Mensheviks

[Aussie Trotskyist]

I've been looking of information on Menshevik policy and ideologies, but haven;t turned up very much.

What exactly was it that made the Mensheviks so liberal? How where they so Liberal? I know these are very basic questions, but I haven't found the answers to them yet.

[Ostrinski]

There is surprisingly little written about the Mensheviks. Soon I am going to try to get Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (http://www.amazon.com/Martov-Political-Biography-Russian-Democrat/dp/0521050731/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=20W7IMPNNNU8L&coliid=I29JXDU2EP7AOH) by Israel Getzler. Ghost Bebel has read it and says it is good. Martov was the leader of the Menshevik-Internationalists, the left wing of the party.

Basically at the turn of the 20th century three political movements had risen in opposition to the monarchy: the quite right wing liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) that declared a moratorium on opposition until victory in war had been won for Russia, Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries which was more of a left populist peasant oriented org, and the Marxist RSDLP.

the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) eventually split into two factions, the radically inclined Bolsheviks and the moderate Mensheviks. The Mensheviks believed in a stagist theory of socialist development, that bourgeois society had to be fully realized before the material conditions would be ripe for socialism in Russia. The productive forces and sizable working class that were to make socialism possible could only be developed by letting capitalism fully blossom in Russia, in their view.

The Bolsheviks viewed differently, they thought that since WWI signified the decay and unsustainability of capitalist society, it would beget a worldwide working class revolution that would come to the aid of backward Russia.

The main important thing to look at is stance on the war. The Mensheviks and SRs were deeply divided on the issue of the war, in contrast to the liberal Kadets who offered unconditional support for the war and the Bolsheviks most of whom were all either defeatists or moderate internationalists. So you had the right wing of the SRs (right SRs) and Mensheviks (Menshevik-Defencists) enthusiastically enlisting to fight Germany as well as taking part in provisional government coalitions, while the Menshevik-Internationalists and left SRs preached peace without indemnities or annexations and condemned participation in the coalition government.

Of course what made the Bolshevik position unique were the policies of "no support for the provisional government" and "all power to the soviets" as well as Lenin's own defeatist view that a military defeat for Russia would be a positive prospect for the revolutionary movement as it would weaken the power of the monarchy.

I don't know very much about the split yet, haven't read much on it so someone else will have to explain that one.

[Ocean Seal]

I've been looking of information on Menshevik policy and ideologies, but haven;t turned up very much.

What exactly was it that made the Mensheviks so liberal? How where they so Liberal? I know these are very basic questions, but I haven't found the answers to them yet.
What made them liberal is that they did what the social democrats did a couple of years earlier. Supporting the war, supporting the nation, and so on. There isn't so much on ideology I would think because they only existed for a handful of years.

[Ostrinski]

^Not all of them supported the war, though. Just the defencists.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Unlike the MIs, at least there was a split by the left SRs.

[Ostrinski]

In my view, the main treachery of the Menshevik-Internationalists was not splitting with the defencists. That of course and not dropping their stagist view of societal development.

[Manic Impressive]

the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) eventually split into two factions, the radically inclined Bolsheviks and the moderate Mensheviks. The Mensheviks believed in a stagist theory of socialist development, that bourgeois society had to be fully realized before the material conditions would be ripe for socialism in Russia. The productive forces and sizable working class that were to make socialism possible could only be developed by letting capitalism fully blossom in Russia, in their view.

The Bolsheviks viewed differently, they thought that since WWI signified the decay and unsustainability of capitalist society, it would beget a worldwide working class revolution that would come to the aid of backward Russia.


The Mensheviks were obviously proven right on that front or at least were more honest and realistic about the potential for socialism in Russia.

[Ostrinski]

Perhaps, perhaps not. I was merely trying to lay out the positions objectively. If I'm not mistaken the SPGB comrades look somewhat positively upon the MIs and Martov so OP you might give one of them a heads up if you are interested in them. Honestly I think the Mensheviks are deserving of a more critical appraisal than is often given.

Also, this should perhaps be in history as it deals with complex historical issues.

[Geiseric]

The Mensheviks were obviously proven right on that front or at least were more honest and realistic about the potential for socialism in Russia.
No they weren't, they were opportunist pro capitalists, just as bad as the SPD in germany regarding bureaucracy. They used stagism to basically argue that the soviets shouldn't exist.

Also the Bolsheviks knew that socialism wouldn't work unless the German revolution worked out, however things could of been done to prolong the USSR's life as a bastion of the world revolution instead of basically a country led by a state which thinks and acts for itself, which oversaw a planned economy which was turned into regular capitalism.

[Ostrinski]

^Comrade I must admit that I am skeptical of
They used stagism to basically argue that the soviets shouldn't exist
I mean we all know that they rejected the idea of the soviets taking political power, but the Mensheviks themselves held many leading positions in the soviet movement and were elected to and held many seats on their boards.

[Let's Get Free]

Whereas the Bolsheviks overthrew the existing capitalist state to reconfigure it in a new form in order to develop state capitalism, the Mensheviks wanted to collaborate with the existing capitalist state to further capitalism.

[Ostrinski]

Whereas the Bolsheviks overthrew the existing capitalist state to reconfigure it in a new form in order to develop state capitalism, the Mensheviks wanted to collaborate with the existing capitalist state to further capitalism.While this may have been the result, the nature and structure of state capitalism in the Soviet Union could not possibly have been envisaged before its development as it was an unprecedented phenomenon.

As I noted in my other post, the October revolution was carried out on the premise that world revolution was imminent and that therefore it made sense to act at that time as it seemed opportune.

Of course, Lenin later spoke of the necessity of building state capitalism (meaning, managed and limited private ownership of some parts of the economy) to rebound from the failure of world revolution. This however cannot be equated with state capitalism as we later saw it in Communist states because first of all the entire definition being used is different and second of all because the circumstances and conditions from which they were given rise to were different and should be understood thusly.

[Geiseric]

From what I remember learning, most of the MI's and left SR's joined the bolsheviks. Plekhanov and the likes of the right wing of the mensheviks really didn't have many redeeming qualities though, they more or less joined the white forces eventually. Same for the SR's, they had vested interests in maintaining their spots in the provisional government, whose mission was to make sure capitalism didn't completely collapse.

I'm not going to even argue about the State Capitalism thing here. The N.E.P. was state capitalism, but that all ended when the planned economy was formed, in which the law of value, the small thing that makes capitalism capitalism, seiced to exist, in which you could be paid the same as a factory worker for sweeping the streets of garbage. Which was a good thing. The bureaucrats by the 50's weren't even that wealthy, and they could only steal so much without the workers getting edgy, which they learned after Hungary '56.

[Let's Get Free]

Of course, Lenin later spoke of the necessity of building state capitalism (meaning, managed and limited private ownership of some parts of the economy) to rebound from the failure of world revolution. This however cannot be equated with state capitalism as we later saw it in Communist states because first of all the entire definition being used is different and second of all because the circumstances and conditions from which they were given rise to were different and should be understood thusly.

Well, there was another option- rejecting both the capitalist agendas while recognizing realistically that communiusm was not an option and retain working class political independence to promote the interests of wage labor industrially and politically in opposition to those of capital and the capitalist state

[Ostrinski]

Well, there was another option- rejecting both the capitalist agendas while recognizing realistically that communiusm was not an option and retain working class political independence to promote the interests of wage labor industrially and politically in opposition to those of capital and the capitalist stateIf ifs were fifths we would all be drunk, as Gramsci Guy said in another thread :thumbup1:

[Lucretia]

Whereas the Bolsheviks overthrew the existing capitalist state to reconfigure it in a new form in order to develop state capitalism, the Mensheviks wanted to collaborate with the existing capitalist state to further capitalism.

The way you phrase this is completely misleading in that it depicts the Bolsheviks as agitating for revolution on the basis of a stageist call for state capitalism. In fact, state capitalism was the tactical fallback position of a regime that had never intended to build capitalism of any kind, but which, owing to adverse conditions, realized that some aspects of capitalism needed to be utilized in order to prop up a workers state that was clinging desperately to power in the dwindling hopes that revolutions occurring in Western Europe would permit the continuation of a transition to socialism (which of course, at a certain point, necessarily has to occur on an international basis).

Whether intentionally doing so or not, you're just regurgitating the anarchist slander against Lenin that he misunderstood socialism as a capitalist economy under his enlightened and unitary authority.

[Let's Get Free]

The way you phrase this is completely misleading in that it depicts the Bolsheviks as agitating for revolution on the basis of a stageist call for state capitalism. In fact, state capitalism was the tactical fallback position of a regime that had never intended to build capitalism of any kind, but which, owing to adverse conditions, realized that some aspects of capitalism needed to be utilized in order to prop up a workers state that was clinging desperately to power in highly adverse circumstances, with dwindling hope of revolutions occurring in Western Europe.

Whether he saw this state capitalism as a means to an end - communism - is a different matter. But this does not preclude him wanting state capitalism, (if only for instrumentalist reasons as a means to end), does it now? My point was different : Even if Lenin wanted communism (and I am not denying he did), the Bolsheviks were doomed for objective historical reasons to pursue only one course of action - to develop capitalism - since communism was simply not an option. In that sense Lenin was quintessentially a bourgeois revolutionary.


Whether intentionally doing so or not, you're just regurgitating the anarchist slander against Lenin that he misunderstood socialism as a capitalist economy under his enlightened and unitary authority.


Lenin himself defined socialism as "merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly."

[Geiseric]

So what does any of this mean? What would you of done instead? He also defined that in the context of what socialists need to do in the immediate future, he was in favor of eventual collectivization and industrialization, which also wouldn't mean actual socialism, but it's what the workers state needed to do.

[Lucretia]

Whether he saw this state capitalism as a means to an end - communism - is a different matter. But this does not preclude him wanting state capitalism, (if only for instrumentalist reasons as a means to end), does it now? My point was different : Even if Lenin wanted communism (and I am not denying he did), the Bolsheviks were doomed for objective historical reasons to pursue only one course of action - to develop capitalism - since communism was simply not an option. In that sense Lenin was quintessentially a bourgeois revolutionary.



Lenin himself defined socialism as "merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly."

I don't know how many times I have responded to this silliness. It's like people deliberately troll for quotes to prove their preconceived notions on Lenin, find some half-baked interpretations of out-of-context quotes, then regurgitate them as fool-proof evidence that Lenin was some kind of idiotic tyrant who had no idea what socialism was.

Have you actually read the work you're quoting from? If you had, you would see that it's absolutely absurd to posit the interpretation you do to the quote you are selectively introducing.

As I noted in a previous post from a while back (http://www.revleft.com/vb/lev-bronsteinovich-call-t166763/index.html?p=2344706)


Do you mean what Lenin wrote in this work? (http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni.../ichtci/11.htm (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm))

I see nothing really objectionable in it. The gist of it is that the collectivized property form that will exist in socialism develops within monopoly capitalism, and that the process of establishing socialism and overthrowing class society (and here is where MH could probably learn something) is of transforming the content of that property form by bringing it under the control of "a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way."

Anarchists love to point out quotes such as: "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly. There is no middle course here. The objective process of development is such that it is impossible to advance from monopolies (and the war has magnified their number, role and importance tenfold) without advancing towards socialism."

And they use these quotes to try to attribute to Lenin the position that socialism is at its essence about a collectivized means of production used to serve the interests of people, without any regard to the people doing the using, the planning, etc. In other words, socialism is a matter of distribution, not of workers' control. (The quotes above are followed by the statement "Either we have to be revolutionary democrats in fact, in which case we must not fear to take steps towards socialism." -- Again the process of democratization of decision-making and movement toward socialism are viewed as inextricable.)

This of course is belied by Lenin's continual stress on the content of the state that controls the means of production. It must necessarily be democratic. So those quotes need to be read in context.My point about your misleadingly implying the Bolsheviks were fighting for a revolution on the basis of a "state capitalist program" stands, and I'll take your comments as a concession that your phrasing was unfair -- and that "state capitalism" was an unintended consequence of the revolution. The whole idea was that revolutions in the West would permit rapid industrial expansion on the basis of democratic planning, NOT STATE CAPITALISM dictated by commodity production and the law of value.

[Let's Get Free]

Lenin was some kind of idiotic tyrant who had no idea what socialism was.

Well, Lenin did have a rather inconsistent application of the word socialism, using it in the same way Marx did (synonymous with communism) at one point, then as the "lower phase of communism" at another and then confusingly identifying socialism with "state capitalism" run in the interests of the workers.
__________________


Have you actually read the work you're quoting from? If you had, you would see that it's absolutely absurd to posit the interpretation you do to the quote you are selectively introducing.

I'm not quoting Lenin selectively. Lenin acknowledged, promoted and desired the implementation of state capitalism in Russia. He argued that, as private capitalism could not develop in Russia, a revolutionary state would have to use 'state capitalism' to build the prerequisites for the transition to communism. This approach was always likely to come into conflict with the working class. Then, as the revolution failed to spread outside Russia, the Bolsheviks imposed even more external discipline on workers.

"While the revolution in Germany is still slow in coming forth, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it (Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 27, page 340.)
Or this
"State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will become invincible in our country""Left Wing" Childishness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality.
Or this
"But state capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital, and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts. In a capitalist state, state capitalism means that it is recognised by the state and controlled by it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and to the detriment of the proletariat. In the proletarian state, the same thing is done for the benefit of the working class, for the purpose of withstanding the as yet strong bourgeoisie, and of fighting it.

[Lucretia]

Well, Lenin did have a rather inconsistent application of the word socialism, using it in the same way Marx did (synonymous with communism) at one point, then as the "lower phase of communism" at another and then confusingly identifying socialism with "state capitalism" run in the interests of the workers.

He's only inconsistent for people who insist on imputing to him things he didn't say. He, like Marx, talked about communism as having two phases, the only difference being that he called the lower phase "socialism" -- whereas Marx called them both communism. Lenin never said that "state capitalism" was the same as socialism, and its misleading to once again, even after being shown a lengthy exegesis of the passage you keep quoting, act as though Lenin perceived socialism as just capitalism with enlightened leadership in the state. His only point in defining state capitalism the way he did was to suggest that the collectivized property form that develops within monopoly capitalism takes on a socialist content when it has been transformed by workers who have seized control of that form through a new kind of state. It's obvious from the context of the piece why he made this point, since it is a discussion about the development of capitalism and the relationship between imperialism, characterized by the state's merger with capitalist trusts, and the possibility of a socialist revolution. There is absolutely nothing in this that Engels or Marx would have disagreed with.

Yet you insist on wanting to attribute to this piece things that are clearly not in it, including the veiled suggestion that Lenin was somehow a market socialist who just wanted the market to be overseen by the right bureaucrats.


I'm not quoting Lenin selectively.

Yes, you are. And I have clearly demonstrated how your quote, when situated in the context of the piece, doesn't mean anything like what you seem to think it does. The only reason links are drawn between state capitalism and socialism is to talk about the collectivized property form that links them, not to suggest that they have anything beyond that in common.


Lenin acknowledged, promoted and desired the implementation of state capitalism in Russia. He argued that, as private capitalism could not develop in Russia, a revolutionary state would have to use 'state capitalism' to build the prerequisites for the transition to communism.

Again, this is an a statement that misleadingly omits important context. He acknowledge the need for "state capitalism" at a particular historical juncture. Prior to the revolution in 1917, it was NOT his intention to establish "state capitalism" as a discrete stage of transitioning to socialism. By omitting the context in which Lenin's view on the importance of state capitalism changed, you are once more constructing this mythical Lenin that never existed -- one who agitated for a socialist revolution that would produce state capitalism.

You then follow this abysmal showing with other quotes you probably found on some anarchist website that just has strings of out-of-context quotes to show how terrible and stupid this Lenin guy must have been. But again, these quotes don't require that I alter anything I've been saying, because the pieces in question are quotes from 1918 and 1921 -- as I said, after the revolution had occurred and was in a desperate situation, with dwindling hopes of a revolution in Germany ("still slow in coming," Lenin says).

If you can provide any quotes of Lenin advocating "state capitalism" before 1918, I would love to see them, and would gladly admit I was wrong. Until then, my point stands -- it is absolutely and completely misleading to present Lenin as advocating for state capitalism as a necessary part of transitioning to socialism. The hope in 1917 was to get the assistance of revolutionary governments in Western Europe so that process of phasing out the law of value and the capitalistic aspects of production could begin immediately. Instead, in the midst of the civil war, it became apparent that aspects of capitalist production had to be encouraged and consolidated. This was the OPPOSITE of what Lenin intended, and by ignoring this context, you are painting a ridiculously inaccurate picture of Lenin's politics.

I highly recommend you read "Lenin as Scientific Manager Under Monopoly Capitalism, State Capitalism, and Socialism: A Response to Scoville" by Victor Devinetz. As the abstract of that work says:


I argue that Lenin's views on scientific management did not shift as drastically as Scoville (2001) claims from 1913 to 1918. The seeds of Lenin's 1918 views on Taylorism actually were contained in an article he wrote in 1914, three years before the October Revolution. In addition, I argue that Lenin did not uncritically embrace the implementation of scientific management in the construction of socialism in the Soviet Republic, as argued by Scoville. I present evidence that Lenin viewed Taylorism as only a temporary measure to be used in the transitory stage of state capitalism that he believed characterized the Soviet Republic in 1918. Finally, because Scoville does not differentiate between the transitory stage of state capitalism and socialism in the Soviet Republic's early years, he states that Lenin advocated the use of scientific management under socialism. I argue that there is insufficient evidence to support this position.

[Let's Get Free]

He's only inconsistent for people who insist on imputing to him things he didn't say. He, like Marx, talked about communism as having two phases, the only difference being that he called the lower phase "socialism" -- whereas Marx called them both communism.

The distinction Lenin made between socialism and communism seem innocent, but it actually did great harm to the socialist movement. It became convenient instruments for legitimizing and justifying the ideology and every act of the Party-State from 1917 onwards in the name of (building) socialism, which was stressed as the need for the immediate future, moving the emancipatory project of the post capitalist society off to the Greek calends of the never-never land of communism, thereby metamorphosing Marx's project of socialism (communism) into an unalloyed utopia to be indefinitely postponed.


Lenin never said that "state capitalism" was the same as socialism, and its misleading to once again, even after being shown a lengthy exegesis of the passage you keep quoting, act as though Lenin perceived socialism as just capitalism with enlightened leadership in the state. His only point in defining state capitalism the way he did was to suggest that the collectivized property form that develops within monopoly capitalism takes on a socialist content when it has been transformed by workers who have seized control of that form through a new kind of state. It's obvious from the context of the piece why he made this point, since it is a discussion about the development of capitalism and the relationship between imperialism, characterized by the state's merger with capitalist trusts, and the possibility of a socialist revolution. There is absolutely nothing in this that Engels or Marx would have disagreed with.

"Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly"
Now for the love of Marx, how the hell is this not saying socialism is state capitalism made to serve the interest of the whole people? I mean, come on now. The words are - in broad daylight - staring at you in the face and STILL you do not want to acknowledge what they say.
Yes I know know Lenin distinguished between "state capitalism" under capitalist state and "state capitalism" under the proletarian state. (In The Impending Catastrophe he said "But state capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital, and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts) And yes I know that when he talked of "state capitalism" he normally referred to the former. But as the above quote makes absolutely clear, he saw a continuity between state capitalism and socialism. In fact , just before this sentence Lenin writes this: "given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!" He then defines socialism as also being state capitalist monopoly but different in form from the state capitalist monopoly of the capitalist state insofar as it was "made to serve the interests of the whole people"
All this is as clear as can be yet perversely you still deny the argument that socialism was for Lenin a form of state capitalism albeit not the state capitalism of the capitalist state variety.






Yet you insist on wanting to attribute to this piece things that are clearly not in it, including the veiled suggestion that Lenin was somehow a market socialist who just wanted the market to be overseen by the right bureaucrats.
Lenin himself admitted that the government was pursuing state capitalism, this was something he was extraordinarily honest about. "State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic.” (Left-Wing' Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality)
The civil war and foreign interventionforced the Bolsheviks to take a number of emergency measures — like nationalizing factories whose owners had fled, requisitioning grain from the peasants, causing inflation by an over-issue of paper currency. Some Bolsheviks regarded these as measures to set up a moneyless economy in Russia, but this was absurd. As soon as the Civil War was over in 1921 they were abandoned and Lenin again advocated a policy of state capitalism. The New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced that year, was described as a policy of developing capitalism in Russia under the control of the Bolshevik government.




The hope in 1917 was to get the assistance of revolutionary governments in Western Europe so that process of phasing out the law of value and the capitalistic aspects of production could begin immediately. Instead, in the midst of the civil war, it became apparent that aspects of capitalist production had to be encouraged and consolidated. This was the OPPOSITE of what Lenin intended, and by ignoring this context, you are painting a ridiculously inaccurate picture of Lenin's politics.


I'm not denying that Lenin identified emotionally with the abstract goal of a communist society. What I am saying is that it was simply not an option. A minority haven taken control of the apparatuses of capitalism without the majority of the population understanding and desiring socialism will have no choice but to continue to administer capitalism, since there is no way socialism can be imposed on a population that neither wants nor understands it. And also, we see the Bolsheviks crushing workers democracy BEFORE the civil war had started. Whether it is soviet democracy, workers' economic self-management, democracy in the armed forces or working class power and freedom generally, the fact is the Bolsheviks had systematically attacked and undermined it from the start. They also repressed working class protests and strikes along with opposition groups and parties. As such, it is difficult to blame something which had not started yet for causing Bolshevik policies. Although the Bolsheviks had seized power under the slogan "All Power to the Soviets," the facts are the Bolsheviks aimed for party power and only supported soviets as long as they controlled them. To maintain party power, they had to undermine the soviets and they did. This onslaught on the soviets started quickly, in fact overnight when the first act of the Bolsheviks was to create an executive body, the Council of People's Commissars (or Sovnarkon), over and above the soviets. This was in direct contradiction to Lenin's The State and Revolution, where he had used the example of the Paris Commune to argue for the merging of executive and legislative powers.

[Dave B]

Unfortunately almost everything that has been said about the Mensheviks on this thread is complete bollocks and even worse than that in fact the complete opposite to the truth.

I have done this several times on this forum before, as always backing myself up with facts that are readily available from the archives.

And I will do so again.

The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ‘split’ in circa 1905 but not over the stagiest theory.

The Bolsheviks/Lenin and the Mensheviks both accepted the stagiest theory.

The stagiest theory being that Russia could not pass from ‘feudalism’ to ‘socialism’ without first passing through the capitalist stage or the ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’.

That is not to say that amongst the leftwing Russian opposition to Tsarism there were not some that opposed the Marxist Stageist theory.

Opposition to stageism could be found amongst some Anarchists and Narodniks (or Socialist revolutionaries).

Thus from Lenin in 1905;

TWO TACTICS OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY IN THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION



But it is entirely absurd to think that a bourgeois revolution does not express the interests of the proletariat at all. This absurd idea boils down either to the hoary Narodnik theory that a bourgeois revolution runs counter to the interests of the proletariat, and that therefore we do not need bourgeois political liberty; or to anarchism, which rejects all participation of the proletariat in bourgeois politics, in a bourgeois revolution and in bourgeois parliamentarism.

From the standpoint of theory, this idea disregards the elementary propositions of Marxism concerning the inevitability of capitalist development where commodity production exists.

Marxism teaches that a society which is based on commodity production, and which has commercial intercourse with civilized capitalist nations, at a certain stage of its development, itself, inevitably takes the road of capitalism. Marxism has irrevocably broken with the ravings of the Narodniks and the anarchists to the effect that Russia, for instance, can avoid capitalist development, jump out of capitalism, or skip over it and proceed along some path other than the path of the class struggle on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism.

page 44

All these principles of Marxism have been proved and explained over and over again in minute detail in general and with regard to Russia in particular. And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism.

The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class. The bourgeois revolution is precisely a revolution that most resolutely sweeps away the survivals of the past, the remnants of serfdom (which include not only autocracy but monarchy as well) and most fully guarantees the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism.

That is why a bourgeois revolution is in the highest degree advantageous to the proletariat. A bourgeois revolution is absolutely necessary in the interests of the proletariat. The more complete and determined, the more consistent the bourgeois revolution, the more assured will be the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie for Socialism. Only those who are ignorant of the rudiments of scientific Socialism can regard this conclusion as new or strange, paradoxical.
http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TT05.html#c6

Actually the more leftwing Mensheviks gagged on this kind of plain speaking from Lenin and thus in part it was an attack on some of them.



From Lenin in 1911;


we can only repeat the words of our Party resolution with even greater conviction:

"As before, the aim of our struggle is to overthrow tsarism and bring about the conquest of power by the proletariat relying on the revolutionary sections of the peasantry and accomplishing the bourgeois-democratic revolution by means of the convening of a popular constituent assembly and the establishment of a democratic republic ".


http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/PRPPR11.html





And from 1914;


Left-Wing Narodism and Marxism
Published: Trudovaya Pravda No. 19, June 19, 1914.



The economic development of Russia, as of the whole world, proceeds from feudalism to capitalism, and through large-scale, machine, capitalist production to socialism.

Pipe-dreaming about a “different” way to socialism other than that which leads, through the further development of capitalism, through large-scale, machine, capitalist production, is, in Russia, characteristic either of the liberal gentlemen, or of the backward, petty proprietors (the petty bourgeoisie). These dreams, which still clog the brains of the Left Narodniks, merely reflect the backwardness (reactionary nature) and feebleness of the petty bourgeoisie.

Class-conscious workers all over the world, Russia included, are becoming more and more convinced of the correctness of Marxism, for life itself is proving to them that only large-scale, machine production rouses the workers, enlightens and organises them, and creates the objective conditions for a mass movement.

When Put Pravdy reaffirmed the well-known Marxist axiom that capitalism is progressive as compared with feudalism, and that the idea of checking the development of capitalism is a utopia, most absurd, reactionary, and harmful to the working people, Mr. N. Rakitnikov, the Left Narodnik (in Smelaya Mysl No. 7), accused Put Pravdy of having undertaken the “not very honourable task of putting a gloss upon the capitalist noose”.

Anyone interested in Marxism and in the experience of the international working-class movement would do well to pander over this! One rarely meets with such amazing ignorance of Marxism as that displayed by Mr. N. Rakitnikov and the Left Narodniks, except perhaps among bourgeois economists.

Can it be that Mr. Rakitnikov has not read Capital, or The Poverty of Philosophy, or The Communist Manifesto? If he has not, then it is pointless to talk about socialism. That will be a ridiculous waste of time.

If he has read them, then he ought to know that the fundamental idea running through all Marx’s works, an idea which since Marx has been confirmed in all countries, is that capitalism is progressive as compared with feudalism. It is in this sense that Marx and all Marxists “put a gloss” (to use Rakitnikov’s clumsy and stupid expression) “upon the capitalist noose”!

Only anarchists or petty-bourgeois, who do not under stand the conditions of historical development, can say: a feudal noose or a capitalist one—it makes no difference, for both are nooses! That means confining oneself to condemnation, and failing to understand the objective course of economic development.

Condemnation means our subjective dissatisfaction. The objective course of feudalism’s evolution into capitalism enables millions of working people—thanks to the growth of cities, railways, large factories and the migration of workers—to escape from a condition of feudal torpor. Capitalism itself rouses and organises them.
Both feudalism and capitalism oppress the workers and strive to keep them in ignorance. But feudalism can keep, and for centuries has kept, millions of peasants in a down trodden state (for example, in Russia from the ninth to the nineteenth century, in China for even more centuries). But capitalism cannot keep the workers in a state of immobility, torpor, downtroddenness and ignorance.

The centuries of feudalism were centuries of torpor for the working people.



The decades of capitalism have roused millions of wage-workers.
Your failure to understand this, gentlemen of the Left Narodnik fraternity, shows that you do not understand a thing about socialism, or that you are converting socialism from a struggle of millions engendered by objective conditions into a benevolent old gentleman’s fairy-tale!

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/19.htm

I could easily swamp this post with similar material from all and sundry others;it was the standard Marxist position re Russia up until 1917.

{With the possible exception of the eccentric Trotsky/Parvus position of the ‘Permanent revolution’ theory that Lenin in 1917 described as;


.....advancing pseudo-intellectual, and in fact utterly meaningless, arguments about a "permanent revolution", about “introducing” socialism, and other nonsense. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm }


Returning to circa 1905; the basic Marxist and ‘Bolshevik’ proposal was to have a democratic capitalist revolution in Russia; and obtain at least a ‘system’ that might look like Switzerland and Holland were communists would have the bourgeois political liberties to agitate amongst a economically numerically growing working class etc etc.

That is not to say that there were no nuanced differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks Circa 1905.

They both anticipated that after the revolutionary overthrow of the Tsarist regime there would have to be some short interim period before elections to a constituent assembly and some kind of caretaker or provisional government to oversee those elections.

The Bolshevik party programme, prior to 1917, insisted that they, the Bolsheviks, should participate in that provisional government and from a position of state power make sure there was no counter-revolutionary hanky panky and backsliding, and to guarantee the convocation of the constituent assembly and ‘consummation’ of the bourgeois democratic revolution etc.


After the elections to the constituent assembly, that the Marxist workers party or parties would have no prospect of winning, they would stand down so to speak and let the bourgeois democratic revolution take its natural Marxist stagiest course.

The Mensheviks, circa 1905, took the leftwing position of staying out of any caretaker, interim or provisional government as that would result in the workers party compromising themselves in running a ‘non socialist state’.


Yes, that is right way round.

The argument was perhaps best laid out I think by Stalin and I shall thus use that.


Lenin said the same thing of coarse and I can provide it on request.

Context is important here.



Stalin the Bolshevik is arguing for participation in the ‘Provisional’ government against the Mensheviks who are arguing against it.

The Mensheviks had dragged up a letter from Engels to an Italian, Turati, containing advice on what the workers should or shouldn’t do during a capitalist bourgeois democratic revolution and were generalising it as point of theory from an Italian situation to an analogous Russian one.

Anyway from Stalin;





Does Marx say anything about a provisional revolutionary government? Not a word! Does Marx say that entering a provisional government during the democratic revolution is opposed to our principles? Not a word! Why then does our author go into such childish raptures? Where did he dig up this "contradiction in principle" between us and Marx? Poor "critic"! He puffs and strains in the effort to find such a contradiction, but to his chagrin nothing comes of it………



………[ the Russian, as with the ‘Italian’ ] revolution will be a democratic and not a socialist revolution it would be a great mistake to dream of the rule of the proletariat and remain in the government after the victory; only before the victory can the proletariat come out jointly with the petty bourgeoisie against the common enemy. But who is arguing against this? Who says that we must confuse the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution? What was the purpose of referring to Turati,

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


The Turati letter is as below, the relevant section being towards the end.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm


What actually happened in the middle of 1917 was that some Mensheviks ended up going into the Provisional government.

I have no desire to appear to defend that decision, but what actually happened is relevant to understanding the truth of the matter and the reversal of “the Menshevik” position.

As a matter of fact there was huge disagreement and almost a split in the Mensheviks over the decision of some Menshevik members of the Petersburg soviet entering another new Provisional government.

Eg the Menshevik ‘leader’ Martov was totally against the idea.

However the Soviet itself ‘insisted’ that leftwingwers eg SR’s and Mensheviks entered into a new Provisional government, actually justified that essentially on the basis of the old Bolshevik party position.

The SR’s refused to join the government unless some Mensheviks went in with them; both parties, rather than individuals, correctly recognising it as a political poisoned chalice

[The Bolsheviks were not asked as there was at the time a cloud of suspicion hanging over them re being funded by Germany, which turned out to be true- and there is no point in pretending that most of the members soviets or the Russian people were anti national chauvinist and ‘internationalist’.]

As minister of labour Skobelev was perhaps the most infamous ‘Menshevik’ member of the provisional government; they should have just expelled them or split the party.

However as the ‘Menshevik’ rightwing, and Skobelev in particular, are portrayed by lying Leninist historians as some kind of left of centre capitalist running dogs, it is worthwhile I think to consult Lenin’s own political appraisal Skobelev himself;


Lenin May 1917; Inevitable Catastrophe and Extravagant Promises



Today we must point out that the programme of the Menshevik Minister Skobelev (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../glossary/people/s/k.htm#skobelev-matvei) goes even further than Bolshevism. Here is the programme, as reported in the ministerial paper, Rech:


“The Minister [Skobelev] declared that ’... the country’s economy is on the brink of disaster. We must intervene in all fields of economic life, as there is no money in the Treasury. We must improve the condition of the working masses, and to do that we must take the profits from the tills of the businessmen and bankers’. (Voice in the audience: ‘How?’) ’By ruthless taxation of property,’ replied the Minister of Labour, Skobelev. ’It is a method known to the science of finance. The rate of taxation on the propertied classes must be increased to one hundred per cent of their profits.’ (Voice in the audience: ’That means everything.’) ‘Unfortunately,’ declared Skobelev, ’many corporations have already distributed their dividends among the share holders, and we must therefore levy a progressive personal tax on the propertied classes. We will go even further, and, if the capitalists wish to preserve the bourgeois method of business, let them work without interest, so as not to lose their clients.... We must introduce compulsory labour service for the shareholders, bankers and factory owners, who are in a rather slack mood because the incentive that formerly stimulated them to work is now lacking.... We must force the shareholders to submit to the state; they, too, must be subject to labour service.’”



We advise the workers to read and reread this programme, to discuss it and go into the matter of its practicability.

The important thing is the conditions necessary for its fulfilment, and the taking of immediate steps towards its fulfilment.

This programme in itself is an excellent one and coincides with the Bolshevik programme, except that in one particular it goes even further than our programme, namely, it promises to take the profits from the tills of the bankers “to the extent of one hundred per cent”.

Our Party is much more moderate. Its resolution demands much less than this, namely, the mere establishment of control over the banks and the “gradual [just listen, the Bolsheviks are for gradualness!] introduction of a more just progressive tax on incomes and properties”.


Our Party is more moderate than Skobelev.

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/16b.htm



Not that I, as an ‘ulta-leftist’ would subscribe to Skobelev’s modern neo- Leninist position.

Skobelev, having adopted the old Leninist position, eventually politically moved even further to the right and joined the Bolsheviks himself.


People say that Lenin’s idea introducing state capitalist as in his leftwing childnishness pamphlet has got nothing to with it.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm)


However the leftwing childishness of 1917 ie opposing the introduction of [state] capitalism was of the same theoretical kind as that of 1905, ie;






…….the ravings of the Narodniks and the anarchists to the effect that Russia, for instance, can avoid capitalist development, jump out of capitalism, or skip over it and proceed along some path other than the path of the class struggle on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism. http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TT05.html#c6

[Lucretia]

The distinction Lenin made between socialism and communism seem innocent, but it actually did great harm to the socialist movement. It became convenient instruments for legitimizing and justifying the ideology and every act of the Party-State from 1917 onwards in the name of (building) socialism, which was stressed as the need for the immediate future, moving the emancipatory project of the post capitalist society off to the Greek calends of the never-never land of communism, thereby metamorphosing Marx's project of socialism (communism) into an unalloyed utopia to be indefinitely postponed.

This is absurd and doesn't even make sense. According to you, Lenin's decision to use the word "socialist" to describe what Marx called the lower phase of communism was responsible for political repression from 1917 onward? What? Lenin couldn't justify political repression in the name of "building the lower phase of communism," but could only justify it if he was talking about "building socialism" when both where referring to the exact same thing?

And this question, of course, is presupposing your highly bizarre understanding of post-1917 Russia as one where Lenin (specifically his ideas), not counter-revolutionary forces, threatened the soviets and thwarted the movement toward socialism. It seems from having this exchange with you that you don't really understand much about Marxism, but hopefully you know enough of the basics to see that your understanding of these events is what Marx would refer to as philosophical or historical idealism -- not historical materialism.


"Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly"
Now for the love of Marx, how the hell is this not saying socialism is state capitalism made to serve the interest of the whole people? I mean, come on now. The words are - in broad daylight - staring at you in the face and STILL you do not want to acknowledge what they say.I keep telling you you're misinterpreting the quote by taking it out of context, explaining how your taking it out of context, and demonstrating how the context provides a clear understanding of what Lenin was attempting to convey with the quote in question. You keep wanting to ignore my comments altogether by repeating, "He said it! He said it!" Uh, yeah. Nobody is disputing the quote is authentic. The dispute we're having is over what the quote means. And instead of providing an interpretation of the quote, you just keep repeating it like its meaning is damningly self-evident. It's not.


Yes I know know Lenin distinguished between "state capitalism" under capitalist state and "state capitalism" under the proletarian state. (In The Impending Catastrophe he said "But state capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital, and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts) And yes I know that when he talked of "state capitalism" he normally referred to the former. But as the above quote makes absolutely clear, he saw a continuity between state capitalism and socialism.Yes, he saw continuity between the two. Big deal. The important question is what continuity? That is the question you keep wanting to avoiding discussing directly, so you can indirectly impute to him the worst, most tendentious possible motivations and ideas similar to what you did above with your silly argument about socialism/communism, and the deterioration of the revolution being the result of a semantic issue in Lenin's pamphlet. To repeat myself for the third time, the continuity that Lenin hones in on is the collective property form. What's discontinuous is the content that form assumes because it is being used by a proletarian state -- a revolutionary democratic state that uses the extant mechanisms of capitalism to, as Lenin said, "serve the interests of the whole people."

