Chapter 26: in which we learn that there's no point in saying "X only please" since there's no way to enforce it.
"What Have We Changed This Time Around?" The objective conditions, mostly. Economic and cultural backwardness, plus lack of victorious revolutions in more advanced countries, led to the growth of bureaucracy in the USSR.
A revolution in the advanced capitalist countries - especially today - would face a whole different situation.
Even in the Third World, things like literacy rates are often higher than in 1917 Russia. The example of Cuba shows that bureaucracy can be....contained, limited in degree in power - even in adverse conditions. The fact they had the aid of the USSR in the early years is a big factor there. One thing that had changed that time around.
(Though Soviet aid did come with a price of bureaucratic political influence.)
That's the main answer, objective conditions...but there are some things that can be learned from the experience of past revolutions, I think.
One is the importance of educational and cultural level; the Bolsheviks knew this of course, and worked hard to improve it....but never did (were never able to do?) anything like the literacy campaigns of Cuba and Nicaragua. Some others....
Originally posted by Hopscotch
[email protected] 29 2006, 12:14 PM
For one we must vigilantly keep up democratic decision making within the party. Secondly, all proletarian organizations should have the undeniable rights of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Thirdly, we need to constantly work against capitalist restorationism and party absolutism through a cultural revolution.
I agree with the first two.
I might add that it's not so simple to say: grant freedom to proletarian organizations. The problem is, who decides which organization is proletarian, and who is a counterrevolutionary maggot who must be ruthlessly crushed? Who guards the guardians?
There is no easy answer. Repression against bourgeois political organization also has an intimidating effect on workers. Because there is, and can be, no Chinese Wall which guarantees the same won't happen to you.
But of course everyone knows revolutions aren't dinner parties, you can't make an omelet etc etc. Repression remains necessary.....a necessary evil.
I think that ol' bourgeois revoluitonary Macchiavelli was right, also: "Hence we may learn the lesson that on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be enabled by their discontinuance to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits. Whosoever, either through timidity or from following bad counsels, adopts a contrary course, must keep the sword always drawn, and can put no trust in his subjects, who suffering from continued and constantly renewed severities, will never yield him their confidence."
That was an error the Bolsheviks made initially: too much mercy. Captured enemies were released on the promise that they would not take up arms again...this promise was of course often broken. During the October insurrection, bourgeois political leaders and officers were let out of the capital when they could have been arrested. It took time for the Russian workers to learn ruthlessness.
If they'd been more severe from the beginning, maybe they coulda been more relaxed later - after the Civil War was over anyway. Consider Cuba: they tried and shot a few thousand Batistiano war criminals right off, and they've been less repressive than the Bolsheviks since.
As for "cultural revolution", that points away from proletarian democracy and towards unrestrained apparatchik dictatorship. Socialist culture - if it's to be a progressive advance - can only be built on the cultural accumulated by the past. Just as socialist economic construction builds on the means of production inherited from the past...heck, culture is an important means of production.
In contrast, the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" proclaimed "the older, the more reactionary" in order to smash all culture, learning and education....except the Holy Writ of Chairman Mao. Schools were shut, almost no books were published except the Little Red Book. Which was learned by rote in compulsory meetings.
Those who didn't parrot the line were beaten and publicly humiliated. It was a period of exceptionally pervasive state-sponsored terror against working people. A strike by Shanghai workers was broken by the Red Guards of Mao's faction. All this was to keep the masses from taking advantage of a factional conflict within the bureaucracy. To keep them from overthrowing the whole rotten bureaucracy and all its factions.
Gangs sponsored by different parts of the state apparatus fought in the streets - with weapons supplied by different parts of the army - and control of the army ultimately decided the outcome of the factional struggle. The last act was the suppression of the Red Guards by Mao, using the army, since they had outlived their usefulness.
And we don't even know what the factional conflict was about, to this day, since none of Mao's factional opponents ever had any...."undeniable rights of freedom of speech and freedom of the press." As you put it. We've only heard one side, Mao's side.
It is a useful example of what not to do. We can benefit by the experience to build workers' democracy - just do the exact opposite. (Judge only after hearing all sides of a debate within the party, make books and education available to everyone, Etc.)
An article by some ex-Maoists about the "Cultural Revolution" - not that I agree with everything in there, but it has some of the more important facts. (https://www.flash.net/~comvoice/20cChinaLeft.html)