Marx versus Lenin-Trotsky on revolution

[robbo203]

http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso/chattopadhyay_25feb03.pdf


TWO APPROACHES TO SOCIALIST REVOLUTION: MARX VERSUS
LENIN-TROTSKY. RUSSIA 1917
PARESH CHATTOPADHYAY

25 FEBRERO 2003


A socialist revolution, as a social revolution, is according to Marx, the “dissolution of the old society” (1976: 409) or “a change in (society's) economic foundation,” “constituted by the totality of the (social)
relations of production” (1980: 100-109). It is not the so-called `seizure of power' by the oppressed, leastof all by a group (party) in the latter's name. Secondly, the dissolution of the old social relations of production cannot be a momentary event (epitomized, for example, in the often-used phrase `victory of the October socialist revolution'), it is secular, epochal. In this sense Marx speaks of the “beginning” of the “epoch of social revolution” (1980: 101). A socialist revolution issues in a society of free and
associated producers or a “union of free individuals” (Marx 1962a: 92), that is, socialism. This latter is a product of history, not of nature or individuals' arbitrary will. Individuals cannot bring their own social relations under their proper control before having created them (Marx 1953: 79). Speaking of the socialist revolution, Marx writes in his Bakunin critique: “A radical social revolution is bound up with certain historical conditions of economic development. The latter are its pre-conditions. It is therefore only
possible where, with capitalist development, the industrial proletariat occupies at least a significant position.” Then he adds “Bakunin understands absolutely nothing of the social revolution, excepting its
political phrases. For him, its economic conditions do not exist” (Marx 1973c: 633; our emphasis). Indeed, “new higher relations of production do not appear before its material conditions of existence have
(already) been hatched within the womb of the old society itself” (Marx 1980: 101). These “historical conditions” of socialist revolution —and correspondingly, of building a society of free and associated
individuals— are not only the proletariat, “the greatest productive power,” occupying a “significant position” in society, but also the universal development of productive forces along with socialization of labour and production. And it is only capital which creates them. Indeed, socialism “comes out of the womb of the capitalist society.” (Marx 1953: 635-36; 1962a: 790-91; 1962b: 321; 1965: 135; 1966: 178).

Given these conditions, socialist revolution begins when capital has reached a situation where the productive powers it has generated including its “greater productive power”— can no longer advance on the basis of the existing relations of production. Socialist revolution itself is seen as an immense emancipatory project —based on workers' self-emancipation leading to the emancipation of the whole humanity— whose very “first step” is the “conquest of democracy,” as the Communist Manifesto, affirms,
the rule of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.

Corresponding exactly to this emancipatory perspective is Marx's idea of the role of the working class in the socialist revolution. He already wrote in the 1840s that the “proletariat can and must liberate itself (1972a:
38) and that “the consciousness of a profound revolution, the communist consciousness, arises from this class (itself)” (1973a: 69). Again in the “Provisional Rules” of the International 1864) he famously affirmed: “The
emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (General Council 1964: 288). Marx put the matter succinctly in a letter (February 2, 1865) to Schweitzer: “The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing” (1973b: 446). Years later, in the Preface to the fourth German edition of the Manifesto, Engels neatly summed up Marx's ideas: “For the final victory of the ideas laid down in the
Manifesto Marx counted only and singularly (einzig und allein) on the intellectual development of the working class as it necessarily had to come out of the united action and discussion (1972: 57; our emphasis).

Against Marx's profound materialist perspective Lenin (and Trotsky) advanced the thesis that socialist revolution could (would) break out where the chain of world capitalism —subject to the law of uneven (and
combined) development— has its weakest link, that is, its productive powers are least developed.


In January 1918, Lenin asserted, against the earlier prognostication by Marx and Engels, that with “a different combination of the forces of socialism prevailing now” it was “easier to start the (socialist)
movement” in a backward country unsullied by the vices of imperialism. “Things have worked differently than what Marx and Engels had expected.” Two months earlier he had, denounced any talk of the “impossibility of a socialist revolution in Russia “as “profoundly un-Marxist.” (In line with many other of his utterances no demonstration was needed here). Trotsky, in his turn, trying to preserve his own Marxist credentials, affirmed that the Russian revolution conformed to Marx's position. Referring to Marx's statement that no social formation disappears without having exhausted all its potential, he wrote that the imperialist war had shown that the “capitalist system had exhausted itself on a world scale” and that “the revolution in Russia was a breaking of the weakest link in the system of world wide capitalism” (1987, vol. 3: 176).

As regards the role of capitalism's “grave diggers” in the socialist revolution, the Leninist (Trotskyist) approach is again, very different from, if not the exact opposite of that of Marx (and Engels). With the LT
approach, the workers' emancipation through socialist revolution is not so much the result of the “selfactivity”(Selbsbetätigung) of the workers themselves (given the appropriate material conditions) as the
outcome of the seizure of (state) power by a party (called `communist') of whole time devoted revolutionaries claiming to be the leaders, the “advanced section” (peredovoi otryad), of the working class (supposed to be incapable of developing revolutionary consciousness on its own), acting in its name, and relying on the support of the mass of workers. As Lenin affirms in 1904: “We are the party of the class, therefore almost the
whole class (during war, in the epoch of the civil war, the whole class) must (dolzhen) act under the leadership of our party” (the emphasized English expression is so in the text). This was Lenin's consistent
stand —a couple statements to the contrary, made for the occasion, notwithstanding— throughout. Indeed, Lenin saw the party “as the repository of revolutionary theory and revolutionary consciousness leading and guiding” the workers (Carr 1964: 19). This is clearly seen in Lenin's practice during the period from April to October, 1917. During this period, while loudly proclaiming publicly “all power to the soviets” (except for a
while in summer) Lenin in his private communication with the party leaders showed utter distrust if not disdain for the soviet power —this vehicle of “formal” democracy— and persevered in his attempt to
persuade the leadership that the party must “alone” (v svoi ruki), ignoring the soviets, seize power.

Ultimately, Lenin, by the threat of resignation from the leadership, succeeded in rallying the majority in the central committee for an immediate seizure of power, independently of and in fact behind the back of the
workers' already established organs of self-rule. Always identifying working class power with the Bolshevik power, Lenin asserted, six months after October, 1912: “We, the party of the Bolsheviks . . . conquered
(otvoevali) Russia from the rich for the poor . . . we must now govern Russia.” A few months later he added: “We have not till now reached the stage where the labouring masses could participate in government.” (A
socialist revolution indeed!). Trotsky, who in his youth (1904) had, in the name of the “self activity of the proletariat,” denounced Lenin's “political substitutionism” of the party for the proletariat, completely reversed
his position after his conversion to Leninism circa 1917. I Deutscher, referring to Trotsky's 1904 Lenincritique, wrote: “Trotsky could have no inkling that one day he himself would go much farther than Lenin in
preaching and glorifying that substitutionism” (1963: 96). This is seen in Trotsky's position in the early 1920s. For example, in 1920 he wrote that “revolutionary domination of the proletariat presupposes the same
domination of the party in the proletariat” and that “in the substitution of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is in fact no substitution.” Writing in 1930 in his famous History he affirmed: “The
Bolsheviks saw it their mission to stand at the head of the people . . . the Bolsheviks were the people.”

Lenin's `weakest link” argument became a canon of the dominant Left as well as of those sympathetic to the Bolshevik régime. Just to give a few outstanding examples, Antonio Gramsci observed, shortly after the
Bolshevik victory, that as opposed to Capital's “demonstration of the fatal necessity of the formation of a bourgeoisie and the inauguration of a capitalist era” before the proletariat could have its own revolution,
“facts have left behind the ideologies, the canons of historical materialism” (1973: 130). I. Deutscher wrote: “It was the Russian Marxists, and not Marx and Engels whom (the events in Russia) proved to be right”
(1980: 184). Later E.H. Carr wrote: “Marxist scheme of revolution was bound to break down when the proletarian revolution occurred in the most backward capitalist country,” which thus showed “an error of
prognostication in the original Marxist scheme” (1964: 43-44). Much later P.M. Sweezy expressed the same dea: “The revolutions that put socialism on history's agenda took place not in economically developed
countries, as Marx and Engels thought they would, but in countries where capitalism was still in early stages”
(1993: 6).


However, these individuals, under the spell of the spectacular political event of the time and carried away by the ideological discourses of its principal actors and ignoring the real “contradictions of material life”
(Marx 1859) and thereby “sharing the illusion of the epoch” —in Marx's penetrating phrase (1973a: 39; emphasis in original)— dismissed Marx's materialism too rapidly. As Lenin quickly realized, given Russia's
backwardness, there was no other way to go forward, but to “catch up and surpass” the advanced capitalist countries —which implied a rapid growth of the productive forces and an advanced working class, and this
necessitated precisely the development of capitalism in a largely pre-capitalist country where the inauguration
of socialism was an impossible project. In more than one text of the period Lenin affirmed the desirability of the development of capitalism in Russia at least “to some extent and for some time,” of course, under the`proletarian' state. The reality of the period 1917-1928 vindicated Lenin's position. A government decree of September 10, 1921, described the wages system as a “fundamental factor of industrial development, wages and employment being considered as a matter of relation based on freely consented contract between the workers and the concerned enterprise.” “In less than a year NEP had reproduced the characteristic essentials of a capitalist economy” (Carr 1963: 320, 321, 323). The data also support this. Thus while the share of independent commodity producers —in handicrafts and agriculture— in the total population (including nonworking dependents) remained constant at 75 per cent level between 1924 and 1928, the share of `workers and employees' —that is, wage and salary earners— rose from 15 percent to 18 percent between the two dates (Narkhoz 1987: 11). As a particular indicator of the early phase of capitalist development we could note that in metallurgy and coal mining the share of workers originating from the peasant families increased from an average of 43.4 percent for 1918-1925 to 53.5 percent in 1926-1927. Taking the industrial production as a whole, its index rose from 39.5 in 1922-23 to 119.6 in 1927-28 (1913: 100) The number of industrial workers doubled, increasing from 1.4 million to 2.8 million during the same period (Prokopovich 1952: 279, 283).
The total value of output of large scale industry, at 1926-27 prices, grew from 1.9 milliard in 1921 to 15.7 milliard in 1928 (Baykov 1970; 121; Narkoz 1922-82: 152). The development of the industrial economy was
of course based on wage labour. Quite appropriately accompanying the whole process was the methodical liquidation of the factory committees as centers of workers' self-administration as well as the “transformation
of the soviets from the organs of proletarian self-rule and vehicles of radical democracy into organs allowing the party elite to read the masses” (Anweiler 1998: 303).

In April, 1918, Lenin discovered that the “Russian is
a bad worker in comparison with the workers of the advanced nations.” Therefore, instead of collectivelyadministering the affairs of the work place, through their own elected organs —a practice which earlier the
Bolsheviks were the foremost to champion but now denounced as “petty bourgeois spontaneity”— the masses must, show the “unquestioning obedience to the single will of the leaders of the labour process” and
must accept “unquestioning subordination during working time to the one-person decision of the soviet directors, of the soviet dictators, elected or nominated by soviet institutions (and) provided with dictatorial
powers (diktatorskimi polnomochiyani).” Two years later, at the 9th party congress, Lenin denounced the still “surviving notorious democratism” and characterized the “outcry against appointees” as pernicious trash
(vrednyi khlam).”

The beginning `moment' of the Russian Revolution in February 1917, initiated and dominated entirely by Russia's toilers without any party guidance, had all the basic features of the great popular revolutions of the
past such as those of 1789-93 and 1871 in France. Targeting mainly the pre-capitalist social order, this revolution started out as an immense democratic mass movement in an open-ended, plural revolutionary
process which the different political parties increasingly tried to bring under control advancing their own agenda as the agenda of the toilers. As Trotsky writes in his monumental history: “The February revolution
was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken on their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat, . . . nobody
summoned the masses from above to insurrection” (1987, vol. 1: 102).

Contentwise a bourgeois democratic revolution in process, the February upsurge, given its spontaneous mass character marked by open-ended plurality, had, it appears, the potential to go over, at a later date —
given appropriate material conditions— to an authentic socialist revolution (in Marx's sense) if the involved toiling masses had been allowed unfettered freedom —through their (own) self-administering organs— to continue their march forward. The Bolshevik seizure of power, putting a brake on the process, destroyed the democratic part of the revolution —derogatively called “notorious democratism” (Lenin)— and accelerated
the bourgeois part, the pace of which would of course be dwarfed under Lenin's successor with an unprecedented accumulation drive under the slogan —textually taken over from Lenin (September 1917)—
of “catching up and surpassing” (dognat'i peregnat') the advanced capitalist countries (Resheniya I 1967: 539).
.
Following the capitalist path by the new regime 2 —the proclamation of having inaugurated a `socialist
revolution' notwithstanding— only demonstrated that a “society's natural development phases can neither be;
jumped over nor legislated away” (Marx 1962a: 16). In fact the so (mis)called `socialist revolutions in the
twentieth century have only confirmed Marx's profound materialist position: “Individuals build a new world
from the historical conquests of their foundering world. They must first, in course of their development,
produce the material conditions of a new society, and no effort of mind or will can free them from this
destiny” (1972b: 339). Indeed, history, this “greatest of all Marxists,” as Hilfeding used to say, has shown
that “if in the society as it is we do not find in a latent (verhüllt) form the material conditions of production
and corresponding relations of circulation for a classless society, all attempts at exploding it would be don
Quixotism” (Marx 1953: 77). And Marx had the last laugh.


1, The `Preface' to the Russian edition (1882) of the Manifesto did posit the possibility of Russia — with still more than half of its land
under communal ownership - to go over to communism skipping the capitalist stage, provided a “revolution” took place in the country
complemented by a “proletarian revolution” in the West. Now, the “revolution” in Russia hoped for by Marx and Engels was clearly
not a proletarian revolution, but a revolution by the Russian people (basically the peasantry) against the Tsarist state, principally to
prevent the process of “decomposition” already appearing in the communal system (as noted by Marx in his correspondence with
Kovalevsky and Zassulitch in 1877 and 1881). However, the Russia of 1917 was not exactly the Russia of 1882. By the First, World
War capitalism, though in its initial stage and far from dominating the country, had made non-negligible inroads in society. In fact in
his correspondence with the Russians (written in French) Marx affirmed (1877, 1881) with astonishing clairvoyance that, given the
gradual decomposition of Russia's rural communes — following the tsarist legislation of 1861 (on the `emancipation' of serfs) —
Russia would be compelled to traverse “all the vicissitudes of the capitalist regime” before its social transformation.

2 Outside of Russia, within the Leninist tendency, A. Bordiga seems to have been about the only one — at least among the front
rankers — who understood this. In the period immediately following the Bolshevik victory, Bordiga wrote: “The stateization of
factories, enterprises, banks and agricultural farms are already revolutionary measures, but of the capitalist revolution” (1980: 144

REFERENCES
Anweiler, Oskar. 1958, Die Rätebewegung in Russland 1905-1921, Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Baykov, Alexander. 1970. The Development of the Soviet Economic System. London: Cambridge University Press.
Bordiga, Amadeo. 1980. Proprietà e Capitale, Florence: Iskra
Carr, E.H. 1963. The Bolshevik Revolution, volume 2, London: Macmillan.
______1964. The Bolshevik Revolution, volume 1, London: Macmillan.
Deutscher, Isaac. 1960. Russia in Transition. New York: Grove Press
______1963. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1919-1921. London: Oxford University Press.
Engels, Friedrich. 1972. “Vorwort zur 4, deutschen Ausgabe des `Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei'“ in MEW, vol. 22, Berlin:
Dietz.
General Council of the First International 1864-1868. 1964. Minutes. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1973. Scritti politici, vol. 1. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Marx Karl. 1953. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Berlin: Dietz, Verlag.
______1962a. Das Kapital, volume 1. Berlin: Dietz.
______1962b. Theorien über den Mehrwert, volume 3. Berlin, Dietz.
______1965. “Misère de la Philosophie,” “Le Capital,” livre premier, in Karl Marx, Oeuvres: Économie, volume 1, Paris: Gallimard.
______1966. “Manifest der kommunistischen Partei” and “Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei” in Karl Marx,
Frederich Engels, Studienausgabe, volume 3, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschenbuch.
______1972a. Die heilige Familie in MEW, vol. 2. Berlin: Dietz.
______1972b. “Die moralisierende Kritik . . .” in MEW, vol. 4. Berlin: Dietz.
______1973a. Die deutsche Ideologie in MEW, vol. 3. Berlin: Dietz.
______1973b. “Brief an Schweitzer” (13.2.1865) in MEW, vol. 16. Berlin Dietz.
______1973c. “Konspekt von Bakunins Buch `Staatlichkeit und Anarchie'“ in MEW, volume Berlin: Dietz.
______1980. “Ökonomische Manuskripte und Schriften (1858-1861” in MEGA, Section 2, volume 2. Berlin: Dietz.
Narkhoz 1922-1982. 1982. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922-1982: Jubileinyi Statisticheskii ezhegodnik, Moscow.
emphasis in text)
Narkhoz 1987. 1987. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 70 let. Moscow.
Prokopovich. 1952. Histoire économique de l'URSS. Paris: Flammarion.
Resheniya partii i pravitel'stva po Khoziaistvennym Voprosam, Volume 1, 1967. Moscow: Politizdat.
Sweezy, P.M. 1993. “Socialism: Legacy and Renewal,” in Monthly Review, January.
Trotsky, Leon. 1987. The History of the Russian Revolution, volumes 1, 2, 3. New

[daft punk]

http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso/chattopadhyay_25feb03.pdf


TWO APPROACHES TO SOCIALIST REVOLUTION: MARX VERSUS
LENIN-TROTSKY. RUSSIA 1917
PARESH CHATTOPADHYAY

25 FEBRERO 2003


A socialist revolution, as a social revolution, is according to Marx, the “dissolution of the old society” (1976: 409)

Ok, before we go any further, wtf is Marx writing in 1976? And I cant see any 1976 in the references below. a bizarre and confusing start.




or “a change in (society's) economic foundation,” “constituted by the totality of the (social)
relations of production” (1980: 100-109).

ok, obvious stuff



It is not the so-called `seizure of power' by the oppressed, leastof all by a group (party) in the latter's name.

obvious stuff, however if the working class seized power, there would be a whole new ball game. It would not be a socialist economy but the class in power would have changed, the first prerequisite to changing the economy.



Secondly, the dissolution of the old social relations of production cannot be a momentary event (epitomized, for example, in the often-used phrase `victory of the October socialist revolution'), it is secular, epochal. In this sense Marx speaks of the “beginning” of the “epoch of social revolution” (1980: 101).

obvious stuff



A socialist revolution issues in a society of free and
associated producers or a “union of free individuals” (Marx 1962a: 92), that is, socialism. This latter is a product of history, not of nature or individuals' arbitrary will. Individuals cannot bring their own social relations under their proper control before having created them (Marx 1953: 79).
These references are annoying. Especially if paraphrasing Marx. This last sentence doesnt seem to make much sense, what is it supposed to mean do you think?
And what does it mean socialism is a product of history not of individuals' free will?




Speaking of the socialist revolution, Marx writes in his Bakunin critique: “A radical social revolution is bound up with certain historical conditions of economic development. The latter are its pre-conditions. It is therefore only
possible where, with capitalist development, the industrial proletariat occupies at least a significant position.”

Marx also hinted at the Trotskyist approach:

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


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882


In other words, they could essential skip a separate bourgeois stage. Of course the Bolsheviks didnt pick up on this but Trotsky expanded it into a major theory which eventually Lenin adopted in 1917.




Then he adds “Bakunin understands absolutely nothing of the social revolution, excepting its
political phrases. For him, its economic conditions do not exist” (Marx 1973c: 633; our emphasis). Indeed, “new higher relations of production do not appear before its material conditions of existence have
(already) been hatched within the womb of the old society itself” (Marx 1980: 101). These “historical conditions” of socialist revolution —and correspondingly, of building a society of free and associated
individuals— are not only the proletariat, “the greatest productive power,” occupying a “significant position” in society, but also the universal development of productive forces along with socialization of labour and production. And it is only capital which creates them. Indeed, socialism “comes out of the womb of the capitalist society.” (Marx 1953: 635-36; 1962a: 790-91; 1962b: 321; 1965: 135; 1966: 178).

yeah we know all this



Given these conditions, socialist revolution begins when capital has reached a situation where the productive powers it has generated including its “greater productive power”— can no longer advance on the basis of the existing relations of production.

This sounds like it is trying to turn M&E into stagists, but they simply sketched out the general world history.




Socialist revolution itself is seen as an immense emancipatory project —based on workers' self-emancipation leading to the emancipation of the whole humanity— whose very “first step” is the “conquest of democracy,” as the Communist Manifesto, affirms,
the rule of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.

Corresponding exactly to this emancipatory perspective is Marx's idea of the role of the working class in the socialist revolution. He already wrote in the 1840s that the “proletariat can and must liberate itself (1972a:
38) and that “the consciousness of a profound revolution, the communist consciousness, arises from this class (itself)” (1973a: 69). Again in the “Provisional Rules” of the International 1864) he famously affirmed: “The
emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (General Council 1964: 288). Marx put the matter succinctly in a letter (February 2, 1865) to Schweitzer: “The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing” (1973b: 446). Years later, in the Preface to the fourth German edition of the Manifesto, Engels neatly summed up Marx's ideas: “For the final victory of the ideas laid down in the
Manifesto Marx counted only and singularly (einzig und allein) on the intellectual development of the working class as it necessarily had to come out of the united action and discussion (1972: 57; our emphasis).

Against Marx's profound materialist perspective Lenin (and Trotsky) advanced the thesis that socialist revolution could (would) break out where the chain of world capitalism —subject to the law of uneven (and
combined) development— has its weakest link, that is, its productive powers are least developed.

WRONG. See above.




In January 1918, Lenin asserted, against the earlier prognostication by Marx and Engels, that with “a different combination of the forces of socialism prevailing now” it was “easier to start the (socialist)
movement” in a backward country unsullied by the vices of imperialism. “Things have worked differently than what Marx and Engels had expected.”

WRONG. Lenin and Trotsky both said the same as M&E above, that they would need the assistance of several advanced countries. They said this many times, you can find dozens of quotes to prove it.
Where did Lenin say that??




Two months earlier he had, denounced any talk of the “impossibility of a socialist revolution in Russia “as “profoundly un-Marxist.” (In line with many other of his utterances no demonstration was needed here). Trotsky, in his turn, trying to preserve his own Marxist credentials, affirmed that the Russian revolution conformed to Marx's position.

Is this guy having a fucking laugh? It was Trotsky's idea 11 years earlier that socialist revolution could start in a backward country like Russia!

This is incredible!





Referring to Marx's statement that no social formation disappears without having exhausted all its potential, he wrote that the imperialist war had shown that the “capitalist system had exhausted itself on a world scale” and that “the revolution in Russia was a breaking of the weakest link in the system of world wide capitalism” (1987, vol. 3: 176).

As regards the role of capitalism's “grave diggers” in the socialist revolution, the Leninist (Trotskyist) approach is again, very different from, if not the exact opposite of that of Marx (and Engels). With the LT
approach, the workers' emancipation through socialist revolution is not so much the result of the “selfactivity”(Selbsbetätigung) of the workers themselves (given the appropriate material conditions) as the
outcome of the seizure of (state) power by a party (called `communist') of whole time devoted revolutionaries claiming to be the leaders, the “advanced section” (peredovoi otryad), of the working class (supposed to be incapable of developing revolutionary consciousness on its own), acting in its name, and relying on the support of the mass of workers. As Lenin affirms in 1904: “We are the party of the class, therefore almost the
whole class (during war, in the epoch of the civil war, the whole class) must (dolzhen) act under the leadership of our party” (the emphasized English expression is so in the text). This was Lenin's consistent
stand —a couple statements to the contrary, made for the occasion, notwithstanding— throughout. Indeed, Lenin saw the party “as the repository of revolutionary theory and revolutionary consciousness leading and guiding” the workers (Carr 1964: 19). This is clearly seen in Lenin's practice during the period from April to October, 1917. During this period, while loudly proclaiming publicly “all power to the soviets” (except for a
while in summer) Lenin in his private communication with the party leaders showed utter distrust if not disdain for the soviet power —this vehicle of “formal” democracy— and persevered in his attempt to
persuade the leadership that the party must “alone” (v svoi ruki), ignoring the soviets, seize power.


Utter distrust. Well the Petrograd soviet got took over by the Mensheviks for a while before Trotsky led it.

But actually Lenin called for all power to the soviets at a time when the Bolsheviks did not have a majority.

Anyway, please provide evidence that Lenin did not trust the soviets.




Ultimately, Lenin, by the threat of resignation from the leadership, succeeded in rallying the majority in the central committee for an immediate seizure of power, independently of and in fact behind the back of the
workers' already established organs of self-rule. Always identifying working class power with the Bolshevik power, Lenin asserted, six months after October, 1912: “We, the party of the Bolsheviks . . . conquered
(otvoevali) Russia from the rich for the poor . . . we must now govern Russia.” A few months later he added: “We have not till now reached the stage where the labouring masses could participate in government.” (A
socialist revolution indeed!).

So he was honest. You think his honesty is a problem?



Trotsky, who in his youth (1904) had, in the name of the “self activity of the proletariat,” denounced Lenin's “political substitutionism” of the party for the proletariat, completely reversed
his position after his conversion to Leninism circa 1917. I Deutscher, referring to Trotsky's 1904 Lenincritique, wrote: “Trotsky could have no inkling that one day he himself would go much farther than Lenin in
preaching and glorifying that substitutionism” (1963: 96). This is seen in Trotsky's position in the early 1920s. For example, in 1920 he wrote that “revolutionary domination of the proletariat presupposes the same
domination of the party in the proletariat” and that “in the substitution of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is in fact no substitution.” Writing in 1930 in his famous History he affirmed: “The
Bolsheviks saw it their mission to stand at the head of the people . . . the Bolsheviks were the people.”

er, civil war?





Lenin's `weakest link” argument became a canon of the dominant Left as well as of those sympathetic to the Bolshevik régime. Just to give a few outstanding examples, Antonio Gramsci observed, shortly after the
Bolshevik victory, that as opposed to Capital's “demonstration of the fatal necessity of the formation of a bourgeoisie and the inauguration of a capitalist era” before the proletariat could have its own revolution,
“facts have left behind the ideologies, the canons of historical materialism” (1973: 130). I. Deutscher wrote: “It was the Russian Marxists, and not Marx and Engels whom (the events in Russia) proved to be right”

see my quote above on this matter.





(1980: 184). Later E.H. Carr wrote: “Marxist scheme of revolution was bound to break down when the proletarian revolution occurred in the most backward capitalist country,” which thus showed “an error of
prognostication in the original Marxist scheme” (1964: 43-44). Much later P.M. Sweezy expressed the same dea: “The revolutions that put socialism on history's agenda took place not in economically developed
countries, as Marx and Engels thought they would, but in countries where capitalism was still in early stages”
(1993: 6).

boring



However, these individuals, under the spell of the spectacular political event of the time and carried away by the ideological discourses of its principal actors and ignoring the real “contradictions of material life”
(Marx 1859) and thereby “sharing the illusion of the epoch” —in Marx's penetrating phrase (1973a: 39; emphasis in original)— dismissed Marx's materialism too rapidly.

bullshit



As Lenin quickly realized, given Russia's
backwardness, there was no other way to go forward, but to “catch up and surpass” the advanced capitalist countries —which implied a rapid growth of the productive forces and an advanced working class, and this
necessitated precisely the development of capitalism in a largely pre-capitalist country where the inauguration
of socialism was an impossible project. In more than one text of the period Lenin affirmed the desirability of the development of capitalism in Russia at least “to some extent and for some time,” of course, under the`proletarian' state. The reality of the period 1917-1928 vindicated Lenin's position. A government decree of September 10, 1921, described the wages system as a “fundamental factor of industrial development, wages and employment being considered as a matter of relation based on freely consented contract between the workers and the concerned enterprise.” “In less than a year NEP had reproduced the characteristic essentials of a capitalist economy” (Carr 1963: 320, 321, 323).

er, yeah, that was kinda the idea.



The data also support this. Thus while the share of independent commodity producers —in handicrafts and agriculture— in the total population (including nonworking dependents) remained constant at 75 per cent level between 1924 and 1928, the share of `workers and employees' —that is, wage and salary earners— rose from 15 percent to 18 percent between the two dates (Narkhoz 1987: 11).


Whooooahh! HOLD YOUR HORSES!

In Jan 1924 Lenin died. Trotsky was ill, Lenin's testament was suppressed, Z&K made a monumental historical mistake and sided with Stalin and Bukharin, for a year or so anyway. Trotsky, the best person to continue Lenin's plans, lost power. Stalin shifted to the right and deepened the NEP greatly.

I have put it to the Stalinists on here a thousand times that inequality grew in this period!

THIS IS NOT NEWS! It is the basis of the Platform Of the Opposition:

"The agricultural tax in the country is imposed, as a general rule, in an inverse progression: heavily upon the poor, more lightly upon the economically strong and upon the kulaks. "

and so on

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm

"At the end of these two years in which the Stalin group has really determined the policies of the central institutions of our party, we may consider it fully proven that this group has been powerless to prevent:

An immoderate growth of those forces which desire to turn the development of our country into capitalistic channels;
a weakening of the position of the working class and the poorest peasants against the growing strength of the kulak, the Nepman, and the bureaucrat;"

Things got worse and during 1927 Stalin's terror had already started:


"The nearer drew the time for the fifteenth congress, set for the end of 1927, the more the party felt that it had reached a crossroads in history. Alarm was rife in the ranks. In spite of a monstrous terror, the desire to hear the opposition awoke in the party. This could be achieved only by illegal means."
my emphasis



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


The political counter-revolution was in full swing.











As a particular indicator of the early phase of capitalist development we could note that in metallurgy and coal mining the share of workers originating from the peasant families increased from an average of 43.4 percent for 1918-1925 to 53.5 percent in 1926-1927. Taking the industrial production as a whole, its index rose from 39.5 in 1922-23 to 119.6 in 1927-28 (1913: 100) The number of industrial workers doubled, increasing from 1.4 million to 2.8 million during the same period (Prokopovich 1952: 279, 283).
The total value of output of large scale industry, at 1926-27 prices, grew from 1.9 milliard in 1921 to 15.7 milliard in 1928 (Baykov 1970; 121; Narkoz 1922-82: 152). The development of the industrial economy was
of course based on wage labour. Quite appropriately accompanying the whole process was the methodical liquidation of the factory committees as centers of workers' self-administration as well as the “transformation
of the soviets from the organs of proletarian self-rule and vehicles of radical democracy into organs allowing the party elite to read the masses” (Anweiler 1998: 303).

see above




In April, 1918, Lenin discovered that the “Russian is
a bad worker in comparison with the workers of the advanced nations.” Therefore, instead of collectivelyadministering the affairs of the work place, through their own elected organs —a practice which earlier the
Bolsheviks were the foremost to champion but now denounced as “petty bourgeois spontaneity”— the masses must, show the “unquestioning obedience to the single will of the leaders of the labour process” and
must accept “unquestioning subordination during working time to the one-person decision of the soviet directors, of the soviet dictators, elected or nominated by soviet institutions (and) provided with dictatorial
powers (diktatorskimi polnomochiyani).” Two years later, at the 9th party congress, Lenin denounced the still “surviving notorious democratism” and characterized the “outcry against appointees” as pernicious trash
(vrednyi khlam).”

Quote mining. That means dishonest quoting.

"We must consolidate what we ourselves have won, what we ourselves have decreed, made law, discussed, planned—consolidate all this in stable forms of everyday labour discipline. This is the most difficult, but the most gratifying task, because only its fulfilment will give us a socialist system. We must learn to combine the “public meeting” democracy of the working people—turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood—with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm

So, you have democracy, but when you get to work you need to stick to the plan.

Bear in mind that 3 million Russians had died in WW1, the economy, already backward, was half destroyed, a civil war was looming, all the other political parties were becoming suspect (the left SRs walked out of government not long after, disagreeing with Lenin's peace plan).




The beginning `moment' of the Russian Revolution in February 1917, initiated and dominated entirely by Russia's toilers without any party guidance, had all the basic features of the great popular revolutions of the
past such as those of 1789-93 and 1871 in France. Targeting mainly the pre-capitalist social order, this revolution started out as an immense democratic mass movement in an open-ended, plural revolutionary
process which the different political parties increasingly tried to bring under control advancing their own agenda as the agenda of the toilers. As Trotsky writes in his monumental history: “The February revolution
was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken on their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat, . . . nobody
summoned the masses from above to insurrection” (1987, vol. 1: 102).

Yeah, and the it stopped and a Provisional Government was formed, which did nothing about the war, land reform and so on.




Contentwise a bourgeois democratic revolution in process, the February upsurge, given its spontaneous mass character marked by open-ended plurality, had, it appears, the potential to go over, at a later date —
given appropriate material conditions— to an authentic socialist revolution (in Marx's sense) if the involved toiling masses had been allowed unfettered freedom —through their (own) self-administering organs— to continue their march forward.

This is easy to say, but revolutions like this burn out quickly. You have to grasp the opportunity. The opportunity came in October. The Bolsheviks grasped it. They had the support of the soldiers and the working class.




The Bolshevik seizure of power, putting a brake on the process, destroyed the democratic part of the revolution

support this wild claim





—derogatively called “notorious democratism” (Lenin)— and accelerated
the bourgeois part,

wtf? Support!




the pace of which would of course be dwarfed under Lenin's successor with an unprecedented accumulation drive under the slogan —textually taken over from Lenin (September 1917)—
of “catching up and surpassing” (dognat'i peregnat') the advanced capitalist countries (Resheniya I 1967: 539).
.
Following the capitalist path by the new regime 2 —the proclamation of having inaugurated a `socialist
revolution' notwithstanding— only demonstrated that a “society's natural development phases can neither be;
jumped over nor legislated away” (Marx 1962a: 16).

wtf is this guy banging on about?




In fact the so (mis)called `socialist revolutions in the
twentieth century

There has only been one revolution in which a Marxist Party tried to move directly towards socialism. It could only work if it successfully ignited the fuse for advanced countries, but that fuse got stamped out.





have only confirmed Marx's profound materialist position: “Individuals build a new world
from the historical conquests of their foundering world. They must first, in course of their development,
produce the material conditions of a new society, and no effort of mind or will can free them from this
destiny” (1972b: 339). Indeed, history, this “greatest of all Marxists,” as Hilfeding used to say, has shown
that “if in the society as it is we do not find in a latent (verhüllt) form the material conditions of production
and corresponding relations of circulation for a classless society, all attempts at exploding it would be don
Quixotism” (Marx 1953: 77). And Marx had the last laugh.

see above I have dealt with this



1, The `Preface' to the Russian edition (1882) of the Manifesto did posit the possibility of Russia — with still more than half of its land
under communal ownership - to go over to communism skipping the capitalist stage, provided a “revolution” took place in the country
complemented by a “proletarian revolution” in the West.

as I said above




Now, the “revolution” in Russia hoped for by Marx and Engels was clearly
not a proletarian revolution, but a revolution by the Russian people (basically the peasantry) against the Tsarist state, principally to
prevent the process of “decomposition” already appearing in the communal system (as noted by Marx in his correspondence with
Kovalevsky and Zassulitch in 1877 and 1881).


"the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. "
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
January 21, 1882, London

yeah right




However, the Russia of 1917 was not exactly the Russia of 1882. By the First, World
War capitalism, though in its initial stage and far from dominating the country, had made non-negligible inroads in society. In fact in
his correspondence with the Russians (written in French) Marx affirmed (1877, 1881) with astonishing clairvoyance that, given the
gradual decomposition of Russia's rural communes — following the tsarist legislation of 1861 (on the `emancipation' of serfs) —
Russia would be compelled to traverse “all the vicissitudes of the capitalist regime” before its social transformation.

2 Outside of Russia, within the Leninist tendency, A. Bordiga seems to have been about the only one — at least among the front
rankers — who understood this. In the period immediately following the Bolshevik victory, Bordiga wrote: “The stateization of
factories, enterprises, banks and agricultural farms are already revolutionary measures, but of the capitalist revolution” (1980: 144



And then WW1 happened and the Feb revolution happened, and the capitalists did nothing progressive. But just brush those facts under the carpet, eh?

oh, that was a big post, if replying, maybe chop into two?

[daft punk]

In fact there are just 2 points here.

1. The bloke is saying the Bolsheviks were attempting socialism too early.

2. He is saying they stamped down on democracy unnecessarily.

The authors suggested course of action? Do nothing, stand at the side watching the workers work like bees, harmoniously establishing socialism as one, when they are good and ready.

And the evidence that this will happen is................................................ .

[Yuppie Grinder]

In fact there are just 2 points here.

1. The bloke is saying the Bolsheviks were attempting socialism too early.

2. He is saying they stamped down on democracy unnecessarily.

The authors suggested course of action? Do nothing, stand at the side watching the workers work like bees, harmoniously establishing socialism as one, when they are good and ready.

And the evidence that this will happen is................................................ .
The nature of all of history's shifts between economic epochs, has been spontaneity. The end of capital will come when the profit mode has exhausted it's potential for growth. A party dictatorship can not just will socialism into existence any more than a government can will feudalism back into existence.

The condescending attitude some folks have towards common people is awful. I sometimes get a "workers are too stupid to liberate themselves" vibe.

[Hit The North]

A socialist revolution, as a social revolution, is according to Marx, the “dissolution of the old society” (1976: 409) or “a change in (society's) economic foundation,” “constituted by the totality of the (social)
relations of production” (1980: 100-109). It is not the so-called `seizure of power' by the oppressed, leastof all by a group (party) in the latter's name.

But seizure of power is a necessary stage given that the proletariat's expropriation of the bourgeoisie does not do away with the capitalist state which will mobilise against workers control. Also, unless the author believes that revolutionary consciousness is achieved when history flips a switch in our heads and we all become revolutionary communists, then power becomes an urgent issue due to the unevenness in political consciousness. What we know about revolutionary situations is that they are accompanied by political polarization of the population and a collapse of the centre, so, again, the seizure of power becomes an important question.

Finally, to argue from the concrete realities of Russia in 1917, in a situation of dual power between the provisional government and the soviets, when the immediate task was to pull Russia out of a murderous war that was drowning the international proletariat in blood, that the seizure of power should not be at the top of the agenda, is to show the kind of political and theoretical naivety that Lenin, for all his faults, could never be accused of.

[Hit The North]

In fact there are just 2 points here.

1. The bloke is saying the Bolsheviks were attempting socialism too early.

2. He is saying they stamped down on democracy unnecessarily.

The authors suggested course of action? Do nothing, stand at the side watching the workers work like bees, harmoniously establishing socialism as one, when they are good and ready.

And the evidence that this will happen is................................................ .

That's a good synopsis of his argument.

I think, in fact, if he had been there, the author, like the Mensheviki, would have been a supporter of the provisional government, paying homage to the soviets but attempting to reign them in so they are in step with the pace of a predetermined "history"; playing the role of nurse maid to the runt-like baby of a respectable bourgeois democracy.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Whenever I read arguments of this nature it brings to mind Rosa Luxemburg's writings on the Russian Revolution, which can be easily accessed online. To attempt to sum it up in the briefest terms, Rosa Luxemburg entirely sided with the Bolsheviks as opposed to Karl Kautsky on the issue of revolution as opposed to reformist support of bourgeois democracy. OTOH she pointed out that the Bolsheviks were engaging in dictatorial practices out of necessity during the civil war that would greatly undermine the nature of the revolution if institutionalized. Sadly, such practices were institutionalized and the party supplanted the working class as the ruling entity. I encourage all RevLefters to read Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in her own words. Marx and Engels were long dead by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and therefore one has to extrapolate the meaning of their writings on Russia and it potential for revolution. Rosa Luxemburg was still alive and IMO her writings are profound and prescient.

[daft punk]

The condescending attitude some folks have towards common people is awful. I sometimes get a "workers are too stupid to liberate themselves" vibe.

"The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. "
Communist Manifesto

No Trotskyist disputes that the workers have to liberate themsleves. But they have to get organised to do that, and it is the job of Marxists to constantly point that out, and to point out that only a socialist transformation will liberate the workers. But the workers never organise independently to the point of successful socialist revolution. There has to be a Marxist presence to guide it. This is why the only time it ever happened was in 1917. There have been dozens of opportunities, only one successful (for a while) revolution.

Trotsky wrote from experience but also prophetically in 1938:

"The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership"
The Transitional Programme

and elsewhere

"Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box but the steam"
The History of the Russian Revolution

have a read of this, left coms, see wocha think

http://www.marxism.org.uk/pack/party.html

http://www.marxism.org.uk/images/logo2.gif (http://www.marxism.org.uk/index.html) The Role Of A Revolutionary Party

by Judy Beishon




"How important is a party? It is only necessary to look at the lessons of revolutions that have failed, to understand why a revolutionary party is vital."


http://www.marxism.org.uk/images/cover100.gif

[DaringMehring]

The nature of all of history's shifts between economic epochs, has been spontaneity. The end of capital will come when the profit mode has exhausted it's potential for growth. A party dictatorship can not just will socialism into existence any more than a government can will feudalism back into existence.

The condescending attitude some folks have towards common people is awful. I sometimes get a "workers are too stupid to liberate themselves" vibe.

"Spontaneity" --- well it still requires organization. Without organization, there won't be any revolution. The state has innumerable well-organized organs of repression that specialize in stamping out anything resembling "spontaneous discontent" or diverting it into safe channels. That doesn't mean anything condescending against the working class; in fact, it is the working class itself that has to build this organization.

[daft punk]

That's a good synopsis of his argument.

I think, in fact, if he had been there, the author, like the Mensheviki, would have been a supporter of the provisional government, paying homage to the soviets but attempting to reign them in so they are in step with the pace of a predetermined "history"; playing the role of nurse maid to the runt-like baby of a respectable bourgeois democracy.

yep. I was a bit surprised that a left com article would be so stagist it went straight to a Menshvik line.

[daft punk]

Whenever I read arguments of this nature it brings to mind Rosa Luxemburg's writings on the Russian Revolution, which can be easily accessed online. To attempt to sum it up in the briefest terms, Rosa Luxemburg entirely sided with the Bolsheviks as opposed to Karl Kautsky on the issue of revolution as opposed to reformist support of bourgeois democracy. OTOH she pointed out that the Bolsheviks were engaging in dictatorial practices out of necessity during the civil war that would greatly undermine the nature of the revolution if institutionalized. Sadly, such practices were institutionalized and the party supplanted the working class as the ruling entity. I encourage all RevLefters to read Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in her own words. Marx and Engels were long dead by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and therefore one has to extrapolate the meaning of their writings on Russia and it potential for revolution. Rosa Luxemburg was still alive and IMO her writings are profound and prescient.

True, but on the negative side she was a bit left com, too slow to see the need for a Communist Party in Germany, and so partly to blame for the lack of successful revolution there.

From my link above:

Germany
AFTER THE Russian Revolution, the German working class tried to overthrow capitalism in Germany in 1918. However, the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party had a reformist ideology – they believed that capitalism should be changed only gradually – and this led to defeat of the revolution and the murder of the great revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
In 1923, economic collapse and the occupation of the Ruhr by France created a major crisis and an opportunity for the working class to sweep German capitalism aside. This time, the Communist Party (CP) had widespread support amongst workers, but the CP leaders failed to prepare them adequately for the task of changing society and to give leadership when the situation was most ripe for carrying out this task.
Less than a decade later, with a background of the world slump in 1929 to 1933, the situation again became critical. The middle class was ruined in the slump and workers’ living standards fell. Fearful of a new revolution, the ruling class poured funds into the Nazi Party.
When the Nazis received six million votes in the general election of 1930, Trotsky and his co-thinkers, recently expelled from the Communist International, called on workers organised in the German CP to go into a ‘united front’ with those in the Social Democratic Party to defeat the fascists. But such was the political degeneration of the Communist International that their leaders described the Social Democrats as ‘Social Fascists’ and refused a united front.
The Communist International even advocated that the CP should unite with the fascists against the Social Democrats! German CP leaders took the fatal position that Hitler would be no worse than the government they had already, and anyway, if Hitler got into power, it would just spur the workers on to wipe out the fascists.
Nor did the Social Democratic leaders give leadership. While workers instinctively started to form defence groups in factories and among the unemployed, the Social Democratic leaders refused to accept that the fascists were a real danger. For instance, one of them, Sohiffrin, said: "Fascism is definitely dead; it will never rise again". They called for calm and restraint. The terrible failures of the workers’ leaders led to the victory of Hitler in 1933 and the smashing of a mighty working-class movement with a Marxist tradition going back 75 years.




article on Rosa Luxemburg:

http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/socialistwomen/sw11.htm


Women fighters and revolutionaries

Rosa Luxemburg: A life inspired

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Poland, 1871 - the year of the Paris Commune. In her short lifetime she experienced three major revolutions and participated in the most important debates amongst socialists internationally.


They did not then have a model of a successful socialist revolution, but were trying to grapple with how workers would move into struggle and become conscious of the need to change society. Rosa was a thinking and 'creative' Marxist, ready to defend the ideas of Marx and Engels but prepared to develop them when necessary.
Hers was an inspirational life, exuding passion and determination, She was passionate in her love of life, about her beliefs and principles and her desire to see an end to all exploitation and oppression. She showed courage and determination, standing firm when in a minority or facing repression, imprisonment, illness, even death.


read more at link

[robbo203]

In fact there are just 2 points here.

1. The bloke is saying the Bolsheviks were attempting socialism too early.

2. He is saying they stamped down on democracy unnecessarily.

The authors suggested course of action? Do nothing, stand at the side watching the workers work like bees, harmoniously establishing socialism as one, when they are good and ready.

And the evidence that this will happen is................................................ .


The "bloke" was right on both counts

1) I note you repeat the misleading claim in your earlier post "There has only been one revolution in which a Marxist Party tried to move directly towards socialism. It could only work if it successfully ignited the fuse for advanced countries, but that fuse got stamped out. The Bolshevik revolutuon was emphatically not a socialist revolution. It did not lead to socialism as yourself admit so how could it be? As Lenin himself acknowleged. the great majority of workers - let alone the population as a whole - were not socialists by any stretch of the imagination. Since you cannot impose socialism on a population that neither understands it nor wants it then by default the only option left to you would be to develop and administer a capitalist society. That is precisely what the Bolsheviks did in the guise of state capitalism.

Even if the Bolsheviks state capitalist revolution had hypothetically ignited the fuse of socialist revolution elsewhere it would still not be possible to introduce socialism in Russia while the great majority were not socialist- . This would similarly apply to any other part of the world where a socialist majority was likewise lacking. And that, Im afraid, is the simple stark truth of the matter which you keep on trying to evade


2) The Bolsheviks did most certainly stamp down on democracy unnecesairily - not initially, to be sure ,because they simply had no real control over events in the immediate aftermath of revolution but over time and incrementally. By 1921 the Bolshevik state capitalist regime was unquestionably a fully fledged dictatorship over the proletariat which sought to justify its dictatorship on utterly specious and self serving grounds as Simon Pirani and others have shown

Nobody is suggesting that since the Bolshevik Revolution had no alternative but to develop capitalism that one should " Do nothing, stand at the side watching the workers work like bees, harmoniously establishing socialism as one, when they are good and ready." This is the kind of pathetic jibe one is accustomed to hearing from those who want deflect attnetion from the state capitalist outcome of the Bolshevik revolution and the ruthless anti working class programe this entailed

What a Marxist would say is not that one should do nothing but that one should do everything and anything possible to advance and promote the interests of the working class. In practice that would inter alia mean opposing with all the might one could muster, the anti working class policies that the Bolshiks increasingly sought to impose on the workers - including of course the scumbag ,Trotsky - your hero, apparently - and his disgusting "militarisation of labour" programme

Of course what one should do is one thing; what one was able to do under the constrained circumstances of the time, is quite another.

[Brosip Tito]

History isn't a magical force that, by itself, will produce socialism. It requires active agitation and organization. I know a few Left Comms who argue that it's better to not vote than vote for a party that will increase the living standards of the proletariat. This idea that socialism will just happen, is absurd. Luxemburg recognized this, and she was a major proponent of spontaneity and the mass strike.

Gramsci Guy is quite right.

[daft punk]

The "bloke" was right on both counts

1) I note you repeat the misleading claim in your earlier post "There has only been one revolution in which a Marxist Party tried to move directly towards socialism. It could only work if it successfully ignited the fuse for advanced countries, but that fuse got stamped out. The Bolshevik revolutuon was emphatically not a socialist revolution. It did not lead to socialism as yourself admit so how could it be?

I said tried.
Lenin, 1917
"there can be no advance except towards socialism. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm






As Lenin himself acknowleged. the great majority of workers - let alone the population as a whole - were not socialists by any stretch of the imagination.

support. The Bolsheviks won a majority in the cities and among the soldiers on the western front. They also won over many of the poor peasants.




Since you cannot impose socialism on a population that neither understands it nor wants it then by default the only option left to you would be to develop and administer a capitalist society. That is precisely what the Bolsheviks did in the guise of state capitalism.

rubbish. State capitalism was simply a stepping stone from capitalism to socialism. You need to read up on this, see what Lenin was saying, and what they were doing. You cannot ignore the fact that political power was taken from the capitalist class by the working class.

"One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called "upper classes", only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society."

"The workers and peasants are still "timid", they have not yet become accustomed to the idea that they are now the ruling class.."
Lenin, December 1917
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/dec/25.htm





Even if the Bolsheviks state capitalist revolution had hypothetically ignited the fuse of socialist revolution elsewhere it would still not be possible to introduce socialism in Russia while the great majority were not socialist- . This would similarly apply to any other part of the world where a socialist majority was likewise lacking. And that, Im afraid, is the simple stark truth of the matter which you keep on trying to evade

prove that the majority did not support socialism. Also, Lenin had a cunning plan.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm

tax the rich, use the money to build state industries and to subsidise co-operatives for poor peasants. This would enable mechanisation of farming which would eliminate hunger and increase their living standards.
However they would need the assistance of several advanced countries to achieve socialism.






2) The Bolsheviks did most certainly stamp down on democracy unnecesairily - not initially, to be sure ,because they simply had no real control over events in the immediate aftermath of revolution but over time and incrementally. By 1921 the Bolshevik state capitalist regime was unquestionably a fully fledged dictatorship over the proletariat which sought to justify its dictatorship on utterly specious and self serving grounds as Simon Pirani and others have shown

Yes, mainly because of the civil war. However it was nowhere near as dictatorial as Stalin's regime later. They needed to move towards workers democracy, but not for a couple of years or so, the economy was so dire that they needed a quick boost which meant central control to kick start industrialisation and encouraged cooperative farming. In the end they went for the NEP as a way to do this. This gave people plenty of freedom. But big projects like rebuilding the railways and electrification, you just have to get on with it. However the unions got more freedom around 1922 I believe.





Nobody is suggesting that since the Bolshevik Revolution had no alternative but to develop capitalism
they were fighting capitalism, not developing it




that one should " Do nothing, stand at the side watching the workers work like bees, harmoniously establishing socialism as one, when they are good and ready." This is the kind of pathetic jibe one is accustomed to hearing from those who want deflect attnetion from the state capitalist outcome of the Bolshevik revolution and the ruthless anti working class programe this entailed

What a Marxist would say is not that one should do nothing but that one should do everything and anything possible to advance and promote the interests of the working class. In practice that would inter alia mean opposing with all the might one could muster, the anti working class policies that the Bolshiks increasingly sought to impose on the workers - including of course the scumbag ,Trotsky - your hero, apparently - and his disgusting "militarisation of labour" programme

Of course what one should do is one thing; what one was able to do under the constrained circumstances of the time, is quite another.
You have offered nothing concrete here except to oppose the Bolsheviks, which means siding with the capitalists. You are a Menshevik. The Mensheviks had very little support in Russia and many of them supported the counter-revolutionary forces.

I can see no difference between your view and the Mensheviks - the revolution was premature, the people weren't ready, the Bolsheviks should be opposed etc.

[robbo203]

I said tried.
Lenin, 1917
"there can be no advance except towards socialism. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm



Lenin's rather vacuous comment above was simply a case of wishful thinking. In any case. what we we talking about here - Lenin's own peculiar definition of "socialism" as merely "state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people" (The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, 1917) or, by contrast, the Marxian definition of socialism as a non-market moneyless wageless and stateless alternative to capitalism in all its varieties

In case you were not aware of this, Lenin was notoriously inconsistent in his appication of the term "socialism - sometimes reverting to the old Marxian definition , sometimes coming up with something completely different. There were at least 3 different versions of the term "socialism" that Lenin employed that i can make out. Another being his claim that socialism was the lower phase of communism - a distinction that never existed in Marxian thought. Even then Lenin completely misunderstood what was meant by the lower of phase of communism . In The State and Revolution he talked of "all citizens being transformed into hired employees of the state" in this lower phase which bore absolutely no relation at all to Marx's notion of the lower phase of communism in which there would be no state and in which labour vouchers would replace waged employment -whether for private capiutalists or the state


Fact is Lenin was an extremely muddled and at times incoherent thinker with a penchant for simply grasping at straws. I mean, what are we to make of this crackpot notion propounded by him that socialism depended on "big banks" of all things "Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism;..A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" (Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? October 1, 1917 Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87-136). No doubt the fat cat directors of Barclays, Lloyds TSB, National Westminster etc etc will be flattered to think that, from a leninist perspective at least, they represent the cutting edge of Marxian revolution but real socialists wouldnt touch this dotty idea with a bargepole


By the Marxian definition of socialism, the Bolshevik revolution was most definitely not a socialist revolution . Only a deluded fantasist would deny this. It did not lead to socialism and nor could it for one very simple reason - and there were several others too - that there was simply not the necessary mass socialist consciousness among the workers to allow this to happen - let alone the population as a whole amongst whom in any case the working class constititued only a small minority at the time



support. The Bolsheviks won a majority in the cities and among the soldiers on the western front. They also won over many of the poor peasants.

.


I know very well that Bolsheviks had considerable support . So what? The point is - support for what? It was certainly not for implementing a socialist society in the above sense was it now? Even Lenin understood this perfectly well.

The Bolsheviks garnered support form the workers NOT on the basis of standing for a new kind of society that did away with the market amnd the state - socialism - but on the basis of the Bolsheviks reform programme. " Peace land and bread" and all that. Thats what attracted the workers intitally - particularly the idea of getting Russia out of the war. And, yes, that was good thing but in itself had nothing to do with socialism






rubbish. State capitalism was simply a stepping stone from capitalism to socialism. You need to read up on this, see what Lenin was saying, and what they were doing. You cannot ignore the fact that political power was taken from the capitalist class by the working class. .


I deny it. The working class did not take political power. What took power was a political organisation claiming to represent the interests of the workers that took power. Big big difference, actually. Your beloved Trotsky elaborated on the idea of "substitutionism" back in 1904 “the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committe”. (N. Trotsky, Nashi Politicheskye Zadachi Geneva, 1904, p.54.) This rather aptly described what happened post 1917.

Not all at once, but gradually and incrementally over the course of a few years, the working class movement was crushed and democratic institutions were destroyed, under an increasingly oppressive and powerful state capitalist dictatorship that consolidated its grip over society. Look what happened to the trade unions and the factory committees. Read Pirani's factual account of these early years in the post revolutionary era if you have any doubts on this score


Poilitical power was not taken from the capitalist class. I question, in any case, whether the local capitalist class had unambihguously captured political power to begin with. The usual argument that has been presented is that this class was too weak and compromised to mount an effective challenge to the precapitalists interests bound up with the old Tsarist state. It was precisely for that reason that the Bolsheviks came into the picture - to finish the task that the local capitalist class were unable effectively to do themselves and to remove all the old institutional barriers to the development of capitalism in the form of state capitalism.

The outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution was the replacement by and large of the private capitalist class with a newly emergent state capitalist class - the tiny minority of top level apparatchiks who effectively controlled the state and therefore collectively, as a class - rather than as private individuals - exerted de facto ownership of the means of production. This tiny class which emerged under Bolshevik rule came to exercise more or less complete control over the disposal the economic surplus and that is precisely what constitutes it as a class in Marxian terms. Its relation to the means of production was radically different to the non-owning Russian working class




prove that the majority did not support socialism. Also, Lenin had a cunning plan.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm.

Well since you love quoting the holy texts of Lenin and Trotsky while accusing others of "quote mining", would a few quotes from Lenin suffice?

In April 1917 at the Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P he said "We cannot be for "introducing" socialism—this would be the height of absurdity. We must preach socialism. The majority of the population in Russia are peasants, small farmers who can have no idea of socialism". A month later he was saying that the "proletariat and semi proletariat", had "never been socialist, nor has it the slightest idea about socialism, it is only just awakening to political life (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/24c.htm). Even after the October revolution, in an addresss to trade unionists in June 1918 Lenin pointed out "there are many...who are not enlightened socialists and cannot be such because they have to slave in the factories and they have neither the time nor the opportunity to become socialists (Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 27 page 466). And in another speech, this time at the Second All-Russia Congress Of Commissars For Labour May 22, 1918 he frankly admitted "We know how small is the section of advanced and politically conscious workers in Russia". This, of course, was precisely Lenin's pretext for his vanguard party supposedly drawn from this small and politically advanced section of the working class; the great majority of workers and peasants, in his estimation, were not yet imbued with a socialist consciousness and so the vanguard had to take power and act on their behalf.




they were fighting capitalism, not developing it.

You have no real understanding of what is meant by capitalism at all it seems - let alone socialism - if you can say such a thing. All of the primary characteristics of a capitalist economy were present in the Soviet Union. The best that Trots such as yourself, following in the footsteps of your master, can come up with is the remarkably feeble argument that in the Soviet Union, you did not have have private capitalists having legal right to private equity. This argument was long ago demolished by the likes of Engels. Capitalism does not require so called private capitalists. It is Capital itself rather than individual capitalists that matters As Engels points out:"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.(Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)



You have offered nothing concrete here except to oppose the Bolsheviks, which means siding with the capitalists. You are a Menshevik. The Mensheviks had very little support in Russia and many of them supported the counter-revolutionary forces.

I can see no difference between your view and the Mensheviks - the revolution was premature, the people weren't ready, the Bolsheviks should be opposed etc.

The very opposite is the truth. It was the Bolshevik regime that nurtured and gave rise to a new kind of capitalist class in the form of the state capitalist class. By supporting this regime it is YOU who is siding with the capitalist class and the viciously anti working class programme it pursued. I note you have no argument against this - that Bolshevik policies vis a vis the workers were clearly anti working class. Even Lenin was not so coy about it as you apparently

"Get down to business all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them, Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running an economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. (Collected Works, Vol. 33 page 72).



My position is not a Menshevik one at all. This is the usual sneering accusation that is frequently made of opponents of the Bolshevik state capitalism to distract attention from the nature of the regime itself. There is a long tradition of this sort thing in Trotskyist and Stalinist circles of attaching labels to opponents and attrributing to them poisitions that they do not hold in the vain hope of somehow circumventing uncomfortable criticism. But then I guess thats only to be expected

[daft punk]

Lenin's rather vacuous comment above was simply a case of wishful thinking. In any case. what we we talking about here - Lenin's own peculiar definition of "socialism" as merely "state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people" (The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, 1917) or, by contrast, the Marxian definition of socialism as a non-market moneyless wageless and stateless alternative to capitalism in all its varieties

In case you were not aware of this, Lenin was notoriously inconsistent in his appication of the term "socialism - sometimes reverting to the old Marxian definition , sometimes coming up with something completely different. There were at least 3 different versions of the term "socialism" that Lenin employed that i can make out. Another being his claim that socialism was the lower phase of communism - a distinction that never existed in Marxian thought. Even then Lenin completely misunderstood what was meant by the lower of phase of communism . In The State and Revolution he talked of "all citizens being transformed into hired employees of the state" in this lower phase which bore absolutely no relation at all to Marx's notion of the lower phase of communism in which there would be no state and in which labour vouchers would replace waged employment -whether for private capiutalists or the state


Fact is Lenin was an extremely muddled and at times incoherent thinker with a penchant for simply grasping at straws. I mean, what are we to make of this crackpot notion propounded by him that socialism depended on "big banks" of all things "Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism;..A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" (Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? October 1, 1917 Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87-136). No doubt the fat cat directors of Barclays, Lloyds TSB, National Westminster etc etc will be flattered to think that, from a leninist perspective at least, they represent the cutting edge of Marxian revolution but real socialists wouldnt touch this dotty idea with a bargepole


By the Marxian definition of socialism, the Bolshevik revolution was most definitely not a socialist revolution . Only a deluded fantasist would deny this. It did not lead to socialism and nor could it for one very simple reason - and there were several others too - that there was simply not the necessary mass socialist consciousness among the workers to allow this to happen - let alone the population as a whole amongst whom in any case the working class constititued only a small minority at the time


I am lost for words. Try reading the article you quote from
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm

Explain to me what is so crazy about taking the banks into public ownership as the basis for a socialist economy. Marx and Engels said the same:

"Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. "
Communist Manifesto




I know very well that Bolsheviks had considerable support . So what? The point is - support for what? It was certainly not for implementing a socialist society in the above sense was it now? Even Lenin understood this perfectly well.

what do you mean in the sense of the above? You just quoted Lenin just before the revolution talking about building socialism. This was published in the Bolshevik magazine, and mentions "the perfectly soluble problem of taking immediate steps towards socialism"





The Bolsheviks garnered support form the workers NOT on the basis of standing for a new kind of society that did away with the market amnd the state - socialism - but on the basis of the Bolsheviks reform programme. " Peace land and bread" and all that. Thats what attracted the workers intitally - particularly the idea of getting Russia out of the war. And, yes, that was good thing but in itself had nothing to do with socialism

see above










I deny it. The working class did not take political power. What took power was a political organisation claiming to represent the interests of the workers that took power. Big big difference, actually. Your beloved Trotsky elaborated on the idea of "substitutionism" back in 1904 “the organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committe”. (N. Trotsky, Nashi Politicheskye Zadachi Geneva, 1904, p.54.) This rather aptly described what happened post 1917.

Not all at once, but gradually and incrementally over the course of a few years, the working class movement was crushed and democratic institutions were destroyed, under an increasingly oppressive and powerful state capitalist dictatorship that consolidated its grip over society. Look what happened to the trade unions and the factory committees. Read Pirani's factual account of these early years in the post revolutionary era if you have any doubts on this score

what is your alternative



Poilitical power was not taken from the capitalist class.

why the fuck say something so utterly stupid?




I question, in any case, whether the local capitalist class had unambihguously captured political power to begin with. The usual argument that has been presented is that this class was too weak and compromised to mount an effective challenge to the precapitalists interests bound up with the old Tsarist state. It was precisely for that reason that the Bolsheviks came into the picture - to finish the task that the local capitalist class were unable effectively to do themselves and to remove all the old institutional barriers to the development of capitalism in the form of state capitalism.

great, you almost got that bit right, cling to it, as it is the only bit so far.

But if the Bolsheviks had not took power the capitalists would have had power. That does not mean they would carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Having power and doing the bourgeois tasks are not the same thing.




The outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution was the replacement by and large of the private capitalist class with a newly emergent state capitalist class - the tiny minority of top level apparatchiks who effectively controlled the state and therefore collectively, as a class - rather than as private individuals - exerted de facto ownership of the means of production. This tiny class which emerged under Bolshevik rule came to exercise more or less complete control over the disposal the economic surplus and that is precisely what constitutes it as a class in Marxian terms. Its relation to the means of production was radically different to the non-owning Russian working class

Look, I appreciate you have put a bit of effort into this, so I dont wanna be too harsh on you, but this is bollocks. It was not a class, and it did not exist under the Bolsheviks. The new caste emerged after Lenin died and Stalin managed to get power. It was not a class and there is a separate thread on that topic so i dont wanna get into that here.






Well since you love quoting the holy texts of Lenin and Trotsky while accusing others of "quote mining", would a few quotes from Lenin suffice?


Quote mining is using quotes out of context, pretending that it has a different meaning. This is why quotes should have links, and why the Stalinists posts are so annoying.




In April 1917 at the Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P he said "We cannot be for "introducing" socialism—this would be the height of absurdity. We must preach socialism. The majority of the population in Russia are peasants, small farmers who can have no idea of socialism". A month later he was saying that the "proletariat and semi proletariat", had "never been socialist, nor has it the slightest idea about socialism, it is only just awakening to political life (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/24c.htm). Even after the October revolution, in an addresss to trade unionists in June 1918 Lenin pointed out "there are many...who are not enlightened socialists and cannot be such because they have to slave in the factories and they have neither the time nor the opportunity to become socialists (Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 27 page 466). And in another speech, this time at the Second All-Russia Congress Of Commissars For Labour May 22, 1918 he frankly admitted "We know how small is the section of advanced and politically conscious workers in Russia". This, of course, was precisely Lenin's pretext for his vanguard party supposedly drawn from this small and politically advanced section of the working class; the great majority of workers and peasants, in his estimation, were not yet imbued with a socialist consciousness and so the vanguard had to take power and act on their behalf.

There is some truth to that. But from your perspective, a little truth is a dangerous thing.

It is true that most of Russia were peasants, that peasants tend to be not very politically conscious, but in April 1917 even the Bolsheviks were mostly opposed to revolution, with only Trotsky and Lenin in favour.

October was a long way away.

Things changed from April to October and from October through 1918. I suggest you read some of Trotsky's history of the Russian revolution to get a feel for the actual events. This proceeded like lightning, with Trotsky holding the lightning conductor and pointing it at the dynamite. This was no place coup, it was a mass movement, certainly in Petrograd, the capital city.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/index.htm

Leon Trotsky

The History of the Russian Revolution

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/index.jpg

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2383062#post2383062)
"they were fighting capitalism, not developing it. "


You have no real understanding of what is meant by capitalism at all it seems - let alone socialism - if you can say such a thing. All of the primary characteristics of a capitalist economy were present in the Soviet Union. The best that Trots such as yourself, following in the footsteps of your master, can come up with is the remarkably feeble argument that in the Soviet Union, you did not have have private capitalists having legal right to private equity. This argument was long ago demolished by the likes of Engels. Capitalism does not require so called private capitalists. It is Capital itself rather than individual capitalists that matters As Engels points out:"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.(Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)


you are mixing up a lot of stuff here. The Bolsheviks were fighting the capitalists in the civil war, and in more subtle ways after it in the NEP. Engels is pointing out that nationalisation within a capitalist economy is nothing to do with socialism. What you have to do is look at this the other way round, that the vestigial traits of capitalism within a new workers state do not mean it is still a capitalist state.




The very opposite is the truth. It was the Bolshevik regime that nurtured and gave rise to a new kind of capitalist class in the form of the state capitalist class. By supporting this regime it is YOU who is siding with the capitalist class and the viciously anti working class programme it pursued. I note you have no argument against this - that Bolshevik policies vis a vis the workers were clearly anti working class. Even Lenin was not so coy about it as you apparently

"Get down to business all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them, Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running an economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. (Collected Works, Vol. 33 page 72).



My position is not a Menshevik one at all. This is the usual sneering accusation that is frequently made of opponents of the Bolshevik state capitalism to distract attention from the nature of the regime itself. There is a long tradition of this sort thing in Trotskyist and Stalinist circles of attaching labels to opponents and attrributing to them poisitions that they do not hold in the vain hope of somehow circumventing uncomfortable criticism. But then I guess thats only to be expected

You sound like a Menshevik when you say the revolution was premature.

Lenin was saying that in 1921. This was in the beginning period of the NEP.

I dont like quotes without links. It reminds me of the Stalinists with their big pile of mined quotes. Most of them have never bothered to check the context. I have even had them use a quote from the wrong period in time and so on.

Lenin called this period a strategic retreat. A year later he was saying it was time to call a halt to the retreat. I suggest you read the article in full plus his speech a year later
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm

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

in the latter he speaks of his fears of the bureaucracy taking over, as well as calling for a halt to the retreat.

"If we beat capitalism and create a link with peasant farming we shall become an absolutely invincible power. Then the building of socialism will not be the task of that drop in the ocean, called the Communist Party, but the task of the entire mass of the working people."

"The other example I wanted to give you is that of the Donets Basin. You know that this is the centre, the real basis of our entire economy. It will be utterly impossible to restore large-scale industry in Russia, to really build socialism—for it can only be built on the basis of large scale industry—unless we restore the Donets Basin and bring it up to the proper level. "

"We are now confronted with the task of laying the foundations of socialist economy. Has this been done? No, it has not. We still lack the socialist foundation. Those Communists who imagine that we have it are greatly mistaken. The whole point is to distinguish firmly, clearly and dispassionately what constitutes the historic service rendered by the Russian revolution from what we do very badly, from what has not yet been created, and what we shall have to redo many times yet."

"The proletarian revolutions maturing in all advanced countries of the world will be unable to solve their problems unless they combine the ability to fight heroically and to attack with the ability to retreat in good revolutionary order. The experience of the second period of our struggle, i.e., the experience of retreat, will in the future probably be just as useful to the workers of at least some countries, as the experience of the first period of our revolution, i.e., the experience of bold attack, will undoubtedly prove useful to the workers of all countries."

"We are standing much more firmly on our feet today than we stood a year ago. Of course, even today the bourgeoisie may attempt another armed intervention, but they will find it much more difficult than before; it is much more difficult today than it was yesterday."

Does this sound like a capitalist?

His main thrust, you will see, is that the bureaucracy is able to run rings around the communists, and this was a huge worry. So his closing remarks were:

"It must be admitted, and we must not be afraid to admit, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the responsible Communists are not in the jobs they are now fit for; that they are unable to perform their duties, and that they must sit down to learn. If this is admitted, and since we have the opportunity to learn—judging by the general international situation we shall have time to do so—we must do it, come what may. (Stormy applause.) "

The emphasis was all about educating communists to run the USSR.

Final quote:

"If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed. Some thing analogous happened here to what we were told in our history lessons when we were children: sometimes one nation conquers another, the nation that conquers is the conqueror and the nation that is vanquished is the conquered nation. This is simple and intelligible to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror. Has not something like this happened in the capital of the R.S.F.S.R.? Have the 4,700 Communists (nearly a whole army division, and all of them the very best) come under the influence of an alien culture? True, there may be the impression that the vanquished have a high level of culture. But that is not the case at all. Their culture is miserable, insignificant, but it is still at a higher level than ours. Miserable and low as it is, it is higher than that of our responsible Communist administrators, for the latter lack administrative ability. Communists who are put at the head of departments—and sometimes artful saboteurs deliberately put them in these positions in order to use them as a shield—are often fooled. This is a very unpleasant admission to make, or, at any rate, not a very pleasant one; but I think we must admit it, for at present this is the salient problem. I think that this is the political lesson of the past year; and it is around this that the struggle will rage in 1922."