I've said this multiple times, but then you want to quote it back to me as if you haven't read anything I've said in this thread:


In fact , just before this sentence Lenin writes this: "given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!" He then defines socialism as also being state capitalist monopoly but different in form from the state capitalist monopoly of the capitalist state insofar as it was "made to serve the interests of the whole people"Ok, now how does state capitalism under a proletarian state serve the whole interests of the people? Since you seem to be an expert on Lenin's vision of state capitalism under private trusts, state capitalism under a proletarian state, and socialism, perhaps you can enlighten us as to what Lenin means when he says this? Do you think he's referring to some minor difference -- as though we'll have all the shit that goes on under monopoly capitalism, but instead the monopolizers will be state bureaucrats? Seriously, you keep spewing out these quotes as though their meaning is obvious, but the only thing obvious here is that you haven't taken the slightest bit of time or effort to seriously engage with them, but keep imputing wildly bad and inaccurate meanings to them on the basis of some preconceived desire to reject anything remotely associated with Lenin's political thought.


All this is as clear as can be yet perversely you still deny the argument that socialism was for Lenin a form of state capitalism albeit not the state capitalism of the capitalist state variety."You seem to have a problem distinguishing between "denying Lenin's quote," and explaining that your presentation of Lenin's quote implies that it has a meaning Lenin never intended to convey. Again, nobody is denying the quote is authentic. What is being denied is your ability to comprehend what the quote means (which is clear from your rather circular refrain that "the quote means what it says it means" -- as though the quote were self-evidently clear, even when taken out of context).


Lenin himself admitted that the government was pursuing state capitalism, this was something he was extraordinarily honest about. "State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic.” (Left-Wing' Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality)You seem to be misunderstanding my argument if you think you need to point out that Lenin understood Russia in 1918-1921 as an ad hoc form of state capitalism dominated by a proletarian state. Nobody here is claiming that Lenin thought otherwise. The claim I have been responding to repeatedly is that Lenin fought for revolution on the basis of advocating for state capitalism -- of actually advocating for an extended retrenchment of economic mechanisms associated with commodity production and the law of value. And as I have repeatedly said, he never advocated state capitalism until after the revolution had taken place and was clearly under severe threat from a quasi-fascist military invasion. The only quotes you've been able to produce, where Lenin actually speaks of the important role of state capitalism in Russia, only serve to corroborate my point, taken as they are from works that written during or immediately after the Russian Civil War.


I'm not denying that Lenin identified emotionally with the abstract goal of a communist society. What I am saying is that it was simply not an option.Finally, you make a statement that has some grounding in reality. But then you follow it up with:


A minority haven taken control of the apparatuses of capitalism without the majority of the population understanding and desiring socialism will have no choice but to continue to administer capitalism, since there is no way socialism can be imposed on a population that neither wants nor understands it. And also, we see the Bolsheviks crushing workers democracy BEFORE the civil war had started.And one is once more left with the clear understanding that your historical inquiries into the revolution has probably consisted of reading a few shoddily constructed anarchist websites with bad color schemes and blinking HTML text. If the majority of workers didn't desire a revolutionary program geared toward socialism, how did the Bolsheviks ever win the democratic support of the majority of soviets? Did the majority of the Russian population have a deep and polished understanding of Marxism and ins and outs of how socialism builds dialectically off capitalism? Of course not, but to suggest that this makes a revolutionary movement toward socialism impossible to take the Kautskyite/Menshevik position that workers, using the existing structure of bourgeois culture and education, can arrive at a deep and profound commitment to Marxian socialism and therefore simply vote socialism into existence through the existing bourgeois institutions of "democracy."

But this is just more idealist claptrap that ignores one of the ABCs of Marxism -- the ruling ideas of every society are the ideas of the ruling class, and you're never going to arrive at a state of affairs in which the dominant ideas within a bourgeois society are Marxist. The very meaning of a revolutionary situation is one where ideas change rapidly in response to changing circumstances. The contribution of Marxian (and Leninist) political strategy is to stress that a vanguard party of the most class consciousness and forward-looking workers is necessary to shape the lessons and ideas that the mass of workers draw from revolutionary experiences. Thus a majority that is committed to socialism at a very advanced intellectual level is developed through revolution, not before revolution, which is the Kautskyite pipe dream.


Whether it is soviet democracy, workers' economic self-management, democracy in the armed forces or working class power and freedom generally, the fact is the Bolsheviks had systematically attacked and undermined it from the start. They also repressed working class protests and strikes along with opposition groups and parties.And they did this because? Because they were just selfish assholes who only wanted power for themselves? Because they were stupidly refusing to wait for that Kautskyite pipe dream of workers one day waking up in bourgeois democracy, picking up a copy of Kapital, then choosing to vote for the RSDLP en masse to the point where they have a parliamentary majority to topple the czar? Give me a break. The political repression you have a fetish for citing were the result of extremely difficult calculations the regime made to try to maintain a revolutionary leadership in the aftermath of a worker-backed political upheaval in a backwards country under threat from counter-revolutionary forces.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Dave B ought to be credited for his thoughtful historical explication. I amy not entirely agree with his conclusions but his historiography is first-rate. If we are to revive the near-moribund socialist movement we ought to do so using our critical thinking faculties rather than accepting dogma churned out from Moscow in the 1930s. Dogmatism and sectarianism so badly sapped the elan vital of our movement that when capitalism was restored most of the population was sufficiently apathetic as to take to the sidelines. Not to discount the importance of material conditions but mechanistic materialism is too often used as a cover for policy blunders.

[Let's Get Free]

This is absurd and doesn't even make sense. According to you, Lenin's decision to use the word "socialist" to describe what Marx called the lower phase of communism was responsible for political repression from 1917 onward? What? Lenin couldn't justify political repression in the name of "building the lower phase of communism," but could only justify it if he was talking about "building socialism" when both where referring to the exact same thing?

It is true that in his Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx wrote of a transition between a lower phase of communism and a higher phase of communism. Marx held that, because of the low level of economic development (in 1875), individual consumption would have to be rationed, possibly by the use of labor-time vouchers. But in the higher phase of communism, when the forces of production had developed sufficiently, consumption would be according to need. It is important to realize, however, that in both phases of socialism/communism there would be no state or money economy. Lenin, on the other hand, said that socialism (or the first phase of communism) is a transitional society between capitalism and full communism, in which there is both a state and money economy. There is a big big big difference between Marx's understanding of the lower stage of communism and Lenin's.



I keep telling you you're misinterpreting the quote by taking it out of context, explaining how your taking it out of context, and demonstrating how the context provides a clear understanding of what Lenin was attempting to convey with the quote in question. You keep wanting to ignore my comments altogether by repeating, "He said it! He said it!" Uh, yeah. Nobody is disputing the quote is authentic. The dispute we're having is over what the quote means. And instead of providing an interpretation of the quote, you just keep repeating it like its meaning is damningly self-evident. It's not.

Look, you can't deny that Lenin wanted state capitalism. Did Lenin say "socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly". Yes or No? If yes, please explain how this does not mean he is equating socialism with a form of state capitalist monopoly. Oh and don't go on about how you have already answered this point. You haven't. You have constantly shied away from answering and nearly bored me to death.


Yes, he saw continuity between the two. Big deal. The important question is what continuity? That is the question you keep wanting to avoiding discussing directly, so you can indirectly impute to him the worst, most tendentious possible motivations and ideas similar to what you did above with your silly argument about socialism/communism, and the deterioration of the revolution being the result of a semantic issue in Lenin's pamphlet. To repeat myself for the third time, the continuity that Lenin hones in on is the collective property form. What's discontinuous is the content that form assumes because it is being used by a proletarian state -- a revolutionary democratic state that uses the extant mechanisms of capitalism to, as Lenin said, "serve the interests of the whole people."

The fact that he meant by this something other than state capitalism under the capitalist state is not the point at issue since I havent denied this. But it was still state capitalism albeit of an (allegedly) different kind that he wanted. Are you seriously denying this? As for maintaining that Lenin distinguished state capitalism from socialism, well, I gave you Lenin's own definition of socialism "socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly". Please explain to me in simple plain English, if you can, how this definition of "socialism" does not equate socialism with state capitalism abeit a state capitalism "made to serve the interests of the whole people"


Ok, now how does state capitalism under a proletarian state serve the whole interests of the people? Since you seem to be an expert on Lenin's vision of state capitalism under private trusts, state capitalism under a proletarian state, and socialism, perhaps you can enlighten us as to what Lenin means when he says this? Do you think he's referring to some minor difference -- as though we'll have all the shit that goes on under monopoly capitalism, but instead the monopolizers will be state bureaucrats?

Look, I know that Lenin distinguished state capitalism under the capitalist state and state capitalism under the proletarian state - even though in practice I would contend that they are one and the same thing and that the "proletarian state" (so called) would in fact be a capitalist state in any case.
I am simply stating the plain fact that the state capitalism under the proletarian state variety was still nevertheless state capitalism - obviously!! - and that Lenin equated this with socialism.
Did Lenin "want" state capitalism. Of course he did! It is ridiculous to deny this. The quotes are all there for everyone to see in black and white. The fact that he meant by this something other than state capitalism under the capitalist state is not the point at issue since I haven't denied this


You seem to have a problem distinguishing between "denying Lenin's quote," and explaining that your presentation of Lenin's quote implies that it has a meaning Lenin never intended to convey. Again, nobody is denying the quote is authentic. What is being denied is your ability to comprehend what the quote means (which is clear from your rather circular refrain that "the quote means what it says it means" -- as though the quote were self-evidently clear, even when taken out of context).
How many of quotes do you need to see that he clearly wanted state capitlism?

What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the
present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the
capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany.
We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly
on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were
established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and
has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that
state capitalism would be our salvation.


I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the
transition to full socialism would he easy, would be within our grasp, because
state capitalism is something centralised, calculated, controlled and
socialised, and that is exactly what we lack: we are threatened by the element
of petty-bourgeois slovenliness, which more than anything else has been
developed by the whole history of Russia and her economy, and which prevents us
from taking the very step on which the success of socialism depends. Allow me to
remind you that I had occasion to write my statement about state capitalism some
time before the revolution and it is a howling absurdity to try to frighten us
with state capitalism. I remind you that in my pamphlet the Impending
CatastropheSee present edition, Vol. 25, pp. 319-65.

"Only the development of state capitalism, only the painstaking establishment of
accounting and control, only the strictest organisation and labour discipline,
will lead us to socialism. Without this there is no socialism."

On the contrary, the development of capitalism, controlled and regulated by the
proletarian state (i.e., "state" capitalism in this sense of the term), is
advantageous and necessary in an extremely devastated and backward small-peasant
country (within certain limits, of course), inasmuch as it is capable of
hastening the immediate revival of peasant farming. This applies still more to
concessions: without denationalising anything, the workers' state leases certain
mines, forest tracts, oilfields, and so forth, to foreign capitalists in order
to obtain from them extra equipment and machinery that will enable us to
accelerate the restoration of Soviet large-scale industry.

This freedom of exchange implies freedom for capitalism. We say this openly and
emphasise it. We do not conceal it in the least. Things would go very hard with
us if we attempted to conceal it. Freedom to trade means freedom for capitalism,
but it also means a new form of capitalism. It means that, to a certain extent,
we are re-creating capitalism. We are doing this quite openly. It is state
capitalism. But state capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital,
and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts. In a
capitalist state, state capitalism means that it is recognised by the state and
controlled by it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and to the detriment of the
proletariat. In the proletarian state, the same thing is done for the benefit of
the working class, for the purpose of withstanding the as yet strong
bourgeoisie, and of fighting it. It goes without saying that we must grant
concessions to the foreign bourgeoisie, to foreign capital. Without the
slightest denationalisation, we shall lease mines, forests and oilfields to
foreign capitalists, and receive in exchange manufactured goods, machinery,
etc., and thus restore our own industry.

Of course, we did not all agree on the question of state capitalism at once.

What compels us to do this? We are not alone in the world. We exist in a system
of capitalist states


We admit quite openly, and do not conceal the fact, that concessions in the
system of state capitalism mean paying tribute to capitalism.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/12.htm

It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary—state capitalism
and socialism—in order to prepare—to prepare by many years of effort—for the
transition to communism.


we must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways
to socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to
communism, we shall never bring scores of millions of people to communism. That
is what experience, the objective course of the development of the revolution, has taught us.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/14.htm

Before the war we had the monopoly of trusts and syndicates; since the war we
have had a state monopoly. Universal labour conscription is something new,
something that constitutes part of a socialist whole—this is often over looked
by those who fear to examine the concrete situation.

The first part of the resolution concentrates on an analysis of the conditions
of capitalist economy throughout the world. It is noteworthy that twenty-seven
years ago Engels pointed out that to describe capitalism as something that "is
distinguished by its planlessness" and to overlook the role played by the trusts
was unsatisfactory. Engels remarked that "when we come to the trust, then
planlessness disappears", though there is capitalism. This remark is all the
more pertinent today, when we have a military state, when we have state monopoly
capitalism. Planning does not make the worker less of a slave, but it enables
the capitalist to make his profits "according to plan". Capitalism is now
evolving directly into its higher, regulated, form.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/29g.htm



You seem to be misunderstanding my argument if you think you need to point out that Lenin understood Russia in 1918-1921 as an ad hoc form of state capitalism dominated by a proletarian state.
How can you call the Bolshevik government a "proletarian state" when the proletarians had no power in it?




If the majority of workers didn't desire a revolutionary program geared toward socialism, how did the Bolsheviks ever win the democratic support of the majority of soviets?
I have never doubted that the Bolsheviks has considerable support among the workers.(at least to begin with) My question was did this support translate into mass conscious support the idea of non market wageless stateless alternative to capitalism (Marxian socialism).

The answer is emphatically NO . The workers flocked to the Bolsheviks because of its reform programme and NOT because they wanted Marxian style socialism



Of course not, but to suggest that this makes a revolutionary movement toward socialism impossible to take the Kautskyite/Menshevik position that workers, using the existing structure of bourgeois culture and education, can arrive at a deep and profound commitment to Marxian socialism and therefore simply vote socialism into existence through the existing bourgeois institutions of "democracy."
No no no! I'm not saying that socialism can be "voted i." I'm saying a new form of capitalism will inevitably be created as happened in nthe Soviet Union should it be the case that a majority of workers are still not socialist minded. That clearly applied in the case of Russia 1917. Not only was the Russian working class only a small fraction of the population - perhaps 10% - but overwhelmingly Russian workers were not socialist minded and Lenin himself free acknowledged this to be the case. For that reason alone socialism was simply not an option. By default, if not design, the Bolsheviks had to take on the administration of capitalism and, in the course of doing so, those who controlled the state became the new de facto capitalist ruling class with complete control over the disposal of the economic surplus


The contribution of Marxian (and Leninist) political strategy is to stress that a vanguard party of the most class consciousness and forward-looking workers is necessary to shape the lessons and ideas that the mass of workers draw from revolutionary experiences. Thus a majority that is committed to socialism at a very advanced intellectual level is developed through revolution, not before revolution, which is the Kautskyite pipe dream.

Well, 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 labor. Thats how capitalism works after all - through the exploitation of wage labor by capital. Leninists claim to be materialists but ,you know, it strikes me that they are really idealists in denying this simple stark fact of life. They think socialist intentions and taking control of the capitalist apparatuses will somehow carry more weight than material reality.
But 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. Indeed, the very definition of socialism itself underwent 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 see through.



And they did this because? Because they were just selfish assholes who only wanted power for themselves? Because they were stupidly refusing to wait for that Kautskyite pipe dream of workers one day waking up in bourgeois democracy, picking up a copy of Kapital, then choosing to vote for the RSDLP en masse to the point where they have a parliamentary majority to topple the czar? Give me a break. The political repression you have a fetish for citing were the result of extremely difficult calculations the regime made to try to maintain a revolutionary leadership in the aftermath of a worker-backed political upheaval in a backwards country under threat from counter-revolutionary forces.
Well, my main point is that you cannot simply blame the civil war for the Bolshevik's anti-working class policies. The process of taking power out of the hands of the workers and peasants and into the hands of the state bureaucracy had begun BEFORE the civil war.The Bolsheviks believed a highly centralized state was necessary, to nationalize and run all industries, and to educate the working class. Indeed, Trotsky argued in Terrorism and Communism that the transition to socialism will involve a period when a "powerful state is necessary", and before supposedly disappearing, "this state would be the most ruthless form of government imaginable." These beliefs would have a profoundly negative impact on the direction of the Russian Revolution once the Bolsheviks were in power.

[Lucretia]

This is quickly becoming a pointless exchange, as you waffle between making sweeping statements without any evidence, and responding to claims and arguments that nobody here is making.

An example of the first problem is your claim that:


Lenin, on the other hand, said that socialism (or the first phase of communism) is a transitional society between capitalism and full communism, in which there is both a state and money economy. There is a big big big difference between Marx's understanding of the lower stage of communism and Lenin's.

I've read State and Revolution many, many times, and nowhere in that document do I see Lenin saying that there is a money economy (and, by implication, value and commodities) in socialism. Care to point out where he says this? I am inclined to think that this is just more sloppy misreading on your part, but I am always open to be proven wrong. So I look forward to your quoting specific passages from State and Revolution where Lenin says this.

You then proceed to say for the second or third time in our exchange:


Look, you can't deny that Lenin wanted state capitalism. Did Lenin say "socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly". Yes or No? If yes, please explain how this does not mean he is equating socialism with a form of state capitalist monopoly. Oh and don't go on about how you have already answered this point. You haven't. You have constantly shied away from answering and nearly bored me to death.It seems you are once again having simple reading comprehension problems. I never said that Lenin did not advocate for state capitalism. And I challenge you to find any place in this discussion where I made any such claim. I said that his advocacy for state capitalism came at a specific historical juncture -- during and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War -- for a specific set of reasons, and that it was totally dishonest for you to claim that Lenin advocated state capitalism without qualifying when and for what purpose he engaged in that advocacy -- as though Lenin was championing state capitalism from the beginning, before the revolution even took place, as as if it were an unqualified good to be fought for on its own merits, regardless of the context. Instead of responding to this criticism, you keep repeating over and over again that "Yes, Lenin did advocate for state capitalism." You see how your response is non-sequential to my statement?

