On the Bolshevik Myth

[abbielives!]

from infoshop:
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?...070607225040457 (http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20070607225040457)


On the Bolshevik Myth

I always have mixed feelings when I see Leninists attack anarchism in their press. On the one hand, I despair as I know they will waste a lot of space getting it wrong. And that a lot of time will be required to correct the errors, distortions and stupidities they inflict on the world (as I have already done in " An Anarchist FAQ"). I also feel hope as it shows that anarchism is growing so much that they feel they have to spend time attacking us. We have three classic examples of this in International Socialist Review issue no. 53.
For some reason, while attacking anarchists and anarchism Marxists feel they have to take our best ideas, experiments and activists. Often they discuss anarchist activists and strangely fail to mention they were anarchists. Louise Michel has suffered this fate, as have the Haymarket Martyrs. The latter have now suffered an even worse fate, with an academic, James Green, trying to appropriate them for Marxism!

In an interview in ISR and a recent book, Green tries his best to turn the Haymarket Martyrs into Marxists. He asserts that "Albert Parsons believed a strong socialist movement needed to follow the prescription put forward by Karl Marx: that is, such a movement needed a mass working-class following." As if that were not Bakunin's position: "for the International to be a real power, it must be able to organise within its ranks the immense majority of the proletariat of Europe, of America, of all lands." (Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 293) (see "An Anarchist FAQ": H.2.7)

Green states that because the Martyrs were "busy organising their own unions" they "didn't stop being Marxists." Yet Marx had mocked Bakunin for arguing that (to quote Marx) the working class "must only organise themselves by trades- unions" and "not occupy itself with politics." (Marx, Engels and Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 48) Like the Martyrs, Bakunin argued that "the natural organisation of the masses . . . is organisation based on the various ways that their various types of work define their day-to-day life; it is organisation by trade association" and once "every occupation . . . is represented within the International, its organisation, the organisation of the masses of the people will be complete." Moreover, Bakunin stressed that the working class had "but a single path, that of emancipation through practical action which meant "workers' solidarity in their struggle against the bosses" by "trades-unions, organisation, and the federation of resistance funds" (The Basic Bakunin, p. 139 and p. 103) So attempts to portray the ideas of the Martyrs as Marxist requires ignoring Bakunin's syndicalism and Marx's consistent opposition to it. (H.2.8)

The Martyrs did come to see that both the state and capitalism had to be abolished at the same time and, as Green says, "the working class had to have its own institutions and its own militia, its own communal forms of decision-making." That is, they came to the same conclusion as Bakunin had and is why they called themselves anarchists:

"the Alliance of all labour associations . . . will constitute the Commune . . . there will be a standing federation of the barricades and a Revolutionary Communal Council . . . [made up of] delegates . . . invested with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times . . . all provinces, communes and associations . . . [will] delegate deputies to an agreed place of assembly (all . . . invested with binding mandated and accountable and subject to recall), in order to found the federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces . . . and to organise a revolutionary force with the capacity of defeating the reaction . . . it is through the very act of extrapolation and organisation of the Revolution with an eye to the mutual defences of insurgent areas that the universality of the Revolution . . . will emerge triumphant." (Bakunin, No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, pp. 155-6)

As Lucy Parsons (the wife of Albert) put it "we hold that the granges, trade-unions, Knights of Labour assemblies, etc., are the embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society . . ." (contained in Albert R. Parsons, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, p. 110) Compare this to Bakunin when he argued that the "organisation of the trade sections, their federation in the International, and their representation by Chambers of Labour, . . . [allow] the workers . . . [to] combin[e] theory and practice . . . [and] bear in themselves the living germs of the social order, which is to replace the bourgeois world. They are creating not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself." (quoted by Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 45)

Clearly, Green's attempt to expropriate the Martyrs for Marxism runs aground on the shores of reality.

It is one of the ironies of Marxism is that attempts of working class people to organise communally have always been repressed not only by traditional ruling classes but also by the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat." This has always been an embarrassment for modern day Leninists, who seek to defend such repression. If this means ignoring or denying well known facts then so be it.

Phil Gasper (in an article ironically entitled "Critical Thinking") does precisely this when he defends Trotsky against bourgeois criticism, arguing as regards the crushing of Kronstadt that "the sailors were threatening an armed rebellion and demanding that the Bolsheviks be purged from the soviets." One slight problem, though, it is not true. As Paul Avrich proved long ago, "'Soviets without Communists' was not, as is often maintained by both Soviet and non-Soviet writers, a Kronstadt slogan." In fact, the Kronstadt program "did allow a place for the Bolsheviks in the soviets, alongside the other left-wing organisations . . . Communists . . . participated in strength in the elected conference of delegate, which was the closest thing Kronstadt ever had to the free soviets of its dreams." (Kronstadt 1921, p. 181)

It is true that the soviet democracy the Kronstadt rebels actually demanded would have resulted in the Bolsheviks losing power as few people would have voted for them. Yet the results democratic process can hardly be termed a "purge."

Was it "an armed rebellion"? Well, the Kronstadt rebels were sailors and soldiers and so had access to arms. That is true, but the actual revolt was peaceful. It was the Bolsheviks who fired the first shots and the Kronstadters defended themselves. In this the Kronstadt rebellion differed from other rebellions by other working class people -- being unarmed, they had no means of defending themselves against Bolshevik repression.

Thus, for example, the Petrograd general strike which immediately preceded and inspired the Kronstadt revolt was put down "peacefully" by means of a three-man Defence Committee which "proclaimed martial law" which was enforced by the Communist officer cadets (as the local garrisons had been caught up the general ferment and could not be relied upon to carry out the government's orders). "Overnight Petrograd became an armed camp. In every quarter pedestrians were stopped and their documents checked . . . the curfew [was] strictly enforced." The Petrograd Cheka made widespread arrests. (Avrich, p. 39, pp. 46-7)

It would have been nice if Gasper had bothered to find out the facts. May I suggest the appendix on Kronstadt in "An Anarchist FAQ"?

It is important to remember that the Bolshevik response to Kronstadt was not an isolated event. In fact, their attack on soviet democracy dates back to the spring of 1918 when they had began disbanding any soviet elected with a non-Bolshevik majority. Significantly, this started before the start of the civil war and was driven by lack of popular support. (Vladimir Brovkin, "The Mensheviks' Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring 1918", The Russian Review, vol. 42, pp. 1-50; Charles Duval, "Yakov M. Sverdlov and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK)", pp. 3-22, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXI, no. 1). Thus Russia had become a one-party dictatorship before the start of the civil war. Needless to say, party ideology was adjusted to reflect this reality soon after and the necessity of party dictatorship became official dogma by the start of 1919. (H.3.15)

This helps explains why, as Gasper notes, the soviets "became little more than talking shops" yet this had happened long before the start of the civil war (a fact he fails to note). As for a "disintegration of the working class" which "left the Bolsheviks suspended in air, controlling the state machine but lacking a social base," this fails to note the systematic repression of working class protest by the Bolsheviks between 1918 and 1921. In fact, Gasper's argument dates back to Lenin who, significantly, first formulated it "to justify a political clamp-down" and was developed in response to rising working class protest rather than its lack: "As discontent amongst workers became more and more difficult to ignore, Lenin . . . began to argue that the consciousness of the working class had deteriorated . . . workers had become 'declassed.'" (J. Aves, Workers Against Lenin, p. 18 and p. 90)

A disintegrated working class does not need martial law, lockouts, mass arrests and the purging of the workforce to control it. So, clearly, the Leninist argument can be faulted. Somewhat ironically, given the last anti-Anarchist article in ISR, Gasper concludes his piece as follows:


Replace Trotsky with Makhno and you get a feel for the quality and inspiration for Jason Yanowitz's "On the Makhno Myth." Like Monty Python's King Arthur faced with a searing anarcho-syndicalist critique of Monarchy, Yanowitz's response to the awkward fact of the Makhnovist refutation of Leninist dogma is to mutter "Bloody peasant!" and trust that the faithful will not actually read the source material his numerous footnotes he selectively references.

Space precludes any detailed critique of Yanowitz's article but, luckily, I do not have to as he repeats the usual Marxist attacks I debunk in detail in "An Anarchist FAQ" (see the appendix on the Makhnovist movement). For some strange reason Yanowitz does not mention that. He obviously hopes his silence will convince those ignorant of the subject that anarchists have no answer to the points he raises. As such, you have to laugh when he asserts that "Makhno was not the saint his supporters suppose." As if anarchists thought he was! In fact, most anarchist accounts of the Makhnovist movement discuss its failings and problems as well as the personal failings of Makhno. Yanowitz is aware of this as he quotes them! The best that can he said of his account is that acknowledges that the Makhnovist "leadership was principally against anti-Semitism or alliances with the Whites" yet strangely fails to note that the Bolsheviks and their followers repeatedly claimed otherwise. (Makhno appendix: 9 and 12) While the subjects may have changed, the approach has not.

For example, it obviously annoys Yanowitz that he cannot prove the long standing Bolshevik claim that the Makhnovists were kulaks so he suggests their policies for the rural economy developed by the peasantry themselves could have been objectively pro-kulak! (Makhno appendix: 8) Given how disastrous the pre-1921 Bolshevik policies as regards the peasants were, Leninists have no real basis for criticism. As for being pro-Kulak, that better suits the post-1921 Bolsheviks as the NEP, unlike the Makhnovist policy, allowed wage labour and so bolstered their economic position.

Suffice to say, Yanowitz presents the same lack of common sense, distortion and lack of understanding of anarchism and the Makhnovists I have come to expect from Marxists and refuted before. The only real new development is that Yanowitz relies heavily on another Marxist's PhD thesis on Makhno by Colin Darch. Yet this new source leaves much to be desired. To get a taste of Darch's perspective, we can point to his first essay on the subject ("The myth of Nestor Makhno", Economy and Society, 14(4)) where he considered "Makhno's role as a leader of peasant counterrevolution in the USSR" as "a significant one, and merits careful investigation." That suggests his Marxism may get in the way of his objectivity. His PhD thesis relies on Soviet sources for many of his key attacks on the Makhnovists (it is on the basis of these that Yanowitz states the anarchist "timeline and version of events is well refuted by Darch"!). Significantly, for all Darch's rummaging around in Soviet sources, non-Marxist scholars like Michael Palij (The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918-1921) and Christopher Reed (From Tsar to Soviets) confirm the anarchist version of events.

Yet even reading Darch's obviously biased account shows that the main Bolshevik complaints about the Makhnovists were simply that they refused to stop spreading their own political ideas countering Bolshevik propaganda ("the political commissar of the Trans-Dnepr Division complained that anarchist and Left SR agitation was making his work very difficult"); they involved the general population in discussing social and military affairs by organising soviet conferences ("the reaction of the Bolshevik commanders to . . . the summoning of yet another anarchist [sic!] congress . . . at a time of military crisis -- was decisive and harsh"); and generally not allowing themselves to be treated like canon fodder for the Bolshevik dictatorship ("Despite the seriousness of the military situation for the Red Army and for the revolution in general, the Congress apparently felt no compunction about adopting and endorsing an anarchist platform that the Bolsheviks inevitably viewed as a provocation").

Which raises an obvious question: Does being a Leninist make you stupid? I ask because Yanowitz simply cannot see the obvious replies to his attacks on the Makhnovists. In a footnote, he seriously wonders why, if the Makhnovist accounts of Bolshevik betrayal were true, then why did the Whites manage to breach the front (and it should be noted that both he and Darch take the Bolshevik claims on this as gospel). However, it is hardly difficult to work out why the Whites breached the front if the Bolsheviks refused to arm the Makhnovists. Troops without weapons or ammunition can hardly fight. That Yanowitz cannot see this shows that discovering the truth about the Makhnovists was the last thing on his mind.

