The role of Trotsky in the revolution and his conflicts with Lenin

[LeninistIthink]

h t t p s : / / w w w . y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = g M q 9 G e P J u t 4

had to put spaces in to post cos damn link post limit
What is your thoughts on the view of history presented in the above video, do you agree, can you debunk it?

This is not intended flamebait and I will willingly take this post down if it does not end up in historical discussion. Please keep to the points in the video.

[RedWorker]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMq9GePJut4

[Fourth Internationalist]

The video (based on the comments, I am not going to watch a video that is over an hour) seems to be nothing more than repeating the typical Stalinist narrative about Lenin and Trotsky, which I believe to be false. One commenter on the video named "hectorbolshevik" makes some good points worth reading if you're going to check out the video.

Numerous threads on this subject have been debated out on RevLeft over and over again. So if anyone is interested in the subject at hand, I'd recommend using the 'search' function to find a couple of these threads and reading through them instead of watching the video so that both sides of the debate are presented. It would probably take significantly less time than watching the entire video as well.

[Flavius]

The 'Relationship of Trotsky & Lenin' debate again? It is amazing that it's still going on since 1924.

Trotsky himself admitted that he had his debates and conflicts with Lenin. He was not a leninist, (in the sense Stalin used that word) and despised those who followed Lenin's ideas like sacred dogmas. He was an autnomous marxist intellectual, and not just a simple "novice".

[Patchd]

He was an autnomous marxist intellectual, and not just a simple "novice".

How was Trotsky an Autonomous Marxist?

[Flavius]

How was Trotsky an Autonomous Marxist?

First, that's not exactly what I wrote, but perhaps I did not use the proper term. However, he certainly was a person who had his own interpretation of marxist theory, which clashed on some points with Lenin's. That's what I wanted to say. That he wasn't a student of Lenin, but had his own interpretation of Marx and socialism in general.

[Hatshepsut]

I agree the Lenin-Stalin-Trotsky splits have been beat like a dead unicorn given they've all been gone the best part of a century now. (Though Stalin's death was in my parents' adult lifetime shortly before I was born.) The theoretical divide, internationalism vs. socialism by individual country, and the tactical error, in Trotsky's not ensuring the Czech Brigade's safe passage out of Russia after Brest-Litovsk, seem to be the two major issues if one can state them in one sentence. Although I admire the Marxian camp's intellectual depth and consider its authors smarter than I am, I do find the code-words and convolution in arguments taxing. Because of politics in that day, it was apparently impossible to write a direct theoretical exegesis without injecting lengthy anecdotes and "isms" and "ites" named for people into the texts. Which is why The Communist Manifesto is still my favorite document—A person who knows nothing about communism and its practitioners can immediately understand what's said.

I agree with Trotsky's thesis that revolution must be international. That's even more true today with global capitalism. A revolution that doesn't enfold at least North America and Europe is doomed.

All three of them agreed on the need for a leading Party; that self-organizing revolution simply won't occur. We can generate fair evidence for that proposition by asking ourselves that if such a spontaneous revolution by the working class is possible, why hasn't it already happened? Certainly most of the global working class is educated enough to have heard of class-based oppression and socialist revolutions.

Yet none of the three solved the paradox or contradiction a vanguard party introduces: If it succeeds, it is corrupted by its success, becoming distant from the working class it's supposed to identify with and succumbing to the temptations of statism and bureaucracy. Communism in its early stages will certainly require a state; I doubt we can abolish this 5000-year old institution in one fell swoop. The history of socialist states then informs us that keeping them on track toward higher communism is a monumental, and perhaps even impossible, task. Which leaves us in a conundrum. Trotsky's answer was a theory of perpetual revolution, although that subject goes beyond the scope of this thread title.

Trotsky's conflicts with Lenin and Stalin are a symptom, not a cause, as far as I can tell. Stalin did have useful things to say about it but can't be taken as sole authority.

[Patchd]

First, that's not exactly what I wrote, but perhaps I did not use the proper term. However, he certainly was a person who had his own interpretation of marxist theory, which clashed on some points with Lenin's. That's what I wanted to say. That he wasn't a student of Lenin, but had his own interpretation of Marx and socialism in general.

Apologies, you did specify an autonomous marxist intellectual, but I thought you were referring to Autonomous Marxism, as in the current.


All three of them agreed on the need for a leading Party; that self-organizing revolution simply won't occur. We can generate fair evidence for that proposition by asking ourselves that if such a spontaneous revolution by the working class is possible, why hasn't it already happened?

But some of us, myself included, will posit that it has happened. A historical analysis of proletarian revolutionary periods will show that they generally happened as a matter of spontaneity, ahead of the predictions of pro-revolutionary organisations. If, by the question posed "why hasn't it already happened?" you meant to ask why it hasn't been successful in establishing a communist mode of production, then the same criticism can be leveled against movements of proletarian partyism.

I think history of proletarian revolutionary periods show that in terms of events it is exactly a spontaneous insurrection and organic attempts by workers to reorganise production and living which preceded the entry of partyist and statist actors as the navigators of the revolution. It was exactly these agents which moved against the self-management of the workers in favour of a centralisation based around the managerial functions of the state, in turn grounding it in a continuation of class as an inevitability of the inseparability of the state from its inherent role as the defender of the social relationships inherent to class society.

Although saying that spontaneity precedes the action of organised political agents in revolutionary periods is not to separate the two, or diminish the roles either of them play. It follows that the proletarian organisations were generally mass organisations or had mass support because of the already existent heightened state of class antagonisms due to the nature of capitalism in its own right, but also that the heightened period of class antagonism was such *in part* because of the role of the proletarian organisations which emerged by course of nature from these antagonisms.


Communism in its early stages will certainly require a state; I doubt we can abolish this 5000-year old institution in one fell swoop.I feel it is less that communism will require a state, but that remnants of a state *will* continue to exist during a revolutionary period (not out of desire, or idealist necessity), in which time it would be necessary to immediately attempt a movement beyond the requirement of a state. To do so would require the rapid abolishment of the conditions which give rise to the class society of our context (capitalism) - the wages system - and which in turn legitimises the existence of the state. The two are inseparable, and whilst the social relationship that make up class exists, so will the state. Equally, whilst the state continues to exist, the order required to sustain a society of antagonistic classes will be maintained and such a society extended.