It's also surprising to see you ask me whether Lenin made the quote he did, when I have repeatedly stressed that the quote is most certainly from one of Lenin's works. I don't know how many more times I have to repeat this for it to finally sink into your consciousness: we do not have a disagreement on the authenticity of the quote, but rather on the meaning to attribute to the quote.

You don't want to discuss the meaning of the quote except insofar as to claim, falsely, that Lenin was "equating socialism with a form of state capitalist monopoly." In fact, Lenin was not equating socialism with a form of state capitalist monopoly.He was not saying that socialism was a variety of state capitalism, or any such thing. He was saying -- and please pay very close attention to this -- that socialism was similar to state capitalism, but then goes on to identify a key DIFFERENCE. If he was "equating" the two, as you said, he would not mention any difference at all. He would being saying that they are exactly the same thing. Yet that's not what he said, and anybody who is capable of reading and any interest in following this thread can easily make this observation.

In light of the context of the rest of the work, which you want to ignore because it uncomfortably puts you into the position of having to take Lenin's ideas seriously, it's incontrovertibly clear that the similarity he is talking about is the collectivized property form, and that the difference is the agency that is controlling that property form (competitive accumulation in the case of monopoly state capitalism vs. workers and workers' needs in socialism). It takes an audacious amount of stupidity to get this wrong, and then claim when somebody brings this to your attention that you are "bored" by it.


The fact that he meant by this something other than state capitalism under the capitalist state is not the point at issue since I havent denied this. But it was still state capitalism albeit of an (allegedly) different kind that he wanted. Are you seriously denying this? As for maintaining that Lenin distinguished state capitalism from socialism, well, I gave you Lenin's own definition of socialism "socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly". Please explain to me in simple plain English, if you can, how this definition of "socialism" does not equate socialism with state capitalism abeit a state capitalism "made to serve the interests of the whole people"For the umpteenth time, I am not disputing that Lenin at a specific historical juncture advocated for state capitalism. This is different than your sloppy ahistorical formulations that make it seem that Lenin equated state capitalism with "socialism," and therefore was actually agitating for a state capitalist revolution in 1917.

Once we have established that you have understood these very basic, easy-to-understand points I am making, and how they exclude the veracity of your points, we can move on to have a more edifying discussion about the revolution, and how Lenin's semantic innovations re: the lower phase of communism were not the original sin of the revolution that caused it all to come crumbling down around him.

[Let's Get Free]

I've read State and Revolution many, many times, and nowhere in that document do I see Lenin saying that there is a money economy (and, by implication, value and commodities) in socialism. Care to point out where he says this? I am inclined to think that this is just more sloppy misreading on your part, but I am always open to be proven wrong. So I look forward to your quoting specific passages from State and Revolution where Lenin says this.
Like I said earlier, Lenin was notoriously inconsistent in his application of the word socialism, having different definitions for it at different times.


It seems you are once again having simple reading comprehension problems. I never said that Lenin did not advocate for state capitalism. And I challenge you to find any place in this discussion where I made any such claim. I said that his advocacy for state capitalism came at a specific historical juncture -- during and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War -- for a specific set of reasons, and that it was totally dishonest for you to claim that Lenin advocated state capitalism without qualifying when and for what purpose he engaged in that advocacy -- as though Lenin was championing state capitalism from the beginning, before the revolution even took place, as as if it were an unqualified good to be fought for on its own merits, regardless of the context. Instead of responding to this criticism, you keep repeating over and over again that "Yes, Lenin did advocate for state capitalism." You see how your response is non-sequential to my statement?
I’ve never said that Lenin desired state capitalism from the very beginning, my point is that The minority having taken over the administration of capitalism are necessarily going to be drawn into pursuing the imperatives involved in running a capitalist system.


You don't want to discuss the meaning of the quote except insofar as to claim, falsely, that Lenin was "equating socialism with a form of state capitalist monopoly." In fact, Lenin was not equating socialism with a form of state capitalist monopoly.He was not saying that socialism was a variety of state capitalism, or any such thing. He was saying -- and please pay very close attention to this -- that socialism was similar to state capitalism, but then goes on to identify a key DIFFERENCE. If he was "equating" the two, as you said, he would not mention any difference at all. He would being saying that they are exactly the same thing. Yet that's not what he said, and anybody who is capable of reading and any interest in following this thread can easily make this observation.
In light of the context of the rest of the work, which you want to ignore because it uncomfortably puts you into the position of having to take Lenin's ideas seriously, it's incontrovertibly clear that the similarity he is talking about is the collectivized property form, and that the difference is the agency that is controlling that property form (competitive accumulation in the case of monopoly state capitalism vs. workers and workers' needs in socialism). It takes an audacious amount of stupidity to get this wrong, and then claim when somebody brings this to your attention that you are "bored" by it.
The point is that he saw a road to socialism through state capitalism. Lenin himself conceded just before his death that it was still advancing along the path of state capitalism and that socialism still lay in the future (not that state capitalism will ever pave the way to socialism - thats a totally discredited theory). As for workers controlling the property - well who was the staunchest advocate of authoritarian "one man management". Thats right - V.Lenin!


For the umpteenth time, I am not disputing that Lenin at a specific historical juncture advocated for state capitalism. This is different than your sloppy ahistorical formulations that make it seem that Lenin equated state capitalism with "socialism," and therefore was actually agitating for a state capitalist revolution in 1917.

I know it wasn’t Lenin’s intentions to administer state capitalism but that is precisely what happened after the Bolsheviks captured power without the majority of the population broadly understanding and desiring socialism. What do we see happening then? We see Lenin in 1918 on enthusing - no, salivating - over top-down authoritarian one man-management as an industrial strategy - hardly a case of the working class exercising power was it? We see the factory committees being gradually crushed out of existence. There was Trotsky, with his despicable anti-working class militarization of labor programme. We see political opponents being suppressed banished and eliminated and we see the subordination and assimilation of the trade unions into the state e to become merely an arm of the state to bully and control the workers into producing more surplus value. And more and more, Lenin began to display the characteristics of a capitalist. He fetishized worker discipline in a manner that is almost hyper capitalist. He urged workers to learn from the capitalist amongst them if they were to (supposedly) take over the running of the economy. More and more Lenin became an outright promoter of capitalist ideology and capitalist institutions. Look at what he said about banking for example: "A single State Bank, the biggest of the big . . .will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus." Now the notion that banks would exist in socialism, let alone be held up as something to be admired would be laughed out of court by any self respecting Marxist but this does give us some clue as to the ever shfting defintion of socialism that Lenin had in mind.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Gladiator's historiography is spot on and he makes some compelling arguments in his most recent post.

[Lucretia]

Like I said earlier, Lenin was notoriously inconsistent in his application of the word socialism, having different definitions for it at different times.


I’ve never said that Lenin desired state capitalism from the very beginning, my point is that The minority having taken over the administration of capitalism are necessarily going to be drawn into pursuing the imperatives involved in running a capitalist system.


The point is that he saw a road to socialism through state capitalism. Lenin himself conceded just before his death that it was still advancing along the path of state capitalism and that socialism still lay in the future (not that state capitalism will ever pave the way to socialism - thats a totally discredited theory). As for workers controlling the property - well who was the staunchest advocate of authoritarian "one man management". Thats right - V.Lenin!


I know it wasn’t Lenin’s intentions to administer state capitalism but that is precisely what happened after the Bolsheviks captured power without the majority of the population broadly understanding and desiring socialism. What do we see happening then? We see Lenin in 1918 on enthusing - no, salivating - over top-down authoritarian one man-management as an industrial strategy - hardly a case of the working class exercising power was it? We see the factory committees being gradually crushed out of existence. There was Trotsky, with his despicable anti-working class militarization of labor programme. We see political opponents being suppressed banished and eliminated and we see the subordination and assimilation of the trade unions into the state e to become merely an arm of the state to bully and control the workers into producing more surplus value. And more and more, Lenin began to display the characteristics of a capitalist. He fetishized worker discipline in a manner that is almost hyper capitalist. He urged workers to learn from the capitalist amongst them if they were to (supposedly) take over the running of the economy. More and more Lenin became an outright promoter of capitalist ideology and capitalist institutions. Look at what he said about banking for example: "A single State Bank, the biggest of the big . . .will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus." Now the notion that banks would exist in socialism, let alone be held up as something to be admired would be laughed out of court by any self respecting Marxist but this does give us some clue as to the ever shfting defintion of socialism that Lenin had in mind.

You're not answering simple questions, Gladiator, and I am not going to continue this discussion until you do. Can you provide any evidence in any of Lenin's writings that he claimed that there would be money (and commodities and value) under socialism?

You made the claim earlier; I responded by asking you for evidence, and I get paragraph after paragraph about how you don't agree with Lenin's positions on workers' control, workers' discipline, one-man management, etc.

We can discuss those issues later if you like, but first we need to establish what has already taken place in this discussion. You falsely claimed that Lenin equated state capitalism with socialism, then asserted that Lenin believed socialism would have money.

Now, when pressed, you're evading. If you want to take politics seriously, especially revolutionary politics, you'd better be prepared to have disciplined and substantive discussions. So far it appears you aren't ready for such a discussion.

[Let's Get Free]

Well, though he maintains that "socialist exchange of products" is "not commodities" he nevertheless identifies "socialist exchange" with "a [certain] type of commodity exchange )" and then distinguishes it from "ordinary purchase and sale, trade." (The New Value Controversy and the Value of Economics 1921, pp 207-208) In the State and Revolution he wrote “What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the 'first', or lower, phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production become common property, the word 'communism' is also applicable here, providing we do not forget that this is not complete communism." Let's consider Lenin's contention that "all citizens", in the first phase of communism, "are transformed into hired employees and workers of one state syndicate" for whom there is "equality of labor and wages " This perspective of socialism in Lenin is completely opposed to Marx's, for whom there would be wage-labor.

The first sentence of this quote is simply untrue and Lenin must have known this. Marx and Engels used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably to refer to the post-revolutionary society of common ownership of the means of production. Lenin defined socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and communism. In effect, the theory of “socialism” as a transitional society was to become an apology for state capitalism. Lenin saw socialism as the progression of the tendency towards the centralization of capital (certainly in 'Imperialism...'). Thus socialism was conceived as democratic state control of the centralized means of production. Thus conceived, it's easy to see why state capitalism was conceived as progressive rather than counter-revolutionary.

Monopoly capitalism, which has been developing into state-monopoly capitalism in a number of advanced countries with especial rapidity during the war, means gigantic socialisation of production and, consequently, complete preparation of the objective conditions for the establishment of a socialist society
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf2/6.htm

War and economic ruin have forced all countries to advance from monopoly capitalism to state monopoly capitalism. This is the objective state of affairs. In a revolutionary situation, during a revolution, however, state monopoly capitalism is directly transformed into socialism. During a revolution it is impossible to move forward without moving towards socialism—this is the objective state of affairs created by war and revolution. It was taken cognisance of by our April Conference,which put forward the slogans, "a Soviet Republic" (the political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat), and the nationalisation of banks and syndicates (a basic measure in the transition towards socialism). Up to this point all the Bolsheviks unanimously agree. But Comrades Smirnov and Bukharin want to go farther, they want to discard the minimum programme in toto.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/06.htm

[Red Enemy]

I was unawares people still believed in the "Lenin is a state capitalist" idea. Amazing. The anti-Lenin fetishism is beyond me, either way.

As for the Mensheviks, they largely consisted of those stageists who wished to allow the provisional government (the bourgeoisie) to remain in power. They largely supported the whites in the civil war. They were horrid, class collaborationist scum.

The Menshevik Internationalists are brought up, and are a group which, iirc, opposed the DOTP. They were probably the only respectable Mensheviks, but Mensheviks nonetheless. They still advocated the continuation of the Kerensky bourgeois government.

[Lucretia]

Well, though he maintains that "socialist exchange of products" is "not commodities" he nevertheless identifies "socialist exchange" with "a [certain] type of commodity exchange )" and then distinguishes it from "ordinary purchase and sale, trade." (The New Value Controversy and the Value of Economics 1921, pp 207-208)

Well, this is certainly odd. Your quotation of Lenin is referring to a book that is not listed in the library of congress, on worldcat, or anywhere else that I can see. If this is indeed an authentic quote from Lenin (and I'm not sure it is), you're certainly pressing your case that Lenin referred to money and commodity production/exchange under socialism, when the quote -- according to you -- says that products under socialism are "not commodities." The rest of the quote is equally unpersuasive, where apparently Lenin is cited as talking about "socialist exchange" (of course exchanges will occur under socialism), then mentions that it is a .... type of commodity exchange." Again, without having access to this phantom text -- which is predictably only cited on those badly designed HTML-blink-tagged anarchist web pages that I earlier guessed was where you frequently troll for anti-Lenin material -- it is impossible to say what Lenin is referring to here. He might very well, for example, be making the point Marx made in Critique of the Gotha program about labour-voucher (socialist) exchanges having the form of commodity exchange since they represent an exchange of equivalents.

But all this is besides the point. Your claim that Lenin believed there would be "money" (and value/commodity production) is clearly false, even by your own strange and highly questionable evidence.



In the State and Revolution he wrote “What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the 'first', or lower, phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production become common property, the word 'communism' is also applicable here, providing we do not forget that this is not complete communism." Let's consider Lenin's contention that "all citizens", in the first phase of communism, "are transformed into hired employees and workers of one state syndicate" for whom there is "equality of labor and wages " This perspective of socialism in Lenin is completely opposed to Marx's, for whom there would be wage-labor.

The first sentence of this quote is simply untrue and Lenin must have known this. Marx and Engels used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably to refer to the post-revolutionary society of common ownership of the means of production. Lenin defined socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and communism. In effect, the theory of “socialism” as a transitional society was to become an apology for state capitalism. Lenin saw socialism as the progression of the tendency towards the centralization of capital (certainly in 'Imperialism...'). Thus socialism was conceived as democratic state control of the centralized means of production. Thus conceived, it's easy to see why state capitalism was conceived as progressive rather than counter-revolutionary.

Here you are conflating socialism (the lower phase of communism) with the transitional society to socialism (which still retains aspects of capitalism like some commodity production, value relations, etc.), then on the basis of this conflation, accuse Lenin of a faulty understanding of socialism. It's simply astounding. I suppose we have now located the source of your false belief that Lenin's understanding of socialism was going to have all sorts of capitalistic attributes.

Now there are some debatable points here about whether Lenin's statement about what "equal labor" and "equal pay" under socialism means, and whether that meaning contradicts what M&E would have argued for (I don't think it does), but it clearly has nothing to do with your accusation that Lenin viewed socialism as state capitalism on steroids.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Having watched this debate progress, it does seem to me that although Gladiator makes some good historiographical points about the state of things in the Soviet Union, it is a mistake to conflate the post-revolutionary transitional economy with socialism. When one looks at a national economy it might be better to refer to it as transitional, unless one believes that it is possible to achieve socialism in a single country.

[Geiseric]

Having watched this debate progress, it does seem to me that although Gladiator makes some good historiographical points about the state of things in the Soviet Union, it is a mistake to conflate the post-revolutionary transitional economy with socialism. When one looks at a national economy it might be better to refer to it as transitional, unless one believes that it is possible to achieve socialism in a single country.

I couldn't of put it better, the process of building up the fSU's economy was basically on the premise that "we cannot create socialism, we don't have the resources or international support, due to the failure of the revolution," so they had to make due with what they had, lead the economy to make sure everybody had food, and repopulate the cities following the civil war, which is a context that would necessitate winning over the peasantry, giving them the power to sell most of their food outside of the country, as long as they would promise to send some to the cities. That is what "state capitalism," is. Along with the ownership of all major industries to be by the state, which pays capitalists to set up the operation, which was necessary seeing as only people like Ford, the Koch brothers, and various german capitalists knew how to set up automotive factories and oil fields. That is also technically state capitalism.

Once the planned economy was put into effect, the situation changed completely, with the state owning all of the farming industry, and kicking out the capitalists, running most industries with the bureaucracy, which learned in the mean time. The catch was that the state had hordes of poor peasants to deal with, due to Stalin's and Bukharin's support of the N.E.P. which created a rich Kulak class, which owned 75% of the farmland, and subsequentally employed about 70% of the peasant population, with the rest being poor to middle peasants who owned their own plots. Those people were also included in the process, basically making it so the state had to move hundreds of million people onto these collective farms, with no prior planning done by the time they actually decided to do it.

From 1928 to 1930 there were several famines induced by the Kulaks, which Stalin used as a pretext for the purges and super collectivization in the immediate future. That position is funny because Stalin supported extending the N.E.P, enabling the Kulaks to accumulate more and more land for the same reasons all rich capitalists can become richer, from 1923 to 1930, which is the year he actually started collectivization. Trotsky and the left opposition warned against this happening in 1925.

However when it comes down to it, "state capitalism," in 1921 meant a whole lot different from both the planned economy, and the normal bourgeois state capitalism that we saw in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, England, and WW2 era U.S.

[Let's Get Free]

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

[Geiseric]

They didn't practice de facto ownership. That would mean they stole profits, and employed wage labor based on the law of value, which they didn't. There was no unemployment and no homeless people in the fSU. They would pay you for a job, and provide you the same standard of living as everybody else, even if your job was meaningless and created no value, such as being a full time street sweeper. That's hardly capitalism of any sort.

Besides the fact that they didn't take any profits, didn't re invest any of the nonexistant profits, and didn't accumulate capital, they just had higher salaries due to their privelages as part of the nomenclature, which managed the economy. They also had secret stores, and secret deals as well, but all of that was illegal by law.

[GoddessCleoLover]

They also had secret stores, and secret deals as well, but all of that was illegal by law.

Therefore the Nomenklatura enjoyed impunity. BTW these privileges extended beyond secret stores to include access to life-saving medications. This division between the Nomenklatura and the working class IMO was a prime cause of the rise of social cynicism that eventually led to the collapse of the Union.

[Geiseric]

yeah indeed, however it was far from full blown capitalism.

[Grenzer]

There was no unemployment and no homeless people in the fSU.

Sorry, but that's complete and total bullshit. Most political criminals who were released from the gulag could not find jobs and most refused to employ them. They were not classified as unemployed, but they were unemployed and seeking jobs none the less. Funny how you're the one echoing Stalinist propaganda here. Also, why refer to it as the "former" Soviet Union? If we're already talking in past tense, then it's established that we are talking about something in the past. This was one of Artesian's idiosyncrasies.

[Lucretia]

Having watched this debate progress, it does seem to me that although Gladiator makes some good historiographical points about the state of things in the Soviet Union, it is a mistake to conflate the post-revolutionary transitional economy with socialism. When one looks at a national economy it might be better to refer to it as transitional, unless one believes that it is possible to achieve socialism in a single country.

