The Idler
7th November 2012, 19:24
As anti-Bolshevik communists, the Socialist Party has discovered that the trouble with critiques of the Russian Revolution from the Left is that they sound ever so plausible since their numbers are full of academics with PhDs in the minutiae of political history. Their analysis is usually based on "the lie of omission", the purposeful ignoring of events and over-emphasis of others to bolster their interpretations and political bias.
The contribution of the Socialist Party of Great Britain with its analysis of the nature of the Russian state is deliberately over-looked. The SPGB was probably the earliest Marxist political party to declare the regime as non-socialist and over the years has been the most consistent critics of the proponents of Bolshevism.
Some on the Left assert that workers' rule was not be able to last due to isolation and backwardness but what should be emphasised is that the rapid time-table of the Bolsheviks reveal they had no intention of having workers' rule but only party rule and such apologies as presented by Leninists and Trotskyists cuts no ice .
"... just four days after seizing power, the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars (CPC or Sovnarkom) "unilaterally arrogated to itself legislative power simply by promulgating a decree to this effect. This was, effectively, a Bolshevik coup d'etat that made clear the government's (and party's) pre-eminence over the soviets and their executive organ. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks relied upon the appointment from above of commissars with plenipotentiary powers, and they split up and reconstituted fractious Soviets and intimidated political opponents...the Bolsheviks immediately created a power above the soviets in the form of the CPC. Lenin's argument in The State and Revolution that, like the Paris Commune, the workers' state would be based on a fusion of executive and administrative functions in the hands of the workers' delegates did not last one night. In reality, the Bolshevik party was the real power in "soviet" Russia...." [Neil Harding, Leninism,]
more here (http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-bolsheviks.html#more)
The contribution of the Socialist Party of Great Britain with its analysis of the nature of the Russian state is deliberately over-looked. The SPGB was probably the earliest Marxist political party to declare the regime as non-socialist and over the years has been the most consistent critics of the proponents of Bolshevism.
Some on the Left assert that workers' rule was not be able to last due to isolation and backwardness but what should be emphasised is that the rapid time-table of the Bolsheviks reveal they had no intention of having workers' rule but only party rule and such apologies as presented by Leninists and Trotskyists cuts no ice .
"... just four days after seizing power, the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars (CPC or Sovnarkom) "unilaterally arrogated to itself legislative power simply by promulgating a decree to this effect. This was, effectively, a Bolshevik coup d'etat that made clear the government's (and party's) pre-eminence over the soviets and their executive organ. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks relied upon the appointment from above of commissars with plenipotentiary powers, and they split up and reconstituted fractious Soviets and intimidated political opponents...the Bolsheviks immediately created a power above the soviets in the form of the CPC. Lenin's argument in The State and Revolution that, like the Paris Commune, the workers' state would be based on a fusion of executive and administrative functions in the hands of the workers' delegates did not last one night. In reality, the Bolshevik party was the real power in "soviet" Russia...." [Neil Harding, Leninism,]
more here (http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-bolsheviks.html#more)