Then there are the numerous factual errors. An example is his claim that "parties were banned from organizing for election to regional bodies." That hardly fits with the fact that they had SR, Menshevik and Communist delegates. What the Makhnovists opposed were "party lists" in soviet elections and special seats for political parties, not delegates that were members of a political party. It is this aspect of "soviet" elections that allowed the Menshevik leader Martov to be picked as a factory "delegate" over Lenin in early 1920. The Makhnovists argued that delegates had to be workers from the village or workplace that elected them. Rather than "obliterate existing state structures before moving on," they organised soviet congresses in both liberated towns and countryside and only left when forced to by military necessity. As for them "regulat[ing] the press," it seems ironic that an increase in press freedom under the Makhnovists compared to the Bolsheviks becomes a rod with which to beat them! Much the same applies to Yanowitz's other examples of Makhnovist so-called authoritarianism.

Then there is Makhno's advice to the railway workers. Well, that is the key thing -- it was advice as he thought that working class people had to solve their own problems by themselves, through their own organisations. In contrast, Trotsky imposed martial law on them along strict military and bureaucratic lines. One-man management or workers' control? Which is more socialist? And which the railway workers preferred? And which worked better, given the railway network totally collapsed after Trotsky got his way with it? Needless to say, in spite of the Bolshevik track record of breaking strikes, disbanding soviets, suppressing freedom of organisation, assembly and speech and imposing political and economic dictatorship onto the working class, Yanowitz still tries to argue that it was the Makhnovists who were anti-working class rather than the Bolsheviks! (Makhno appendix: 10)

Yanowitz's assertions to the contrary, in reality, it was the lack of "local autonomy" which lead the Bolshevik "coordinated, centralised plan for war production and defence" into inefficiency, waste and bureaucracy, i.e. it made matters much worse (see Silvana Malle's The Economic Organisation of War Communism 1918-1921). This mismanagement started early. One historian summarises the situation in 1918:

"it seems apparent that many workers themselves . . . had now come to believe . . . that confusion and anarchy [sic!] at the top were the major causes of their difficulties, and with some justification. The fact was that Bolshevik administration was chaotic . . . Scores of competitive and conflicting Bolshevik and Soviet authorities issued contradictory orders, often brought to factories by armed Chekists. The Supreme Economic Council. . . issu[ed] dozens of orders and pass[ed] countless directives with virtually no real knowledge of affairs." [William G. Rosenberg, Russian Labour and Bolshevik Power, p. 116]

Significantly, the one-man management imposed by the Bolsheviks made things worse. On the railways, for example, abolishing the workers' committees resulted in more confusion, isolation and ignorance of local conditions. It got so bad that "a number of local Bolshevik officials . . . began in the fall of 1918 to call for the restoration of workers' control, not for ideological reasons, but because workers themselves knew best how to run the line efficiently, and might obey their own central committee's directives if they were not being constantly countermanded." (William G. Rosenberg, Workers' Control on the Railroads, pp. D1208-9) Leninist wishful thinking and fantasy aside, the destruction of the Russian economy under the weight of centralisation confirmed the anarchist argument on the importance decentralisation, from the bottom-up organising and federalism.

As for the old myth "anarchists ignore the objective difficulties facing the revolution," that is debunked in AFAQ (there is a whole appendix on it). Strangely Yanowitz could not bring himself to discuss that. It is as perplexing as his silence over the Bolsheviks disbanding any soviet elected with a non-Bolshevik majority since before the Civil War started, how they had been advocating party dictatorship since the start of 1919 and how this influenced their relations with the Makhnovists. The identification of party dictatorship with "the dictatorship of the proletariat" helps explain the Makhnovist "hostility" which Yanowitz finds so puzzling (as one delegate to a Makhnovist soviet congress put it, "No party has a right to usurp governmental power into its own hands . . . We want life, all problems, to be decided locally, not by order from any authority above; and all peasants and workers should decide their own fate, while those elected should only carry out the toilers' wish." (quoted by Palij, Op. Cit., p. 154)). And who, precisely, decides when "objective circumstances" cannot permit a social transformation? The Bolsheviks never asked working class people or peasants their opinion on this. Perhaps, as seems likely, they took their rejection in soviet elections as the sign?

Space also excludes much discussion of the political issues Yanowitz raises as much as the factual ones. As he repeats the standard Marxist attacks anarchists have been debunking for decades, I can simply recommend visiting AFAQ for the anarchist critique to Marxism, our vision of social revolution and how to defend it (see section H). A few basic points can be made, however.

The central fallacy of his critique is to assume that abolishing or resisting authority is somehow authoritarian. Few people would consider stopping someone trying to kill or enslave you as being "authoritarian." They would rightly consider your actions as self-defense. This applies to his examples of Makhnovist "authoritarianism." He seems to assume that the true "libertarian" approach is to let others impose their rule on you as stopping them is "authoritarian"! As Malatesta put it, some "seem almost to believe that after having brought down government and private property we would allow both to be quietly built up again, because of respect for the freedom of those who might feel the need to be rulers and property owners. A truly curious way of interpreting our ideas." (Anarchy, p. 41)

The next fallacy is his assumptions about anarchism and his curious interpolations about what opposing authority means -- inspired no doubt by Engels' "On Authority" (H.4). Rather than some individualistic notion which makes collective decision making impossible, anarchist opposition to authority logically implies the importance of collective decision making by those who are affected by the decision. Bakunin argued that "the principle of authority" was the "eminently theological, metaphysical and political idea that the masses, always incapable of governing themselves, must submit at all times to the benevolent yoke of a wisdom and a justice, which in one way or another, is imposed from above." (Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 33)

Clearly, by the term "principle of authority" Bakunin meant hierarchy rather than organisation and the need to make agreements (what is now called self-management). And note the collective nature of Bakunin's definition - "themselves" and "the masses." Thus the "principle of authority" refers to the elimination of collective decision making by the people and its replacement by the power of the few who govern them on their behalf. This support for self-management (collective freedom) has its roots in individual freedom, of course, as its rationale is that only in self-managed organisations can individuals express their freedom. It also explains anarchist support for dissent within free organisations as the majority can be wrong and minorities have the right to point this out and resist if need be. (H.2.11)

Underlying his attack is the assumption that self-management is impossible, that we cannot manage our own affairs and need someone to rule us. Usually, Leninists argue that self-management is possible - when the state withers away. For Yanowitz, any complex organisation seems to be a state because it necessitates, at best, collective decision making, or, at worse, hierarchy and so anarchism is impossible. Yet if that is the case, then Marx and Lenin were wrong - the state will never "wither away." Yet anarchists have long pointed out that government is not the same as collective decision making. We are also aware that a delegate body and any associated administrative organs may, by force of circumstances or by design, start to act like a state. That is why we have always argued for instant recall of mandated delegates rather than representatives who elect a government. However, to argue that we should just give up trying to organise in this way because of this possibility makes as much sense as becoming reformists because of the possibility that a revolution will fail.

Which brings us to the next fallacy: the assumption that any form of social organisation equals a state. As he puts it:

Yet there is a fundamental difference between a social organization based on self-government from the bottom up and one based on top-down, centralized power held by a minority. The latter has what has always been rightly termed a state and its structure has evolved precisely to exclude the majority from decision making. The former is not a state as it empowers the many to govern themselves. This can be seen under "primitive communism." Tribes practiced communal decision making and used delegates to form federations to co-ordinate their joint interests ("legislative conferences"). They had war bands to fight their enemies ("armed detachments") and defended their liberty by force ("banned authority with which they disagreed"). Even Engels and Marx acknowledged that these were not states. States came later when the masses were subjected to minority rule, a rule which required a state to impose.

So to call the communal system anarchists aim for a "state" when its role is to promote and ensure mass participation in social life is nonsense. (H.3.7) That Leninists are vaguely aware of this obvious fact explains why they sometimes talk of a "semi-state" or a "new kind of state." This not a matter of mere "labels" as Yanowitz asserts, but rather revolves around who has the real power in a revolution - the people armed or a new minority (a "revolutionary" government). Anarchists argue for the former, the Leninists for the latter (hidden, usually, under democratic rhetoric).

Failing to understand that anarchists and Leninists do not share the same definition on what constitutes a state, Yanowitz bolsters the anarchist analysis:

"Why did self-proclaimed anarchists create a state? They were not confused or impure. They built a state because they had no choice. Ultimately, states are coercive instruments whereby one class rules society. A workers' state is unique in history because the class wielding power does so in the interests of the vast majority."

Can it be considered "coercive" to stop people ruling or oppression you? (H.4.7) As for "unique in history," quite! So why call it a state? Simply because, in reality, the working class does not wield power in the so-called "workers' state": the party does. This was the case in Russia. The working class never wielded power under the Bolsheviks and here is the most obvious contradiction in Yanowitz's account. (H.3.8) Throughout 1917, Lenin constantly called for the Bolsheviks to seize power not the working class - and that is precisely what happened. The first result of the Bolshevik revolution was the creation of an executive organ above the All-Russian Soviet Congress which was in direct contradiction to Lenin's arguments in "State and Revolution." (H.1.7) From top to bottom of the new state, the Bolsheviks centralised power in executive bodies, gerrymandered soviet elections and simply disbanded any soviet with a non-Bolshevik majority. (H.3.15).

So the working class did not wield power, the Bolsheviks did. This can also be seen by whom the so-called "workers' state" actually repressed. Yanowitz complains that "[i]n the midst of a civil war, [the Makhnovists] emptied all the prisons and jails." Considering who were in Bolshevik jails, they had a point. Of the 17,000 prison camp detainees on whom statistical information was available on 1 November 1920, peasants and workers constituted the largest groups, at 39% and 34% respectively. Similarly, of the 40,913 prisoners held in December 1921 (of whom 44% had been committed by the Cheka) nearly 84% were illiterate or minimally educated, clearly, therefore, either peasants or workers. (George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police, p. 178) I'm also sure that Robespierre and the reactionaries of Thermidor that followed him were disappointed that the ignorant masses had demolished the Bastille. Stalin, I am sure, was grateful that he did not have to build new prisons for the Trotskyists - they simply joined the anarchists and other socialist political prisoners who had been rotting in them since Lenin's time.

As such, Bolshevik Russia confirmed Bakunin warning that "[b]y popular government [the Marxists] mean government of the people by a small under of representatives elected by the people." That is, "government of the vast majority of the people by a privileged minority. But this minority, the Marxists say, will consist of workers. Yes, perhaps, of former workers, who, as soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers' world from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people." (Statism and Anarchy, p. 178)

Or, to quote Trotsky summarising the lessons of the Bolshevik revolution, the "very same masses are at different times inspired by different moods and objectives. It is just for this reason that a centralised organisation of the vanguard is indispensable. Only a party, wielding the authority it has won, is capable of overcoming the vacillation of the masses themselves." (The Moralists and Sycophants, p. 59) Such "vacillation" is expressed by democratic organisations. Unsurprisingly, Trotsky (echoing Lenin) explicitly argued that the "revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party" was "an objective necessity imposed upon us by the social realities -- the class struggle, the heterogeneity of the revolutionary class, the necessity for a selected vanguard in order to assure the victory." This "dictatorship of a party" was essential and "we can not jump over this chapter" of human history. He stressed that the "revolutionary party (vanguard) which renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses to the counter-revolution" and argued that "the party dictatorship" could not be replaced by "the 'dictatorship' of the whole toiling people without any party." This was because the "level of political development among the masses" was not "high" enough as "capitalism does not permit the material and the moral development of the masses." (Trotsky, Writings 1936-37, pp. 513-4)

So much for "the class wielding power"!(H.1.2)

Anarchists are well aware that any libertarian socialist society will not be created overnight. (H.2.5) In fact, as AFAQ proves, we have always been at pains to stress that a social revolution would be difficult, facing both economic disruption and counter-revolution. As such, we know that "[d]uring the civil war, the Ukraine was far from a classless society, as the actions of the Makhnovists show." That, in its own way, gives the game away. Yes, the Bolsheviks were fighting a civil war. The Makhnovists were fighting a revolution, not merely a civil war. So it looks like the old Stalinist argument from the Spanish Revolution of winning the civil war first, then having the revolution has an old heritage.