Here I think you arrive at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. The reason we shouldn't conflate Lenin's remarks on the transitional society with his remarks on socialism is that we should be clear on what Lenin is and is not arguing if we are to honestly and seriously assess his body of work. So if Lenin says something that indicates there might be socialism in a single country, we should accept that these are his views, and not pretend they aren't his views simply because we disagree with them.

With that preface out of the way, Lenin clearly distinguishes the transitional society under the DotP from the lower stage of communism. Moreover, there's nothing in "State and Revolution" that indicates that Lenin in any way foresaw the possibility of socialism in a single country, at least not anymore than he foresaw the possibility of communism in a single country -- something even Stalinists deny is possible. Quotes like the one about "a single countrywide 'syndicate'" in the "lower phase of communism" (socialism) are sometimes used by Stalinist types to argue that Lenin here is talking about the lower phase of communism, a phase that has a state economy that is only "countrywide." So, see, he's assuming that socialism can develop in a single country. But this ignores the fact that the entire pamphlet, including the sections on capitalism, the DotP, socialism, and communism, abstract from concrete reality of multiple states and focuses only on the "state" and "society" in the singular. Indeed, the pamphlet is not called "States and Revolutions," for the frame of reference from hunter-gatherer beginning to communist end is a society/state/country in abstraction. Because this abstraction enables Lenin to examine what really interests him in this work, without introducing additional layers of concrete reality that would only muddy that point of interest.

That point, of course, is not the formulation of a specific revolutionary strategy or how competition between states modifies it (he wrote a separate work on that), but rather the nature of the link between class antagonism and state power, and what the implications of a workers' revolution are for this relationship. Careful observers will note that Lenin makes no theoretically significant mention of imperialism or the international dimensions of capitalism throughout his pamphlet (in fact, one of the two or so places he mentions the word at all is in his briefly providing background for his polemic on Kautsky). Again, stripping quotes out of their context is a dangerous exercise indeed, whether done by anarchists or Stalinists.

[Dave B]

Re ‘socialist exchange’ from post 33.



Lenin did talk about it in tax in kind concerning the exchange of products or ‘commodities’ between ‘peasant agriculture’ and ‘socialist state capitalist’ industry depending on how you prefer to analyse it.

Thus;








Conclusion



To sum up.



The tax in kind is a transition from War Communism to a regular socialist exchange of products……………..……….Hence, the first thing to do is to improve the condition of the peasants. The means are the tax in kind, the development of exchange between agriculture and industry, and the development of small industry.


Exchange is freedom of trade; it is capitalism. It is useful to us inasmuch as it will help us overcome the dispersal of the small producer, and to a certain degree combat the evils of bureaucracy; to what extent this can be done will be determined by practical experience. The proletarian power is in no danger, as long as the proletariat firmly holds power in its hands, and has full control of transport and large-scale industry.


……… By means of this control we shall direct the capitalism that is to a certain extent inevitable and necessary for us into the channels of state capitalism……………….We must not be afraid of Communists “learning” from bourgeois experts, including merchants, petty capitalist co-operators and capitalists, in the same way as we learned from the military experts, though in a different form. The results of the “learning” must be tested only by practical experience and by doing things better than the bourgeois experts at your side; try in every way to secure an improvement in agriculture and industry, and to develop exchange between them. Do not grudge them the “tuition” fee: none will be too high, provided we learn something.



……….. As for the “non-party” people who are only Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries disguised in fashionable non-party attire à la Kronstadt, they should be kept safe in prison, or packed off to Berlin, to join Martov in freely enjoying all the charms of pure democracy and freely exchanging ideas with Chernov, Milyukov and the Georgian Mensheviks.



April 21, 1921
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm

He repeated the general idea in the following, seemingly unfamiliar important article; again referring back to a; ‘regular socialist exchange of products between industry and agriculture’.

With also;



The peasants will give one part of their produce in the form of tax and another either in exchange for the manufactures of socialist factories, or through the exchange of commodities……….………..



But state capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital, and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts. In a capitalist state, state capitalism means that it is recognised by the state and controlled by it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and to the detriment of the proletariat.



In the proletarian state, the same thing is done for the benefit of the working class, for the purpose of withstanding the as yet strong bourgeoisie, and of fighting it. It goes without saying that we must grant concessions to the foreign bourgeoisie, to foreign capital. Without the slightest denationalisation, we shall lease mines, forests and oilfields to foreign capitalists, and receive in exchange manufactured goods, machinery, etc., and thus restore our own industry.


Of course, we did not all agree on the question of state capitalism at once.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/12.htm

the later part of that is interesting perhaps as it is a paraphrase of Trotsky’s own state capitalist position of 1922





………..this is explicable in part by an incomprehension of an expression frequently used by us, that we now have state capitalism. I shall not enter into an evaluation of this term; for in any case we need only to qualify what we understand by it. By state capitalism we all understood property belonging to the state which itself was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which exploited the working class.



Our state undertakings operate along commercial lines based on the market. But who stands in power here? The working class. Herein lies the principled distinction of our state ‘capitalism’ in inverted commas from state capitalism without inverted commas.

What does this mean in perspective? Just this. The more state capitalism say, in Hohenzollern Germany, as it was, developed, the more powerfully the class of junkers and capitalists of Germany could hold down the working class. The more our ‘state capitalism’ develops the richer the working class will become, that is the firmer will become the foundation of socialism.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm

(http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm)
Trying to be helpful, as it has cropped up before, there can be a bit of confusion on Lenin’s state capitalism re ‘moving towards it with gigantic steps and ‘retreating from it’; as there were for him two types.


State capitalism (lesser) was state capitalist state industries.


State capitalism (greater); was the concession system of renting out, or receiving de-facto ‘interest payments’, on state property to capitalist proper for them to use to exploit the working class.



Non lesser; tended to involve mines, oil wells and timber etc etc but obviously included ‘fixed capital’ as well.


Although Vlad was never the sharpest tool in the box when it came to understanding Das Capital; he understood enough to comprehend that that was capitalism.


The situation is quite clear.


Karl said that, according to his theory, as Lenin outlined in 1914, that inevitably what would have to happen after the collapse of feudalism in Russian would be capitalism, and a ruling [state] capitalist class.


That is what happened.

True enough the traditional capitalist class ie Russians in frock coats and top hats presumably, did not step up to the plate and play out their casted historical role.


However they did appear in different garb and costumes, leather jackets etc, with all the minority elitist notions and ideological paraphernalia of the bourgeois intelligentsia.

Returning to the Mensheviks at last; they said in circa 1905 that the Bolshevik proposal of entering into a provisional government and introducing capitalism would be the beginning of a slippery slope.


And they said once the ‘Bolsheviks’ crossed the threshold of ‘the marble halls of power’; they would like it too much to give it up.

[Lucretia]

Re ‘socialist exchange’ from post 33.



Lenin did talk about it in tax in kind concerning the exchange of products or ‘commodities’ between ‘peasant agriculture’ and ‘socialist state capitalist’ industry depending on how you prefer to analyse it.

Thus;



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm

He repeated the general idea in the following, seemingly unfamiliar important article; again referring back to a; ‘regular socialist exchange of products between industry and agriculture’.

With also;


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/12.htm

the later part of that is interesting perhaps as it is a paraphrase of Trotsky’s own state capitalist position of 1922




http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm

(http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm)
Trying to be helpful, as it has cropped up before, there can be a bit of confusion on Lenin’s state capitalism re ‘moving towards it with gigantic steps and ‘retreating from it’; as there were for him two types.


State capitalism (lesser) was state capitalist state industries.


State capitalism (greater); was the concession system of renting out, or receiving de-facto ‘interest payments’, on state property to capitalist proper for them to use to exploit the working class.



Non lesser; tended to involve mines, oil wells and timber etc etc but obviously included ‘fixed capital’ as well.


Although Vlad was never the sharpest tool in the box when it came to understanding Das Capital; he understood enough to comprehend that that was capitalism.


The situation is quite clear.


Karl said that, according to his theory, as Lenin outlined in 1914, that inevitably what would have to happen after the collapse of feudalism in Russian would be capitalism, and a ruling [state] capitalist class.


That is what happened.

True enough the traditional capitalist class ie Russians in frock coats and top hats presumably, did not step up to the plate and play out their casted historical role.


However they did appear in different garb and costumes, leather jackets etc, with all the minority elitist notions and ideological paraphernalia of the bourgeois intelligentsia.

Returning to the Mensheviks at last; they said in circa 1905 that the Bolshevik proposal of entering into a provisional government and introducing capitalism would be the beginning of a slippery slope.


And they said once the ‘Bolsheviks’ crossed the threshold of ‘the marble halls of power’; they would like it too much to give it up.





Congrats. You established what Lenin and Trotsky never denied: that Russia in 1921 wasn't socialist.

[GoddessCleoLover]

We ought to find common ground whenever possible. I join Dave B and Lucretia with respect that the Soviet Union was not socialist in 1921. How many RevLefters would agree if I were to contend that it never became wither socialist or a worker's state at any time after 1921?

[hetz]

They also had secret stores, and secret deals as well, but all of that was illegal by law. What? Please provide evidence for this. Stores for the nomenklatura were, from what I know, not "secret" at all, neither were beryozka hard-currency shops and such. Of course there were "secret deals", but that's corruption and nepotism.

[Luís Henrique]

There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings of the dispute between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Dave B corrected some, but introduced some others of his own.


The Mensheviks believed in a stagist theory of socialist development, that bourgeois society had to be fully realized before the material conditions would be ripe for socialism in Russia.

This is a common belief, but it is certainly not what made the difference between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Bolsheviks were every bit as stageist as the Mensheviks - up to April 1917, when Lenin changed his position, and even later, until Lenin won over the majority of the other members of the Politburo.

Indeed, a non-stageist position before 1917 would have been a privilege of Trotsky's small current, which remained among the Mensheviks due to other, not automatically related, issue - that of membership and whether it should be extended to political supporters that were not affiliated to, and working with, organised sections of the party.

(Pre-1917 stageism was revived, of course, in a distorted way, in post-1925 "Bolshevism", and became, in due time, a dogma of Stalinism.)


What made them liberal is that they did what the social democrats did a couple of years earlier. Supporting the war, supporting the nation, and so on.

Well, as others have pointed, no; the Mensheviks were deeply divided on the war issue, and while certainly a huge bunch of them became defencists, another big chunk remained solidly internationalist and anti-war.


The Mensheviks were obviously proven right on that front [ie, stageism (LH)] or at least were more honest and realistic about the potential for socialism in Russia.

Well, no. As I pointed above, both parties were stolidly stageist up to 1917 (with the exception of the small Menshevik fraction led by Trotsky). Their difference in that respect is that the Mensheviks believed the proletariat should support the bourgeoisie's efforts to topple tzarism and make a bourgeois revolution, while the Bolsheviks realised that the Russian bourgeoisie would by no means lead any kind of revolution, and would always prefer to bow to the Tzar, from which they concluded that the proletariat should actually take the lead of a "bourgeois revolution" instead of supporting the unreliable and treacherous lead of the bourgeoisie. In that, of course, the Bolsheviks were absolutely right, and the Mensheviks were completely wrong.


No they weren't, they were opportunist pro capitalists, just as bad as the SPD in germany regarding bureaucracy. They used stagism to basically argue that the soviets shouldn't exist.

No; as Ostrinski points, the Mensheviks took part of the soviets up to the Revolution and even later; they never argued that soviets shouldn't exist. They opposed the soviets taking power (again with the exception of Trotsky's fraction, which broke with them and joined the Bolsheviks exactly on this issue), but that's an altogether different question.


Whereas the Bolsheviks overthrew the existing capitalist state to reconfigure it in a new form in order to develop state capitalism, the Mensheviks wanted to collaborate with the existing capitalist state to further capitalism.

This is again a very distorted view of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the issues on which they opposed each other.

Both tendencies started by recognising that the Russian State was not a capitalist State, but a feudal one. So none would even think about cooperating with the State to further capitalism. Where they differed was in how to overthrow the feudal State and destroy the remnants of feudalism in Russia; in other words, in how to make a bourgeois revolution, and in what should be the role of the proletariat and its party in such bourgeois revolution.

You are perhaps confusing the Mensheviks with an earlier and less important tendency, that of "legal Marxists", that had a somewhat Lassalian idea of allying with the feudal State against the bourgeoisie.

As for the Bolsheviks, your caricature borders on the ridiculous. The Bolsheviks never proposed "State capitalism"; they proposed that the proletariat should led the bourgeois revolution and remove the feudal State. they changed position in 1917, probably realising that the idea that the proletariat would topple the feudal State and then hand the power to the bourgeoisie was absurd, since the proletariat was actively building the instruments of its own power, the soviets.


I'm not going to even argue about the State Capitalism thing here. The N.E.P. was state capitalism, but that all ended when the planned economy was formed, in which the law of value, the small thing that makes capitalism capitalism, [ceased] to exist.


The "law of value" never ceased to exist in the Soviet Union; it was always what ultimately drove the economy.


Well, there was another option- rejecting both the capitalist agendas while recognizing realistically that communiusm was not an option and retain working class political independence to promote the interests of wage labor industrially and politically in opposition to those of capital and the capitalist state

There was never such option; nobody ever reasoned like that, nobody ever proposed anything like that, nobody ever framed the issue in terms of two different capitalist agendas, nobody (not even the Mensheviks) ever proposed renouncing political independence.

And, of course, "promoting the interests of wage labour industrially and politically" without proposing communism as an option is what we would normally call "reformism".

All that boils that to the fact that no one at that time could look back to the failures of the Russian Revolution, and so could not understand the problems it faced with hindsight.


Even if Lenin wanted communism (and I am not denying he did), the Bolsheviks were doomed for objective historical reasons to pursue only one course of action - to develop capitalism - since communism was simply not an option. In that sense Lenin was quintessentially a bourgeois revolutionary.

In other words, you support a stageist strategy. At least in Russia in 1917.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ‘split’ in circa 1905 but not over the stagiest theory.

Yes. The real issue opposing both tendencies was organisational. Of course there were loads of divergences on other issues, but all of them would be recognised as tolerable within a proletarian party by both sides. They wouldn't have split on stageism, on whether the proletarian party should or should not participate in a bourgeois revolutionary government, on "State capitalism" vs private capitalism, etc. Those were simply not immediate issues as organising the party was. Neither was war an issue; both tendencies opposed the Nipo-Russian war, and WWI was still a decade into the future. Neither was the feudal nature of the Russian State, or the necessity to oppose it first and foremost.


The Bolsheviks/Lenin and the Mensheviks both accepted the stagiest theory.

The stagiest theory being that Russia could not pass from ‘feudalism’ to ‘socialism’ without first passing through the capitalist stage or the ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’.

That is not to say that amongst the leftwing Russian opposition to Tsarism there were not some that opposed the Marxist Stageist theory.

Opposition to stageism could be found amongst some Anarchists and Narodniks (or Socialist revolutionaries).

Yes, but in this case what is meant by "socialism" may be widely different from what we understand by that (including some semi-primitivist views of the Russian commune, slavophilia and Russian nationalism, going up to its extreme consequence, anti-semitism).

A theoretically more serious opposition to stageism was the stand of Trotsky's faction, that you describe as "eccentric" and was indeed at least largely minoritary. And, of course, the Bolsheviks changed positions in 1917, and abandoned stageism until it was brought back by the defeat of the world revolution up to 1925 (which is a determinant part of Trostky's faction decision not to just break with the Mensheviks, but also to join the Bolsheviks).


The Bolshevik party programme, prior to 1917, insisted that they, the Bolsheviks, should participate in that provisional government and from a position of state power make sure there was no counter-revolutionary hanky panky and backsliding, and to guarantee the convocation of the constituent assembly and ‘consummation’ of the bourgeois democratic revolution etc.

After the elections to the constituent assembly, that the Marxist workers party or parties would have no prospect of winning, they would stand down so to speak and let the bourgeois democratic revolution take its natural Marxist stagiest course.

The Mensheviks, circa 1905, took the leftwing position of staying out of any caretaker, interim or provisional government as that would result in the workers party compromising themselves in running a ‘non socialist state’.

Indeed, but that was not the issue in discussion when they broke. In fact, it was much more a post-facto justification, and the kind of attacks two political groups make on each other after breaking. If not for the organisational issue, both sides would easily tolerate both the ideas of participating and not participating on a provisional government. Since they split on the issue of organisation, they were not above picking programatic differences and enlarging them in order do demonise each others. It happens almost always a leftist group splits.


What actually happened in the middle of 1917 was that some Mensheviks ended up going into the Provisional government.

I have no desire to appear to defend that decision, but what actually happened is relevant to understanding the truth of the matter and the reversal of “the Menshevik” position.

As a matter of fact there was huge disagreement and almost a split in the Mensheviks over the decision of some Menshevik members of the Petersburg soviet entering another new Provisional government.

Yes, and again that wasn't a problem big enough to result in a split.


Eg the Menshevik ‘leader’ Martov was totally against the idea.

However the Soviet itself ‘insisted’ that leftwingwers eg SR’s and Mensheviks entered into a new Provisional government, actually justified that essentially on the basis of the old Bolshevik party position.

In other words, the working class believed its interests were best served by participating in the Provisional Government.


The SR’s refused to join the government unless some Mensheviks went in with them; both parties, rather than individuals, correctly recognising it as a political poisoned chalice

True, though quite soon they - especially the SRs - learned to appreciate the poison.


However as the ‘Menshevik’ rightwing, and Skobelev in particular, are portrayed by lying Leninist historians as some kind of left of centre capitalist running dogs, it is worthwhile I think to consult Lenin’s own political appraisal Skobelev himself;

So let's read Lenin, as you quote him:


We advise the workers to read and reread this programme, to discuss it and go into the matter of its practicability.

The important thing is the conditions necessary for its fulfilment, and the taking of immediate steps towards its fulfilment.

This programme in itself is an excellent one and coincides with the Bolshevik programme, except that in one particular it goes even further than our programme, namely, it promises to take the profits from the tills of the bankers “to the extent of one hundred per cent”.

Our Party is much more moderate. Its resolution demands much less than this, namely, the mere establishment of control over the banks and the “gradual [just listen, the Bolsheviks are for gradualness!] introduction of a more just progressive tax on incomes and properties”.

Our Party is more moderate than Skobelev.

There seems to be some sarcasm in Lenin's remarks, and certainly lots of rhetorics - Lenin always tended to abuse of rhetorics. But let's see what else he says, in direct continuation:


Skobelev dispenses immoderate, nay, extravagant promises, without understanding the conditions required for their practical realisation.

That is the crux of the matter.

