Why did the Bolsheviks Dissolve the Constituent Assembly? [Archive]

Dave B

4th November 2011, 21:07

What would have been the relationship between the constituent assembly and the Soviets is a point of conjecture, irrespective of any prejudices.

As the constituent assembly was shut down on it’s first sitting and never even got as far as discussing its future relationship to the soviets.

The workers and ‘peasants’ who demonstrated against the ‘strangling’ of the constituent assembly a few days later were machine gunned in the streets by the Bolsheviks.

In fact the Bolshevik coup of October was justified by the Bolsheviks, and by Trotsky in particular, as necessary in order to stop the bourgeois ………….. preventing the Constituent Assembly ...’

Thus;

Tony Cliff Trotsky: Towards October 1879-1917
15. Towards the insurrection

At last on 5 October the central committee bent to Lenin’s will and resolved, with only one dissenting voice – Kamenev’s, to withdraw from the Pre-Parliament on its first day. Trotsky succeeded in convincing the Bolshevik delegates to the Pre-Parliament that they should boycott this body – again with only one vote against.

On 7 October Trotsky read out a fighting statement at the Pre-Parliament. This was probably the first time he appeared as the main Bolshevik spokesman. Sukhanov describes the scene:………..

‘The officially stated aim of the Democratic Conference,’ Trotsky began, ‘was the elimination of the personal regime that fed the Kornilov revolt, and the creation of a responsible government capable of liquidating the war and promoting the convocation of a Constituent Assembly at the appointed time……………..

………. If the propertied elements were really preparing for the Constituent Assembly in a month and a half, they would have no grounds for defending the non-responsibility of the government now. The whole point is that the bourgeois classes have set themselves the goal of preventing the Constituent Assembly ...’

There was an uproar. Shouts from the right: ‘Lies!’

……….. The propertied classes, who provoked the uprising, are now moving to crush it and are openly steering a course for the bony hand of hunger, which is expected to strangle the revolution and the Constituent Assembly first of all.

‘Nor is foreign policy any less criminal. After forty months of war the capital is threatened by mortal danger. In response to this a plan has been put forward for the transfer of the government to Moscow. The idea of surrendering the revolutionary capital to German troops does not arouse the slightest indignation amongst the bourgeois classes; on the contrary it is accepted as a natural link in the general policy that is supposed to help them in their counter-revolutionary conspiracy.’

The uproar grew worse.

The patriots leaped from their seats and wouldn’t allow Trotsky to go on speaking. Shouts about Germany, the sealed car and so on. One shout stood out: ‘Bastard!’

……………………….The chairman called the meeting to order. Trotsky was standing there as though none of this were any concern of his, and finally found it possible to go on.

‘We, the Bolshevik fraction of the Social-Democratic Party, declare that with this government of national treachery and this “Council” we –’

The uproar took on an obviously hopeless character. The majority of the right got to their feet with the obvious intention of stopping the speech. The chairman called the speaker to order. Trotsky, beginning to lose his temper, and speaking by now through the hubbub, finished:

‘–……... We appeal to the people: Long live an immediate, honourable democratic peace, all power to the Soviets. All land to the people, long live the Constituent Assembly!’

All the Bolsheviks stood up and walked out of the assembly hall to the accompaniment of shouts ‘Go to your German trains!’

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/15-towards.html

In fact the real reason for the abolition of the constituent assembly by the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with Soviets power or Leninist theory and the answer is more mundane and can in fact be seen in the above tract.

In the palpable outrage at the rank hypocrisy of Trotsky and his Bolsheviks re being in cahoots with the 'German' capitalist class.

The Bolsheviks had been receiving vast amounts of money from the German government; and that was, as it turns out known, or at least suspected at the time.

There is no suggestion that there was any sympathy between the two, they were both just using each other.

It was uncovered of course and Lenin was wanted for questioning; which is why he was in hiding and on the run from about May onwards.

There were doubts at the time about whether or not this was just ‘Fox news’ slanderous bourgeois propaganda and anti leftist which hunting etc.

The issue was discussed in the soviets, which gave its cast iron guarantee that any investigation and perhaps trial would overseen by it to ensure fairness etc.

And the soviets requested that Lenin hand himself in to clear his name.

It was discussed by the Bolshevik party and it ultimately refused; and it is on the record in Lenin’s own ‘collected works’, particularly if you bother to rummage about in the footnotes.

Any other government other than a Bolshevik one would have been the end of the Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular. .

No doubt it will be said that this is Richard Pipes bougiouse propaganda, but unfortunately the evidence is there and Pipes didn’t find it first, far from it.

And what matters is that it was known about at the time, in fact Abrahamovitch, admittedly Menshevik, mentions it in an almost matter of fact and in passing manner in his history of the Russian Revolution

S.Artesian

4th November 2011, 21:24

This is just bullshit. Really. Bringing up the "German agents" crap again. Right that explains everything. That explains why the Bolsheviks gained in popularity, where viewed as the only party that would defend the revolution, would defend the soldiers against the reimposition of capital punishment---[cue Dave B. to point out how the Bolsheviks then, in the Civil War, restored capital punishment; yet another example of "Bolshevik hypocrisy!" And being agents of the Germans.]

Sure, Lenin should hand himself in to the PG so that he could be executed. As a matter of fact, Trotsky did clear both their names

Really Dave B. take this horseshit smear out of here.

ComradeOm

4th November 2011, 21:38

Once again Dave, you don't know what you're talking about. It's so much easier to fall back on quotes and gossip. Really, the Bolsheviks wanted to shut down the CA because of a scandal from July? This is despite the fact that in the CA elections they dominated in urban areas and amongst the working class? Do just decide to go on random tangents for the fun of it?

You know what, forget that. Let's deal with the actual topic at hand and not get dragged down your rabbit hole

[SIZE=3]What would have been the relationship between the constituent assembly and the Soviets is a point of conjecture, irrespective of any prejudices.

As the constituent assembly was shut down on it’s first sitting and never even got as far as discussing its future relationship to the soviets.Have I mentioned that you don't know what you're talking about? Of course the CA discussed its relationship with the soviets. What do you imagine they sat around talking about?

The relationship with the soviets was, understandably, the focus of the first day of the CA. It was raised several times, most notably by Tsereteli who presented the Menshevik resolution which explicitly rejected Soviet power and called for all state power to be vested in the CA. In the event, it was the slightly more diplomatic resolution sponsored by the Right SR Pumpianskii - which ignored the soviets altogether and insisted that the CA assume political authority throughout Russia - that was ultimately passed by the delegates

Shteinberg, on the behalf of the Left SRs, then explicitly challenged the majority to endorse Soviet power or risk confirming their counter-revolutionary nature. They refused to recognise Soviet authority and the Left SRs therefore left the chamber around 04:00

Yet you don't believe that any of this drama, debate and passing of resolutions comprises 'a discussion of its future relationship to the soviets'?

Die Neue Zeit

5th November 2011, 01:59

The usual junk from our usual junk-meister-- i.e. don't deal with the actual question, but use it as a vector to detour discussion into a personal pet theme.

The OP said "it is clear that they did not hold that universal support," and already this thread detoured into a discussion on the soviets before I jumped in.

The question is why did the Bolsheviks disperse the CA? Because the CA was the vehicle for those who wanted to dispossess the soviets of power, of "sovereignty," proposing instead the CA as the ultimate authority. That was an explicit organizing principle of the CA.

There was no way to "keep the bourgeois elements out" and keep the CA which was, in its very existence, the organ of reconstituting the bourgeoisie.

So why did the Bolsheviks themselves call for a Constituent Assembly in their political program?

There was a way: Do exactly what the Soviet constitution did and disenfranchise the bourgeoisie and others from voting and being elected in new elections.

Think about it: there was dual power between the PG, and the class organization of the workers, the soviets, which could not be maintained. One or the other had to give way.

So says our resident inconsistency meister with regards to workers power, Left-SRs, and peasant soviets. :rolleyes:

A new CA or Bukharin's Revolutionary Convention, without bourgeois delegates or voters, would have yielded the very same Left-SR government you conceded, without the tragic detour into unequal suffrage.

Not really. The Bolsheviks never really pretended to represent the peasantry, at least not at this stage. The October Revolution had been conducted by the proletariat and the soldiery in the name of the "Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies" (to quote both the MRC and Congress decrees). The peasantry were to have some form of representation, though the peasant soviets, but there was never the intention of providing "equal suffrage"

The 1936 constitution was technically a step back from this class principle. Not that it was particularly relevant - no one was voting in those elections

That depends on your interpretation of history. The "ironic triumph of old Bolshevism," to quote historian Lars Lih, demonstrates that many were open to the possibility of a peasants and workers Revolutionary Provisional Government (http://www.revleft.com/vb/revolutionary-provisional-government-t163083/index.html) (note the order between "peasants" and "workers").

Note: It's too bad our usual SPGB/WSM parliamentary cretins jumped into this thread. :(

A Marxist Historian

5th November 2011, 19:00

Hey guys, just a question you have probably heard before.

I already know that the party roles did not reflect the SR split and therefore were outdated, so I understand why the Bolsheviks dissolved it.

However, why did the Bolsheviks not hold new elections? I totally understand the dissolution, but then why not hold elections to truly represent the people? This is one thing that really irks me, as the Bolsheviks did not represent the Russian people and therefore should not have dissolved the Assembly. They may have thought they 'represented' the interests of the masses, but it is clear that they did not hold that universal support - which is why free speech in the Assembly would be been so necessary.

So why did the Bolsheviks do it, and why did they not call me elections? Because it seems to me that the Bolsheviks just got very dictatorial and stop the democracy gained in the Russian Revolution.

Also, some stats and unbiased sources on the Assembly and R.R in general would be a great help.

Thanks.

Why didn't they call new elections, post-left right split in the SR's?

Because, as they explained in great detail, this is very far from a secret, they saw the Soviet form as a superior form of democracy, proletarian *participatory* democracy. The delegated system with instant recall, etc. Read Marx on the Paris Commune, decades before the Soviet idea was even invented.

In a CA, everybody including the capitalist class gets a vote, and the peasants, 9/10th of the Russian population, would swamp the workers. The whole idea of the Russian Revolution was for the working class to rule. In a backward, illiterate country whose peasantry was only emerging out of the sleep of the ages, peasant rule could only have reactionary consequences, as it would inevitably mean the rule of anti-democratic peasant guerilla leaders, at best, and more likely mean the rule of reactionaries deluding the peasantry with anti-Semitism or what have you.

Once the pesantry had seized the land from the nobles, it ceased to be a revolutionary force and all became interested in becoming petty capitalist proprietors. Only the threat of restoration of Tsarism by the Whites kept the peasantry *as a whole* on the revolutionary side in the Civil War.

The Paris Commune of course was defeated by peasant reaction, with the French peasantry overwhelmingly on the side of the Versailles reactionary murderers.

So the workers soviets and the peasant soviets had *equal* representation in the worker-peasant soviet regime, with no one man-one vote nonsense. And in the peasant soviets, unfortunately, one man is exactly right, women were ignored at best in Russian peasant society.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

5th November 2011, 19:09

Because, as they explained in great detail, this is very far from a secret, they saw the Soviet form as a superior form of democracy, proletarian *participatory* democracy. The delegated system with instant recall, etc. Read Marx on the Paris Commune, decades before the Soviet idea was even invented.

The whole Communal Council met frequently. Above the local level, the soviets didn't.

In a CA, everybody including the capitalist class gets a vote, and the peasants, 9/10th of the Russian population, would swamp the workers.

The first problem could have been addressed constitutionally, and the second "problem" isn't a democratic problem at all.

In a backward, illiterate country whose peasantry was only emerging out of the sleep of the ages, peasant rule could only have reactionary consequences, as it would inevitably mean the rule of anti-democratic peasant guerilla leaders, at best

How exactly were they undemocratic, apart from the sexism?

Once the pesantry had seized the land from the nobles, it ceased to be a revolutionary force and all became interested in becoming petty capitalist proprietors. Only the threat of restoration of Tsarism by the Whites kept the peasantry *as a whole* on the revolutionary side in the Civil War.

Please. There's also the difference between individual petty proprietorship and communal petty proprietorship, which "late Marx" recognized and Trotsky didn't.

The Paris Commune of course was defeated by peasant reaction, with the French peasantry overwhelmingly on the side of the Versailles reactionary murderers.

That's the subject of another thread.

So the workers soviets and the peasant soviets had *equal* representation in the worker-peasant soviet regime, with no one man-one vote nonsense. And in the peasant soviets, unfortunately, one man is exactly right, women were ignored at best in Russian peasant society.