Whilst the state will not be abolished in one fell swoop, it should be the task of communists to argue for and attempt to abolish it in a period as close to immediacy as the conditions of the time will allow.

[Hatshepsut]

A few earlier discussions this web site for perusal

Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, 2010
http://www.revleft.com/vb/marxism-leninism-trotskyism-t140229/index.html

Trotsky & Permanent Revolution, 2012
http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotsky-and-permanent-t168656/index.html

Trotsky denounced in Long March-like post lifted from different forum, 2006
http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-denounces-trotsky-t40967/index.html

Kronstadt affair (the dead sailors), 2006
http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-trotsky-and-t43193/index.html

Trotsky vs. Lenin, Conversation of ghosts including Banned Mod, 2008
http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotsky-vs-lenin-t90714/index.html

First impression is that Trot’s not too popular, if bandwagons are hardly good basis for evaluation. Agreed it's a "sectarian" matter; why so vexatious somewhat hard for me to understand but eternally typical of Left, if only a bit more than the Dems and GOP in mainline U.S. politics. It's not like we can repeat the Old Bolshevik experience in the future. Next time around will bring something different. The posts have a lot of details I didn't know about, and notable basic issues are still relevant. Lenin is said to accuse Trotsky of neglecting the importance of peasants (Soc. Democrat, 1915) and trade unions:

"Trade unions are not just historically necessary; they are historically inevitable" (Trade Unions, Present Situation, Trotsky's Mistakes-speech & pamphlet, 1921)
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm

Obviously they managed to lay aside differences and work together in and after 1917. Today, it seems trade unions have gone down the drain and won't figure too much in planning, at least in the USA where only 11% of the workforce is enrolled in them, many of those in teachers' or public employee unions that rarely strike, much less radicalize.

[Hatshepsut]

But some of us, myself included, will posit that it has happened. A historical analysis of proletarian revolutionary periods will show that they generally happened as a matter of spontaneity, ahead of the predictions of pro-revolutionary organisations. If...you meant to ask why it hasn't been successful in establishing a communist mode of production, then...

No, I just meant successful in effecting a regime change. The CPSU blatantly did not bring about communism in the USSR; the longer things went on the less communism they had there. Yet when I think of spontaneous workers’ movements, the Paris Commune comes to mind. Or, since it’s now his centennial, Joe Hill and his brief interlude with the community of immigrant miners in Utah, ending with his 1915 execution by firing squad on murder charges ostensibly unrelated to activism. South America has been notable for having revolutions by election of a Marxist to the presidency, as with Allende in 1970 or Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2005. None of these toppled a Western state.

It’s true that 1905 preceded 1917 in Russia. The upwelling of worker unrest amid contradictions in a society supports revolution. But I’ve never seen it where a decentralized movement has taken down an extant state. If a movement can’t protect itself and find a vulnerable point to strike at, the security organs just mop them up. A decentralized fellow-traveler contingent or nest of independent cells is desirable, yet I think a party and an apparatus has also been needed to tie it together.

[LeninistIthink]

Thank you to Hatsheput for those links, I'll have a look.

[Patchd]

No, I just meant successful in effecting a regime change. The CPSU blatantly did not bring about communism in the USSR; the longer things went on the less communism they had there. Yet when I think of spontaneous workers’ movements, the Paris Commune comes to mind. Or, since it’s now his centennial, Joe Hill and his brief interlude with the community of immigrant miners in Utah, ending with his 1915 execution by firing squad on murder charges ostensibly unrelated to activism. South America has been notable for having revolutions by election of a Marxist to the presidency, as with Allende in 1970 or Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2005. None of these toppled a Western state.

Apologies as I'm a bit confused slightly and am going to have to ask for a clarification on some of your statements. What do you mean exactly by a regime change? I would argue that all revolutionary periods have been spontaneous in origin and it is the spontaneity that has brought about the regime changes in these circumstances.

The Russian 1917 (from February) and German 1918 revolutionary periods are such examples of where spontaneous proletarian insurrections were successful in toppling previous regimes.

Also, unless I've mistaken your statement, I would contend that those South American examples were not revolutionary periods as begun as a result of the election of those individuals. The periods where they were periods of heightened class struggle had begun prior to the elections of self-proclaimed Marxists, in Chile's case from the 1960s after a series of independently organised strikes forced the Chilean Left into being (on whose tide Allende came to power), and a prolonged armed struggle by the Guevarist MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement).


It’s true that 1905 preceded 1917 in Russia. The upwelling of worker unrest amid contradictions in a society supports revolution. But I’ve never seen it where a decentralized movement has taken down an extant state. If a movement can’t protect itself and find a vulnerable point to strike at, the security organs just mop them up. A decentralized fellow-traveler contingent or nest of independent cells is desirable, yet I think a party and an apparatus has also been needed to tie it together.

1917 did exactly that. The movement that brought down the Tsar and the autocratic political system in place, was a decentralised spontaneous movement that took many professional revolutionaries by surprise, a movement that continued after February, from the effort of organised communists and anarchists despite calls from some socialist revolutionaries regarding the premature nature of action and struggle against Kerensky's provisional government. The same can be said of the movement in Germany which ended with the abolition of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the installment of the Weimar Republic, again later continued by the organised efforts of communist and anarchist workers.

I think there does have to be organisational networking throughout our class, although I see parties as running contrary to this aim. A party aims to impose a certain political direction upon the working class, and although the emergence of parties is a historical inevitability (at least from historical examples as they stand) I think communists should argue for communism external to these organs as we understand them. True workers' self-management and defence (which includes defence against internal opponents to self-management and the revolutionary momentum) comes from the organs created during revolutionary periods (historically; factory committees, strike committees, soviets, militias etc.) and the existence of these organs should be defended, if not their roles extended during the revolution. A party may become necessary to defend these gains, but that would be a party acting against the traditional notions of what roles parties should play.

[John Nada]

[
...I would argue that all revolutionary periods have been spontaneous in origin and it is the spontaneity that has brought about the regime changes in these circumstances.

