Anti-Leninism

[Questionable]

I don't post a lot, but I browse this forum very often, and I'm interested in why there has been such an upsurge of anti-Leninism as of late, not just on this website either.

Most of the criticisms I read are directed at his idea of a vanguard party. Correct me of I'm wrong, but the vanguard strategy that Lenin proposed was simply a response to the fact that workers were too busy actually working to sit down and read Marx, and they were becoming radicalized unevenly. So, the most politically aware sections of the working-class needed to form a party that would lead workers away from simply struggling for better conditions within the capitalist system, and towards overthrowing the entire system.

However, most anti-Leninists like to claim the vanguard strategy simply amounts to an intellectual elite guiding the herds of uneducated workers. I'm sorry, but I don't see how anybody can come to that conclusion unless they blatantly do not understand. I could see nothing in Lenin's works that even hinted at resentment towards the proletariat. He was simply addressing the fact that class consciousness emerges unevenly, and devising a tactic to counter that. Some workers are going to know all about Marx and their position in the world, and some are going to be too busy working or too misguided by propaganda to bother learning themselves. It's not elitism, it's reality.

Or maybe I'm the one who's misunderstood. What has caused such a huge rise of Anti-Leninist sentiment? Because based on what I've seen, a lot of grievances with Lenin's theories result from simple misunderstandings.

[ВАЛТЕР]

I agree, I believe that the Vanguard must be formed. It may not have to be a Vanguard in the exact sense as it was in Russia. However, I think a Vanguard is needed in order to agitate, and educate.

To sum it up:

If you ain't down with Lenin then I ain't down with you. :D

[moulinrouge]

Because this will always result in the leaders of the vanguard party forming a new ruling class.

[Rooster]

I have respect for Lenin but I think he put himself into a position that he couldn't maintain. The whole 'socialism is state capitalism made to benefit the people' just isn't correct.

[Questionable]

Because this will always result in the leaders of the vanguard party forming a new ruling class.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. How do you figure that? Is it because power corrupts? If so, you're still tainted with bourgeois idealism. Is it because of an organizational error? Then those can be analyzed and mended.

It appears to me that a lot of anti-Leninists are liberals who have either recently become communists, or are using it as a veil for their true liberal intentions. The argument will be something like, "I'm a communist, but I'm not dictator like Lenin/Stalin/Tito/the communist boogeyman I've been raised to believe in!" Then they'll propose strategies based on their personal values that end up amounting to reformism. They're the same type who will say they like communism as a theory, but will then follow up with an asinine remark about how Stalin was evil or how it's incompatible with human nature.

Not to say that anti-Leninism is entirely bunk. There are a lot of valid critiques to be made, but in other arenas of discussion, it seems like my example prevails.

[Yuppie Grinder]

It appears to me that a lot of anti-Leninists are liberals who have either recently become communists, or are using it as a veil for their true liberal intentions.
This is true for social democrats and "anarchist" chomskyites.

[Paulappaul]

Even if that was Lenin's theory it doesn't stand up at all today, the Working Class can and often does read Marx which is way more readily accessible and easy to understand then it was say 50 or 100 years ago. The fact that the working class is now more then ever organizing itself towards a revolutionary end proves Lenin's theory false. Second Lenin's theory supposed that Consciousness was something to be obtained, like knowledge in mathematics or astronomy. This is a bourgeois mentality and was pouted by the likes of Classical Liberals in Bourgeois Revolutions. Consciousness is a reaction to the material conditions of the world, and the movement of the proletariat towards Communism is a material fact as a negation to its existing conditions of alienation and exploitation. Lenin figured that this wasn't true and that there was no natural movement of the Proletariat towards Communism, that they had to be lead by a political minority to that end. He refuted partially following the uprising of the proletariat in 1905 in Russia.

[Prometeo liberado]

Because this will always result in the leaders of the vanguard party forming a new ruling class.

A new political ruling class born of a ML party can only come into being when the theory and practice and democratic centralism is abandoned. Vanguardism is in its simplest form is a military tactic. Putting your most seasoned troops forward so to speak. Every battle utilizes it because it works. The major theoretical issues of the party still need to be read and hashed out amongst the membership. Much of the Leninist bashing I feel is less a result of having read Lenin than of peoples misinformed view of it as a monolithic and dry ideology.

[Caj]

I think the argument against the Leninist vanguard party has not so much to do with the bourgeois-idealist sentiment that "power corrupts", but with a valid concern regarding the possibility of the vanguard taking on class interests seperate from that of the proletariat.

Let's say a vanguard party, composed of a minority of the class conscious proletariat as a whole, takes state power and proceeds to centralize the means of production in the hands of the state. It should be obvious that this vanguard is, owing to its position of state power and control of the means of production, going to take on class interests seperate from that of the class conscious proletariat as a whole which lacks state power, i.e., the vanguard will cease to be proletarian in nature.

Now, in the semi-feudal, backward country of 1917 Russia, I don't think this criticism applied. There wasn't much of a proletarian population to begin with, and only a fraction of this was class conscious. Today, however, I can't think of a region with material conditions similar to that of 1917 Russia that would render the use of a Leninist vanguard party practical. I think we should return to the notion of the "vanguard" simply meaning the class conscious section of the proletariat.

[Questionable]

Even if that was Lenin's theory it doesn't stand up at all today, the Working Class can and often does read Marx which is way more readily accessible and easy to understand then it was say 50 or 100 years ago. The fact that the working class is now more then ever organizing itself towards a revolutionary end proves Lenin's theory false.

What working class are you talking about? Based on my own experience, the average worker still doesn't have the time, education, or desire to sit down and analyze Das Kapital. The leftist movements we have today are still in the vast minority compared to the popular sentiment of the working class.


Second Lenin's theory supposed that Consciousness was something to be obtained, like knowledge in mathematics or astronomy. This is a bourgeois mentality and was pouted by the likes of Classical Liberals in Bourgeois Revolutions. Consciousness is a reaction to the material conditions of the world, and the movement of the proletariat towards Communism is a material fact as a negation to its existing conditions of alienation and exploitation. Lenin figured that this wasn't true and that there was no natural movement of the Proletariat towards Communism, that they had to be lead by a political minority to that end. He refuted partially following the uprising of the proletariat in 1905 in Russia

And yet his theory worked, and so far it's lead the only (temporarily) successful proletariat revolution. I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement, certainly the world has changed, but to disregard all his works as an irrelevant failure is a grave mistake.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

I would consider myself a non-Leninist, but not anti-Leninist. I think Lenin's ideas and tactics were specific for Russia during that time period, but not applicable to more western industrialized countries. I would reccomend this to read.

Open Letter To Comrade Lenin by Herman Gorter. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter/index.htm)

Lenin was a true revolutionary, but he also wasn't a god. His tactics were correct for his time and place. I am under that firm belief.

[Caj]

A new political ruling class born of a ML party can only come into being when the theory and practice and democratic centralism is abandoned.

Please explain to me how a political ruling class is formed from abandonment of democratic centralism. Once you do that, explain to me how it's the only way that a political ruling class can emerge from an M-L party.

[x359594]

...a lot of grievances with Lenin's theories result from simple misunderstandings.

...that were translated into practice by people who formed vanguard parties.

Lenin's ideas are one thing on paper an another matter when put into practice by people who interpreted them according to given circumstances. Lenin himself modified his own ideas as they were tested in real situations.

After Lenin's death his body of theoretical and practical work was reified into the holy writ of revolution, but during his lifetime Lenin warned against turning theory into dogma in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder as well as rebutting criticism of his theories.

I think a lot of criticism is directed against this fossilization of Lenin's theories into something called "Leninism" rather than to an actual engagement with the theories themselves. Indeed, some have been superseded by scientific discoveries (some of which occurred in Lenin's lifetime that he apparently didn't know about, such as the theory of relativity) while other still have some practical use.

[Rooster]

No one bringing up the whole socialism is state-capitalism made to benefit be people? No? Oh well... :confused:

[Prometeo liberado]

An elite and separate class as a separate ruling class forms within the context of an abandonment of DC because no longer are the safe guards in place to ferret out or even monitor the political/ideological class conscious maturity of would be leaders. Appointees to various posts are no longer held to the scrutiny of the membership. Before the revolution there were those in the leadership of the Bolshevik party who felt Lenin was wrong. Lenin was forced to fight this not through anti-class behavior(supporting the appointments of questionable Marxist to leading committees), but by the power of his ideas and the support of the working class.
Within a ML party that practices a strict adherence to DC only the political body of working class leadership can exist. Only when the democratic part of DC is lost can this new class become fully entrenched.

[Paulappaul]

What working class are you talking about? Based on my own experience, the average worker still doesn't have the time, education, or desire to sit down and analyze Das Kapital. The leftist movements we have today are still in the vast minority compared to the popular sentiment of the working class.Luckly they don't have to read Das Kapital, they can check it out on Wikipedia or pick up about a Million books giving the basic rundown of the what the book says. Marx didn't say to the working class: "Read Das Kapital" that's dumb. He gave lectures on Political Economy and released much easier explanations (ie "Wages, Prices and Profits" or whatever its called).

It's not about "Leftist" Movements. It's about the Proletarian Movement. And they are almost never, ever, one of the same.


And yet his theory worked, and so far it's lead the only (temporarily) successful proletariat revolution. I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement, certainly the world has changed, but to disregard all his works as an irrelevant failure is a grave mistake. Oh yes because what a Russian said about the Russian Proletarit said over 100 years ago still has a great deal of relevancy today :rolleyes: Sorry forget. Lenin didn't lead anything, to place one man's theory at the head of the movement of the classes is ignorance and Vulgar Marxism. Lenin was reflective of particular material conditions, a fresh working class with relative ignorance to the Western Proletariat and a society in transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. The only revolution in Russia that happened was a Bourgeois Revolution, and its Proletarian Content was stripped away by 1921. I am a million times more fascinated with workings of the modern proletariat then the Ghost of this tyrant.

[moulinrouge]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. How do you figure that? Is it because power corrupts? If so, you're still tainted with bourgeois idealism. Is it because of an organizational error? Then those can be analyzed and mended.

It appears to me that a lot of anti-Leninists are liberals who have either recently become communists, or are using it as a veil for their true liberal intentions. The argument will be something like, "I'm a communist, but I'm not dictator like Lenin/Stalin/Tito/the communist boogeyman I've been raised to believe in!" Then they'll propose strategies based on their personal values that end up amounting to reformism. They're the same type who will say they like communism as a theory, but will then follow up with an asinine remark about how Stalin was evil or how it's incompatible with human nature.

Not to say that anti-Leninism is entirely bunk. There are a lot of valid critiques to be made, but in other arenas of discussion, it seems like my example prevails.

I am a communist and i don't want the working class to be ruled by a new class emerging from the vanguard party.

This is what happened after all vanguard party revolutions it is inevitable due to the material conditions of a vanguard party.

And i'm not even going to argue about stalin, thats a flamewar that has been going for the past 80 years.

[KlassWar]

Because this will always result in the leaders of the vanguard party forming a new ruling class.

That can be more or less worrying depending on their power base: If their power base is their popularity inside workers' councils and they're recallable and replaceable by the Soviets, they're not much different from union bosses. That's manageable.
A fully democratic DOTP can get hijacked by social-traitors and degenerate into run-of-the-mill social democracy, and it's a risk they'll have to ward off against.


If the power base is the Party itself (and its partisan militias), they face the risk of slipping into rule by cliques, paternalism, substitutionism and even totalitarianism.

Vanguard parties must exist: They're an immensely useful tool in organizing and coordinating the struggle, and they've been present in most overthrowals of bourgeois power. The Party must support the working masses in their revolutionary struggle and help coordinate their assault on capitalist power. Its post-revolution role should be mainly agitation-propaganda, education, pushing for policy inside the Soviets/Soviet-Equivalents, and internationalism: Assisting similar movements in destroying bourgeois power wherever revolutionary struggles are happening.

During a revolutionary war, the Party might be forced to exercise dictatorship directly: Those fighting reactionary forces will have to overrule, dismiss or suppress compromisers and defeatists, even from the Soviets or organs of class power. This is an extremely dangerous move (but sometimes military considerations make it inevitable)


Vanguard Parties that find themselves in the need to exercise dictatorship on the basis of their own partisan forces should strive to both represent the vast majority of the class-conscious elements in the working classes and be internally democratic: That'd preserve some form of ultimate worker control. Ultimate worker control is needed to prevent a revolution from eventually derailing. If a Vanguard Party both fails to install genuine Soviet power (rule by workers' representatives) and they fail to maintain inner-party debate and democracy, things will get ugly pretty damn fast.

[robbo203]

I don't post a lot, but I browse this forum very often, and I'm interested in why there has been such an upsurge of anti-Leninism as of late, not just on this website either.

Most of the criticisms I read are directed at his idea of a vanguard party. Correct me of I'm wrong, but the vanguard strategy that Lenin proposed was simply a response to the fact that workers were too busy actually working to sit down and read Marx, and they were becoming radicalized unevenly. So, the most politically aware sections of the working-class needed to form a party that would lead workers away from simply struggling for better conditions within the capitalist system, and towards overthrowing the entire system.

However, most anti-Leninists like to claim the vanguard strategy simply amounts to an intellectual elite guiding the herds of uneducated workers. I'm sorry, but I don't see how anybody can come to that conclusion unless they blatantly do not understand. I could see nothing in Lenin's works that even hinted at resentment towards the proletariat. He was simply addressing the fact that class consciousness emerges unevenly, and devising a tactic to counter that. Some workers are going to know all about Marx and their position in the world, and some are going to be too busy working or too misguided by propaganda to bother learning themselves. It's not elitism, it's reality.

Or maybe I'm the one who's misunderstood. What has caused such a huge rise of Anti-Leninist sentiment? Because based on what I've seen, a lot of grievances with Lenin's theories result from simple misunderstandings.

I think you do misunderstand and as one of those who counts himself as an "anti leninist" let me explain.

Lenin knew well enough what socialism meant in its original Marxian sense - as a moneyless wageless stateless society. He knew well enough that there was no mass socialist consciosuness among the Russian workers despite the romanticised rubbish that sometimes gets posted here about the mass "socialist" movement existing in Russia at the time He understod enough of Marxism to appreciate that without a socialist majority you simply cannot have socialism and he said this many times. He accepted that socialism was simply not on the cards in Russia for that very reason

The problem was that he subscribed to a vanguardist theory of revolution. According to this, the enlightened minority of socialists would capture power in advance of the majority becoming socialists and, from this position of power, would somehow steer society in a "socialist" direction and create an environment more conducive to the growth of socialist ideas.

Unfortunately it just does not work out like this and, however well intentioned Lenin may have been, his vanguardist policy in retrospect has been an absolute unmitigated disaster. Without hesitation I would say that what happened in the aftermath of Russian revolution which laid the foundations for the Stalinist dictorship that followed, was perhaps the single biggest factor in history that has impeded the growth of a genuine socialist movement since then. Pseudo socialist movements deriving inspiration from Lenin there have aplenty but not much in the way of the genuine article. This two things are hardly concidental and its for this reason that the decline of Leninism might just signify the possibility of a genuine socialst movement making a much bigger impact than it has done hitherto.


Why did the whole Lenist detour prove such a disaster? Well quite simply for this reason and this, Im afraid, is what Leninnists and their various offshoots tend alway to overlook: in capturing power in advance of majority of workers becoming socialists this can only mean one thing - you are stuck with capitalism. Whether you like it or not you are obliged to administer capitalism since there is no way you can yet introduce socialism.

This is where the problem arises. In administering capitalism you are compelled by the very nature of the system itself to promote the interests of capital against those of wage labour. Thats how capitalism ticks after all - through the exploitation of wage labour by capital. Leninists claim to be materialists but , you know , it strikes me that they are really rank idealists in denying this simple stark fact of life. They think socialist intentions and cleaving to the nomenclauture of socialist revolution will somehow carry more weight than material reality, that if you keep on repeating to yourself that the Bolshevik revolution was a socialist revolution often enough this will somehow make it so. It wont.

Trapped within this profound contradiction of having to operate a capitalist system in the interests of capital and against the workers while professing to want socialism, Leninists then went on to do huge damage to the socialist cause in their efforts to square the circle. Indeed, the very definition of socialism itself underwnet a profound change at the hands of Lenin himself. This was all part of a sustained (and actually rather sophisticated) ideological attempt to cultivate the impression that the soviet system was still somehow "on course" to achieve socialism while conveneniently allowing the question of when socialism might be introduced to be indefinitely postponed

In point of fact the Vanguard did not change Russiain society in a "socialist direction". Quite the opposite happened. The vanguard itself changed under the impact of managing capitalism. Its essential capitalist core was progressively revealed over subsequent decades - rather like peeling an onion - as the whole ideological baggage of soviet " socialism" grew increasingly thin and threadbare.

Most ironically of all in the very twilight years of the Soviet Union it was the Vanguard itself or powerful elements within it, that dealt the final coup de grace to the whole farce that was the Soviet Union in their "revolution from above". Many of the Red fat cats, the soviet capitalist class, that enjoyed a measure of power and privilege way beyond what the ordinary Russian workers could even dream of , were to use their position of influence to mutate into that new breed of modern oligarchs in Russia today.

How ironic this all was, The very Vanguard that was supposed to steer the non-socialist Russian workers to socialism were the very ones to embrace corporate capitalism with such a gusto,. If any single fact condemns the whole Leninist theory of the vanguard to well deserved oblivion it is surely this . Nothing can be more pathetic than the feeble attempts on the part of Leninists to rationalise away such a development in such moralistic/idealistic terms as an "act of betrayal". It was hardly an act of betrayal. It was the logical outcome of a historical process whose foundations had been laid 70 years earlier



I could go on but I wont. Other anti-Leninist will no doubt have a slightly different persective on the matter than me . Buit I think we would all agree that Leninism as a world view has proven to be failure of monumental proportions as far the project of working class self-emancipation is concerned

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

^^That is a fantastic expose of Leninism's failures in respect to the USSR.

Indeed, I find Leninism to be too idealistic and utopian in its ideas regarding a few englightened individuals leading the working class to glorious Socialism after an indefined period.

[andyx1205]

The working class CAN ONLY be emancipated by the WORKING CLASS itself. I'm not saying, Marx said this.

Lenin was an opportunist. He had good intentions, of course, he was an idealistic revolutionary, yet, good intentions do not translate into good results. Stalinism was a natural outgrowth of Leninism, something that even Slavoj Zizek agrees with. This does not mean Lenin would have approved of Stalinism, of course not, but the structure that he left behind led to Stalinism. Those on the top will come and go, hence you need to construct a movement from the ground up, that is, real socialism...bottom-up socialism not Leninist top-down socialism.

A lot of idealists are Leninists that think they can somehow guide the ignorant masses to a revolution but this is unrealistic and does not work in the long-term and never has. The Soviet Union was a failure, it offered free health-care and education and technically full employment (though in reality this was not true) but it did not emancipated the masses. It was like living in a prison...you get social services and welfare but you're still in chains, disobedience and dissent is not tolerated. We can respect the domestic accomplishments of the Soviet Union from an objective level but this has nothing to do with socialism or Marxism.

I understand the influence of and admiration of Leninism from the point of view of impoverished nations and third world countries but in today's Capitalist West, Leninism has absolutely NO RELEVANCE. People still haven't gotten over it. This ideology was tried and failed, it was a disaster and blaming everything on the Capitalist West for its failures is childish and irrational.

As Slavoj Zizek says, we need a new form of communism. We need to formulate a new communism for the 21st century and this should be the task of all communists today. Lets face it, we have no communist theory. No plan of how to get there or how to carry it out or what the society will be like, we only have general ideas. Leninism was a failure.

Marx showed us what happened, what is happening, and what can happen (class struggle leading to dictatorship of proletariat) if we wish it so. It's up to us to get there, and it will be a difficult task.

As long as we have Leninists in the mix who still cling to a failed ideology, we will not be able to move forward.

[Althusser]

I don't post a lot, but I browse this forum very often, and I'm interested in why there has been such an upsurge of anti-Leninism as of late, not just on this website either.

Most of the criticisms I read are directed at his idea of a vanguard party. Correct me of I'm wrong, but the vanguard strategy that Lenin proposed was simply a response to the fact that workers were too busy actually working to sit down and read Marx, and they were becoming radicalized unevenly. So, the most politically aware sections of the working-class needed to form a party that would lead workers away from simply struggling for better conditions within the capitalist system, and towards overthrowing the entire system.