It is impossible not only to realise Skobelev’s programme, but even to make any serious efforts towards its realisation, either arm in arm with ten ministers from the party of the landowners and capitalists, or with the bureaucratic, official-ridden machine to which the government of the capitalists (plus a few Mensheviks and Narodniks) is perforce limited.


Which one would have to agree; whether Skobelev's program is radical or moderate, similar or dissimilar to that of the Bolsheviks, good or bad, in the interests of the working class or otherwise - it was not a program that could be carried on by the provisional government, or any other government with a similar class composition.

And so Skobelev's position, not coupled with his lack of resignation from a government that could not implement it, nor even a watered down version of it, boils down to a complete delusion at best, empty talking in any case, and the use of pseudo-radical verbiage to cover a sell-out at worst. (as Lenin puts it, in the same text, a few lines below, this kind of phrase-mongering is always used in bourgeois parliamentary republics to hoodwink the people.)


People say that Lenin’s idea introducing state capitalist as in his leftwing childnishness pamphlet has got nothing to with it.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm


However the leftwing childishness of 1917 ie opposing the introduction of [state] capitalism was of the same theoretical kind as that of 1905

Erm, certainly no. In 1905 he was opposing the idea to skip from feudalism to socialism without passing through capitalism, an idea that was held by people in the opposition to a government that had not even a remote intention to either skip to socialism or to merely go to capitalism. There is nothing about "State capitalism" there, he is talking about capitalism sans phrase.

In 1917 he is arguing against a minister who is saying that a capitalist government should implement measures that imply abolishing profits without abolishing capitalism:


the country’s economy is on the brink of disaster. We must intervene in all fields of economic life, as there is no money in the Treasury. We must improve the condition of the working masses, and to do that we must take the profits from the tills of the businessmen and bankers. By ruthless taxation of property. It is a method known to the science of finance. The rate of taxation on the propertied classes must be increased to one hundred per cent of their profits. Unfortunately, many corporations have already distributed their dividends among the share holders, and we must therefore levy a progressive personal tax on the propertied classes. We will go even further, and, if the capitalists wish to preserve the bourgeois method of business, let them work without interest, so as not to lose their clients.... We must introduce compulsory labour service for the shareholders, bankers and factory owners, who are in a rather slack mood because the incentive that formerly stimulated them to work is now lacking.... We must force the shareholders to submit to the state; they, too, must be subject to labour service.

He isn't objecting the attempt to skip capitalism (and neither is Skobelev actually proposing it, but rather, even if "uncounsciouly", as Lenin says, to make safe the rule of almighty capital by a temporary sacrifice of profits), but the attempt to perform a radical war-time centralisation of decisions and imposition of "sacrifices" on the capitalists with the wrong instrument, ie, the provisional government. And instead, proposing exactly what he thought was wrong in 1905:


The workers must sweep aside all high-sounding phrases, promises, declarations, project-mongering by bureaucrats in the centre, who are ever ready to draw up spectacular plans, rules, regulations, and standards. Down with all this lying! Down with all this hullabaloo of bureaucratic and bourgeois project-mongering which has everywhere ended in smoke. Down with this habit of shelving things! The workers must demand the immediate establishment of genuine control, to be exercised by the workers themselves.

That this was not the result of the Russian Revolution of November,1917, is a different problem.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

As the OP points out, the Mensheviks are an important topic of discussion, and most that we read about them comes from Bolshevik, or worse, Stalinist literature; it would be important to try and debate a little bit more about them, especially avoiding demonisation.

This thread, however, has somewhat degenerated into a discussion of Lenin, Bolshevism, and State capitalism - all subjects that we routinely discuss more often than we should, and as usual locked in very limiting ideological paradigms that don't help elucidating the subject.

We should stick to the Mensheviks in this thread, and lose our time on Lenin, his misconstructions of Marxism, and our own (sometimes monstruous) misconstructions of Lenin, his ideas, and the reality he had to face, in other threads.

Luís Henrique

[Dave B]

Well there is a lot for me to deal with here and I will try and go through some of it whilst ‘attempting’ to stay on Menshevism and off state capitalism as much as possible.

Originally Posted by Dave B


The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ‘split’ in circa 1905 but not over the stagiest theory.
I put ‘split’ in inverted comma’s because post circa 1905 there were various attempts to get back together.

However the Bolshevik programme of going into and participating in the provisional government etc was connected, at least as mudslinging and rhetorically, to the ‘main’ cause of the split ie the ‘organisational’ issue.

To express it my way; the Bolsheviks wanted the party to be organised from the top down, or centralised control, by a professional group of revolutionaries, a vanguard of elite theoreticians.

The Mensheviks wanted a more laid back broad church approach.

This was demonstrated in fact by both factions attitude to the ‘Bundists’.

The Bundists were secular Marxists and real workers, most of them, in fact they formed the bulk membership of the foundation the RSDLP.

They were like a kind of ‘black section’ that you used to get in some Leninist organisations.

However in ‘Apartheid’ 1905 Russia they were subject to institutionalized racism; and they had their own culture and common language etc.


Russian Yiddish I think; and produced, with their own press, their own communist literature etc.

And thus wanted to remain federated as part of the RSDLP.

Lenin’s Bolshevik idea of a centralised party run by a bourgeois intelligentsia was thus an anathema for a genuinely working class ‘Yiddish’ speaking section.

Thus they never actually got round to voting against Lenin at the conference of Bolshevik/Menshevik split vote circa 1905.

Because they walked out in disgust before the vote on the Bolshevik position that was being put at the conference.

Obviously the Bundists later on, on mass became part of the Menshevik broad church faction.

That is not to say incidentally that all Mensheviks, including ‘Jewish’ ones like Martov, were happy at the idea of a working class party, being the issue, being ‘divided’ on the basis of ‘ethnicity’.

The lies told about the Mensheviks by Bolsheviks eg that they were anti semitic don’t seem to have any limits.

I am not even suggesting for a moment that the Bolsheviks ever were by the way.


However progressing onto organisational issue, the Mensheviks including the famous one ie Trotsky, and non Menshevik Rosa for that matter, suspected that Bolshevism was latent or incipient Blanquism, and even Bakuninism.

[To be balanced as regards the Mensheviks; perhaps rhetorical mudslinging, insinuation and calumny.]

And that the Bolshevik’s keen interest in crossing the threshold of the ‘marble halls of power’ (a Menshevik pejorative term used circa 1904) and entering a provisional revolutionary government was just a barely repressed psychological reflection of the Bolsheviks Blanquist lust for power, as was likewise the Bolsheviks pragmatic ideas re an elite of a theoretical vanguard.

So from the last omitted chapter of the Menshevik, Totsky’s ‘Our Political Tasks’of 1905;



Thus we have charged our Ural Comrades [Bolsheviks] with Blanquism. And we recalled at once that it is Bernstein who also charges the revolutionary social democrats with Blanquism. This is entirely sufficient to get the people from the Urals classed as revolutionary social democrats, and ourselves as Bernsteinians.

That is why we consider it highly useful to quote Engels on the question of the role which the Blanquists ascribe to themselves at the moment of the socialist revolution.

“Trained in the conspiratorial school, accustomed to the strict discipline required in a conspiracy, they acted on the view that a relatively small number of determined and well organised people may, under favourable circumstances, not only capture the power, but through the application of powerful merciless energy maintain it until they succeed in rallying to the revolution the masses of the people and grouping them around the small handful of leaders. This requires, above all, the strictest dictatorial centralization of power in the hands of the new government.”

(Marx “The Civil War in France”, Engels’ Preface to the third German Edition).




The idea being, as above, that because Bernstien said that Bolsheviks were Blanquists, as he did, people who accused the Bolsheviks of Blanquism, ie Mensheviks, were thus de-facto Bernstienists.

Absurd then; as everyone knew the Mensheviks of 1905, on the leftwing of the second international, were virulently opposed to Bernstienism.

Blanquism was a Marxist mudsling slur of course. Eg

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm


And in fact Engels in a ‘letter’ to the later Menshevik Vera ‘trigger’ Zasulich predicted Blanquists might end up playing a part in the anticipated Russian revolution.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_04_23.htm

The Russian Marxists knew about that ‘letter’ as well

Returning to the list; I would be interested in the supposed point at which Lenin did categorically and theoretically did abandon the ‘stagiest theory’.

I don’t think his so called April thesis really fits the bill as is claimed, particularly based on the kind of admittedly opportunistic stuff he came out with later or during 1917.

Like his ‘support’ for the constituent assembly throughout 1917 and at one point, ‘On Slogans’, rejection of the ‘obsolete soviet’ system.

For me; far from Lenin theoretically rejecting stageism; he implemented it with his ‘gigantic steps forwards’ of state capitalism.

Re the pre 1917 idea of the Bolsheviks entering a provisional revolutionary government.

The apostate and renegade Mensheviks participated in Provisional Revolutionary Government for a mere, say, seventeen weeks.

A brief period of liberal political freedom that Russia soon lost by the beginning of the Bolshevik chekka police state in early 1918.

The Bolshevik counter revolutionary ‘Provisional Revolutionary Government’ lasted for almost seventy years, before the ‘after’ and ‘final victory’ ‘Stalin’s’, of 1906, consummation of the bourgeois democratic revolution in the 1980’s; or whatever.

I am by the way not uncritical of Menshevism; and it had well and truly disappeared up its own arsehole by the 1930’s in my opinion.

[l'Enfermé]

Oh, wow, didn't see this thread yet. Dave B, I don't think you have even a basic understanding of RSDLP history. Pretty much everything you're writing is absolutely wrong.



I put ‘split’ in inverted comma’s because post circa 1905 there were various attempts to get back together.
Yes.


However the Bolshevik programme of going into and participating in the provisional government etc was connected, at least as mudslinging and rhetorically, to the ‘main’ cause of the split ie the ‘organisational’ issue.
The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks had one party programme until 1917, since they were, you know, one party.



To express it my way; the Bolsheviks wanted the party to be organised from the top down, or centralised control, by a professional group of revolutionaries, a vanguard of elite theoreticians.
That's not true at all, the "vanguard of elite theoreticians" is just a shameful lie.

The Bolsheviks were pro-centralism, but you don't understand the meaning of the word "centralism" in 1903. Let's put it in context:

In 1903, there was no party. There were local Social-Democratic "party" committees in the Russian Empire, but they were disconnected from each other and all of them pretty much did their own thing, and the exiled socialist leadership in Western Europe. In 1898, during the first Congress, a CC and a Central Organ were elected but the police suppressed them and until 1903, they weren't revived.

By "centralism", it was meant the unification of these local committees and the creation of an actual party.

I don't even know where you're getting this "vanguard of elite theoreticians" shit, because Lenin and the rest of the Bolsheviks were consistently anti-intelligentsia(Lenin openly mocked the Russian intelligentsia as "craven, spineless Philistines") and always fought for bringing more actual workers onto leadership committees of the party.


The Mensheviks wanted a more laid back broad church approach.
The Mensheviks wanted to promote opportunism.


This was demonstrated in fact by both factions attitude to the ‘Bundists’.

The Bundists were secular Marxists and real workers, most of them, in fact they formed the bulk membership of the foundation the RSDLP.

They were like a kind of ‘black section’ that you used to get in some Leninist organisations.

However in ‘Apartheid’ 1905 Russia they were subject to institutionalized racism; and they had their own culture and common language etc.


Russian Yiddish I think; and produced, with their own press, their own communist literature etc.

And thus wanted to remain federated as part of the RSDLP.

Lenin’s Bolshevik idea of a centralised party run by a bourgeois intelligentsia was thus an anathema for a genuinely working class ‘Yiddish’ speaking section.

Thus they never actually got round to voting against Lenin at the conference of Bolshevik/Menshevik split vote circa 1905.

Because they walked out in disgust before the vote on the Bolshevik position that was being put at the conference.

Obviously the Bundists later on, on mass became part of the Menshevik broad church faction.
That's just bullshit you're pulling out of your ass.
1 - The Bundists weren't Marxists and didn't even pretend they were for the most part
2 - Most of them were artisans and the like, more petty-bourgeois than proletarian
3 - They didn't produce communist literature because they didn't even pretend to be communists'
4 - They made up a considerable part of the RSDLP in 1898, but in 1903, there were 51 delegates and only 5 of them were Bundists. At the London 1907 RSDLP Congress, there were 338 delegates who represented 76,000 "Russian" RSDLPers, 42,000 Polish-Lithuanian Social-Democrats and only 33,000 Bundists. This amounted to 202 "Russian" RSDLP delegates, 73 Polish-Lithuanian SD delegates and only 59 Bundists.
5 - The Bundists left the RSDLP not because of Lenin's imagined notion of having the bourgeois intelligentisa run the party(which has nothing to do with reality), but because at the Second Congress, in 1903, the Russian Social-Democrats refused to recognize the Bund as the sole representative of the Jewish people in the Russian Empire, which was what the Bund demanded. In 1906, the Bundist leadership decided to rescind this demand and re-joined the party.


That is not to say incidentally that all Mensheviks, including ‘Jewish’ ones like Martov, were happy at the idea of a working class party, being the issue, being ‘divided’ on the basis of ‘ethnicity’.

The lies told about the Mensheviks by Bolsheviks eg that they were anti semitic don’t seem to have any limits.
What lies? Who is saying the Mensheviks were anti-semitic between 1903 and 1917?


However progressing onto organisational issue, the Mensheviks including the famous one ie Trotsky, and non Menshevik Rosa for that matter, suspected that Bolshevism was latent or incipient Blanquism, and even Bakuninism.
Trotsky split with the Mensheviks within a year and Rosa famously actually defended the Bolsheviks from accusations of Blanquism in 1906. (http://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html)



And that the Bolshevik’s keen interest in crossing the threshold of the ‘marble halls of power’ (a Menshevik pejorative term used circa 1904) and entering a provisional revolutionary government was just a barely repressed psychological reflection of the Bolsheviks Blanquist lust for power, as was likewise the Bolsheviks pragmatic ideas re an elite of a theoretical vanguard.
Lust for power? Elite theoretical vanguard? Are you joking?


So from the last omitted chapter of the Menshevik, Totsky’s ‘Our Political Tasks’of 1905;



The idea being, as above, that because Bernstien said that Bolsheviks were Blanquists, as he did, people who accused the Bolsheviks of Blanquism, ie Mensheviks, were thus de-facto Bernstienists.

Bernstein also accused Marx and Engels of Blanquism.



Absurd then; as everyone knew the Mensheviks of 1905, on the leftwing of the second international, were virulently opposed to Bernstienism.

The Mensheviks were actually to the right of the Bolsheviks. It's no coincidence that economists, the liquidators and the defencists and social-patriots all joined the Bolsheviks.



The apostate and renegade Mensheviks participated in Provisional Revolutionary Government for a mere, say, seventeen weeks.
Yes, the Mensheviks provided ministers for a government which was waging an imperialist war that has butchered over 15 million people. In fact, it provided ministers that sat on the Central Committee of the party.


The Bolshevik counter revolutionary ‘Provisional Revolutionary Government’ lasted for almost seventy years, before the ‘after’ and ‘final victory’ ‘Stalin’s’, of 1906, consummation of the bourgeois democratic revolution in the 1980’s; or whatever.
The Bolsheviks were pretty much all killed by the Stalinist counter-revolution in the 1930s so I don't know what you're talking about.
(http://www.revleft.com/vb/old-bolsheviks-many-t175309/index.html?t=175309)

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Dave B., Lenin as an "opportunist" is more than a reach. And you really lost me when you stated he was taking "German Gold." That's an old ball of shit to dredge up. I've said this elsewhere, but the fusion of the "Interboro" group of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks was predicated on a coming together of their programs -- essentially, Trotsky came over to Lenin's view of the vanguard party and Lenin came over to Trotsky's view of Permanent Revolution.

And comrade, the idea that coming into Petrograd and flaying the Bolsheviks for giving any kind of support to the provisional government demonstrates how opportunistic Lenin was is preposterous. In fact it shows the opposite. this was highly unpopular with the population at large, and even among the Bolsheviks caused quite an uproar. That's called principles. Lenin's view had shifted, based on new understanding of events. The opportunists joined the provisional government (Uh that would include the Mensheviks). Had Lenin and the Bolsheviks deferred to the constituent assembly, the Whites would have been in power in a matter of months if not weeks. It would have been a massive betrayal to the world revolution.

And that is what is completely absent from your posts. The sense that the Bolsheviks were more concerned with the world revolution for socialism than with local issues. They were trying to hold on and help foster this -- that is a critical aspect in understanding the compromises they made -- before the Thermidor, that is (1924).

[GoddessCleoLover]

Just to focus on the issue of overcentralization. As a Luxemburgian it appears clear to me that the type of not-so-democratic centralism practiced by the Bolsheviks lead directly to Thermidor (sometime between 1921 and 1924). IMO the RCP (b) took a series of decisions beginning with the 1921 Party Congress that allowed the Stalin/Zinoviev/Kamenev troika to liquidate party democracy.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Just to focus on the issue of overcentralization. As a Luxemburgian it appears clear to me that the type of not-so-democratic centralism practiced by the Bolsheviks lead directly to Thermidor (sometime between 1921 and 1924). IMO the RCP (b) took a series of decisions beginning with the 1921 Party Congress that allowed the Stalin/Zinoviev/Kamenev troika to liquidate party democracy.
Well, the ban on factions certainly bit the party on the ass. But hindsight is 20/20. The party had been rent with opposition groupings and it given that they had been going from crisis to crisis, it seemed to many of the leaders at the time, that this was a sane way of calming things down in the party. But I tend to agree that this kind of false unity is very bad for a living political organism.

Added to that, it would seem that Lenin was very concerned about what would happen to the party if he were to become unable to lead. He was mainly concerned that Stalin and Trotsky would rip each other to shreds, leaving the party in a heap. He was kind of right. But the ban actually tied Trotsky's hands for a while, as he refused to take on a leadership position for a while and left the leadership to Preobrazhinsky and others, so as not to be violating the rule of no factions. Meanwhile, the Triumvirs were in a factional frenzy against him and the incipient LO.

My thought is that the democratic centralism of the Bolsheviks was fine. But the suppression of democratic discussion and the formation of factions was not.

[Let's Get Free]

In other words, you support a stageist strategy. At least in Russia in 1917.


No, being realistic about the material conditions doesn't mean supporting a stageist strategy. After the civil war and the destruction of the independent working class institutions and workers democracy by the Bolsheviks, along with the failure of the revolution to spread, it didn't look like there was going to be any further development towards socialism, and unsurprisingly, there was none.