The Russian 1917 (from February) and German 1918 revolutionary periods are such examples of where spontaneous proletarian insurrections were successful in toppling previous regimes.What is "spontaneous"? It conjures up images of people collectively saying "fuck it" one day and rioting, or lying about planned strikes and riots to cover there asses for stuff planned in advance("We didn't do it your Honor. The random masses spontaneously were just pissed at the government and capitalists. I don't even know who they were.";)).

Both in Russian 1917 and Germany 1918 the insurrections were organized by the Social Democrats. Mass strikes, protests, organized councils, seizure of land and property and armed rebellion, all led by members of the SPD/USPD in Germany and the RSDLP and SR party in Russia, says there was a high degree of planning and organizing going back decades. The Bolsheviks organized strikes, set up armed organizations, infiltrated the military and state and distributed propaganda for decades, with the SRs focusing mostly on the peasantry. You could go back even earlier if you count the Narodniks' influence. The surprise was not it coming out of the blue and catching them off-guard, but that it was so successful beyond all expectations.

[Hatshepsut]

Apologies as I'm a bit confused slightly and am going to have to ask for a clarification...The Russian 1917 (from February) and German 1918 revolutionary periods are such examples of where spontaneous proletarian insurrections were successful in toppling previous regimes.

Agreed clarity and precision are important. Spring 1917 and November 1918 forced Tsar and Kaiser to abdicate, leaving the Russian and German states largely unsullied. The State Duma had been dissolved the previous summer and a Russian Republic declared without firmly ending the careers of its members. They were merely unchained now, free to pursue political factionalism once Kerensky's provisional government was in office. The midlevel bureaucrats and connected people remained for the most part, continuing to operate as they had before. I'm not even sure how spontaneous either event was: Unrest in the streets broke out in both cases, yet it had been organized by politicians in (or originally from) these countries' legislatures who then moved behind the scenes to restore the social order.

Of course progress of a sort might have been achieved. Both cases had the potential to evolve into durable republics of the democratic socialist kind we're familiar with in Europe today, had conditions been more comfortable. Especially Weimar Germany. It sure beats an autocrat, but capitalism would have remained in control of the German economy and probably arisen in Russia as well. Although Kerensky wasn't so meek and mild as baby Jesus in a manger—His portrayal as liberal democrat is embellished by myth the West manufactured after WWII amid its umpteenth red hysteria. Nicholas probably had the more tender heart in reality; just that the Boyars and Big Men wouldn't allow him to express it too often, plus Rasputin messing with his head.

Vladimer Putin's mouthpiece waxes hip to this Russian scene down to its bushy beards and a suggestion for alcoholic modern celebration:
http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/boyarin/

[Rafiq]

But some of us, myself included, will posit that it has happened. A historical analysis of proletarian revolutionary periods will show that they generally happened as a matter of spontaneity, ahead of the predictions of pro-revolutionary organisations. If, by the question posed "why hasn't it already happened?" you meant to ask why it hasn't been successful in establishing a communist mode of production, then the same criticism can be leveled against movements of proletarian partyism.

There have never been instances of a spontaneous proletarian revolutionary period for the very simple reason that revolutionary consciousness itself is never spontaneously wrought out. This relegates back to the simple fact that workers are limited by their immediate prerogatives - nothing unites them except the socialist consciousness which entails a holistic understanding of the situation. We see this very basically today: The spontaneous impulse of worker's anger is not against the capitalist class, but - like animals fighting over the scraps from the master, amongst different layers and sections of each other. The working class can only ever spontaneously trail behind the angered petite-bourgeoisie, and this is not only the case in America for the 'privileged' white industrial working class, but also the black dispossessed of the ghettos, who are very susceptible to reactionary conspiracy theories of solely a petite-bourgeois nature.

The petite-bourgeoisie, conversely, despite being brothers in contempt like the capitalist class as a whole, has an affirmative social existence. That means there is no "false consciousness" for the petite-bourgeoisie, but true unconsciousness, each and every constitutive member of the petite-bourgeoisie are united in their aims and ambitions spontaneously, because the logical end of their immediate class interests are in no way grounded in the abolition of classes (which necessitates self-consciousness). Propertied classes can, solely by merit of their existence, come into agreement with one and another. The proletariat however is doomed to tail them behind without the party. But alas, the proletariat struggles for consciousness like men in darkness struggle for light - it is an insult to workers to prattle of "spontaneous" consciousness because they are already struggling for it, handicapped by their general condition.


I think history of proletarian revolutionary periods show that in terms of events it is exactly a spontaneous insurrection and organic attempts by workers to reorganise production and living which preceded the entry of partyist and statist actors as the navigators of the revolution. It was exactly these agents which moved against the self-management of the workers in favour of a centralisation based around the managerial functions of the state, in turn grounding it in a continuation of class as an inevitability of the inseparability of the state from its inherent role as the defender of the social relationships inherent to class society.

Which events do you speak of? The fact is simple: There has never even been a proletarian revolution without the party, and without entailing conquest of political power. You speak of self-management, but again, the fetishism of self-management completely misses the point: When Communists spoke of workers controlling the means of production, they spoke of institutions by, of and for workers who controlled it for their common good. This is not just a cheap or empty phrase - when the bourgeoisie speaks of the common good, we know they really mean the common good of capital. But what is left after the destruction of class antagonism and property? The administration of things.

It is true that social antagonism persisted throughout the entirety of the Soviet Union's existence, but this is not owed to the existence of the party or the state alone. What were the functions of the state in this period, SPECIFICALLY? Aggrandizing itself at the expense of the workers? No, industrialization, modernization, destroying the remnants of feudalism. You can talk about the privileges of the "Nomenklatura", but did this constitute a class? If so, how? You will not tell me that the Soviet state's existence was built upon guaranteeing the various privileges and "possessions" of high-level state officials. These were, so to speak, not worth it - it certainly didn't constitute private property. You are correct that the state is inherently an organ of class repression, which is precisely why we speak of a proletarian dictatorship. The reason for the inability for this to persist in the Soviet Union is rather simple: The proletariat as a class was decimated physically, and the necessity of modernizing the country was a task that couldn't be taken up by the proletariat.

[L.A.P.]