However, most anti-Leninists like to claim the vanguard strategy simply amounts to an intellectual elite guiding the herds of uneducated workers. I'm sorry, but I don't see how anybody can come to that conclusion unless they blatantly do not understand. I could see nothing in Lenin's works that even hinted at resentment towards the proletariat. He was simply addressing the fact that class consciousness emerges unevenly, and devising a tactic to counter that. Some workers are going to know all about Marx and their position in the world, and some are going to be too busy working or too misguided by propaganda to bother learning themselves. It's not elitism, it's reality.

Or maybe I'm the one who's misunderstood. What has caused such a huge rise of Anti-Leninist sentiment? Because based on what I've seen, a lot of grievances with Lenin's theories result from simple misunderstandings.

Agreed.

"If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years."
- Vladimir Lenin

I believe that Lenin thought that before implementing a "dictatorship of the proletariat", an actual industrialized nation, like Germany, had to go socialist. That nation would then proceed to industrialize Russia. I think the 1917 revolution was a way to put Russia at a halt, rather than fail at bringing socialism to an un-industrialized backward nation. Unfortunately, Stalin continues to make Lenin's policies look like shit with his "socialism in one country" counter-revolutionary nonsense. Put my Trotskyist bias aside, but Trotsky wouldn't have ignored the rise of fascism. He would have successfully led a workers revolution in Germany. Long Live Lenin.

[Geiseric]

The way Left Communism works is that it instantly makes Leninists seem like douchebags by putting up the strawman, "Oh the workers can't manage themselves? The workers state is forming a new class! State Capitalism benefits only the vanguard, who pretty much are indistinguishable from the bureaucracy that arose in the fSU (While they ignore the purges of the people who were Leninists when it wasn't cool or popular to be one)."

Ultra leftism is what is ruining Occupy by calling for a fucking General Strike. I was looking forward to organizing a group from my high school to head to a demonstration that had solid demands on May 1st like has been happening for the past few years, but the Anarchists who are organising Occupy fucked it up completely by calling for a General Strike. Great fucking job! I was pissed when republican students tried to numb the walk out that I planned at my school, but for calling for a General Strike without even talking to the Unions or any existing organs of workers control is assanine.

Anyways there really isn't anything to bash on Lenin for, he tolerated the Left Coms in Russia for alot longer than they give him credit for. But when you don't think that a state is necessary to deal with a counter revolution, there is something wrong in your head. When you think that Communism can be achieved without a DotP, you are utopian. I probably look like a dick but I don't care.

[Paulappaul]

Ultra leftism is what is ruining Occupy by calling for a fucking General Strike. I was looking forward to organizing a group from my high school to head to a demonstration that had solid demands on May 1st like has been happening for the past few years, but the Anarchists who are organising Occupy fucked it up completely by calling for a General Strike. Great fucking job! I was pissed when republican students tried to numb the walk out that I planned at my school, but for calling for a General Strike without even talking to the Unions or any existing organs of workers control is assanine. Good GOD. It's one of those moments where I really wish I could stick my head through the Computer Screen and pop out of yours and tell you just how stupid this is face to your face. Unions make up 11% of the working class population, as though they could fucking call a General Strike and make it work. That's a fucking joke. The 89% of the working class can make this a General Strike, not the Unions. Furthermore look at history please, was the the Railroad Strike of 1877 that shut down the nation called by any Union? Oh wait, that's right there was no Union! Spoiler Alert: You don't need a Union to call a Strike!



Anyways there really isn't anything to bash on Lenin for, he tolerated the Left Coms in Russia for alot longer than they give him credit for. But when you don't think that a state is necessary to deal with a counter revolution, there is something wrong in your head. When you think that Communism can be achieved without a DotP, you are utopian. Oh you know fucking up World Revolution or being a total dick that's nothing to bash. Left - Communists believe in a "state" just not in the same sense as you do. Obviously there will be counter insurgencies, we just don't think you need to centralize power or eliminate workers control. DotP needs to be an act of the revolution, not a historical stage.


I probably look like a dick but I don't care. Yeah you really do.

[Geiseric]

You do need a union, in the U.S. to call a strike. I will be right as soon as the "General Strike" fails and when we lose a chance to show solidarity to the working class in spain and greece who are organising general strikes and demonstrations in the hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom aren't part of Unions i'd speculate.

I know that the union leaderships are tied to capital, however they and us have some similar goals, i.e. the preservation of some kind of organ of workers power! The minimum wage, SS, Medicare, and everything else our grandparents generation struggled for in the Depression will be gone if there are no workers organizations to organise the class to do something against those being lost. Those are goals that are in common with us and them.

We shouldn't support the democrats like they do. However refusing to work with mainstream parties or unions is what paved the road to the rise of Fascism, and we need to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Btw the world revolution would have had no chance of happening if the Russian revolution, led to victory by the revolutionary working class organised under the banner of the Bolsheviks wasn't victorious and if Hungary, Germany and Spain weren't sparked by the RR.

The DotP was purged by the Bureauracy, which is nothing Lenin or any other Leninists could have prevented unless they had bullet proof skulls.

[Brosip Tito]

I consider myself a Leninist of sorts. I see him as very influential on my politics. I agree here, I disagree there.

I would certainly say I am pro-Lenin.

Now, stop saying Leninism = Marxism-Leninism.

[Questionable]

Luckly they don't have to read Das Kapital, they can check it out on Wikipedia or pick up about a Million books giving the basic rundown of the what the book says. Marx didn't say to the working class: "Read Das Kapital" that's dumb. He gave lectures on Political Economy and released much easier explanations (ie "Wages, Prices and Profits" or whatever its called).

It's not about "Leftist" Movements. It's about the Proletarian Movement. And they are almost never, ever, one of the same.

Have fun waiting for everybody to learn Marxism from Wikipedia.


Oh yes because what a Russian said about the Russian Proletarit said over 100 years ago still has a great deal of relevancy today :rolleyes: Sorry forget. Lenin didn't lead anything, to place one man's theory at the head of the movement of the classes is ignorance and Vulgar Marxism. Lenin was reflective of particular material conditions, a fresh working class with relative ignorance to the Western Proletariat and a society in transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. The only revolution in Russia that happened was a Bourgeois Revolution, and its Proletarian Content was stripped away by 1921. I am a million times more fascinated with workings of the modern proletariat then the Ghost of this tyrant.

Now you're just being a douche, and there's way too much bickering and insults going around this site than actual debating. The fact that Lenin's theories were reflective of his material conditions does not mean that certain aspects do not still hold true today, or that they can be updated, and they certainly have not been "debunked" as you say when his tactics have resulted in the few revolutions we've had so far. Your grievances with Lenin seem more personal than theoretical, what with you calling him a "huge dick."
Marx's theories were also reflective of the material conditions of the 1800s. Good thing I'm a million times more fascinated with the workings of the modern proletariat than the ghost of a writer, eh? But then again, you're probably going to just lament that you can't reach through your computer screen and yell at me like you did with Syd.

[Paulappaul]

You do need a union, in the U.S. to call a strike. I will be right as soon as the "General Strike" fails and when we lose a chance to show solidarity to the union members in spain and greece who are organising general strikes and demonstrations in the hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom aren't part of Unions i'd speculate.

I love how you didn't address the Historical examples in the US where a Strike has been called without a Union. You know, one of the most famous and effective strikes. A General Strike never "wins", its a piece of a struggle towards a historical moment when the Working Class has the means and experience to overthrow the existing state of things. So wait, it will only be "Solidarity" when it is done by a Union? How the fuck does that make any sense.


I know that the union leaderships are tied to capital, however they and us have some similar goals, i.e. the preservation of some kind of organ of workers power! The minimum wage, SS, Medicare, and everything else our grandparents generation struggled for in the Depression will be gone if there are no workers organizations to organise the class to do something against those being lost. Those are goals that are in common with us and them.

It's Unions which are fighting weakest for those things which your Grandparents struggled for. Occupy and the Broader the majority of the working class outside of Unions are doing so much more then Trade Unions in fighting those reformist struggles then Unions. The fact that Occupy was able in just a couple of weeks a mass 100,000 in Oakland and several thousand outside of Oakland to a General Strike shows its potential is so much more then any Union.


However refusing to work with mainstream parties or unions is what paved the road to the rise of Fascism, and we need to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Another weird strawman to try and get me to debate Left - Communism with you. Fine whatever. Refusing to work with Mainstream Parties or Reformist Trade Unions opens up a third possibility outside choosing between Republican Capitalism and Fascist Capitalism, that is, Communism. Honestly I'd choose the later.


the world revolution would have had no chance of happening if the Russian revolution.. wasn't victorious

The conditions for revolution in the West were laid way for Russia and would have happened anyways. The Russian Revolution wasn't victorious. The fact that it created more despotism and ultimately collapsed is testament to this. World Struggles in the Revolutionary period of 1917 - 21 failed. Both on the part of the Proletarit and the Theories its leaders pertained. Lets not try to glorify the past.


The DotP was purged by the Bureauracy, which is nothing Lenin or any other Leninists could have prevented unless they had bullet proof skulls.

There was never a "DotP" there was a Bourgeois Revolution then there was an attempt at a Proletarian Revolution which was crushed by the Bolsheviks working off the theory of Lenin protecting their own social status.

[Paulappaul]

Have fun waiting for everybody to learn Marxism from Wikipedia.

Have fun injecting what a Russian said 100 years ago into the Ghettos of America. It's not about people "learning Marxism" that won't cause a Revolution.


The fact that Lenin's theories were reflective of his material conditions does not mean that certain aspects do not still hold true today, or that they can be updated, and they certainly have not been "debunked" as you say when his tactics have resulted in the few revolutions we've had so far. Your grievances with Lenin seem more personal than theoretical, what with you calling him a "huge dick."

Lolwut. How is it personal? I don't know Lenin haha. Huge dick for you know, allowing the purges, bein chill with Kronstadt and all and bein a dick to any opposition to his authority. Nothing Lenin said holds true today. The conditions are so immensly different then backwards Russia in 1905. It's like saying Thomas Jefferson is important for the Revolution today. Oh yes those few great revolutions that produced nothing but defeat, State Capitalism and the world wide rejection of Socialism. Good Job Leninism.


Marx's theories were also reflective of the material conditions of the 1800s. Good thing I'm a million times more fascinated with the workings of the modern proletariat than the ghost of a writer, eh?

Marx isn't relevant today outside of his works on Political Economy or history. To quote the Communist Manifesto would be ignorance and Vulgar Materialism.


But then again, you're probably going to just lament that you can't reach through your computer screen and yell at me like you did with Syd.

Still wish I could do that :(

[Geiseric]

The port shutdowns with the ILWU accomplished more in a few nights than Occupy San Fransisco has since it started with its Liberal Anarchist spectacles. there is no attempt from Occupy's side to organize with the working class and to create demands that the working class collectively has in its interest, and that will be its downfall.

So far, Occupy is saying "We're pissed, but we're not going to demand anything." And that is not proletarian, it is petit bourgeois adventurist reformism. That is what Occupy is since it refuses to work with working class organizations.

[Questionable]

Have fun injecting what a Russian said 100 years ago into the Ghettos of America. It's not about people "learning Marxism" that won't cause a Revolution.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Can you honestly not say how vanguard tactics could be applied today? Class consciousness develops unevenly, that's a fact whether you care to admit it or not. The vanguard allows a way for the most radicalized section of the proletariat to work together and lead the rest in the right direction. Obviously things have changed, but the basic principles are still applicable.


Lolwut. How is it personal? I don't know Lenin haha. Huge dick for you know, allowing the purges, bein chill with Kronstadt and all and bein a dick to any opposition to his authority. Nothing Lenin said holds true today. The conditions are so immensly different then backwards Russia in 1905. It's like saying Thomas Jefferson is important for the Revolution today. Oh yes those few great revolutions that produced nothing but defeat, State Capitalism and the world wide rejection of Socialism. Good Job Leninism.

You mock me for implying it's personal, then go on to list your grievances with Lenin's actions. There's already some articles posted by A Marxist Historian floating around about the Kronstadt that ultra-leftists love romanticizing so much.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html)

[Geiseric]

Kronstadt wouldn't of been handled like it was if the whites weren't ready to invade from Finland, and France reported it two weeks before the uprising happened, meaning that there was obviously something more important than an ultra left soldiers uprising going on.

By the way, I have skype if you want to "yell at my face." I have nothing better to do since there isn't anything to organize due to the reformism of the Immigrants Rights groups under obama and the occupy people losing all of the momentum.

[Ostrinski]

There are many things to criticize Lenin for, however, I feel the concept of the basic need for a vanguard party is not one of them.

[Geiseric]

What is there to criticize Lenin for?

[Paulappaul]

The port shutdowns with the ILWU accomplished more in a few nights than Occupy San Fransisco has since it started with its Liberal Anarchist spectacles. there is no attempt from Occupy's side to organize with the working class and to create demands that the working class collectively has in its interest, and that will be its downfall.

The Port Shutdowns by Occupy were not endorsed by the Union, but they effectively got the EGT to the negiotating table with Local 21, then the Union sold them out. There is the Historic interests of the working class which it is not always conscious of, but is always working towards. Occupy is the first step by spontaneous initiative to actualizing those historic interests. What's important is that Occupy is putting this in a class perspective and starting to think as a class which will lead it to the conclusion that Capitalism and the State must go and it is already well on its way to that.


So far, Occupy is saying "We're pissed, but we're not going to demand anything." And that is not proletarian, it is petit bourgeois adventurist reformism. That is what Occupy is since it refuses to work with working class organizations.

When Occupy shutdown the Ports it had demands. When it declared its first Occupation it had demands. What world are you living on? Do you know anything about Occupy?


don't understand what you're trying to say. Can you honestly not say how vanguard tactics could be applied today? Class consciousness develops unevenly, that's a fact whether you care to admit it or not. The vanguard allows a way for the most radicalized section of the proletariat to work together and lead the rest in the right direction. Obviously things have changed, but the basic principles are still applicable.

For one, who gives you the high and mighty position of understanding every process of the revolution? To know its right direction? This type of elitism has lead us into countless poor decisions. Of course Class Consciousness develops unevenly, that doesn't necessitate a Vanguard.


Kronstadt wouldn't of been handled like it was if the whites weren't ready to invade from Finland, and France reported it two weeks before the uprising happened, meaning that there was obviously something more important than an ultra left soldiers uprising going on.

This old piece of garbage, really? There were tons of bourgeois propaganda floating around that an uprising was happening in Russia that the Russian Proletariat was unhappy or some shit. I don't take for a minute that just because some obscure newspaper ran an article (supposedly mind you, do you know of who someone WHO ACTUALLY HAS THAT ARTICLE? ) that this was an International Conspiracy. Look at the statistic of the folks at Kronstadt and you will see the vast majority were Bolsheviks, from the Old guard mind you, and 60% were fighters in civil war of 1918.

[Questionable]

For one, who gives you the high and mighty position of understanding every process of the revolution? To know its right direction? This type of elitism has lead us into countless poor decisions. Of course Class Consciousness develops unevenly, that doesn't necessitate a Vanguard.

The more I talk to you, the more your position is boiling down to "Lenin is bad because authority is bad! Down with the man! Lenin was a jerk!"

If class consciousness develops unevenly, but we don't need a vanguard, what do you propose as your alternative?

[Paulappaul]

The more I talk to you, the more your position is boiling down to "Lenin is bad because authority is bad! Down with the man! Lenin was a jerk!"

If class consciousness develops unevenly, but we don't need a vanguard, what do you propose as your alternative?

How? I said elitism is bad for Revolutionaries, you think its good? Yes its fucking dandy that you have these revolutionaries walking around telling the working class how they need to act. Don't try to create those "authority" strawmen to drive me into some debate on Libertarianism.

Generalizing class struggle = exposing it to your readymade plan. This was Luxemburg's criticism of Anarchists and Leninists alike. In its place I think we should be advocating in worker institutions the linking up of struggles/assuring their struggles are a success. Some struggles are gonna be farther along, take Occupy for instance which had way more resources and avenues of struggling then the ILWU. Obviously Occupy was more Revolutionary then the ILWU and showed solidarity to the Rank and File struggles who were behind Occupy politically and the rank and file responded positively and solidarity was felt in feeling and in action.

[Geiseric]

My entire point was that the port shutdown, done in conjunction with labor that is organized, was a great thing, and that the rest of occupy makes no attempt to organize outside of their own camps. there were no demands when it was in its first stages, and the entire consensus reasoning ruined the entire thing. This proves that a centralised and democratic (not consensus, which is increadibly undemocratic) Leninist party to organise all revolutionary workers and communists is necessary.

[Paulappaul]

My entire point was that the port shutdown, done in conjunction with labor that is organized, was a great thing, and that the rest of occupy makes no attempt to organize outside of their own camps.

"Labor" represents a minority of the working class. You have a weird fetish for those organized elements of the working class who are typically very conservative and reactionary. Heads up: "Trade Union Consciousness" does not equal "Socialist Consciousness". BTW labor meaning the Bureaucrats in the Trade Unions was pissed we shutdown the ports, whereas the Rank and File eat it up, they loved it. In Portland Longshoreman brought us Pizza and gave us funds, joined in on the Picketline. We lead them to shutdown industries around the Port as well. That's a Working Class Vanguard, there self - proclaimed Socialist Vanguards from your Camps were pissed.


there were no demands when it was in its first stages, and the entire consensus reasoning ruined the entire thing.

Typically when Class Struggle emerges it is just out of anger and will of action. As becomes more organized in solidifys its organization and conceptualizes its demands. Its first stages are gone and it very much has demands, the readdressing of the grievances of the Working Class, the end of Class distinctions.


This proves that a centralised and democratic (not consensus, which is increadibly undemocratic) Leninist party to organise all revolutionary workers and communists is necessary.

I can't wait for your Vanguard to pontificate to me and the broader working class how we aught to organize. It'll be a joke in the face of real and practical working class action.

[Questionable]

How? I said elitism is bad for Revolutionaries, you think its good? Yes its fucking dandy that you have these revolutionaries walking around telling the working class how they need to act. Don't try to create those "authority" strawmen to drive me into some debate on Libertarianism.

I've tried explaining to you multiple times that vanguard =/= elite forcing the proletarian to do its bidding, but you just keep throwing the same shit at me about how revolutionaries are going to be walking around using the workers like toy soldiers. I'm starting to think you just don't want to understand.

Don't talk to me about strawmen. Your whole argument is based on a fallacy. You say vanguard = elite, therefore anyone who supports it supports elitism, despite my many attempts to explain to you that it is not what you're saying it is.

[robbo203]

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Can you honestly not say how vanguard tactics could be applied today? Class consciousness develops unevenly, that's a fact whether you care to admit it or not. The vanguard allows a way for the most radicalized section of the proletariat to work together and lead the rest in the right direction. Obviously things have changed, but the basic principles are still applicable

No they are NOT applicable and never were. Their inevitable outcome was an unmitigated disaster. Read my earlier post on the subject

You confuse two things. It is legitimate to talk of a "vanguard" as the most militant class conscious section of the working class. What is definitely NOT legitimate is to suggest that this tiny section of the working class class should seize power in advance of the working class becoming socialist and try to steer society in the direction of socialism. (When the working class as a whole becomes socialist there is by definition no more vanguard)

That is what the Vanguard theory is about and that is what has set back the growth of the socialist movement probably by decades. The ghost of Leninism needs to be exorcised by from the socialist movement one and for all!!

[Jimmie Higgins]

Or maybe I'm the one who's misunderstood. What has caused such a huge rise of Anti-Leninist sentiment? Because based on what I've seen, a lot of grievances with Lenin's theories result from simple misunderstandings.Not sure I've noticed this - at least not as a significant difference on the left. What I do see is more people radicalizing and in movements most people still tend to come from a default liberal viewpoint and among the growing numbers of radicals the default politics tend to range from radical liberalism to forms of anarchism.

Movements are new and politically immature; independent organization (political or social) in the US working class at least is pretty non-existent outside of church groups. The best things Leninist methods have to offer deal with how revolutionaries involved in more mature working class struggles might operate. We're not hiding out from the Tsarist police so those years can only be crudely informative and no revolutionaries of contemporary working classes have really had to seriously consider the organization question like radicals of the early 20th century had to.

So in a lot of these movements spontaneity and disorganization exist, but are not seen by many involved in politics for the first time to be problems because in general, and I think all radicals should recognize this, even disorganized and uneven fight-back is better than a lack of class struggle. Things have been in the decline for our class so long that people are still timid to push for more than moderate reforms on the one hand, or are content with a flashy one-off direct action that shows discontentment but doesn't achieve anything concrete.

So I think this is why there has been an initial rejection of organization among many newly radicalizing people since the late 1990s. I think some of these political tendencies have basically made a virtue out of the limitations of the modern left and have adapted to it.

But in the bigger picture of why is there anti-Leninism among revolutionaries I think the answer is pretty simple, the revolution lost and what came after derailed working class movements for multiple generations. But because the Bolsheviks did have a partial victory and their methods did achieve many of the things that they aimed for, "Leninism" can't simply be written off by it's critics. You can't argue that these methods can't work, so you have to argue that they can work, but that there is something inherent in them that will cause any succeeding revolution to then fail internally.

Personally I think you need to read history backwards in order to accept many of the anti-Leninism arguments - you have to be predisposed to think that the failure of the revolution was inherent regardless of the circumstances. I think this is the wrong way to look at how things unfold in history and the fact that Bolshevism lead to Stalin is not the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution, but the outcome out of several possible outcomes.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The way Left Communism works is that it instantly makes Leninists seem like douchebags by putting up the strawman, "Oh the workers can't manage themselves? The workers state is forming a new class! State Capitalism benefits only the vanguard, who pretty much are indistinguishable from the bureaucracy that arose in the fSU (While they ignore the purges of the people who were Leninists when it wasn't cool or popular to be one)."

Ultra leftism is what is ruining Occupy by calling for a fucking General Strike. I was looking forward to organizing a group from my high school to head to a demonstration that had solid demands on May 1st like has been happening for the past few years, but the Anarchists who are organising Occupy fucked it up completely by calling for a General Strike. Great fucking job! I was pissed when republican students tried to numb the walk out that I planned at my school, but for calling for a General Strike without even talking to the Unions or any existing organs of workers control is assanine.

Anyways there really isn't anything to bash on Lenin for, he tolerated the Left Coms in Russia for alot longer than they give him credit for. But when you don't think that a state is necessary to deal with a counter revolution, there is something wrong in your head. When you think that Communism can be achieved without a DotP, you are utopian. I probably look like a dick but I don't care.

He tolerated left-coms? Wow, how gracious of dear Lenin!

That you talk in such terms implies his (and the Bolsheviks') dictatorship. Not of the proletariat, merely their own dictatorship of the party, on behalf of teh working class. Obviously, whilst he was clearly a good intentioned Socialist, and whilst the USSR at least early on did lead to a great amount of growth, redistribution and welfare, it DID NOT equate to Socialism, because it was CLEAR, very early on, that the workers were never going to self-control the means of production, nor self-control their own political destinies.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I consider myself a Leninist of sorts. I see him as very influential on my politics. I agree here, I disagree there.

I would certainly say I am pro-Lenin.

Now, stop saying Leninism = Marxism-Leninism.

Really? I'm surprised, comrade.

Lenin's theories are exactly what led to the rise of the state takign power on behalf of the workers, in the form of the vanguard party, which then led to the bureaucratic counter-revolution...i mean, i'm sure you know all this and won't insult your intelligence thus, i'm just surprised that you are pro-Leninist ideas.

[daft punk]

Ok, let me put this simply. Stalinism was the negation of Bolshevism, not any logical conclusion of it. We can prove this very simply. Of the Bolshevik Central Committee members who survived the civil war, only two survived Stalin's purges (excluding Kollantai who was abroad).

Stalin made up false charges, got false confessions, and killed all the people who wanted to carry out socialism as per Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg.


The Bolsheviks needed a vanguard party from 1917 to 1923, but by 1924 they should have been implementing more democracy.

Stalin took over. He represented the balance of forces, which was that the revolution was starting to degenerate due to it's isolation in a backward country. He was the personification of the degeneration. He aided it.

However in 1928 he realised he had gone too far in favouring the wealthy, and now faced a challenge from them. So he collectivised and purged.

Finally in 1934-8 he purged a million communists from the party and many were shot including tens of thousands of Trotskyists, their wives, husbands, children and even grandchildren.

The counter revolution was complete. In 1928 it could have been a straightforward bourgeois counter-revolution, but for various reasons Stalin could not allow that. So he instead continued his counter-revolution against the socialists simultaneously with suppressing a bourgeois counter-revolution. In doing so he actually carried out the socialist task of collectivisation, but he did it in a terrible way, for the wrong reasons.

The end result was a degenerated version of a planned economy, one ruled by an elite instead of being managed by the people. This is known as a degenerated workers state.

The left coms, Stalinists and bourgeois all say the same thing. That Stalinism was a continuation of Leninism. The Stalinists are repeating old lies, the bourgeois are not interested in the truth, they want all of socialism to be tarnished by Stalinism. The left coms have a valid line of questioning, but unfortunately on revleft it often just becomes sectarian shit posting.

[Thirsty Crow]

However, most anti-Leninists like to claim the vanguard strategy simply amounts to an intellectual elite guiding the herds of uneducated workers. I'm sorry, but I don't see how anybody can come to that conclusion unless they blatantly do not understand. I could see nothing in Lenin's works that even hinted at resentment towards the proletariat. He was simply addressing the fact that class consciousness emerges unevenly, and devising a tactic to counter that. Some workers are going to know all about Marx and their position in the world, and some are going to be too busy working or too misguided by propaganda to bother learning themselves. It's not elitism, it's reality.
There are really two most important sources for reaching this conclusion:

1) in the field of ideas - Lenin's What is to be Done actually functions as a model for this substitutionist theory of both working class consciousness and the role of the party (which is to be constituted by the intelligentsia who bring consciousness to the working class, the consciosuness of the need for social revolution). In this work, it is quite explicitly stated that the working class is incapable of reaching this stage of consciousness on its own, and that at most workers are capable of "trade union consciousness".

2) the historical practice of the various communist practice, but in the first place, the practice of the Bolshevik Party in the constitution of the party-state apparatus and the destruction of soviets (for example, the soviets which returned SR and Menshevik majorities were simply disbanded; I'm not saying here that this wasn't necessary or that it was a proof of some kind of an inherent authoritarianism, but simply that these actions definitely led to a very dangerous kind of a political development and that they represent the historical basis for the assessment of "Leninism" and Bolshevism; but as Victor Serge pointed out, this was but one of the many germs hiding within Bolshevism!)

Also, thinking in terms that knowing Marx represents working class consciousness - socialist consciousness in fact - is misguided in my opinion. It's not about the detailed knowledge of theory, but of the detailed knowledge of reality and the way it can be changed; though of course theory plays an important role in that, I still don't think it's necessary for it to be linked with the scrupulous study of one man's writings.

In doing so he actually carried out the socialist task of collectivisation, but he did it in a terrible way, for the wrong reasons.

What bullshit.
Talking about reasons, it's flying into the face of reality to conclude that partially autarchic modernization and industrialization were the wrong reasons! This was, indeed, one of the most pressing imperatives arising from the development of the productive forces in Russia up to that point.

It's one thing to conclude that the "collectivization" entailed disastruous social results, both for the urban working class and the peasantry, but it's another thing to deny the definite material conditions which necessitated modernization.

[Tim Cornelis]

Ok, let me put this simply. Stalinism was the negation of Bolshevism, not any logical conclusion of it.

Really now?

Was it Stalin who set up concentration camps? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.
Was it Stalin that introduced a one-party dictatorship from above? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.
Was it Stalin that abolished free speech, even for workers? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.
Was it Stalin that dismantled the democratic workers' councils? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.

The Bolsheviks laid the very foundations of Stalinism.


We can prove this very simply. Of the Bolshevik Central Committee members who survived the civil war, only two survived Stalin's purges (excluding Kollantai who was abroad).

Why is this supposed to be prove that Stalinism is the negation of Bolshevism, and could not simply be its consequence?

It reminds me of the evil scientist who invented a powerful robot, but the robot turned against the evil scientist and killed him, and began a reign of terror.

The Bolsheviks laid the foundations of what Stalin used against them, so the fact they were killed was their own fault.

[Geiseric]

Collectivisation should have happened earlier, before the rich were allowed to gain such a power of control and at a time before privately owned farms by Kulaks didn't grow as large as they did during he N.E.P. This was Trotsky's position. This would of made it so that the collectivisation could have happened without such a disasterous depression in the country.

By the way if workers were capible of reaching beyond Trade Union organisation it would have happened by now. We need an organized labor/workers party to carry out the revolution.

[Geiseric]

Really now?

Was it Stalin who set up concentration camps? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.
Was it Stalin that introduced a one-party dictatorship from above? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.
Was it Stalin that abolished free speech, even for workers? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.
Was it Stalin that dismantled the democratic workers' councils? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.

The Bolsheviks laid the very foundations of Stalinism.



Why is this supposed to be prove that Stalinism is the negation of Bolshevism, and could not simply be its consequence?

It reminds me of the evil scientist who invented a powerful robot, but the robot turned against the evil scientist and killed him, and began a reign of terror.

The Bolsheviks laid the foundations of what Stalin used against them, so the fact they were killed was their own fault.

Concentration camps as in forced labor prisons for counter revolutionaries during the war? It seems more productive than killing them, and they're doing something for the proletariat.

The one party dictatorship was the party that the workers supported during the aftermath of October. They wouldn't of retained power and won the war if they weren't popular. The SRs and Mensheviks were reformist.

As for free speech, if you're refering to the defeatist Menshevik and SR newspapers maybe being canceled, they were bourgeois parties. DotP.

I don't know much about the workers councils being broken apart, if you could show me something about that i'd appreciate it.

The bolsheviks who were purged by Stalinism were not the ones who created it, they would have been doing the purging if they were. The old guard were the ones who stuck with the "down with the provisional government, all power to the soviets," line during October, and they were the ones killed.

[Thirsty Crow]

By the way if workers were capible of reaching beyond Trade Union organisation it would have happened by now. We need an organized labor/workers party to carry out the revolution.
To the OP: here you have a cler exposition on the Leninists' view (at least the view some of the self-labeled Leninists have) of working class consciousness, and consequently, the exposition of the political disease of substitutionism.

To address this simplistic point you make: it seems that you view the development of counsciousness as a completely linear affair drawn out through time. I don't think it's necessary to point out how mistaken this is since it disregard the interaction between consciousness and the social conditions which give rise to it. I'm not arguing against the necessity for the political organization, but I do maintain that the view you espouse is politically catastrophic.

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2403556#post2403556)
"In doing so he actually carried out the socialist task of collectivisation, but he did it in a terrible way, for the wrong reasons. "

What bullshit.
Talking about reasons, it's flying into the face of reality to conclude that partially autarchic modernization and industrialization were the wrong reasons! This was, indeed, one of the most pressing imperatives arising from the development of the productive forces in Russia up to that point.

It's one thing to conclude that the "collectivization" entailed disastruous social results, both for the urban working class and the peasantry, but it's another thing to deny the definite material conditions which necessitated modernization.

Yes Russia needed modernising and collectivising. Yes Stalin did it. But did he do it to

1. further the cause of socialism
2. benefit the masses
3. save his ass

He did it because he was forced to. From 1924-8, as I explained, he did the exact opposite. The end result was a challenge by the kulaks which he had to put down and collectivisation was a way to do it.

There were other reasons. Obviously he was in charge and he needed to provide solutions to stay in charge. He could have just allowed capitalist restoration. Why didnt he? Partly because the private economy was clearly failing, partly because he propably feared that capitalist restoration would mean him losing power.

But also there was the fact that the Left Opposition had said for years that collectivisation was required, that the kulaks would revolt and so on. The LO were clearly right and Stalin could no longer get away with ignoring that, so he had to quickly collectivise in order to say 'I was always gonna do it anyway, but you wanted to do it prematurely at a time we needed to rely on the kulaks'. That was the gist.

Also there was China. Stalin had just cocked up the Chinese revolution but was pretending everything was hunky dory. So he entered the Third Period partly I think as a sort of smokescreen to cover that.

The Third Period was his fake ultraleft period in which the Comintern's new position meant allowing the Nazis into power in Germany.

Then in 1934 they swung back to right wing policies.

[Tim Cornelis]

Concentration camps as in forced labor prisons for counter revolutionaries during the war? It seems more productive than killing them, and they're doing something for the proletariat.

The did kill them, really slow. About 10 percent was worked and starved to death, they were slaves.


The one party dictatorship was the party that the workers supported during the aftermath of October. They wouldn't of retained power and won the war if they weren't popular. The SRs and Mensheviks were reformist.

If a political party has the support of the working class, then why not allow elections to verify whether this is the case? The Bolsheviks received 22 percent of the votes in the 1917 elections that took place.


As for free speech, if you're refering to the defeatist Menshevik and SR newspapers maybe being canceled, they were bourgeois parties. DotP.

:rolleyes: How do you argue with such logic? That's rather the point innit? If you ban free speech for all the bourgeoisie, and you consider everyone who is not a Bolshevik bourgeois (which you obviously do) then you ban free speech for 'everyone', simple as that.


I don't know much about the workers councils being broken apart, if you could show me something about that i'd appreciate it.

Never heard of war communism? Kinda of the basis of the "Russian Revolution". Started in 1918:


All industry was nationalized and strict centralized management was introduced.
State monopoly on foreign trade was introduced.
Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.
Obligatory labour duty was imposed onto "non-working classes."
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population.
Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in urban centers in a centralized way.
Private enterprise became illegal.
The state introduced military-style control of railroads.


As for the rank and file of the workmen, the new system was scarcely conducive to enthusiasm on their part. In the first place they were forced to give up definitely the idea that the workmen employed in each particular enterprise were going to own or at least control that enterprise. This idea had been carefully inculcated in them by the demagogical agitators, and the introduction of nationalization was, indeed, a disappointment to them. For under the system of nationalized industry, the workmen became simply servants of the state, forced to submit to the officials appointed by the state in precisely the same manner in which they had been formerly forced to submit to private entrepreneurs and their managers. Moreover, immediately after the apparatus of management was somewhat put together under nationalization, the Soviet authorities began to exact labour discipline, which, naturally, appeared so hard and prosaic to the rank and file of the workmen after the revolutionary carousal, that the task of obtaining efficiency under the circumstances became increasingly difficult.

Note how the workers were opposed to this Bolshevik policy, i.e. the workers did not support the Bolsheviks.

Also note how you are not denying that the Bolsheviks laid the foundations of Stalinism, but are doing apologetics for it.

[daft punk]

Really now?

Was it Stalin who set up concentration camps? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.

There was a civil war started by reactionary generals and backed by non-Bolsheviks generally to varying degrees.



Was it Stalin that introduced a one-party dictatorship from above? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.

False. They had a multiparty democracy. The main coalition partner, the Left SR party, walked out of government because they disagreed with Lenin's plan for a peace deal with Germany.

All the opposition parties acted to help the enemy in various ways and gradually they got banned and their best member joined the Bolsheviks.



Was it Stalin that abolished free speech, even for workers? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.

chalk and cheese. Different leagues. Stalin's repression was a million, a billion times greater than anything that came from Lenin. Lenin did what he had to to save the revolution. Stalin did what he had to to CRUSH THE REVOLUTION.




Was it Stalin that dismantled the democratic workers' councils? No it was Lenin/under Lenin's approval.

please support this claim



The Bolsheviks laid the very foundations of Stalinism.

as predicted you agree with the Stalinists and the bourgeois media who both had a vested interest in this lie - anti-socialism.



"We can prove this very simply. Of the Bolshevik Central Committee members who survived the civil war, only two survived Stalin's purges (excluding Kollantai who was abroad). "
Why is this supposed to be prove that Stalinism is the negation of Bolshevism, and could not simply be its consequence?
Stalin killed the original Bolsheviks. Why? To kill socialist ideas, to kill any chance of a movement for genuine democratic socialism Lenin wanted:

"Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic." Lenin, 1918 Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/democracy.htm)








It reminds me of the evil scientist who invented a powerful robot, but the robot turned against the evil scientist and killed him, and began a reign of terror.

This was Frankenstein's monster. But the monster was actually a good guy, initially at least, a sympathetic figure, unlike Stalin. The woman who wrote the story, Mary Shelley, was actually a socialist herself. The story was published in 1918. Maybe the monster represented man's alienation from the work he does.


The Bolsheviks laid the foundations of what Stalin used against them, so the fact they were killed was their own fault.


This is nonsense

[Tim Cornelis]

There was a civil war started by reactionary generals and backed by non-Bolsheviks generally to varying degrees.

I am not contesting this.


False. They had a multiparty democracy. The main coalition partner, the Left SR party, walked out of government because they disagreed with Lenin's plan for a peace deal with Germany.

I stand corrected. Nevertheless, I will reformulate my claim. The Bolsheviks, while not introducing a single-party state laid the foundations for it by banning free speech, demolishing democratic soviets, and as well as ignoring they were not the most popular socialist party amongst the workers. And with banning factionalism there was no opposition or dissent within the Bolsheviks. All this ensured Stalin had no obstacles in introducing the single-party state.


All the opposition parties acted to help the enemy in various ways and gradually they got banned and their best member joined the Bolsheviks.

How is that different from Stalin claiming that the victims of the Great Purge were aiding the opposition? This is what I mean by saying that Lenin laid the foundations for Stalinism.


chalk and cheese. Different leagues. Stalin's repression was a million, a billion times greater than anything that came from Lenin. Lenin did what he had to to save the revolution. Stalin did what he had to to CRUSH THE REVOLUTION.

I'm saying Lenin laid the foundations for Stalinism, not that Lenin was as worse than Stalin.


please support this claim

How come none of you Trotskyist know of War Communism?


All industry was nationalized and strict centralized management was introduced.
State monopoly on foreign trade was introduced.
Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.
Obligatory labour duty was imposed onto "non-working classes."
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population.
Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in urban centers in a centralized way.
Private enterprise became illegal.
The state introduced military-style control of railroads.


As for the rank and file of the workmen, the new system was scarcely conducive to enthusiasm on their part. In the first place they were forced to give up definitely the idea that the workmen employed in each particular enterprise were going to own or at least control that enterprise. This idea had been carefully inculcated in them by the demagogical agitators, and the introduction of nationalization was, indeed, a disappointment to them. For under the system of nationalized industry, the workmen became simply servants of the state, forced to submit to the officials appointed by the state in precisely the same manner in which they had been formerly forced to submit to private entrepreneurs and their managers. Moreover, immediately after the apparatus of management was somewhat put together under nationalization, the Soviet authorities began to exact labour discipline, which, naturally, appeared so hard and prosaic to the rank and file of the workmen after the revolutionary carousal, that the task of obtaining efficiency under the circumstances became increasingly difficult.


as predicted you agree with the Stalinists and the bourgeois media who both had a vested interest in this lie - anti-socialism.

And you agree with both Stalinists and the bourgeoisie that Russia was socialist under Lenin. Got more guilty by association fallacies?


Stalin killed the original Bolsheviks. Why? To kill socialist ideas,

"Lenin killed anarchists. Why? To kill socialist ideas." We can go back and forth with this, but the fact of the matter is anarchists, Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and Stalin(ists) all want socialism. You cannot deny this. What we disagree on is how to get there, and possibly what socialism entails.


Lenin wanted:

"Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic." Lenin, 1918 Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/democracy.htm)




And in practice (which is what matters) he suspended proletarian democracy under the guise that there was a civil war. Stalin also wanted proletarian democracy, and on paper it existed in the USSR.

For example:
"it speaks of the kolkhoz as a “form of agricultural production cooperative of peasants that voluntarily unite for the purpose of joint agricultural production based on ... collective labor.” It asserts that “the kolkhoz is managed according to the principles of socialist self-management, democracy, and openness, with active participation of the members in decisions concerning all aspects of internal life”

Clearly, Stalin wanted socialism and democracy and self-management, but equally clearly this did not translate into practice.



This is nonsense

If they hadn't began to construct an authoritarian state, they wouldn't have fallen victim to a totalitarian one. It was their own fault. You won't see me shed a tear over those tyrants with blood on their hands.

[daft punk]

I stand corrected. Nevertheless, I will reformulate my claim. The Bolsheviks, while not introducing a single-party state laid the foundations for it by banning free speech, demolishing democratic soviets, and as well as ignoring they were not the most popular socialist party amongst the workers. And with banning factionalism there was no opposition or dissent within the Bolsheviks. All this ensured Stalin had no obstacles in introducing the single-party state.
My god, someone on revleft admits to being corrected. Hats off to you for that. However you then more or less ignore that. You need to support these claims. As I said, the Left SRs walked out of the government, nobody forced them to. They then began trying to sabotage the Bolsheviks peace deal with Germany. They killed the German ambassador for example. The Mensheviks and right SRs also often worked with the whites or against the peace.

In the first half of 1918 only fascist were banned and only 22 people were executed, so it's just not true that the Bolsheviks immediately implemented a dictatorship. Please provide evidence that they destroyed democratic soviets. They were the most popular party among the workers, you are wrong. The Bolsheviks got 23% of the vote in 1917, but the workers were only about 10% of the population. The Bolsheviks won the votes of most of the workers, and the soldiers on the western front. They formed a coalition government with the Left SR party.



" All the opposition parties acted to help the enemy in various ways and gradually they got banned and their best member joined the Bolsheviks. "

How is that different from Stalin claiming that the victims of the Great Purge were aiding the opposition? This is what I mean by saying that Lenin laid the foundations for Stalinism.

Because Stalin was blatantly lying. It depends what you mean by 'opposition'. The opposition to the Bolsheviks was a pro-Tsar pro-capitalist White army, a brutal army who killed 150,000 Jews and massacred Bolsheviks. They were supported by 150,000 troops an £billions of military aid in real terms from the west.

The opposition to Stalin was from the right and left. The Left Opposition was identical with the original Bolsheviks and their aims for socialism. Stalin represented a political counter-revolution. Stalin claimed that the Left Opposition were working with the Nazis to bring down the USSR or some such nonsense. I did a thread on it but no Stalinist has posted on it. I wonder why.




I'm saying Lenin laid the foundations for Stalinism, not that Lenin was as worse than Stalin.

To a certain extent you are right, but there is no other way to carry out a revolution. Stalin won because the revolution failed. The revolution failed, as predicted by basic Marxism, as it was isolated in a backward country, not because the Bolsheviks did this or that.




How come none of you Trotskyist know of War Communism?

of course I do. But are you gonna give us actual detail on Lenin dismantling the democratic soviets?








And you agree with both Stalinists and the bourgeoisie that Russia was socialist under Lenin. Got more guilty by association fallacies?

No Russia was not socialist under Lenin, but it was trying to move in that direction. Lenin said it would take 2 or 3 generations, and would only be possible with the help of advanced countries.

Marx:

"this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced;"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm





"Lenin killed anarchists. Why? To kill socialist ideas." We can go back and forth with this, but the fact of the matter is anarchists, Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and Stalin(ists) all want socialism. You cannot deny this. What we disagree on is how to get there, and possibly what socialism entails.

Please support your claim that Lenin killed anarchists to suppress socialist ideas.

I suggest you read this
http://www.isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml

Makhno and his army were allowed to do their thing. What this anarchist leader did was set up a mini gangster state, one based on the peasants but not supported by many peasants. He had contempt for the cities. He had conscription in his armies. He attacked the trains. He attacked the Bolsheviks.



And in practice (which is what matters) he suspended proletarian democracy under the guise that there was a civil war.

The civil war was no guise, it was a real war, and there was also hunger in the towns and on the front lines. The people who had their democratic rights curtailed were saboteurs who brought it on themselves.




Stalin also wanted proletarian democracy, and on paper it existed in the USSR.

For example:

Clearly, Stalin wanted socialism and democracy and self-management, but equally clearly this did not translate into practice.

Come on, be serious. This isnt an exercise in winning an argument by clever use of words. The Bolsehviks wanted socialism and Stalin wanted to crush socialism. There was no democracy in Stalin's Russia. Oh, tell a lie, you could democratically get your neighbour shot by saying they supported the Left Opposition.





If they hadn't began to construct an authoritarian state, they wouldn't have fallen victim to a totalitarian one. It was their own fault. You won't see me shed a tear over those tyrants with blood on their hands.

If they hadnt begun to construct an authoritarian state the White would have massacred them and introduced capitalism.

Now, I suggest you do some reading on the subject from proper sources. Read that article on Makhno and tell me what you think of it, it is well researched as you will see, and debunks the halftruths told by the anarchists based on biased accounts.

[Tim Cornelis]

My god, someone on revleft admits to being corrected. Hats off to you for that. However you then more or less ignore that. You need to support these claims. As I said, the Left SRs walked out of the government, nobody forced them to. They then began trying to sabotage the Bolsheviks peace deal with Germany. They killed the German ambassador for example. The Mensheviks and right SRs also often worked with the whites or against the peace.

I'm not talking about that. Banning free speech, demolishing democratic soviets, etc. in combination with banning factionalism brought about an authoritarian government, which Stalin easily used to turn it into a totalitarian state.


In the first half of 1918 only fascist were banned and only 22 people were executed, so it's just not true that the Bolsheviks immediately implemented a dictatorship.

What about this:


In April 1918 the Bolshevik secret police (The Cheka) raided 26 Anarchist centres in Moscow. 40 Anarchists were killed or injured and over 500 imprisoned

Source: M. Brinton "The Bolsheviks and workers control", page 38


Please provide evidence that they destroyed democratic soviets.

I did twice already, read my two previous posts with a large quotation.


They were the most popular party among the workers, you are wrong. The Bolsheviks got 23% of the vote in 1917, but the workers were only about 10% of the population. The Bolsheviks won the votes of most of the workers, and the soldiers on the western front. They formed a coalition government with the Left SR party.

Okey, true, I said "workers" but I referred to the non-capitalist population. The peasants should not be deprived of a vote either.

I have trouble finding sources on the coalition government, could you provide them?


Because Stalin was blatantly lying. It depends what you mean by 'opposition'. The opposition to the Bolsheviks was a pro-Tsar pro-capitalist White army, a brutal army who killed 150,000 Jews and massacred Bolsheviks. They were supported by 150,000 troops an £billions of military aid in real terms from the west.

Okey, it wasn't an accurate analogy.



To a certain extent you are right, but there is no other way to carry out a revolution. Stalin won because the revolution failed. The revolution failed, as predicted by basic Marxism, as it was isolated in a backward country, not because the Bolsheviks did this or that.



of course I do. But are you gonna give us actual detail on Lenin dismantling the democratic soviets?


It's called War Communism..... I mean, war communism introduced one-man management. And also, I gave you a big ass quote detailing how the Bolsheviks abolished workers' control/workers' councils.


Marx:


Please support your claim that Lenin killed anarchists to suppress socialist ideas.

That's the point, he didn't. and neither did Stalin. He repressed socialist opposition because they had a different view on socialism. And this was a threat to Stalin's power.


I suggest you read this
http://www.isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml

No please god no. This is a discredited repeating of Bolshevik propaganda. I can go into detail, but that would derail the thread (maybe send a PM if you feel like it).


The civil war was no guise, it was a real war, and there was also hunger in the towns and on the front lines. The people who had their democratic rights curtailed were saboteurs who brought it on themselves.

But imo that was not the real motivation for his actions.


Come on, be serious. This isnt an exercise in winning an argument by clever use of words. The Bolsehviks wanted socialism and Stalin wanted to crush socialism. There was no democracy in Stalin's Russia. Oh, tell a lie, you could democratically get your neighbour shot by saying they supported the Left Opposition.

Answer this question: do you think that Stalin thought of himself as an anti-socialist?

Stalin clearly was a socialist, the problem socialism was not implemented in practice.


If they hadnt begun to construct an authoritarian state the White would have massacred them and introduced capitalism.

Sounds like a non-sequitur. How does centralising decision-making power regarding politics and economics, strengthen your military capabilities?


Now, I suggest you do some reading on the subject from proper sources. Read that article on Makhno and tell me what you think of it, it is well researched as you will see, and debunks the halftruths told by the anarchists based on biased accounts.

I will, but not in this thread.

[Grenzer]

What the hell does Makhno have to do with Goti's politics? You're assuming that he's a Makhnovist just because he's an anarchist, I don't see the logic in that other than being a convenient straw man. A lot of anarchists aren't big fans of Makhno, and what the Makhnovists did or didn't do has absolutely no reflection on their politics.. unfortunately you can't straw man anarchism like that the way you can do with the "great man" tendencies of Marxism like Stalinism and Trotskyism.

[daft punk]

I'm not talking about that. Banning free speech, demolishing democratic soviets, etc. in combination with banning factionalism brought about an authoritarian government, which Stalin easily used to turn it into a totalitarian state.

Yes but you have yet to support that the Bolsheviks banned free speech, banned factionalism etc. Obviously there is some truth to that, but how much? And what other option did they have? Also, the main thing that created Stalinism was the isolation of the revolution in a backward country.

This is Lenin in 1922:

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

The huge bureaucratic machine was inherited from the Tsar. The Bolsheviks had to use it because of the low levels of education in Russia. They tried to manage without it and found it impossible. This bureaucracy became Stalin's power base.

You should read that speech because it outlines Lenin's position in 1922. His main concern was to get the young communists educated so they could administer the country. He worried about the bureaucrats and he worried about red tape and people passing decisions upwards instead of getting on with things. He also spoke about how dangerous disunity could be at such a tricky time, but that it was much less evident than a year earlier. They clamped down on factionalism to some extent in 1921, but never on debate:

"We must ruthlessly expose our mistakes and discuss them." Lenin 1922.




What about this:
"In April 1918 the Bolshevik secret police (The Cheka) raided 26 Anarchist centres in Moscow. 40 Anarchists were killed or injured and over 500 imprisoned "



Source: M. Brinton "The Bolsheviks and workers control", page 38

Your quote omits that 12 Cheka were also killed.

"By April 1918 there were already 50 units of the Black Guard in Moscow, formed by the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG). Peters, deputy chairman of the Cheka , in particular, was worried about their growth. "I remember after my arrival in Moscow Cheka here that there were 2 powers: on the one hand, the Moscow Soviet, and on another - the headquarters of the Black Guard in the former Merchants' Club in Malaya Dmitrovka. This headquarters of the Black Guard operated and managed as a power, organising raids on the streets, taking away weapons and valuables, seizing houses…” The Moscow Federation had already seized 26 houses which had been the mansions of the rich, and they used these as bases. Some of these houses were strategically placed in the city. They were furnished with machine gun nests, had dormitories, libraries, lecture halls, arsenals and stockpiles of food."


"Emulating the work of forming a Red Guard Army, the Federation set out to organize a military force of its own, the so-called “Black Guards”. Another house was seized and turned into barracks for the newly formed “Black Guard” contingents. Comrade Kaydanov, an active figure in the Anarchist movement and a comrade of long standing, was commissioned with the organization and leadership of this military formation, which soon became the formal cause of Bolshevik enmity, which resulted in the spreading of vile calumnies, faked charges of subversive intentions leveled at the Anarchists, and of the final smashing up of Anarchist organizations.”"
http://libcom.org/history/black-guards


As well as organising as a separate power, they were opposing the peace deal with Germany. In Lenin's opinion, peace with Germany was vital for the revolution to succeed. His opinion got the most votes at the Congress.


The anarchist article above is an interesting read. Trotsky apparently ordered the attack, and said that many of the anarchists were actually criminals not ideological anarchists. There was also talk of the anarchists planning an insurrection.


all this and more is summed up officially:


"The attack by the Left SRs on the Soviet power on July 6, 1918 put an end to the political bloc which, after October (and to some extent before it) was formed by the Communists, the Left SRs and the Anarchists, on the platform of Soviet power and struggle against the bourgeoisie and the compromisers.
This conditional and temporary coalition was bound to break up in the course of the revolution, owing to the complete social difference between the programs of the parties which it brought together.
It suffered its first failure already in April 1918, when the Soviet power, forced to take this action by their disorganizing activity, disarmed the Anarchist organizations and called them to order."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch34.htm




"Please provide evidence that they destroyed democratic soviets."
I did twice already, read my two previous posts with a large quotation.

All I can find is
"All industry was nationalized and strict centralized management was introduced.
State monopoly on foreign trade was introduced.
Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.
Obligatory labour duty was imposed onto "non-working classes."
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population.
Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in urban centers in a centralized way.
Private enterprise became illegal.
The state introduced military-style control of railroads. Quote:
As for the rank and file of the workmen, the new system was scarcely conducive to enthusiasm on their part. In the first place they were forced to give up definitely the idea that the workmen employed in each particular enterprise were going to own or at least control that enterprise. This idea had been carefully inculcated in them by the demagogical agitators, and the introduction of nationalization was, indeed, a disappointment to them. For under the system of nationalized industry, the workmen became simply servants of the state, forced to submit to the officials appointed by the state in precisely the same manner in which they had been formerly forced to submit to private entrepreneurs and their managers. Moreover, immediately after the apparatus of management was somewhat put together under nationalization, the Soviet authorities began to exact labour discipline, which, naturally, appeared so hard and prosaic to the rank and file of the workmen after the revolutionary carousal, that the task of obtaining efficiency under the circumstances became increasingly difficult. "

There are no links, no sources, and I cant see it talking about destroying democratic soviets. It's all a bit vague. Yes the Bolsheviks wanted discipline in the workplace, but still they had freedom to debate stuff outside of working hours. They needed labour discipline in work, it was a civil war.




Okey, true, I said "workers" but I referred to the non-capitalist population. The peasants should not be deprived of a vote either.

I have trouble finding sources on the coalition government, could you provide them?

The peasants were not denied.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/13.htm
V. I. Lenin

Extraordinary Fourth All-Russia Congress Of Soviets[1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/13.htm#fw1)

March 14-16, 1918


End notes:

"Extraordinary Fourth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, which was held to decide the question of the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was held in Moscow from March 14 to 16, 1918. On March 13 this question was discussed by the Communist group of the Congress; Lenin spoke at the meeting (for the secretarial record of this speech see Lenin Miscellany XI, pp. 68-70). By 453 votes to 36 the group approved the signing of the treaty. Not all the delegates had arrived at the time and the group was not present in full strength. According to the minutes, the Congress was attended by 1,232 delegates with a vote; they included 795 Bolsheviks, 283 Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, 25 Socialist-Revolutionaries of the Centre, 21 Mensheviks, and 11 Menshevik-Internationalists. The questions on the agenda were: ratification of the peace treaty; transfer of the capital; election of the All-Russia C.E.C. After a statement on the peace treaty by G. V. Chicherin, People’s Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lenin gave the report on the main question on the agenda on behalf of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee; the second report on behalf of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries against ratification of the treaty was given by B. D. Kamkov.
The Mensheviks, Right and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Maximalists, anarchists and others put up a solid front against ratification of the treaty. After a keen debate a signed vote was taken and the Congress adopted Lenin’s resolution in favour of ratification by an overwhelming majority. There were 784 votes in favour, 261 against and 115 delegates abstained. In connection with the ratification of the Brest Treaty the Left S.R.s withdrew from the Council of People’s Commissars. The “Left Communists” refused to take part in the voting and stated in a special declaration that the conclusion of peace would undermine the country’s defence and the gains of the revolution. By refusing to vote, the “Left Communists” violated the decisions of the Seventh Party Congress and the Communist group of the Extraordinary Fourth All-Russia Congress of Soviets and the decision taken by the Central Committee, which met while the Congress was on, that there should be no action against the decisions of the Party."






It's called War Communism..... I mean, war communism introduced one-man management. And also, I gave you a big ass quote detailing how the Bolsheviks abolished workers' control/workers' councils.

which quote, the one above? The Bolsheviks had a revolution in the middle of WW1 and then a civil war with outside intervention. The economy was destroyed. People were hungry. This was a time for making decisions and getting things done. They had a huge number of massively urgent tasks, and very little expertise. The people with the expertise were by and large the class enemy, and the Bolsheviks could not manage without them.

You might want to read Lenin's article from 1919

THE SOVIETS AT WORK

The Problems of the Soviet Government


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

"The Socialist character of the Soviet democracy—that is, of proletarian democracy in its concrete particular application—consists first in this: that the electorate comprises the toiling and exploited masses—that the bourgeoisie is excluded. Second in this: that all bureaucratic formalities and limitations of elections are done away with—that the masses themselves determine the order and the time of elections and with complete freedom of recall of elected officials. Third, that the best possible mass organization of the vanguard of the toilers—of the industrial proletariat—is formed, enabling them to direct the exploited masses, to attract them to active participation in political life, to train them politically through their own experience, that in this way a beginning has been made for the first time actually to get the whole population to learn how to manage and to begin managing. Such are the principal distinctive features of the democracy which is being tried in Russia and which is a higher type of democracy, which breaks away from bourgeois distortion, and which is a transition to socialist democracy and to conditions which will mean the beginning of the end of the state."


"We must work unceasingly to develop the organization of the Soviets and Soviet rule."


Nothing about destroying soviet democracy. You claim to have provided evidence but I cant find it. Essentially as far as I can tell it was soviet democracy with strict management once you actually got to work, which obviously isnt true socialism but it was the best they could do at that time, otherwise it would be chaos.









That's the point, he didn't. and neither did Stalin. He repressed socialist opposition because they had a different view on socialism. And this was a threat to Stalin's power.

No, Stalin didnt repress the LO because they had a different view on socialism, it was because they were socialists period, and he was not.




No please god no. This is a discredited repeating of Bolshevik propaganda. I can go into detail, but that would derail the thread (maybe send a PM if you feel like it).

Ok, start a thread on Makhno and go through the article debunking it if you want. I did bump into someone who knew the author, who sent me some more info, as the article was a summary of a lot of research for a thesis or something, not sure if I still have the other document though.




"The civil war was no guise, it was a real war, and there was also hunger in the towns and on the front lines. The people who had their democratic rights curtailed were saboteurs who brought it on themselves. "
But imo that was not the real motivation for his actions.

Lenin was forced to abandon some aspects of what socialists aim for, in the short term, but not as much as you think. I believe you have been fed a biased version of events by anarchists or left coms. At the end of the day, these supposed allies were always gonna end up in opposition and that effectively meant on the side of counter revolution.

Now you try to sample that scenario and implant it into the thinking and actions of Stalin, but Stalin was not Lenin and the objective circumstances were different. The people Stalin killed were the people who led the revolution, who you are complaining about. You cant compare the two. I know you will insist on it, but the similarity in dwarfed by the massive dissimilarity. Opposites are not the same because they share a superficial feature.








Answer this question: do you think that Stalin thought of himself as an anti-socialist?

Stalin clearly was a socialist, the problem socialism was not implemented in practice.


I think Stalin gave up on socialism gradually. He never had any theory. He was a follower in the revolution and for a few years after. He came to power as the revolution teetered on the brink of degeneration. He wanted power and that meant fighting Trotsky who represented the ideas of Lenin and genuine socialism. So Stalin slipped into working on behalf of the forces of the degeneration of the revolution. No I dont think he thought he was a socialist after 1924. He may have done, people can be very self delusional. Stalin kicked Trotsky out in 1928. Trotsky's crime was wanting to stick to Lenin's plans. Stalin was mainly interested in personal power. Soon he became conscious anti-socialist, especially after 1934. This was a period summed up by Trepper here

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/1009

have a quick read, it's not long and it describes a keen young communist who went to Russia but then found himself and many other in fear of their lives. He went on though to become a hero of the USSR. It still got him jailed.




Sounds like a non-sequitur. How does centralising decision-making power regarding politics and economics, strengthen your military capabilities?

I dunno, I wasnt there. In wars the government usually takes over industry, even in capitalist countries. How can you run an army without factories and food distribution and so on? There isnt time to mess about. The Bolsheviks took power and a civil war started and they had a responsibility to feed people and so on.


Basically you need to try to find solid concrete detailed evidence that the Bolsheviks clamped down on democracy unnecessarily. Personally I would say you should read a bit more from Lenin and Trotsky etc because the anti stuff can be very biased. I think you should forget about trying to shoehorn Stalin into all this because it's a dead end. All you need to do is get the detail on what the Bolsheviks did and why, and whether they really had much choice.

If you want to think about Stalin I would start with the intro to Platform of the Opposition, 10 minute read that sets out exactly how Stalin has allowed things to veer off course from the angle Lenin had set things on. Also maybe the chapter in My Life where Trotsky describes the period 1926-7, as the terror started and the frameups began.

Trotsky and the old Bolsheviks did not suddenly all become counter-revolutionaries. This was the biggest lie told in history and is very easily seen if you go looking.

[robbo203]

No Russia was not socialist under Lenin, but it was trying to move in that direction. Lenin said it would take 2 or 3 generations, and would only be possible with the help of advanced countries.

.....


If they hadnt begun to construct an authoritarian state the White would have massacred them and introduced capitalism.

What is it with Daft Punk? Like some manic grasshopper he flits from one thing to another without ever really dealing adequately with the point at hand. (incidentally DP, Im still waiting to hear your response to my post on the "Ussr" thread critiqueing that dotty idea that is the so called "degenerated workers state". How anyone can come out with such tosh beats me)

But look at the above comments from him. Russia he admits was not socialist under Lenin. So what the hell was it then? According to DP it wasnt capitalism either because capitalism would only have been "introduced" had the Whites triumphed.

Making due allowance for the fact that our DP does not seem to understand either what socialism is - he constantly confuses it with so called public ownership/ nationalisation - or capitalism, one has to ask - what on earth is going in inside his head? If it was neither capilalism not socialism that existed in the Russia under Lenin then what was it that existed then?