[Art Vandelay]

No, being realistic about the material conditions doesn't mean supporting a stageist strategy. After the civil war and the destruction of the independent working class institutions and workers democracy by the Bolsheviks, along with the failure of the revolution to spread, it didn't look like there was going to be any further development towards socialism, and unsurprisingly, there was none.

Then what exactly would you have done? Cause quite frankly you can deny proposing a stageist strategy, but it blatantly shines through in your posts.

[Let's Get Free]

Then what exactly would you have done? Cause quite frankly you can deny proposing a stageist strategy, but it blatantly shines through in your posts.

What would I have done? Well, if I had a time machine, I would have worked to revitalize popular organs of working class power, and I would have done everything and anything possible to advance and promote the interests of the working class. In practice that would of course mean opposing with all the might one could muster, the ruthlessly anti working class policies that the Bolsheviks increasingly sought to impose on the workers - including of course Trotsky and his disgusting "militarization of labor" programme

[Art Vandelay]

What would I have done? Well, if I had a time machine, I would have worked to revitalize popular organs of working class power, and I would have done everything and anything possible to advance and promote the interests of the working class. In practice that would of course mean opposing with all the might one could muster, the ruthlessly anti working class policies that the Bolsheviks increasingly sought to impose on the workers - including of course Trotsky and his disgusting "militarization of labor" programme

:laugh:

Is there any lot you would of thrown your weight in with?

[Let's Get Free]

:laugh:

Is there any lot you would of thrown your weight in with?

I would have opposed both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in their respective capitalist agendas, if that's what you're asking.

[Luís Henrique]

Well there is a lot for me to deal with here and I will try and go through some of it whilst ‘attempting’ to stay on Menshevism and off state capitalism as much as possible.

Thank you.


To express it my way; the Bolsheviks wanted the party to be organised from the top down, or centralised control, by a professional group of revolutionaries, a vanguard of elite theoreticians

I think this is much more a Stalinist re-reading of Bolshevism than anything else.


The Mensheviks wanted a more laid back broad church approach.

Well, yes, but let's understand what such "broad church approach" entails, hm?

The basic disagreement was on whether one could be affiliated with the party without being a militant member of a rank-and-file organisation. The Mensheviks thought yes, the Bolsheviks argued no. Was this disagreement tied to other disagreements concerning the nature of the Russian State and economy, and of the revolution required to put an end to them? Probably, since a "broad church approach" seems quite inadequate for political work in dictatorship that actually forbids political activity - and so might reflect some Menshevik delusion about the autocracy being reformable into a proper "democratic" bourgeois State. But I don't think they expressed that in any conscious way, though of course the Bolsheviks would denounce them for it.


Lenin’s Bolshevik idea of a centralised party run by a bourgeois intelligentsia was thus an anathema for a genuinely working class ‘Yiddish’ speaking section.

Just like I don't think the Mensheviks consciously argued that the Tzarist autocracy could be reformed into a constitutional monarchy, I don't think the Bolsheviks counsciously argued for a "centralised party run by a bourgeois intelligentsia" before Stalin's hegemony was being established. This doesn't mean that the internal logic of their positions didn't work in that direction (as was the case with the Mensheviks also).


The lies told about the Mensheviks by Bolsheviks eg that they were anti semitic don’t seem to have any limits.

Never actually saw anything like that - on the contrary, the worst lies about the Mensheviks that can be related to Bolsheviks - to Stalinists, to be precise - tend to point in the opposite direction, that Mensheviks were "rootless cosmopolites".


I am not even suggesting for a moment that the Bolsheviks ever were by the way.

It depends on what historical period we are talking about. In 1905, 1917, 1921, 1924, or even 1930, they certainly werent. In 1950, I'm not so sure. But then this boils down to whether we believe Stalinism is a direct continuation of Bolshevism, something altogether different, a peculiar degeneration of the former, etc.


However progressing onto organisational issue, the Mensheviks including the famous one ie Trotsky, and non Menshevik Rosa for that matter, suspected that Bolshevism was latent or incipient Blanquism, and even Bakuninism.

I think this is an obvious aspect of Bolshevism. They themselves energically denied anything like that, and even denounced Blanquism as anti-working class ideology. There are aspects of their reasoning, however, that seem to me recasts, under Marxist terminology, of Blanquist - or Blanquistoid - tenets. To what extent this is a Russian phenomenon - the absence of any democratic tradition in the Russian State, the traditional submission of peasantry and working class, the semi-feudal nature of economy and society, the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, the very recent formation of the proletariat (most proletarians in 1917 would have had peasant parents, and almost all of them would have had peasant grand-parents), it is evidently debatable.

What seems clear to me, however, is that the Mensheviks had no workable alternative. Their "broad-church approach" could perhaps work in critical periods, when the regime had to tactically concede some freedoms to the populace; but it would mean the destruction of the organisation - or its programmatical lowering, in order to achieve a condescending permit from the authorities - in 'normal' periods in which the autocracy was firmly on the saddle.


And that the Bolshevik’s keen interest in crossing the threshold of the ‘marble halls of power’ (a Menshevik pejorative term used circa 1904) and entering a provisional revolutionary government was just a barely repressed psychological reflection of the Bolsheviks Blanquist lust for power, as was likewise the Bolsheviks pragmatic ideas re an elite of a theoretical vanguard.

This I think is completely off base. First, I don't believe in a "Blanquist lust for power"; Blanquism is a natural expression of working class resistance against capitalism in a early phase - and Russia was clearly in an early phase of working class resistance against capitalism. Second, Blanquism never actually entailed any desire to enter any "marble halls of powers" except gun in hand; the Menshevik controversy about that is clearly false.

What both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks proposed was that, once the autocracy was toppled, a Constituent Assembly should be called; where they differed is that Bolsheviks thought the proletarian party should participate in a provisional government to call such Constituent Assembly, which the Mensheviks refused. Superficially, the Menshevik position may seem more radical, but in practice it would have entailed, quite probably, as anyone who knows how the bourgeoisie behaves in belated countries, the suppression of said Constituent Assembly, or its election under very limiting laws.


The idea being, as above, that because Bernstien said that Bolsheviks were Blanquists, as he did, people who accused the Bolsheviks of Blanquism, ie Mensheviks, were thus de-facto Bernstienists.

Absurd then; as everyone knew the Mensheviks of 1905, on the leftwing of the second international, were virulently opposed to Bernstienism.

Indeed. The Mensheviks were not only anti-Bernsteinian, but also anti-Kautskian (though of course they would have never said that; on the contrary, just like pretty much everybody except of course Rosa Luxemburg, they prefered to delude themselves about Kautsky and pretend to be in agreement with him, or pretend that he was in agreement with them). But as the situation in Russia (an economy in transition to capitalism headed by a feudal State) were different from those in Western Europe (young capitalist economies headed by bourgeois States), the necessities of proletarian struggle were also different, and different were the roads to subordinate such struggle to the rule of capital. So the specificities of Russian reformism would mean it would have had to be very distinct from Bernstein's or Kautsky's reformism.


Blanquism was a Marxist mudsling slur of course.

Judging from you post, I would say it still is.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm

From it,


AFTER THE FAILURE of every revolution or counter revolution, a feverish activity develops among the fugitives, who have escaped to foreign countries. The parties of different shades form groups, accuse each other of having driven the cart into the mud, charge one another with treason and every conceivable sin. At the same time they remain in close touch with the home country, organise, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that the trouble will start afresh within twenty-four hours, that victory is certain, and distribute the various government offices beforehand on the strength of this anticipation.


Of course, disappointment follows disappointment, and since this is not attributed to the inevitable historical conditions, which they refuse to understand, but rather to accidental mistakes of individuals, the mutual accusations multiply, and the whole business winds up with a grand row. This is the history of all groups of fugitives from the royalist emigrants of 1792 until the present day. Those fugitives, who have any sense and understanding, retire from the fruitless squabble as soon as they can do so with propriety and devote themselves to better things.

Which is more or less what we are doing here, if we refuse to take into account the inevitable historical conditions.


For me; far from Lenin theoretically rejecting stageism; he implemented it with his ‘gigantic steps forwards’ of state capitalism.

Oh yes, this certainly. But he did it through delusions, not through an actual pre-conceived plan to do it. The point being, the pivotal condition for doing it was to delude himself - or rather that the Russian working classes deluded themselves - that there was a way to socialism that circumvented capitalism. Placed as a conscious program to attain capitalism, the whole thing would fall flat as politically unsustainable.

And the delusional nature of the dreams of socialism in one country that stem from that - though of course Lenin would deny it - express themselves in the mangled character of Russian "capitalism" during the existence of the Soviet Union. Which is where the "State capitalism" theories completely miss the point in their analysis of the Soviet Union and working class paradises at large: they conflate the incomplete, flawed, self-denying, limited, distorted version of "capitalism" in the Soviet Union with the post-liberal brands of capitalism in Germany, France, Britain, United States, Japan...


Re the pre 1917 idea of the Bolsheviks entering a provisional revolutionary government.

The apostate and renegade Mensheviks participated in Provisional Revolutionary Government for a mere, say, seventeen weeks.

A brief period of liberal political freedom that Russia soon lost by the beginning of the Bolshevik chekka police state in early 1918.

The Bolshevik counter revolutionary ‘Provisional Revolutionary Government’ lasted for almost seventy years, before the ‘after’ and ‘final victory’ ‘Stalin’s’, of 1906, consummation of the bourgeois democratic revolution in the 1980’s; or whatever.

A brief period of liberal political freedom and continual slaughter of the working masses in an unwinnable war. Seriously, here you are completely missing any inevitable historical conditions, and allowing yourself into idealist Great Men theory.


I am by the way not uncritical of Menshevism; and it had well and truly disappeared up its own arsehole by the 1930’s in my opinion.

It evidently lost the inevitable historical conditions for its existence. What would a theory of the working class toppling the Russian autocracy and then handing political power to the bourgeoisie through a parliamentary election serve for after the autocracy was destroyed in a completely different way?

Luís Henrique

[Art Vandelay]

I would have opposed both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in their respective capitalist agendas, if that's what you're asking.

I am asking if there is any group at all you would of supported?

[GoddessCleoLover]

My thought is that the democratic centralism of the Bolsheviks was fine. But the suppression of democratic discussion and the formation of factions was not.[/QUOTE]

My thought is that given the post-1921 history of the RCP (b) our concept of democratic centralism ought to focus on the dangers of the latter swallowing the former.

[Geiseric]

Well if the right opposition formed during the peasant rebellions, I would be afraid of the civil war sparking again, between the socialist remnents of the SR and Mensheviks, who would of gotten support from the peasantry. I'm just speculating, but there were no factions worth supporting in 1921, everybody's goals were the same, start the N.E.P. and get food to the cities. The plan was to collectivize once the economy got better and to start paying farm workers with wages instead of food (as is the peasant economy) and to get rid of the Kulak class ASAP. Which didn't happen because of the right and center opposition.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Well if the right opposition formed during the peasant rebellions, I would be afraid of the civil war sparking again, between the socialist remnents of the SR and Mensheviks, who would of gotten support from the peasantry. I'm just speculating, but there were no factions worth supporting in 1921, everybody's goals were the same, start the N.E.P. and get food to the cities. The plan was to collectivize once the economy got better and to start paying farm workers with wages instead of food (as is the peasant economy) and to get rid of the Kulak class ASAP. Which didn't happen because of the right and center opposition.

In 1921 RCP (b) had yet to jell exactly into the Right, Left and Center that characterized the party a few years later. I recommend folks to look into the politics of two opposition factions that IMO had some profound things to say; the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic Centralism group.

[Luís Henrique]

Skobelev, having adopted the old Leninist position, eventually politically moved even further to the right and joined the Bolsheviks himself.

As far as I understand, Skobelev joined the Bolsheviks when they implemented the NEP. So it seems that Skobelev joined the Bolsheviks when the Bolsheviks moved, or appeared to move, to the right, and consequently became acceptable to Skobelev.

Luís Henrique

[Let's Get Free]

I am asking if there is any group at all you would of supported?

I probably would have worked with what was left of the factory committees.

[Dave B]

Following post 50

As I said I put ‘split’ in inverted comma’s; the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were at least two fractions, I prefer to ignore technical and pedantic issues as to whether or not or at what point they may or may not have been two parties, or ‘congresses’.

As we have covered, a main difference between the two fractions was the future participation or not in the provisional revolutionary government.

Eg;

V. I. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../1909/feb/12.htm) Lenin (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../1909/mar/23.htm) The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution (http://www.revleft.com/vb/index.htm#i) 1909



The establishment of a democratic republic in Russia will be possible only as the result of a victorious popular uprising, whose organ will be a provisional revolutionary government....



Subject to the relation of forces and other factors which cannot be determined exactly beforehand, representatives of our Party may participate in the provisional revolutionary government for the purpose of waging a relentless struggle against all attempts at counter-revolution, and of defending the independent interests of the working class.”

The Menshevik resolution read:

"...Social-Democracy must not set out to seize power or share it with anyone in the provisional government, but must remain the party of extreme revolutionary opposition.”


It is evident from the above that the Bolsheviks them selves, at an all-Bolshevik Congress,………………… stated only that it was permissible to participate in the provisional government, and that it was the “mission” of the proletariat to “play the leading role”.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/aim/i.htm

the elitism of the ‘revolutionary socialist intelligentsia’ came originally from

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Eg;



page 37
We have said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.[* (http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/WD02i.html#np37#np37)] The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. According to their social status, the founders of modern scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement, it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/WD02i.html

(http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/WD02i.html)
But that is perhaps all well and good from 1902 as theory; but how might it manifest itself in practice, say in 1920, as regarding a 'corrupted and degraded' working class that required ‘emancipation’ by a ‘philanthropic’ vanguard of ‘the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals’? ;


V. I. Lenin The Trade Unions, The Present Situation
And Trotsky’s Mistakes



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………….for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation. It cannot work without a number of “transmission belts” running from the vanguard to the mass of the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people.

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm

This vanguard then, how big were they and what generally were their proportion of the population?

Before moving onto numbers and hard data.


“

We”, the vanguard, the advanced contingent of the proletariat, are passing directly to socialism; but the advanced contingent is only a small part of the whole of the proletariat while the latter, in its turn, is only a small part of the whole population.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm)


As might not be surprising from the above, this ‘vanguard’ constituted in fact less than 1% of the population, the rest being the 99%, as the Bolshevik party had by that point been trimmed down, or purged, to circa 400,000.

From its maximum of about 800,000; I can pull that data out from Lenin himself if asked.

Although according to Lenin the ‘advanced contingent of the proletariat’ didn’t mean the ‘advanced contingent of the casual elements who worked in factories’.


T

here we have to deal with workers. Very often the word “workers” is taken to mean the factory proletariat.

But it does not mean that at all.

During the war people who were by no means proletarians went into the factories; they went into the factories to dodge the war. Are the social and economic conditions in our country today such as to induce real proletarians to go into the factories? No. It would be true according to Marx; but Marx did not write about Russia; he wrote about capitalism as a whole, beginning with the fifteenth century. It held true over a period of six hundred years, but it is not true for present-day Russia. Very often those who go into the factories are not proletarians; they are casual elements of every description.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

The Vanguard were of course the ‘advanced contingent’ of people who didn’t work in factories; what self respecting Bolshevik or real proletarian would be induced “to go into the factories?”


The Bundists.

They did originate economically out of or from the Russian artisan community, as did many of the ‘communists’ in western Europe.

They were the one of first sections of Russian society to be proletarianised and reduced to wage labour, as standard in Marxist theory, by failing to be able to compete with the mechanisation of big capital.

The Russian ‘Jewish’ community had historically dominated the economic niche of petty artisan production, more so than in Western Europe, as there was apparently no established exclusive ‘guild system’ Russia.

I suppose we could contend whether the Bundist of circa 1905 or whatever were communists but we could also let them speak for themselves in august 1918;


T

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

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

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

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

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

[It is a bit curious as, Abramovitch, from other material appeared, to have abandoned the pure or exteme ‘Bundist’ position and switched to the ‘anti ethnic orientated’ working class position.]


He left for Germany, then later briefly hot tailed it to France to escape the fascists and then to America, and wrote an interesting book on the Russian revolution.

Abramovitch the Menshevik, and the ‘Bundist’ pops up in the Trotksky's archive in a rare example of Trotsky explaining what socialism and the ‘road to socialism’ is ;

Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism;





Both economic and political compulsion are only forms of the expression of the dictatorship of the working class in two closely connected regions. True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly that under Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle of compulsion contradicts Socialism, that under Socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labor, etc., etc. This is unquestionable.

Only this unquestionable truth must be a little extended. In point of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction. Now just that insignificant little fact – that historical step of the State dictatorship – Abramovich, and in his person the whole of Menshevism, did not notice; and consequently, he has fallen over it.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch08.htm

We had an interesting thread on that on Libcom a while back involving Russian 'archivists'.

‘Apparently’ it was in fact originally from a speech given by Trotsky to some kind of trade union conference at which Abramovich was in attendance.



The Mensheviks managed to politically cling on for a while from their traditional base within the non Bolshevik and state sanctioned trade union movement.


I have had Leninists, on libcom!, arguing that the Mensheviks participated anti semitic pogroms post 1917.

I am trying to run through this but an starting to get tired,re;

Economists, the liquidators and the defencists.

The Russian economists, mostly “Menshevik” couldn’t face up to the idea of going to the working class and telling them that although feudalism was crap what they needed was more capitalism and to put the capitalist in charge.

If Lenin’s ‘Two Tactics’ and Leftwing ‘golden noose’ Narodism material makes you choke and gag; as it did with the ‘economists’; then you are an 'ecomomist'.

The opportunist ‘economists’; said bollocks to Marxist stagiest theory and what socialism is and what is required historically before it is possible etc.

We, as opportunist ‘economists’, are just going to support the working class in their ‘limited’ trade union consciousness struggle against the capitalist class, in feudalism.

When it comes to ‘bollocks to Marxist stagiest theory and what socialism is’ ironically most modern neo Leninists/Trotskyists are ‘economists’.

The last political strand of anti economism, as accused, is in fact the anti Leninist SPGB.

On the anti imperialist war thing.


The pre 1914 Mensheviks were one of the few self described European Marxist organisations that opposed the war and they were members and participants in the Zimmerwald section etc.

There was also an antiwar Marxist party in Britian; ie the SPGB.

I am not attempting to defend any of the following one way or another, but..

The leftwing non imperialist ‘defencists’ position cut across party lines both Bolshevik, Menshevik and ‘council communist’.

One position was that; are we going to let a load of imperialist capitalists ex Germany, with their deluded working class soldiers, to wander in and to steal the best ‘material’ and fixed capital bits of the emergent Bolshevik ‘state socialist utopia?