These are some notes on Trotsky by Gilles Dauve that I think are relevant to this question:


If one goes back to Trotsky's quarrel with Lenin in 1903-4 and in the following years, in the "Menshevik" period of his life, one must admit that he rightly saw the flaw in the Kautsky-Lenin view that "class consciousness" arises outside the workers' movement, and is then introduced into it by the "party." This is explained in Our Political Tasks, although it is considerably blurred by many other ideas. Trotsky refutes Lenin's conception from a democratic point of view: he does not see communism as the abolition of the commodity economy and the creation of a new world, but as the rule of the workers over society. Therefore he attacks Lenin for substituting the party for the proletariat. But Lenin's theory must be refuted from another angle: Lenin fails to grasp what Marx had tried to show. Transformed into a commodity, having all aspects of its life turned into commodities, the proletariat, when capital forces it to revolt (for instance, after a crisis), cannot avoid destroying the market economy and all its consequences on labour, personal relations, affective life, use of space and nature, representation, etc. Lenin, like all the militants of the Second International, failed to see that the communist program was within the proletariat. More generally, these people ignored the dynamics of capital, and what communism really is. All the contributions to the breakdown controversy (Luxemburg, Hilferding, etc.), most of which had a purely economic conception, saw the problem from the point of view of capital: why it could not work, and not from the point of view of the proletariat: how the revolt of the workers led to new social relations. This is not to say that communism only emerges out of the action of the workers. On the contrary, the workers only attack capital if it attacks them because of its inner problems (fall of the rate of profit, etc.). But it is not enough to understand economic crises; one also has to understand what they imply for the proletariat.

This was not understood at that time, owing to the overall stability and prosperity. But it led revolutionaries to make a series of mistakes. One of them was to misunderstand the workers' movement, which at that time could only be reformist, and also the social-democratic movement, which could only be evolutionary (with few exceptions). Only the collapse of the International in 1914 really taught them what social-democratic parties really stood for.

Trotsky's conception of the permanent revolution in Russia can only be studied in this context. He thought that, after the democratic revolution (which could only be made by the workers and peasants, as the bourgeoisie was too weak: Lenin agreed about that), the workers could not avoid going further, and would quickly take power for themselves - with the support of the small peasants - to introduce socialism. This is where Lenin did not agree. Now it is obvious that communism - as Marx and communist theory define it - was impossible at that stage in Russia, because of the huge pre-capitalist sector. Trotsky did not care about that, because to him socialism was equivalent to workers' power. This is what I mean about his democratic conception of the revolution. However, communism is a transformation of social life, not just its management by the masses.

Despite, or rather because of this conception, Trotsky was able to play a much larger role in the 1905 revolution (because he was much closer to the workers) than Lenin, whose centralist and rigid position in the 1903 split had alienated him from many active workers. Lenin also did not trust spontaneous movements. It is even possible that the 1905 events helped him modify his own position and become more efficient in the period from 1906 to 1914.

During the war, Trotsky's internationalism, like Luxemburg's, was not as radical, as the position Lenin expressed with his slogan: transform the imperialist war into a civil war.

After he joined the Bolsheviks, Trotsky clearly showed that he hardly understood what was going on. He had formerly identified socialism with workers' power; he now identified workers' power with party power. From this he concluded that Russia was building socialism. In Communism and Terrorism he stated that the duty of the worker was to obey the (workers') State and that socialism meant discipline and high productivity of labour. Lenin acted the same way, but he was at least aware of the notion of communism. He more or less realised that Russia was not socialist and could only be socialist with the help of Europe.

One must be very accurate on this question. Trotsky actually believed that capitalism could be avoided in Russia, even with no revolution in Europe. It is true that he did not go so far as to believe that Russia was completely socialist. This is why he had to invent the notion of an intermediate stage, neither capitalist nor socialist, and a fantastic theory of Bonapartism.

Trotsky took a very active part in the suppression of all opposition which had some communist content. His own opposition was opportunistic (alliance with Zinoviev in 1926) and he was afraid of becoming a threat to the State. He organised his own defeat. How many people know that in 1925-6 he refrained from all political activity for about a year and a half? There is no need to insist on this.

On the international level, he proved unable to understand the real efforts of communist minorities and he supported the Communist International in all its mistakes (activity within unions and parliament, "mass" parties, slogan of workers' government, etc.). After he was expelled from Russia, he was totally unable to establish any sort of useful contact with revolutionary groups. He refused to question the validity of the notorious "first four congresses of the Communist International." He was both a sectarian and an opportunist. He had an altogether administrative view of revolution. In France, for instance, he supported people who had neither proletarian ties nor revolutionary abilities, but were left-wing intellectuals. A list of all his political blunders would be amazing. Looking for a mass following, he urged his supporters to join socialist parties. He founded an International which had a program but no proletariat. He was always looking for a new magic device with which to go to the masses, and always failed.
In fact he had no program. He must be regarded as an active militant, full of activity and ability, lacking a communist theoretical background. He was excellent in the midst of a rising movement, as in 1905, but he went completely wrong in a declining movement. Then he could become the worst bureaucrat if he was in power, or a troublemaker if he had no power. It is doubtful that he ever had a theory of his own, except for the theory of permanent revolution - and we do not know exactly what role Parvus played in the creation of this theory.

Trotsky only became an important figure as a symbol of the Russian revolution. After the defeat of the revolutionary movement, he remained important only because of the weakness of the communist minority.

[Patchd]

[What is "spontaneous"? It conjures up images of people collectively saying "fuck it" one day and rioting, or lying about planned strikes and riots to cover there asses for stuff planned in advance("We didn't do it your Honor. The random masses spontaneously were just pissed at the government and capitalists. I don't even know who they were.";)).

Spontaneity is pretty self-defining, in this sense proletarian struggle originating and spreading within the class without a clear pre-meditation and direction from political groups. Lenin acknowledged and critiqued (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm) this phenomena amongst the working class, arguing that left to their own devices, the working class will only ever achieve trade union consciousness.

It's less so about some apparent spiritual connection between proletarians which they somehow harnessed to one day collectively decide to act on their own volition en masse, not about a sudden emergence of anti-government feeling. More about the gradual build up of tensions from antagonistic class relations. February 1917 was not the first occurrence in the Russian Empire throughout the war that workers decided to actualise their grievances concerning their war-time conditions. Not to mention that organisation, political and economic does occur as a natural process of class struggle. Factory strike committees were formed throughout the war, regardless of the role of members of the Russian social democratic movement (the actual co-ordination role of the leadership of Russian social democracy was largely absent). February began as a result of a strike at the Putilov plant. It was the result of unpredicted social and political conditions in 1917 which led to the insurrection; strike action spreading, demonstrations, riots and mutinies, often exacerbated by the actions of the Tsarist state.

I agree that social democracy had a large political presence within the European working class in this period, during the war however, defeatism was actively suppressed and discouraged, at the beginning of the war Lenin even claimed (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/sep/28.htm) that "the whole of our working-class legal press has been suppressed. Most working-class associations have been disbanded, and a large number of our comrades have been arrested and exiled", and continues with "though the tsar’s government has increased its tyranny tenfold, the Social-Democratic workers of Russia are already publishing their first illegal manifestos against the war, thus doing their duty to democracy and to the International". Social democracy as a political force was in no position to organise class struggle against the war. Their organisational role came when the political room had been opened up by the independent, spontaneous action by the working class.

Note that I did state this earlier (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2849338&postcount=8);


Although saying that spontaneity precedes the action of organised political agents in revolutionary periods is not to separate the two, or diminish the roles either of them play. It follows that the proletarian organisations were generally mass organisations or had mass support because of the already existent heightened state of class antagonisms due to the nature of capitalism in its own right, but also that the heightened period of class antagonism was such *in part* because of the role of the proletarian organisations which emerged by course of nature from these antagonisms.

I'm not making a judgement about revolutionary political organisation (although I have my positions on specific revolutionary organisations), merely an observation that its pushed into action by preceding spontaneity of the class.

I'll reply to the other posts later...

[Patchd]

There have never been instances of a spontaneous proletarian revolutionary period for the very simple reason that revolutionary consciousness itself is never spontaneously wrought out. This relegates back to the simple fact that workers are limited by their immediate prerogatives - nothing unites them except the socialist consciousness which entails a holistic understanding of the situation.

A self-orientation of the class towards communism is never the result of spontaneity in isolation, the spontaneous action of the working class does however lend itself to the analysis required for the determination towards revolutionary [proletarian] consciousness. Proletarian revolutionary periods however do begin as a matter of spontaneity, taking the 1871 Paris Commune as an example, proletarian consciousness was not even a key factor in its origination, and yet can still (and is) considered to be an example of a proletarian insurrection, cited by Engels to be an example of proletarian dictatorship. Throughout the Commune this was made even more apparent; elections to the political commune were only organised on the basis on the legitimacy of the old regime - after the old mayors of the city released the electoral lists, "proletarian" representatives most commonly identified as members of The International only comprised less than a third of the political commune (and even then, the French section was largely composed of utopian socialists - and the only section to have earlier opposed the inclusion of women into The International) - the rest of the commune (over 2/3) was made up of Jacobins, moderate republicans, and conservatives), proletarian elements colluded with the bourgeoisie within the commune and in most cases attempted to compensate the old factory owners for the loss of their property, in some cases where the owners remained in the city they were given managerial roles within their old factories (this is despite the minister of labour being a member of The International, Leo Frankel), "bourgeois" battalions of the National Guard remained active and comprised a supposed defence force for the commune etc...

So whilst I take your point that "the spontaneous impulse of worker's anger is not against the capitalist class, but - like animals fighting over the scraps from the master, amongst different layers and sections of each other", it is still important to consider the role spontaneity plays as a historical phenomenon in revolutionary periods.


But alas, the proletariat struggles for consciousness like men in darkness struggle for light - it is an insult to workers to prattle of "spontaneous" consciousness because they are already struggling for it, handicapped by their general condition.I don't find it an insult to make (obviously only what I consider to be) correct historical analyses. The politics of communism is still pushed by ourselves within the context of our every day lives, that we acknowledge the spontaneous character of preceding insurrections is to highlight the affirmation of the working class as a class that strives by its nature, historically for the self-management and responsibility of the lives of human beings.


There has never even been a proletarian revolution without the party, and without entailing conquest of political power. You speak of self-management, but again, the fetishism of self-management completely misses the point: When Communists spoke of workers controlling the means of production, they spoke of institutions by, of and for workers who controlled it for their common good. This is not just a cheap or empty phrase - when the bourgeoisie speaks of the common good, we know they really mean the common good of capital. But what is left after the destruction of class antagonism and property? The administration of things.What constitutes a party for you? To your case against the "fetishism" of self-management, I raise the argument that historically, proletarian parties have generally divulged along the path of substitutionism. That is to lack trust in capabilities of the proletariat in administering and organising their own production and work and to take over this role, as if in the absence of the proletariat through executives. What this has resulted in has been the continuation of the state as a political force for the maintenance of the social relationships required for the existence of class society. In the absence of the bourgeoisie, to continue to manage capitalism for their eventual return... I find the fetishism of party organisations to be a premature attempt at reconciling the lack of political tact within the class as a whole whilst being actively thrown into revolutionary periods where political power exercised by the class is a material necessity, at certain junctions in our history.

Pannekoek highlights this point in the following (https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party-working-class.htm);



The very expression 'revolutionary party' is a contradiction in terms, for a party of this kind could not be revolutionary. If it were, it could only be so in the sense in which we describe revolutionary as a change of government resulting from somewhat violent pressures, e.g., the birth of the Third Reich. When we use the word 'revolution,' we clearly mean the proletarian revolution, the conquest of power by the working class.

The basic theoretical idea of the 'revolutionary party' is that the working class could not do without a group of leaders capable of defeating the bourgeoisie for them and of forming a new government, in other words, the conviction that the working class is itself incapable of creating the revolution. According to this theory, the leaders will create the communist society by means of decrees; in other words, the working class is still incapable of administering and organizing for itself its work and production.


If the idea is that the class is incapable of this level of self-responsibility, maybe it follows that party fetishists do not see the working class as a revolutionary class capable of actualising communism.



You can talk about the privileges of the "Nomenklatura", but did this constitute a class? If so, how? You will not tell me that the Soviet state's existence was built upon guaranteeing the various privileges and "possessions" of high-level state officials. These were, so to speak, not worth it - it certainly didn't constitute [I]private property. You are correct that the state is inherently an organ of class repression, which is precisely why we speak of a proletarian dictatorship.No, I don't see the Nomenklatura as a class. I believe it administered class relations and the social relationship inherent to capitalism in the absence of the capitalist class as a physical entity.


The reason for the inability for this to persist in the Soviet Union is rather simple: The proletariat as a class was decimated physically, and the necessity of modernizing the country was a task that couldn't be taken up by the proletariat.How so?


The State Duma had been dissolved the previous summer and a Russian Republic declared without firmly ending the careers of its members ... I'm not even sure how spontaneous either event was: Unrest in the streets broke out in both cases, yet it had been organized by politicians in (or originally from) these countries' legislatures who then moved behind the scenes to restore the social order.

Are you talking about the Summer of 1916? The Russian Duma had dissolved itself in 1914 only to reinstate itself with the agreement of the Tsar a year later.

I would also contend that the initial actions which marked the beginning of the February 1917 revolution were the result of agitation from politicians. If anything, individual members and activists from Russian socialist factions (but not these political factions organised in their own right) would have been more influential in making the case for, and conducting the individual actions (strikes, demonstrations, riots) which surprisingly ended up constituting the waves of the revolutionary tide. Although I may have missed something, not out of any antagonism towards you, but are there sources to back up the case for the importance of the role of social democratic organisations/politicians in these earlier events?

Apologies if I've mistaken any of your arguments (Rafiq, Hapshetsut and Juan Moreno).

[Rafiq]

A self-orientation of the class towards communism is never the result of spontaneity in isolation, the spontaneous action of the working class does however lend itself to the analysis required for the determination towards revolutionary [proletarian] consciousness. Proletarian revolutionary periods however do begin as a matter of spontaneity, taking the 1871 Paris Commune as an example, proletarian consciousness was not even a key factor in its origination, and yet can still (and is) considered to be an example of a proletarian insurrection, cited by Engels to be an example of proletarian dictatorship.

The problem is that it is precisely wrong to conceive the Paris Commune as a spontaneous proletarian insurrection, as it was organized, facilitated and done under the backdrop of a then growing militant political movement, i.e. there was absolutely nothing "spontaneous' about it. We try and speak of revolutionary periods as though they are owed to blind, unpredictable fluctuations in the general historic class struggle, but the very logic must be abandoned all together: Communism entails the self-consciousness of society, as such, to conceive the intelligentsia as "intruders" upon the organic predispositions of the proletariat is thoroughly misguided - reactionary even: because there are no intruders - the party, and the party alone encapsulates the political class struggle, without which there is only the working class insofar as it is a cog in a machine. Of course class struggle proceeded the party principle, of course the proletariat INEVITABLY struggles for consciousness - Lenin acknowledged this. The point is that to leave them to their own devices is nonsensical as it would reduce the class struggle to the mere individual experiences of workers themselves. A historic example of how this is - how the proletariat struggles for consciousness, can be seen in post-Jacobin France:

When the conspiracy of the equals was first formed, it was despised by the general population. Eventually, the oviers - the French proto-proletariat became the substantive basis of the conspiracy, which upon inception had absolutely nothing to do with workers, was merely compromised of intellectuals, and so on. The party does not seek to mis-direct the organic inclinations of workers, but precisely recognizes the non-existence of the "organic" - the proletariat, the social antagonism is always constitutive of the social field, and the proletariat always struggles for consciousness - to leave them to their own devices is to, so to speak, let them drown in tailing the aspirations of reactionary classes. Of course the proletariat cannot be emancipated by degree, of course a revolution entails the actual mass-mobilization and the energetic efforts of the proletariat as a class, literally: But all of this relegates back to the highest sophistication of the political class struggle - the Communist party, without which, we are doomed to the abyss. It is true that revolutionary energy always surpasses the expectations, or even basis of thought for intellectuals, but it is a reciprocal relationship: The point of dialectics, in fact, is to preserve the thing (the class struggle) irregardless of qualitative changes that occur in the political struggle, which means that come revolution, come something like a WWI, the party must change to preserve itself.


Throughout the Commune this was made even more apparent; elections to the political commune were only organised on the basis on the legitimacy of the old regime - after the old mayors of the city released the electoral lists, "proletarian" representatives most commonly identified as members of The International only comprised less than a third of the political commune (and even then, the French section was largely composed of utopian socialists - and the only section to have earlier opposed the inclusion of women into The International) - the rest of the commune (over 2/3) was made up of Jacobins, moderate republicans, and conservatives), proletarian elements colluded with the bourgeoisie within the commune and in most cases attempted to compensate the old factory owners for the loss of their property, in some cases where the owners remained in the city they were given managerial roles within their old factories (this is despite the minister of labour being a member of The International, Leo Frankel), "bourgeois" battalions of the National Guard remained active and comprised a supposed defence force for the commune etc...

The reason the commune is conceived as a proletarian dictatorship is not because it represented a form of socialism. If you read the ten planks of the Communist manifesto, for example, you will find that the immediate tasks of a proletarian dictatorship (or what constitutes it) is never the immediate implementation of socialism as such. For example, throughout the commune's existence, never was the bourgeoisie made a beneficiary AT THE EXPENSE of the Parisian proletariat. Power belonged to the proletariat as a class.

But if we look at the spontaneous inclinations of the actual proletariat today: Racism, immigrant-bashing, chauvinsim and reaction, it would be absolutely ridiculous to conceive these as uniquely "proletarian" at all. Of course, Marx and Engels only referred to the commune as a proletarian dictatorship to encapsulate a basic example: Political organs being under control by the prerogatives of the proletariat as a class.


So whilst I take your point that "the spontaneous impulse of worker's anger is not against the capitalist class, but - like animals fighting over the scraps from the master, amongst different layers and sections of each other", it is still important to consider the role spontaneity plays as a historical phenomenon in revolutionary periods.

I agree, but the point I make is that it would be erroneous to refer to the fact that the proletariat is susceptible to proletarian consciousness, or that they don't just amount to huge swaths of passive zombies waiting to be manipulated by the party apparatus - as something that pertains to spontaneity. Spontaneity, if we look at the context from which the term derived in Russia, referred to the general opposition to the party principle laid out by the Second International in the Erfurt program - the notion that the masses can, "naturally" acquire revolutionary consciousness and among their own ranks build the predispositions to political struggle. Of course, this is unarguably wrong - even in those cases where the energy of the working people is best expressed, in ways that greatly surpass the expectations of intellectuals, the relationship is always a reciprocal one - they still rely on the guidance of revolutionary organizations that can encapsulate long-term, holistic interests.

I suppose the point I'm making is that even if the proletariat can somehow spontaneously constitute itself as a class for the class, this would basically be an accident - it would be ridiculous to fall back on this rather than the highest instrument of their will - the Communist party, most especially, revolutionary social democracy as it was conceived in Germany.


I don't find it an insult to make (obviously only what I consider to be) correct historical analyses. The politics of communism is still pushed by ourselves within the context of our every day lives, that we acknowledge the spontaneous character of preceding insurrections is to highlight the affirmation of the working class as a class that strives by its nature, historically for the self-management and responsibility of the lives of human beings.

The problem however is that the working class 'by its nature' is a function in the reproduction of capital in nothing more, there is no implicit political predispositions embedded in its very existence - we must remember that the intelligentsia too constitutives the general historic antagonism. That is to say, "conscious intervention" in the prerogatives of the proletariat, not leaving htem to their own devices, etc. - holistically constitutes a part of the class struggle. Perhaps the stark difference between Lenin and Kautsky is found here: Kautsky saw Marxists as mere neutral scientific observers bringing truth to the working masses, while Lenin took the opposite conclusion - The scientific truth of Marxism is only wrought out from taking a real, direct side in the class struggle as it objectively exists. Taking sides, therefore, is the true axiom, not science.


What constitutes a party for you? To your case against the "fetishism" of self-management, I raise the argument that historically, proletarian parties have generally divulged along the path of substitutionism. That is to lack trust in capabilities of the proletariat in administering and organising their own production and work and to take over this role, as if in the absence of the proletariat through executives.

The party is a political entity - it is the organization which actively strives for the conquest of political power. A union or syndicate deals with the governance of the factory, a party deals with the governance of society as a whole. This is the crucial difference. Finally, of course this has nothing to do with trust - it is not that workers are too stupid, but that workers are not magically embedded with the ability to think holistically, mechanisms, institutions and structures which assure that the prerogatives of this or that community to not infringe or violate those of 30 other communities in the same region, and furthermore, the region in juxtaposition to other regions, and on it goes. If a society was relegated to merely a single factory, or even a dozen of them, of course there would be no problem with this.

What you say, however, does not really strike true in pertinence to the Russian situation. Even up to Stalinism, workers were heavily encouraged, coerced even, to self-organize, to manage their own affairs, to control production where it did not extend beyond the factory as democratically as possible. The problem is not the logic of representation as such, it is under the backdrop that which this substitution occurs:


What this has resulted in has been the continuation of the state as a political force for the maintenance of the social relationships required for the existence of class society. In the absence of the bourgeoisie, to continue to manage capitalism for their eventual return... I find the fetishism of party organisations to be a premature attempt at reconciling the lack of political tact within the class as a whole whilst being actively thrown into revolutionary periods where political power exercised by the class is a material necessity, at certain junctions in our history.

The problem is that this was only apparent because of the unique situation in Russia: Lenin's goal initially was not simply insurrection and revolution, it was for a democratic (bourgeois even) revolution to topple the Russian autocracy so the SPD model could truly be built in Russia. The proletarian party was tasked not only with organizing society on socialist lines, but destroying the remnants of feudalism and modernizing the country. Whether workers were in control or not doesn't make the difference: Any government would have been forced to deal with the basic fact of - where from here, now that the revolution has failed internationally? First with the NEP, and then the dispute over collectivization - which radically transformed the Soviet state into a bourgeois one (even with the absence of a bourgeoisie). Collectivization by its very nature couldn't have been spear-headed by the proletariat, because the technical base for building socialism did not even exist at this point.

The state precisely did not maintain capitalist relations, it had to establish the predispositions to them, knowingly or otherwise, and it is the Chinese who perfected this during the cultural revolution - the predispositions to capitalism were made in a perfect manner politically, while in Russia, even today the setbacks of the romantic bourgeois revolution in agriculture (Bordiga) are seen with the relationship between the Putinist state and the big bourgeoisie. It wasn't intentional of course, but this is the only way the state could survive and allocate energy - by expending its energy to DESTROY (the remnants of feudalism) rather than affirmatively build a new society.

We cannot speak of revolutionary periods passively. They do not come about organically - there is no such thing. It is easy to think of history as a passive, inevitable process, but it is not. The only thing which separated Tahrir square from being a proletarian movement, for example, was the absence of revolutionary politics and socialist consciousness. This is especially pertinent to 2015 where the bourgeois state and bourgeois ideology have become so resilient in stamping out even the most immediate forms of trade-union consciousness. What little insurrections or bursts of anger we do have in the 21st century are IMMEDIATELY perverted, destroyed, or mis-directed into reaction.


If the idea is that the class is incapable of this level of self-responsibility, maybe it follows that party [I]fetishists do not see the working class as a revolutionary class capable of actualising communism.

The proletariat is not an affirmative class. It is a negative one - it stands for the universal negation of the proletariat (I.e. negation of the bourgeoisie = proletariat, negation of the proletariat = classlessness). The only thing which separates the proletarian from the capitalist is that the former has nothing to lose - there is nothing inherent about it in a positive sense which is revolutionary - it possesses precisely no positive qualities. The proletariat inherits, therefore, all the achievements of civic society and the enlightenment in its struggle for emancipation. It is the anti-class itself - perhaps this might be a reason why we ought to stop focusing on the industrial proletariat today in the west, and maybe the precariously employed, the dispossessed (Xhar-Xhar's words) - but further investigation must be done before I can arrive at this conclusion.


No, I don't see the Nomenklatura as a class. I believe it administered class relations and the social relationship inherent to capitalism in the absence of the capitalist class as a physical entity.

if you refer to Bordiga's intricacies within production (i.e. as a class struggling to come into existence but constantly unable to via politics) the I basically agree. If not, what do you mean by class relations then?


How so?

The proletariat that was responsible for all the revolutionary energy was physically decimated after the civil war. The state was still a proletarian dictatorship - but basically without a proletariat. After collectivization, it had to structurally, ideologically and politically change at the expense of the remnants of this dictatorship. All that remained was a large and hostile peasantry, and the organs of repression had to accommodate to this. Naturally this would extend back to the proletariat, or the factory worker after they were conceived in the 30's.

The soviet state suffered an existential crisis in the mid 20's for this reason.


I would also contend that the initial actions which marked the beginning of the February 1917 revolution were the result of agitation from politicians.

The February revolution was not a socialist revolution, however. It was not a worker's revolution - it may have been OF workers, but it was not by and for workers.

[Hatshepsut]

Are you talking about the Summer of 1916?

I was thinking of the Fourth Duma, which had five sessions. There was a period between its convocation in Feb. 1916 and its re-convocation on Nov. 1, 1916. During the summer was when Mikhail Rodzianko failed to act against the pro-German foreign minister Boris Stürmer, who had recently been the prime minister ordering Rodzianko to strike the stenographic record of anti-bourgeois speeches in the Duma (Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979; Louise McReynolds 2014, The News Under Russia's Old Regime, pp. 266-267). It was also when the Bolsheviks achieved organization of a city committee in Nizhni-Novgorod, probably as base for their anti-war propaganda effort:

Shlyapnikov 1930?/1982, “On the Eve of 1917”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/shliapnikov/1923/eve1917/chap6.html

Frankly my knowledge of this history is defective and I won’t try to argue it under a thesis of a nerve center for workers’ activities. But it looks that things were planned and organized before they happened, appearing spontaneous only to onlookers who didn’t know what was coming, including the unfortunate Stürmer, who lost his portfolio in the fifth session of Nov. 1916, and Rodzianko, who by February was pleading for the government to “send him a minister capable of running the country.”

Reading through it, notice how players don’t vanish just because a government body is dissolved. Bolsheviks participated on the Duma until they were banned; while top politicians get sacked their underlings move into places where they can continue influencing affairs. It may be crass, and incorrect as well, to call a revolutionary a politician. But revolutionaries certainly involve themselves in politics and deal with politicians. The Bolsheviks were clearly advantaging themselves of the Tsar’s absence, Duma recess, and chaos in the bureaus that summer.

[Patchd]

Thank you for the points raised, they've made me reconsider a few things even though I have some responses to make. I've been quite busy this weekend and I have an early start at work tomorrow but I'll get back to this thread soon when I get the time!

[John Nada]

Spontaneity is pretty self-defining, in this sense proletarian struggle originating and spreading within the class without a clear pre-meditation and direction from political groups. Lenin acknowledged and critiqued this phenomena amongst the working class, arguing that left to their own devices, the working class will only ever achieve trade union consciousness.The word for "spontaneity" in Russian can also be translated as "elemental". "Trade union consciousness" is workers realizing the need to unionize, go on strike and even try to get favorable laws passed. It's a start, but this alone is not revolutionary. In the US or the UK this "spontaneity" stopped at winning better pay, better benefits and favorable legislation. Now all that's being lost in a bourgeoisie's counteroffensive, and there's less strikes now in the modern US than in Tsarist Russia where you could get imprisoned or even killed for even thinking about it. But if revolutionaries can join up with the basic workers' movement, both can take things further. That's Lenin's point, it wasn't that he thought the workers' were fools, but but criticizing those who didn't want to go any further than "trade union consciousness"
It's less so about some apparent spiritual connection between proletarians which they somehow harnessed to one day collectively decide to act on their own volition en masse, not about a sudden emergence of anti-government feeling. More about the gradual build up of tensions from antagonistic class relations. February 1917 was not the first occurrence in the Russian Empire throughout the war that workers decided to actualise their grievances concerning their war-time conditions. Not to mention that organisation, political and economic does occur as a natural process of class struggle. Factory strike committees were formed throughout the war, regardless of the role of members of the Russian social democratic movement (the actual co-ordination role of the leadership of Russian social democracy was largely absent). February began as a result of a strike at the Putilov plant. It was the result of unpredicted social and political conditions in 1917 which led to the insurrection; strike action spreading, demonstrations, riots and mutinies, often exacerbated by the actions of the Tsarist state.The February Revolution was the bourgeois democratic revolution. The October Revolution was the proletarian socialist revolution. As Hatshepsut's link showed the Bolsheviks and workers were planning and executing a lot of things prior to both.
I agree that social democracy had a large political presence within the European working class in this period, during the war however, defeatism was actively suppressed and discouraged, at the beginning of the war Lenin even claimed that "the whole of our working-class legal press has been suppressed. Most working-class associations have been disbanded, and a large number of our comrades have been arrested and exiled", and continues with "though the tsar’s government has increased its tyranny tenfold, the Social-Democratic workers of Russia are already publishing their first illegal manifestos against the war, thus doing their duty to democracy and to the International". Social democracy as a political force was in no position to organise class struggle against the war. Their organisational role came when the political room had been opened up by the independent, spontaneous action by the working class.Read what Lenin wrote that article in. It was an underground newspaper. Just because the Bolsheviks were heavily repressed doesn't mean the workers were no long in touch.

[reviscom1]

. We can generate fair evidence for that proposition by asking ourselves that if such a spontaneous revolution by the working class is possible, why hasn't it already happened? Certainly most of the global working class is educated enough to have heard of class-based oppression and socialist revolutions.
.

Because Social Democracy (which I am defining as employment rights and state provision of services) has artificially staved off Capitalism's collapse. Now Social Democracy is becoming unaffordable under the Capitalist system (a problem expressed in Europe as "the austerity debate")

When public services collapse and employment rights are removed (as they are being in the UK at the moment) THEN there will be a revolution (5-10 years)

[A.J.]

When public services collapse and employment rights are removed (as they are being in the UK at the moment) THEN there will be a revolution (5-10 years)

That's quite a bold prediction........I wouldn't be that optimistic:unsure:


Personally, I think a revolution is most likely to occur during or immediately following a big war. By which I mean a war that leads to the general mobilisation of the population. Then we'll see an exponential and sudden rise in the political consciousness of the masses.

When, however, such a conflagration takes place is for the most part guesswork.