rationalwiki.org's criticism of Leninism

[Dogs On Acid]

"Vladimir Lenin, leading the Russian Revolution, paid large amounts of lip service to Marx, while instead taking more ideas from Blanquism (even though Marx hadn't thought too highly of the chances of revolution from a feudalistic society, and had coined the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in order for differentiate from the Blanquist minority dictatorship) and declared open class warfare on the bourgeoisie (and that he would bring 'Peace, Bread and Land!'), in an attempt to take power. Lenin jumped the gun by leading a communist revolution with a small group of intellectuals without waiting for a significant working class to develop, trying to jumpstart a socialist state by skipping an entire step in the process Marx had described. This would become known as Leninism, a sort of backwards Marxism, in which a small group of enlightened leaders, known as a vanguard, took over the state first, and industry and a large working class were developed afterwards. In Leninism, the initial leaders of the revolution were to be caretakers of the socialist state until the workers caught up and society could be transformed into "communism" (as the beginning of the idea of socialism and communism being different stages from revolution originated mainly from Lenin). Crucially, this idea of a vanguard party meant elevating the Bolsheviks to become a new elite within Russia, while the workers and peasants - the same people the Bolsheviks claimed to represent - were subjected to the same dictatorial control as the Tsar's regime. The "soviets" (councils of self-governing workers based on the idea of direct democracy) were suppressed in a direct contradiction of Lenin's rallying cry "all power to the soviets!"
There was a total of one democratic election after the October Revolution, and when the Communists lost out to the more democratic socialist parties (the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks) they sent in the Red Guard and closed the Constituent Assembly. A one-party state was established and opposition on both right and left fermented and soon exploded into the brutal Russian Civil War.
It is true that Lenin's ideas (especially applying planned economy principles to agriculture) didn't really work, but though some reforms were suggested, Lenin and Trotsky killed most of those suggesting them, and then Lenin died, and Stalin took over the Soviet Union and converted a brutal and repressive autocracy (as Lenin had abolished democracy and implemented Party dictatorship) into an extremely brutal and repressive autocracy, ruling by fear and paying only lip service to the thoughts of Marx. So not only was the great Soviet experiment not working, Stalin stepped in and ensured it never would, which was more than enough to carry the crazy red-baiters of the 1920s into the 50s with McCarthyism, throwing the adjective "godless"[4] in just to give it a bit more emotional sting. Of interest is the fact that the US had helped anti-Bolshevik (and largely pro-Tsarist, though occasionally peasant-based in the case of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who were more popular than the Bolsheviks in Russia) forces during the Russian Civil War, and never seem to mention it.
To summarize, communism is a classless, democratic (Marx called for 'self-government of the commune' in response to Bakunin's accusations that he wished for a minority dictatorship) and international society. There are different theories to how it should be organized, for example, the anarcho-syndicalists and De Leonists wish for a Socialist Industrial Union, while mutualists (inspired by the ideas of Proudhon) wish for a non-capitalist free market (often claiming that the capitalist market can never have anything to do with 'freedom'), other socialists wish for a system of workers' councils (though these can often be compared to the syndicalist unions), as in the "soviets" which represented the working class in Russia until Lenin's coup d'etat. The workers has also taken over factories, instituting elected and recallable factory committees which ran them under their ultimate control, before Lenin took over. Such "worker self-management" has also been a key part of socialism, in both libertarian Marxist and anarchist tendencies or schools of thought."

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Communism#Vladimir_Lenin

[Dogs On Acid]

Engels' criticism of Blanquists in The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune:

"Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionist. He is a socialist only through sentiment, through his sympathy with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor any definite practical suggestions for social remedies. In his political activity he was mainly a "man of action", believing that a small and well organized minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of the people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution."

[Geiseric]

If anything the Bolsheviks were carried by the proletariat, not the other way around.

[Questionable]

I don't get the claims that the Bolsheviks somehow managed to start the revolution by themselves. Isn't that claim, by it's very essence, anti-Marxist by proposing that some intellectuals can change society and then ruin it.

The article also fails to mention anything about the effects that the Russian Civil War had on the diminishing the proletarian democracy, instead preferring to imply that Lenin simply woke up one morning and decided he was going to be a dictator.

Furthermore, rationalwiki is total bullshit. There's nothing encyclopedic about it, it's just a glorified blog for pseudo-intellectuals. It's about as liberal as you can get. I'm pretty sure their article on communism once concluded that it could never work because of human nature.

[Roxsas]

the absurdity of this claims can be answered by books written more han a hundred years ago

please refere to Lenin's or plechanov's books about Narodism n specially their philosophy of revolution which is exactly what have u wrote above, Lenin n Plechanove nailed such dysfunctional views n approaches many times:laugh:

furthermore please read the comment above of comrade questionable about the class nature of the writers of such laughable claims

[Ismail]

RationalWiki is not a serious source for anything. If you want a modern, non-communist (but not right-wing anti-communist) account of the Russian Revolution see Sheila Fitzpatrick's aptly titled book The Russian Revolution. The Constituent Assembly was to become a reactionary parliamentary body which aimed to subordinate the soviets to it and, in any case, its closure did not elicit any significant response on the part of the proletariat, which handily backed soviet power over bourgeois power. The Bolsheviks also won quite well in this "democratic election" (by what standards?) in actual industrial centers.

The 1970's Great Soviet Encyclopedia is actually not a bad source on this point:

The Decembrists were the first group in Russia to demand the convocation of a constituent assembly, which they called the Velikii Sobor (Great Assembly). In the 1860’s the idea of a constituent assembly, known as the Zemskii Sobor (National Assembly), was promoted by the members of the Narodnik (Populist) organization Land and Liberty; the idea was incorporated into the program of the People’s Will. A slogan calling for the convocation of a constituent assembly was included in the 1903 program of the RSDLP and gained wide currency during the first Russian revolution, the Revolution of 1905–07.

After the victory of the February Revolution of 1917, the idea of a constituent assembly was popular among the broad masses, especially the petite bourgeoisie. The petit bourgeois and bourgeois parties used it to distract the masses from the revolutionary struggle by asserting that a constituent assembly would legislate an end to all the country’s economic and political problems. The Provisional Government, however, under pressure from the bourgeoisie, blocked the convocation of an assembly for fear that “in Russia today” it would “yield a majority to peasants who are more to the left than the Socialist-Revolutionaries” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 34, p. 35). The Bolsheviks did not reject the idea of a constituent assembly, but they exhorted the masses to a revolutionary struggle, pointing out that when the bourgeois democratic revolution is transformed into a socialist one, “practice and the revolution tend to push the Constituent Assembly into the background” (ibid., vol. 31, p. 110). Lenin emphasized that a republic of soviets was a higher form of democracy than a bourgeois democratic republic with a constituent assembly. On Aug. 9 (22), 1917, the bourgeois Provisional Government scheduled the elections to the Constituent Assembly for November 12 (25). The election law provided for universal suffrage.

After the victory of the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik party sought to help the petit bourgeois masses rid themselves of bourgeois constitutional illusions by presenting them with the opportunity to compare the Constituent Assembly with the soviets. In Lenin’s words, in order “to destroy the bourgeois parliament in Russia we were first obliged to convene the Constituent Assembly, even after our victory” (ibid., vol. 41, p. 257). The Council of People’s Commissars confirmed the date for the elections, which were held in November and December in most places and in January 1918 in some remote areas. About half the electorate did not take part in the voting because of inadequate preparations for the elections, counterrevolutionary sabotage, and the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Bolsheviks polled 23.9 percent of the vote, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR’s) 40 percent, the Mensheviks 2.3 percent, and the Constitutional Democrats 4.7 percent; the remaining votes were cast for other petit bourgeois and bourgeois parties and groups. The election results did not reflect the actual interrelations of political forces in the country because the influence of the working class and the Bolshevik party on the nonproletarian masses was “incomparably stronger in the extra-parliamentary than in the parliamentary struggle” (ibid., vol. 34, p. 219). Even the formal results, however, proved that the victory of the October Revolution conformed to the laws of history: the Bolsheviks won in Petrograd (45 percent of the vote), in Moscow (48 percent), on the Northern and Western fronts (56 and 67 percent, respectively), in the Baltic Fleet (58.2 percent), and in 20 okrugs (districts) of the Northwest and Central Industrial regions (53.1 percent). That is to say, the majority of the proletariat and almost half of the military voted for the Bolsheviks.

The counterrevolutionaries struggled against Soviet power under the slogan “All power to the Constituent Assembly!” and they created the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. On January 5 (18) the Constituent Assembly convened. About 410 deputies out of a total of 715 were present. The Centrist SR’s, led by V. M. Chernov, predominated. There were about 120 Bolshevik deputies. The counterrevolutionary majority in the Constituent Assembly refused to discuss the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People, proposed by Ia. M. Sverdlov on behalf of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and refused to recognize the decrees of Soviet power adopted by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The Bolshevik faction walked out of the session. The Left SR’s and the representatives of several other parties subsequently withdrew. At 5:00 A.M. on January 6 (19) the session of the Constituent Assembly was adjourned at the request of the guards. On the night of January 6–7 (19–20) the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, acting on a report by Lenin, issued a decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly; the decree was approved by the popular masses and by the delegates of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

[Dogs On Acid]

RationalWiki is not a serious source for anything. If you want a modern, non-communist (but not right-wing anti-communist) account of the Russian Revolution see Sheila Fitzpatrick's aptly titled book The Russian Revolution. The Constituent Assembly was to become a reactionary parliamentary body which aimed to subordinate the soviets to it and, in any case, its closure did not elicit any significant response on the part of the proletariat, which handily backed soviet power over bourgeois power. The Bolsheviks also won quite well in this "democratic election" (by what standards?) in actual industrial centers.

The 1970's Great Soviet Encyclopedia is actually not a bad source on this point:

So in other words, the best part of the prols and half the soldiers voted Bolshevik, while the peasants, other half of the army, and petit-bourgeoisie voted for the SRs?

Also this obviously meant that the non-industrial, agrarian parts of Russia voted SR.

[Ismail]

Yes. The places where the revolution's impact was not yet felt voted for the SRs and other forces. But the influence of the Bolsheviks were rising just about everywhere and continued to rise as soviets in rural areas gained ground, etc. The Assembly election was just a poor, disjointed snapshot of this fact.

So in conclusion the Constituent Assembly was a reactionary organ that could not express the revolutionary aspirations of the working-class and poor peasantry. Its existence would have been a break on soviet power and subordination of the proletarian revolution in Petrograd and other major cities to the bourgeoisie.

[Rafiq]

RationalWiki is not a serious source for anything. If you want a modern, non-communist (but not right-wing anti-communist) account of the Russian Revolution see Sheila Fitzpatrick's aptly titled book The Russian Revolution. The Constituent Assembly was to become a reactionary parliamentary body which aimed to subordinate the soviets to it and, in any case, its closure did not elicit any significant response on the part of the proletariat, which handily backed soviet power over bourgeois power. The Bolsheviks also won quite well in this "democratic election" (by what standards?) in actual industrial centers.

The 1970's Great Soviet Encyclopedia is actually not a bad source on this point:

Sheila's book is taught in my school. I'm glad.