Another argument, from even within the Bolshevik community, was let them come and trust in the international solidarity of the working class.

Or as Lenin put it ‘leftwing childisness’.

[Dave B]

For your information there is some info and links on the pre-Bundist, Bundist/Mensheviks and the Bundist Menshevik Raphael Rein Abramovich below.

I have included the rather long text but abridged text on the first as I think it warrants it for the Revleft record.


The Abramovich wiki link must be fairly new I think as I am sure it wasn’t there in that extended form 2 years or so ago.


I hadn’t realized that his son had been kidnapped from Spain during the ‘civil war’ and murdered by the Bolsheviks.



BUND (abbr. of Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland; "General Jewish Workers' Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia"), Jewish socialist party founded in Russia in 1897; after a certain ideological development it came to be associated with devotion to Yiddish, autonomism, and secular Jewish nationalism, envisaging Jewish life as lived out in Eastern Europe ("Doykeyt"; "Hereness," in Bund ideology), sharply opposed to Zionism and other conceptions of a world-embracing Jewish national identity.
Beginnings (Pre-Bund)

The structure and ideology of the Bund, while stemming from the social patterns and needs, from the problems and tensions within Jewish society in the *Pale of Settlement in the second half of the 19th century, were also an outcome of the aims, tendencies within, divisions in, and methods of the Russian socialist movement in the multinational empire of the czars.
The first stirrings of the Jewish labor movement in general, and the formation of the Bund subsequently, occurred in "Jewish Lithuania," i.e., the six northwestern Lithuanian-Belorussian provinces with some adjoining districts, headed by Vilna. From here came the earliest leaders and pioneers of the Bund. In this region the working element was relatively important in Jewish society and its proportion among the proletariat (occupied in crafts and industry) in the cities and towns was higher than elsewhere. The trend to *assimilation was less strong in a region where sociocultural and political conflict among the Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Belorussian elements was rife, none of whose aims appealed to the Jewish population which had attained independently a high cultural standard, exemplified in its celebrated yeshivot. From the Lithuanian-Belorussian provinces the Jewish labor movement spread only gradually to Poland and the Ukraine.
The Jewish labor movement, in particular "pre-Bund" and Bund socialism, drew its support from three sectors in Jewish society. The first, the hired-worker class, was just then assuming corporate consciousness and cohesion as an outcome of the capitalization of the crafts and the breakup of the traditional craft associations (*ḥevrot), which brought about the separate organization of apprentices (from the mid-19th century especially in the garment industry). Sporadic strikes had taken place in the 1870s among the textile and tobacco workers. Secondly, there were the circles of the radical intelligentsia who in this region combined revolutionary ideas and Marxist ideology with feelings of involvement with their Jewish identity and of responsibility toward the Jewish proletariat. Finally there was the semi-intelligentsia, who, though lacking a formal general education, were deeply rooted in Jewish culture.
In the 1870s Aaron Samuel *Liebermann and his circle made the first attempts to spread socialist ideas among the Jewish people in their own language and to start a revolutionary movement. From the 1880s this became a continuous development creating the Jewish labor movement.
Study circles for Jewish intellectuals to promote culture and socialism among Jewish working men were formed in Vilna during 1886 and 1887, and all their activities were conducted in Russian. Workers' mutual assistance funds were founded and attempts were also made to found artels. Gradually, however, the ideology of these circles changed, and, from following the traditional populist position taken by Russian socialists, turned to Marxism as advocated by Plekhanov. The circles of intelligentsia also gradually changed their attitude toward the Jewish artisan and abandoned their former "cosmopolitan" stand, which in practice had meant the "Russification" of the Jewish elements in Russia.
The change matured through several stages during the years 1890 to 1895, in which a leading part was taken by A.I. *Kremer, S. *Gozhanski, J. *Mill, I. *Eisenstadt, Z. *Kopelsohn, V. *Kossovski, and A. *Mutnik(ovich), among others. The number of circles and their membership increased, while efforts to obtain an amelioration of working conditions were intensified, in particular to shorten the working day in the sock-knitting, tobacco, and tailoring trades where conditions were notoriously disgraceful.
In addition to the general revolutionary tension in Russia at this time, unrest among Jews was enhanced by the widespread antisemitism in general society and government circles, which, combined with the social and economic constriction in the overcrowded shtetl, also led to massive emigration, and revived Ḥovevei Zion activity (see *Zionism). Eventually the leaders of these circles reached the conclusion that Jewish workers could and must form their own socialist labor movement, since their specific circumstances necessitated demands which were largely peculiar to the Jewish worker. They also considered that the Jewish environment in general was more objectively receptive to the idea of opposition to and revolt against the authoritarian czarist regime. A new line of action was formulated by Kremer in his "On Agitation" that was to influence the whole Russian Social Democratic movement. Elaborated by Gozhanski ("Letter to Agitators," 1893) and Julius *Martov (May Day lecture, 1895), it called for a change from activity in closed propaganda "circles" to mass "agitation" in order to rally workers to struggle for better conditions as a "phase" toward revolutionary political consciousness and activity. To enable the "agitation" to reach the Jewish masses, both orally and in writing, it was decided to replace Russian by Yiddish as the medium for propaganda, and "Jargon committees" were formed (in Vilna in 1895) for this purpose. Thus the movement was integrated into the concomitant process of revival of the Yiddish language and literature. The radical Jewish intelligentsia was called upon to abandon its "mistrust of the Jewish masses" and "national passivism," to work for the establishment of an organization of Jewish workers aimed at obtaining their rights, and to carry on a "political national struggle" in order to obtain civic emancipation for all Jews. This organization should associate itself with the non-Jewish proletariat and the all-Russian labor movement in an "indissoluble bond," but only on the basis of equal partnership and not of integration of the Jewish within the general labor movement. This dualism was to be the cause of ideological oscillation throughout the whole of the Bund's existence.
The "Workers' Opposition" to the "new program" led by A. *Gordon failed, and from 1894 the new trend gained support in many industrial centers. Funds ("Kases") hitherto established for mutual assistance were converted into workers' struggle funds (trade unions). At the beginning of 1896, 32 such funds existed in Vilna alone. A wave of successful strikes ensued. The Jewish labor groups were represented at the congress of the Socialist International in London in 1896. A central "Group of Jewish Social Democrats" was formed, and published the periodical Yidisher Arbayter(1896–1905), as well as Arbayter Shtime (1897–1905), both of which later became the organs of the Bund.
The Bund

The Bund was founded at a secret convention held in Vilna on Oct. 7–9, 1897, with the participation of 13 delegates (eight of them working men). At the founding convention of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in March 1898, three of the nine delegates were Bundists. The Bund entered the Russian party as an autonomous body, and Kremer was elected a member of its central committee. The sovereign institution of the underground Bund was its periodic convention. In addition to the founding meeting, the following conventions were held: the second convention, October 1898, in Kovno; the third, December 1899, in Kovno; the fourth, May 1901, in Bialystok; the fifth, June 1903, in Zurich; the sixth, October–November 1905, in Zurich; the seventh, August–September 1906, in Lemberg (Lvov); the eighth, December 1917, in Petrograd (Leningrad). The convention elected a central committee which was the chief political administrative and representative body of the Bund. Between the conventions, conferences, whose authority was more limited, also met. Larger branches were headed by committees, mostly comprising members nominated by the central committee. The "strike funds," including the national unions of bristlemakers and tanners, were integrally incorporated within the Bund. There were also groups of intellectuals. The number of Bund members from 1903 to 1905 varied between 25,000 and 35,000. The "Committee Abroad," which was founded in December 1898 by students and workers who had left Russia, its members including at various periods the most important Bund leaders, served as the Bund representative vis-à-vis the international socialist movement, raised funds, printed literature, and organized its transportation. Considerable assistance was given to the Bund by its "*Landsmanschaften" and branches of sympathizers in the United States, headed by the "Central Farband," which in 1906 comprised 58 organizations with 3,000 members. Although the Bund opposed cooperation with the Jewish labor movement in other countries, it had a significant influence on the formation of the *Jewish Social Democratic Party in Galicia in 1905. Bundist principles contributed to the establishment of the Jewish Socialist Federation of America in 1912. Some prominent activists of the American Jewish Labor Movement came from the ranks of the Bund, including S. *Hillman, B. Hoffmann (*Ẓivion), B. *Vladeck, Y.B. Salutzki-Hardman, M. *Olgin, N. Chanin, and D. *Dubinsky. The activity and ideas of the Bund also had influence on Jewish socialism in Argentina, Bulgaria, and Salonika (Greece).
From the beginning of the 20th century, the Bund concentrated its activities on the political sphere, and the party became an important factor in Jewish public life. The fourth convention of the Bund (1901) already recommended discretion in the proclamation of strikes – for the government was suppressing them severely and they brought little amelioration of the workers' conditions – and called for struggle through purely political agitation, May Day demonstrations and strikes, accompanied by political demands. This trend gained in strength as a result of various economic, social, and political factors (see also *Independent Jewish Workers' Party).
Feelings became inflamed when Jewish workers were flogged during the May Day demonstrations in 1902 on the order of the governor of Vilna who was subsequently shot by a Bundist youth, Hirsh *Lekert. However, the tendency to advocate violent measures – "organized vengeance" – which evolved in the Bund after this assault was short-lived. The pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century intensified political alertness among the Jews as a whole, and efforts were made toward active *self-defense. These bloody attacks dissipated the reservations of many who had formerly held aloof from the revolutionary activity of the Bund. The Bund then became one of the principal promoters, and in some places the main organizer, of the self-defense movement to combat the perpetrators of the pogroms. It began to find support among the Jewish middle classes, and gained adherents in the provincial towns of Poland and southern Russia. From mid-1903 to mid-1904 the Bund held 429 political meetings, 45 demonstrations, and 41 political strikes, and issued 305 pamphlets, of which 23 dealt with the pogroms and self-defense. The number of Bundist political prisoners in 1904 reached 4,500. A children's organization, Der Klayner Bund, was formed. The Bund reached its peak influence during the revolution of 1905. It then acquired semilegal status, played an important role in general revolutionary and political activities, and began to publish a daily newspaper under various names (Veker, Folkstsaytung).
About this time (at the fourth convention in 1901) the Bund advanced beyond its former demand for equal political and civic rights for Jews. Various internal and external factors pressured this change, such as the solutions advocated by S. *Dubnow, the views of H. Zhitovsky, and the growth of Zionism. The Bund now drew a Marxist legitimation for its nationalist tendencies from the Austrian Social Democratic Party which had changed its structure to a federal-nationalist one, approximate to the concepts of *autonomism, as the basis for the constitution of a multinational state. The third convention of the Bund (1899) still rejected Mill's suggestion that the demand for Jewish "national rights" be included in its program. However, at the fourth convention, promoted by M. *Liber, a representative of the second generation of Bund leaders, with the support of the older leaders, Kremer, Mill, and Kossovski who were absent at the convention, the proposition was advanced that Russia should be converted into a federation of nations without reference to region of domicile, with the provision that the concept of nationality should be applied to the Jews. However, as a compromise with opponents of this proposal, it was decided not to campaign for Jewish autonomy as a concrete demand for fear of "inflating the national feeling" which was liable "to blur the class consciousness of the proletariat and lead to chauvinism." This limitation was not observed in practice even in 1904, and was officially removed at the sixth convention in 1905. A further resolution of the fourth convention sought to reconstruct the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party on a national-federal basis. This proposal was rejected by the second convention of the Russian Social Democratic Party. In consequence the Bund seceded from it and constituted itself as an independent party.
Even after its fourth convention, the Bund did not consider the Jews a worldwide national entity, and was opposed to a global Jewish policy, limiting its demands for rights and autonomy with reference to Russian Jewry. The Bund rejected, in the name of class-war principles, any collaboration with other Jewish parties, even in the organization of self-defense against pogroms. While assimilationist Russian Social Democrats regarded Bundist ideology as "inconsistent Zionist," the Bund, for its part, defined Zionism as reactionary and bourgeois or petit-bourgeois, even including such parties as the *Po'alei Zion, the *Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (the Sejmists), and the *Zionist Socialist Workers Party (the Territorialists), in this category. From 1903 the struggle with other Jewish parties sharpened, as the Bund's Zionist and other rivals penetrated the proletarian camp. The Bund itself remained in a constant state of ideological vacillation and internal strife in its perpetual effort to square nationalism with internationalism, and the conception of the Jewish proletariat as part of the all-Russian proletariat with its position as part of Jewry. Opposing nationalist, cosmopolitan, and semi-assimilationist elements confronted each other within the Bund and prevented a clear-cut decision either for or against devotion of its efforts to seeking full Jewish political and cultural identity, while even its positive attitude toward the use of Yiddish was mainly governed by pragmatic considerations. Hence the Bund adopted the doctrine of neutralism developed by the party ideologist V. *Medem with the fundamental reservations of Kossovski. Neutralism assumed that no prognosis of the survival of the Jewish people could be advanced: they might equally be expected to subsist or assimilate. The task of the Bund was to fight for a political framework which would guarantee freedom of evolution for both trends, but not to regard as incumbent on it to assist intentionally national continuity. During 1905–06, the Bund sided on many questions with the Bolsheviks, whose support at the convention of the Social Democratic Party in Stockholm in 1906 enabled the Bund to return to the all-Russian organization. After a sharp cleavage of opinion, the "softliners," prominent among them Medem, Rosenthal, and B. *Mikhalevich, prevailed, and amalgamation with the Social Democrats was decided at the seventh convention of the Bund (1906). The question of the national program was left open, and in practice the Bund retained its independence.
1907 to 1917

With the failure of the 1905 revolution the Bund suffered a serious decline and succeeded in maintaining only the nucleus of its organization. Terrorization, frustration, and despair, together with the massive emigration, considerably reduced the ranks of the Bund. With the limitation of political and trade union activities, the semilegal activities of the Bund now concentrated on culture – the organization of literary and musical societies, evening courses, and drama circles. The Bund became an advocate of fundamental Yiddishism. The eighth conference of the Bund (October 1910) decided in favor of pressing for freedom of rest on the Sabbath and for state Yiddish schools. The Bund agreed to participate in several conferences and cultural institutions of a general Jewish nature, such as the *Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia and the meeting of Jewish communal leaders, where the Bundists demanded greater autonomy, and secularization, and democratization in Jewish communal life. The theory of Neutralism was rejected by some prominent Bundists. In 1910–11 the Bund made renewed efforts to strengthen its organization, both openly and by underground activity. It took part in the elections to the fourth *Duma (1912). In Warsaw the joint candidate of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the Bund, E. Jagello, was returned thanks to the support of the nonsocialist Jewish electorate. The Bund campaigned actively on several Jewish issues, including the Polish anti-Jewish *boycott, and the ousting of Jewish workers from their places of employment. It organized a protest strike (Oct. 8, 1913) in reaction to the *Beilis trial, which was observed by some 20,000 Jewish workers. The Bundist press was also revived (Lebns-Fragen, Tsayt). In regard to the division in Russian social-democratic opinion between those who supported continued underground activity and those opposing it, the Bund in general adopted a mediatory stand. After the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1912, the Bund remained within the Menshevik Social Democratic Party, which now tended to favor Jewish national-cultural autonomy, while the Bolsheviks hardened their position against it. The Bund belonged to the socialist wing that condemned all belligerents in World War I, and approved the manifestos of Zimmerwald, 1915, and Kienthal, 1916. The Bund at this time turned more expressly toward adopting a general Jewish stand. At a consultation held in Kharkov (spring 1916) the Bund decided, in contrast to its former position, to take part in activities of the communal Jewish relief organizations, such as *ORT, *OZE, and *Yekopo. It also recognized there, to a certain extent, that the Jewish question had assumed some international significance. The Bund publicized cases of persecution of Jews in Russia through its committee abroad. However, discussion on the question of constituting a World Jewish Congress was not resolved.
The 1917 Revolutions and Their Aftermath

By the end of 1917 the Bund had approximately 40,000 members, in almost 400 branches, of whom 20% were outside the former Pale of Settlement, mostly refugees expelled from the Pale. On the general political scene, Bund leaders (M. Liber and R. *Abramowitz) were spokesmen for both the right and left wings of the Mensheviks, and the Bund discussed and took a stand on problems connected with the revolution. At the same time, it brought forward the claim for Jewish national-cultural autonomy. It participated in communal elections and was represented on the organizing committee for a general Jewish convention to be held in December 1917. However, it opposed the moving of Zionist formulations there as well as debate on the guarantee of rights to Jews living outside Russia. In the Ukraine, the Bund, led by M. *Rafes, was in favor of an autonomous Ukraine as part of federal Russia. At the elections for the Jewish National Assembly of the Ukraine (November 1918), the Bund received 18% of the votes.
From the fall of 1918, Bundist sympathies, especially in the Ukraine, the scene of frightful pogroms, began to incline toward the Communists. In March 1919, the "Communist Bund" (Kombund) was established in the Ukraine led by Rafes. In May it joined the United Jewish Communist Party to form the Komfarband, which in August amalgamated with the Communist Party of the Ukraine. At the all-Russian (12th) conference of the Bund held in Moscow (April 1920), a split occurred. The majority, led by A. *Weinstein and *Esther (Lifschitz), favored affiliation with the Communists, but on an autonomous basis. Although this condition was rejected by the Communist International, the conference at Minsk (March 1921) nevertheless decided to join the Russian Communist Party. In January 1925, there were only 2,795 former Bundists in the Communist Party, forming 9% of its Jewish members. These included some leaders of the *Yevsektsiya (Jewish section of the Russian Communist Party). A minority at the 12th conference (which included Abramowitz, Eisenstadt, and G. *Aronson) broke away and established the short-lived Social Democratic Bund. Sooner or later the activists in both factions became victims of Communist government persecution.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0004_0_03730.html

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



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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rein_(journalist)

[Leftsolidarity]

I am currently reading Trotsky's "History of the Russian Revolution" which is a fantastic read even if you don't exactly adhere to "Trotskyism". In it he is going in detail through pretty much everything about everything involving the revolution and talks a good deal about the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. So if you're interested in learning more about their history you might want to check it out. I'm not sure if it's online cuz mine is a paper-copy but I highly suggest looking into it.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I am currently reading Trotsky's "History of the Russian Revolution" which is a fantastic read even if you don't exactly adhere to "Trotskyism". In it he is going in detail through pretty much everything about everything involving the revolution and talks a good deal about the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. So if you're interested in learning more about their history you might want to check it out. I'm not sure if it's online cuz mine is a paper-copy but I highly suggest looking into it.

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

[Leftsolidarity]

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

In particular I can point to the section I am finishing up right now which is "The Executive Committee" in volume 1. That chapter has given a pretty good overall picture of the dynamics of the SRs, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks.