previous comment. Where have I suggested one single body-- the steroid soviet-- that makes all decisions? I am stating there is nothing wrong with a geographic based soviet that reconciles production and consumption in its social organization.

i disagree. the big city soviets were hierarchist bodies controlled by the party intelligentsia. they tended to treat the plenaries of delegates as rubber stamps. they were concerned with their political power.

That is a completely ahistorical "analysis" and ignores the real change in composition and orientation and program of the soviets throughout the course of the actual Russian Revolution.

syndicat

6th July 2011, 23:26

Well, I think I certainly understand dual power. And the tragedy of the Spanish Revolution is that the CNT did not.
like i said, you don't understand the dual governance model. you show that by your commentary here. dual governance is a model or proposal for structuring a socialist arrangement.

the soviets only represent people as workers. and you say:

Except neighborhood and village assemblies were, as you say, channels for input, they were not direct control over the production floor, something you criticize the soviets for lacking. So in what respect can these assemblies be considered more "organic" than workers' councils that are organs of the collective, social power of the proletariat as a class, for governing all of society. here you are assuming that there is a single organization structure, the soviets, that will make all the decisions about the economy and society.

some aspects of decisions pertaining to an industry will affect people other than workers. this is why those others, such as users of the service or communities affected by its operations also have their own bodies thru which they can develop proposals about what they want.

that's the point to saying that there needs to be two structures for decision-making. there are the assemblies in the neighborhoods, and delegates from these to city wide and regional congresses. these can work up proposals as far as the service levels, allowable enviro impacts and so on. they have their own committees and associations that help in developing proposed plans for infrastructure and public services.

but it isn't necessary, as some envision, that these public bodies impose a managerial hierarchy on the workers in production.

if we take the railway industry, proposals by the rail workers for how they will operate the trains will have impacts on others in various ways...pollution from diesel exhaust, dangers at crossings, frequency of passenger service. this is where plans developed by the popular power bodies, derived from the resident assemblies, can make requests for changes. for example, if we think of the popular power bodies in an area as having effective control over access to the enviro commons, they can request a pollution reduction from train operations. if the popular power bodies effectively control access to the enviro commons, they force a price for the diesel pollution or ban some pollutant, if they so decide.

rather than one side to the governance system imposing its will on the other, we can think of a process of economic negotiation where requested products sum to a projected demand and proposals of worker orgs for what they will do sums to projected supply, and social opportunity costs can fall out of that. worker orgs will be under pressure to stay within budget as well city or neighborhood governance bodies.

negotiated coordination is a complex idea, but it does a better job of an organic link between consumption and production than simply focusing all power into a single decision-making body.

you may object that there would be local soviets and higher level congresses and so on, but the point is these are all supposed to go back to, derive their authority from, people as workers in workplaces.

when you talk about "the limit of syndicalism" I think maybe you are raising a classic Marxist objection that syndicalism proposes worker management of industries in isolation from everything else. but that was not the position of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists and that is actually inconsistent with the proposal for negotiated coordination, which I'm suggesting here.

S.Artesian

7th July 2011, 03:28

like i said, you don't understand the dual governance model. you show that by your commentary here. dual governance is a model or proposal for structuring a socialist arrangement.

Sure it is "a model or proposal for structuring a socialist arrangement."

There's the mere technicality of conquering power first, for which the dual governance model was, apparently, completely inadequate. None of the beauty, the democracy, the community, the reciprocity of the "dual governance" model means anything unless those organizations are capable of taking state power. That's the part you leave out. And that's what separates soviets from your model. Soviets are expressions of the class taking social power away farom another class.

the soviets only represent people as workers. and you say:

The soviets represent that class that can actually overthrow the social relations of production and reorganize production completely on the basis of need and use. That's not "only representing people as workers." It's representing workers as people, kind of like that association of producers Marx talked about.

here you are assuming that there is a single organization structure, the soviets, that will make all the decisions about the economy and society.

Do I think there is a single organizational structure as as the decision making body as opposed to a single organization? Yeah, probably, councils at various levels, including the factory committee, linked in some sort of reciprocating communication.

some aspects of decisions pertaining to an industry will affect people other than workers. this is why those others, such as users of the service or communities affected by its operations also have their own bodies thru which they can develop proposals about what they want.

Of course, that's why there were district soviets, regional soviets. But exactly what interests do consumers have, as a social group, that are opposed or different from producers as a social group? Exactly what, for example, in the issues of education, health, transportation, are the interests of "consumers" foreign to, separate from, the interest of the producers of education, health, transportation?

.

if we take the railway industry, proposals by the rail workers for how they will operate the trains will have impacts on others in various ways...pollution from diesel exhaust, dangers at crossings, frequency of passenger service. this is where plans developed by the popular power bodies, derived from the resident assemblies, can make requests for changes. for example, if we think of the popular power bodies in an area as having effective control over access to the enviro commons, they can request a pollution reduction from train operations. if the popular power bodies effectively control access to the enviro commons, they force a price for the diesel pollution or ban some pollutant, if they so decide.

And exactly how can the interests of the "consumers," "residents" regarding pollution, grade crossings, etc. be separated from railway workers who are at the same time consumers, residents, impacted equally, if not identically, if not in fact even more so by issues of pollution, noise, safety?

Nevertheless the organization of soviets does not preclude the organization of district councils, neighborhood councils. Didn't preclude the organization of those councils in Russia, and in Russia, despite your dismissal, or refusal to engage with the actual history of those organizations, they did specifically represent issues of both production and consumption.

rather than one side to the governance system imposing its will on the other, we can think of a process of economic negotiation where requested products sum to a projected demand and proposals of worker orgs for what they will do sums to projected supply, and social opportunity costs can fall out of that. worker orgs will be under pressure to stay within budget as well city or neighborhood governance bodies.

Huh? The workers need "labor discipline" imposed upon them by neighborhood committees? I don't think so. What your scheme reminds me of [a bit] is some sort of extended contract negotiation, or even better, auction market

you may object that there would be local soviets and higher level congresses and so on, but the point is these are all supposed to go back to, derive their authority from, people as workers in workplaces.

Except you haven't dealt with the original point-- which is first, and last I guess, you dismiss the soviets as "authentic" organizations of the workers as a "class for itself," and then you flip the script and criticized the soviets as being limited by its regard for people only as workers.

syndicat

7th July 2011, 05:24

There's the mere technicality of conquering power first, for which the dual governance model was, apparently, completely inadequate. None of the beauty, the democracy, the community, the reciprocity of the "dual governance" model means anything unless those organizations are capable of taking state power. That's the part you leave out. And that's what separates soviets from your model. Soviets are expressions of the class taking social power away farom another class. 1. you universalize the Russian revolution as the be-all and end-all for all future revolutions...

2. despite the fact the working class did not take power in the Russian revolution and never held power in it. the main soviets were controlled by party intelligentsia and were used by the Bolsheviks as a trampoline to get their party into control of a hierarchical state...check, tousands of tsarist officers and one-man managers and all. (i'm over-generalizing to some extent, as there some soviets that were fairly grassroots and which were an authentic expression of collective worker power, like the soviet in Kronstadt. but there was not worker power at the level of Russia as a whole.)

the program of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists for power consisted of three parts:

1. regional and national worker congresses, elected from base assemblies, election by these congresses of regional and national defense councils, to run a unified militia

2. direct workers management of entire industries unified thru industrial federations, and united through the worker congresses.

3. the "free municipalities" which would be the basis of control over social service and consumer decision-making as the consumer channel for grassroots planning

the first two part could be considered a taking of power by the class, but part 1 was carried out only in the region of Aragon for reasons that I've mentioned before, in particular, the success of the Socialist and Communist parties in blocking it.

me:
some aspects of decisions pertaining to an industry will affect people other than workers. this is why those others, such as users of the service or communities affected by its operations also have their own bodies thru which they can develop proposals about what they want.
you:
Of course, that's why there were district soviets, regional soviets.wrong. those also only represent people as workers.

The soviets represent that class that can actually overthrow the social relations of production and reorganize production completely on the basis of need and use. That's not "only representing people as workers." It's representing workers as people, kind of like that association of producers Marx talked about.
again, re-ifying into a universal truth organizational forms that showed up in Russia and were not in fact a means to worker power (except in some places for awhile, as in Kronstadt where the soviet was organized on a very grassroots basis).

I don't see why the three part structure proposed by the CNT in 1936 could not also constitute a way for the working class to organize its power.

And exactly how can the interests of the "consumers," "residents" regarding pollution, grade crossings, etc. be separated from railway workers who are at the same time consumers, residents, impacted equally, if not identically, if not in fact even more so by issues of pollution, noise, safety? it's true that workers are often the first people affected by pollutants...as pesticides in agriculture. but the point is that pollutants and noise affect others also and often as much...so why should they be denied a say?

air pollution affects people in virtue of living in a region, not just because they work in some industry.

Nevertheless the organization of soviets does not preclude the organization of district councils, neighborhood councils. then you don't really have any objection to the CNT program of "free municipalities" after all.

The workers need "labor discipline" imposed upon them by neighborhood committees? I don't think so. What your scheme reminds me of [a bit] is some sort of extended contract negotiation, or even better, auction marketnope. participatory planning is a bit complicated to explain. but it involves an interactive process of workers making plans for what they propose to produce, and neighborhood organizations and regional organizatons and households and so on making their requests or proposals for what they want produced. there is a worker organization that collects all the plans and aggregates the data to obtain estimates of projected supply and projected demand. from this projected prices fall out based on changes in supply and demand relative to the previous levels of production and demand. because individual consumers, neighborhood orgs, regional orgs, and worker production orgs all need to stay in budget, they then will need to revise their proposals to take into consideration any revision in prices.

it's not a market system because worker remuneration is not at issue...worker orgs aren't trying to compete or suck down surpluses from revenue. It's a question of ensuring that resources are allocated in the way that best meets the desires of individuals, households, communities, workers and consumers. it's not possible to do that without a system that can effectively capture what people's preferences are.

but in order for this type of negotiated coordination system to exist there needs to be separate venues through which workers put forth their proposals for what they want for their work situations and what they propose to produce, and venues where people just as residents of communities put forth what they want as individuals, households, as communities and as regions. this is why there needs to be both the neighborhood assemblies (and wider federations of these) and the worker self-management organizations (and wider federations of these).

people who live in communities are the best judge if social resources need to be put into new housing. people in communities are all affected by any air pollutants in their area, such as from industries or power plants. because pollution of the air and water affects all the residents, it makes most sense for this to be something that falls under the purview of the resident-based assemblies. the resident based assemblies (and federations of these over wider areas) develop proposals for production of public goods/services, such as education, health care, public transit, housing, enviro protection. but the workers in these industries are in the best position to say how this could be done, and thus what the costs would be of the proposals. should housing be increased by 5 percent this year? if so, we have to allot the resources in our budget, which has finite limits. there may be trade offs...fewer new schools built. It is ultimately the population that should decide how the resources of the society should be allocated for production of public goods/services.

negotiated coordination of this sort is a complex system...precisely because it tries to have local groups adjust their own plans to each other.

the only other alternatives are either central planning...which tends to inevitably empower a bureaucracy and has no way to capture effectively what the preferences of the population are for production...or market socialism.

putting aside the complicated question of participatory planning, it's a bit misleading for you to say you think soviets are the expression of working class power, because soviets were merely local bodies. in Oct 1917 the "taking of power" officially was by the soviet congress. so you must mean it is the power of the soviet congress that expresses the power of the class.

but how does the soviet congress differ from the CNT's proposed worker congresses? the CP and the Popular Front hated the CNT regional congress and defense council in Aragon precisely because it was an autonomous working class power...a dual power.

the proposed national defense council would have been perhaps comparable to the council of people's commissars but with certain differences: the national defense council was not to have any power over the management of the economy, except for the drawing up of requests for war production, that is, materials to be supplied to the army. The defense council was to be the directing body for the militia and the judicial system (based on popular tribunals).

There was to be a parallel National Economics Council. this would differ from the Supreme Council of National Economy in Russia in that it would not be appointed from above by the Defense Council but would be elected by the worker congresses, just as the Defense Council would be, and would be made up of delegates elected by assemblies in various industries, that is, the various industrial federations were to represented on the Economics Council as a coordinating body.

S.Artesian

7th July 2011, 13:45

1. you universalize the Russian revolution as the be-all and end-all for all future revolutions...

Absolutely not. But workers councils have pretty much been universal forms created and adapted by workers in struggles for power.

2. despite the fact the working class did not take power in the Russian revolution and never held power in it. the main soviets were controlled by party intelligentsia and were used by the Bolsheviks as a trampoline to get their party into control of a hierarchical state...check, tousands of tsarist officers and one-man managers and all. (i'm over-generalizing to some extent, as there some soviets that were fairly grassroots and which were an authentic expression of collective worker power, like the soviet in Kronstadt. but there was not worker power at the level of Russia as a whole.)
Repeating it doesn't make it any more correct. The above is simply inaccurate. Simple question, if the working class never took power and never held power at any point in the Russian Revolution, what class did?

it's true that workers are often the first people affected by pollutants...as pesticides in agriculture. but the point is that pollutants and noise affect others also and often as much...so why should they be denied a say?
Who said anyone is denied a say? You're argument is that workers' councils, by their very existence of workers' councils, deny people a say. That's not my argument.

then you don't really have any objection to the CNT program of "free municipalities" after all.
Not a programmatic, class difference. Not a difference that means I would object to that program being put forward as a class wide program for organization of the struggle. But again, you reverse the question. You're the one with the objection to the program advocated by Trotsky of workers' councils, militias, assemblies, etc.

the only other alternatives are either central planning...which tends to inevitably empower a bureaucracy and has no way to capture effectively what the preferences of the population are for production...or market socialism.
Really? So there are only 3 alternatives-- the CNT free municipalities, central planning, and market socialism? Sounds to me like you're the one doing the reifying.

Are you really going to claim that cordones of the Chilean struggle 1970-1973 were inadequate for the tasks you delineate?

putting aside the complicated question of participatory planning, it's a bit misleading for you to say you think soviets are the expression of working class power, because soviets were merely local bodies. in Oct 1917 the "taking of power" officially was by the soviet congress. so you must mean it is the power of the soviet congress that expresses the power of the class.

No, actually the taking of power was accomplished first by the MRC of the Petrograd soviet, followed by a more protracted struggle in Moscow by the Moscow soviet. The congress validated, approved, endorsed, formalized the taking of power.

syndicat

7th July 2011, 17:09

Really? So there are only 3 alternatives-- the CNT free municipalities, central planning, and market socialism? Sounds to me like you're the one doing the reifying. no. the three alternatives are:

1. participatory planning, which requires independent bodies of decision-making for workers, and for people as residents of areas, this is what i call the dual governance model. there is then a process of negotiation between them.

2. market socialism, which has the independent decision-making bodies in workplaces but no society wide planning system (except for the state, in the model preferred by social democrats or Marxists like Schweickart and Carl Davidson). this retains competing firms that seek surpluses, growing inequalilty of income, and other problems.

3. central planning, which is based on the rejection of the dual governance model as there is only one channel of decision-making.

in essence each of these represents a different way for the workers in social production under socialism to be accountable to the population in terms of how they use the means of production.

The above is simply inaccurate. Simple question, if the working class never took power and never held power at any point in the Russian Revolution, what class did?no class consolidated its power immediately. the setting up of Sovnarkom, cheka, the Red Army, one-man management etc represented an incipient bureaucratic class system.

No, actually the taking of power was accomplished first by the MRC of the Petrograd soviet, followed by a more protracted struggle in Moscow by the Moscow soviet. The congress validated, approved, endorsed, formalized the taking of power. the MRC didn't take power. it organized the military aspect of the transfer of power to the soviet congress. the local soviet was a highly hierarchical body that represented an ambiguous class power since party intelligentsia had significant control. but in 1917 the workers still had significant independent say in the sense that the leaders had to take them into account or they might lose the next soviet election. and the local soviets were subordinate to the national government after a national government was set up in Oct 1917. it was the soviet congress in Oct 1917 that approved the Bolshevik proposal to set up Sovnarkom as the national government. in Nov 1917 the soldier-worker soviet congress merged with the peasant congress, and to obtain a majority Bolsheviks were required to enter into a coalition government with the Left SRs. the Left SRs represented mainly the peasantry in the government. that's why it was officially called a "workers and peasants government." but it wasn't really a workers government since Bolshevism implicitly represented a different class, the nascent bureaucratic class.

Jose Gracchus

7th July 2011, 17:18

It should be noted the October coup was popularly supported on the premise that it would be a vehicle to an all-socialist, or at least all-"pro-soviet" socialist government, not a single-party government by the Bolsheviks, until the Constituent Assembly could meet. The Bolsheviks were supported as a means to an end, not the end in of itself. Plenty of socialists and pro-soviet groups were alarmed and distressed by the October coup leading to the formation of an all-Boshevik government, that immediately composed itself in the manner of a bourgeois cabinet, and that included your spiritual ancestors, S. Artesian, the highly radical workers of the Vizkel railway workers' union, who struck and tried to force the Bolsheviks to negotiate for what had been presumed to be the basis of "soviet power" - as said before, a government of all pro-soviet power factions. They failed, and shortly thereafter the Sovnarkom began turning against the autonomy of organizations the Bolsheviks previously had supported when they had been in the opposition, like the factory committees. They also shortly began restraining speech among the workers and appropriated the functions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (which was packed irregularly with representatives of unions and such), basically acquiring power to rule by decree. When the city soviets voted the wrong way in Spring of 1918 in 19 cities, well, they used that new power and we all know how that ended.

I strongly recommend Rex Wade's The Russian Revolution, 1917 on the topic.

syndicat

7th July 2011, 18:48

The Bolsheviks were supported as a means to an end, not the end in of itself. Plenty of socialists and pro-soviet groups were alarmed and distressed by the October coup leading to the formation of an all-Boshevik government, that immediately composed itself in the manner of a bourgeois cabinet, and that included your spiritual ancestors, S. Artesian, the highly radical workers of the Vizkel railway workers' union, who struck and tried to force the Bolsheviks to negotiate for what had been presumed to be the basis of "soviet power" - as said before, a government of all pro-soviet power factions. They failed, and shortly thereafter the Sovnarkom began turning against the autonomy of organizations the Bolsheviks previously had supported when they had been in the opposition, like the factory committees. They also shortly began restraining speech among the workers and appropriated the functions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (which was packed irregularly with representatives of unions and such), basically acquiring power to rule by decree. When the city soviets voted the wrong way in Spring of 1918 in 19 cities, well, they used that new power and we all know how that ended.

i wouldn't call it a "coup" tho since the MRC had the support of the workers and soldiers in carrying out the armed actions...which were relatively minor. the actual revolution was the transfer of power to the soviet congress, which the vast majority of the left supported. only the right Mensheviks (a minority in their own party) and the right SRs (also a minority in the SR party) disagreed with the transfer of power to the soviet congress...that's why they walked out of the congress in protest.

the vast majority of the left in Russia at the time supported this transfer of government power to the soviet congress...the syndicalists and most anarchists were willing to give "critical support" to this change despite their criticisms of top down soviets.

but what the Left generally assumed was that the government would be the Executive Committee of the soviet congress...a diverse body that included some Left Mensheviks and a couple anarchists as well as Left SRs and Bolsheviks.

when the right Mensheviks and right SRs walked out, that gave the Bolsheviks a majority of the remaining delegates and they then introduced Lenin's proposal for a smaller executive authority, Sovnarkom. but with the merger with the peasant congress, Bolsheviks lost their majority and had to agree to a coalition government with the Left SRs. but that's when they started packing the soviet congress executive with union bureaucrats, paid officials from solidier orgs and other people who weren't directly elected delegates to the congress...creating a Bolshevik structural majority.

after that the Bolsheviks on Sovnarkom started ruling by decree...not bothering to get soviet approval for their laws.

A Marxist Historian

7th July 2011, 18:53

1. you universalize the Russian revolution as the be-all and end-all for all future revolutions...

Just on this. Yes, I think the Russian revolution should be universalized as the be-all though not end-all for all future revolutions.

Why?

Because all other attempts at workers' revolutions failed. I don't mean failed long term and went bad, like in Russia, I mean failed *right away.* Spain coming closer than any other workers' revolution to being an exception to this rule, but no cigar.

The success of the Russian Revolution *immediately* had a huge impact on the whole rest of the planet. Indeed the *entire* story of the history of the twentieth century is wrapped up in the Russian Revolution and its consequences all over the world, from 1917 all the way through to 1992, when it came to an end and so did the twentieth century, as most historians periodize it.

So far at least it seems that the human race has only figured out one way to successfully overthrow capitalism and replace it with something else. So until something else does come along that works, that is the model we need to emulate.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were a lot of attempts to come up with something brand new unlike the Russian model. All of them were bad jokes, with leftists saying hey, we don't have all the answers, why don't you just go bother somebody else. The Zapatistas being by far the *best* example of this sort of thing, and that is obviously a futile movement at this point.

Theoretically, the clearest expression of the futility of all this was that book by Hardt and Negri, according to which the "multitudes" needed to find a way to "change the world without taking power." Good luck with that! As that very bright Social Democrat Tony Judt put it, "with the American left reading Multitude, Dick Cheney can sleep easy."

Maybe the human race is just not as imaginative as it thinks it is. Or maybe the Russian way is just plain the right way to do it.

-M.H.-

Jose Gracchus

7th July 2011, 19:00

Tim Finnegan

7th July 2011, 19:03

Just on this. Yes, I think the Russian revolution should be universalized as the be-all though not end-all for all future revolutions.

Why?

Because all other attempts at workers' revolutions failed. I don't mean failed long term and went bad, like in Russia, I mean failed *right away.* Spain coming closer than any other workers' revolution to being an exception to this rule, but no cigar.

The success of the Russian Revolution *immediately* had a huge impact on the whole rest of the planet. Indeed the *entire* story of the history of the twentieth century is wrapped up in the Russian Revolution and its consequences all over the world, from 1917 all the way through to 1992, when it came to an end and so did the twentieth century, as most historians periodize it.

So far at least it seems that the human race has only figured out one way to successfully overthrow capitalism and replace it with something else. So until something else does come along that works, that is the model we need to emulate.
You should really stop referring to yourself as "The Marxist Historian" if you're going to spout this kind of idealist shit.

syndicat

7th July 2011, 21:50

Because all other attempts at workers' revolutions failed. I don't mean failed long term and went bad, like in Russia, I mean failed *right away.* Spain coming closer than any other workers' revolution to being an exception to this rule, but no cigar.
the Russian revolution was certainly a failure...from the point of view of the self-emancipation of the working class. the working class remained a subordinate and exploited class. it did replace capitalism with "something else"...a bureaucratic mode of production, presided over by a bureaucratic dominating, exploiting class.

where we can agree is that the Russian and Spanish revolutions were the closest the working class has come to actual replacing the regime of exploitation with its own control.

S.Artesian

7th July 2011, 22:44

the MRC didn't take power. it organized the military aspect of the transfer of power to the soviet congress. the local soviet was a highly hierarchical body that represented an ambiguous class power since party intelligentsia had significant control. but in 1917 the workers still had significant independent say in the sense that the leaders had to take them into account or they might lose the next soviet election. and the local soviets were subordinate to the national government after a national government was set up in Oct 1917. it was the soviet congress in Oct 1917 that approved the Bolshevik proposal to set up Sovnarkom as the national government. in Nov 1917 the soldier-worker soviet congress merged with the peasant congress, and to obtain a majority Bolsheviks were required to enter into a coalition government with the Left SRs. the Left SRs represented mainly the peasantry in the government. that's why it was officially called a "workers and peasants government." but it wasn't really a workers government since Bolshevism implicitly represented a different class, the nascent bureaucratic class. __

Yeah, the MRC did. Seizing the telephone exchange; dispossessing the PRG. As for the rest of the above paragraph, [except for the bold part], that's pretty accurate.

Regarding IFC's post-- I don't know how "radical" the Vizkel railway workers' union really were but it certainly wanted to "broaden" the government. Still the issue was what would be the "source" of sovereignty-- the Constituent Assembly or the soviets. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries categorically demanded the liquidation of the Bolshevik led government and were opposed to government based on the class power of soviets.

To ignore that, as Syndicat does in his dismissal of the proletarian class nature of soviets is really to miss everything about the actual movement of the revolution.

The supposed small d democrats in the Duma and the moderate socialists argued that Lenin and Trotsky should be disqualified from government posts.

In the first session of the Vizkhel talks, and in a special panel, the Mensheviks and SR insisted on the liquidation of the Bolshevik government and its replacement by a grouping from which the Bolsheviks were to be excluded. They also insisted upon disarming the workers, and allowing Krasnov's forces to enter the capital.

Now, not only is that not "radical" in my view [although it wasn't the position of the railway unions], this is hardly a "democratic" program. On the contrary, it was an outright advocacy of counterrevolution.

The fact of the matter was that there was no room to compromise with the moderate socialists. They were committed to "bourgeois democracy" and this was the moment of proletarian revolution.

The treatment of the Left SRs however after this conference and beyond is a whole other issue.

Regarding this notion that the Bolsheviks represented a nascent emerging class-- to be a class there must be some unique, specific relation to the means of production as a property and a specific organization of labor corresponding to that property form. So what were those unique formations that the Bolsheviks represented? We should be able to see them forming and emerging directly within the ancien regime. But we don't. The Bolsheviks don't own anything before after the seizure. They don't introduce a new organization of labor-- so where is this new class that, unlike the bourgeoisie, doesn't own anything; and unlike communism does not introduce a new social organization of labor?

But see how it always comes back to the Russian Revolution? I'm not trying to universalize it, but it certainly was a world-historic event, and IMO, the single most important event of the 20th century.

A Marxist Historian

7th July 2011, 23:01

Or maybe it'd be just as absurd as screaming about the Paris Commune and its precise forms in 1905 when the workers were building soviets and the hallowed Social Democrats were just tailing the workers.

In fact all the revolutionary theoreticians *were* screaming about the Paris Commune and drawing conclusions about it back then. Not just Lenin and Trotsky, all of them.

The Paris Commune lost. Why? Marxists had been discussing that ever since, starting of course with Marx himself.

Soviets were a much better form for workers' rule than the Commune, but that is the merest beginning of wisdom, and not a super-important point at that compared to all the *other* reasons why it failed.

Yes indeed, Soviets were a spontaneous thing, that the revolutionaries needed to learn from rather than complain that they just weren't exactly in the plan, as for example Stalin did. If workers spontaneously *do* come up with some great new form of revolutionary organization that nobody thought of before, great. I see no sign of that however. Do you?

But the same is true for the Russian Revolution as a whole. Learn from it first before you start criticizing.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

7th July 2011, 23:15

the Russian revolution was certainly a failure...from the point of view of the self-emancipation of the working class. the working class remained a subordinate and exploited class. it did replace capitalism with "something else"...a bureaucratic mode of production, presided over by a bureaucratic dominating, exploiting class.

Well, that of course is where we disagree, I think it was a bureaucratically-deformed workers' state, just exactly like most unions, also workers' organizations, are bureaucratically deformed and dominated by dictatorial and corrupt bureaucracies, where the rank and file are definitely subordinate and sometimes even exploited. But when a union goes on strike, no matter how rotten its leaders are, you have to support it vs. the bosses or you are a scab. Same thing for the Soviet Union vs. Truman and Reagan and whatnot in the Cold War.

I think the idea of a brand new class in society dropping out of the sky and creating a whole new mode of production after the workers take over is very bad analysis, and essentially impossible. Certainly the Soviet bureaucrats didn't act like a ruling class when the USSR collapsed, rather they splintered in a zillion directions, and the new capitalist ruling class in Russia has essentially no relationship to the old order, aside from some minor personnel overlap.

I think the best proof that what used to be called "bureaucratic collectivism" is an impossibility is looking at Pol Pot's Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge really did IMHO try to create something like that. Sure as hell didn't work.

where we can agree is that the Russian and Spanish revolutions were the closest the working class has come to actual replacing the regime of exploitation with its own control.

Yup. Though I think ownership is what matters, not control. In a capitalist economy, the CEOs are in control, but ultimately it's in the hands of the stockholders, who often have no control over the company whatsoever. Bu they're the ones getting the dividends etc., the CEOs have to run it in their interests or some Warren Buffett comes along and does a hostile takeover.

Similarly, the USSR was always *ultimately* dependent on the working class. Once the bureaucrats lost the support, even if passive, of the Soviet working class, it was all over. When the Donbass miners, historically the hard core of Stalin support going back to Stakhanov and even further, went into rebellion in 1989, the USSR was over.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

7th July 2011, 23:16

You should really stop referring to yourself as "The Marxist Historian" if you're going to spout this kind of idealist shit.

Eh?

Tim Finnegan

7th July 2011, 23:22

Eh?
Attempting to universalise a particular historical episode entails overlooking the actual material conditions of both that period and of the particular period with which you are actually dealing in favour of some pursuing some declaredly universal essence of proletarian revolution. It's profoundly un-Marxist, as Marx- who was nothing if nothing scathing of bourgeois radical attempts to recreate 1789 over and over and over again- would have been happy to tell you.

syndicat

8th July 2011, 05:25

Regarding IFC's post-- I don't know how "radical" the Vizkel railway workers' union really were but it certainly wanted to "broaden" the government. Still the issue was what would be the "source" of sovereignty-- the Constituent Assembly or the soviets. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries categorically demanded the liquidation of the Bolshevik led government and were opposed to government based on the class power of soviets.

To ignore that, as Syndicat does in his dismissal of the proletarian class nature of soviets is really to miss everything about the actual movement of the revolution.

only the right Mensheviks had exactly the view you describe...but they were a minority in that party. the majority were willing to accept the soviets to work in them, but did have a programmatic commitment to western style parliamentarism.

the Left SRs were not opposed to soviet power but were supporters of it.

as to the class character of the soviets, my view is more nuanced than you represent. i've pointed to some soviets that were grassroots, worker controlled bodies, and others that were more hierarchical and more dominated by the party intelligentsia...an analogy could be made with bureaucratic business unions. are they unambiguously "worker organizations." not quite.

Jose Gracchus

8th July 2011, 07:09

This isn't anything new. Revolutionary workers' organizations have formed and all but scatter the bourgeois state only to be brought into tow behind counterrevolutionary tendencies. Take the German soviets in 1919, the Hungarian soviets in 1919, the Spanish workers' congresses and industrial federations and militias in 1936, and 1937, and Hungarian soviets again in 1956, which after basically dissolving the state and overthrowing Stalinism were dragged back behind the collaborationist and ultimately counterrevolutionary Nagy coalition government.

A Marxist Historian

8th July 2011, 08:07

Attempting to universalise a particular historical episode entails overlooking the actual material conditions of both that period and of the particular period with which you are actually dealing in favour of some pursuing some declaredly universal essence of proletarian revolution. It's profoundly un-Marxist, as Marx- who was nothing if nothing scathing of bourgeois radical attempts to recreate 1789 over and over and over again- would have been happy to tell you.

Well, has the world fundamentally and materially changed since 1917? I don't think so. We're still in that age of imperialism Lenin talked about. If anything, since the collapse of the Soviet Union the world is *more* similar to the way things were in 1905 than they were say 30 years ago. The only things really preventing another World War I between the imperialist powers are (1) the rise of China, a non-capitalist state and (2) nuclear weapons, which make world war a bit dicy.

And is the proletariat still the basic force in society? Well, check the numbers. The percentage of the world population describable as proletarians is *far* higher than in Lenin's day, if you are willing to look outside the USA and Europe. That is probably even true for the "classic" proletarians, not that that really matters. There are probably more steelworkers and coalminers in China now than there were on planet earth in Lenin's time.

Trouble with bourgeois radical attempts to create 1789 is that the world has changed, and bourgeois democracy is no longer the path forward. Though that needs to be explained to a whole lot of folk in Tunisia and Egypt who don't seem clear on this point. I mean there they are, trying to do a 1789 all over again, even chattering about Constituent Assemblys.

However, technology has moved ahead. Now what with the Internet etc., Soviets are *easier* to create, and don't actually have to have the geographical matrix they did back then. You could have a workers council for an international corporation with branches on every continent that really could be a single unit.

Doing democratically centralized economic planning was *real tough* in Lenin's day. Now, with the Internet in every African village, it'd actually be pretty easy.

And half the left is still talking about "think yokelly act locally." Or is it think globally act locally?

"Workers of the world unite" is a *hell* of a lot easier nowadays than in Marx's time. Hey, just look at Revleft, with leftists around the world easily communicating in the global lingua franca, English.

In the '90s everyone was complaining about how hard "globalism" was making it for workers' struggles. If people had any imagination at all, they'd realize how the exact opposite was true.

Then there's the Leninist idea of a international democratic centralist vanguard party of the advanced workers and intellectuals. Is that old hat now? Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but one thing that is obvious is that with modern technology, cell phones, fax machines, the Internet, fairly cheap plane flights etc. that is just much more *doable and practical* than it used to be.

-M.H.-

Jose Gracchus

8th July 2011, 08:24

I think Lenin's theory of imperialism is shit, and has been used to justify just about every pile of garbage wrapping itself in a red flag for about 90 years.

A Marxist Historian

8th July 2011, 09:15

I think Lenin's theory of imperialism is shit, and has been used to justify just about every pile of garbage wrapping itself in a red flag for about 90 years.

Um, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

Unless you'd care to get more specific?

Actually, back in Lenin's days you could have made some arguments against the idea that the key to imperialism was imperialist countries exploiting capital to Third World countries to squeeze surplus profit out of cheaper labor. Luxemburg's plain-outright-theft-through-trade arguments seemed to make some sense too, and were quite popular. At any rate, they were a damn good model for *nineteenth* century imperialism, like in the Opium Wars.

Now it seems kinda obvious. It's in the "duh" category, with even the financial sections of mainstream newspapers breaking down and admitting that from time to time. You don't think all that overseas investment and outright deindustrialization of places like America is 'cuz they like the weather better, do you?

-M.H.-

S.Artesian

8th July 2011, 12:26

only the right Mensheviks had exactly the view you describe...but they were a minority in that party. the majority were willing to accept the soviets to work in them, but did have a programmatic commitment to western style parliamentarism.

Not so. The "right" Mensheviks were a distinct majority and enacted resolutions representing the entire organization. This "majority" was willing to "accept" the soviets, but not "all power to the soviets." That is more than a mere technical difference. The fact that you can, at one and the same time "discount" soviets as being limited to regarding people only as workers, or as vehicles for party hierarchies while stating that the Mensheviks were, in essence, not anti-soviet indicates how the actual issue of class power is foreign to your analysis.

the Left SRs were not opposed to soviet power but were supporters of it.Never said they were. I have repeatedly pointed to the loyalty of the Left SRs to the soviets as the basis for revolutionary power, and repeatedly pointed to the mistakes, stupidity, whatever of the Bolsheviks in their relations with the Left SRs.

as to the class character of the soviets, my view is more nuanced than you represent. i've pointed to some soviets that were grassroots, worker controlled bodies, and others that were more hierarchical and more dominated by the party intelligentsia...an analogy could be made with bureaucratic business unions. are they unambiguously "worker organizations." not quite.You may think your view is more nuanced, but you certainly have not expressed that nuance. Soviets are analogous to bureaucratic business unions? Priceless. You call that nuance? I call that total misapprehension of the revolutionary struggle.

This isn't anything new. Revolutionary workers' organizations have formed and all but scatter the bourgeois state only to be brought into tow behind counterrevolutionary tendencies. Take the German soviets in 1919, the Hungarian soviets in 1919, the Spanish workers' congresses and industrial federations and militias in 1936, and 1937, and Hungarian soviets again in 1956, which after basically dissolving the state and overthrowing Stalinism were dragged back behind the collaborationist and ultimately counterrevolutionary Nagy coalition government

"Scatter the bourgeois state" ? "Only to be brought into tow behind 'counterrevolutionary tendencies.' " ? Sorry, that's hardly a description of any of the post WW1 class combat. Where, in these not so new struggles, were the bourgeoisie "scattered"? Were the bourgeoisie as a class overthrown? Were the bourgeoisie as owners of the means of production expropriated as a class?

You claim the soviets were revolutionary workers' organizations. Syndicat claims they were not, unless of course you consider bureaucratic business unions to be revolutionary workers' organizations.

And.......let's not forget the fact, that in the course of the Russian Revolution, soviets aren't "dragged back behind collaborationist and counterrevolutionary" parties-- the soviets start out initially being supportive, endorsing collaboration with the PRG; the soviets are then transformed by the development of class struggle. The soviets move forward to revolutionary struggle with, through, by the reciprocating connections between the workers and the Bolsheviks in the factories, in the navy, in the districts.

Attempting to universalise a particular historical episode entails overlooking the actual material conditions of both that period and of the particular period with which you are actually dealing in favour of some pursuing some declaredly universal essence of proletarian revolution. It's profoundly un-Marxist, as Marx- who was nothing if nothing scathing of bourgeois radical attempts to recreate 1789 over and over and over again- would have been happy to tell you.

No, that's not correct. Explicating the universal significance, the universal forces at work in the particular manifestation is exquisitely Marxist; hence Marx's exploration of world-historical events.

Jose Gracchus

8th July 2011, 16:39

Jose Gracchus

8th July 2011, 17:09

The fact that you can, at one and the same time "discount" soviets as being limited to regarding people only as workers, or as vehicles for party hierarchies while stating that the Mensheviks were, in essence, not anti-soviet indicates how the actual issue of class power is foreign to your analysis.

I have an idea, that soviets ought to be composed of what the empirical working class choose to compose them of. I'm not ready to say that one group of workers has the right to unleash political violence on other workers with whom they disagree, and that that is the way forward for the class.

Syndicat is absolutely right, that the 1917 soviets were in many cases composed by the major Social Democratic fractions in the advance of the movement of the workers as such, as opposed to 1905 when they were pretty much generally spontaneous. "Party-mindedness" had a tendency to act against workers' democracy, with whatever fraction or combination of fractions could compose itself as a decent majority would end up having soviet resolutions drafted behind closed doors between those party committees or what have you, and then presented to the delegate plena for 'ratification'. This is before 1918. Israel Getzler has a great piece on this in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, in a chapter called "Soviets as Instruments of Democratization."

Other soviets at the radical end of the spectrum, like Helsingfors (Helsinki) and Kronstadt, successfully fought for the organization of the soviet as representing the major shopfloor and community or barracks constituencies, not political fractions. As a result, a lot more resolutions and votes and delegates emanated directly from the shopfloor, and politics were worked out directly by revolutionary workers, and not pre-drafted by party intelligentsia, who were rather placed in a more appropriate (in my view) role of education and agitation.

You may think your view is more nuanced, but you certainly have not expressed that nuance. Soviets are analogous to bureaucratic business unions? Priceless. You call that nuance? I call that total misapprehension of the revolutionary struggle.

Why don't you provide some evidence for your view rather than just OMFG DID YOU SRSLY JUST SAY THAT? RLY RLY? You can do better than mere abuse.

"Scatter the bourgeois state" ? "Only to be brought into tow behind 'counterrevolutionary tendencies.' " ? Sorry, that's hardly a description of any of the post WW1 class combat. Where, in these not so new struggles, were the bourgeoisie "scattered"? Were the bourgeoisie as a class overthrown? Were the bourgeoisie as owners of the means of production expropriated as a class?

We've been over this. I'm not going to argue with you over "state capitalism" since you "cannot imagine capitalism without a [private] 'capitalist class'". My point is clearly in Hungary 1956 we see workers' soviets end up in tow behind a government that was moving toward social democracy and away from workers revolution. The workers certainly expropriated the means of production, though not from the "bourgeoisie" as such in your view. Do you think Hungary 1956 was not a workers' revolution? The soviets totally broke state power and constituted the real authority in the country, including armed power through the revolutionary militas. It was also compromised hopelessly with nationalism; that happens, and that's the nuance I'm talking about.

In Hungary 1919, the bourgeoisie WAS expropriated, but basically much of it was also co-opted by what amounted to a social-patriotic government looking to wage revanchist war backed by the popular support of the lower classes against the annexationist Entente and hoping to get rescued by the Red Army, where the "revolutionary government" was appointed by a liberal Count and in advance of the organization of Hungarian soviets on a national basis. I don't see workers in the driver's seat, though it is possible I suppose things could have improved. Of course by this time the RSFSR had already degenerated into a single-party state and shopfloor control had been all but eradicated, so it looks pretty grim.

You claim the soviets were revolutionary workers' organizations. Syndicat claims they were not, unless of course you consider bureaucratic business unions to be revolutionary workers' organizations.

I think the formation of soviets, the soviet form, is rather revolutionary. Of course my point is the movement of soviets, the existence of soviets, is not proof positive of continuous movement toward communism.

And.......let's not forget the fact, that in the course of the Russian Revolution, soviets aren't "dragged back behind collaborationist and counterrevolutionary" parties--

Really? What do you say below that?

the soviets start out initially being supportive, endorsing collaboration with the PRG;

Exactly. They certainly started off compromised with counterrevolutionary elements, or the whole mythology of the 1917 Bolsheviks and the rest of the "left bloc" holds no water.

the soviets are then transformed by the development of class struggle. The soviets move forward to revolutionary struggle with, through, by the reciprocating connections between the workers and the Bolsheviks in the factories, in the navy, in the districts.

It certainly was not merely the Bolsheviks. Support for "the Bolsheviks" in retrospect was manifested as support for a broader "revolutionary left bloc" that included the Menshevik Internationalists, Left SRs, Bolsheviks, SR Maximalists, and anarchists. It is true that the Bolsheviks were the largest component of this bloc generally, and the best organized on a national basis. But it is certainly untrue that it was "the Bolsheviks" as such being the only factor leading the workers toward revolution. Considering how much dithering occurred at the top of the party, aside from Lenin, it is in many cases equally valid to look at it as the workers became more and more revolutionary and entered the Bolshevik party en masse, transforming it into a rather democratic and decentralized party. But the party intelligentsia did successfully ride this into power for themselves, and rapidly close off the avenues by which the workers as a class could exercise power (for instance by appropriating the right to rule by decree for their bourgeois cabinet-by-another-name, and by subordinating the fabzavkomzy to the trade unions).

Rex Wade in his Russian Revolution, 1917, goes into considerable depth.

No, that's not correct. Explicating the universal significance, the universal forces at work in the particular manifestation is exquisitely Marxist; hence Marx's exploration of world-historical events.

Ugh. Both you and TMH are being hopelessly vague. No one is suggesting that "workers' councils" based on real rule of the working-class, democratically-elected and instantly-recallable delegates, have gone out of history. But the specific content must be related to the specific historical circumstances, and I doubt we're going to see soviets of the 1917 style when we don't exactly live in a time renown for its 1500-workers-to-a-shift gigantic steel mills as the center of workers' struggles.

It will probably look more like Cochabamba in the water war of the last decade (what Goldner called the "proto-soviet", massive street assemblies and actions in Greece and Madison, WI, and stuff like the the piqueteros in Argentina taking over Buenos Aires, except more organized.

syndicat

8th July 2011, 17:33

The "right" Mensheviks were a distinct majority and enacted resolutions representing the entire organization. This "majority" was willing to "accept" the soviets, but not "all power to the soviets." That is more than a mere technical difference. The fact that you can, at one and the same time "discount" soviets as being limited to regarding people only as workers, or as vehicles for party hierarchies while stating that the Mensheviks were, in essence, not anti-soviet indicates how the actual issue of class power is foreign to your analysis.
bullshit several times over.

1. read "The Mensheviks After October". the left Mensheviks had 62 percent of the delegates at the Nov 1917 party congress. they expelled the right Mensheviks for joining the whites in June 1918. their position was one of not endorsing an armed uprising against the soviet government but of trying to organize in the unions and soviets.

2. I've never said i was against institutions that represent people as workers. on the contrary, I advocate such. what I did say is that there also needs to be bodies such as neighborhood assemblies that represent people as residents & consumers. otherwise a socialist economy cannot be efficient in terms of capturing people's preferences for what they want produced.

3. if the actual Russian soviets were often top-down and controlled by party intelligentsia, and not effective organizations for workers...as in fact was the case for the big city soviets in St Petersburg and Moscow...this shows they were not in fact adequate organizations of worker power. now, there were in fact, as I've pointed out, some soviets that were grassroots affairs where the workers were definitely in control...such as the Kronstadt soviet. you should infer that I would favor all of the soviets being like the Kronstadt soviet, not that I am in principle against soviets. Also, i pointed out that the worker congresses proposed by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists were the equivalent of soviet congresses.

now, if I advocate workers taking over management of production, building organizations that run the industries where they work, and extending this power via congresses that cover who regions or nations...how is that "foreign to worker power"?

and why can't neighborhood assemblies by vehicles for working class power?

You claim the soviets were revolutionary workers' organizations. Syndicat claims they were notwhere did i claim the soviets were not revolutionary workers' organizations? the kronstadt soviet was certainly a revolutionary working class body. the more hierarchical soviets were revolutionary bodies representing workers, but dominated by party intelligentsia.

a revolution can also lead to the capitalists being replaced by a new bureaucratic mode of production. that is what happened in the Russian revolution. you might ask yourself, how did that happen?

And.......let's not forget the fact, that in the course of the Russian Revolution, soviets aren't "dragged back behind collaborationist and counterrevolutionary" parties-- the soviets start out initially being supportive, endorsing collaboration with the PRG; the soviets are then transformed by the development of class struggle. The soviets move forward to revolutionary struggle with, through, by the reciprocating connections between the workers and the Bolsheviks in the factories, in the navy, in the districts.

and then what happened to them after Oct 1917?

S.Artesian

8th July 2011, 19:22

bullshit several times over.

Not hardly.

1. read "The Mensheviks After October". the left Mensheviks had 62 percent of the delegates at the Nov 1917 party congress. they expelled the right Mensheviks for joining the whites in June 1918. their position was one of not endorsing an armed uprising against the soviet government but of trying to organize in the unions and soviets.

Should I call this "bullshit" or deliberate misdirection. We were discussing the Vikzhel Conference were we not? When were those talks held? Before of after June 1918 when the left Mensheviks expelled the right? Uh.. the talks were held around Oct 29, 30, 1917.

According to Rabinowitch in The Bolsheviks in Power :

A hard-line resolution adopted by the Menshevik Central Committee on 28 October reflected this view. The resolution prohibited negotiations of any kind with the Bolsheviks until their "adventure" had been completely liquidate. Moreover, it called on the ACS [All Russian Committee for Salvation of the Homeland and Revolution-- engaged in open revolt at this point] to enter into discussions with the Provisional Government, the Preparliament, and workers organizations on construction of a new government. So confident were the centrist and rightist Mensheviks that things were going their way that in this resolution they called on the ACS to propose to the MRC that it surrender at once--in exchange for which its leaders would receive guarantees of personal safety until the Constituent Assembly had an opportunity to decide whether they should be tried.

That's Oct 28 1917. And sure, guarantees of personal safety mean so much in class war. Count on it. This resolution by the Mensheviks meant the physical liquidation of the Bolsheviks and the dispersal of the soviets. If you can't see that, then you are truly blind to the course of revolutionary struggle.

Rabinowitch continues:

This staunchly anti-Bolshevik stance was reflected in the behavior of the representatives of the moderate socialists groups and of the ACS at the first three sessions of the Vikzhel talks on 29-30 October, and in the work of a "Special Commission" delegated by participants in the talks to formulated a draft agreement on the makeup and program of a new government on the morning of the thirtieth. In these forums, Mensheviks and SR leaders demanded the immediate removal of Lenin's government and it replacement by an exclusively socialist coalition cabinet from which both the Bolsheviks and representatives of privileged society would be excluded; the disarming of the workers; the dissolution of the MRC; and acceptance of the principle that everything done by the Second Congress of Soviets, including its very existence should be declared null and void. In return, efforts would be made to insure that upon entering the capital, Krasnov's forces would refrain from reprisals.

That's fucking generous isn't it? That's a real fucking radical congress the Vikzhel executive convened isn't it?

Does anybody here endorse that? Anyone here think the workers should have been disarmed? The Bolshevik government liquidated [of course, with efforts made to confine the slaughter to Lenin, Trotsky and those recalcitrant workers who would defend the soviets]? The Second Congress of Soviets declared null and void?

If you do-- what are you doing on this forum?

The issue was power; who and how was power to be exercised. The Bolsheviks stated "All Power to the Soviets" They were supported in that by Left SRs, and most importantly, the working class itself.

You, with your notion of the Bolsheviks as as "new bureaucratic class" do you think it is/was of no consequence if the resolutions introduced by the Mensheviks would have triumphed, if the Bolsheviks had been liquidated, if the soviets had been dispersed?

2. I've never said i was against institutions that represent people as workers. on the contrary, I advocate such. what I did say is that there also needs to be bodies such as neighborhood assemblies that represent people as residents & consumers. otherwise a socialist economy cannot be efficient in terms of capturing people's preferences for what they want produced.

You have discounted and dismissed the soviets from the getgo for numerous reasons. I have yet to see a "nuanced" analysis from you of the relations of the workers to the soviets to the Bolsheviks in and out of soviets and factory committtees.

now, if I advocate workers taking over management of production, building organizations that run the industries where they work, and extending this power via congresses that cover who regions or nations...how is that "foreign to worker power"?

Answer the question I asked above, and we'll see. My tentative answer is that when it comes to the question of taking power, maintaining power, of suppressing the enemies of the proletariat's power who will, of course, appear garbed as friends of the workers, and friends of democracy, as "moderate socialists" for "real" working class power, your support for workers power becomes in fact a support for workers powerlessness.

Power, like it or not, to make itself manifest throughout a society in the midst of class war, has to be organized as a revolutionary state power. The bourgeoisie won't allow you to survive if you do everything but that.

and why can't neighborhood assemblies by vehicles for working class power?

They can be vehicles certainly. Where did I say they couldn't? Remember you stated that the Trotskyist rendition of workers councils wasn't really revolutionary.

where did i claim the soviets were not revolutionary workers' organizations? the kronstadt soviet was certainly a revolutionary working class body. the more hierarchical soviets were revolutionary bodies representing workers, but dominated by party intelligentsia.

Again your claim was that the Trotskyist demand amounted to creating workers' councils as a way to implement the dictatorship of the party in opposition to the class. I stated that confusing the organization of a class wide power with a party advocating that organization is "perfect" sectarianism.

a revolution can also lead to the capitalists being replaced by a new bureaucratic mode of production. that is what happened in the Russian revolution. you might ask yourself, how did that happen?

You have to show that that's what happened. You make the claim, you have to identify the specific economic makeup, the social relations that define this new mode of production, and how it reproduces itself.

S.Artesian

8th July 2011, 19:56

Second post. Too much bullshit to take apart in one post.

I have an idea, that soviets ought to be composed of what the empirical working class choose to compose them of. I'm not ready to say that one group of workers has the right to unleash political violence on other workers with whom they disagree, and that that is the way forward for the class.

That's nice. But when one part of the workers, or the representatives of workers generally receiving better compensated, with more stable employment than another section sends ministers into the bourgeois government, negotiates, treats with forces explicitly hostel to soviet power; when dual power exists but cannot survive-- then what do you do? Fall back on the empirical choice? Choice?

What was the reason for the split? It was the taking of power, plain and simple. Everything else, at that point was bullshit. Who was going to take power and exercise it? How was the power going to be exercised? Through a constituent assembly-- a formation that embodies the bourgeoisie's need to obscure the nature of class rule? Or soviets?

Why don't you provide some evidence for your view rather than just OMFG DID YOU SRSLY JUST SAY THAT? RLY RLY? You can do better than mere abuse.
What view is that? That the Bolsheviks aren't a new bureacratic class introducing a distinct bureaucratic mode of production? We've already hashed that in the thread initiated by Kiev Communard.

Or my more "nuanced" view of the soviets as actually transforming themselves as the class struggle developed? the workers fixing on the Bolsheviks as the only party, made up of workers, that would in fact defend soviet power?

I suggest you read Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, where such nuance is demonstrated and supported, even statistically. Imagine that? OMFG did I really just say that?

EDIT:
and then what happened to them after Oct 1917? Suppressed. Does that prove that workers' councils are inadequate to the task of revolutionary power? That they were vehicles for a party hierarchy acting in its own interests?

We've been over this. I'm not going to argue with you over "state capitalism" since you "cannot imagine capitalism without a [private] 'capitalist class'". My point is clearly in Hungary 1956 we see workers' soviets end up in tow behind a government that was moving toward social democracy and away from workers revolution. The workers certainly expropriated the means of production, though not from the "bourgeoisie" as such in your view. Do you think Hungary 1956 was not a workers' revolution? The soviets totally broke state power and constituted the real authority in the country, including armed power through the revolutionary militas. It was also compromised hopelessly with nationalism; that happens, and that's the nuance I'm talking about.So you consider the Hungarian soviets moving in tow behind the government with the soviets in Moscow and Petrograd etc.equivalent to having Bolsheviks elected to the majority; with the increasing petitions to the soviets from the workers in the factories and the neighborhoods, for the soviets to take state power?

And in Spain, where do we see the syndicates, the unions, the anarchists, at least in part winding up? Behind a popular front. So do you think expropriation of the bourgeoisie, dispersal of the popular front government of the PRG [because that's what it was] by the soviets, is the same as preserving the bourgeoisie, as the dispersal of the popular front by Franco?

Exactly. They certainly started off compromised with counterrevolutionary elements, or the whole mythology of the 1917 Bolsheviks and the rest of the "left bloc" holds no water.What's your point? Are you arguing that after the return of Lenin, the cooptation of Trotsky, the Bolsheviks were not the left-bloc? That the Bolsheviks did not oppose the All Russian Congress [of counterrevolution] that Kerensky scheduled for Moscow? That the workers in and out of the factories did not see the Bolsheviks as the party which would act on a program of "All power to the soviets."

Considering how much dithering occurred at the top of the party, aside from Lenin, it is in many cases equally valid to look at it as the workers became more and more revolutionary and entered the Bolshevik party en masse, transforming it into a rather democratic and decentralized party.Now this is exactly correct. That is exactly what happened

But the party intelligentsia did successfully ride this into power for themselves, and rapidly close off the avenues by which the workers as a class could exercise power (for instance by appropriating the right to rule by decree for their bourgeois cabinet-by-another-name, and by subordinating the fabzavkomzy to the trade unions).What does that mean? "For themselves"? As a new class? For their own accumulation? To gain personal privilege? Or collective privilege? All of those things. Can you expand on the for themselves-- and perhaps some conscious class type actions of the "new" bourgeoisie to protect extend their "privileges"-- we're talking about 1917 and 1918, right?

Ugh. Both you and TMH are being hopelessly vague. No one is suggesting that "workers' councils" based on real rule of the working-class, democratically-elected and instantly-recallable delegates, have gone out of history. But the specific content must be related to the specific historical circumstances, and I doubt we're going to see soviets of the 1917 style when we don't exactly live in a time renown for its 1500-workers-to-a-shift gigantic steel mills as the center of workers' struggles.We may or may not. Certainly rank and file strike committees in the recent outburst in France had the potential, in that they certainly tried to represent more than just the workers in any one workplace, and tried to reach across union division.

That's not the point. The exact form of "soviets" is not the "universal" in the particular. The need for the working class to generate a form of organization as a class through which it can confront and exercise power independently of the pre-existing forms in capitalism is the "universal" and in this regard the soviets present a vivid manifestation of that universality.

It will probably look more like Cochabamba in the water war of the last decade (what Goldner called the "proto-soviet", massive street assemblies and actions in Greece and Madison, WI, and stuff like the the piqueteros in Argentina taking over Buenos Aires, except more organized.It may or may not. Certainly the massive street assemblies in Spain, and Greece, have been hampered by a lack of political organization; a lack of distinct class organization--- and Madison, Wi? Well, my friend Loren doesn't think Madison was much of anything, and hardly a "proto-soviet" expression.

But all of this is speculation. Here's what the original issue was: the Trotskyists in Spain proposed workers' councils, assemblies, militias, and no participation or support for the popular front. What would prevent a syndicalist from cooperating in a united front with the Trotskyists on such issues?-- I'll bet the Trotskyists would have listened attentively to proposals to expand the councils to include neighborhoods or issue of consumption, distribution etc. But what class based reason could any anarchist, syndicalist have for rejecting such work in common-- unless of course such anarchists, syndicalists, want to work with the popular front.

Jose Gracchus

8th July 2011, 22:20

That's nice. But when one part of the workers, or the representatives of workers generally receiving better compensated, with more stable employment than another section sends ministers into the bourgeois government, negotiates, treats with forces explicitly hostel to soviet power; when dual power exists but cannot survive-- then what do you do? Fall back on the empirical choice? Choice?

No, I agree with you about almost all of this. At the end of the day the PG needed to be pushed aside; the soviet congresses needed to assume power; the CA was an instrument of bourgeois democracy (personally, though, had the Left SRs been kept in with the Bolsheviks as a solid bloc for soviet power, and run on new elections on fresh lists on that basis, the CA could've served to legitimize soviet rule, and to eject right Menshevik and Right SR class collaboration; the SR votes that ended up electing Right SR lists by the peasantry were probably really for the Left SRs). But that's speculation and aside.

What was the reason for the split? It was the taking of power, plain and simple. Everything else, at that point was bullshit. Who was going to take power and exercise it? How was the power going to be exercised? Through a constituent assembly-- a formation that embodies the bourgeoisie's need to obscure the nature of class rule? Or soviets?

Agreed.

What view is that? That the Bolsheviks aren't a new bureacratic class introducing a distinct bureaucratic mode of production? We've already hashed that in the thread initiated by Kiev Communard.

I agree with that. I don't think the Bolsheviks inherently represented some sui generis ruling class and sui generis "bureaucratic" mode of production. I don't think there is bureuacracy-for-bureaucracy's sake. There's bureaucracy and a crushing of workers for the sake of aggrandizing accumulation (whether we call it "bourgeois" accumulation or "analogous to bourgeois" accumulation is really beside the point, I think we agree).

Or my more "nuanced" view of the soviets as actually transforming themselves as the class struggle developed? the workers fixing on the Bolsheviks as the only party, made up of workers, that would in fact defend soviet power?

I suggest you read Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, where such nuance is demonstrated and supported, even statistically. Imagine that? OMFG did I really just say that?

No, I know the Bolsheviks were the prime (though not only) instrument of the revolutionary workers in achieving power for their organs. But very quickly that went down hill. Why? What material or organizational reasons were there for it? I don't care personally, for the idea it was mainly an issue of "the working class collapsed, so the party intelligentsia had to rule for them" that the ortho-Trots push, nor the ortho-anarchist "they were uh hierarchical and partyite and liked the state". The former is mechanistic and simplistic and a whitewash in my view, and the latter is basically idealistic, and doesn't explain why workers in motion could be bamboozled despite the fact they moved thoroughly toward revolution and against the bourgeois state, toward communism. So what happened?

EDIT: Suppressed. Does that prove that workers' councils are inadequate to the task of revolutionary power? That they were vehicles for a party hierarchy acting in its own interests?

Not necessarily. But very quickly the Bolshevik leadership managed to turn Sovnarkom into a bourgeois cabinet-style government, rule in the manner of a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, and strip all the instruments of workers' control and workers' power from the really existing working class.

So you consider the Hungarian soviets moving in tow behind the government with the soviets in Moscow and Petrograd etc.equivalent to having Bolsheviks elected to the majority; with the increasing petitions to the soviets from the workers in the factories and the neighborhoods, for the soviets to take state power?

The soviets are only "taking state power" if the soviets are actually exercising it. Sovnarkom rapidly appropriated almost all power from the Soviet Congress and the Central Executive Committee (mere weeks), and then started arresting coalition partners and suppressing the base soviets that voted the wrong way within months. How did that happen?

The fact remains that most workers demanding that the soviets take state power considered that the CEC would function as the government, and that it would be a coalition of all pro-soviet factions, not just the Bolsheviks. Lenin and Trotsky were desperate to maintain a Bolshevik-only SNK, and reluctantly acceded to a Left SR minority on the SNK which they proceded to violate in principle by excluding them from war negotiations, and then violate in principle by smashing wrongly-elected soviets and arresting other soviet factions. Do you think any of the above is "the soviets taking state power" in practice? How did we go from "the soviets taking state power" to a stranglehold by the Bolsheviks on soviet power, disproportionate to their representation at the base of the soviet system, to rapidly gerrymandering it, to finally destroying it? You tell me.

And in Spain, where do we see the syndicates, the unions, the anarchists, at least in part winding up? Behind a popular front. So do you think expropriation of the bourgeoisie, dispersal of the popular front government of the PRG [because that's what it was] by the soviets, is the same as preserving the bourgeoisie, as the dispersal of the popular front by Franco?

The fact is if you read "The Libertarians Vindicated?" by Robert Acton in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, a huge volume of expropriations occurred at the initiative of workers at the base, in the fabzavkomzy, in express contradiction to the wishes of the Sovnarkom, whom it coldly informed often that it had expropriated the factories anyway. If you read Lenin, it is clear that he imagined that bourgeois ownership and production would continue for a time under workers' power. So there's "expropriating the bourgeoisie".

And the popular front of the PRG was displaced by the Petrograd workers and the Bolsheviks which presented the soviets with a fiat accompli. And then the Bolsheviks rapidly constituted a power which ruled over workers and against them. How did that happen? Lots of revolutionary workers and workers in soviet work went along with it, so how did that happen? My point is soviets do not always magically move in the direction of revolution, and the point is what are the soviets doing, how well are workers at the base controlling the political content of them, etc. The soviets of Russia were obviously incapable of preventing the rapid reversal of the attempted proletarian revolution there. What is your explanation?

What's your point? Are you arguing that after the return of Lenin, the cooptation of Trotsky, the Bolsheviks were not the left-bloc? That the Bolsheviks did not oppose the All Russian Congress [of counterrevolution] that Kerensky scheduled for Moscow? That the workers in and out of the factories did not see the Bolsheviks as the party which would act on a program of "All power to the soviets."

The workers in and out of the factories were mostly likely to support to support the Bolsheviks, but certainly not all of them did as a program of "all power to the soviets". Some support SR Maximalists, Left SRs, and anarchists. All of them were incorporated into the new soviet power (though not all in the government). It was after all, an anarchist militant who dismissed the Constituent Assembly. And it was actually the anarchists who first called for no collaboration with the PG and for soviet power.

Now this is exactly correct. That is exactly what happened

I don't know why you're so excited to prove the Bolsheviks were the distilled essence of workers' revolutionary bona fides, but then explicitly went on in a couple months to violate soviet power in principle by refusing to acknowledge the rights of their coalition partners, who were based on soviet power.

Why did the Bolsheviks move so quickly in practice to act in a way which functionally undermined soviet power?

What does that mean? "For themselves"? As a new class? For their own accumulation? To gain personal privilege? Or collective privilege? All of those things. Can you expand on the for themselves-- and perhaps some conscious class type actions of the "new" bourgeoisie to protect extend their "privileges"-- we're talking about 1917 and 1918, right?

The party intelligentsia was exercising power on the workers' behalf, then? I don't know why or what forces compelled the Bolshevik party intelligentsia to end up constituting itself as a power independent from the workers ruling dictatorially against them. Maybe you could explain it to me.

We may or may not. Certainly rank and file strike committees in the recent outburst in France had the potential, in that they certainly tried to represent more than just the workers in any one workplace, and tried to reach across union division.

That's not the point. The exact form of "soviets" is not the "universal" in the particular. The need for the working class to generate a form of organization as a class through which it can confront and exercise power independently of the pre-existing forms in capitalism is the "universal" and in this regard the soviets present a vivid manifestation of that universality.

I think this is stretching way beyond what Tim Finnegan's point is. I think its the idea you're going to get soviets in the manner of 1917, and I don't think you're going to get workers' committees in McDonald's representing all the McDonald's in the city soviet. A lot of Trotskyist politics (especially the Spartacist League) have this kind of character than implies for them time has stopped in 1917, and they've not noticed the re-composition of the working-class since then.

It may or may not. Certainly the massive street assemblies in Spain, and Greece, have been hampered by a lack of political organization; a lack of distinct class organization--- and Madison, Wi? Well, my friend Loren doesn't think Madison was much of anything, and hardly a "proto-soviet" expression.

I said the Cochabamba water war produced city assemblies that Goldner called a "proto-soviet". Its right on his website. I don't think Madison, WI was a 'soviet'. It didn't include major sectors of the working-class, and can't be considered therefore a class organ or event as such. I'm just saying that the composition of these working-class struggles is different from "delegates from factories X, Y, Z composed of productive workers from steel mills with 1500 workers to a shift". We're dealing with a different working-class compositionally, even if it has the same historical mission. Is that more clear?

But all of this is speculation. Here's what the original issue was: the Trotskyists in Spain proposed workers' councils, assemblies, militias, and no participation or support for the popular front. What would prevent a syndicalist from cooperating in a united front with the Trotskyists on such issues?-- I'll bet the Trotskyists would have listened attentively to proposals to expand the councils to include neighborhoods or issue of consumption, distribution etc. But what class based reason could any anarchist, syndicalist have for rejecting such work in common-- unless of course such anarchists, syndicalists, want to work with the popular front.

With this I am in total agreement.

A Marxist Historian

8th July 2011, 22:47

How can you support "soviets" while conveniently excluding from "soviets" those parties you decree the workers should just have the good taste not to legitimately elect? A Menshevik worker who has gained the confidence of his comrades on the shopfloor, whatever his silly politics, is a less legitimate factory delegate than uh, Lenin, who never stopped on the shopfloor in his life? By openly calling for Menshevik repressions, you're implicitly opening the door for violence within the class, against "unconscious elements" and its a hop-skip-and-a-jump to the opportunistic repression of the Left SRs from there, since they cannot see the disaster in 'revolutionary war' and the question of political support from the army.

On that, may I suggest you read Rosa Luxemburg's polemic vs. Lenin on this question?

She didn't believe that soviets were the best vehicle for workers' power, she thought the best venue was a revolutionary constituent assembly.

To the argument that the right wing might dominate a constituent assembly, she had a very simple answer. If they do, you do what the Jacobins did, and rally the masses to throw the Girondins out. Purge it of counterrevolutionaries. (She changed her mind about soviets and constituent assemblies a year later when the German Revolution happened, but that is another story.)

This is what the Bolsheviks did with the Mensheviks in the soviets. They supported counterrevolution, either explicitly with the Right Mensheviks or backhandedly like Martov, who refused to break with the Right Mensheviks while they were collaborating with the Whites, except in extreme cases.

When Mensheviks stopped supporting counterrevolution, they were let back in. In the spring of 1921 they were tossed out again due to the special circumstances of the time, but some of them were let in even after that, with Menshevik delegates elected to and serving on the Moscow and Petrograd soviets as late as 1923.

The Menshevik leaders were sent into exile, but the Bolsheviks *subsizided* the Menshevik exile journal until Stalin took over, as the intention was to let them back in and let them be a loyal opposition as soon as possible. One of the first things Stalin did when he took over was to end this.

This was all without Martov's knowledge of course, arranged by the Cheka, as Martov would never have accepted the money if he knew where it came from. My source for this, by the way, is the generally accepted academic Martov bio, which I read a long time ago. I think the author's name was Getzler.

As for the Left SR's, they tried to stage a coup, which wasn't even a military coup, but a *Cheka* coup, led by the Left SR deputy head of the Cheka, which if it had succeeded would have meant instead of workers' rule you would have had a "left" police state.

This adventure destroyed the Left SR party, with huge numbers of its best militants going over to the Bolsheviks. Including a lot of Chekists, all too many of whom would become infamous twenty years later as right-hand men for Yezhov during the Great Terror. Not all of them were like that, especially Blumkin, the central operative in the Left SR putsch, who assassinated the German ambassador. He was "turned" first by Dzerzhinsky and then by Trotsky, became a loyal supporter of Trotsky, and was the *first* Trotskyist executed by the Stalinists, in 1929.

The Left SR party had already destroyed a lot of its influence among the peasantry by its opposition to the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The Russian people desperately wanted peace, and any concessions whatsoever to the opposition parties wanting to continue the war would not only have been wrong, it would have been a crime against worker and peasant democracy. After the coup, its remnants became more or less a terrorist group trying to organize ugly peasant insurrections to murder Jews and Communists in places like the Tambov province.

-M.H.-

syndicat

8th July 2011, 22:58

We were discussing the Vikzhel Conference were we not? When were those talks held? Before of after June 1918 when the left Mensheviks expelled the right? Uh.. the talks were held around Oct 29, 30, 1917.

that central committee was controlled by the right Mensheviks. but they lost control of the party after the Nov 1917 party conference. anyway, i have no interest in defending the Mensheviks, only correcting typical falsehoods about them propagated by MLs.

You have discounted and dismissed the soviets from the getgo for numerous reasons.

look, why the fuck should i discuss with you if you ignore what i say?

Answer the question I asked above, and we'll see. My tentative answer is that when it comes to the question of taking power, maintaining power, of suppressing the enemies of the proletariat's power who will, of course, appear garbed as friends of the workers, and friends of democracy, as "moderate socialists" for "real" working class power, your support for workers power becomes in fact a support for workers powerlessness.

since you decline to offer any cogent argument this is really just an insult,

fuck you too.

S.Artesian

8th July 2011, 23:59

No, I agree with you about almost all of this. At the end of the day the PG needed to be pushed aside; the soviet congresses needed to assume power; the CA was an instrument of bourgeois democracy (personally, though, had the Left SRs been kept in with the Bolsheviks as a solid bloc for soviet power, and run on new elections on fresh lists on that basis, the CA could've served to legitimize soviet rule, and to eject right Menshevik and Right SR class collaboration; the SR votes that ended up electing Right SR lists by the peasantry were probably really for the Left SRs). But that's speculation and aside. [QUOTE]

OK

[QUOTE]
I agree with that. I don't think the Bolsheviks inherently represented some sui generis ruling class and sui generis "bureaucratic" mode of production. I don't think there is bureuacracy-for-bureaucracy's sake. There's bureaucracy and a crushing of workers for the sake of aggrandizing accumulation (whether we call it "bourgeois" accumulation or "analogous to bourgeois" accumulation is really beside the point, I think we agree).

OK again

No, I know the Bolsheviks were the prime (though not only) instrument of the revolutionary workers in achieving power for their organs. But very quickly that went down hill. Why? What material or organizational reasons were there for it? I don't care personally, for the idea it was mainly an issue of "the working class collapsed, so the party intelligentsia had to rule for them" that the ortho-Trots push, nor the ortho-anarchist "they were uh hierarchical and partyite and liked the state". The former is mechanistic and simplistic and a whitewash in my view, and the latter is basically idealistic, and doesn't explain why workers in motion could be bamboozled despite the fact they moved thoroughly toward revolution and against the bourgeois state, toward communism. So what happened?

We know what happened. Given the precarious state of the revolution from the getgo, the attacks from the right, and the attacks from the left regarding "revolutionary war" with Germany, the Bolshevik center moved to suppress and and every bit of dissent. IMO, the Bolshevik center-- Lenin/Trotsky et al, pretty much made bad move after bad move. Was that inherent in the Bolshevik organization? I think probably. The "opening"-- the "brightest movement" is the period before the taking of power, when the workers are pretty much driving the party.

Not necessarily. But very quickly the Bolshevik leadership managed to turn Sovnarkom into a bourgeois cabinet-style government, rule in the manner of a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, and strip all the instruments of workers' control and workers' power from the really existing working class.

That's true. No matter how anyone tries to explain it and justify it; no matter what the role of those who wanted to "compromise," the final result is just that.

The soviets are only "taking state power" if the soviets are actually exercising it. Sovnarkom rapidly appropriated almost all power from the Soviet Congress and the Central Executive Committee (mere weeks), and then started arresting coalition partners and suppressing the base soviets that voted the wrong way within months. How did that happen?

No argument. Those are the facts. The "shift up" to the Sovnarkom, and the refusal of the Sovnarkom to acknowledge accountability to the CEC was extremely destructive. How did it happen? The Bolsheviks clearly regard themselves as the revolution.

The fact remains that most workers demanding that the soviets take state power considered that the CEC would function as the government, and that it would be a coalition of all pro-soviet factions, not just the Bolsheviks. Lenin and Trotsky were desperate to maintain a Bolshevik-only SNK, and reluctantly acceded to a Left SR minority on the SNK which they proceded to violate in principle by excluding them from war negotiations, and then violate in principle by smashing wrongly-elected soviets and arresting other soviet factions. Do you think any of the above is "the soviets taking state power" in practice? How did we go from "the soviets taking state power" to a stranglehold by the Bolsheviks on soviet power, disproportionate to their representation at the base of the soviet system, to rapidly gerrymandering it, to finally destroying it? You tell me.

The record of those actions is clear. The Bolsheviks, correct as they were in the question of power and "program," "executed" their program in a manner that gutted the vitality of the revolution itself. I'm not a Leninist, nor a Trotskyist, and certainly not a Luxemburgist. The issue is twofold: 1) does this mean soviets are incapable of being other than a vehicle for "party hierarchies" 2) are the actions of the Bolsheviks the actions of a distinct class, and therefore in every circumstance those fashioning themselves as Bolsheviks-- i.e. Trotskyists will act this way and debilitate the very revolution they support. The answers to both are, IMO, "no."

The fact is if you read "The Libertarians Vindicated?" by Robert Acton in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, a huge volume of expropriations occurred at the initiative of workers at the base, in the fabzavkomzy, in express contradiction to the wishes of the Sovnarkom, whom it coldly informed often that it had expropriated the factories anyway. If you read Lenin, it is clear that he imagined that bourgeois ownership and production would continue for a time under workers' power. So there's "expropriating the bourgeoisie".

Agreed. But the revolution did expropriate the bourgeoisie. I did not, and do not claim the Bolsheviks initiated, imposed from the getgo, expropriating the bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution compelled those steps. And as always the party lags behind the class.

And the popular front of the PRG was displaced by the Petrograd workers and the Bolsheviks which presented the soviets with a fiat accompli. And then the Bolsheviks rapidly constituted a power which ruled over workers and against them. How did that happen? Lots of revolutionary workers and workers in soviet work went along with it, so how did that happen? My point is soviets do not always magically move in the direction of revolution, and the point is what are the soviets doing, how well are workers at the base controlling the political content of them, etc. The soviets of Russia were obviously incapable of preventing the rapid reversal of the attempted proletarian revolution there. What is your explanation?

Agreed. My explanation of that? The same explanation I have for the fact that the revolution actually occurred: uneven and combined development.

The workers in and out of the factories were mostly likely to support to support the Bolsheviks, but certainly not all of them did as a program of "all power to the soviets". Some support SR Maximalists, Left SRs, and anarchists. All of them were incorporated into the new soviet power (though not all in the government). It was after all, an anarchist militant who dismissed the Constituent Assembly. And it was actually the anarchists who first called for no collaboration with the PG and for soviet power.

Prior to the seizure of power, petitions to the soviets from the districts, neighborhoods, committees etc. asking for the soviets to take all power and dismiss the PRG increased dramatically.

I don't know why you're so excited to prove the Bolsheviks were the distilled essence of workers' revolutionary bona fides, but then explicitly went on in a couple months to violate soviet power in principle by refusing to acknowledge the rights of their coalition partners, who were based on soviet power.

I'm not.

The party intelligentsia was exercising power on the workers' behalf, then? I don't know why or what forces compelled the Bolshevik party intelligentsia to end up constituting itself as a power independent from the workers ruling dictatorially against them. Maybe you could explain it to me.

Want to know what I think? I think the Bolsheviks didn't have a fucking clue as to what to do regarding the very concrete issues of organizing power, provisioning a city; agricultural policies. I think the Bolshevik center was actually convinced that in a few short weeks revolution would break out in Europe and those questions would all be resolved for them. I think they took power, because power had to be taken, but well before they were the least bit ready to exercise power. And what's the fallback position in those circumstances? The Cheka.

I think throughout the 1918-1919 the Bolsheviks were very close to losing power. The economy was in collapse. They did not know how to remedy that. Internal transportation was collapsing. They didn't know what to do about that. They did think they knew one thing however-- that if they lost power the revolution would be defeated. And that's how they acted.

I think this is stretching way beyond what Tim Finnegan's point is. I think its the idea you're going to get soviets in the manner of 1917, and I don't think you're going to get workers' committees in McDonald's representing all the McDonald's in the city soviet. A lot of Trotskyist politics (especially the Spartacist League) have this kind of character than implies for them time has stopped in 1917, and they've not noticed the re-composition of the working-class since then.

But that's not the meaning of the universal, world-historical, importance of those councils.

I said the Cochabamba water war produced city assemblies that Goldner called a "proto-soviet". Its right on his website. I don't think Madison, WI was a 'soviet'. It didn't include major sectors of the working-class, and can't be considered therefore a class organ or event as such. I'm just saying that the composition of these working-class struggles is different from "delegates from factories X, Y, Z composed of productive workers from steel mills with 1500 workers to a shift". We're dealing with a different working-class compositionally, even if it has the same historical mission. Is that more clear?

Certainly.

With this I am in total agreement.

And that's the part that counts; because those councils, whatever form they take, or however they are supplemented, represent class organs, and the class participating in its own empowerment in these organizations is the only way to prevent defeat of the revolution, or "derangement" of the revolution by specific parties.

That's how this got started. That's the point I was trying to make in the first post.

A Marxist Historian

9th July 2011, 00:13

Tim Finnegan

9th July 2011, 01:14

Well, has the world fundamentally and materially changed since 1917? I don't think so.
And what had fundamentally changed between 1789 and 1848? Yet Marx observes, of that episode:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
The rest is, variously, tautology and nonsense.

No, that's not correct. Explicating the universal significance, the universal forces at work in the particular manifestation is exquisitely Marxist; hence Marx's exploration of world-historical events.
There's a wee bit to travel between that and arguing for a rerun of Red October, don't you think? And it's that, unless I am grossly mistaken, which both "The" "Marxist" "Historian" (a tragic choice of name) and myself meant by "universalising the Russian Revolution".

S.Artesian

9th July 2011, 01:36

And what had fundamentally changed between 1789 and 1848? Yet Marx observes, of that episode:

The rest is, variously, tautology and nonsense.

There's a wee bit to travel between that and arguing for a rerun of Red October, don't you think? And it's that, unless I am grossly mistaken, which both "The" "Marxist" "Historian" (a tragic choice of name) and myself meant by "universalising the Russian Revolution".

I don't know. I just wouldn't sneer at Red October, that's my point. If you don't think the Russian Revolution was an "authentic" proletarian revolution, then exactly how do you account for it? If it was an authentic proletarian revolution, then it means there is a universal significance to how it organized itself. Doesn't mean everything has to be imitated; it doesn't mean it didn't get fucked up beyond all recognition. Just means there's a universal significance to it. I think that significance is in the organs of workers power, the councils, and the factory committees.

Tim Finnegan

9th July 2011, 02:04

I don't know. I just wouldn't sneer at Red October, that's my point. If you don't think the Russian Revolution was an "authentic" proletarian revolution, then exactly how do you account for it? If it was an authentic proletarian revolution, then it means there is a universal significance to how it organized itself. Doesn't mean everything has to be imitated; it doesn't mean it didn't get fucked up beyond all recognition. Just means there's a universal significance to it. I think that significance is in the organs of workers power, the councils, and the factory committees.
I'll be honest, I'm not at all sure where you're reading this into what I've said. My criticism was of TMH's insistence on "universalising the Russian Revolution" because nothing has "fundamentally changed". I didn't mean to suggest that the 1917-1921 revolutions, in Russia or elsewhere, where anything other than of tremendous significance.

S.Artesian

9th July 2011, 02:24

I'll be honest, I'm not at all sure where you're reading this into what I've said. My criticism was of TMH's insistence on "universalising the Russian Revolution" because nothing has "fundamentally changed". I didn't mean to suggest that the 1917-1921 revolutions, in Russia or elsewhere, where anything other than of tremendous significance.

Well, OK, things have changed. And then again, things haven't. Right. There are still popular fronts out there, right? Still those out there urging collaboration with the bourgeoisie, right? In fact there's still a bourgeoisie, and a proletariat, and everything in between.

There's still uneven and combined development, right? All I meant was a simple little "moment"-- the Russian Revolution was in fact a proletarian revolution. Doesn't mean we are going to clone it, and create commissars-- geez I hope not. But the significance of it is/was "universal" or at least "global." That's all.

Oh.... and one more thing what is the lesson of the Bolsheviks treatment of the actual organizations of workers power, and of the Left SRs-- same lesson as that of Robespierre and his treatment of the Commune.

Those who suppress those to the left of themselves are digging their own graves.

S.Artesian

9th July 2011, 02:29

that central committee was controlled by the right Mensheviks. but they lost control of the party after the Nov 1917 party conference. anyway, i have no interest in defending the Mensheviks, only correcting typical falsehoods about them propagated by MLs.

look, why the fuck should i discuss with you if you ignore what i say?

since you decline to offer any cogent argument this is really just an insult,

fuck you too.

I'm sorry you took what I said as a personal insult. I don't mean it as such. But I do think referring to soviets consistently as vehicles for party hierarchies and "bureaucratic business unions" really misses the importance of this organizations in the prospect and actuality of revolution.

I was kind of taken aback by you question where you want to know how I could consider you "anti-workers power" because I didn't think I had ever said that.

What I intend is that to dismiss a group's program for class wide organizations because you think the groups's conception of the organization is stunted misses the point. To think that the class wide organizations themselves are inherently stunted misses more than the point... and the boat. It misses the revolution.

A Marxist Historian

9th July 2011, 05:01

And what had fundamentally changed between 1789 and 1848? Yet Marx observes, of that episode:

Yes indeed, everything had changed fundamentally between 1789 and 1848. In 1789 a proletarian revolution was essentially impossible. So the best things socialists could do was to try to push the French *bourgeois* revolution as far to the left as possible. Since a genuine socialist workers' revolution in France was an utter impossibility, the conspiratorial methods of Buonarotti, the world's first real communist, were probably perfectly appropriate.

By 1848 this was no longer the case. Proletarian revolution was difficult but definitely not impossible, indeed at moments in France and England looked like it was going to happen. In Germany, more difficult, but the possibility of a workers' revolution led by the Communist League and backed up by peasant rebellion at least existed, and was Marx's strategic plan. He referred to this as "permanent revolution."

By the way, the Communist League in its organizational structure was an excellent example of Leninist democratic centralism, though nobody called it that of course.

To me, that's about as huge a difference as I can think of, and has absolutely everything to do with material economic developments, namely the Industrial Revolution, and has little or nothing to do with ideas and ideology.

[/QUOTE]The rest is, variously, tautology and nonsense.

There's a wee bit to travel between that and arguing for a rerun of Red October, don't you think? And it's that, unless I am grossly mistaken, which both "The" "Marxist" "Historian" (a tragic choice of name) and myself meant by "universalising the Russian Revolution".[/QUOTE]

Actually it is a bit tragic. When I made my first post, I planned to call myself "A Marxist Historian," not "The Marxist Historian" which is definitely a bit pompous. But I was in a hurry late at night, and by now however I am stuck with it.

As for reruns of Red October, well, like I said before, that worked and nobody else has come up with anything else that does. And none of the material conditions that *made* Bolshevism appropriate in 1917 have changed, though quite a few other things have changed.

If you don't think a rerun of Red October in Greece or Britain or anywhere else is the task of the hour, what do you think is? I'm all ears.

-M.H.-

Tim Finnegan

9th July 2011, 05:21

Yes indeed, everything had changed fundamentally between 1789 and 1848. In 1789 a proletarian revolution was essentially impossible. So the best things socialists could do was to try to push the French *bourgeois* revolution as far to the left as possible. Since a genuine socialist workers' revolution in France was an utter impossibility, the conspiratorial methods of Buonarotti, the world's first real communist, were probably perfectly appropriate.

By 1848 this was no longer the case. Proletarian revolution was difficult but definitely not impossible, indeed at moments in France and England looked like it was going to happen. In Germany, more difficult, but the possibility of a workers' revolution led by the Communist League and backed up by peasant rebellion at least existed, and was Marx's strategic plan. He referred to this as "permanent revolution."

By the way, the Communist League in its organizational structure was an excellent example of Leninist democratic centralism, though nobody called it that of course.

To me, that's about as huge a difference as I can think of, and has absolutely everything to do with material economic developments, namely the Industrial Revolution, and has little or nothing to do with ideas and ideology.
Firstly, I don't think that you understand my analogy; Marx's comments referred to the bourgeois radicals of his day, not to the proletarians (the organised movement of which, despite Marx's enthusiasm, was hopelessly underdeveloped at this point in time). My point is that he was himself highly critical of those who attempt to universalise a particular historical episode, so I find it ironic that somebody wearing his name as part of their own would do just that.
Secondly, with that in mind, I'm not actually sure what the fundamental changes alleged to have occurred in regards to bourgeois revolution actually were. There were changes, certainly, by the core of it- the compulsion of the bourgeoisie to carry out their historical mission- was much as it ever was, just as the core of Red October, the compulsion of the proletariat to carry out their historical mission, is of relevance today. As S. Artesian suggests, there's a difference between the "universal forces at work" in a revolution and the methods by which the revolution struggle is carried out; I would tentatively call it a distinction between content and form, although that may well be a load of bollocks.

As for reruns of Red October, well, like I said before, that worked and nobody else has come up with anything else that does. And none of the material conditions that *made* Bolshevism appropriate in 1917 have changed, though quite a few other things have changed.

If you don't think a rerun of Red October in Greece or Britain or anywhere else is the task of the hour, what do you think is? I'm all ears.

-M.H.-Has the large-scale recomposition of the working class, as discussed by The Inform Candidate elsewhere in this thread, entirely passed you by? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the fundamental ingredients as referenced by S. Artesian- councils, factory committees, soviets- are not of relevance today, but arguing for the entire thing to be re-staged simply because you can't think of anything better strikes me as almost willfully simplistic. Even within the 1917-1921 period, different approaches emerged in different situations- Russia was necessarily different than Germany, a hypothetical revolutionary USA would have different again, and so on; the idea that November 7th, 1917, Petrograd can encapsulate all of late capitalist society would have been ridiculous at the time, let alone ninety years on!

Tell me, have you ever hear the suggestion that "madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"?

A Marxist Historian

9th July 2011, 08:56

Firstly, I don't think that you understand my analogy; Marx's comments referred to the bourgeois radicals of his day, not to the proletarians (the organised movement of which, despite Marx's enthusiasm, was hopelessly underdeveloped at this point in time). My point is that he was himself highly critical of those who attempt to universalise a particular historical episode, so I find it ironic that somebody wearing his name as part of their own would do just that.

You're right, I don't understand your analogy, I didn't in the first place, and after reading the above I still don't. You are talking of "those who attempt to universalise a particular historical episode," a phraseology I find so abstract and so far out of context as to be almost meaningless. Idealist, indeed.

Be it noted that the line between bourgeois and proletarian radicals was highly undeveloped at that point.

Secondly, with that in mind, I'm not actually sure what the fundamental changes alleged to have occurred in regards to bourgeois revolution actually were. There were changes, certainly, by the core of it- the compulsion of the bourgeoisie to carry out their historical mission- was much as it ever was, just as the core of Red October, the compulsion of the proletariat to carry out their historical mission, is of relevance today. As S. Artesian suggests, there's a difference between the "universal forces at work" in a revolution and the methods by which the revolution struggle is carried out; I would tentatively call it a distinction between content and form, although that may well be a load of bollocks.

OK, you agree that there were fundamental changes in the capacity of the proletariat to carry out a proletarian revolution, but say that there were no fundamental changes in the capacity of the bourgeoisie to carry out a bourgeois revolution, between 1789 and 1848? That sounds like what you are saying.

If so, that was certainly not Marx's opinion. He thought that in 1789 the bourgeoisie was highly capable of carrying out bourgeois revolution, did one in France, right after the American bourgeoisie had done one in America. And it would be hard to find a revolution more utterly and purely bourgeois than the American revolution, in the northern half of America at any rate.

Did he think that the bourgeoisie was still capable of carrying out bourgeois revolutions in 1848? Of course not.

Has the large-scale recomposition of the working class, as discussed by The Inform Candidate elsewhere in this thread, entirely passed you by?

What is this large scale recomposition? It is the transfer of large swatches of industry out of the old imperial centers to the Third World, with a certain tendency to imperial parasitism in said old centers, especially in America, with much growth of the "service sector," servicing basic production outsourced and moved offshore out to the neo-colonies.

Isn't this exactly what Lenin predicted in his brilliant pamphlet on imperialism? Which, if anything, describes empirical reality *much better* now than when he wrote it, as much of what he wrote there was predictions for the future rather than immediate description. [/QUOTE]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the fundamental ingredients as referenced by S. Artesian- councils, factory committees, soviets- are not of relevance today, but arguing for the entire thing to be re-staged simply because you can't think of anything better strikes me as almost willfully simplistic. Even within the 1917-1921 period, different approaches emerged in different situations- Russia was necessarily different than Germany, a hypothetical revolutionary USA would have different again, and so on; the idea that November 7th, 1917, Petrograd can encapsulate all of late capitalist society would have been ridiculous at the time, let alone ninety years on!

I am not saying that you'll see replication in every detail. Notably, I am sure the *word* Soviet is unlikely to be used, except of course when they reappear in former Soviet bloc countries.

As I've said elsewhere, the Internet and other recent technological developments will reshape Soviets. Make 'em in my opinion better and more flexible. But the basic pattern will remain the same, unless and until somebody comes up with a better one.

Since I *don't* think we are fundamentally living in a different political era now than in 1917, I don't think that is likely. But anything is possible.

Tell me, have you ever hear the suggestion that "madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"?

Being an American, I prefer the old American saying, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

-M.H.-

syndicat

9th July 2011, 18:57

A Marxist Historian

9th July 2011, 19:54

about the soviets, let me try to explain my position...which is not unique to me. during the Russian revolution virtually the entire libertarian left...syndicalists, maximalists, Ukrainian anarchist federation, anarcho-communists...criticized many of the major soviets as "party soviets". they were not objecting to the fact that delegates were members of parties, but that they soviets had been structured in a hierarchical way, concentrating power in the executive committee and/or presidium, with the party intelligentsia making the decisions.

their alternative program was for what they called "free soviiets", that is, horizontally structured, grassroots soviets that were genuinely controlled by workers, like the soviet in Kronstadt. the maximalists' proposal for a "Toilers' Republic" was for a federation of grassroots soviets.

they took this position because they believed the soviets were not yet fully controlled by the working class.

That is all an accurate characterization. Given the great and evergrowing interdependence of society and the economy in our era, lately referred to as "globalism," democratic centralism is the correct formula for "all" forms of worker organization, not just partys, with equal emphasis on both words. This was very much recognized in revolutionary Russia, by the way, and not only by Bolsheviks.

The necessary centralism, which you characterize as "hierarchy," needs to be balanced by the Soviet principle of instant recall, internal democracy and freedom of discussion, etc.

Was this fully realized in starving, socially and economically backward, isolated Red Russia invaded on all sides and wracked by civil war? No. But that was the plan and the program. What was fully immediately practical was *internal* party democracy in the Bolshevik Party. When this went away in January 1924, the revolution had been deformed and betrayed.

In practice, true democratic centralism is counterposed not to democracy, but to the bureaucratic centralism and outright top-down dictatorship of the vast majority of workers' organizations.

By the way, the Bolshevik centralism did *not* concentrate power in the hands of intelligentsia. The whole idea of a Leninist party is to be the party of the politically advanced segment of the working class, with the revolutionary intelligentsia *breaking* from their class origins and social interests and fusing with the advanced workers, on the basis of the objective class outlook of the *working class,* explained so well in the Communist Manifesto.

In practice, it was parties like the Mensheviks and the SRs that were dominated by the intelligentsia. Indeed the vast majority of the intelligentsia in Russia *opposed* the Bolsheviks, who were certainly the most working class party in Russia.

There were quite a few anarchist and syndicalist intellectuals with a disproportionate influence in their movements, for that matter.

nonetheless, most of the libertarian left did not reject the soviets outright but tried to work within them, and gave "critical support" to the soviets, as a better alternative than a parliamentary state of the sort preferred by the Mensheviks.

why were the Russian soviets often structured in this hierarchical way? here i think Sam Farber (a member of Solidarity) offers an insight. in his book "Before Stalinism" he points out that a weakness of Russian Marxism, in both its Menshevik and Bolshevik forms, did not place much emphasis on participation and control by ordinary people over their daily lives on and off the job. Instead they were fixated on control over the central government. they seemed to have the view that the important thing is not direct empowerment of the working class itself, but "who is in charge? who is giving the orders?"

I am tempted to answer, in the words of John Belushi I think it was,

"But syndicat! You say that as if it was a bad thing"!

Who is in charge, who is giving the orders, is exactly what empowerment of the working class is all about. What the central government does is the most important thing that affects people's lives, not worrying about who is in charge of what widget gets produced next year at your factory, and who distributes the toilet paper.

Tito turned lots of "direct empowerment" at the factory level over to the workers, which was harmless from his point of view as he got to decide all the important central government stuff. So you had Stalinism plus "control by ordinary people of their lives on and off the job."

The result was to get first the individuals factories squabbling with each other, and then conflict between the different nationalities, and then after Tito died things got really really bad.

how else are we to explain what the Bolsheviks actually did after October 1917? they immediately created the Supreme Council for National Economy, appointed from above, stacked with managers, engineers, party stalwarts, with power to plan the whole national economy. by the spring of 1918 there was then the move to replace the workers militia with a hierarchically structured Red Army with thousans of ex-tsarist officers in charge, and began pushing the central planning approach downwards, with Lenin's opposition to worker control of the regional and industry boards, and then elimination of the collective management systems workers had created in the revolution by 1920.

fighting a civil war does not explain this direction. the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists also fought a civil war but did not propose statist and managerialist control over production...that was the position of the Spanish CP.

Well, the Bolsheviks fought a civil war and won, the Spanish anarchists, and then the Spanish CP after the anarchists let power slip out of their fingers into the hands of the Stalinists, fought a civil war and lost.

I think this is a real big difference, and has everything to do with why the Bolshevik conception was good and the anarchist bad, and the Stalinist even worse.

-M.H.-

S. Artesian wants to say that the soviets either were or were not a direct expression of worker power unambiguously. but this, to put it in Marxist lingo, a bit undialectical. the situation was more conflicted with differences in the left organizations over how the soviets should be run etc.

syndicat

9th July 2011, 20:38

The necessary centralism, which you characterize as "hierarchy," needs to be balanced by the Soviet principle of instant recall, internal democracy and freedom of discussion, etc.your "centralism" was the path for the empowerment of the nascent bureaucratic class.

and "freedom of disucssion" was very soon abandoned with systematic repression of alternative left organizations within the working class.

and "instant recall" certainly did not exist in the soviets. from March 1917 to Oct 1917 there had been soviet elections every three months but no new elections were held from Oct til the spring of 1918...and the Bolsheviks lost majorities in a number of cities...and then promptly used military force to overthrow those soviets. so much for "instant recall"!

Well, the Bolsheviks fought a civil war and won, the Spanish anarchists, and then the Spanish CP after the anarchists let power slip out of their fingers into the hands of the Stalinists, fought a civil war and lost.yes, the Communists won...and were thus the vehicle for continued subordination of the working class to a dominating, exploiting class, the bureaucratic class. the working class were thus defeated. it was a victory for the bureaucratic revolution, a defeat for the proletarian revolution.

in Spain it was the two Marxist parties, PSOE and CPE, who preferred the "centralist" (as you would call it) path of a hierarchical, professional army, in which the CP exercized main influence. meanwhile they allowed the Soviet union to cheat Spain on arms deals and refused to use the gold reserves to build up a native arms industry in Catalonia where the workers had created on their own over 200 factories supplying the militia. the Soviet Union's looting of Spain was a big factor in the defeat, with the transfer of the gold reserves to Russia causing a 50 percent drop in the value of the Spanish currency, thus undermining the ability to fight the war. so your "centralist"/party-dominated path lost the war.

the anarcho-syndicalsists' failure was in not staying sufficiently hard and united in support of their own program of direct worker power and a unified militia under direct working class control, and use of the gold reserves to build up a native arms industry, independence for Morrocco, and use of guerrilla forces in the mountains behind fascist lines in the south.

A Marxist Historian

9th July 2011, 21:46

your "centralism" was the path for the empowerment of the nascent bureaucratic class.

and "freedom of disucssion" was very soon abandoned with systematic repression of alternative left organizations within the working class.

There was plenty of freedom of discussion *within the revolution and among revolutionaries.* In the Civil War context, with people starving to death in huge numbers, the economy in collapse, and imperialist armies marching in on all sides, counterrevolutionaries had to shut up or else, and rightly so. That included, unfortunately, a lot of those alternate left organizations within the working class you refer to.

Did Bolshevik centralism make it easier for the bureaucrats to take over? Yes. Such is life in the big city. You can't build socialism in a single country anyway, especially one as socially and economically backward as Russia at the time. A major reason why certain things actually did briefly go better in Spain is that Spain was less backward than Tsarist Russia.

As for instant recall, not a good idea when soviets are being taken over by Menshevik and SR counterrevolutionaries hand in glove with the White Guard semi-fascists.

It's like Abraham Lincoln put it when criticized for violating the democratic rights of the pro-Confederate copperheads during the American Civil War, abolishing habeas corpus and so forth, with the pro-Confederate Supreme Court whining up a storm. To preserve democracy, first you have to preserve the Union. The Soviet Union in this case.[/QUOTE]

and "instant recall" certainly did not exist in the soviets. from March 1917 to Oct 1917 there had been soviet elections every three months but no new elections were held from Oct til the spring of 1918...and the Bolsheviks lost majorities in a number of cities...and then promptly used military force to overthrow those soviets. so much for "instant recall"!

yes, the Communists won...and were thus the vehicle for continued subordination of the working class to a dominating, exploiting class, the bureaucratic class. the working class were thus defeated. it was a victory for the bureaucratic revolution, a defeat for the proletarian revolution.

in Spain it was the two Marxist parties, PSOE and CPE, who preferred the "centralist" (as you would call it) path of a hierarchical, professional army, in which the CP exercized main influence. meanwhile they allowed the Soviet union to cheat Spain on arms deals and refused to use the gold reserves to build up a native arms industry in Catalonia where the workers had created on their own over 200 factories supplying the militia. the Soviet Union's looting of Spain was a big factor in the defeat, with the transfer of the gold reserves to Russia causing a 50 percent drop in the value of the Spanish currency, thus undermining the ability to fight the war. so your "centralist"/party-dominated path lost the war.

The PSOE were Social Democrats, the CPE Stalinists. Neither were Marxists. I'm for democratic centralism on behalf of the revolutionary working class, not bureaucratic centralism on behalf of Spanish capitalists and Soviet bureaucrats.

And so was Durruti, pretty much. There's a quote from Durruti I've heard, that he once said, "I'll show those communists what revolutionary discipline really is." He may have been an anarchist, but he was also a revolutionary, unlike the rest of the anarcho-syndicalist leaders, and he understood that when the shit hits the fan you do what you gotta do.

All the stuff you mention below was in the program of the tiny band of Spanish Trotskyists, and *not* what the CNT was pursuing at all. Direct workers' power, union controlled workers militias etc. would have been the necessary stage to what was needed to beat Franco, which indeed would have required professionalization of the army etc., but of a *Red* army not a "republican" capitalist army with NKVD advisers calling the shots.

the anarcho-syndicalsists' failure was in not staying sufficiently hard and united in support of their own program of direct worker power and a unified militia under direct working class control, and use of the gold reserves to build up a native arms industry, independence for Morrocco, and use of guerrilla forces in the mountains behind fascist lines in the south.

syndicat

10th July 2011, 03:52

But all of this is speculation. Here's what the original issue was: the Trotskyists in Spain proposed workers' councils, assemblies, militias, and no participation or support for the popular front. What would prevent a syndicalist from cooperating in a united front with the Trotskyists on such issues?-- I'll bet the Trotskyists would have listened attentively to proposals to expand the councils to include neighborhoods or issue of consumption, distribution etc. But what class based reason could any anarchist, syndicalist have for rejecting such work in common-- unless of course such anarchists, syndicalists, want to work with the popular front. I'm not sure about them advocating assemblies. Maybe they did. Since the Trotskyists were very small in numbers, the question in fact would have been, what would prevent the Trotskyists from working in a united front with the revolutionaries in the CNT, such as the Friends of Durruti, who advocated defense councils, worker congresses, assemblies, and a unified militia, as well as free municipalities?

The defense councils they advocated were revolutionary committees elected by the congress...analogous to a milirtary revolutionary committee or executive committee of a soviet in the Russian revolution. the revolutionaries in the CNT did not advocate anything exactly like the soviets in Russia, but the regional worker congresses were the closest equivalent. the regional congress of Aragon was invoked for an area with a population of about 450,000. their view was that the worker assemblies and local worker councils (delegate committees elected by the assemblies) were to maintain surveillance and control over the defense councils.

RedTrackWorker

10th July 2011, 04:37

what would prevent the Trotskyists from working in a united front with the revolutionaries in the CNT, such as the Friends of Durruti, who advocated defense councils, worker congresses, assemblies, and a unified militia, as well as free municipalities?

Two things prevented them from working with such revolutionaries in the CNT:
1. Until the Friends of Durruti formed, given the small forces of the Trotskyists, it would've been hard for them to make inroads to anarchists advocating a revolutionary program since none existed as an organized tendency fighting openly for such a program. But they probably made tactical mistakes in not trying harder before the Friends were formed and some acknowledged that--one Trotskyist leader wrote: "In the past we focused almost exclusively on the POUM. The anarchist revolutionary workers were unduly neglected, with the exception of the Friends of Durruti." But again, no anarchist group other than the Friends was fighting openly for a revolutionary program.

2. They did try to work with the Friends of Durruti and were refused (beyond basic measures of solidarity in the illegal underground after May 1937 that both groups can be proud of from everything I've read). That's based on Guillamon's book on the Friends, see chapter 10 (http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/spain/sp001780/chap10.html) which seemingly gleefully recounts how the FoD refused to even meet with the Trotskyists to discuss joint action after the May Days in which they were the only two organizations putting forward a program for workers' revolution. (The Trotskyists also called on the left of the POUM for a conference and joint action, saying: "you have a duty to invite the 'Friends of Durruti', as well as ourselves, to seek some common accord on the requisite practical steps which may afford an escape from this situation and pave the way for new struggles that will lead us on to victory.")

syndicat

11th July 2011, 19:16

1. Until the Friends of Durruti formed, given the small forces of the Trotskyists, it would've been hard for them to make inroads to anarchists advocating a revolutionary program since none existed as an organized tendency fighting openly for such a program. But they probably made tactical mistakes in not trying harder before the Friends were formed and some acknowledged that--one Trotskyist leader wrote: "In the past we focused almost exclusively on the POUM. The anarchist revolutionary workers were unduly neglected, with the exception of the Friends of Durruti." But again, no anarchist group other than the Friends was fighting openly for a revolutionary program.

well, the CNT itself had a revolutionary program and during Sept-Oct 1936 their main daily papers were beating the drum for the revolutionary program I referred to...defense councils, worker congresses, workers direct management, etc. but they thought of a united front in terms of a class front, that is, a "revolutionary workers alliance" between CNT and UGT.

2. They did try to work with the Friends of Durruti and were refused (beyond basic measures of solidarity in the illegal underground after May 1937 that both groups can be proud of from everything I've read). That's based on Guillamon's book on the Friends, see chapter 10 (http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/spain/sp001780/chap10.html) which seemingly gleefully recounts how the FoD refused to even meet with the Trotskyists to discuss joint action after the May Days in which they were the only two organizations putting forward a program for workers' revolution. (The Trotskyists also called on the left of the POUM for a conference and joint action, saying: "you have a duty to invite the 'Friends of Durruti', as well as ourselves, to seek some common accord on the requisite practical steps which may afford an escape from this situation and pave the way for new struggles that will lead us on to victory.") Yesterday 02:52

i don't know why they refused to work with them there are many possible explanations...the Trots lack of influence or following in the class, small size, FoD's wariness of Leninists, their particular experience with that group, etc.

The PSOE were Social Democrats,

this is an inaccurate statement. people are transformed by revolution and this was true of much of the working class base of the UGT. particularly after the brutal repression of the worker uprising in Asturias in 1934, in which the PSOE was the dominant party. from that point til 1936 Largo Caballero and other leading members of the Left of the PSOE were making speeches calling for a "workers government", "proletarian revolution" and the inevitability of a violent revolutionary conflict. the Left PSOE were the leaders of the UGT farm workers union, which mushroomed to half a million members, and became a mass revolutionary movement in the countryside, seizing large estates in the spring of 1936, and with a program barely distinguishable from the CNT's farm workers union.

of course there was a moderate faction of the PSOE, led by people like Negrin and Prieto. Negrin was the PCE's choice for prime ministrer as he let them do what they want....and arranged for the transfer of 70 percent of the gold reserves to Moscow.

the incipient revolutionary tendencies in the base of the left of the PSOE were the potential basis for a revolutionary alliance with the CNT, and this did happen in practice in various places. but the Largo Caballero leadership wavered between social democratic and revolutionary directions. Durruti's view was that the left of the UGT needed to be pushed by the CNT, taking actions that would force their hand. They did this to some extent...seizing whole industries in which half the workforce were in the UGT...and with the UGT workers following on after the CNT took the initiative. or with the setting up of the workers government (defense council) in Aragon...initially all CNT, but with some UGT members added later (UGT was a minority there).

A Marxist Historian

11th July 2011, 20:56

well, the CNT itself had a revolutionary program and during Sept-Oct 1936 their main daily papers were beating the drum for the revolutionary program I referred to...defense councils, worker congresses, workers direct management, etc. but they thought of a united front in terms of a class front, that is, a "revolutionary workers alliance" between CNT and UGT.

i don't know why they refused to work with them there are many possible explanations...the Trots lack of influence or following in the class, small size, FoD's wariness of Leninists, their particular experience with that group, etc.).

Given that the CNT joined the government, the revolutionary rhetoric in the CNT press didn't mean a thing. As for Durutti's unwillingness to even talk to the Trotskyists, there is no mystery about that. He was a revolutionary, but he had plenty of sectarian leftover anti-Trotskyist anarchist prejudices that he never transcended.

The Stalinists were quite aware of this, and rather than treating him as the ultimate ultra-left Hitler tool or whatever, they praised him and tried, very unsuccessfully, to win him over.

this is an inaccurate statement. people are transformed by revolution and this was true of much of the working class base of the UGT. particularly after the brutal repression of the worker uprising in Asturias in 1934, in which the PSOE was the dominant party. from that point til 1936 Largo Caballero and other leading members of the Left of the PSOE were making speeches calling for a "workers government", "proletarian revolution" and the inevitability of a violent revolutionary conflict. the Left PSOE were the leaders of the UGT farm workers union, which mushroomed to half a million members, and became a mass revolutionary movement in the countryside, seizing large estates in the spring of 1936, and with a program barely distinguishable from the CNT's farm workers union.

Yes, but this was a very temporary flip flop on Caballero's part, which wore off pretty quickly after he joined the government. Before 1934, Caballero had been a sellout Social Democratic bureaucrat of the worst sort, absolutely no different from Prieto or Negrin, worse if anything.

The left in the PSOE was however a serious affair. This is exactly what the break between Trotsky and Andres Nin in 1934 was about. Trotsky wanted Nin and the Spanish Trotskyists to *join* the PSOE and merge with its left wing. Totally possible, the youth group of the PSOE was writing letters to Trotsky begging him to leave France, come to Spain and lead them. Which neither the French nor Spanish government would have allowed of course.

Instead Nin formed the POUM together with Maurin and the Spanish Bukharinists, and sneered at and ignored both the PSOE and the CNT, believing that all the revolutionary workers would automatically follow this "Party of Marxist Unification," with all the big left names from the 1920s in it.

And the PSOE youth organization gave up on Trotsky and Nin and ... joined the official CP, turning what was then a tiny isolated sect into a real political party.

of course there was a moderate faction of the PSOE, led by people like Negrin and Prieto. Negrin was the PCE's choice for prime ministrer as he let them do what they want....and arranged for the transfer of 70 percent of the gold reserves to Moscow.

the incipient revolutionary tendencies in the base of the left of the PSOE were the potential basis for a revolutionary alliance with the CNT, and this did happen in practice in various places. but the Largo Caballero leadership wavered between social democratic and revolutionary directions. Durruti's view was that the left of the UGT needed to be pushed by the CNT, taking actions that would force their hand. They did this to some extent...seizing whole industries in which half the workforce were in the UGT...and with the UGT workers following on after the CNT took the initiative. or with the setting up of the workers government (defense council) in Aragon...initially all CNT, but with some UGT members added later (UGT was a minority there).