-M.H.-

One-man-one-vote is a very basic democratic principle that you seem to be contemptuous of. As for the sexism in the peasant soviets, that could have been addressed constitutionally.

S.Artesian

5th November 2011, 21:28

∞

6th November 2011, 00:23

So wouldn't nationalizing agricultural production been better for relationships between the urban and the agricultural working class?

The Insurrection

6th November 2011, 00:36

Because it was hindering their ability to control the state.

S.Artesian

6th November 2011, 00:45

So wouldn't nationalizing agricultural production been better for relationships between the urban and the agricultural working class?

Yeah, but we're dealing with uneven and combined development, where nationalization doesn't make much sense unless you have the wherewithal to maintain, support, expand agricultural production through that nationalization. Russia did not.

So a very "deft" hand was needed in relations with the countryside, and deftness, the "light" touch was never a strong suit of the Bolsheviks-- much better for the left SRs with stronger connections to the rural poor to devise, execute, manage, and control the strategy for reconciling rural production and rural producers to the needs of the revolution.

Needless to say, the Bolsheviks weren't going to allow that; their "requisitioning" teams weren't very good at distinguishing poor peasantry and subsistence producers from rich and middle peasantry, so much of the surplus that was requisitioned was not exactly surplus.

It got so bad during the civil war that in some areas the peasantry raised the slogan at demonstrations and protests in villages, "Down with Communism! Long live Bolshevism!" meaning of course, long live the Bolshevism that got rid of the landlords.

Tragedy, really due to the failure of the revolution to conquer in Europe-- tragedy repeated, not as farce, but as a nightmare weighing on the brain of the living with Stalin's first 5 year plan.

Anyway, no doubt the CA would have rolled back the expropriations that were carried out in the countryside of the landlords' estates. One more reason why dispersal of the CA was not without the support of the revolutionary parties and their constituencies, particularly the Left SRs.

Die Neue Zeit

6th November 2011, 01:31

RED DAVE

6th November 2011, 02:15

the one-man-one-vote principle and other facets of equal suffrageAnd what does this have to do with Marxism? I this your latest kick? Whatever happened to Third World Caesarist Socialism?

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

6th November 2011, 02:25

And what does this have to do with Marxism? I this your latest kick? Whatever happened to Third World Caesarist Socialism?

That is part and parcel of Third World Caesarean Socialism. In the triad of politico-ideological independence for the proletarian demographic minority, Urban Petit-Bourgeois Democratism, and Peasant Patrimonialism, equal suffrage belongs to the second component.

As for what you perceive to be "Marxism," equal suffrage is part of what Marx and Engels lauded as the "battle of democracy."

S.Artesian

6th November 2011, 03:17

Central authority /= czar's authority. Peasant patrimonialism doesn't care about the specific form of central authority, only that said authority: (A) isn't antagonistic towards peasant interests to the point of engaging in civil war with the peasantry, and (B) honours its end of the social contract going back to the ancient protection from shepherds and their flocks gone astray, marauders, etc.

I just scanned the renegade Kautsky's "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and Lenin's "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," and, to my expectations, neither author discussed the one-man-one-vote principle and other facets of equal suffrage (re. peasant vs. worker votes), in addition to not discussing the 1918 Bolshevik coups d'etat against the working class (shutting down dissident workers councils). :mellow:

Again, the answer was not "Constituent Assembly"/"parliament" or "soviets" or even the renegade Kautsky's flimsy "Constituent Assembly"/"parliament" and "soviets," but a Revolutionary Provisional Government rule-by-decree rei gerendae causa. The initial Bolshevik majority should have pursued peace more aggressively, then afterwards yielded to a Left-SR majority in the RPG as reflective of Russia's peasant majority.

Un-fucking-believable. You don't have the slightest grasp of historical materialism. Revolution is nothing but a play with puppets with you imagining yourself as the puppet-meister.

"Social contract"??? Hey guess what John Locke... no such thing. Ever.

Die Neue Zeit

6th November 2011, 03:27

You dodged the subject of equal suffrage, as I expected.

You don't have the slightest grasp of historical materialism.

Au contraire, the subject of a Revolutionary Provisional Government is part of a larger discussion: Did Russia need Caesar[ean Social]ism? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/nep-did-russia-t146798/index.html)

"Social contract"??? Hey guess what John Locke... no such thing. Ever.

Again, minor off-topic quibble.

S.Artesian

6th November 2011, 03:50

A Marxist Historian

6th November 2011, 08:11

The whole Communal Council met frequently. Above the local level, the soviets didn't.

True, but inevitable unfortunately. Given the social backwardness of Russia and the extreme devastation of Soviet Russia during the civil war, the proletariat essentially disintegrated as a social class, leaving behind its vanguard, the Bolshevik Party, as what was left of it. Thereby leading to a hollowing out of proletarian rule and bureaucratization. The cure would have been the spreading of the Revolution to more advanced countries. Without that, some sort of degeneration was inevitable. The only barrier to that was democracy *within* the proletarian vanguard, the Bolshevik Party. Once that ended in January 1924, well, the rest is history.

Stalinism is the natural, indeed inevitable sooner or later, result of a proletarian revolution isolated in one country. Especially, but not only I suspect, in a country as socially backward as Tsarist Russia.

The first problem could have been addressed constitutionally, and the second "problem" isn't a democratic problem at all.

"Democracy" is rule of the people, both in the original Greek and as commonly understood. An ultimately unMarxist conception as a universal abstraction, as the people are divided into social classes. And moreover, if all the people rule, then there is no rulership, as there is no one to rule over.

As Marx explains in the Communist Manifesto, the social nature of the working class is such that it is the negation of classes, as its true class interest, whether it realizes it or not, is in the abolition of classes and class society, which it is the negation of.

Therefore the only true "democracy," which is not really rulership at all, rather a society with no rulers and no ruled, can only come about through the dominion of the working class over all other classes, including the peasantry. As the working class is the only class whose objective nature means that this is what in its interests.

How exactly were they undemocratic, apart from the sexism?

The peasantry is, as Marx put it, a "sack of potatoes" not a class. Peasant movements are *always* led by dictatorial petty Bonapartes who lord it over the peasants themselves as much as anyone else. This is because the peasantry, not having any overall class interests beyond getting rid of feudalism and other such pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, cannot rule over society itself, but always has to support other classes, hopefully the working class.

This has been true throughout history. You have "progressive" and even "revolutionary" petty Bonapartes like Mao or Castro, and reactionary ones like the anti-Semitic peasant band leaders that fought both the Bolsheviks and the Whites during the Russian Civil War. But all of them have been petty dictators, that is the nature of the peasantry and its leaders, because the peasantry is not a revolutionary class, indeed not a class at all, but a social category divided into classes.

Please. There's also the difference between individual petty proprietorship and communal petty proprietorship, which "late Marx" recognized and Trotsky didn't.

When Marx was writing his late in life analyses of land ownership in Russia, the ancient communal land ownership of the "mir" was much stronger than in Trotsky's day, by which time the advance of capitalist relations in Russia had disintegrated it to a considerable degree. As Lenin explained so well in his first major work, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia" is I think the title. Trotsky in this area was simply following Lenin's theoretical work.

The remnants of the "mir" were why *some* Russian peasants (though damn few Ukrainian, to say nothing of the Cossacks) actually supported Stalin's forced collectivization program, at least initially. Most did not.

The agrarian revolution vs. the noble landlords in 1917 set the Russian countryside free for the flowering of capitalist relations and social differentiation, which developed quite rapidly during the NEP, with the formation of a "kulak" class out of almost nothing in a remarkably short period of time.

That's the subject of another thread.

One-man-one-vote is a very basic democratic principle that you seem to be contemptuous of. As for the sexism in the peasant soviets, that could have been addressed constitutionally.

There is no such thing as an all-encompassing "democratic principle." Each social class has its own form of democracy *within it.* So one person one votre is proper for workers' soviets, and proper for peasant soviets or soldier soviets or other more contemporary forms of council rule of various social groupings allied with the working class, but not applicable to society as a whole.

This is of course Lenin's basic point vs. Kautsky, as I'm sure you must know.

Sexism within peasant soviets certainly needed addressing, and was addressed, by the work of the women's section of the Communist Party in organizing women to demand their rights within peasant society, with the help of the working class and its vanguard. Addressing it merely by fiddling with constitutions from above would have been useless.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th November 2011, 08:24

Well, if DNZ knew anything about "communal ownership" in Russia, he would know what a conservative force it was; how in fact it was incorporated, protected by those dedicated to preserving the Czar's authority to mediate between city and countryside, urban production and landholders, and as a body responsible for collecting taxes.

So please, let's not pretend that because Marx was intrigued by the Russian commune that his understanding of it, and his "hopes" for it constituted any possibility for such organizations being a basis for revolutionary action. You might as well claim that the ejido could become a force for socialist revolution in Mexico. It couldn't and it didn't.

Personally, I think it's a damn shame Marx spent his time dealing with that issue, rather than exploring the actual movements of capital during the period of the "long deflation."

Doesn't mean the Bolsheviks post 1917 handled the situation well-- they didn't. They should have afforded much more power and latitude to the left SRs in this, but to do that would have meant to probably lose control over what Lenin viewed as the single most important issue after November 1917-- exiting the war at any price.

On that issue... no doubt Lenin and Trotsky were right about exiting the war and the "left" Bolsheviks and left SRs were wrong-- Russia, and the Revolution simply could not stand the costs of maintaining the war-- the army was crumbling and literally razing and looting its own territory in its collapse--but here's a case were being right necessarily must be subordinated to the soviet process...

On the mir, things weren't quite that simple I don't think, in Marx's day. But that's arguable, and Artesian makes interesting points, certainly better grounded than DNZ's total formalistic incomprehension of the material realities of Tsarist Russia.

But on 1917, he makes a truly strange argument. Was following all p's and q's of process truly more important than safeguarding the revolution from collapse? I have to express my appreciation to Artesian for expressing his argument with such clarity as to make it totally obvious how wrong he is.

BTW, as a piece of historic analysis, he is expressing only *half* of the reason the Left SR's stopped supporting the regime. The other reason was that in the spring of 1918, the cities were beginning to starve and the countryside, because of the agrarian revolution and the obliteration of the draining of the countryside by the Tsarist nobility, was suddenly, and briefly, quite prosperous.

It would have been nice if the workers could have produced lots of consumer goods to trade with the peasants for food, but given the chaos inevitably created by revolution, this was not doable right away. So to avoid immediate starvation in the cities, food had to be forcibly appropriated from the peasantry, whether they liked it or not. This naturally was opposed by the Left SR's, who represented the peasants not the workers.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th November 2011, 08:30

So wouldn't nationalizing agricultural production been better for relationships between the urban and the agricultural working class?

That's what Stalin thought, circa 1929. He was wrong.

Just because the peasants are not a revolutionary class doesn't mean you can force down the throat of nine tenths of trhe country something that the vast majority of them bitterly opposed. Circa 1917, the agricultural working class as such amounted to a scattering of field hands here and there, more often than not a single field hand working for a single peasant, usually one who had a little patch of land himself that the peasant commune had assigned to him, but just wasn't as good at farming as the more successful peasant he was working for.

There were efforts at organizing rural communes during the Revolution, and here and there some even worked more or less, but by and large the peasantry, which had just taken back their land from the landlords, simply wasn't interested. They wanted to be farmers, i.e. petty agricultural capitalists.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th November 2011, 08:40

Yeah, but we're dealing with uneven and combined development, where nationalization doesn't make much sense unless you have the wherewithal to maintain, support, expand agricultural production through that nationalization. Russia did not.

So a very "deft" hand was needed in relations with the countryside, and deftness, the "light" touch was never a strong suit of the Bolsheviks-- much better for the left SRs with stronger connections to the rural poor to devise, execute, manage, and control the strategy for reconciling rural production and rural producers to the needs of the revolution.

Needless to say, the Bolsheviks weren't going to allow that; their "requisitioning" teams weren't very good at distinguishing poor peasantry and subsistence producers from rich and middle peasantry, so much of the surplus that was requisitioned was not exactly surplus.

It got so bad during the civil war that in some areas the peasantry raised the slogan at demonstrations and protests in villages, "Down with Communism! Long live Bolshevism!" meaning of course, long live the Bolshevism that got rid of the landlords.

Tragedy, really due to the failure of the revolution to conquer in Europe-- tragedy repeated, not as farce, but as a nightmare weighing on the brain of the living with Stalin's first 5 year plan.

Anyway, no doubt the CA would have rolled back the expropriations that were carried out in the countryside of the landlords' estates. One more reason why dispersal of the CA was not without the support of the revolutionary parties and their constituencies, particularly the Left SRs.

All very correct vs. DNZ et.al. But...

Trouble with this analysis is that the Left SR's weren't the party of the poor peasants, but of all the peasants really, all of whom wanted to seize the land from the nobility without compensation, unlike the Right SR's.

The Bolsheviks attempted to organize committees of poor peasants, along exactly the lines you suggest, who would be in charge of food requisitioning and requisition from the rich not the poor. The Left SR's bitterly opposed this.

And, because this was being done by a party with little roots in the countryside unlike the Left SRs and indeed against them, it did not work very well, in exactly the fashion you describe. Quite often peasants would claim to be "poor" to get in on the committees and get the share of the requisitions which, as alleged "poor peasants," they would get.

Where they were fairly successful, the committees of poor peasants were essentially made up out of the only group of peasants that the Bolsheviks really had a base among, namely the soldiers. Who, since they were in the army when the agrarian revolution happened and the land was shared out, often didn't get their share and instantly became "poor peasants" by default.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th November 2011, 08:45

Central authority /= czar's authority. Peasant patrimonialism doesn't care about the specific form of central authority, only that said authority: (A) isn't antagonistic towards peasant interests to the point of engaging in civil war with the peasantry, and (B) honours its end of the social contract going back to the ancient protection from shepherds and their flocks gone astray, marauders, etc.

I just scanned the renegade Kautsky's "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and Lenin's "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," and, to my expectations, neither author discussed the one-man-one-vote principle and other facets of equal suffrage (re. peasant vs. worker votes), in addition to not discussing the 1918 Bolshevik coups d'etat against the working class (shutting down dissident workers councils). :mellow:

Again, the answer was not "Constituent Assembly"/"parliament" or "soviets" or even the renegade Kautsky's flimsy "Constituent Assembly"/"parliament" and "soviets," but a Revolutionary Provisional Government rule-by-decree rei gerendae causa. The initial Bolshevik majority should have pursued peace more aggressively, then afterwards yielded to a Left-SR majority in the RPG as reflective of Russia's peasant majority.

So, instead of rule by *either* a Constituent Assembly *or* Soviets *or* somehow both at the same time a la Kautsky, instead there should have been ... rule by decree!

Doesn't sound too democratic to me!

Actually, I must express my appreciation to DNZ for taking his arguments to their logical conclusion and ... refuting himself! Thereby saving others the trouble.

-M.H.-

Dave B

6th November 2011, 13:09

Referring to unsubstantiated and un-sourced ComradeOm’s post [9] on what was discussed at the Constituent assembly there does appear to be in fact some dispute.

So for example from the debate in the CEC of the soviet on the dissolution of the assembly held on Janauary 19th Sukhanov (presumably the Sukhanov ) made the following contribution;

“……the reasons for the dispersion indicated in the resolution were known prior to the calling of the Assembly. There is one additional reason that the people have no more faith in the Constituent Assembly, but this is lie.

Neither is it true that the constituent assembly refused to recognise the Soviet Government. That question was never brought up.”

Novaia Zisn No 6 January 22

And from a Bolshevik who opposed the dissolution Resolution, Riazzonov said;

………that the Constituent Assembly was never a fetish to him yet once it was called it should be given a chance to show what it could do. This had not been done. The people could not form an idea of its possibilities in one day………….

Pravda No 7 January 24 1918.

Both taken from ‘The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-8; Documents and Materials; Bunyan & Fisher. Pg 383

Even then, I thought I had chosen my words carefully when I said that the relationship between the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly had not been debated as if it could in 12 hours.

The whole point of a constituent assembly which the Bolsheviks had supported right up to December is to assume ‘political’ authority; of at least some sort.

The Constituent Assembly did not vote to dissolve the soviets.

The Bolshevik October Coup was justified in order to prevent the bourgeoisie hindering the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

What rank hypocrisy, worthy of Fox news ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ for the self appointed saviours of the Constituent Assembly to then go on to dissolve it at gun point weeks later, as the consummation of the October coup.

Thus from Lenin in October 1917,which was the substance of Trotsky’s address to the pre-parliament or whatever;;

How can it be proved that the bourgeoisie are not strong enough to hinder the calling of the Constituent Assembly?

If the Soviets have not the strength to overthrow the bourgeoisie, this means the latter are strong enough to prevent the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, for there is nobody else to stop them. To trust the promises of Kerensky and Co……… (as opposed to the promises of the Bolsheviks who were being funded by the German government)……., to trust the resolutions of the servile Pre-parliament—is this worthy of a member of a proletarian party and a revolutionary?

Not only has the bourgeoisie strength enough to hinder the convocation of the Constituent Assembly if the present government is not overthrown, but it can also achieve this result indirectly by surrendering Petragrad to the Germans, laying open the front, increasing lockouts, and sabotaging deliveries of foodstuffs.

Is it so difficult to understand that once power is in the hands of the Soviets, the Constituent Assembly and its success are guaranteed? The Bolsheviks have said so thousands of times and no one has ever attempted to refute it. Everybody has recognised this "combined type", but to smuggle in a renunciation of the transfer of power to the Soviets under cover of the words "combined type", to smuggle it in secretly while fearing to renounce our slogan openly is a matter for wonder.

Both the convocation and the success of the Constituent Assembly depend upon the transfer of power to the Soviets.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/17.htm

According to Brovkin chapter 2 Page 62

All the newspapers that had started to print the procedures of the constituent assembly were closed and already printed issues were confiscated and burned on the streets by the Red Guards. The SR’s claimed that the Bolsheviks were trying to prevent the peasants from learning that the constituent assembly had passed laws on the socialisation and distribution of land.

As well as apparently agreeing to an Armistice.

I don’t want to get too bogged down over the German Gold case or the straw man argument of ‘espionage’ but for interest.

Letter to the Editors of Proletarskoye Dyelo Proletarskoye Dyelo No. 2, July 28 (15), 1917

Comrades,

We have changed our minds about submitting to the Provisional Government’s decree ordering our arrests, for the following reasons. ………..

……….The Constituent Assembly alone, if it meets, and if its convocation is not the handiwork of the bourgeoisie, will have full authority to pass judgement upon the Provisional Government’s decree ordering our arrest.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/28.htm

ComradeOm

6th November 2011, 14:33

Referring to unsubstantiated and un-sourced ComradeOm’s post [9] on what was discussed at the Constituent assembly there does appear to be in fact some disputeRabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power

So for example from the debate in the CEC of the soviet on the dissolution of the assembly held on January 19th Sukhanov (presumably the Sukhanov ) made the following contributionI'll check my copy of Sukhanov when I can but in this case he is simply mistaken. Or, more likely, being deliberately obtuse and defensive. The CA did not explicitly condemn the soviets in its final resolution - as I said, it simply ignored them while calling for power to be vested in the CA - but the question was most certainly raised. Most obvious was Tsereteli who explicitly condemned Soviet power and called for its replacement. Perhaps Sukhanov was absent when his fellow Menshevik was making his powerful speech?

With regards your second quote, I've no idea what you are hoping to show there. Nothing in that suggests that the CA had not discussed its relationship with the soviets. But then reading comprehension has never been your strong suit. You did not suggest that the issue had "not been debated as if it could in 12 hours" but that the CA "never even got as far as discussing" the matter. (There's an irony there.) Now you're back-peddling

Die Neue Zeit

6th November 2011, 16:49

True, but inevitable unfortunately. Given the social backwardness of Russia and the extreme devastation of Soviet Russia during the civil war, the proletariat essentially disintegrated as a social class, leaving behind its vanguard, the Bolshevik Party, as what was left of it.

Even in the very beginning, the soviets didn't meet as frequently as typical parliaments. Without this, you can't hold the government accountable. My point about Old Bolshevism's program for a Revolutionary Provisional Government rule-by-decree rei gerendae causa was that it was Sovnarkom, the Milrevkoms, and lower executive committees that held the real power.

"Democracy" is rule of the people, both in the original Greek and as commonly understood.

Wrong. Demokratia in Greek political philosophy was class-based rule by the poor!

The peasantry is, as Marx put it, a "sack of potatoes" not a class.

My point was that Russia had a petit-bourgeois demographic majority that should have exercised power.

Peasant movements are *always* led by dictatorial petty Bonapartes who lord it over the peasants themselves as much as anyone else. This is because the peasantry, not having any overall class interests beyond getting rid of feudalism and other such pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, cannot rule over society itself

So what do you make of this post-Trotskyist quote by CPGB comrade Mike Macnair?

It's true that the peasantry is forced to decide between the fundamental classes. But it's not true that, because the peasantry is forced to decide between the fundamental classes, it cannot find political representation or act in support of autonomous peasant goals, that is to say, patriarchalism, the setting up of an absolute ruler, a cult of personality whether it's of Lenin or Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe.

Where Engels and Trotsky made the fundamental mistake was not acknowledging "autonomous peasant goals."

The remnants of the "mir" were why *some* Russian peasants (though damn few Ukrainian, to say nothing of the Cossacks) actually supported Stalin's forced collectivization program, at least initially. Most did not.

Wait a minute! Didn't the forced kolkhozization actually eliminate what was left of the mir and obshchina?

There is no such thing as an all-encompassing "democratic principle." Each social class has its own form of democracy *within it.* So one person one vote is proper for workers' soviets, and proper for peasant soviets or soldier soviets or other more contemporary forms of council rule of various social groupings allied with the working class, but not applicable to society as a whole.

This is of course Lenin's basic point vs. Kautsky, as I'm sure you must know.

He didn't make that point in PRRK at all. The renegade Kautsky didn't make his point in DOTP, either.

Naturally, I disagree with you. Equal suffrage has always been a "democratic demand" levelled at society as a whole.

So, instead of rule by *either* a Constituent Assembly *or* Soviets *or* somehow both at the same time a la Kautsky, instead there should have been ... rule by decree!

Doesn't sound too democratic to me!

Actually, I must express my appreciation to DNZ for taking his arguments to their logical conclusion and ... refuting himself! Thereby saving others the trouble.

-M.H.-

There's no self-refutation here.

A Revolutionary Convention performing kontrol (Kamenev) over a Revolutionary Provisional Government is quite different from fetishes for the Constituent Assembly or "All Power to the Soviets." This would be more analogous to Nepal's CA and PG than to Castro's pre-1976 Council of Ministers. The point is, since the bigger body is focused on establishing a new constitution, the passing of many laws is necessarily left to the actual government.

It got so bad during the civil war that in some areas the peasantry raised the slogan at demonstrations and protests in villages, "Down with Communism! Long live Bolshevism!" meaning of course, long live the Bolshevism that got rid of the landlords.

That was only part of Lars Lih's point about the ironic triumph of Old Bolshevism, not Trotsky's "permanent revolution."

Die Neue Zeit

6th November 2011, 16:54

BTW, as a piece of historic analysis, he is expressing only *half* of the reason the Left SR's stopped supporting the regime. The other reason was that in the spring of 1918, the cities were beginning to starve and the countryside, because of the agrarian revolution and the obliteration of the draining of the countryside by the Tsarist nobility, was suddenly, and briefly, quite prosperous.

It would have been nice if the workers could have produced lots of consumer goods to trade with the peasants for food, but given the chaos inevitably created by revolution, this was not doable right away. So to avoid immediate starvation in the cities, food had to be forcibly appropriated from the peasantry, whether they liked it or not. This naturally was opposed by the Left SR's, who represented the peasants not the workers.

The Left-SRs had a labour program too, you know. If the sell-out SPD could mobilize German war production efforts despite declining membership (one of many prices paid for voting for war credits), then the Left-SRs could have mobilized the peasantry instead of the forced requisitions.

That's what Stalin thought, circa 1929. He was wrong.

No he didn't. He was for forced kolkhozization along the artel lines, not for the sovkhozization drive pursued by his successors.

Just because the peasants are not a revolutionary class

They are not a socially revolutionary class. They are, however, both a socially radical class and a politically revolutionary class, sometimes more politically revolutionary than the proletariat they outnumber. Trotsky was wrong.

There were efforts at organizing rural communes during the Revolution, and here and there some even worked more or less, but by and large the peasantry, which had just taken back their land from the landlords, simply wasn't interested. They wanted to be farmers, i.e. petty agricultural capitalists.

That's an interesting anecdote on field hands.

A Marxist Historian

7th November 2011, 09:36

Even in the very beginning, the soviets didn't meet as frequently as typical parliaments. Without this, you can't hold the government accountable. My point about Old Bolshevism's program for a Revolutionary Provisional Government rule-by-decree rei gerendae causa was that it was Sovnarkom, the Milrevkoms, and lower executive committees that held the real power.

Wrong. Demokratia in Greek political philosophy was class-based rule by the poor!

True enough, which strengthens my point if anything.

As for revolutionary provisional governments, make up your mind. If that was a good thing, not to my mind but justifiable under emergency circumstances, then you should be praising the various revkoms for supplanting the soviets rather than criticising.

My point was that Russia had a petit-bourgeois demographic majority that should have exercised power.

Why? It was not capable of exercising power. And if it had, the results would not have been good, as the petty bourgeoisie has no consistent class interests other than, perhaps, trying to hold back the economic forces that dissolve it. Which is reactionary.

So what do you make of this post-Trotskyist quote by CPGB comrade Mike Macnair?

It's true that the peasantry is forced to decide between the fundamental classes. But it's not true that, because the peasantry is forced to decide between the fundamental classes, it cannot find political representation or act in support of autonomous peasant goals, that is to say, patriarchalism, the setting up of an absolute ruler, a cult of personality whether it's of Lenin or Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe.

Or, as I put it, all authentic peasant leaders are dictatorial petty Bonapartes? He is saying the same thing.

Unless he is implying that cults of personality, absolutism and paytriarchalism are actually good things. I rather hope not.

Was there a cult of personality around Lenin? Well, to some degree there was, much to Lenin's annoyance. As we all know, that helped create Stalinism.

Can autonomous peasant goals exist? I suppose so, but as described at least they are reactionary and should be fought against.

Where Engels and Trotsky made the fundamental mistake was not acknowledging "autonomous peasant goals."

Oh, they acknowledged them all right. However, the working class is a revolutionary class and the peasantry is not, so therefore the peasantry needs to be led away from its autonomous goals. As a weak and socially divided entity, a "sack of potatoes" with no inherent unity, other classes can do so. And, since the bourgeoisie does so, indeed does so with the greatest of ease, why shouldn't the workers do the same?

Wait a minute! Didn't the forced kolkhozization actually eliminate what was left of the mir and obshchina?

Yes as a matter of fact. Throughout the '20s the peasant soviets and the mir were counterposed and in conflict. The mir and the obshchina, which were still around, were the power base of the kulaks, under their control. Old egalitarian conceptions withered away once the Tsar and the nobles were gone, and the old village leaders grabbed hold of the old institutions---and sometimes the peasant Soviets too--and used them to enrich themselves at the expense of others, now that no barriers to "free enterprise" remained.

An indication that mid'20s Bolshevik policy in the countryside, whether on the Bukharin "get rich" model or its opposite-side-of-the-same-coin Stalin model, was not too successful.

He didn't make that point in PRRK at all. The renegade Kautsky didn't make his point in DOTP, either.

Naturally, I disagree with you. Equal suffrage has always been a "democratic demand" levelled at society as a whole.

There's no self-refutation here.

A Revolutionary Convention performing kontrol (Kamenev) over a Revolutionary Provisional Government is quite different from fetishes for the Constituent Assembly or "All Power to the Soviets." This would be more analogous to Nepal's CA and PG than to Castro's pre-1976 Council of Ministers. The point is, since the bigger body is focused on establishing a new constitution, the passing of many laws is necessarily left to the actual government.

That was only part of Lars Lih's point about the ironic triumph of Old Bolshevism, not Trotsky's "permanent revolution."

You are trapped in legal-constitutional fetishism. There was a Soviet constitution in the early years, though few paid much attention to it, or to law for that matter.

E.H. Carr is worth reading on this, about how in the early years the "revolutionary consciousness of right" was considered superior to *all* legal enactments and decrees. This was indeed the official legal doctrine, as officially expounded by the legal authorities, such as they were.

With the NEP and a partial return to capitalism, scrupulously adhered to legal codes were allowed to return, law became a profession again, and the constitution was rewritten and people actually started paying attention to what it said on a day to day basis.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

7th November 2011, 09:46

The Left-SRs had a labour program too, you know. If the sell-out SPD could mobilize German war production efforts despite declining membership (one of many prices paid for voting for war credits), then the Left-SRs could have mobilized the peasantry instead of the forced requisitions.

No he didn't. He was for forced kolkhozization along the artel lines, not for the sovkhozization drive pursued by his successors.

They are not a socially revolutionary class. They are, however, both a socially radical class and a politically revolutionary class, sometimes more politically revolutionary than the proletariat they outnumber. Trotsky was wrong.

That's an interesting anecdote on field hands.

Thre SPD was able to mobilize the working class for war production for the Kaiser because, ultimately, it was a tool of the German imperial bourgeois state. Coercion, not persuasion, was the fundamental tool.

Couldthe Left SRs have mobilized the peasantry to voluntarily accept worthless Soviet scrip in return for the food they were growing? Well, if they had wanted to, perhaps. But they didn't.

Why didn't they? Because they responded to what the peasants wanted. And, once the peasants had the land, they were no longer interested in the Revolution, though they would back the revolutionary regime against people trying to take the land away from them, like the Whites. The Left SR's, unlike their peasant base, were still interested in revolution, and deluded themselves that the peasants felt similarly, and just disliked all those Bolshevik requisitioners.

They even deluded themselves that the peasants wanted a "revolutionary war" vs Germany! Nothing of course could be farther from the truth.

Yes, the peasantry were a revolutionary entity, not just politically but socially too, as long as you had Tsarism and the land was in the hands of the nobles. As soon as that changed, they no longer had any objective social interest in supporting the workers vs. capitalist--except insofar as the capitalists were in alliance with the landlords wanting theirland back.

So they instantly became a *conservative* class, interested in *conserving* their gains against all comers, not least the workers.

-M.H.-

Iron Felix

7th November 2011, 09:49

Because it was hindering their ability to control the state.
Bravo!

Revolutionair

7th November 2011, 10:56

I fucking love this thread, the only thing that is missing is a Red Dave post.

Die Neue Zeit

7th November 2011, 15:05

As for revolutionary provisional governments, make up your mind. If that was a good thing, not to my mind but justifiable under emergency circumstances, then you should be praising the various revkoms for supplanting the soviets rather than criticising.

I'm not being inconsistent about the 1918 coups at all. Sovnarkom had no formally subordinate executive organs upon which soviets could have exercised only kontrol.

Why? It was not capable of exercising power. And if it had, the results would not have been good, as the petty bourgeoisie has no consistent class interests other than, perhaps, trying to hold back the economic forces that dissolve it. Which is reactionary.

A re-examination of the Russian situation by the likes of Lars Lih and Mike Macnair have shown the exact opposite of what you just said.

Or, as I put it, all authentic peasant leaders are dictatorial petty Bonapartes? He is saying the same thing.

Bonapartism is thrown around excessively on the Marxist left, I think. Gramsci, like Parenti and myself, saw progressive potential in the likes of Julius Caesar.

Unless he is implying that cults of personality, absolutism and patriarchalism are actually good things. I rather hope not.

Read my stuff on the subject matter.

Obs

7th November 2011, 15:53

Read my stuff on the subject matter.
This is the worst advice anyone has ever given.

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not need universal suffrage. It's a class dictatorship.

edit: no, i didn't read the second page of this thread and am fairly aware that the topic has shifted slightly.

A Marxist Historian

7th November 2011, 18:31

I'm not being inconsistent about the 1918 coups at all. Sovnarkom had no formally subordinate executive organs upon which soviets could have exercised only kontrol.

A re-examination of the Russian situation by the likes of Lars Lih and Mike Macnair have shown the exact opposite of what you just said.

Bonapartism is thrown around excessively on the Marxist left, I think. Gramsci, like Parenti and myself, saw progressive potential in the likes of Julius Caesar.

Read my stuff on the subject matter.

Circa 1917 and 1918 and 1920, Sovnarkom didn't have any "formal" anything, but was going on a day to day basis on the principle of "revolutionary consciousness of right." The formalities were gradually evolving, and only became genuinely stable and consistent when the situation stabilized under NEP. In other words, there was a revolution going on.

I find your legalistic-constitutional formalism quite peculiar. During revolutions, rules are made to be broken.

I'm unfamiliar with MacNair, whom I've mostly heard of here on Revleft. As for Lars Lih, I've read some of his stuff. He is a political scientist essentially, and has interesting and sometimes correct things to say about the nature and structure of the Bolshevik Party and the workers movement in Russia in general. If nothing else, greatly superior to mythmakers like the Stalinists and Tony Cliff, to say nothing about most of your other bourgeois academics.

But on all sociological questions, which is really what we are talking about, he is at sea and a confusionist.

That Gramsci, who had a certain Italian nationalist streak, liked Julius Caesar is no more surprising than his fascination with Machiavelli. Perry Anderson, in his brilliant *Lineages of the Absolute State,* has an excellent critique of Gramsci's ideas about Italian history in the section on Italy, I recall.

Me, I'm with Marx, who called Spartacus "the noblest of all the Romans." But then I am a Spartacist, so that is natural. And, to a lesser degree, with the Catiline conspirators and the other such honest to Jupiter-and-Zeus *original* democrats who started up this whole democracy thing in the first place. Not Caesar!

For that matter, I recall that Kautsky's best book was about ancient Rome anyway. He was no Caesar fan.

-M.H.-

Dave B

7th November 2011, 20:50

I would like to return to he dialogue that I had with ComradeOM

I said, a bit casually admittedly that ;

As the constituent assembly was shut down on it’s first sitting and never even got as far as discussing………. (or refused to discuss?) ……..its future relationship to the soviets.
And ‘backed’ that up later with;

Sukhanov (presumably the Sukhanov ) made the following contribution;

Neither is it true that the constituent assembly refused to recognise the Soviet Government.
That question was never brought up.”

Novaia Zisn No 6 January 22

taken from ‘The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-8; Documents and Materials; Bunyan & Fisher. Pg 383.

So then we have from V. I. Lenin Draft Decree On The Dissolution Of The Constituent Assembly,;

…
…….., the party of Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov, obtained the majority in the Constituent Assembly which met on January 5.

Naturally, this party refused to discuss the absolutely clear, precise and unambiguous proposal……(ultimatum) .. of the supreme organ of Soviet power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets,

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jan/06a.htm

There is obviously some natural ambivalence here but I think this much is clear even from the Lenin Archive itself.

Lenin and his Bolsheviks issued an ultimatum demanding the complete and immediate subservience and subordination of the constituent assembly to the ‘dictatorship’ of ‘Bolshevik controlled Petrograd Soviet’.

And the constituent assembly refused to discuss this absolutely clear, precise and unambiguous ultimatum.

I am sure the ‘Palestinians’ would understand the nuances of the debate so far.

I do appreciate that as a Leninist and an intellectual bourgeois red fascist, same thing, you must think that holding a gun to someone’s head and saying do want I want or I will ‘dissolve’ you constitutes a discussion and debate.

However there never was beforehand as the default position any clear idea on what the relationship between the constituent assembly and the soviets was going to be apart from ( giving an opinion) that there would be some sort of co-existence between the two, however impractical that may sound now.

I mean this is just Dead Russian Society stuff to me

Are you drawing your Rabinowitch material from page circa 118?

It is a crap book I think, what did he have to say about Lenin’s non NEP and impure state capitalism?

You wouldn’t be Rabinowitch yourself would you?

S.Artesian

7th November 2011, 21:00

I don't know how others feel but this:

I do appreciate that as a Leninist and an intellectual bourgeois red fascist, same thing, you must think that holding a gun to someone’s head and saying do want I want or I will ‘dissolve’ you constitutes a discussion and debate.

is complete and utter libelous crap, and I intend to see if I can get this joker restricted.

Dave B

7th November 2011, 21:24

This is great fun!

So we are playing virtual reality avatar Bolsheviks versus Mensheviks?

For the public manifestations of Menshevism our revolutionary courts must pass the death sentence, otherwise they are not our courts, but God knows what.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

Its only a short step to Stalinism ain’t it ?

Make my day!

S.Artesian

7th November 2011, 23:12

No, you moron. You identified a comrade as a intellectual bourgeois red fascist, simply because he doesn't buy into your kowtowing before the formality of intellectual bourgeois constructs like a "constituent assembly."

Stalinism? Nobody's smearing you by accusing you of something you did not say, or did not do. Nobody's calling you an agent of fascists, or a fascist. You're the one doing that. You're the one taking that short, short step.

You're just a jerk.

Die Neue Zeit

8th November 2011, 02:02

Circa 1917 and 1918 and 1920, Sovnarkom didn't have any "formal" anything, but was going on a day to day basis on the principle of "revolutionary consciousness of right." The formalities were gradually evolving, and only became genuinely stable and consistent when the situation stabilized under NEP. In other words, there was a revolution going on.

I find your legalistic-constitutional formalism quite peculiar. During revolutions, rules are made to be broken.

I'm unfamiliar with MacNair, whom I've mostly heard of here on Revleft.

I forwarded you his Revolutionary Strategy work. There's also a RevLeft group on his book which you can join. BTW, he's quite a legal academic. ;)

As for Lars Lih, I've read some of his stuff. He is a political scientist essentially, and has interesting and sometimes correct things to say about the nature and structure of the Bolshevik Party and the workers movement in Russia in general. If nothing else, greatly superior to mythmakers like the Stalinists and Tony Cliff, to say nothing about most of your other bourgeois academics.

But on all sociological questions, which is really what we are talking about, he is at sea and a confusionist.

The two of us just don't agree with Trotsky's premises re. "permanent revolution." There's nothing "confused" about that.

That Gramsci, who had a certain Italian nationalist streak, liked Julius Caesar is no more surprising than his fascination with Machiavelli. Perry Anderson, in his brilliant *Lineages of the Absolute State,* has an excellent critique of Gramsci's ideas about Italian history in the section on Italy, I recall.

He may have been part of that philosophically "unholy" trio which includes Lukacs and Korsch, but I sympathize with his views on Caesar.

Me, I'm with Marx, who called Spartacus "the noblest of all the Romans." But then I am a Spartacist, so that is natural. And, to a lesser degree, with the Catiline conspirators and the other such honest to Jupiter-and-Zeus *original* democrats who started up this whole democracy thing in the first place. Not Caesar!

For that matter, I recall that Kautsky's best book was about ancient Rome anyway. He was no Caesar fan.

The slaves had no really comprehensive political program. Parenti accounted for political measures which many slaves of the day would've been politically illiterate about, if they were actually literate at all! More contemporarily, Haiti has been plagued with mismanagement since the beginning.

This is the worst advice anyone has ever given.

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not need universal suffrage. It's a class dictatorship.

edit: no, i didn't read the second page of this thread and am fairly aware that the topic has shifted slightly.

Again, you're confusing two topics: universal suffrage and equal suffrage.

∞

8th November 2011, 02:26

this is great fun!

So we are playing virtual reality avatar bolsheviks versus mensheviks?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

its only a short step to stalinism ain’t it ?

Make my day!

big letters

Die Neue Zeit

8th November 2011, 06:29

And as I predicted from the getgo, you would ignore the actual issue and simply distort all the exchanges to feed into your fantasy world of your own making-- Caesarism, r-r-r-r-evolutionary provisional government-- the entire circus with its staff of regular clowns.

Your only solution tantamounts to either wishful thinking on relations between small groups of workers and larger groups peasants, or thugs holding guns to the heads of many peasants.

S.Artesian

8th November 2011, 11:49

Your only solution tantamounts to either wishful thinking on relations between small groups of workers and larger groups peasants, or thugs holding guns to the heads of many peasants.

Now that's funny, coming for a clown like you who thinks Stalin's use of slave-labor amounted to "primitive socialist accumulation."

You're almost entertaining enough.

Yazman

8th November 2011, 12:38

big letters

Do not make posts like this. It doesn't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way. If I see you do it again you'll be infracted.

No, you moron. You identified a comrade as a intellectual bourgeois red fascist, simply because he doesn't buy into your kowtowing before the formality of intellectual bourgeois constructs like a "constituent assembly."

Stalinism? Nobody's smearing you by accusing you of something you did not say, or did not do. Nobody's calling you an agent of fascists, or a fascist. You're the one doing that. You're the one taking that short, short step.

You're just a jerk.

No more name-calling or flaming. It's not allowed, even against restricted users it isn't allowed. Do it again and you'll be infracted.

Bravo!

One word posts aren't allowed. While I appreciate the spirit of this post, you should just use the "Thanks" button in future. Consider this a warning.

I do appreciate that as a Leninist and an intellectual bourgeois red fascist, same thing, you must think that holding a gun to someone’s head and saying do want I want or I will ‘dissolve’ you constitutes a discussion and debate.

Dave B, I've had some complaints about this particular bit you posted earlier. You should be careful and probably elaborate on it. There are a lot of anti-Leninists at Revleft, a lot and that's totally fine, but you needn't be quite so abrasive. Be more careful in future. This isn't a warning to you since you haven't broken any rules, but be careful in future.

S.Artesian

8th November 2011, 13:32

Let's see if I get this right-- it's OK for Dave B. to call someone who disagrees with his distortions and outright lies [the Bolsheviks were paid agents of the Germans] an "intellectual bourgeois red fascist"-- as long as he "elaborates on it"-- but it's "name calling" to identify somebody who does that as a "jerk"?

And Red Dave got an infraction from you for saying that DNZ loves bureaucracy like his cat loves tuna fish?

What is the matter with you?

Dave B. disseminates outright lies [see remark about Germans and Bolsheviks] that have been the stock-in-trade of white Russians, anti-communists, etc. for years; he provides erroneous information about class struggle in the Russian Revolution and smears those who disagree with him as "red fascists," but he isn't "flaming" or "spamming" or breaking any rules.

Is that clear to everyone? It's certainly clear to me.

So let me elaborate, as part of being more careful. The charges of Lenin and Trotsky being in the pay of the Germans were raised before, and particularly after the July Days, as the PG sought to weaken the strength of the Bolsheviks among the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, and the soldiers at the crumbling front. This itself was part of the attempt to weaken the soviets as part of outlawing soldiers' committees that the stavka found so disruptive to their plans. This dovetailed nicely with the sentiment among those supporting the PG, including the Mensheviks that the soviets had to be reduced [and I mean that in both the political and military sense].

After the July Days, Trotsky did emerge and did disprove those charges of German patronage. Funny that Dave B.'s charge against the Bolsheviks is of course the same charge Stalin made against the Bolsheviks during the purges of the 1930s. Coincidence? I think not.

Consequently, on that basis I think Dave B. is quite clearly the partisan of Stalin, and has earned for himself the sobriquet of the social-democratic Stalinist white Russian fascist-- I mean it's all the same thing.

ComradeOm

8th November 2011, 14:18

There is obviously some natural ambivalence here but I think this much is clear even from the Lenin Archive itself.

Lenin and his Bolsheviks issued an ultimatum demanding the complete and immediate subservience and subordination of the constituent assembly to the ‘dictatorship’ of ‘Bolshevik controlled Petrograd Soviet’.

And the constituent assembly refused to discuss this absolutely clear, precise and unambiguous ultimatumWhy do I subject myself to this? That's a serious question that I'm going to answer someday soon. In this case I have no excuse: the only history you're familiar with has been gleaned from MIA and Google Books... and even that you somehow manage to misunderstand

What Lenin was referring to was the pro-Soviet resolution calling for an endorsement of the Declaration of Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples (http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/decright.html), which explicitly called for the soviets to form the basis of authority. This was discussed and ultimately voted on by the CA. The latter's rejection of this, coupled with the failure to acknowledge the soviets at all, was an implicit rejection of Soviet power in favour of the CA

So again you are simply wrong. Is it that difficult to admit that the CA did in fact discuss its relationship to the soviets?

It is a crap book I think, what did he have to say about Lenin’s non NEP and impure state capitalism?It's a history book that covers the period Oct 1917-1918. But please, don't worry about casting judgement without having read it. Because I, as a fascist, recommend it, it must clearly be a work of Leninist hagiography designed to further the aims of the intellectual bourgeoisie

On a more serious note: stop embarrassing yourself

Dave B

9th November 2011, 22:33

Well to start off with there is some dispute here about whether or not the constituent assembly refused, rejected or as Lenin put it ‘refused to discuss’ either the Bolshevik ultimatum or proposal depending on your or position.

So again from Lenin;

Naturally, this party refused to discuss the absolutely clear, precise and unambiguous proposal of the supreme organ of Soviet power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...18/jan/06a.htm

My interest is one of open minded historical curiosity rather than one that revolves around any ideological principal

What I ‘think’ happened was that at first an order of business or agenda was settled upon, that is usual at least.

And that the Bolshevik ultimatum was raised as something to be placed on the agenda.

That was presumably rejected from the agenda hence the CA ‘refused to discuss’ it; according to Lenin.

It was Lenin who said it ‘wasn’t discussed’ and it was my memory of that from the Leninist archive that prompted me to say something like the relationship between the soviets and the CA wasn’t discussed.

I think it is a bit mean spirited in the light of that to accuse me, as I seem to be, of dissembling.

On the other point when debating I attack the ideas and ideology not the person.

The idea of Leninism, as opposed to the subtlety different ‘Leninists’, of being 'bourgeois red facsism' is an old one that has been discussed theoretically by the likes of the ex Trotskyists Burnham and Rizzi etc.

It is for the Leninists to decide whether Leninism is lying to the working class, overthrowing at gun point assemblies elected by universal suffrage and instituting one party dictatorships of a petty bourgeois Nomenclatura, by 1919; and thus that that is Red Facism.

And proudly boasting that we are the one percent.

To say nothing of political dissent ie Menshevism carrying the death penalty.

I actually have quite a few close ‘Leninist’ friends, ordinary members of the working class and foot soldiers distinguishable from the leaders by some small degree of moral compass and honesty.

As I hear my libertarian friends howl with laughter.

I don’t know why S Artisan got so touchy feely about it, he denied being a Leninist on Libcom.

So ComradeOm is Robonowitch, then plugging his own book.

I have absolutely no crying complaint at all about be called a social democratic whiteguardist Stalinists.

Dave B

9th November 2011, 22:37

I must say what I did like about RoBonwitches book was the pictures, I do like a book with lots of pictures.

S.Artesian

10th November 2011, 00:14

I don’t know why S Artisan got so touchy feely about it, he denied being a Leninist on Libcom.Your ignorance would be appalling if you were anything more than the pathetic character you are.

Being a Leninist or not has nothing to do with calling those who disagree with your homage to the constituent assembly "red fascists." I'm not a Leninist, nor am I a Trotskyist. Unlike yourself, however, I am not a liar. I don't trade in the stock of those white Russian "assets," claiming that the Bolsheviks were paid agents of the Kaiser. You do.

You provide not a shred of evidence, and indeed you can't, because there never was any, no more than there ever was any evidence that the old Bolsheviks, Tukachevsky etc. were agents of the Nazis, the Emperor of Japan, etc. etc. Comfortable with your "liberal, democratic" Stalinism, Dave B.?

The question is why did the Bolsheviks suppress the Constituent Assembly? The answer is clearly, as the CA itself made clear, that the CA regarded itself as the source of all sovereignty, alone capable of determining the form of government, and refused to acknowledge the government of soviets.

The parties participating in the CA-- who had proved themselves incapable of defending the revolution, i.e. defending the soviets, in September-- presented themselves as the arbiters of the fate of the workers who, through their soviet organizations, had defended the revolution. Allowing the CA to present itself as an alternate government, as a pretender to sovereignty would have been, besides unacceptably stupid, suicide.

Of the few things the Bolsheviks got right... the few were absolutely critical to the defense of the revolution:

1. all power to the soviets
2. immediate end to the war
3. expropriation of the large estates
4. no support for the PG
5. defense of the revolution through the independent authority of the soviets
6. taking power and dispersing the PG
7. not ceding an ounce of sovereignty to any organization representing, constituted by, or collaborating with bourgeois parties

Whatever distortions, mistakes, reversals the Bolsheviks made vis-a-vis a government of and by the workers through their soviets, dispersing the CA was not one of them.

The fact that you "locate" yourself alongside Burnham and Rizzi tells us exactly where you come from and where you will wind up.

ZeroNowhere

10th November 2011, 01:14

A Marxist Historian

10th November 2011, 01:27

He doesn't pop up that often, so when he does he feels that he has to make it count.

But he made it count in the worst possible way.

Now, Artesian's polemics can get nasty, I've been on the receiving end myself. But the fact is, if Party A calls Party B a fascist, and Party B calls Party A a jerk, giving Party B an infraction is insane and indicative of political favoritism to Party A.

Let me be generic and not offend anyone in particular. I will simply say that *anybody* who calls *anybody* a fascist is, at best, a jerk if not much worse, unless the person in question actually is a fascist.

The only good fascist is a dead fascist.

Now, fascist can also be used as an adjective, not a noun in the fashion that Dave B. used it. As an adjective, it simply means somebody in authority behaving in a nastily dictatorial and unfair fashion.

Such as the way our moderator has just treated Artesian.

-M.H.-

Dave B

11th November 2011, 20:35

Well I think S Artisan you are putting up straw man arguments about the Bolsheviks being paid agents of the Kaiser.

Although I don’t dispute that those kind of accusations were flying around from around 1916.

I actually don’t think they are true.

What I am suggesting is that the Imperial German government thought that it would suit their own ends to fund the Bolsheviks.

Is that so hard to imagine?

It appeared fairly recently, and before Pipe’s book, in the following academic article which as far as I know has not been challenged.

International Affairs Vol. 32, No. 1, April 1956
German Foreign Office Documents on Financial Support to the Bolsheviks in 1917 by George Katkov

http://yamaguchy.com/library/pearson/katkov.html#n_12_

And it mentions I seem to remember that the Mensheviks; ie Axelrod were ‘approached’ as well.

Bernstien in the early 1920’s also wrote an article on the same subject.

The Bolsheviks squealed libel, and Bernstien invited them to see him in court, and they declined.

Allegedly, and I do not whether or not it is true, and it is not in the archive, at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee in November, 1918 Lenin is supposed to have said;

“I am often accused of having carried out our revolution with German money; I do not deny it, but instead, with the Russian money, I'm going to carry out the same revolution in Germany.”
It would be great if that could be knocked on the head or otherwise.

I don’t think anybody, even the whiteguardists, seriously thought that Lenin was acting under direct orders of the German Capitalism, despite his admiration for, and desire to copy their state capitalist system.

The ‘rumours’ that the Bolsheviks were receiving money from the Germans however was rife in the middle of 1917.

I can probably find another quote from Lenin himself to substantiate that.

So 'allegedly' from Bernstien;

"From absolutely reliable sources I have now ascertained that the sum was very large, an almost unbelievable amount, certainly more than fifty million goldmarks, a sum about the source of which Lenin and his comrades could be in no doubt. One result of all this was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. General Hoffmann, who negotiated with Trotsky and other members of the Bolshevik delegation at Brest, held the Bolsheviks in his hand in two senses [that is, military and monetary], and he made sure they felt it."

We probably need a separate thread about what is a fascist.

But;

.

"Both communism (Leninism) and fascism claim, as do all the great social ideologies to speak for the people as a whole for the future of mankind. However it is interesting to notice that both provide even in their public words for an elite or vanguard. The elite is of course the managers and their political associates the rulers of the new society.

Naturally the ideologies do not put it this way. As they say it the elite represents, stands for, the people as a whole and their interests. Fascism is more blunt about the need for the elite, for `leadership'. Leninism worked out a more elaborate rationalisation. The masses according to Leninism are unable to become sufficiently educated and trained under capitalism to carry in their own immediate persons the burdens of socialism

The mases are unable to understand in full what their interests are. Consequently, the transition to socialism will have to be supervised by an enlightened vanguard which `understands the historic process as a whole' and can ably and correctly act for the interests of the masses as a whole; like as Lenin puts it, the general staff of an
army.

Through this notion of an elite or vanguard, these ideologies thus serve at once the two fold need of justifying the existence of a ruling class and at the same time providing the masses with anattitude making easy the acceptance of its rule.

This device is similar to that used by the capitalist ideologies when they argued that capitalist were necessary in order to carry on business and that profits for capitalists were identical with prosperity for the people as a whole…………….The communist and fascist doctrine is a device, and an effective one, for enlisting the support of the masses for the interests of the new elite through an apparent identification of those interests with the interests of the masses themselves."

Managerial Revolution,Chapter 13.

S.Artesian

11th November 2011, 23:11

Well I think S Artisan you are putting up straw man arguments about the Bolsheviks being paid agents of the Kaiser.

Although I don’t dispute that those kind of accusations were flying around from around 1916.

I actually don’t think they are true.

You know, if I weren't such a forgiving soul, I might be tempted to use harsh language and point out how chronically, congenitally almost, dishonest you are. But I am a forgiving soul, so I won't use the harsh language, I'll just point out that you are that dishonest by quoting your own words:

In fact the real reason for the abolition of the constituent assembly by the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with Soviets power or Leninist theory and the answer is more mundane and can in fact be seen in the above tract.

In the palpable outrage at the rank hypocrisy of Trotsky and his Bolsheviks re being in cahoots with the 'German' capitalist class.

The Bolsheviks had been receiving vast amounts of money from the German government; and that was, as it turns out known, or at least suspected at the time.

Now that's what you claimed. You don't think they're true? Sure you do. You repeat them uncritically. You speculate about these claims like Grover-Furr speculates about the victims of the purges actually working with the Nazis, the Japanese military for the overthrow of the fSU, like "birthers" speculate about the validity of Obama's citizenship.

What I am suggesting is that the Imperial German government thought that it would suit their own ends to fund the Bolsheviks.
Is that so hard to imagine?

No that's not what you are suggesting. You're not suggesting anything. You made explicit accusations, charges, determinations, not suggestions.

We all familiar with what the German govt. hoped for, the famous statement about sending Lenin to Russia, like a bomb. So what? I'll bet the Imperial command even paid for the train tickets. So what again?

And why do you make this accusation? Because you claim it explains why the Bolsheviks dispersed the CA. That is your claim. You maintain that the Bolsheviks acted as they did because the Germans paid them to.

And why? So the government of soviets could withdraw Russia from the war, the war which obviously the "patriotic" SRs, Mensheviks, Kadets, etc. would not end, but would pursue.

That is the essence of your argument. Otherwise it makes no sense for the Germans to even claim funding the Bolsheviks.

That is reason enough, for anyone not adhering to "social patriotism," to supporting slaughter in the service to capitalism, to support the Bolsheviks and demand the dispersal to the CA.

You have made the case against allowing the CA to exist in your very defense of it.

We don't need a separate thread about fascism, at least not with your scumbag slanders of others who don't buy into your
bullshit.

Citing Burnham though, that's a beaut. You really should be restricted to OI.

promethean

12th November 2011, 02:57

The idea of Leninism, as opposed to the subtlety different ‘Leninists’, of being 'bourgeois red facsism' is an old one that has been discussed theoretically by the likes of the ex Trotskyists Burnham and Rizzi etc.Claiming Leninism is red fascism is a historically false statement. For bourgeois propagandists like Burnham and Rizzi, it is useful to associate Leninism and ultimately all of socialism with what they see as the ultimate evil, "fascism". Leninism as a current never actually historically existed. The Bolshevik type of socialism was developed by theorists who mainly learned their Marxism from the Second International with suitable modifications for Russian conditions. So, if you accept the description of so-called Leninism as being a different form of fascism, then you are just being historically ignorant. Lenin was not some evil figure who came up with the idea that Russia needed state capitalism. By reading your posts, one would get the impression that Lenin was some evil figure whose sole aim was to rule the masses. I keep seeing abundant quotes from his writings being supplied by the likes of yourself without stating the fact that Lenin was not making these quotes up all by himself, but was mainly following his German Marxist teachers.

Instead of trying to make imbecilic accusations of Lenin being an agent of the German state, you could perhaps point out the historically verifiable statement that Lenin was not actually a paid agent of the German state, but was a good disciple of German Marxism. Your own party, the SPGB, has its roots in the SPD-dominated Second International. Going by your own logic, one should probably start "speculating" about the SPGB being agents of the German state.

As far as fascism's relation to Bolshevism is concerned, the German social democrats were the biggest socialist party in the world for a long time. Due to their semi-reformist character, their form of Marxism developed more or less as an early form of Socialism in One Country, which shares several common features with fascism, but is not identical with it. This kind of socialism, especially developed among the right wing of the SPD, was doubtless part of what inspired the National Socialism of Hitler later on. However, none of this has anything to do with the Russian variety of socialism, called Bolshevism (if you want, Leninism).

Dave B

13th November 2011, 01:09

I am actually attempting not just to make wild accusations but to provide sourced documentation.

When the German funding of the Bolsheviks started and by what mechanism has been raised elsewhere before.

And Parvus of permanent revolutionary fame has frequently popped up.

There appear to be some evidence for this from;

GERMANY AND THE REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA 1915-1918 Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry; EDITED BY Z. A. B. ZEMAN LONDON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK TORONTO 1958

TELEGRAM NO. 76

A 934 Berlin, 9 January 1915

The Imperial Ambassador in Constantinople has sent the following telegram under No. 70.

'The well-known Russian Socialist and publicist, Dr. Helphand, one of the main leaders of the last Russian Revolution, who was exiled from Russia and has, on several occasions, been expelled from Germany, has for some time been active here as a writer, concerning himself chiefly with questions of
Turkish economics. Since the beginning of the war, Parvus's attitude has been definitely pro-German. He is helping Dr. Zimmer in his support of the Ukrainian movement and he also rendered useful services in the founding of Batsarias's newspaper in Bucharest.

In a conversation with me, which he had requested through Zimmer, Parvus said that the Russian Democrats could only achieve their aim by the total destruction of Czarism and the division of Russia into smaller states. On the other hand, Germany would not be completely successful if it were not possible to kindle a major revolution in Russia. However, there would still be a danger to Germany from Russia, even after the war, if the Russian Empire were not divided into a number of separate parts. The interests of the German government were therefore identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries, who were already at work. However, there was as yet a lack of cohesion between the various factions. The Mensheviks had not yet joined forces with the Bolsheviks, who had already gone into action. He saw it as his task to create a unity and to organize the rising on a broad basis. To achieve this, a congress of the leaders would first of all be needed--possibly in Geneva.

He was prepared to take the necessary first steps to this end, but would need considerable sums of money for the purpose. He therefore requested an opportunity of presenting his plans in Berlin.

A NOTE ON TRANSLATION, FILMING, AND ARCHIVAL REFERENCES

Those readers interested in the German originals, or in the exploration of avenues which this publication opens, can consult the relevant films in the Public Records Office. Apart from the majority of the mission files, some of the Grosses Haupt- quarrier papers and the relevant Nachlässe, it is to be hoped that all the documents printed here have been filmed. The editor had the good fortune to work on the original documents: the private filming, done by the various university and other institutions, and intended to supplement the official project filming, is not indicated in any way on the originals. The documents filmed officially bear a stamp, the so-called serial and frame number. Because of the diversity of manner in which this material has been filmed, the editor decided not to include any filming references. The original archival references, used here, are a sufficient guide for the location of every document not only in the archives, but also on the film. action taken)
How long it went on for comes from;

On May 17 (1918) Mirbach sent a telegram to the Foreign minsister Von Kuhlman stating;

I continue to do my best to counteract the efforts of the allies and support the Bolsheviks. I however would be grateful to receive your instructions in regard to whether the general situation would justify spending large sums of money in our interests.

The next day 18 May 1918 Mirbach received Von Kuhlman’s reply;

Please spend large sums……because it is very much in our interests that the Bolsheviks remain in power. Ritzlers funds are at your disposal. If you need more money please wire how much.

On 3rd June Mirbach wired to the German foreign ministry;

“Because of the strong rivalry of the allies 3 million marks a month is needed,”

Mirbachs advisor Trautman sent a memorandum to Von Kuhlman stating;

The fund which until now we had at our disposal has been exhausted. Because of this it is necessary for the secretary of the Imperial treasury to provide a new fund for our disposal. Taking into the above mentioned circumstances this fund has to be at least no less than 40 million marks.

Those later quotes were taken from;

The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life By Roman Brackman but allegedly taken from Zenans book.

I think Trotsky was at Brest-Litovsk meeting the Bolsheviks German bankers when the constituent Assembly was dissolved wasn’t he?

promethean

13th November 2011, 01:42

I am actually attempting not just to make wild accusations but to provide sourced documentation.
There could be documentation to prove that the Bolsheviks received funds from Germans. The Bolsheviks were the enemies of the Tsar and naturally, funding them would have been in the interests of the German state and the Bolsheviks were not fools to have refused such material help. But, however this relation with the German empire this may have influenced their foreign policies with regard to the German empire, there is no evidence to prove that this had any influence on their policies towards their own countrymen, including the dissolving of the constituent assembly. To claim such things sounds more like a conspiracy theory. I don't think anyone can prove that Lenin and Trotsky dissolved the constituent assembly because the Germans asked them to. The reasons to the Bolshevik's actions can be found in the material conditions of the situation and their ideology which was formed out of the social democratic Second International.

And Parvus of permanent revolutionary fame has frequently popped up.It has popped up among antisemitic conspiracy theorists and Stalinists, not among historians.

'The well-known Russian Socialist and publicist, Dr. Helphand, one of the main leaders of the last Russian Revolution, who was exiled from Russia and has, on several occasions, been expelled from Germany, has for some time been active here as a writer, concerning himself chiefly with questions of
Turkish economics. Since the beginning of the war, Parvus's attitude has been definitely pro-German. He is helping Dr. Zimmer in his support of the Ukrainian movement and he also rendered useful services in the founding of Batsarias's newspaper in Bucharest.

In a conversation with me, which he had requested through Zimmer, Parvus said that the Russian Democrats could only achieve their aim by the total destruction of Czarism and the division of Russia into smaller states. On the other hand, Germany would not be completely successful if it were not possible to kindle a major revolution in Russia. However, there would still be a danger to Germany from Russia, even after the war, if the Russian Empire were not divided into a number of separate parts. The interests of the German government were therefore identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries, who were already at work. However, there was as yet a lack of cohesion between the various factions. The Mensheviks had not yet joined forces with the Bolsheviks, who had already gone into action. He saw it as his task to create a unity and to organize the rising on a broad basis. To achieve this, a congress of the leaders would first of all be needed--possibly in Geneva.

He was prepared to take the necessary first steps to this end, but would need considerable sums of money for the purpose. He therefore requested an opportunity of presenting his plans in Berlin. None of this proves that the internal policies of the Bolsheviks, like the dissolving of the constituent assembly, were conducive to the interests of the German state.

Die Neue Zeit

13th November 2011, 02:02

Your own party, the SPGB, has its roots in the SPD-dominated Second International. Going by your own logic, one should probably start "speculating" about the SPGB being agents of the German state.

Not at all. The SPGB refused to affiliate with the original Socialist International.

Due to their semi-reformist character, their form of Marxism developed more or less as an early form of Socialism in One Country, which shares several common features with fascism, but is not identical with it. This kind of socialism, especially developed among the right wing of the SPD, was doubtless part of what inspired the National Socialism of Hitler later on.

It would have been better if you used the word "centrist" instead of "semi-reformist." :glare:

promethean

13th November 2011, 02:10

The SPGB had its roots in the Second International insofar as they were a split from the Social Democratic Federation which was a party of the International.

S.Artesian

13th November 2011, 04:00

I am actually attempting not just to make wild accusations but to provide sourced documentation.

Wait a minute, in your previous post you just stated you didn't believe that the Bolsheviks were being funded by the Germans.

So which is it?

The main issue, of course, is the one you absolutely refuse to engage, because in doing so you would expose yourself for what you are: a partisan of class collaboration with "liberal democrats," royalists, large landowners, capitalism.

You never answer the question as to why the government of soviets dispersed the CA.

You never engage with how the CA intended to function, and what it's goal was.

You've played this game in other venues on similar issues-- like the opposition of the Bolsheviks to the provisional government-- claiming that the Bolsheviks were always in favor, unlike the Mensheviks, of participation in a provisional government-- ignoring the mere technicality than when a PG was constituted during the revolution, it was the Mensheviks who accepted ministerial portfolios in the PG while Lenin, and Trotsky led the Bolsheviks to the position of "All Power to the Soviets." Certainly the Bolsheviks were not the only ones to articulate that demand, but the Bolsheviks did become the most powerful by articulating that demand.

Your disregard for historical accuracy makes a perfect little liberal.

Dave B

13th November 2011, 14:52

What I said I think was that I didn’t believe that the Bolsheviks were agents or taking direct orders, if you like, from the German government and that the Bolsheviks were in a sense following their own agenda and interests.

Or in other words the interests of the German government and the Bolsheviks coincided for different reasons and that they used each other.

Thus from The German Imperial Ambassador in Constantinople (and Parvus)

The interests of the German government were therefore identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries…….

It is an old game as with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘Afghan Trap’ with the CIA support of the Mujahadeen and Bin Laden etc as in;

How the US provoked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan;: Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76.

You never answer the question as to why the government of soviets dispersed the CA.
There could have been many reasons why the Bolsheviks dissolved the CA, being thrown out of power would have been one.

That could have resulted in the Bolsheviks being tried for receiving funding from the Germans, it was Lenin who had agreed to answer those charges only to the constituent assembly once it had convened.

Lenin may have also been anticipating the more lavish funding of 40 million gold marks that might follow on from a Brest-Litovsk peace treaty which Trotsky was arranging at the time.

Bernstien was correct, it was an unbelievable amount, something in the order of billion dollars in today’s money I think, maybe somebody else can work it out.

You never engage with how the CA intended to function, and what it's goal was.
Well as I stand accused of Stalinism and a dog with a bad name, that question was addressed by the Bolshevik Stalin in 1905 eg

The tsarist government will be overthrown. On its ruins will be set up the government of the revolution -- the provisional revolutionary government, which will disarm the dark forces, arm the people and immediately proceed to convoke a Constituent Assembly. Thus, the rule of the tsar will give way to the rule of the people. That is the path which the people's revolution is now taking.

.........In short, the provisional government must fully carry out our minimum programme and immediately proceed to convene a popular Constituent Assembly which will give "perpetual" legal force to the changes that will have taken place in social life.

http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/PRG05.html

That was ‘almost’ the standard second international ‘Amsterdam’ position as in Lenin’s Two Tactics of the same year.

And ‘paradoxically’ the Marxist would support a constituent assembly as the ‘consummation’ of the ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ or capitalism, as ‘progress’. Leading to the development industrial production and the working class with it; and ideally ‘bourgeois political liberties’ like you had in Switzerland and Amsterdam were Marxist would be free to carry on their propaganda.

There was a hazard of a bonapartist type counter revolution and a system that would be a political-economic fusion of feudal autocracy and capitalism under a kind of Tsar Joseph I.

I don’t want to get close at all to the second international reformist Kautksy (especially the one of 1932) however for balance and another’s view;

When the elections to the Constituent Assembly revealed that the majority had been won by the Socialists, not the Bolsheviks, Lenin decided without further ado to dissolve the Assembly, the convocation of which he had himself but recently demanded. Upon the ruins of democracy, for which he had fought until 1917, he erected his political power. Upon these ruins he set up a new militarist-bureaucratic, police machinery of state, the new autocracy.

This gave him weapons against the other socialists even more potent than shameless lies. He now had in his hands all the instruments of repression which czarism had used, adding to these weapons also those instruments of oppression which the capitalist, as the owner of the means of production, was against wage slaves. Lenin now commanded all the means of production, in utilizing his state power for the erection of his state capitalism, which is best characterized as state slavery.

No form of capitalism makes the workers so absolutely dependent upon it as centralized state capitalism in a state without an effective democracy. And no political police is so powerful and omnipresent as the Tcheka or G.P.U., created by men who had spent many years in fighting the czarist police and, knowing its methods as well as its weaknesses and shortcomings, knew also how to improve upon them.

It would have been absolutely unnecessary to resort to any of these instruments of repression had Lenin agreed to form a coalition with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionists in 1917. These parties commanded the support of the overwhelming majority of the population, as the elections to the Constituent Assembly had shown. Everything of a truly progressive nature which the Bolsheviks sought to realize was also part of the program of the other socialist parties and would have been carried out by them, for the people had empowered them to do so.

The confiscation of the big landed estates had also been planned by the Socialist-Revolutionists and Mensheviks – they actually put it into effect in Georgia. Abolition of illiteracy, marriage law reform, social welfare measures, children’s homes, public hospitals, shop councils, unemployment insurance and laws for the protection of labor, about all of which such a big to-do is being made in Soviet Russia, have been attained to a much greater and more perfect degree in capitalist countries where the democracy of labor has won any considerable power. The socialization of heavy industry, insofar as this would have appeared economically advantageous, would likewise have been approved by the majority of the Constituent Assembly.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1932/commsoc/ch04.htm

There was a debate going on even amongst the Bolsheviks at the end of 1917 about the future relationship between the soviets and CA. I think it was Kamenev or maybe Zinoviev for instance who wrote and article about ‘combined type’ of system or something Sukhanov discussed it in his book somewhere.

As to ;

like the opposition of the Bolsheviks to the provisional government-- claiming that the Bolsheviks were always in favor, unlike the Mensheviks, of participation in a provisional government-- ignoring the mere technicality than when a PG was constituted during the revolution, it was the Mensheviks who accepted ministerial portfolios in the PG

I have raised that matter on this list, as well as on others many times, just one example being;

Post 7

http://www.revleft.com/vb/keep-hearing-russians-t149496/index.html?t=149496

The soviets insisted that those Mensheviks enter the PRG and they did against the wishes of the Menshevik centre, and I did that as well, with you I think, with a quote from Abrahamovitch.

The Bolsheviks, or Lenin and Stalin at least, opposed all power to the soviets, in July 1917?

This is just like the real world isn’t it with the white-collar bourgeois intelligentsia doing the talking and the blue-collar factory proletariat doing all the real work.

Actually when it comes to the Bolsheviks taking orders from the Imperial German government I am a bit ambivalent and open minded about it.

One can’t help pondering on whether the genius and authorship of Lenin’s April thesis shouldn’t really be credited to the Foreign Ministry of the German imperial government.

As I understand the section of the SDF that went on to form the SPGB in 1904 were on the far left of the SDF and thus also of the second international.

They left or were kicked out of the SDF over their opposition to the latent reformism of the then SDF.

S.Artesian

13th November 2011, 17:27

And still what you never engage is: who, which class would govern through which organs-- the workers through the soviets; or the bourgeoisie through the "beard" of the CA? This is why your entire "analysis" rests on rumors, claims from German agents, and your personal slanders of others.

Class content, the historical determinants of the struggle that propelled the revolution drops out completely from your "analysis."

You claimed that the Bolsheviks dispersed the CA because the Germans paid them too. I quoted the post where you made that claim.

The only reason that might even appear as a possibility is that it served to get Russia out of the war which a govt formed by a CA would most definitely continue.

So... in your support for the CA, you are consciously supporting Russia's continued participation in WW1.

That's where your "anti-Leninism" gets you, right in the lap of the British bourgeoisie and the Russian STAVKA.

Me? I'm no Leninist, but when the issue is standing with the Bolsheviks for a govt. of soviets and an end to the war, or with the Kadets, royalists, Menshevik ministers, and the British bourgeoisie for continuing the war, I'm honored to be mis-identified as a Leninist.

A Marxist Historian

14th November 2011, 04:42

There could be documentation to prove that the Bolsheviks received funds from Germans. The Bolsheviks were the enemies of the Tsar and naturally, funding them would have been in the interests of the German state and the Bolsheviks were not fools to have refused such material help. But, however this relation with the German empire this may have influenced their foreign policies with regard to the German empire, there is no evidence to prove that this had any influence on their policies towards their own countrymen, including the dissolving of the constituent assembly. To claim such things sounds more like a conspiracy theory. I don't think anyone can prove that Lenin and Trotsky dissolved the constituent assembly because the Germans asked them to. The reasons to the Bolshevik's actions can be found in the material conditions of the situation and their ideology which was formed out of the social democratic Second International.

It has popped up among antisemitic conspiracy theorists and Stalinists, not among historians.

None of this proves that the internal policies of the Bolsheviks, like the dissolving of the constituent assembly, were conducive to the interests of the German state.

This is a very old business, the Zeman book. The best refutation of it was provided many decades ago by a Hoover Institute scholar with personal experience of the movement in the old days, namely Boris Souvarine. The Hoover Institute, for those who don't know, is an exceedingly right wing affair, though named after Herbert not J. Edgar. Not exactly where you expect to find people flacking for Lenin.

Basically, what Souvarine pointed out was that the letters Zeman scrounged up were all among various German high diplomatic mucky-mucks, and were written to persuade other mucky mucks during Brest Litovsk that making peace with the Bolsheviks rather than making war on them was smart policy. So there is no reason whatsoever to take them seriously and think that they are accurate. Letters from liars to other liars.

Real evidence for this would be (a) actual financial records, with dates, times and places in German archives, or (b) something similar in Soviet archives.

Both German and Soviet archives are wide open and have been thoroughly plundered, first by the Allies after WWII for the German archives, and secondly the Soviet archives after the collapse of the USSR. No trace of anything like this, not even the tiniest, has ever appeared. And if anything like this had happened, it would have. Or somebody who was the bagman would have written his memoirs, or something.

This first started with accusations by Kerensky in 1917, on the basis of which Trotsky was arrested and Lenin had to go into hiding. It was all thoroughly exposed as a frame up. Naturally there have been attempts to revive this frameup ever since, and Dave B. is just the latest in a long line of anti-communist frameup artists.

Parvus, a quite perceptive Marxist thinker and theoretician who sold out with extreme thoroughness to German imperialism during WWI, would have loved to arrange the funding of his old friends the Bolsheviks by his new friends, the German military, and he made approaches to the Bolsheviks after the revolution. Lenin fairly famously said that the Revolution needs clever minds, but it even more needs clean hands.

Here's a link to an old article in Soviet Studies on all this, from all the way back to 1976. Unfortunately it's on JSTOR, so people without some kind of connection to a university can't see more than the first page. Of course, Soviet Studies is in a lot of libraries. Mr. Senn took another route, to find out if Lenin had any contact with any German agents in Zurich and if so what kind, and concludes that German money is just one of those urban legends, like baby crocodiles in the sewer system coming to maturity and crawling out of your toilet bowl and eating you (not his words).

http://www.jstor.org/pss/150283

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

14th November 2011, 04:46

The SPGB had its roots in the Second International insofar as they were a split from the Social Democratic Federation which was a party of the International.

Right. So charging Dave B. with Stalinism is missing the point, and I suppose unfair.

He's a Second International style Right Menshevik, of the sort that collaborated with the Whites in Russia during the Civil War, when they were calling Lenin a German agent and murdering workers, leftists and Jews, and in Germany sponsored the crushing of the revolution and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg.

Not a Stalinist!

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

14th November 2011, 04:50

Not at all. The SPGB refused to affiliate with the original Socialist International.

It would have been better if you used the word "centrist" instead of "semi-reformist." :glare:

It's true the SPGB didn't affiliate with the SI, but they still were in a similar ideological ballpark. They didn't affiliate, quite simply, because they were famously sectarian.

They did I believe actually have a pro-Stalin period come to think of it early on, 1930s or thereabouts, but then flip-flopped into the usual anti-revolutionary Social Democratic anti-communism and anti-revolutionism.

-M.H.-

S.Artesian

14th November 2011, 05:59

OK then right-wing Menshevik social-democrat supporter of the white Russians. That sounds about right. So why isn't he restricted to OI?

Dave B

14th November 2011, 21:48

I have really touched on a raw nerve here haven’t I?

Although I speak for myself on most things I do have an SPGB tag and therefore given the rants feel obliged to answer some of the more absurd and palpable contradicting statements made so far.

This feels like a Goldstien scene from 1984, but I do love the attention.

The SPGB or those in the SDF that went onto to form the SPGB were impossibilism-ists, thus;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossibilism

Believing that the orthodox Marxist minimum programme was just or had become, or whatever a fig leaf for reformism.

There is an interesting little rant form Henry Hyndman in May 1903 on the subject directed at the future SPGB of 1904 I guess re;

‘furious impossibilists with their anarchical absurdities’.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/hyndman/1903/05/impossibilism.htm

I haven’t been accused of being an anarchist yet, which is a bit disappointing really.

There was obviously little space in the second international for impossibilism, unlike the mainstream Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

People are free to put that down to pathological sectarianism or political principal.

Then there was the;

They did I believe actually have a pro-Stalin period come to think of it early on, 1930s or thereabouts, but then flip-flopped into the usual anti-revolutionary Social Democratic anti-communism and anti-revolutionism.
I wasn’t sure with this one whether it was referring to the second international or the SPGB.

We were having our meetings smashed up by the Stalinists (and fascists) in the 1930’s.

I am unaware of a ‘Stalinist period’ of the SPGB, I suggest you post that with details on Libcom.

We did have ex Stalinists join the party including a Harry Young who was apparently out there when it was all going on etc.

Now where are we?

I am not a right or left wing Menshevik, not that denial means much.

The Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks, were 1905 2nd internationalists and I, or we were not.

Actually the Mensheviks stuck to the Bolsheviks and Leninists stageist theory and the support of the constituent assembly etc and it was the Bolsheviks who opportunistically ‘flip-flopped’.

I actually find all this stuff about murdering of ‘Jews’ when you disagree with someone deeply disturbing.

I accept that it is a seminal example and paradigm of evil etc but it looks to me like a disgusting debasement of an appalling event in human history as an opportunity to slur others.

When everything else fails.

So why not jump into the vat of tripe with the ‘Jewish question’ and the semitic and anti semitic gutter.

The ‘Jewish’ working class organisations went with the Mensheviks and were oppressed by the Bolsheviks.

Protest of the (Russian) Social Democratic Labour Party and of the Jewish Socialist Party sent to the executive Committees of all Socialist Parties of Europe and America, August 1918

T
he imaginary dictatorship of the proletariat has definitely turned into the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, which attracted all sorts of adventurers and suspicious characters and is supported only
by the naked force of hired bayonets. Their sham socialism…………….'

` In the continuing struggle against the Bolshevik tyranny which dishonours the Russian revolution, social democracy pursues the following aims.

1) To make it impossible for the working class to have to shed its blood for the sake of maintaining the sham dictatorship of the toiling masses or of the sham socialistic order, both of which are bound to perish and are meanwhile killing the soul and body of the proletariat.

2) To organise the working class into a force which, in union with other democratic forces of the country will be able to throw off the yoke of the Bolshevik regime, to defend the democratic conquests of
the revolution…….'

That was from 1918.

The bayonets were obviously paid for with German gold by the bolsheviks

S.Artesian

14th November 2011, 22:16

You haven't been called an anarchist because nobody associates anarchists with supporting the CA.

What you are is what you have exposed yourself to be-- a liar.

A Marxist Historian

15th November 2011, 19:44

So why not jump into the vat of tripe with the ‘Jewish question’ and the semitic and anti semitic gutter.

The ‘Jewish’ working class organisations went with the Mensheviks and were oppressed by the Bolsheviks.

Protest of the (Russian) Social Democratic Labour Party and of the Jewish Socialist Party sent to the executive Committees of all Socialist Parties of Europe and America, August 1918

That was from 1918.

The bayonets were obviously paid for with German gold by the bolsheviks

Wading into the muck with this distortion artist is distasteful. But, in the interests of historical accuracy, first I'll say that, as to the SPGB, I may be crossing them with their ideological cousins, the SLP of Daniel De Leon, who, long after his death, were almost as enthusiastic about Stalin and his purges as they had been disapproving of Lenin and Trotsky.

Now as for Jews, which for some peculiar reason DB seems to want to put in quotation marks, yes indeed, the Whites covered the Russian and Ukrainian steppes with Jewish blood. Several hundred thousand Jews were murdered and raped by the Whites and other anti-Bolsheviks. I think that is rather important and worth noting, unlike Dave B. it seems.

The Jewish Socialist parties in Russia and Ukraine all split, and the majority of each of them (there were several) joined the Bolsheviks. The Jewish Section of the Soviet Communist Party was dominated by ex-Bundists, the Bund being the largest of the Jewish Socialist parties. Largely forgotten as Stalin dissolved the Jewish Section and killed most of its leaders in the 1930s.

The quote Dave B. dragged up from some Jewish Socialist Party or other (I have never heard of one by that name) is from the summer of 1918 before the splits took place, and also before the mass murder carried out by the Whites and various others in 1919 and 1920.

The Social Democratic Party he refers to is, of course, the Mensheviks, Dave B. being, whatever his protestations, a Right Menshevik. Perhaps the JSP he mentions is the Bund, indeed then allied with the Mensheviks, perhaps it is a figment of his very active imagination.

-M.H.-

Dave B

16th November 2011, 00:28

From contemporary ‘documents’ of the time the ‘Jewish Socialist Party’ and the ‘Bund’ did seem to used interchangeably and sometimes simultaneously.

Although I must admit there seems to be little record of this in any acaedemic material I have read.

There was a Jewish Socialist Workers Party as well I think but I believe they were different.

The full text is as below and mentions the ‘Jewish’ Abramovitch in the Bolshevik clink again.

He was arrested several times and escaped a Bolshevik firing squad by hours once upon the intervention of one of the Adler brothers I think.

He fled Russian eventually to Germany and then fled Germany during facism. Not a save place for a ‘Jewish’ Menshevik Marxist during Nazi –Soviet pact.

And again by the skin of his teeth from France when the Nazi’s followed him there.

Anyway;

The imaginary dictatorship of the proletariat has definitely turned into the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, which attracted all sorts of adventurers and suspicious characters and is supported only by the naked force of hired bayonets. Their sham socialism resulted in the complete destruction of Russian industry, in the country's enslavement to foreign capital, in the destruction of all class organisations of the proletariat, in the suppression of all democratic liberty and of all organs of democratic State life, thus preparing the ground for a bourgeois counter-revolution of the worst and most brutal kind.

The Bolsheviks are unable to solve the food problem, and their attempt to bribe the proletariat by organising expeditions into the villages in order to seize supplies of bread drives the peasantry into the arms of the counter-revolution and threatens to rouse its hatred towards the town in general, and the proletariat in particular, for a long time to come. . . . In continuing the struggle against the Bolshevik tyranny which dishonours the Russian revolution, social democracy pursues the following aims :

(1) To make it impossible for the working class to have to shed its blood for the sake of maintaining the sham dictatorship of the toiling masses or of the sham socialistic order, both of which are bound to perish and are meanwhile killing the soul and body of the proletariat ;

(2) To organise the working class into a force which, in union with other democratic forces of the country, will be able to throw off the yoke of the Bolshevik regime, to defend the democratic conquests of the revolution and to oppose any reactionary force which would attempt to hang a millstone around the neck of the Russian democracy. . . . Forty delegates elected by workmen of various towns, to a con- ference, for the purpose of making arrangements for the convocation of a Labour Congress, have been arrested and committed for trial by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, created to pass death sentences without the ordinary guarantees of a fair trial.

They are falsely and calumniously accused of organising a counter-revolutionary plot. Among the arrested are the most prominent workers of the Social Democratic Labour movement, as, for instance, Abramovitch, member of the Central Executive Committees of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and of the " Bund," who is personally well known to many foreign comrades ; Alter, member of the Executive Committee of the " Bund " ; Smirnov, member of last year's Soviet Delegation to the Western Countries ; Vezkalin, member of the Executive Com- mittee of the Lettish Social Democratic Party ; Volkov, chairman of the Petrograd Union of Workmen's Co-operative Societies ; Zakharov, secretary of the Petrograd Union of Workmen of Chemical Factories ; and other prominent workers of the trade union and co-operative movement. We demand immediate intervention of all Socialist parties to avert the shameful and criminal proceeding. (Protest of the Social Democratic Labour Party and of the Jewish Socialist Party sent to the Executive Committees of all Socialist Parties of Europe and America, August, 1918.)

The document comes from recently released secret or ‘official purposes only’ British MI5 files that they were collecting at the time to get a handle on what was going on. It includes what you might expect as well as clippings from Bolshevik newspapers and interviews from civilians returning back etc etc

You obviously have to take with a pinch of salt the stuff from Etonian public schoolboy British diplomats and sift through it.

http://www.archive.org/stream/collectionofrepo00greaiala/collectionofrepo00greaiala_djvu.txt

I like to look at contemporary material, like Lenin’s, rather than just read books as it at least gives you the opportunity to discover stuff for yourself and get a kind of historical context.

There was for instance an interesting and fairly ‘neutral’ article, given the circumstances, by the even more interesting Bolshevik ‘sympathiser’ Arthur Ransome in the New York Times cabled on the 12th of march published on the 16th 1918.

It was mentioned, in reference to interview(s) with a Russian capitalist(s), that ;

‘as to the suggestion that the Bolsheviki had been bought by Germany these business men said ‘we only wish they were’…….’

No doubt incredulous that even in war time that their German brother capitalists would stab them in the back in such a manner.

If nothing else it does indicate that these rumours were flying around and extant in 1918 Russia.

If true, of course, it also calls into question the motives for assassination Wilhelm von Mirbach. If he was believed to be a conduit for German funding of Bolshevik oppression.

As to the truth of the story at first I found it hard to believe especially when I did the sums on the amount, but Bernstien was lots of things, but not a liar. I followed my nose and all I came across was more and more smoke.

I am an internationalist and ultra anti racists and don’t even like or accept the implicit racist terminology hence I put it all in inverted comma’s and feel like a shower after having been forced into the nomenclature and implicit false ideology of the debate.