Was it some new mode of production we have not heard of or perhaps a variation on feudalism - industrial feudalism? Maybe the Asiatic mode of production or perhaps an updated version of Ancient Slavery? (Well I mean to say- the treatment meted out to striking workers under Trotsky's brutally anti-working class "militarisation of labour" programme was not that far removed from slavery and of course the Soviet state made good use of the gulags)

See, this is what I find kind of annoying - this completely cavalier attitude to historical analysis. If you are going to make a statement along these lines then back it up - give it some substance. If Russia was neither socialist not capitalist then tell us what you think it was.

Oh, and dont tells us it was a "workers state" or a "proletarian dictatorship" or some such crap as that. It wasnt that anyway since it was very clearly a dictatorship over the proletariat but , that apart, a "workers state" is NOT a mode of production - it is a political set up. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" ( though personally i think the whole idea is utterly balmy and completely incogerent) was specifically decribed by Marx as a "political transition period" and therefore not a mode of production as such. Actually the mode of production that would prevail under the so called "dictatorship of the proletariat" would clearly be, and could only logically be, capitalism since a working class presupposes a capitalist class and hence capitalism

So do tell us DP - if it was not capitalism and it was not socialism what was it? We are all ears. Lenin seems to have thought it was state capitalism that Russia was moving towards but then - hey! - who am I to question that.

[thriller]

I don't think Lenin intended the vanguard to become an elite bureaucratic class that controlled the means of production, but sadly, that what happened. I think Lenin was on to something back in the early 1900's. Most workers were over-worked, underpaid, and illiterate. One problem I have with it is that history has shown that the vanguard took control, and never relinquished power. The other problem is that almost EVERYONE knows the word socialism. They may not know the actual definition, but I would bet they have a view on it. Back early 1900's Russia, the workers did not really hear that word everyday. The workers today know what the USSR became. I doubt anyone wants to go back to that. And that is the basis for my third problem with Leninism/vanguardism. If someone is trying to rekindle old political ideas in the present day, they are, by definition, a reactionary. They are trying to revert society to an older time an place. The problem with this is a). it is not moving society forwards, but backwards, and b). the materialistic conditions are no longer available for the October Revolution. Much more of the world is industrialized. On a personal level, I feel that it is impossible to expect the workers to be able to manage society if they are not actively involved in the revolution. It's like doing someone else's homework for a year, and then expecting the person who did no work to pass their final with flying colors. If the workers are not the ones revolting, who the fuck cares?

[theblackmask]

If you ain't down with Lenin then I ain't down with you. :D

This is why people are Anti-Leninists.

[Geiseric]

For all of those Anti-Vanguardists, only 2 of the leading 50 bolsheviks were alive when Stalin started his counter revolution... He killed most of them, and replaced them with people who were not in the proletarian revolutionary vanguard, i.e. Bureaucrats. There was a fundamental political upheaval of the Bolshevik party.

[Grenzer]

This is why people are Anti-Leninists.

It's not such much Lenin I have a problem with as it is the people who claim that he did everything right and never made mistakes. I use Leninism as a colloquial for Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism more or less. It's shorter than writing those three out every time I want to bash them collectively.

[Grenzer]

For all of those Anti-Vanguardists, only 2 of the leading 50 bolsheviks were alive when Stalin started his counter revolution... He killed most of them, and replaced them with people who were not in the proletarian revolutionary vanguard, i.e. Bureaucrats. There was a fundamental political upheaval of the Bolshevik party.

Yet bureaucratic degeneration began under Lenin, he admitted as much himself. What happened under Stalin was merely a culmination of the problems that were there since nearly the beginning of the revolution.

These is not so much indicative of Bolshevik policy, although that is part of it, but it was the poor conditions they faced which caused it. The degeneration of the party and Lenin didn't occur because Lenin was a bad guy or anything, but that doesn't mean we should excuse it and turn a blind eye to his later deficiencies.

I think Lenin's vanguardism is a perversion of the vanguard that Marx presented. He specifically said that the vanguard should not be apart from the masses. That said, I think Lenin's conception of the vanguard was crucial for a place like Russia, but that it is in no way appropriate it to apply it to industrialized countries were the peasantry don't exist. It seems extremely anachronistic to say that all of his ideas were completely correct and that we should transplant his strategy from 1902 into 2012.

[thriller]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand Lenin did not intend a communist society to be democratic-centralist, just the functioning of the vanguard during the revolution. Is this right?

[Grenzer]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand Lenin did not intend a communist society to be democratic-centralist, just the functioning of the vanguard during the revolution. Is this right?

I believe you are right. I recall somewhere that he planned for the post-civil war Soviet Union to have a multi-party system, but I could be wrong on that. In his later writings, he became more erratic and inconsistent; like with the bullshit of socialism being state capitalism, which I think is reflective of his degeneration, and the degeneration of the revolution as a whole. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss Lenin based solely on what he said in the year or two before his death though.

[Geiseric]

The bureaucratisation happened despite Lenin, not with his support. They were the only ones who were educated and could do many jobs that most people had to be educated for. It had nothing to do with Vanguardism, and there was actually a struggle against the bureaucracy which was led by some of the most theoretically hardcore Leninists that were still around. If anything, when Vanguardism and the concept of a central party were abandoned, the degeneration hastened since opportunist and the future stalinist clique could join the Bolshevik party. Instead of those being purged like with Lenin, the ones who would of advocated for the purge of them were purged, along with the obvious capitalists.

Democratic Centralism is something that shouldn't of been abandoned in a full out war and economic depression, when people are eating each other in the countryside.

[Grenzer]

The bureaucratisation happened despite Lenin, not with his support. They were the only ones who were educated and could do many jobs that most people had to be educated for. It had nothing to do with Vanguardism, and there was actually a struggle against the bureaucracy which was led by some of the most theoretically hardcore Leninists that were still around. If anything, when Vanguardism and the concept of a central party were abandoned, the degeneration hastened since opportunist and the future stalinist clique could join the Bolshevik party. Instead of those being purged like with Lenin, the ones who would of advocated for the purge of them were purged, along with the obvious capitalists.

It's difficult to deny Lenin's individual agency in the role of policy making; as such, he cannot be completely absolved of responsibility; he was essentially the de facto head of state after all. Stalin didn't have much to do with the excesses of the purges personally; it was in fact his underlings like Yezhov that were overzealous in the carrying out of executions, but this still does not excuse Stalin's agency in the excesses of the purges. It's a similar situation. As the revolution degenerated, so did the party and Lenin himself. It is of course possible that had he lived longer, he might have taken measures against the crystallization of the bureaucracy as ruling elite; but it's just idle speculation in the end. He well could have played the same role as Stalin, had he lived longer.

If the vanguard model was abandoned, then you're saying that they must have moved to a mass, democratic party? I don't think they did that. I think vanguardism is an elitist idea since it only includes the most militant; but the democratic aspect of the party withered away. I'm not exactly sure when this happened, but it's undeniable that it did. I don't think this says much of democratic centralism as in 1917, democracy in the Bolshevik party thrived. If anything, the problem was that they retained the vanguard model, but abandoned democratic centralism. It seems undeniably that, increasingly over time, the party became managed more from the top down than the other way around. I don't think you need vanguardism and democratic centralism to have a centralized and efficient party that genuinely reflects the interests of the base, either.

In the end, the vanguard party and the idea of a party taking state power in the first place is flawed because only the working class can represent the working class, not a small clique of revolutionaries who say they represent the workers' interests, no matter how genuine their dedication is.

[daft punk]

What is it with Daft Punk? Like some manic grasshopper he flits from one thing to another without ever really dealing adequately with the point at hand. (incidentally DP, Im still waiting to hear your response to my post on the "Ussr" thread critiqueing that dotty idea that is the so called "degenerated workers state". How anyone can come out with such tosh beats me)

Fuck, if you think I missed something, pm me ffs, I cant keep track of everything.



But look at the above comments from him. Russia he admits was not socialist under Lenin. So what the hell was it then? According to DP it wasnt capitalism either because capitalism would only have been "introduced" had the Whites triumphed.

correct. Under lenin it was a workers state in the sense that the workers party controlled the state, moving towards socialism, as best it could in the circumstances.




Making due allowance for the fact that our DP does not seem to understand either what socialism is - he constantly confuses it with so called public ownership/ nationalisation - or capitalism, one has to ask - what on earth is going in inside his head? If it was neither capilalism not socialism that existed in the Russia under Lenin then what was it that existed then?

see above and stop repeating yourself



Was it some new mode of production we have not heard of or perhaps a variation on feudalism - industrial feudalism? Maybe the Asiatic mode of production or perhaps an updated version of Ancient Slavery? (Well I mean to say- the treatment meted out to striking workers under Trotsky's brutally anti-working class "militarisation of labour" programme was not that far removed from slavery and of course the Soviet state made good use of the gulags)

stop posting silly stuff. Are you a Marxist?

If so, address how your ridiculing here fits with this:

"Establishment of industrial armies"






See, this is what I find kind of annoying - this completely cavalier attitude to historical analysis. If you are going to make a statement along these lines then back it up - give it some substance. If Russia was neither socialist not capitalist then tell us what you think it was.



Let me spell this out. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

What statement along what lines? Are you still talking about this?

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2403710#post2403710)

"No Russia was not socialist under Lenin, but it was trying to move in that direction. Lenin said it would take 2 or 3 generations, and would only be possible with the help of advanced countries.

.....


If they hadn't begun to construct an authoritarian state the White would have massacred them and introduced capitalism. "

The above statements are facts. Lenin said that, and the second bit is fucking obvious. Tell me, if the Bolsheviks disarmed and allowed the Whites etc to do what they wanted, what other possible outcome would there be?






Oh, and dont tells us it was a "workers state" or a "proletarian dictatorship" or some such crap as that. It wasnt that anyway since it was very clearly a dictatorship over the proletariat but , that apart, a "workers state" is NOT a mode of production - it is a political set up.

There are 2 meanings of 'workers state'.
1. Workers party in power attempting to move towards socialism. This existed 1917-27.
2. Planned economy. This existed 1928 onwards.

Socialism requires both. The above formula is very simplified so please dont boringly dive on it and nit pick, I am trying to explain the basic idea.





The "dictatorship of the proletariat" ( though personally i think the whole idea is utterly balmy and completely incogerent)

ok so you are not a Marxist.



was specifically decribed by Marx as a "political transition period" and therefore not a mode of production as such.

The mode of production is obviously a mixture



Actually the mode of production that would prevail under the so called "dictatorship of the proletariat" would clearly be, and could only logically be, capitalism since a working class presupposes a capitalist class and hence capitalism

So do tell us DP - if it was not capitalism and it was not socialism what was it? We are all ears. Lenin seems to have thought it was state capitalism that Russia was moving towards but then - hey! - who am I to question that.


Russia in 1917 was semifeudal, semi capitalist. The Bolsheviks took power on behalf of the workers ans attempted to move in the direction of socialism. They first had to deal with the civil war so they had war communism. Then they had to deal with extreme backwardness so they had a temporary retreat, the NEP. Then Stalin took over. He really fucked things up.

In general it was a mixture of all sorts, from the stuff that existed before the revolution to state capitalism and state industry. It was trying to move towards socialism.

Lenin and Trotsky wanted the rich peasants and bourgeois to be heavily taxed, to raise cash and also keep them down, keep them less numerous and less powerful etc.

The money raised would be used to build state industries, and to subsidise coops, to entice the poor peasants into collective farming by the back door.

Stalin had other plans- get rid of Trotsky. So Stalin did the opposite of what lenin wanted, and based himself on looking after the wealthy

[Questionable]

This is why people are Anti-Leninists.

This is about as asinine as me declaring that people are Anti-Ultra Left because of the circlejerk of thanks that occur every time someone makes an anti-Leninist post without any actual substance.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Me:
"I think that we should analyze history to see how the vanguard should work in the 21st century [insert Lenin quote, Stalin quote, statistics, primary sources]."
3 thanks (at the most).

Anyone else:
"Fuck the vanguard! Get off of Red Alert (who even plays that game anymore) and come join RAAN! Yeah!!!!! [Another mindless comment]."
20 thanks (minimum)

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

^^^^That's RevLeft.

[Red Rabbit]

Me:
"I think that we should analyze history to see how the vanguard should work in the 21st century [insert Lenin quote, Stalin quote, statistics, primary sources]."
3 thanks (at the most).

Anyone else:
"Fuck the vanguard! Get off of Red Alert (who even plays that game anymore) and come join RAAN! Yeah!!!!! [Another mindless comment]."
20 thanks (minimum)

Sounds like whenever I post, except replace analyzing the vanguard party with analyzing religion and how it can work into Leftist politics, and replace the 'Anyone else' with the millions of Atheists.

[daft punk]

It's not such much Lenin I have a problem with as it is the people who claim that he did everything right and never made mistakes. I use Leninism as a colloquial for Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism more or less. It's shorter than writing those three out every time I want to bash them collectively.

To use Leninism as a word for Stalinism is incredibly stupid, as Stalinism was the opposite of Leninism.

If you think Lenin made mistakes you should say what they are and what would have worked better, and who at the time was proposing this and so on, and then you might have people listening.

[daft punk]

Yet bureaucratic degeneration began under Lenin, he admitted as much himself.

Tell us something we dont know.



What happened under Stalin was merely a culmination of the problems that were there since nearly the beginning of the revolution.

sheer unadulterated nonsense. make it clear do you mean material conditions or Bolshevik policies



These is not so much indicative of Bolshevik policy, although that is part of it, but it was the poor conditions they faced which caused it. The degeneration of the party and Lenin didn't occur because Lenin was a bad guy or anything, but that doesn't mean we should excuse it and turn a blind eye to his later deficiencies.

Make your mind up. First you say Stalin was a culmination (of Bolshevik policies? if so, wrong), then you say it was the material conditions that caused it (correct), then you say that doesnt excuse it. Well of course it does. And what later deficiencies are you on about?

I dunno if Lenin could or should have done some things different. But everything he did was logical and well intended. The revolution degenerated because of the material conditions, in accordance with Marxist theory. The centralised nature of the Bolshevik party was part of the problem, but it was impossible to avoid. If Lenin and Trotsky had run the USSR instead of Stalin they could not have built socialism in one country. BUT, things would have been completely different. If you actually read some Lenin and Trotsky and had a more open mind this would be obvious to you. But as it is like most people on here you have decided on your political position and all you are interested in really is trying to defend that position. By all means try, but do a proper job of it.



I think Lenin's vanguardism is a perversion of the vanguard that Marx presented. He specifically said that the vanguard should not be apart from the masses.

You think Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to be removed from the masses? Anyway, what Marx was on about was sectarianism not bureaucratic degeneration.




That said, I think Lenin's conception of the vanguard was crucial for a place like Russia,

make your mind up!



but that it is in no way appropriate it to apply it to industrialized countries were the peasantry don't exist. It seems extremely anachronistic to say that all of his ideas were completely correct and that we should transplant his strategy from 1902 into 2012.
Nobody is saying to copy everything from 1917 Russia to 2012 in an advanced country. However a party would be needed to lead a revolution. It would have to be a Marxist party schooled in the honest study of all previous revolutions and the history of the last 100 years and more.

many of the lessons are there. I pointed out a crucial example in one thread. Instead of discussing that classic example, you threw lies, blatant lies, and shit at me in your desperation to cling to the shitty coat tails of the biggest shit poster on that thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2400284&postcount=55).

Credibility zero.

[La Comédie Noire]

People don't like Leninism because it asks them to either be a part of or submit to a dictatorship for their or someone elses own good. That this dictatorship is somehow freer than say a constitutional republic because of its class content (free in content, repressive in form ect.) is just a way to get around the obvious fact it entails the submission to a one party state.

It comes from a healthy attitude of suspicion which questions power.

[Questionable]

People don't like Leninism because it asks them to either be a part of or submit to a dictatorship for their or someone elses own good. That this dictatorship is somehow freer than say a constitutional republic because of its class content (free in content, repressive in form ect.) is just a way to get around the obvious fact it entails the submission to a one party state.

It comes from a healthy attitude of suspicion which questions power.

And here is everything I dislike about Anti-Leninism condensed into one post. Confusing Leninism with Stalinism? Check. Claiming that bourgeois forms of government are superior? Check. Disregarding the material conditions that lead to repressive measures in favor of an idealist position that Leninism single-handedly corrupted Russia? Check. Using abstract terms such as "power" to masquerade as a wise sage in the absence of a coherent materialist analysis? Check. Replace "Leninism" with "Communism" and it's the exact kind of thing I would expect when arguing with a liberal.

Not to say that there aren't some valid points being made here by other users, but I can't stand crap like this.

[Ocean Seal]

The working class CAN ONLY be emancipated by the WORKING CLASS itself. I'm not saying, Marx said this.

Trite, Lenin never denied this, and there is plenty of evidence to show a widespread proletarian insurrection followed by the ascension of working class power in post revolutionary Russia. Workers power isn't just sitting on a council saying you want to produce this and that. That is simply not a model for a large revolution. The state exists to collectivize the economy and plan what the workers councils produce.



Lenin was an opportunist. He had good intentions, of course, he was an idealistic revolutionary, yet, good intentions do not translate into good results.
Yes as opposed to all of the realistic libertarian revolutionaries who have experienced so much success. Not good results? Lenin established the first widespread proletarian dictature. One which was not destroyed almost immediately like the Hungarian communes or anarchist Catalonia.
Every revolution is authoritarian, it consists of a new class interest exerting power over the defeated classes. What you get is a state regardless of how black your flag is.


As long as we have Leninists in the mix who still cling to a failed ideology, we will not be able to move forward.
Idealist bullshit according to your worldview. So what if there are a few Leninists in this world? Doesn't the working class emancipate itself and thus we don't need communists? Stop blaming Leninists for your failures.

[La Comédie Noire]

Leninism with Stalinism? Check.

Certainly you aren't going to blame everything on Stalin? That would be just as bad as me blaming everything single handedly on Lenin. Which we know isn't part of a coherent material analysis.


Claiming that bourgeois forms of government are superior? Check.

In regards to civil liberties yeah. I mean of course oppressive measures will have to be carried out, but when they go against fellow leftists or stifle discussion in general, they are deleterious to the intellectual climate and just lead to a bunch of yes men and their party superiors.

It creates the worst kind of mediocrity and should be limited as much as possible.


Disregarding the material conditions that lead to repressive measures in favor of an idealist position that Leninism single-handedly corrupted Russia?

I never said Leninism single handedly led to the corruption of Russia. Though it is a favorite tool of apologists to blame material conditions for the decline of genuine proletarian democracy.


Using abstract terms such as "power" to masquerade as a wise sage in the absence of a coherent materialist analysis? Check.

Power as in political power, who wields it, how its made accountable ect. Things that the Democratic Centralist model has trouble with and don't act like there weren't alternatives to this intellectual death trap.


Replace "Leninism" with "Communism" and it's the exact kind of thing I would expect when arguing with a liberal.

You know you've hit on a nuanced and superior analysis of history when someone calls you a liberal. I'll take it as a compliment.






.

[Questionable]

Certainly you aren't going to blame everything on Stalin? That would be just as bad as me blaming everything single handedly on Lenin. Which we know isn't part of a coherent material analysis.

Did I say "Stalin did it"? No, I said "Stalinism," or "Marxism-Leninism" if you want to be more specific. The material conditions underwent many quantitative changes until they reached a qualitative change, and the political philosophy reflected that.


In regards to civil liberties yeah. I mean of course oppressive measures will have to be carried out, but when they go against fellow leftists or stifle discussion in general, they are deleterious to the intellectual climate and just lead to a bunch of yes men and their party superiors.

It creates the worst kind of mediocrity and should be limited as much as possible.You're right on this part. There should always be freedom of discussion amongst leftists, as long as the decision is followed through once it is decided and there is no disruptive sectarianism.



I never said Leninism single handedly led to the corruption of Russia. Though it is a favorite tool of apologists to blame material conditions for the decline of genuine proletarian democracy.You're right again, us Leninists like to use materialism to explain things a whole lot. Guilty as charged, although I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be ashamed of this or not.


Power as in political power, who wields it, how its made accountable ect. Things that the Democratic Centralist model has trouble with and don't act like there weren't alternatives to this intellectual death trap.The workers held power through the soviets, the Bolsheviks had popular support from the proletariat, etc. Honestly, this argument has been repeated a thousand times on this site and anything I say won't faze you.


You know you've hit on a nuanced and superior analysis of history when someone calls you a liberal. I'll take it as a compliment.Haha, what the fuck are you talking about? You had no historical analysis. You just threw the same crap about how Leninism = bloodthirsty tyrants and how power would corrupt it. It was only after I called you out that you tried to explain your position, and you still haven't made a historical analysis, you've just attacked the ideals you dislike. Or is this just the old "You insulted me first, that means I'm winning!" fallacy?

[daft punk]

People don't like Leninism because it asks them to either be a part of or submit to a dictatorship for their or someone elses own good. That this dictatorship is somehow freer than say a constitutional republic because of its class content (free in content, repressive in form ect.) is just a way to get around the obvious fact it entails the submission to a one party state.

It comes from a healthy attitude of suspicion which questions power.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/13.htm


Extraordinary Fourth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, which was held to decide the question of the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was held in Moscow from March 14 to 16, 1918. On March 13 this question was discussed by the Communist group of the Congress; Lenin spoke at the meeting (for the secretarial record of this speech see Lenin Miscellany XI, pp. 68-70). By 453 votes to 36 the group approved the signing of the treaty. Not all the delegates had arrived at the time and the group was not present in full strength. According to the minutes, the Congress was attended by 1,232 delegates with a vote; they included 795 Bolsheviks, 283 Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, 25 Socialist-Revolutionaries of the Centre, 21 Mensheviks, and 11 Menshevik-Internationalists. The questions on the agenda were: ratification of the peace treaty; transfer of the capital; election of the All-Russia C.E.C. After a statement on the peace treaty by G. V. Chicherin, People’s Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lenin gave the report on the main question on the agenda on behalf of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee; the second report on behalf of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries against ratification of the treaty was given by B. D. Kamkov.
The Mensheviks, Right and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Maximalists, anarchists and others put up a solid front against ratification of the treaty. After a keen debate a signed vote was taken and the Congress adopted Lenin’s resolution in favour of ratification by an overwhelming majority. There were 784 votes in favour, 261 against and 115 delegates abstained. In connection with the ratification of the Brest Treaty the Left S.R.s withdrew from the Council of People’s Commissars. The “Left Communists” refused to take part in the voting and stated in a special declaration that the conclusion of peace would undermine the country’s defence and the gains of the revolution. By refusing to vote, the “Left Communists” violated the decisions of the Seventh Party Congress and the Communist group of the Extraordinary Fourth All-Russia Congress of Soviets and the decision taken by the Central Committee, which met while the Congress was on, that there should be no action against the decisions of the Party.
The Congress passed a resolution on the transfer of the capital of the Soviet state to Moscow and elected a Central Executive Committee consisting of 200 members.
The decision of the Congress on ratification of the peace treaty was approved by the local Soviets, the Party organisations and the working people at numerous meetings and conferences held at the time.


see how you are wrong? It was not a one party state, it was a multiparty democracy. The main other party, the Left SRs walked out of government. Then they tried to sabotage the Bolshevik's peace deal with Germany. And so they became enemy. Many of their members left and joined the Bolsheviks.

So now you know, it was not the Bolsheviks fault it became a one party state.

Maybe now you will question some of the other ideas you believe to be true.

[Rooster]

correct. Under lenin it was a workers state in the sense that the workers party controlled the state, moving towards socialism, as best it could in the circumstances.

So when Labour controlled the UK, did that make it a workers' state? :confused:

[daft punk]

Ok here is the problem with the left coms. They understand roughly that material conditions are at the root of everything. They know that at certain times certain individuals can also have a big influence.

So far so good.

What they fail to understand is any of the actual detail, to put things together in a coherent way.

One key thing to understand is how much is an individual shaping events and how much is he a product of events.

Another is what is the individual actually trying to do.

Another is what are the actual material conditions.

Let's go right back to 1906. Russia was semifeudal ie backward and the Bolsheviks were basically stagists, not unreasonably. However Trotsky made a breakthrough in revolutionary theory by sussing out that the capitalist class in Russia were stunted and could not play a progressive role.

This theory is called Permanent Revolution is is vital to all understanding of events after 1906 up to the present day.

In 1917 the masses rose up in Russia. The bourgeois did not play a progressive role and Lenin rapidly came to the same conclusion as Trotsky.

The rest of the Bolsheviks were lagging behind, supporting the Provisional Government and still thinking like stagists.

So, what is to be done?

Some left coms, the impossiblists, I think, say nothing, because Russia is too backward. Doing nothing when 3 million have died in WW1 and the peasants cannot afford land is not exactly very inspiring.

What about the rest of the left coms and anarchists, what would they do?

We never seem to hear what should have been done.

Trotsky and then Lenin advocated a workers government to attempt socialism, knowing full well that it would need help from revolutions in advanced countries to survive and succeed.

Should they not have bothered, in case it failed to spread?

The peasants and workers were all expecting some sort of revolution and an end to the war.

Lenin and Trotsky organised that.

What else should they have done?

As for Stalin, he was the product and architect of the degeneration. You have to approach it dialectically. The isolation of a revolution in a backward country produced degeneration, the degeneration made Stalin who he was, and he helped the degeneration.

If you cant understand this please make the effort to do so, because other wise you will have no clue.

Did Lenin make mistakes? Hard to say, even in hindsight. It is not really the point to pick over that too much. The point is to have a general understanding, which left coms do not even seem to attempt let alone achieve.

The main thing is the material conditions - they changed, revolution burns out after a while and leads to counter revolution, especially in an isolated backward country.

Stalin took the lead of the degeneration at a critical time and ensured it's rapid success, in a novel way obviously, blown around by different events.

Everything changed after Lenin died.

You have to think of this dialectically. Think of the appearance of a new species. Speciation is the result of tiny changes in a gene pool over time. Suddenly a new species pops up. Sudden qualitative change is the result of cumulative quantitative change.

This is essentially a tipping point, a defining line. This was marked in the calender by Lenin's death. It was the last little gene mutation before the new species was defined.


It's not just a line in the middle of a constant gradual change though. For one thing what was changing was all sorts of things. Secondly, change does not happen at a constant rate.

When Lenin died events unfolded at breakneck speed, Stalin managed to get a couple of key allies and suppress Lenin's testament. Trotsky was ill. Stalin gained immediate power and Stalin had no theory and no principles.

In fact he had been working on it for a while, building up his circle of cronies and sucking up to the bureaucrats.

[Grenzer]

So when Labour controlled the UK, did that make it a workers' state? :confused:

Degenerated Workers' state since the economy was only partially nationalized.

[daft punk]

So when Labour controlled the UK, did that make it a workers' state? :confused:
Not really, the leadership was always thoroughly reformist. However in principle it was a socialist party and many members saw it that way, plus they did nationalise stuff on principle, not just out of immediate necessity.

Put it this way, it could have been. I'm not sure how much support there would have been for socialist revolution in Britain in 1945. Would have to read up on that. Of course Stalin was working against that everywhere. And Marshall Aid was being used to try to stop it. For instance the French government kicked out the Communists (even though they were anti-revolution) in order to get aid. Not sure it that happened in Britain.

It's different in an advanced country anyway. In an advanced country you should be able to get close to a workers democracy quite quickly. Russia was a different kettle of fish entirely. Please bear that in mind.

[daft punk]

Degenerated Workers' state since the economy was only partially nationalized.
Ludicrous. It was not a workers state. The phrase 'degenerated workers state' uses the phrase 'workers state' in a different meaning to the one Rooster just used. 'Workers state' meant planned economy. Degenerated meant ruled by a dictatorship. Russia had a planned economy ruled by a dictatorship.

Britain was still capitalist. It had a reformist party which nationalised a fair bit of stuff but it was never close to attempting socialism. The ruling class were never expropriated. Most stuff that was nationalised was either done because it was making a loss, or because it needed to be unified to be modernised. There was no real class war.

[Rooster]

Not really, the leadership was always thoroughly reformist. However in principle it was a socialist party and many members saw it that way, plus they did nationalise stuff on principle, not just out of immediate necessity.

But it was a workers' party, wasn't it? And wasn't the bolshevik policy essentially one of reformism, once they attained state power, from state capitalism to socialism?

[Railyon]

What about the rest of the left coms and anarchists, what would they do?

We never seem to hear what should have been done.

Because this:


The isolation of a revolution in a backward country produced degeneration[...]

I like your construction of historical strawmen in scenarios that can only lead to the same outcome.

I think you make the same mistake here as those you accuse of "not approaching things materialistically". At least SIOC is an attempt at a coherent answer to this, if you hold an internationalist perspective hell would freeze over before changes in personnel made a difference to checkmate situations.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Most of the criticisms I read are directed at his idea of a vanguard party.
History has shown that vanguard parties, no matter how well-intentioned, are dictatorships over the proletariat instead of of the proletariat. I would count Lenin as one of the well-intentioned, but it's 2012 now, not 1917. Learn from mistakes of the past, don't replicate them.

[Veovis]

I love how everyone blames Lenin and his party for fucking up the Russian revolution and not the ongoing Great War, the invading Allies, the white generals, or the preexisting lack of development in Russia's productive forces.

[thriller]

Me:
"I think that we should analyze history to see how the vanguard should work in the 21st century [insert Lenin quote, Stalin quote, statistics, primary sources]."
3 thanks (at the most).

Anyone else:
"Fuck the vanguard! Get off of Red Alert (who even plays that game anymore) and come join RAAN! Yeah!!!!! [Another mindless comment]."
20 thanks (minimum)

You obviously have not been reading this thread. Grezner has made some good points about why he doesn't support Leninism, but understands it. Same thing with me. Also I don't believe the materialist conditions exist for a vanguard anymore. Workers have risen up recently with out being led by a single party because they know they are being attacked. We can learn a lot from Lenin. Both positives and negatives. BTW Red Alert pwns.

[Rooster]

I think it's also worth remembering that the soviet in st. Petersburg came about independently of the bolsheviks, and they initially didn.t approve of it it either.

[Questionable]

History has shown that vanguard parties, no matter how well-intentioned, are dictatorships over the proletariat instead of of the proletariat. I would count Lenin as one of the well-intentioned, but it's 2012 now, not 1917. Learn from mistakes of the past, don't replicate them.

See? There are two types of Anti-Leninists in this thread; people who are actually making theoretical criticisms, whether you agree with them or not, and then people that are just spouting the same pseudo-wisdom that's already been said and refuted a dozen times.

[La Comédie Noire]

Did I say "Stalin did it"? No, I said "Stalinism," or "Marxism-Leninism" if you want to be more specific. The material conditions underwent many quantitative changes until they reached a qualitative change, and the political philosophy reflected that.

Oh great Dialects. I'm of the opinion that you don't need dialects to explain history and all the statements of historical materialism can be rephrased without them.


You're right on this part. There should always be freedom of discussion amongst leftists, as long as the decision is followed through once it is decided and there is no disruptive sectarianism.

Honestly some of the best discussion is disruptive.


You're right again, us Leninists like to use materialism to explain things a whole lot. Guilty as charged, although I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be ashamed of this or not.

When it's used as an excuse for despotism you should.


The workers held power through the soviets, the Bolsheviks had popular support from the proletariat, etc. Honestly, this argument has been repeated a thousand times on this site and anything I say won't faze you.

The Bolsheviks did not have support from all the soviets. The Bolsheviks dissolved those soviets that did not give them support or until they could get a majority. The Bolsheviks took the power from the soviets and turned them into purely consultative bodies. The Bolsheviks expelled the other leftist parties except for those who were willing to agree with them.

The Bolsheviks were not evil, they were reacting to material conditions, but it should be understood this was just one of many ways they could react and a policy must be judged on its outcomes not what was intended.

So did it work? No, it did not. The act of gutting proletarian democracy no matter how well intentioned killed initiative and laid the groundwork for the rule of the bureaucrat and then Stalin.


Haha, what the fuck are you talking about? You had no historical analysis. You just threw the same crap about how Leninism = bloodthirsty tyrants and how power would corrupt it. It was only after I called you out that you tried to explain your position, and you still haven't made a historical analysis, you've just attacked the ideals you dislike. Or is this just the old "You insulted me first, that means I'm winning!" fallacy?

You are a lot like your Leninist forebears who think if they say something enough times, make enough decrees, ect. It will become true.

[Questionable]

Oh great Dialects. I'm of the opinion that you don't need dialects to explain history and all the statements of historical materialism can be rephrased without them.

I'd be interested in knowing more about your viewpoint on this.


Honestly some of the best discussion is disruptive.

Well...okay. I don't see what you're trying to say here. It seems like another nugget of wisdom in place of an argument.


When it's used as an excuse for despotism you should.

Not an excuse, an explanation, and thereby a way to view the errors and correct them.


The Bolsheviks did not have support from all the soviets. The Bolsheviks dissolved those soviets that did not give them support or until they could get a majority. The Bolsheviks took the power from the soviets and turned them into purely consultative bodies. The Bolsheviks expelled the other leftist parties except for those who were willing to agree with them.

These things were the result of imperialist aggression in Russia, and in times of war, I can agree with limiting democracy to a certain extent.


The Bolsheviks were not evil, they were reacting to material conditions, but it should be understood this was just one of many ways they could react and a policy must be judged on its outcomes not what was intended.

Uh-oh. Looks like you're using materialism to justify despotism.


So did it work? No, it did not. The act of gutting proletarian democracy no matter how well intentioned killed initiative and laid the groundwork for the rule of the bureaucrat and then Stalin.

It was much more complicated than that. Among many other factors, after the civil war, the proletarian had nearly been destroyed.


You are a lot like your Leninist forebears who think if they say something enough times, make enough decrees, ect. It will become true.

I believe I'm starting to get a coherent argument out of you, but you still say stuff like this, and I honestly just don't understand what the hell you're talking about.

[robbo203]

Let me spell this out. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

What statement along what lines? Are you still talking about this?

Originally Posted by daft punk

"No Russia was not socialist under Lenin, but it was trying to move in that direction. Lenin said it would take 2 or 3 generations, and would only be possible with the help of advanced countries.

.....


If they hadn't begun to construct an authoritarian state the White would have massacred them and introduced capitalism. "

The above statements are facts. Lenin said that, and the second bit is fucking obvious. Tell me, if the Bolsheviks disarmed and allowed the Whites etc to do what they wanted, what other possible outcome would there be?



See, this kind of bears out what Ive been saying about by your cavalier approach. Not just to historical analysis but to the questions people ask of you. You're rattled because you know in your heart of hearts you have no real answers to the points raised and I suspect you half realise yourself that the house of Trotsky is built on sand. Peppering your response with expletives - "fuck this" and "fuck that" - only reinforces the impression that you are flustered and unmistakably on the defensive.

You do realise - dont you? - that you'll thank me in the long run for remorsely baiting you - once youve passed through your rrrrrrevolutionary Trotskyist phase, that is ;) Bit like teenager pimples, eh? But dont for chrissakes turn Tory which is what a disproportinately large number of ex-Trots seem to do. I wonder why that is?

Anyway enough of joshing - to business. If you calmed down and actually read carefully what I wrote you would not need to write "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?". It was pretty clear what the fuck I was talking about

My question was a simple one. If you 1) agree that Russia was not socialist and if you 2) imply that it was not capitalist either (since capitalism would only have been "introduced" had the Whites triumpled) then what mode of production would adequately describe Russia at the time?

Calling it a "workers state", as I explained, is no answer. A workers state - and I do not accept it was a so called workers state - is NOT a mode of mode of production. It is a hypothetical political arrangement. Its a bit of a dotty idea anyway - the slaves telling the slave owners what to do while choosing to remain slaves. As if...






There are 2 meanings of 'workers state'.
1. Workers party in power attempting to move towards socialism. This existed 1917-27.
2. Planned economy. This existed 1928 onwards.

Socialism requires both. The above formula is very simplified so please dont boringly dive on it and nit pick, I am trying to explain the basic idea.



Sorry, cant oblige - Im gonna be boring and nitpick

1. In what sense did workers have power in 1917-27? Just because the so called Vanguard takes control of state power and declares itself to be the most advanced militant section of the proletariat - blah blah blah - does not mean that the proletariat itself has taken power, does it now? Ive painstaking explained to you, not once but several times, that if you capture state power in advance of a majority of workers becoming socialist, that necessarily your vanguard will have no other option but to run capitalism. And in running capitalism IT IS INEVITABLE that your vanguard will go against the interests of workers and side with the interest of capitalism . That is the only way in which capitalism can be run - in the interests of capital.

One of the very few useful insights that that eminently bourgeois revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, left us with was the notion of "substitutionism" - how the Party substitutes itself for the Class and the Central Committe for Party and the Leader for the Central Committee etc etc. In point of fact, for all the talk of workers power, the Russian workers had very little in the way of power to fight back against those who wielded state power - the new Soviet ruling class. Independent trade unionism was crushed, political opposition was banned, "one-man management" and "scientific Taylorisim" vigorously imposed from above, striking and absenteeism severely punished. Need i go on? In fact, under Soviet state capitalism the workers probably had less power than their counterparts in the West. To talk of "workers power" is nonsense. Its was a con, an empty political slogan effectively used by the new ruling class to legitimise its own de facto dictatorship over the proletariat

2. You claim that something called a "planned economy" existed after 1928. What the hell does a "planned economy mean? All economies involves planning. This is just another of those sacred cows upheld by some on the Left which turns out to be just so much hot air signifying very little. If the idea of planned economy is supposed to signifiy that the total pattern of production was "planned" in some apriori sense then Im afraid you are quite wrong. Certainly GOSPLAN generated some pretty comprehensive "plans" but to suggest that it was these plans that guided the economy is hugely mistaken. The plans were little more than a wishlist of things the planners wanted done. Invariably and pretty frequesntly the plans were modified and the production targets changed to fit in with changing economic realities - not the other way round. The Soviet economy was actually a lot more decentralised than people sometimes realise and indeed the degree of industrial concentration was significantly less compared with other capitalist countries such as the United States. Competition was rife at every level of Soviet society and state enterrpises were obliged to pursue profit as a legal requirement. All of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism were present in the Soviet Union post (and prior to) 1928 - including also the buying and selling of means of production between state enterprises. So much for your so called "planned economy"!







The mode of production is obviously a mixture



Yes different modes of production can indeed coexist and articulate together - providing we are talking about modes based on sectional ownership of the means of prpoduction, It is not possible for a socialist or communist mode of production based on common ownership of the means of production to coexist with any other mode based on sectional ownership. That should be pretty obvious. Common ownership by definition precludes sectional or private ownership. One form of sectional or private ownership, on the hand. does not preclude another. So capitalism can coexist with feudalistic remnants but not with socialism/communism





Russia in 1917 was semifeudal, semi capitalist. The Bolsheviks took power on behalf of the workers ans attempted to move in the direction of socialism. They first had to deal with the civil war so they had war communism. Then they had to deal with extreme backwardness so they had a temporary retreat, the NEP. Then Stalin took over. He really fucked things up.

In general it was a mixture of all sorts, from the stuff that existed before the revolution to state capitalism and state industry. It was trying to move towards socialism.



"Trying to move to socialism" means absolutely nothing. Its just political rhetoric - not a description of existing economic reality. In any case, as we have seen, Lenin had already redefined socialism to mean state capitalism run - allegedly - in the interests of the the whole people. He even talked of "big banks" of all things, as constituting nine-tenths of the "socialist apparatus"!!! Such talk is completely alien to traditional marxism. Im just flabbergasted that so many on the Left still seem to fall for this
"trying to move to socialism" line. Its nonsense . In reality, Russia was trying to move towards state capitalism - Lenin said so himself and criticised those who said state capitalism was a bad thing. In the end this is what was achieved - state capitalism. All the rhetorical talk of moving towards socialism was just so much hot air and rank political opportunism






Lenin and Trotsky wanted the rich peasants and bourgeois to be heavily taxed, to raise cash and also keep them down, keep them less numerous and less powerful etc.

The money raised would be used to build state industries, and to subsidise coops, to entice the poor peasants into collective farming by the back door.

Stalin had other plans- get rid of Trotsky. So Stalin did the opposite of what lenin wanted, and based himself on looking after the wealthy

This smacks a bit of the "Great Man" theory doesnt it? It all went wrong, according to our Trots when the evil Machiavellian, Stalin, took power and starting implementing "his" own plans . Actually if it had been the other way round and Trotsky got the power and Stalin, the icepick, I seriously doubt things would have been much different.

You need to read Plekhanov's essay "The Role of the Individual in History" which is a brilliant refutation of this kind of naive idealistic interpretation of history. See here http://art-bin.com/art/oplecheng.html . Plekhanov aptly decribed such a view as being based on an "optical illusion". And so it is

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Not really, the leadership was always thoroughly reformist. However in principle it was a socialist party and many members saw it that way, plus they did nationalise stuff on principle, not just out of immediate necessity.


Yes, Lord Attlee bringing the means of production under democratic workers' control, via the great mass Socialist Party that is the Labour Party, on principle rather than out of necessity.

So tell me, does that mean that the Tory governments of Churchill, Eden and Heath were workers' parties too? Because (especially under Heath) they were just as committed to welfare-ism, nationalisation and so on as Old Labour were.

Trotskyists in the west - just love a bit of Old Labour. If only Peter Taaffe was in charge, he and Militant would have steered that party towards Marxism, right? The party of the glorious Kier Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Attlee, bringing revolution and emancipation to the workers of Britain, I can just see it now.

And saying this, you have the gall to tell left-communists that we don't see the bigger picture!

[Binh]

Most of the criticisms I read are directed at his idea of a vanguard party. Correct me of I'm wrong, but the vanguard strategy that Lenin proposed was simply a response to the fact that workers were too busy actually working to sit down and read Marx, and they were becoming radicalized unevenly. So, the most politically aware sections of the working-class needed to form a party that would lead workers away from simply struggling for better conditions within the capitalist system, and towards overthrowing the entire system.

Unfortunately, you are wrong. The vanguard strategy was pioneered by the German SPD, following Marx's merger formula of the worker movement and the socialist movement that Karl Kautsky did a lot to flesh out on the theory side. Check out Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscoved for the documentation on this.

I don't see anything wrong with anti-Leninism since Lenin himself wasn't a Leninists and the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP wasn't a Leninist organization but part of a broad, multi-tendency party.

[robbo203]

Unfortunately, you are wrong. The vanguard strategy was pioneered by the German SPD, following Marx's merger formula of the worker movement and the socialist movement that Karl Kautsky did a lot to flesh out on the theory side. Check out Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscoved for the documentation on this.

I don't see anything wrong with anti-Leninism since Lenin himself wasn't a Leninists and the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP wasn't a Leninist organization but part of a broad, multi-tendency party.


It needs to be said that Marx and Engels pretty much looked askance at the vanguardist tendencies in the SPD to which they were vigorously opposed. There is an interesting letter from Engels in 1879 in which he wrote

As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one path open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is therefore impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new Party organ adopts a line corresponding to the views of these gentlemen, and is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains for us, much though we should regret it, but publicly to declare our opposition to it and to dissolve the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German Party abroad. But it is to be hoped that things will not come to that. (my emphasis)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/letters/79_09_15.htm


Engels later expanded on this approach in his 1895 Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850:

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.

Lenin's position was quite contrary to this. As you rightly point out the vanguardist strategy was poineered by the SPD but Lenin developed his ideas in the basis of that - most crucially the leninist idea that a vanguard should FIRST capture power ahead of the majority of working becoming socialists in order - allegedly - to steer society in a socialist direction. That was an absolutely disastrous idea totally at variance with the principle of working class self emancipation. It inevitably meant the Vanguard coming to administer capitalism in the absence of this precondition for socialism - mass socialist consciousness - and thus, in the end, to side with interests of capital against wage labour. It was inevitable in order words that the Vanguard would transmute into a new ruling capitalist class

This position of Lenin's is clearly spelt out in something he wrote in 1920 in which he precisely declared - contra Engels - that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above:

"On the other hand, the idea, common among the old parties and the old leaders of the Second International, that the majority of the exploited toilers can achieve complete clarity of socialist consciousness and firm socialist convictions and character under capitalist slavery, under the yoke of the bourgeoisie (which assumes an inIinite variety of forms that become more subtle and at the same time more brutal and ruthless the higher the cultural level in a given capitalist country) is also idealisation of capitalism and of bourgeois democracy, as well as deception of the workers.

In fact, it is only after the vanguard of the proletariat, supported by the
whole or the majority of this, the only revolutionary class, overthrows the
exploiters, suppresses them, emancipates the exploited from their state of
slavery and-immediately improves their conditions of life at the expense of the expropriated capitalists—it is only after this, and only in the actual process of an acute class struggle, that the masses of the toilers and exploited can be educated, trained and organised around the proletariat under whose influence and guidance, they can get rid of the selfishness, disunity, vices and weaknesses engendered by private property; only then will they be converted into a free union of free workers."
(http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/04.htm)

If nothing else this demonstrates that Leninism itself stands opposed to the central principle of working class self emancipation. It is the vanguard according to Leninism that is to emancipate the workers from above - not the workers themselves - a notion for which Engels reserved his utmost scorn and contempt in his 1879 letter...

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2406344#post2406344)
"Not really, the leadership was always thoroughly reformist. However in principle it was a socialist party and many members saw it that way, plus they did nationalise stuff on principle, not just out of immediate necessity. "


But it was a workers' party, wasn't it? And wasn't the bolshevik policy essentially one of reformism, once they attained state power, from state capitalism to socialism?

And was the Bolshevik government really like the Labour one?

There was no civil war for a kick off. Labour didnt nationalise the banks. The labour leaders were not socialists, not revolutionaries. There was no prising the army away from the tops.

The main thing is the economic backwardness in Russia, you cant expect things to be the same as if it was advanced. If Russia had an economy as advanced as Britain, the Bolsheviks would have nationalised all the big stuff very quickly. But it was mainly a peasant economy so they could not do that.

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2406341#post2406341)
"What about the rest of the left coms and anarchists, what would they do?

We never seem to hear what should have been done. "

Because this:

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2406341#post2406341)
"The isolation of a revolution in a backward country produced degeneration[...]"



I like your construction of historical strawmen in scenarios that can only lead to the same outcome.

I think you make the same mistake here as those you accuse of "not approaching things materialistically". At least SIOC is an attempt at a coherent answer to this, if you hold an internationalist perspective hell would freeze over before changes in personnel made a difference to checkmate situations.

What strawman? What are you on about? What mistake? In what way is SIOC an attempt at a coherent answer?
What are you actually trying to say?

It seems to me you are saying you would do nothing because it was bound to degenerate because it was isolated in a backward country. Is that what you are saying? If so you are right. Please confirm.

So Stalin would therefore make no difference?

This is nonsense.

This is a dialectical process any Marxist would understand.

[robbo203]

And was the Bolshevik government really like the Labour one?

There was no civil war for a kick off. Labour didnt nationalise the banks. The labour leaders were not socialists, not revolutionaries. There was no prising the army away from the tops.

The main thing is the economic backwardness in Russia, you cant expect things to be the same as if it was advanced. If Russia had an economy as advanced as Britain, the Bolsheviks would have nationalised all the big stuff very quickly. But it was mainly a peasant economy so they could not do that.


Actually the capitalist Labour Party (of which SPEW's forerunners, the so called Militant Tendency , were loyal members) nationalised the Bank of England in 1946.

Engels ridiculed those who thought nationalisation had anything to do with socialism - like Daft Punk - pointing that this would make Bismark into some sort of socialist. If Daft Punk accepts that Russia was not socialist but still thinks nationalisation has something to do with socialism then he has some explaining because under the Bolsheviks there was indeed widespread nationalisation.

Engels also commented in the same publication in which he mentions Bismark:

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"

It was not only the economic backwardness of Russia that ruled out socialism but the absence of mass socialist consciousness - a point that Daft Punk consistently overlooks. See my previous post

[daft punk]

My question was a simple one. If you 1) agree that Russia was not socialist and if you 2) imply that it was not capitalist either (since capitalism would only have been "introduced" had the Whites triumpled) then what mode of production would adequately describe Russia at the time?

Calling it a "workers state", as I explained, is no answer. A workers state - and I do not accept it was a so called workers state - is NOT a mode of mode of production. It is a hypothetical political arrangement. Its a bit of a dotty idea anyway - the slaves telling the slave owners what to do while choosing to remain slaves. As if...

It was a planned economy, which we also call a workers state.





Sorry, cant oblige - Im gonna be boring and nitpick

1. In what sense did workers have power in 1917-27? Just because the so called Vanguard takes control of state power and declares itself to be the most advanced militant section of the proletariat - blah blah blah - does not mean that the proletariat itself has taken power, does it now? Ive painstaking explained to you, not once but several times, that if you capture state power in advance of a majority of workers becoming socialist, that necessarily your vanguard will have no other option but to run capitalism. And in running capitalism IT IS INEVITABLE that your vanguard will go against the interests of workers and side with the interest of capitalism . That is the only way in which capitalism can be run - in the interests of capital.

In 1918 they had soviet democracy. They even voted on ending WW2. The government was a party committed to socialism. It had the support of most urban workers and most soldiers on the western front. The fact is the Feb revolution happened. The Bolsheviks had two choices, no nothing, as you would advocate, or grab a chance to start the world socialist revolution. If it had spread to advanced countries it could have succeeded. Unfortunately it didnt quite make it. Sometimes it is better to try and fail that to do nothing. What they did achieve ultimately was a planned economy and that did show it's advantages over capitalism.

Do you understand that after the February revolution it was the workers who ran the factories? In some places Factory Committees even ran the local town itself. You seem totally unaware of all this. Read about it. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1918/origins.htm) Pun not intended.

"This method of controlling production by the workers, sprung spontaneously from the Russian revolution, has just been legalized by the new Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government of the Russian Republic. Also it has become possible, through the power of the government for the workmen themselves to take over and operate all plants those owners cannot keep them open. With unlimited credit behind them, and the huge, organized force of the government, there is no reason why the workers cannot hire engineers and technical staff, or why, with such training, they may not be able, in a few years, to take over the greater part of Russian industrial enterprise. With the control of the means of production and distribution in the hands of the popular government the main obstacle to the achievement of industrial democracy has vanished."






One of the very few useful insights that that eminently bourgeois revolutionary, Leon Trotsky,

Why do you call him bourgeois? That sound really pathetic. He was not bourgeois and his views were revolutionary. He predicted, advocated and led a revolution. You would have done nothing.





left us with was the notion of "substitutionism" - how the Party substitutes itself for the Class and the Central Committe for Party and the Leader for the Central Committee etc etc. In point of fact, for all the talk of workers power, the Russian workers had very little in the way of power to fight back against those who wielded state power - the new Soviet ruling class. Independent trade unionism was crushed, political opposition was banned, "one-man management" and "scientific Taylorisim" vigorously imposed from above, striking and absenteeism severely punished. Need i go on? In fact, under Soviet state capitalism the workers probably had less power than their counterparts in the West. To talk of "workers power" is nonsense. Its was a con, an empty political slogan effectively used by the new ruling class to legitimise its own de facto dictatorship over the proletariat

this is nonsense. Trotsky and Lenin each lived with their families in a room in an old school that was partitioned. They had no luxuries. They implemented management in industry because of the civil war and the devastation of industry.

John Reed again, October 1918:
"As all real socialists know, and as we who have seen the Russian Revolution can testify, there is today in Moscow and throughout all the cities and towns of the Russian land a highly complex political structure, which is upheld by the vast majority of the people and which is functioning as well as any newborn popular government ever functioned. Also the workers of Russia have fashioned from their necessities and the demands of life an economic organisation which is evolving into a true industrial democracy."

"The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was in operation when I was in Russia, may serve as an example of how the urban units of government function under the socialist state. It consisted of about 1200 deputies, and in normal circumstances held a plenary session every two weeks. In the meantime, it elected a Central Executive Committee of 110 members, based upon party proportionality, and this Central Executive Committee added to itself by invitation delegates from the central committees of all the political parties, from the central committees of the professional unions, the factory shop committees, and other democratic organisations."

"Elections of delegates are based on proportional representation, which means that the political parties are represented in exact proportion to the number of voters in the whole city. And it is political parties and programmes which are voted for – not candidates. The candidates are designated by the central committees of the political parties, which can replace them by other party members. Also the delegates are not elected for any particular term, but are subject to recall at any time. No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1918/soviets.htm

You mention Taylorism. They were simply trying to raise productivity to meet the needs of the people, not to make a profit. Your criticism is absurd.

You should try reading Lenin etc:

"The fight against the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet form of organisation is assured by the firmness of the connection between the Soviets and the “people”, meaning by that the working and exploited people, and by the flexibility and elasticity of this connection. Even in the most democratic capitalist republics in the world, the poor never regard the bourgeois parliament as “their” institution. But the Soviets are “theirs” and not alien institutions to the mass of workers and peasants. The modern “Social-Democrats” of the Scheidemann or, what is almost the same thing, of the Martov type are repelled by the Soviets, and they are drawn towards the respectable bourgeois parliament, or to the Constituent Assembly, in the same way as Turgenev, sixty years ago, was drawn towards a moderate monarchist and noblemen’s Constitution and was repelled by the peasant democracy of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky.[14] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm#fw14) It is the closeness of the Soviets to the “people”, to the working people, that creates the special forms of recall and other means of control from below which must be most zealously developed now. For example, the Councils of Public Education, as periodical conferences of Soviet electors and their delegates called to discuss and control the activities of the Soviet authorities in this field, deserve full sympathy and support. Nothing could be sillier than to transform the Soviets into something congealed and self-contained. The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm#sec8







2. You claim that something called a "planned economy" existed after 1928. What the hell does a "planned economy mean? All economies involves planning. This is just another of those sacred cows upheld by some on the Left which turns out to be just so much hot air signifying very little. If the idea of planned economy is supposed to signifiy that the total pattern of production was "planned" in some apriori sense then Im afraid you are quite wrong. Certainly GOSPLAN generated some pretty comprehensive "plans" but to suggest that it was these plans that guided the economy is hugely mistaken. The plans were little more than a wishlist of things the planners wanted done. Invariably and pretty frequesntly the plans were modified and the production targets changed to fit in with changing economic realities - not the other way round. The Soviet economy was actually a lot more decentralised than people sometimes realise and indeed the degree of industrial concentration was significantly less compared with other capitalist countries such as the United States. Competition was rife at every level of Soviet society and state enterrpises were obliged to pursue profit as a legal requirement. All of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism were present in the Soviet Union post (and prior to) 1928 - including also the buying and selling of means of production between state enterprises. So much for your so called "planned economy"!

It was not a privately owned, capitalist, market economy. It was a publicly owned, non-capitalist, non-market economy. Dont try to pretend otherwise. After collectivisation, I am talking about.







Yes different modes of production can indeed coexist and articulate together - providing we are talking about modes based on sectional ownership of the means of prpoduction, It is not possible for a socialist or communist mode of production based on common ownership of the means of production to coexist with any other mode based on sectional ownership. That should be pretty obvious. Common ownership by definition precludes sectional or private ownership. One form of sectional or private ownership, on the hand. does not preclude another. So capitalism can coexist with feudalistic remnants but not with socialism/communism

This is incorrect. prior to 1928 there was all sorts going on. Of course it was a mix. You expect Paul Daniels to do some magic trick?






"Trying to move to socialism" means absolutely nothing.

a really stupid statement




Its just political rhetoric - not a description of existing economic reality.

the revolution was all a dream




In any case, as we have seen, Lenin had already redefined socialism to mean state capitalism run - allegedly - in the interests of the the whole people.

No he didnt. You are cherry picking. One quote from one speech, big deal. He was trying to make a point and you missed it. Find the quote, read the context.






He even talked of "big banks" of all things, as constituting nine-tenths of the "socialist apparatus"!!!

oh shock horror! Oh the scandal!
Read the quote and the context.









Such talk is completely alien to traditional marxism.



"5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. "
Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm





Im just flabbergasted that so many on the Left still seem to fall for this
"trying to move to socialism" line. Its nonsense . In reality, Russia was trying to move towards state capitalism - Lenin said so himself and criticised those who said state capitalism was a bad thing.

Wrong. Lenin used the phrase a few times, to make a point. In fact he was only talking about certain aspects of the economt and these no longer existed in 1928 according to Trotsky, have I not already told you this? Google it, research it.

Even Lenin's 'state capitalism' quotes prove you wrong. For instance he mentions state capitalism in On Cooperation, which is about stressing the need for cooperatives for poor peasants. A very important document. In it he says

"Our opponents told us repeatedly that we were rash in undertaking to implant socialism in an insufficiently cultured country. But they were misled by our having started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory (the theory of pedants of all kinds), because in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, that very cultural revolution which nevertheless now confronts us. This cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely socialist country; but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, we must have a certain material base)."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm


Now, what is he aiming for? Clues highlighted in red.





In the end this is what was achieved - state capitalism. All the rhetorical talk of moving towards socialism was just so much hot air and rank political opportunism

yawn







Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2405503#post2405503)

"Lenin and Trotsky wanted the rich peasants and bourgeois to be heavily taxed, to raise cash and also keep them down, keep them less numerous and less powerful etc.

The money raised would be used to build state industries, and to subsidise coops, to entice the poor peasants into collective farming by the back door.

Stalin had other plans- get rid of Trotsky. So Stalin did the opposite of what lenin wanted, and based himself on looking after the wealthy "



This smacks a bit of the "Great Man" theory doesnt it? It all went wrong, according to our Trots when the evil Machiavellian, Stalin, took power and starting implementing "his" own plans . Actually if it had been the other way round and Trotsky got the power and Stalin, the icepick, I seriously doubt things would have been much different.

You need to read Plekhanov's essay "The Role of the Individual in History" which is a brilliant refutation of this kind of naive idealistic interpretation of history. See here http://art-bin.com/art/oplecheng.html . Plekhanov aptly decribed such a view as being based on an "optical illusion". And so it is

You are getting this all wrong. Let me again try to give you the basics.

1. Socialism is impossible in one country

2. Socialism is particularly difficult in a backward country.

3. Therefore, socialism in an isolated backward country is doubly impossible.

4. Revolutions are most likely in backward countries.

5. In backward countries, indigenous capitalism becomes stunted, held down by foreign capital and tied to feudalism. To understand this properly read In Defence of October.

6. So, revolutions happen where capitalism is weakest, but where socialism is most difficult.

7. The solution to this riddle is that the revolution must be the spark for revolution in advanced countries which can then help the backward one.

8. Russia was stuck and the internationalisation failed. Part of this was Stalin's fault (eg he opposed the revolution in Germany in 1923).

9. In Russia in 1924, the only thing they could do would be to try to hang on, make the best of things, creep very slowly in the direction of socialism, try to spread the revolution internationally, try to avoid capitalist counter-revolution, try to avoid bureaucratisation of the party.

10. Dont ignore what I just said in what you quoted, that Lenin and Trotsky had these plans and Stalin did the opposite. Marxism is not all about materialism, it is dialectical materialism, which means it acknowledges the role of the individual. The individual will be shaped by the material conditions - Stalin was a product of the degeneration of the revolution stemming from it's isolation in a backward country. But he can also shape events too. And Marx knew this full well.

"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. "

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm#001

"Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.
Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by historical examples."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

[Rooster]

It was a planned economy, which we also call a workers state.

What classes were there and how did they relate to means of production? How was surplus value extracted? What does this say about the division of labour? Was there generalised commodity production? :confused:

[human strike]

I'm sure this must have already been said, but Lenin's theory wasn't based on the idea that the working class were too busy for revolution, it was based on the idea that the class is incapable of transcending a trade union consciousness for a revolutionary consciousness.

[robbo203]

It was a planned economy, which we also call a workers state.


You really dont get it do you? Firstly what is a "planned economy" and how is it a distinct mode of production. Do you understand what is meant by a "mode of production"? All economies involve "planning". Planning itself is a technical activity, it does not in itself signify a particular economic relationship to the means of production and therefore a "planned economy" cannot sensibly be called a "mode of production". If you mean by a planned economy that the total pattern of production was planned in some kind of coordinated fashion then that is quite misleading anyway. As Ive said many times before, GOSPLAN's plans were largely a wishlist of things the planners wanted done; they bore little relation to what actually happened and the production targets were constanbtly modified to fit in with changing circu,sytances. The economy thus guided the plan not the other way round, So it was not a planned economy in your sense of term

Secondly what on earth is this absurdity you call a "workers state"? If you are saying a working class existed then neccessarily you are saying that a capitalist class existed. But a capitalist class can only exist by virtue of exploiting a working class. In which case a workers state turns out to be a capitalist state actually pretending to be a workers state

In any case, as well you know, the workers in the Soviet Union did not control the state - the vanguard did - and this vanguard evolved pretty rapidly into a new capitalist ruling class. Not even Lenin believed that the workers controlled the state - it had to be controlled by the Vanguard

"But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. The whole is like an arrangement of cogwheels."(http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm)

So once again you are talking out of your backside , it seems




Im well aware of the Factory Committees, thank you very much, and dont presume to tell me what I am aware of or not, Ive read Maurice Brinton, Simon Pirani and others on the subject. For instance, in the introduction to Brintons pamphlet The Bolsheviks and Workers' control: the state and counter-revolution it is stated:

"Between March and October the Bolsheviks supported the growth of the Factory Committees, only to turn viciously against them in the last few weeks of 1917, seeking to incorporate them into the new union structure, the better to emasculate them."

The Bolshevik destruction of spontaneous forms of worker democracy and the crushing of opposition to the state capitalist regime was not some sudden one-off event. It was a gradual and accumulative process. Service called it a process of "organisational metamorphosis" which is quyite a good term I think. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover, the Party had little real effective control over events and even of its own membership, That situation was to change dramatically in the span of a few short years with the consolidation of state power in the hands of the Bolshevik dictatorship

[QUOTE=daft punk;2407239

"This method of controlling production by the workers, sprung spontaneously from the Russian revolution, has just been legalized by the new Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government of the Russian Republic. Also it has become possible, through the power of the government for the workmen themselves to take over and operate all plants those owners cannot keep them open. With unlimited credit behind them, and the huge, organized force of the government, there is no reason why the workers cannot hire engineers and technical staff, or why, with such training, they may not be able, in a few years, to take over the greater part of Russian industrial enterprise. With the control of the means of production and distribution in the hands of the popular government the main obstacle to the achievement of industrial democracy has vanished."

This has got to be a joke surely. It was the Bolshevik government itself that crushed whatever "industrial democracy" there was. Lenin himself was insistent on the need for top-down hierarchical one-man management throughout industry







Why do you call him bourgeois? That sound really pathetic. He was not bourgeois and his views were revolutionary. He predicted, advocated and led a revolution. You would have done nothing.



And the revolution he "predicted advocated and led" was a bourgeois revolution which firnly established capitalist relations of production in the form of state capitalism. Far form doing nothing I would have thrown my weight behind working class resistance to the new Bolsehvik capitalist regime. What woulkd you havce done. Cravenly supported said regime, I suppose.



You mention Taylorism. They were simply trying to raise productivity to meet the needs of the people, not to make a profit. Your criticism is absurd.

You should try reading Lenin etc:

I have read Lenin thank you very much, including lovely juicy qupotes like this


"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).

Seems he was quite amenable to the idea of capitalists making a healthy profit out of the workers!


As for my criticism of Lenin's fondness for Scientifc Talyorism being "absurd" - is it really? I appreciate you dont have much of clue about economics but lets look at your claim as face value that "They were simply trying to raise productivity to meet the needs of the people, not to make a profit". Now raising productivity needs among other things capital investment . How do you suppose this capital materialised if not out of the surplus value produced in the first place? Do you think the fairy godmother , Leon Trotsky waved her magic wand and all that machiney etc suddenly appeared of thin air. Of course they were concerned about profit margins Actually Lenin was scrulously obsessive about capitalist accounting procedures and the need for such things




It was not a privately owned, capitalist, market economy. It was a publicly owned, non-capitalist, non-market economy. Dont try to pretend otherwise. After collectivisation, I am talking about.


I dont pretend anything - it was a capitalist market- based economy different from more western sttle capitalist market based economies in that the market was more regulated. Neverthless a regulated market economy is still a market economy. Consumer goods were bought and sold. Labour power was bought and sold , Means of production were bought and sold. What does buying and selling signifiy to you if not a market.?

Public ownership is a complete misnomer as has already been explained to you. The "public" dont own the "publically owned" means of production. It is the state that owns the means of production and state ownership is perfectly compatible with capitalism

Thus Engels
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 getting this all wrong. Let me again try to give you the basics.

1. Socialism is impossible in one country

2. Socialism is particularly difficult in a backward country.

3. Therefore, socialism in an isolated backward country is doubly impossible.

4. Revolutions are most likely in backward countries.

5. In backward countries, indigenous capitalism becomes stunted, held down by foreign capital and tied to feudalism. To understand this properly read In Defence of October.

6. So, revolutions happen where capitalism is weakest, but where socialism is most difficult.

7. The solution to this riddle is that the revolution must be the spark for revolution in advanced countries which can then help the backward one.

8. Russia was stuck and the internationalisation failed. Part of this was Stalin's fault (eg he opposed the revolution in Germany in 1923).

9. In Russia in 1924, the only thing they could do would be to try to hang on, make the best of things, creep very slowly in the direction of socialism, try to spread the revolution internationally, try to avoid capitalist counter-revolution, try to avoid bureaucratisation of the party.


Look, its pretty simple. Instead of wittering on about geopolitics of capitalist revolutions in backward countries and "creeping slowlly in the direction of socialism - meaningless waffle if ever there was - there are really just two basic preconditions of socialism

1) A sufficiently developed technological infrastructrue to support and sustain a global non market stateless system of production

2) Mass socialist consciousness - the widespread desire for a socialist society and a understand of what it would basically ential

I noticve you make no mention of the latter. This is typical of the vanguardist outlook. For the vanguardists it does not whether the mass of workers are socialist minded as to whether or you can effect a socialist revolution. But without such mass consciousness there is no way you could have a socialistsociety and therefore there is no way that any revolution you embarked could possibly be a socialist revolution. By default it could only be a capitalist revolution - like the Bolshevik revolution effectively was, notwithstanding the fact that it clothed itself in socialist rhetoric


10. Dont ignore what I just said in what you quoted, that Lenin and Trotsky had these plans and Stalin did the opposite. Marxism is not all about materialism, it is dialectical materialism, which means it acknowledges the role of the individual. The individual will be shaped by the material conditions - Stalin was a product of the degeneration of the revolution stemming from it's isolation in a backward country. But he can also shape events too. And Marx knew this full well.

Why might I ask are you quoting at length the German Ideology and how does this relate to the Great Man Theory of history I was speaking of? Do you know what i am even talking about? I am trying to explain to you that the Great Man Theory is an idealist interpretation of history which attributes large scale social events or developments to particular individuals as an expression of their own particular personal make up etc

Plekhanov's classic essay sey out to refute this claim. It was not an attempt to deny the role of the individual in history but to put it in proper persprtive, There is also quite a useful lik here which touches on the subject http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/historical-materialism

You seem to have fallen for the Great Man Theory of history by attributing inordinate influence to Stalin on the way things turned out. To do that is to ignore the social and material contexct in which Stalin operate. Plekhanov makes the prescient point that if Napoleon had not existed a Napoleon-like figure would have emerged because the circumstances at the time required this. Similarly if Stalin had not existed a Stalin=like figure would have emerged . In all probability it would have been Trotsky and you today would be opposing Trotskyism

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I'm sure this must have already been said, but Lenin's theory wasn't based on the idea that the working class were too busy for revolution, it was based on the idea that the class is incapable of transcending a trade union consciousness for a revolutionary consciousness.
Without the help of a Vanguard Party, that is.

[Brosip Tito]

Daft Punk:

If planned economics = workers state, was the uSA under Roosevelt a Workers' State, Chile under Allende, or France under the fifth republic?

[Geiseric]

Economies planned by organs of the DotP makes it a workers state. Those planned economies were for the benefit of the Bourgeois at the expense of the proletariat. Nationalization is a huge step forward for developing countries. Everything cuba has today is the result of a planned economy.

The economy today is "planned," in the sense that Corporations plan out how they will manage and distribute their capital and commodities on a scale that takes up continents. The alternative to Planned Economy was a ton more of N.E.P. which shouldn't of happened nearly for as long as it did.

But if the workers state can't plan out the economy, who would? "The workers," isn't an acceptible answer, it's just too vague. Who should have ran the economy after the Russian Civil War if not for the DotP?

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

See? There are two types of Anti-Leninists in this thread; people who are actually making theoretical criticisms, whether you agree with them or not, and then people that are just spouting the same pseudo-wisdom that's already been said and refuted a dozen times.
Right, because pointing out the historical trend of vanguard parties in power being a dictatorship over the proletariat is "pseudo-wisdom." If it's been said a dozen times, it clearly hasn't been said enough to disabuse some communists from their belief in vanguardism.

[daft punk]

Actually the capitalist Labour Party (of which SPEW's forerunners, the so called Militant Tendency , were loyal members) nationalised the Bank of England in 1946.

Just to one, to act as a central bank, that was just to help capitalism run smoother.




Engels ridiculed those who thought nationalisation had anything to do with socialism - like Daft Punk - pointing that this would make Bismark into some sort of socialist.

I find this sort of statement quite incredible. Engels' aim was a nationalised economy. The aim of Marx and Engels was the abolition of private property. Dont bother mining for quotes, he was talking about nationalisation done in a capitalist economy, totally different.





If Daft Punk accepts that Russia was not socialist but still thinks nationalisation has something to do with socialism [it has and it hasnt, depends on the circumstances] then he has some explaining because under the Bolsheviks there was indeed widespread nationalisation.

There was nationalisation under the Bolsheviks and it was a workers government. It was trying to move towards socialism. Stalin did more nationalisation, but he completely obliterated the workers government, so they had a planned economy but not socialism.








Engels also commented in the same publication in which he mentions Bismark:
[I]
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"


Irrelevant, see above




It was not only the economic backwardness of Russia that ruled out socialism but the absence of mass socialist consciousness - a point that Daft Punk consistently overlooks. See my previous post

well the two are obviously linked, but among the urban workers and soldiers on the western front the Bolsheviks had a lot of support, and the peasants gave the regime some support.

[daft punk]

What classes were there

After collectivisation there was just the one class essentially, though there was huge variations in incomes.



and how did they relate to means of production?

the means of production was publicly owned.



How was surplus value extracted?

I dunno. There was no class making a profit. The elite just got paid more.




What does this say about the division of labour?

you tell me



Was there generalised commodity production? :confused:
I dunno.

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2407239#post2407239)
"It was a planned economy, which we also call a workers state."

You really dont get it do you? Firstly what is a "planned economy" and how is it a distinct mode of production.

A publicly owned economy can be planned. A privately owned one works via market forces. It is a distinct mode because it is no longer owned and controlled by the capitalist class, no longer operates for profit via market forces.




Do you understand what is meant by a "mode of production"?

Yes, as I just explained. Do you?





All economies involve "planning". Planning itself is a technical activity, it does not in itself signify a particular economic relationship to the means of production and therefore a "planned economy" cannot sensibly be called a "mode of production". If you mean by a planned economy that the total pattern of production was planned in some kind of coordinated fashion then that is quite misleading anyway. As Ive said many times before, GOSPLAN's plans were largely a wishlist of things the planners wanted done; they bore little relation to what actually happened and the production targets were constanbtly modified to fit in with changing circu,sytances. The economy thus guided the plan not the other way round, So it was not a planned economy in your sense of term

Ok, yes of course there is some planning in a capitalist world.

Yes of course the economy in the USSR wasnt perfectly planned. It was quite badly planned actually.

Does that mean the USSR was a capitalist economy?

No. Far from it. The fact is the USSR economy was by and large publicly owned and planned, and it did very well in the 1950s and 60s, which shows the potential for a real socialist economy. It was however hindered by lack of democracy - all decision making was done by bureaucrats and that means slowly, by self interested careerists who are usually far removed form the shop floor. The bureaucracy was a relative fetter that became an absolute one.





more later

[daft punk]

Secondly what on earth is this absurdity you call a "workers state"?


There are 2 definitions
1. a workers government
2. a planned economy

The phrase 'degenerated workers state' means a planned economy with a workers government that has been exterminated and replaced by a dictatorship.




If you are saying a working class existed then neccessarily you are saying that a capitalist class existed.

There was no capitalist class, so if it makes you happy, there was no working class. But everyone was a worker, it was a workers state. That is what we call it because it makes the most sense. Your definition does not make sense.






In any case, as well you know, the workers in the Soviet Union did not control the state - the vanguard did - and this vanguard evolved pretty rapidly into a new capitalist ruling class.

my arse it did.

The bureaucracy controlled industry but did not own it and was not like a capitalist class.

And the economy made rapid progress thanks to being publicly owned and planned. A crucial point you continually ignore.





Not even Lenin believed that the workers controlled the state - it had to be controlled by the Vanguard

"But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. The whole is like an arrangement of cogwheels."(http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm)

So once again you are talking out of your backside , it seems

Things were not perfect in 1920. How surprising. Lenin said it would take 2 or 3 generations to achieve socialism, and even that could only happen with help from advanced countries, so why are you quoting this as if it is some big revelation?

Lenin wanted the workers to control the industry, and to some extent they did, but it was a civil war in a backward country so dont expect perfection.




Im well aware of the Factory Committees, thank you very much, and dont presume to tell me what I am aware of or not, Ive read Maurice Brinton, Simon Pirani and others on the subject. For instance, in the introduction to Brintons pamphlet The Bolsheviks and Workers' control: the state and counter-revolution it is stated:

"Between March and October the Bolsheviks supported the growth of the Factory Committees, only to turn viciously against them in the last few weeks of 1917, seeking to incorporate them into the new union structure, the better to emasculate them."



Well, he wasnt even there and without detail statement like that means zilch.





The Bolshevik destruction of spontaneous forms of worker democracy and the crushing of opposition to the state capitalist regime was not some sudden one-off event. It was a gradual and accumulative process. Service called it a process of "organisational metamorphosis" which is quyite a good term I think.

Service is a lying wanker who refuses open debate with the CWI.




This has got to be a joke surely. It was the Bolshevik government itself that crushed whatever "industrial democracy" there was. Lenin himself was insistent on the need for top-down hierarchical one-man management throughout industry

A joke? John Reed is a well respected journalist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Days_that_Shook_the_World#Critical_response

They had management in industry but they still had democracy in the soviets.






And the revolution he "predicted advocated and led" was a bourgeois revolution which firnly established capitalist relations of production in the form of state capitalism. Far form doing nothing I would have thrown my weight behind working class resistance to the new Bolsehvik capitalist regime. What woulkd you havce done. Cravenly supported said regime, I suppose.


So, you would have backed the Whites?






I have read Lenin thank you very much, including lovely juicy qupotes like this


"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).

Seems he was quite amenable to the idea of capitalists making a healthy profit out of the workers!


This was at the start of the NEP ffs, when some capitalism still existed and it was impossible to do without them because they had the expertise. Lenin wanted the communists to learn, so they could run state industries and make them outperform the capitalist ones. Read the whole goddam piece, try to understand what you yourself just posted.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm

[daft punk]

Look, its pretty simple. Instead of wittering on about geopolitics of capitalist revolutions in backward countries and "creeping slowlly in the direction of socialism - meaningless waffle if ever there was - there are really just two basic preconditions of socialism

1) A sufficiently developed technological infrastructrue to support and sustain a global non market stateless system of production

2) Mass socialist consciousness - the widespread desire for a socialist society and a understand of what it would basically ential

I noticve you make no mention of the latter. This is typical of the vanguardist outlook. For the vanguardists it does not whether the mass of workers are socialist minded as to whether or you can effect a socialist revolution. But without such mass consciousness there is no way you could have a socialistsociety and therefore there is no way that any revolution you embarked could possibly be a socialist revolution. By default it could only be a capitalist revolution - like the Bolshevik revolution effectively was, notwithstanding the fact that it clothed itself in socialist rhetoric

I have already told you - most of the urban workers supported the Bolsheviks and Lenin and Trotsky reckoned they could win over most of the peasants.



Why might I ask are you quoting at length the German Ideology and how does this relate to the Great Man Theory of history I was speaking of? Do you know what i am even talking about? I am trying to explain to you that the Great Man Theory is an idealist interpretation of history which attributes large scale social events or developments to particular individuals as an expression of their own particular personal make up etc

Plekhanov's classic essay sey out to refute this claim. It was not an attempt to deny the role of the individual in history but to put it in proper persprtive, There is also quite a useful lik here which touches on the subject http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/historical-materialism

You seem to have fallen for the Great Man Theory of history by attributing inordinate influence to Stalin on the way things turned out. To do that is to ignore the social and material contexct in which Stalin operate. Plekhanov makes the prescient point that if Napoleon had not existed a Napoleon-like figure would have emerged because the circumstances at the time required this. Similarly if Stalin had not existed a Stalin=like figure would have emerged . In all probability it would have been Trotsky and you today would be opposing Trotskyism

You are talking a grain of truth and presenting it as a mountain. Marx was a dialectical materialist not just a materialist, which meant he understood how important individuals can be.

Stop trying to simplify it to just the material. Stalin was not Trotsky and they fought a huge battle from 1924-8 over policy. Trotsky would obviously have tried the policies he presented in the Platform of the Opposition and Lenin's On Cooperation.


"Q. What is the Role of the Individual in History?
As explained by V.I. Lenin (http://www.newyouth.com/archives/classics/works_by_vi_lenin.asp).
A. Marxism does not at all deny the importance of the role of the individual in history, but only explains that the role played by individuals or parties is circumscribed by the given level of historical development, by the objective social environment which, in the last analysis, is determined by the development of the productive forces. This does not mean - as has been alleged by the critics of Marxism - that men and women are merely puppets of the blind workings of "economic determinism". Marx and Engels explained that men and women make their own history, but they do not do so as completely free agents, but have to work on the basis of the kind of society that they find in existence. The personal qualities of political figures - their theoretical preparation, skill, courage and determination can determine the outcome in a given situation. There are critical moments in human history when the quality of the leadership can be the decisive factor that tips the balance one way or another. Such periods are not the norm, but only arise when all the hidden contradictions have slowly matured over a long period to the point when, in the language of dialectics, quantity is changed into quality. Although individuals cannot determine the development of society by the force of the will alone, yet the role of the subjective factor is ultimately decisive in human history."


http://www.newyouth.com/content/view/124/60/#2

[Dogs On Acid]

Daft Punk used his advanced Trotskyist philosophy to, in an anti-Marxist fashion, identify a brand new mode of production that lies secretly between Capitalism and Socialism. He calls it the "planned economy". This brand new mode of production was never predicted by Marx or Engels, and thanks to Trotsky, we have discovered the real future of mankind.

[daft punk]

Daft Punk used his advanced Trotskyist philosophy to, in an anti-Marxist fashion, identify a brand new mode of production that lies secretly between Capitalism and Socialism. He calls it the "planned economy". This brand new mode of production was never predicted by Marx or Engels, and thanks to Trotsky, we have discovered the real future of mankind.


http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/l.htm

Planned Economy


gives a few definitions, theirs is slightly different to mine


"planned economy" site:www.marxists.org


Search
About 949 results (0.31 seconds)

ok so there you have 949 hits to read at marxists.org


have a read of those, let us know what you think

[Dogs On Acid]

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/l.htm

Planned Economy


gives a few definitions, theirs is slightly different to mine


"planned economy" site:www.marxists.org


Search
About 949 results (0.31 seconds)

ok so there you have 949 hits to read at marxists.org


have a read of those, let us know what you think


Nice colors, did you just leave elementary? :lol:


"Trotsky put it this way:

“The working out of even the most elementary economic plan-from the point of view of the exploited, not the exploiters-is impossible without workers’ control, that is, without the penetration of the workers’ eye into all open and concealed springs of capitalist economy. Committees representing individual business enterprises should meet at conference to choose corresponding committees of trusts, whole branches of industry, economic regions and finally, of national industry as a whole. Thus, workers’ control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalised industry when the hour for that eventuality strikes.” Transitional Program, 1938"

[daft punk]

Nice colors, did you just leave elementary? :lol:


"Trotsky put it this way:

“The working out of even the most elementary economic plan-from the point of view of the exploited, not the exploiters-is impossible without workers’ control, that is, without the penetration of the workers’ eye into all open and concealed springs of capitalist economy. Committees representing individual business enterprises should meet at conference to choose corresponding committees of trusts, whole branches of industry, economic regions and finally, of national industry as a whole. Thus, workers’ control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalised industry when the hour for that eventuality strikes.” Transitional Program, 1938"

No I am very old. Why did you post that? This is why it was called degenerated. We know socialism needs workers control.

[Dogs On Acid]

No I am very old. Why did you post that? This is why it was called degenerated. We know socialism needs workers control.

That quote is from the link you gave me. Trotsky is saying that for there to be a "planned economy" (which is a dumb term because all economies are planned), the workers have to analyse every nook and cranny of the system they intend to plan: Capitalism.

[daft punk]

That quote is from the link you gave me. Trotsky is saying that for there to be a "planned economy" (which is a dumb term because all economies are planned), the workers have to analyse every nook and cranny of the system they intend to plan: Capitalism.


Shame you didnt read the article you quoted. From the same page of the same article:

"All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."

Do you even know what it's title is?

The Death Agony of Capitalism
and the Tasks of the Fourth International

The Transitional Program

(Part 1)

The Objective Prerequisites for a Socialist Revolution



There are a couple of clues there... Death of Capitalism, Socialist Revolution...

[TheRedAnarchist23]

Lenin was a ruthless dictator who, like all dictators, killed all who opposed him, even fellow revolutionaries. He was as bad as Stalin.

[Ostrinski]

lmao^