Yanowitz argues that the Makhnovists "had repeatedly declared overwhelming hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and had nothing but vague platitudes to offer as a substitute." Given that the Bolsheviks themselves equated the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the dictatorship of the party by this time, this in itself suggests that Makhnovist "hostility" was understandable. This rather than "their utopian views prevented them from uniting with the workers' state." Equally, since when were soviet democracy, workers' self-organisation and self-management, freedom of press, association and speech mere "vague platitudes"? How do you expect a socialist society to be created without the active participation of the working class and peasantry? How do you expect an economy not to break-down in the face of centralized bureaucratic ignorance? But then, Yanowitz seems unable to understand what "socialism from below" actually means:

"The Makhnovists were organized with an approach of anarchism from above as the peasant army would roll into a town and obliterate existing state structures before moving on."

Presumably, the Makhnovists should have waited outside of the town leaving the workers to the tender mercies of the Whites until they had organized their own insurrection? What about solidarity? Equally, should the Makhnovists have allowed the White state structures to remain intact? Whatever happened to smashing the capitalist state? The lack of commonsense is staggering. And what was the Bolshevik (and, presumably, "socialism from below") approach? Well, the Red Army would roll into a town and obliterate existing state structures. What happened next is what counts. Rather than impose, as the Bolsheviks did, a revolutionary committee to exercise power the Makhnovists called a soviet conference in order for working class people to start to manage their own affairs by means of their own organizations. Unlike under the Bolsheviks, all parties could publish their papers and their members could, and did, get elected to attend the congress. As Arshinov notes, the "only restriction that the Makhnovists considered necessary to impose on the Bolsheviks, the left Socialist-Revolutionaries and other statists was a prohibition on the formation of those 'revolutionary committees' which sought to impose a dictatorship over the people." (The History of the Makhnovist Movement pp. 153-4)

Now, how is this "anarchism from above"? With his, let me say, unique understanding of up and down, Yanowitz should not be put in charge of a lift never mind a powerful centralised state. That is the fundamental issue. (H.3.2 and H.3.3)As he states in his conclusion:

"But the strength required to fundamentally transform society and set it on new foundations cannot exist only among the enlightened few who 'get it.' Instead, it is found in the collective energy and self-activity of the working class. With their hand on the lever of production, only the working class can revolutionise society. The Russian experience demonstrates they will need a state when they do so-to defend their new gains."

This is precisely what did not happen in Russia precisely because the Bolsheviks created a state! If it had, I'm sure that most anarchists would be Marxists now. Instead, Bakunin's grim predictions of party rule became all too true (i.e., the "dictatorship of the proletariat" quickly became a dictatorship over the proletariat). (H.1.1) The working class was dispossessed of political, economic and social power by the Bolshevik government which implemented its vision of centralised state "socialism" rather than that, for example, of the factory committees ("On three occasions in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory] committees leaders sought to bring their model [of workers' self-management of the economy] into being. At each point the party leadership overruled them. The Bolshevik alternative was to vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them." (Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38)). (H.3.13 and H.3.14)

That any future "socialist" revolution preceded over by Leninists will suffer the same fate can be seen by Yanowitz's words: "when workers' power next establishes itself, its wielders will have to put tremendous energy into helping workers in other countries in their project of self-emancipation." That is, the working class will not be wielding "workers' power" but rather something else will -- namely the party.

Ignoring all the evidence that refutes him (including, ironically, some he mentions himself), Yanowitz states that "Makhno had . . . no generalized plan or vision for the future." (Makhno appendix: 6 and 7)Needless to say, the Makhnovists, like anarchists, had a vision for the future and tried to implement it rather than impose it on an unwilling population as the Bolsheviks did. They also recognised that the means shaped the ends. There is no point having a vision of the future if your current actions take you on a path that leads away from it. Anarchists do not seek perfection; simply that society is changing in ways which will make anarchy more likely rather than less. As Emma Goldman put it, she had not "come to Russia expecting to find Anarchism realised." Such idealism was alien to her (although that has not stopped Leninists saying the opposite). Rather, she expected to see "the beginnings of the social changes for which the Revolution had been fought." She was aware that revolutions were difficult, involving "destruction" and "violence." That Russia was not perfect was not the source of her opposition to Bolshevism. Rather, it was the fact that "the Russian people have been locked out" of their own revolution and that the Bolshevik state used "the sword and the gun to keep the people out." As a revolutionary she refused "to side with the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party."(My Disillusionment in Russia, p. xlvii and p. xlix) That was why she, like so many anarchists then and now, supported the Makhnovists.

Could the Makhnovists have won the civil war? Not on their own. That would have required similar movements in all parts of Russia and the Ukraine. What anarchists argue is that the principles which inspired the Makhnovists and which they tried their best to implement could have. They show that Bolshevik authoritarianism was not simply a product of "objective circumstances" as Leninists argue. Rather, Bolshevik ideology played a key role. Their vanguardism produced the ideological justification for party dictatorship once their popular support receded. (H.5) Their centralism dispossessed working class people from their own revolution and turned organs of popular self-management into marginalised talking shops within a state. Their vision of socialism as "merely state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people" (to use Lenin's term) justified the elimination of the factory committees and workers' control, so making the economic situation worse. (See the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?"). As Kropotkin summarised, "We are learning to know in Russia how not to introduce communism." (Anarchism, p. 254)

Ultimately, the logic in Yanowitz's attack fails him. True, the Makhnovists did not live up to all their anarchist ideals but they did a remarkable job in difficult circumstances. The Bolsheviks did far worse in relation to theirs! Yet, for Marxists, the former must be pilloried far more than the latter. I can only surmise that this is because the Makhnovists, for all their faults, expose the authoritarian core of Bolshevism and show that libertarian alternatives were possible after all.

All I can do is sketch the real facts and sources of disagreement between anarchism and Marxism. I hope that those interested will seek the facts for themselves. As Peter Arshinov put it: "Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else." Hopefully, An Anarchist FAQ would be a good starting place for that journey.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Don't you have anything better to do than to constantly rip at the Bolsheviks? Is there not a struggle between the contending classes outside of our doorsteps? There are far more important things for us to discuss than fighting about a bunch of dead guys with silly mustaches and beards. What is the theoretical importance of this discussion on the class character of the Soviet Union anyway? How will we learn to fight for the future when we viciously fight over the events of the distant past? It's sad - I think we could relate on so many issues, but we divide ourselves along lines of 'vanguardists' and 'anti-authoritarians'. Abbie Hoffman and the New Left were far bigger hemroids on the worker's movement than the Bolsheviks ever were.

[abbielives!]

Just as there is a unconquerable divide between wages slaves and owners, so there is among those who belive in democracy and those who would be totalitarian. while this leads to a loss of tatical power it is nessisary for the greater strategic gain.

now if you would address the essay..

[Labor Shall Rule]

No, I won't address the essay. We had this debate thousands of times already: we could practically compose a novel as long as the Bible filled with what we have wrote within this forum on the subject of the Russian Revolution if we had to.

Abbie Hoffman however, was a lumpen - a street criminal, a drug dealer, a low-life addict; he provided no strategy and disastrous tactics that isolated the workers during a time in which potential to build a mass movement existed. The New Left was unorganized, undisciplined, and really just repulsive on a number of levels. They held rallies in which youths would parade through the streets naked, carrying flowers and theatre masks. People who make obscene displays in order to "express themselves" or shock people make us all look terrible. I believe the average worker, looking at these people, saw first a movement lead by has-beens who have no direction and a vanguard of people who are offensive for the sake of being offensive. If this is the best we can do, we're already defeated. When the time comes and the crap hits the fan, its the armed, organized fascists that are going to take power, not the peace and love crowd with its chants, cardboard signs, oversized top-hats, and temper tantrums. Abbielives, bury the goddamned peace sign and raise the sickle and hammer.

[abbielives!]

yes we have had this debate a thousand times and we will continue to have it until you concede.

you may not like the new left, but the fact is they sucsessfully mobalized millions of people.
as for Abbie being a 'lumpen' who gives a damn revolution will be made the people or not at all.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by abbielives!@June 10, 2007 03:25 am
yes we have had this debate a thousand times and we will continue to have it until you concede.

you may not like the new left, but the fact is they sucsessfully mobalized millions of people.
as for Abbie being a 'lumpen' who gives a damn revolution will be made the people or not at all.
I think that all the Bolsheviks on this forum should have a boycott of all topics pertaining to the Russian Revolution - maybe it will get the anarchists to stop.

They mobilized 'millions' of people? Where is your evidence? What did they really accomplish? Do you know what a lumpen is? Do you really think that the leadership of a revolution should be a pocketful of criminals?

[Rawthentic]

I dig what you are saying Dali, this shit is so stupid and ridiculous.

I dont know if we can stop it thought, it seems to be ingrained into their thinking.

Their lack of a materialist understanding shows here more than ever.

Oh, bOlShEvIks, EvIl tYrANnY!

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

The anarchists never bring up anarchist collaboration with capitalist states, maybe its why they bang on about Leninism to divert attention.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10, 2007 03:39 am

I think that all the Bolsheviks on this forum should have a boycott of all topics pertaining to the Russian Revolution - maybe it will get the anarchists to stop.

They mobilized 'millions' of people? Where is your evidence? What did they really accomplish? Do you know what a lumpen is? Do you really think that the leadership of a revolution should be a pocketful of criminals?

aww, those mean anarchists are debunking Leninism again.

just couple examples of what the new left acomplished: civil rights for blacks, desegrigation, end to Vietnam war, womens rights, a general assualt on puritain values, the enviromental movement, exposesure of cointelpro program, native rights, toppling of Nixon and Johnson admins. , emergance of youth culture, gay rights, etc
generally the biggest mass movement since the depression

lumpen- class of people marx falsley reguarded as having no revolutionary potental

all revolutionaries are criminals in the eyes of the elite (bolshevik or capitalist)

[Rawthentic]

And the reality is that the only real revolutionaries were the communists, such as the Black Panther Party, who really mobilized the Black proletariat as a revolutionary body.

The Abbie Hoffman hippie-types were just smoking weed and fucking in their communes, what idiots and morons they really were. And are.

[syndicat]

well, i'm old enough that i was around for the "New Left". The Yippies evolved into merely a ring of drug dealers...capitalists in fact. But the New Left also included an emphasis upon participatory democracy, and that was a valuable revival. The union i helped to build in the early '70s was based on this.

The Panthers were a complex mix. They were influenced by "third world" marxism as was the radical left in general in that era. People hadn't yet learned about what the real class nature of the regimes in Vietnam, China, Cuba were. One of my co-workers in 1969 was a member of the BPP and he and I got along fine. His emphasis was a moral position, that black people, as an oppressed group, should be in solidarity with each other. Like the Panthers in general he wasn't anti-white.

I didn't buy the Marxist-Leninist schtick because it was obvious to me that the workers in the "Communist" countries were still a subjugated and exploited class.

Some of you may remember redstar2000. He and I were in two different radical left groups together in the '70s. He had been a Marxist-Leninist in the '60s but developed a critique of Leninism based on his experience of Leninism in practice.

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Now i have read the entire article, i am left wondering why this guy is attacking Leninists and the Bolsheviks? :blink:

I mean, for all the faults of the societies that were created, state power was taken from the capitalist class.

The anarchists in Spain and Mexico think you can win the revolution without taking power.

They postulate that there is no need for central government or a state, yet in the Spanish revolution, the Anarchist Leadership, Openly stated that in order to win the civil war, they needed centralization.

I mean, the anarchist Leadership joined the Madrid government, they should be commended for fighting the fascists but really they missed a massive opportunity to carry on the workers rule in some parts of Spain all because they were so scared of setting up a state of their own.

So, while Marxists and anarchists should be critical of each other, anarchism has suffered monumental failure in that its not even had an opportunity to fail as Marxism unfortunately has.

[Labor Shall Rule]

It was a failed opportunity; the anarchists subordinated themselves, rather than maintaining their independent position by seizing control of the political power. Federica Montseny, a chief anarchist orator and organizer, claims in the following video that the anarchist leadership was reluctant to take such an historic step because it "meant we would be betraying a pact of common struggle we had that was sealed in the blood of so many men from different sides -- communists, socialists, syndicalists, and above all, anarchists. It would of meant betraying that pact, and doing in Catalonia what Lenin and Trotsky did in the Soviet Union with the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks."

Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUig0lFHDDw)

According to Abel Paz, in Durruti: The People Armed, the revolutionary martyr's final words were:


"A single thought, a single objective...: destroy fascism.... At the present time no one is concerned about increasing wages or reducing hours of work... to sacrifice oneself, to work as much as required... we must form a solid block of granite. The moment has arrived for the unions and political organizations to finish with the enemy once and for all. Behind the front, administrative skills are necessary.... After this war is over, let's not provoke, through our incompetence, another civil war among ourselves.... To oppose fascist tyranny, we must present a single force: there must exist only a single organization, with a single discipline."

Fascism/Anti-Fascism (http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/fasant06.htm)

It was the subjection to the popular frontist tactic of anti-fascism, and their unwillingness to carry on their revolutionary objectives, that ultimately betrayed the workers of Spain in the end -- they collaborated with the bourgeois class, and they were slowly torn into peices as factories and land plots were returned to their owners, as worker militias were integrated into the armed forces, and as remaining elements of the revolutionary leadership were thrown in dungeons and executed by the NKVD. Montseny later went on to say "we have been criticized for not doing it [seizing power]. Perhaps; Perhaps we should of done it."

Even if the anarchists were the 'minority', I don't think that should of stopped them from seizing control of the state power -- after all, they legitimately represented the revolutionary workers and peasants in Spain; they were the most advanced, conscious section of the proletarian -- the revolutionary vanguard that was capable of taking on a leading role of example for the rest of the workers in Spain. It is this allusion of 'democracy' and 'anti-authoritarianism', that is clearly displayed in Spain, that we can associate the anarchists with plain defeatism and bankruptcy.

[KC]

Just as there is a unconquerable divide between wages slaves and owners, so there is among those who belive in democracy and those who would be totalitarian. while this leads to a loss of tatical power it is nessisary for the greater strategic gain.

Totalitarian is a bourgeois rhetorical term.


just couple examples of what the new left acomplished: civil rights for blacks, desegrigation, end to Vietnam war, womens rights, a general assualt on puritain values, the enviromental movement, exposesure of cointelpro program, native rights, toppling of Nixon and Johnson admins. , emergance of youth culture, gay rights, etc

The "New-Left" is really good at solving a problem without actually solving it. Next you'll be saying that racism doesn't exist anymore and that we should now be focusing our energy on saving the trees...


Now i have read the entire article

Why waste your time?

[syndicat]

bloody:

The anarchists in Spain and Mexico think you can win the revolution without taking power.

This is simply false. The CNT's program called for replacing the Republican state with a structure of regional and national worker congresses, made up of delegates elected from assemblies at the base, and regional and national Defense Councils, to control the social self-defense function (miltia, courts), to replace the state. And seizure of all the industries by the workers and development of a system of social planning from below. That obviously would mean that the working class would have taken over the running of the country.



They postulate that there is no need for central government or a state, yet in the Spanish revolution, the Anarchist Leadership, Openly stated that in order to win the civil war, they needed centralization.

What they called for was replacement of the uncoordinated scheme of separate party and union militias with a unified people's militia and a unified command, controlled by committees elected by the unions, and under the auspices of the Defense Councils (see above).



I mean, the anarchist Leadership joined the Madrid government, they should be commended for fighting the fascists but really they missed a massive opportunity to carry on the workers rule in some parts of Spain all because they were so scared of setting up a state of their own.

Only partially true. You have to keep in mind that you're talking about a mass anarcho-syndicalist union organization. This union organization did in fact carry on workers rule in the region of Aragon, where they did set up a regional congress elected from the villages and an elected Defense Council elected by the unions.

The union joined the national government in Nov. 1936 only after the UGT, controlled by the Socialists and Communists, veto'd their proposal for a joint UGT/CNT national defense council and national workers congress.


So, while Marxists and anarchists should be critical of each other, anarchism has suffered monumental failure in that its not even had an opportunity to fail as Marxism unfortunately has.
In this case the Spanish Marxists share the responsibility for the failure.

reddali refers to Federica Montseny's argument for her opposition to the CNT replacing the government of Catalonia. it needs to be said that this was only one view. at the regional plenary of the CNT of Catalonia in July of 1936 where the decision to "temporarily" not overthrow the government of Catalonia was made, this happened only after a debate. the unions of Baix Llobregat, an industrial region just south of Barcelona, argued for the unions to take power, and thus carry out their program. Montseny's confusion derives from her failure to look at it from a class point of view (as Garcia Oliver points out in his memoir), seeing that what was needed was uniting the working class in a new structure of class power, and which could have retained the unity with socialist, communist, anarchist and syndicalist workers she describes, but which would have exluded the party leaders of the Republican and other parties who were drawn from the professional, managerial and business classes.

However, through further debate in the CNT over the next six weeks, the CNT was brought around to proposing exactly that sort of solution, through the proposal for labor defense councils to replace the government, based on worker congresses.

The CNT did not need an agreement with the other unions to take power in Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon, where it was the majority, tho it should have offered them participation, but it did need the UGT's agreement for a worker-run structure to take power in Madrid, where the socialists and communists and the UGT were dominant, and similarly in Asturias and most of the center of the country. The idea of a political minority imposing its will on the working class is no doubt consistent with reddali's Leninism, but is not consistent with a perspective that takes seriously the principle that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves." It was also probably not do-able given the balance of forces in things like armed militias in the Madrid area.

This is why the CNT had committed itself in May 1936 to the development of a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the UGT. Its failure was in not forcing the UGT's hand in all the places where it had the power to do so, especially in Catalonia.

[Labor Shall Rule]

To Syndicat:

"reddali refers to Federica Montseny's argument for her opposition to the CNT replacing the government of Catalonia. it needs to be said that this was only one view. at the regional plenary of the CNT of Catalonia in July of 1936 where the decision to "temporarily" not overthrow the government of Catalonia was made, this happened only after a debate."

You can't have a 'temporary' measure when there is class forces that want to destroy you; over 3 million fascist troops, tanks, and airplanes, which included personnel from Italy and Germany. Not to mention, Manuel Azaña, Francisco
Largo Caballero, José Giral, and Juan Negrin -- the bourgeois puppets of the Second Republic, had at their disposal a momentous force that was armed and trained to not only combat the fascist current, but also the revolutionary spasm that arised in Aragon, Basque, and Catalonia.

"the unions of Baix Llobregat, an industrial region just south of Barcelona, argued for the unions to take power, and thus carry out their program."

Why did they not do this in all of Spain?

"Montseny's confusion derives from her failure to look at it from a class point of view (as Garcia Oliver points out in his memoir), seeing that what was needed was uniting the working class in a new structure of class power, and which could have retained the unity with socialist, communist, anarchist and syndicalist workers she describes, but which would have exluded the party leaders of the Republican and other parties who were drawn from the professional, managerial and business classes."

Garcia Oliver? I think he failed to examine the situation from a "class point of view", considering that he became a bourgeois minister in Caballero's government. In a top secret document sent to NKVD, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, General Consul of the Soviet Union in Barcelona, stated the following about Juan Garcia Oliver:


"My conversations with Garcia Oliver and with several other CNT members, and their latest speeches, attest to the fact that the leaders of the CNT have an honest and serious wish to concentrate all forces in a strengthened united front and on the development of military action against the fascists. I must note that the PSUC is not free from certain instances that hamper the "consolidation of a united front": in particular, although the Liaison Commission has just been set up, the party organ Treball suddenly published an invitation to the CNT and the FAI that, since the experience with the Liaison Commission had gone so well, the UGT and the PSUC had suggested that the CNT and the FAI create even more unity in the form of an action commission.

"The idea of a political minority imposing its will on the working class is no doubt consistent with reddali's Leninism, but is not consistent with a perspective that takes seriously the principle that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves."

The composition of the CNT were workers and poorer sections of the peasantry, correct? Then why is it "not consistent" with the perspective that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the the workers themselves"? Marx wrote that quote for Hochberg, Bernstein, and Shramm; the "three Zurichers" who were apart of the opportunistic wing of the Social Democratic Party, and also for Zukunft and Neue Gesellschaft, periodicals that were distributed in Berlin and Zurich that called for the petit-bourgeois -- the shop-owners and small proprietors, to lead the urban proletariat since they were more 'educated' and since they 'knew what could be achieved in their time'; this brilliant quote can not be applied to this situation, since he was pounding the viewpoint that the petit-bourgeoisie should not hold the position of leadership, not that a political minority shouldn't seize the state power.

[syndicat]

reddali:

You can't have a 'temporary' measure when there is class forces that want to destroy you; over 3 million fascist troops, tanks, and airplanes, which included personnel from Italy and Germany. Not to mention, Manuel Azaña, Francisco Largo Caballero, José Giral, and Juan Negrin -- the bourgeois puppets of the Second Republic, had at their disposal a momentous force that was armed and trained to not only combat the fascist current, but also the revolutionary spasm that arised in Aragon, Basque, and Catalonia.

I've agreed that the decision in July of 1936 to not sweep away the Generalitat and replace it with the worker congress and defense council, as per the CNT's program, was a mistake. So what's your point?


"the unions of Baix Llobregat, an industrial region just south of Barcelona, argued for the unions to take power, and thus carry out their program."

Why did they not do this in all of Spain?
I've already gone over this. at their national plenary of Sept 3, 1936 the CNT did in fact propose the unions doing this in all of Spain. but it was their view that the balance of forces were such that they required the support of the workers of the UGT, especially in regions where the UGT was dominant, and in the summer of 1936, that meant the UGT also had the dominant armed millitias at its disposal in those areas.


Garcia Oliver? I think he failed to examine the situation from a "class point of view", considering that he became a bourgeois minister in Caballero's government. In a top secret document sent to NKVD, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, General Consul of the Soviet Union in Barcelona, stated the following about Juan Garcia Oliver:

The quote from the Communists is not an objective assessment. Garcia Oliver chaged his position. In July-August-Sept 1936 he was pushing for the CNT to go for power. The proposal for a national defense council, regional defense councils, worker congresses, unified militia command, etc. were something he was active in working for within the CNT at the time. After he was pressured into being a CNT minister in the government, and he became Minister of Justice, his stance gradually changed. This happened to a lot of influential anarchists and syndicalists who took positions in government or positions in the new army command. It corrupted them. People have a tendency to want to justify their actions. This leads them to change their conceptions to fit their current course. This is exactly what happened to Garcia Oliver.


"The idea of a political minority imposing its will on the working class is no doubt consistent with reddali's Leninism, but is not consistent with a perspective that takes seriously the principle that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves."

The composition of the CNT were workers and poorer sections of the peasantry, correct? Then why is it "not consistent" with the perspective that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the the workers themselves"?

Yes the CNT was made up of workers and poorer peasants. But in Madrid it was a minority of the organized workers. The UGT and its socialist and communist allies had the dominant position, including armed militias they could call on.

I believe that the CNT's best shot would have been to take over in the regions where it was the majority labor organization, and call on the UGT and FOUS (POUM uniions) to join with them. This would have put tremendous pressure on the Left Socialist leadership of the UGT to go along at the national level. This was Durruti's view of the appropriate strategy, as quoted in Abel Paz's biography. This was why Durruti believed that setting up the regional congress and regional defense council in Aragon was so important, to pressure Caballero. But the CNT failed to also do this in Catalonia and Valencia where it had the power to do so (it had defacto armed monopoly).

As it is, Caballero did seriously consider going along with the CNT proposal. But he tended to waver, and allowed himself to be swayed by Manuel Azana, who threatened to resign if the national defense council replaced the government, and by Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador, who warned that the CNT proposal would destroy the international legitimacy of the Spanish republic. Caballero was also swayed by the French imperialist government who were angered by the anarchist proposal to declare Spanish Morocco free and give arms to the Moroccan rebels in exchange for help in appealing to Franco's moroccan troops.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 10, 2007 06:14 am


The Abbie Hoffman hippie-types were just smoking weed and fucking in their communes

you say that like its a bad thing
you could stand to do some of both

[abbielives!]

in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.


its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite

[KC]

you say that like its a bad thing

And you call yourself a revolutionary leftist?



laugh.gif "bourgeois rhetorical term"

Yes.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by abbielives!@June 11, 2007 02:24 am
in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.


its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite
What? :huh:

[Ismail]

Originally posted by abbielives!@June 11, 2007 02:07 am
you say that like its a bad thing
you could stand to do some of both
The world is more than simple-minded teenagers taking drugs and having sex. Indeed, I view our sexualized culture as one of the things that should be changed.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11, 2007 04:45 am
The world is more than simple-minded teenagers taking drugs and having sex. Indeed, I view our sexualized culture as one of the things that should be changed. Our society, I would admit, is a rotten cesspool of drugs, sex, and violence; I don't think that any regular person can turn their television set on and off without seeing something related to that subject matter. But will we turn it into a repressed and banal 'family values' kind of society, or will we transform it into a peice of art? I don't think we can truly accomplish anything on the front of social and cultural enlightenment until we overcome production for exchange.

But I don't it's a correct assumption to claim we are a 'sexualized' culture; I see nothing wrong with sex, and I also don't know how it's some sort of bourgeois perversion -- you can site examples of 'sexualized culture' in even tribal corners of our world, and also discover that throughout certain historical periods, it has not been absent from our textbooks.

But for Abbielives, it seems that he doesn't understand that the New Left was a bunch of college kids that ran around with flowers and accomplished nothing.

[Ismail]

By "sexualized" I mean stuff like people judging others based on superficial value and so on.

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

I'm a pretty big social liberal, though. So I'm not one of the "family values" types. I'm one of the "Stop revolving your world around sex, drugs, and drinking" types. I too see nothing wrong with sex, I just think some people focus on it a bit too much.

In the end, I see this as a part of a bigger issue, with things such as child marketing and so on.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by RedDali+June 11, 2007 04:32 am--> (RedDali @ June 11, 2007 04:32 am)
abbielives!@June 11, 2007 02:24 am
in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.


its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite
What? :huh: [/b]



you have to be a bit more detailed :huh:

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by abbielives!+June 11, 2007 09:36 pm--> (abbielives! @ June 11, 2007 09:36 pm)
Originally posted by [email protected] 11, 2007 04:32 am

abbielives!@June 11, 2007 02:24 am
in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.


its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite
What? :huh:



you have to be a bit more detailed :huh: [/b]
The CNT made mistakes -- but that doesn't mean you can completely write off their revolutionary actions as "anarchism not applied".

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Originally posted by abbielives!@June 11, 2007 03:24 am
in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.


its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite

The leaders of the Spanish Federation of Labour (CNT), the only important anarchist organisation in the world, became, in the critical hour, bourgeois ministers. They explained their open betrayal of the theory of anarchism by the pressure of “exceptional circumstances”. But did not the leaders of German social democracy produce, in their time, the same excuse? Naturally, civil war is not peaceful and ordinary but an “exceptional circumstance”. Every serious revolutionary organisation, however, prepares precisely for “exceptional circumstances”. The experience of Spain has shown once again that the state can be “denied” in booklets published in “normal circumstances” by permission of the bourgeois state, but the conditions of revolution leave no room for the denial of the state: they demand, on the contrary, the conquest of the state. We have not the slightest intention of blaming the anarchists for not having liquidated the state with the mere stroke of a pen. A revolutionary party , even having seized power (of which the anarchist leaders were incapable in spite of the heroism of the anarchist workers), is still by no means the sovereign ruler of society. But all the more severely do we blame the anarchist theory, which seemed to be wholly suitable for times of peace, but which had to be dropped rapidly as soon as the “exceptional circumstances” of the ... revolution had begun. In the old days there were certain generals – and probably are now – who considered that the most harmful thing for an army was war. Little better are those revolutionaries who complain that revolution destroys their doctrine.

Please Read this passage by Trotsky.

He is respectful to the anarchists so it isn't just him bashing the CNT

[syndicat]

Trotsky didn't understand what the "doctrine" of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists was. He thinks they were against replacing the state with a new structure of working class power. That is not the case. In referring to the doctrine of "unusual circumstances," he's not referring to the ideas that were actually present in the debate about whether to take over in July 1936, but were concocted six months after they had agreed to join the national Popular Front government. The thing is, the ideas of the influential militants in government changed over time.

The failure in Catalonia in July of 1936 has more to do with failure of preparation, as Cesar Lorenzo says in "Los anarquistas y el poder". At their congress in May 1936 they failed to discuss a practical strategy to carry out their aim of a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the workers of the UGT. As a result they were "forced to improvize in incoherencea" (Lorenzo). They needed a concept of an institution through which the working class could jointly take over and in which the various unions could be incorporated. They did ultimately come up with this, in Sept 1936, after six weeks of internal debate. But not having such an program in July let Montseny effectively argue that the CNT itself taking over would be a "dictatorship".

An appropriate answer to Montseny would be to say that the proposed regional workers congress would include delegates representing workers in all the unions, not just CNT, and they could vote in electing the Defense Council. But that program was only developed after six weeks of debate in the CNT, and they were only motivated to adopt it when they began to see that allowing the parties to set up their militias was a bad idea, and seeing the Communists gaining headway beating the drum for rebuilding a conventional hierarchical army the Communists would control.

Mistakes are not always due to a theoretical deficiency.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by RedDali+June 12, 2007 01:39 am--> (RedDali @ June 12, 2007 01:39 am)
Originally posted by abbielives!@June 11, 2007 09:36 pm

Originally posted by [email protected] 11, 2007 04:32 am

abbielives!@June 11, 2007 02:24 am
in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.


its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite
What? :huh:



you have to be a bit more detailed :huh:
The CNT made mistakes -- but that doesn't mean you can completely write off their revolutionary actions as "anarchism not applied". [/b]

once they joined the goverment they stopped applying anarchism.
at this point they ceased being revolutionary

[bezdomni]

once they joined the goverment they stopped applying anarchism.
at this point they ceased being revolutionary


How and why did they stop being revolutionary...and why did they make that choice?

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12, 2007 07:02 pm

once they joined the goverment they stopped applying anarchism.
at this point they ceased being revolutionary


How and why did they stop being revolutionary...and why did they make that choice?


i have already anwered the first part.
they ceased to agitate for revolution was because they did not want not weaken the war against the fascists. furthering the revolution would have helped the anarchists though it would have ended the 'popular front'. i think that a guerilla campain would have been in order. this course would have entailed signifigant risk.

[syndicat]

the anarchists did propose guerrilla war in the mountains of Andalucia in 1937 but by then the Stalinists had control over the state and the Soviet Union was the source of arms, and they veto'd arms going to the anarchists for the guerrilla war campaign.

once the CNT had failed to set up union-controlled governance institutions in Catalonia and Valencia in the summer of 1936, replacing the old state, they were trapped in a losing proposition of Popular Front alliance where the Communists had the dominant cards.

[abbielives!]

they could have, and i think, should have waged one without the 'support' of the state. as i said above i think a split with the forces of the republic would have been nessisary.
i don't know how signifigant the lack of arms was, after all in a guerrilla war your main source of arms/ammo is your enemy. see cuban revolution/irish war for independance. the whole idea of waging a traditional war against an enemy with superior equipment and training is suicide. i think the fascists had superior numbers too.

the spainish revolution was interesting and inspiring, but i don't think we should be uncritical of it. unlike certain other people *cough*Leninists*cough*

[syndicat]

we definitely should not be uncritical of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. there were a lot of really inspiring things, things they did right, and very frustrating mistakes.

the problem of arms is as follows. initially the CNT seized all the industries in Catalonia which had 70% of Spain's manufacturing capacity. and they built immediately two dozen plants to make shells, cartridges and armored vehicles for their union militia. but they were desperately short of resources to build up the arms industry. Spain had the fourth largest gold reserves in the world. the CNT joined the national government in part to get some of those resources. in the end, they got very little. they would have done better to follow their original idea in Sept. 1936 to steal a large part of the gold reserve, unless they could get the UGT to go along with the CNT-UGT joint governance structure to replace the state.

as it is 70% of the gold was shipped to Spain. Stalin was basically looting Spain.

so the problem is they needed resources to keep fighting. by Dec. 1936 the union militia had about 100,000 people under arms. that requires a lot of resources to keep an army of that size in the field. by a year later, the Republican army was 400,000 men. it's often said the militia supported the revolution and the army lost the war.

i don't know that they could have gotten their weapons and resources from the enemy. not all parts of Spain were well-suited to guerrilla war.

even if the CNT had taken power in Catalonia and Valencia (bringing the UGT and FOUS (POUM) unions in along with them), forced Caballero to agree to share power with the CNT, and blocked the gold going to Russia, and even if they could have defeated the fascists despite all the aircraft Germany and Italy supplied, they would still have had to deal with the probability of a German invasion of Spain after the fall of France in June 1940.

they would have needed to not only defeat the fascists but also spread the revolution, to Portugal, to Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, to France.

[Rawthentic]

The most important revolution in history was the Russian Revolution, led by "Leninists."

A revolution has never and will never be led by hippies or Abbie Hoffman- type scum.

[syndicat]

the Russian revolution was an abject failure. it led to a pseduo-socialist class system discrediting socialism. it was a country where 80% of the population were self-subsistent peasants, half of whom were illiterate. it was a country ruled over by a semi-feudal police state, which retarded the development of democratic mass organiations.

hierarchical party machines were able to set up top down structures-- the "soviets". the Bolshevik legacy is something that needs to be dumped in the trashbin of history where it belongs.

Catalonia in 1936 was an industrialized region like other areas of western Europe. Spanish agriculture was capitalist. most of the workers in agriculture were wage laborers. only half the population worked in agriculture, not 80%. Spain had both a violent history of labor conflict (like the USA) but also a history of worker mass organization and radical political culture. civil liberties existed under the Spanish republic. in that sense the Spain of the '30s is a bit closer to our own circumstances, tho it is still very different as the world has changed a great deal since the '30s.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 04:46 am

i don't know that they could have gotten their weapons and resources from the enemy. not all parts of Spain were well-suited to guerrilla war.

even if the CNT had taken power in Catalonia and Valencia (bringing the UGT and FOUS (POUM) unions in along with them), forced Caballero to agree to share power with the CNT, and blocked the gold going to Russia, and even if they could have defeated the fascists despite all the aircraft Germany and Italy supplied, they would still have had to deal with the probability of a German invasion of Spain after the fall of France in June 1940.

they would have needed to not only defeat the fascists but also spread the revolution, to Portugal, to Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, to France.

i think that guerrilla war can be adapted to most areas, i also don't see why they could not get arms from the fascists
aircraft are only a problem if you are in an area where there is no cover
again i think a german assualt could be repelled and this time they would have the advantage of getting supplies from other countries, after all even Russia got supplies during WW2 also i dont know how long Germany could have held on to that sized area particularly if it went after russia or if russia went after germany (war was likley inevitable between those two countries)

they would definitly have needed to spead the revolution to morrocco or at least offered them idependace if they fought against franco.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 13, 2007 04:46 am
The most important revolution in history was the Russian Revolution, led by "Leninists."




worker control in the russian revolution lasted from october 1917 until the spring of 1918, when it was destroyed by the new elite Bolshevik class. they did not give power to the masses they gave it to a new elite class.

[Rawthentic]

But then you go on and blame "Leninism" rather than material conditions!

And syndicat, it is your type of mentality, the menshevik crap, that needs to go into the trashbin of history. The idea that the Russian Revolution failed when it brought the working class to power for the first time and created living standards surpassing that of other "advanced" nations.

[syndicat]

And syndicat, it is your type of mentality, the menshevik crap, that needs to go into the trashbin of history. The idea that the Russian Revolution failed when it brought the working class to power for the first time and created living standards surpassing that of other "advanced" nations.

In what way did the working class "hold power"? Holding power would mean that workers themselves actually controlled the decisions. But they didn't. And don't tell me they elected the Bolshevik government. The working class is the majority in the developed countries today. if they elect a party to office, such as the PSOE in Spain or the Swedish social-democrats, does that mean the working class "holds power" in those countries? well, no, because those are capitalist countries. and the bureaucratic layer was empowered from the beginning in the Russian revolution. they didn't really control most local soviets. and only some of the enterprises, and then only til control by the factory committees was done away with during the civil war.

and living standards there in the '30s were very poor -- wages were very low, housing was very crowded, etc. certainly never came up to the level of the developed capitalist countries. did do better than some other poor countries such as Brazil during that era.

it wasn't only the material conditions that defeated the revolution. defeat of the revolution means that a new bureaucratic dominating class was consolidated over the working class. this came about from the very policies preferred by the Bolsheviks, and still advocated by Leninists, such as statist management of industry, central planning. Leninists don't advocate direct worker management of production or horizontal participatory planning. Leninists advocating a party taking power by controlling a state. that will inevitably empower a bureaucratic class.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 13, 2007 02:05 pm
But then you go on and blame "Leninism" rather than material conditions!

And syndicat, it is your type of mentality, the menshevik crap, that needs to go into the trashbin of history. The idea that the Russian Revolution failed when it brought the working class to power for the first time and created living standards surpassing that of other "advanced" nations.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the ones who started the dicatorship not the 'material condititions'.
and don't give me that bullshit that they were elected, Hitler was elected by popular vote and he turned germany into a totalitarian state, in the same way that lenin did to russia. elections are not a mandate to create a dictatorship.

thr russian revolution did not bring the worker class to power, it brought the Bolsheviks to power.
replacing the old capitalist class with a new "communist" class.

[Rawthentic]

Leninists advocating a party taking power by controlling a state. that will inevitably empower a bureaucratic class.

This is the part of your strawman that I will refute. "Leninists", whatever the fuck you mean by that, are for the working class taking power and creating a worker's state, not a state in the conventional sense, but run by worker's councils and assemblies, armed to the core to defend itself. I'm not playing your ignorant semantics games.


this came about from the very policies preferred by the Bolsheviks, and still advocated by Leninists, such as statist management of industry, central planning.
Oh yeah, the Bolsheviks did it for fun&#33; Not because Russia was in a brutal Civil War or had retreated from a world war or because it was struggling to leave the Middle Ages. <_<

Moron.

[syndicat]

QUOTE
this came about from the very policies preferred by the Bolsheviks, and still advocated by Leninists, such as statist management of industry, central planning.


Oh yeah, the Bolsheviks did it for fun&#33; Not because Russia was in a brutal Civil War or had retreated from a world war or because it was struggling to leave the Middle Ages.

Moron.

Do you support hierarchical state management of industry? That is, appointment of managers by the state? Leninists have always supported this.

Or do you support self-management of industry via worker assemblies and elected councils and congresses of delegates? Do you support central planning?

Leninists have traditionally not supported self-management and have supported central planning.

Those methods were not adopted by the Bolsheviks in 1917-18 because of "adverse material conditions". They never made any such argument. They were part of the centralist approach that is a core part of Leninism.

Oh, and insults are childish.

[Rawthentic]

So are your idealist misconceptions on the Bolshevik Revolution.


Or do you support self-management of industry via worker assemblies and elected councils and congresses of delegates? Do you support central planning?


I support this, but it isn&#39;t antithetical to Lenin&#39;s theories.

[syndicat]

Or do you support self-management of industry via worker assemblies and elected councils and congresses of delegates? Do you support central planning?

I support this, but it isn&#39;t antithetical to Lenin&#39;s theories.

There are two different questions. If you support central planning, you can&#39;t also support self-management -- they are flatly inconsistent. "democratic centralism", central planning, and state management of industry are flatly inconsistent with workers selfmanagement and power residing in the base assemblies of workers.

[Rawthentic]

Democratic centralism, not bureaucratic centralism, is freedom of dissent within a workers party for all views, and then unity in action where a common platform is adopted. Majority groups can become minorities, and minorities have all the right and ability to become majorities.

[syndicat]

you never answered the question of whether you support central planning.

[Rawthentic]

I support direct worker&#39;s control of society, and like I said, is inclusive with democratic centralism, it is how the working people&#39;s political party should operate.

[syndicat]

Maybe you don&#39;t understand what central planning is. It&#39;s a way to organize an economy. It means that there is an elite group of planners. they collect information about what consumer demand is, and about the production capacity of the various facilities in the economy. they then devise a plan for production and give marching orders to the various groups of workers in the various production facilities.

this system is obviously incompatible with workers self-management. Self-management means controlling the decisions that affect you. if some elite group is making those decisions and giving you orders, that tramples on and denies your self-management. it is a form of "alienated labor" because it reduces the worker to a mere tool of the elite.

this system typically also leads to bosses being imposed from above over workers. that&#39;s because the central planners will want to have people on site
to make sure their plans are carrie out.

hence you end up with a class system, and it should be no surprise that this bureaucratic class of experts, planners and managers will make more money, assign various privileges to themselvs and so on. that&#39;s what a ruling class will do.

[bezdomni]

This makes so little sense, I don&#39;t know where to begin...


Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the ones who started the dicatorship not the &#39;material condititions&#39;.
Yeah...because the bolsheviks didn&#39;t have mass support from the workers or anything...

OMG ELECTED PROLETARIAN OFFICIALS SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE RECALL&#33; SOUNDS LIKE A DICTATORSHIP&#33;

The only dictatorship established by the bolsheviks was the dictatorship of the proletariat.


and don&#39;t give me that bullshit that they were elected, Hitler was elected by popular vote and he turned germany into a totalitarian state, in the same way that lenin did to russia. elections are not a mandate to create a dictatorship.

Uh, no.

Hitler worked entirely contrary to the interests of the working class and abolished even bourgeois democracy. Germany was entirely subservient to the caste of bourgeois that dominated the Nazi party.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, represented the interests of the proletariat and worked entirely against the interests of the bourgeoisie. Also unlike Hitler, democracy was greatly expanded in the Soviet Union once the proletariat seized state power.

In fact, the only way Hitler and Lenin can really be compared is that they were both statesmen and they both effected the world in very important ways. Lenin, in a profoundly positive way; and Hitler, in a profoundly negative way (at least from a proletarian perspective).


thr russian revolution did not bring the worker class to power, it brought the Bolsheviks to power.
No, the working class brought the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to power, because the CPSU was made up pretty much entirely made up of workers and peasants.


replacing the old capitalist class with a new "communist" class.
No...the bourgeoisie was replaced as the ruling class by the proletariat. Nice try though.

[Forward Union]

We must have gone over this several time by now?


Originally posted by [email protected] 14, 2007 07:47 pm
Yeah...because the bolsheviks didn&#39;t have mass support from the workers or anything...

That really is a side issue, as even the nazis had popular support to begin with.

Just look at the top 10 songs in the charts today. Popular sure doesnt mean right.


The only dictatorship established by the bolsheviks was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And yet, within weeks of this wonderful soviet experinment (prior to the civil war) the decision making power of the soviets was being dissolved, taken away from the workers and placed in the hands of foreign, capitalist industry advisors I forget the official name of the panel, but it, along with leading members, has been well documented (though perhaps not in the books you read).The workers were not deemed capable of understanding &#39;national industry&#39; They were only alowed limited decision making power in regards to local industry. But even this was short lived.

Eventually, syndicalist unions were banned (due to growing popularity, and events like kronstadt) as were all "anti-government leaflets" leading Libertarian-communists were executed and imprisoned. Then the civil war broke out and things got worse.

The Russians done deals with Imperialist Germany, giving away land won in the revolution. And when the Workers Militias in these regions (coined the Makhnovists) prepared for battle with the German military (which it had defeated just 3 years prior) the Bolsheviks needlessly invaded, and destroyed the first example of democratic workers councils, in Ukraine, on behalf of the German empire.

For the next several decades workers struggles in this region were be basiaclly stamped out completely. With a few exceptions.

I don&#39;t know how you can honestly appologise for this grotesque failure.


Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, represented the interests of the proletariat and worked entirely against the interests of the bourgeoisie. Also unlike Hitler, democracy was greatly expanded in the Soviet Union once the proletariat seized state power.

For the blink of an eye, yes. But as has been well documented, and admitted even by Lenin this "democracy" really didn&#39;t last very long. The Solidarity Federation in the UK done some wonderful pamphlets with a wide array of sources and references relating to everything i have basically been saying. Unfortunatly the online version has been taken down.

[Herman]

Hitler was elected by popular vote

No, he wasn&#39;t. Read a tad more of history, please.

[Rawthentic]

I can&#39;t deny what the anarchdude says here, but the whole problem with their idealist premise is that they blame "Leninism" or even Marxism, as something inherent within their ideology that "magically" causes revolutions to degenerate.

[Leo]

No, he wasn&#39;t. Read a tad more of history, please.

The Nazis had gotten 37% of the vote in the elections in July 1932 and they were the biggest party in the parliament, although they didn&#39;t have the majority in the parliament. In January 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg decided to appoint Hitler Chancellor.

[syndicat]

the Bolsheviks never actually got a majority in any national election. In Oct 1917 there was a meeting of the Congress of Soviets. This represented only the urban workers and the soldiers and sailors. The peasantry, who were 80% of the population, had a separate organization, the Peasant Congress. But even at the Congress of Soviets in Oct 1917 the Bolsheviks did not have a majority.

At the begining of the meeting of that congress, the Mensheviks put forward a motion to make the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress into a goverment of the entire left. This got a huge ovation. It didn&#39;t happen only because of what transpired later in the day. At one point the Bolsheviks, who were not a majority but had a large delegation, sprung their suprise: they demanded, since they&#39;d orchestrated the military overthrow of the Provisional Government, that a new Council of People&#39;s Commissars, controlled by them, be made the government. At that point the Right SRs and Right Mensheviks, who had been supporters of the provisional government, walked out. With them gone, the Bolsheviks now had a majority of the remaining delegates and were thus able to elect themselves into power.

But they couldn&#39;t ignore the peasant congress since the peasants were 80% of the pouplation. So in November there was a meeting of the Peasant Congress and Right SRs walked out in protest again. That left the Left SRs in control. The Left SRs then agreed to merge the Peasant Congress with the Soviet Congress and in exchange the Bolsheviks agreed to form a coalition government with them.

But there was never really a free election again of the Soviet Congress. By the next meeting in the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks had already begun using the cheka to suppress various political organizations of the Left.

if you look at elections to the local soviets, the Bolsheviks lost the elections to the local soviets in 19 provincial cities in European Russia in the spring of 1918. The Mensheviks and SRs won the majorities. The Bolsheviks responded by abolishing those soviets or refusing to leave power.

so much for the myth about "recallable delegates"&#33;

[syndicat]

I can&#39;t deny what the anarchdude says here, but the whole problem with their idealist premise is that they blame "Leninism" or even Marxism, as something inherent within their ideology that "magically" causes revolutions to degenerate.

Do you think that ideas make no difference in history? If not, why do you care you or anyone else or any political organization advocates?

The problem is that the program the Bolsheviks put into practice leads inevitably to emergence of a new dominating class, of managers and top professionals, -- the government officers, management, officer corps, political party leaders, etc.

This derives from things like:

central planning
appointing "one-man managers" over workers
creating a hierarchical army, hiring 30,000 czarist officers to run it, with privileges
stripping the workplace committees of their autonomy
creating a highly indirect system for electing the top administrative committee (Sovnarkom) so that it wasn&#39;t really accountable.

You talk about "material conditions" being the source of all their problems. was this their program or not? if not, what was their "real" program? when did they ever say, "Well X is our real program but we just can&#39;t do that now so we&#39;re going to do Y instead"?

[Rawthentic]

Do you think that ideas make no difference in history? If not, why do you care you or anyone else or any political organization advocates?
Since Marxism is not a dogma, material conditions dictate who things turn out.


f not, what was their "real" program? when did they ever say, "Well X is our real program but we just can&#39;t do that now so we&#39;re going to do Y instead"?
This was their program. But to blame "Leninism" is like saying that poor people steal because they are monstrous and greedy instead of analyzing why they steal (hungry, cold, etc.)

[syndicat]

This was their program. But to blame "Leninism" is like saying that poor people steal because they are monstrous and greedy instead of analyzing why they steal (hungry, cold, etc.)

okay, but the program is what Leninism is. if you admit that this program, when implemented, leads to the emergence of a bureaucratic ruling class, why do you support Leninism?


Since Marxism is not a dogma, material conditions dictate who things turn out.

so you think that humans are mindless automatons that are just mechanical reflections of "material conditions"? you don&#39;t think that the actors have any control over the outcome? why, then, do you care about what political viewpoint to advocate?

[Rawthentic]

This is stupid.



so you think that humans are mindless automatons that are just mechanical reflections of "material conditions"? you don&#39;t think that the actors have any control over the outcome? why, then, do you care about what political viewpoint to advocate?
This is dumb. The Bolsheviks implemented the program (its consequences are irrelevant here although I agree with you as to what they caused) as responses to the material conditions facing Russia, not because they were "evil" or cool.



okay, but the program is what Leninism is

Dealt with above.

[syndicat]

This is dumb. The Bolsheviks implemented the program (its consequences are irrelevant here although I agree with you as to what they caused) as responses to the material conditions facing Russia, not because they were "evil" or cool.

that their program was merely a "response to material conditions" is shown to be false by the fact that other political tendencies in the Russian revolution were immersed in the same material conditions but differed about the way forward.

further, the program itself would lead to the emergence of a professional/managerial ruling class even if conditions were less austere. Central planning itself is a violation of worker and community self-managment because it concentrates expertise and knowledge and authority in a planning elite, and tends to lead them to favor managers being set up over workers, as actually happened.

this tendency of central planning would emerge even under better conditions. the same is true for the other aspects of the program that i referred to. So, either you advocate this program or not. if you advocate it, agreeing that it leads to a bureaucratic ruling class over the workers, then you advocate the continued existence of the class system, not the liberation of the working class from class oppression.

therefore, by conceding that Leninism is that program, the program they implemented, then i&#39;d point out a Leninist is commiting himself to a program that can&#39;t possibly liberate the working class but could only lead to its continued subordination to a dominating class, and thus continued exploitation.

it isn&#39;t a question of whether the program is regarded as "cool" or "good" by anyone but what it&#39;s consequences would be. if it&#39;s consequences would inevitably be a new system of class oppression and exploitation, why advocate it?

[Rawthentic]

If I was a "Leninist", here in the United States where I live, you are saying that I would advocate central planning and managers dictating production? False.

I want the working class to destroy the capitalist state and establish its very own working people&#39;s republic based in the workplace and community.

This is a reason why I tend to uphold more Lenin the theoretician than the politician.

[syndicat]

Before you seemed to acknowledge that Leninism was it&#39;s program for revolution. We discussed that program. Now you say you don&#39;t advocate that program. If that program is Leninism and you don&#39;t advocate it, then it follows you&#39;re not a Leninist. So now it seems you&#39;re saying that the progam they advocated, and which we&#39;ve discussed, ISN&#39;T what Leninism is. If so, then what is Leninism? What "theory" of Lenin do you "uphold"?

[Forward Union]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente Trabajad[email protected] 15, 2007 01:53 am
This is dumb. The Bolsheviks implemented the program (its consequences are irrelevant here although I agree with you as to what they caused) as responses to the material conditions facing Russia, not because they were "evil" or cool.

In the same way that the "material conditions" for a square peg will not allow it to go through a round hole. And never will.

Not only did leninism fail in Russia, but every application. That&#39;s a significant failure rate. It also insisted on destroying all Libertarian projects it could, for almost no reason (other than the political threat)

[Rawthentic]

It failed?

Ok, so what is Leninism?

[Vargha Poralli]

Originally posted by "Urban Spirit"

Not only did leninism fail in Russia, but every application. That&#39;s a significant failure rate. It also insisted on destroying all Libertarian projects it could, for almost no reason (other than the political threat)

Really funny when we see track of Achievements of anarchism.

Atleast Leninism was tried once. And also lead to various advancements in Various countries.

If we have to abandon Leninism for being tried once and failed why we have even to try anarchism which have never met with any success.

[Rawthentic]

I also want to know how "Leninism" was "applied" according to them.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Bolshevism was applicated in the Soviet Union. All later experiments were products of the bureaucratized stratum that arised. China, Spain, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Cuba -- they were all serious blows in the stomach of global imperialism, but certainly not a practical flexing of Bolshevism; there was no proletarian party to act as the leadership, and they were based primarily around the peasantry and proprietor classes rather than an independent proletariat.

[abbielives!]

once again it is absurd to say that materal conditions required dictatorship is absurd, the makhnovists clearly demonstrate that other meathods of organization were possible.
to argue that the soviet union was not a dicatorship is crazy.
only the proletariat can know what their interests are, you cannot reprsent their interests for them
the people in the CPSU may have once been workers but once they accepted a postion with higher reward they ceased to be a member of the working class

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by g.ram+June 15, 2007 03:50 pm--> (g.ram @ June 15, 2007 03:50 pm)
"Urban Spirit"

Not only did leninism fail in Russia, but every application. That&#39;s a significant failure rate. It also insisted on destroying all Libertarian projects it could, for almost no reason (other than the political threat)

Really funny when we see track of Achievements of anarchism.

Atleast Leninism was tried once. And also lead to various advancements in Various countries.

If we have to abandon Leninism for being tried once and failed why we have even to try anarchism which have never met with any success. [/b]

we object to Leninism because it will always produce a failure like Russia, because THE THEORY IS FLAWED it is not that it was not applied or not applied correctly -it&#39;s that is does not produce the kind of society we want

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 15, 2007 03:54 pm
I also want to know how "Leninism" was "applied" according to them.

it was applied in russia by lenin himself.

[Severian]

Originally posted by abbielives&#33;+June 11, 2007 03:36 pm--> (abbielives&#33; @ June 11, 2007 03:36 pm)
Originally posted by RedDali+June 11, 2007 04:32 am--> (RedDali &#064; June 11, 2007 04:32 am)
abbielives&#33;@June 11, 2007 02:24 am
in my own opinion the actions of the CNT leadership are indefensable, a clear violation of anarchist priciples. it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.

its true that power was taken from the capitalist class, it was taken, and then given to the party elite
What? :huh: [/b]

you have to be a bit more detailed :huh: [/b]
You want more detail? What the fuck are you talking about? When was power taken from the capitalist class?

The Spanish Republic was a coalition government dominated by capitalist parties....and anarchist leaders even became capitalist ministers.

Please, read a book.


somebody
it is absurd to say that Spain represents a failure of anarchism because the theory was not applied.

Hm, let&#39;s apply that type of excuse to some other situations.

"It is absurd to say that support to the imperialist First World War represents a failure of social-democracy, because the theory was not applied." (Their theory called for opposing all sides of that war.)

"It is absurd to say that the Spanish Stalinists&#39; betrayal of the revolution represents a failure of Stalinism, because the theory was not applied." (In theory, they claimed to be communists and not defenders of capitalist rule.)

Etc.

Now if anarchism is supposed to represent something better than social-democracy and Stalinism (let alone actual communism), then you have to show the ability to apply your radical-sounding slogans about smashing the state....when the opportunity to do so actually arrives.

So far, when it counts, anarchists&#39; opposition to workers taking state power into our own hands.....has always amounted in practice, to leaving state power in the hands of the capitalists.

Which isn&#39;t surprising, since those are the two realistic choices.

[Forward Union]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 03:50 pm
Really funny when we see track of Achievements of anarchism.

I would say it has had limited succes in, Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, England and Korea, which have been halted by either the popularity and millitary force of leninism or of the bourguisie in the 17th and 20th centuries.

The point to be made is that unlike Leninism, the Anarchist projects did not collapse due to any internal faults (that&#39;s not to say there weren&#39;t any) They&#39;re not prone to material conditions that mean that the new ruling party suddenly needs to command a lot of power and wealth...

Frankly we can&#39;t make the same conclusions about Anarchism as we can Leninism, because one has been tried on a mass scale and failed 100% of the time, the other has been tried in marginal conditions, and worked until removed by external factors.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Severian+June 18, 2007 06:58 am--> (Severian &#064; June 18, 2007 06:58 am)
You want more detail? What the fuck are you talking about? When was power taken from the capitalist class?

The Spanish Republic was a coalition government dominated by capitalist parties....and anarchist leaders even became capitalist ministers.

Please, read a book.

Now if anarchism is supposed to represent something better than social-democracy and Stalinism (let alone actual communism), then you have to show the ability to apply your radical-sounding slogans about smashing the state....when the opportunity to do so actually arrives.

So far, when it counts, anarchists&#39; opposition to workers taking state power into our own hands.....has always amounted in practice, to leaving state power in the hands of the capitalists.

Which isn&#39;t surprising, since those are the two realistic choices. [/b]


sad, you don&#39;t even know about the collectives in catalonia or aragon.
we dont want to take state power we want to abolish it, and distribute desision making power among the people. workers cannot take state power becase goverment requires represntation, therefore taking state power nessisarily involves creating a new governing class. just because the new leader are from the working class does not mean they represent the woorkers interests. power corrupts and all that.
i suggest reading about the Zapatistas before you go around screaming about the need for state power.


somebody
Hm, let&#39;s apply that type of excuse to some other situations.

"It is absurd to say that support to the imperialist First World War represents a failure of social-democracy, because the theory was not applied." (Their theory called for opposing all sides of that war.)

"It is absurd to say that the Spanish Stalinists&#39; betrayal of the revolution represents a failure of Stalinism, because the theory was not applied." (In theory, they claimed to be communists and not defenders of capitalist rule.)

Etc.

i dont really see a coherant critisism here

[syndicat]

When was power taken from the capitalist class?

The Spanish Republic was a coalition government dominated by capitalist parties....and anarchist leaders even became capitalist ministers.

Altogether too simplistic. The mass movement of the CNT smashed the old armed bodies of the state, held defacto armed power in the northeastern part of Spain, expropriated 18,000 enterprises -- many times the number expropriated by the workers themselves in the Russian revolution -- and expropriated more than 14 million acres of land, and extablished nearly 2,000 collectivized agricultural communities.

the struggle to replace the state with a new worker-controlled governance structure was more complex than you allow. there was an internal debate inside the mass unions of the CNT. they were committed to a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the socialist union, the UGT. after six weeks of internal debate in the CNT movement, a program was worked out at a national plenum on Sept 3, 1936, to replace the national Republican state with a unified people&#39;s militia (revolutionary army), controlled directly by the two union organizations, and overseen by a National Defense Council, a working class government, elected from a National Workers Congress, of delegates elected from the assemblies at the base, and as well, regional congresses and defense councils.

The problem was that the Left Socialist leadership of the UGT vacillated about whether to go along with this proposal. To force his hand, the CNT took over power in one of the regions, Aragon. They carried out in that region their progam, forming a CNT union government -- a Regional Defense Council, elected by and answerable to a regional congress.

The problem is, they failed to carry out this program coherently and consistently. the region that they controlled that was most important was Catalonia, and there they didn&#39;t replace the old state apparatus but joined the government on Sept. 26th, giving the wrong signal to the Left Socialist leaders. This undermined their leverage, their ability to force the wavering Left Socialists to go along with their program of worker government at the national level and throughout Spain.

so they ended up being faced with undesireable choice of either being left out of government decision making about resources for the war effort, or else to join the national government. that&#39;s how the CNT national leadership were able to get the organization to join the Popular Front government.

but it is incorrect to describe the Republican state at that point as a capitalist state. It would be more accurate to describe it as moving in the direction of a Stalinist-style coordinator class regime, which only became clear in 1937, when the Communists made their overt moves, kicked the unions out of the goverment, went on the warpath against the revolutionary left, set up secret police prisons, nationalized worker-managed industries, destroyed the CNT regional union government in Aragon, etc.

maladroit moves by the CNT are not the only explanation for the result. the waverings of the Left Socialists are another part of the unfortunate saga.
The CNT did not have the power by itself to institute worker power over Spain as a whole, but needed to gain the agreement of the UGT. the only way to do that was through a strategy of pressure by creating facts of worker power on the ground, to press the wavering Left Socialists from the left.

[Labor Shall Rule]

To Urban Spirit:

"The point to be made is that unlike Leninism, the Anarchist projects did not collapse due to any internal faults"

This is ridiculous; all experiments, no matter how much zeal and determination the workers and peasantry had, were faced with the obstacle of the situation that they naturally had to encounter. According to Abad de Santillan, an Anarchist member of the Militias Committee:


Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 1937

"We have not organized the economic apparatus which we had planned. We have been satisfied with throwing out the proprietors from the factories and putting ourselves in them, as committees of control. There has been no attempt at connections, there has been no coordination of the economy in due form. We have worked without plans and without real knowledge of what we were doing."

Not only that, but internal inefficiences compliment external problems.

"Frankly we can&#39;t make the same conclusions about Anarchism as we can Leninism, because one has been tried on a mass scale and failed 100% of the time, the other has been tried in marginal conditions, and worked until removed by external factors."

This is a bold statement that is profoundly incorrect.

I have noticed that anarchists generally bring up the &#39;capitalistic&#39; measures that the Bolsheviks instituted. The Bolsheviks needed to reconstruct and advance their backward country foward; what other means do they have at their disposal? If socialism is not attained through these processes as they occur under capitalism, then through what is it attained? Backwards economic movement, back to isolated, small-scale production? If socialism is to be built on the basis of reality, and not utopian fairy-tales, then all of these "capitalistic" developments are necessary. What you convienently and selectively leave out are the repeated instances, that all of these capitalistic institutions and processes are to be subordinated to the conscious control of the workers state.

But the anarchist conception of history reduces every historical event to a struggle between the formless masses and the conspiracies of the leaders. The notion that party could represent the interests of a class (and actually be supported by a majority of that class) is alien to them.

In the final analysis the rule of the working class is only assured when it is materially possible for the working class to dissolve itself as a class. It is not the curse of "Leninism" that dooms them to fail.

[Forward Union]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19, 2007 03:14 pm
Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 1937

"We have not organized the economic apparatus which we had planned. We have been satisfied with throwing out the proprietors from the factories and putting ourselves in them, as committees of control. There has been no attempt at connections, there has been no coordination of the economy in due form. We have worked without plans and without real knowledge of what we were doing."

Was this from Catalonia? and from which Militia, under who&#39;s jurisdiction? The CNT? FAI, Friends of durruti?

Either way, there are bigger problems than that with the Anarchist movement, that should absolutely not be ignored. Makhno made far more crippling accusation in The Organisational Platform.

But the point still stands that these projects did not ultimately fail due to internal complications. They simply didn&#39;t but as I said, that&#39;s not to say there were not any.


all of these capitalistic institutions and processes are to be subordinated to the conscious control of the workers state.

Granted, you make a fair point. But these advances can also be made by decenteralised workers soviets, Catalonia is testament to that, some of the greatest industrial improvements to date, notably to the tram networks, were made while it was run by the CNT. It seems to me, like the bolsheviks you believe the proletariat to be uncapable of such planning of the economy, and thus require subjucation to the capitalist advisory committee - until capitalisms work is done for it?

[abbielives!]

the term workers state is an oxymoron.

[Redmau5]

Originally posted by abbielives&#33;@June 19, 2007 05:27 pm
the term workers state is an oxymoron.
No it&#39;s not. A communist state is oxymoronical, not a workers&#39; state.

[Rawthentic]

Granted, you make a fair point. But these advances can also be made by decenteralised workers soviets, Catalonia is testament to that, some of the greatest industrial improvements to date, notably to the tram networks, were made while it was run by the CNT. It seems to me, like the bolsheviks you believe the proletariat to be uncapable of such planning of the economy, and thus require subjucation to the capitalist advisory committee - until capitalisms work is done for it?
Granted, so do you. This is one of the historical errors that the Bolsheviks made, in compromising with the petty-bourgeoisie instead of training the proletariat in Russia intellectually and materially to run their own society. After all, that is one of the main purposes of the proletarian vanguard.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 06:31 pm

When was power taken from the capitalist class?

The Spanish Republic was a coalition government dominated by capitalist parties....and anarchist leaders even became capitalist ministers.

Altogether too simplistic. The mass movement of the CNT smashed the old armed bodies of the state, held defacto armed power in the northeastern part of Spain, expropriated 18,000 enterprises -- many times the number expropriated by the workers themselves in the Russian revolution -- and expropriated more than 14 million acres of land, and extablished nearly 2,000 collectivized agricultural communities.
And joined the bourgeois government as ministers.

Have you read anything the revolutionary Spanish anarchists, the Friends of Durruti, wrote at the time? Say, Towards a Fresh Revolution (http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=912)? It ougta be a good antidote for all the excuses for CNT reformist you make throughout your post.

I know about the workers&#39; militias, the collectives, everything positive the CNT ranks attempted. The UGT ranks, heck the ranks of reformist workers&#39; organizations in many times and places have done similar things.

But if you leave the bourgeois state intact, it will eventually crush any number of workers&#39; militias and collectives. And that&#39;s exactly what happened in Spain.


The problem was that the Left Socialist leadership of the UGT vacillated about whether to go along with this proposal.

We had a great idea to overthrow the Provisional Government, we just couldn&#39;t get the Mensheviks to go along with it.


The problem is, they failed to carry out this program coherently and consistently.

Yes, that&#39;s also the problem with Social Democrats, offical CPs, and all other reformists. They sometimes have great radical-sounding rhetoric, especially when they&#39;re under pressure from below during times of crisis.

But they don&#39;t carry it out.

The Bolsheviks carried out their program. Their actions matched their words. That&#39;s the truly distinctive thing about them, compared to all other supposedly anti-capitalist groups. Their great, unforgiveable sin.


so they ended up being faced with undesireable choice of either being left out of government decision making about resources for the war effort, or else to join the national government. that&#39;s how the CNT national leadership were able to get the organization to join the Popular Front government.

Yes, reformists always have excuses. Often, exactly that excuse. But anarchism is supposed to be different, isn&#39;t it?


but it is incorrect to describe the Republican state at that point as a capitalist state. It would be more accurate to describe it as moving in the direction of a Stalinist-style coordinator class regime, which only became clear in 1937, when the Communists made their overt moves, kicked the unions out of the goverment, went on the warpath against the revolutionary left, set up secret police prisons, nationalized worker-managed industries, destroyed the CNT regional union government in Aragon, etc.

In other words, the fact that the Republic crushed the working class - made it "clear" that it wasn&#39;t a capitalist regime&#33; Mind-boggling.

No, it was a capitalist regime. The "Communists" were a small group within the Spanish Socialist Party. (Which, BTW, doesn&#39;t stop some people from blaming their actions on....vanguardist concepts of party organization.) The Socialist Party was, IIRC, a minority in the Republic government.

More importantly, the capitalist state structure was not replaced - the Assault Guards and whatnot were a capitalist army - and capitalist control of the means of production was not ended. There were some nationalizations, but that&#39;s hardly unusual for capitalist regimes under pressure from below. Most of the nationalizations were of stuff the capitalists had already lost, as you say.

The role of the Stalinists in Spain was simply that of the worst social-democrats, like the German social-democrats who slaughtered the 1919 revolutionaries. As anarchist Camilo Berneri said of their role at the time "It smells of Noske". They had no intention of setting up a Soviet-style regime - they intended to facilitate the USSR&#39;s attempts at alliance with France and Britain by helping preserve capitalism in Spain. Obviously the overthrow of capitalist rule in Spain would not have pleased Britain and France or facilitated that alliance.

This, BTW, is typical of Popular Front official "Communist" politics, from Indonesia to Chile.

[CornetJoyce]

Abby was not a hippie and certainly didn&#39;t spend all his time smoking and fucking in communes, although he certainly did both, as we all did. If you were around and didn&#39;t, it&#39;s because you were spotted as a narc and weren&#39;t invited.
I knew the guy somewhat (he was expected at our house when he got busted) and he certainly worked harder at overturning the Thing than the typical dozen Marxist schoolmarms. No one would confuse Abby with a deep thinker but he was creative and dedicated. The Left was the Party of Liberty, not the Party of Dogma, which makes Abby an archleftist.

June 23rd is the birthday of Freddie Demuth, speaking of sex- the son of Karl Marx and his maid Helene.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Makaveli+June 19, 2007 05:55 pm--> (Makaveli @ June 19, 2007 05:55 pm)
abbielives&#33;@June 19, 2007 05:27 pm
the term workers state is an oxymoron.
No it&#39;s not. A communist state is oxymoronical, not a workers&#39; state. [/b]

even in a democratic state people hold little conrol over the desions that affect them

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 19, 2007 06:04 pm

Granted, you make a fair point. But these advances can also be made by decenteralised workers soviets, Catalonia is testament to that, some of the greatest industrial improvements to date, notably to the tram networks, were made while it was run by the CNT. It seems to me, like the bolsheviks you believe the proletariat to be uncapable of such planning of the economy, and thus require subjucation to the capitalist advisory committee - until capitalisms work is done for it?
Granted, so do you. This is one of the historical errors that the Bolsheviks made, in compromising with the petty-bourgeoisie instead of training the proletariat in Russia intellectually and materially to run their own society. After all, that is one of the main purposes of the proletarian vanguard.

the purpose of the vanguard is to seize power, the effect of the vanguard is to take power out of the hands of the masses

[Rawthentic]

even in a democratic state people hold little conrol over the desions that affect them

Do you know what a state is and what is its purpose?


the purpose of the vanguard is to seize power, the effect of the vanguard is to take power out of the hands of the masses
Do you know what the vanguard is and what is its purpose?

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 20, 2007 02:33 am

But if you leave the bourgeois state intact, it will eventually crush any number of workers&#39; militias and collectives. And that&#39;s exactly what happened in Spain.


The problem is, they failed to carry out this program coherently and consistently.

Yes, that&#39;s also the problem with Social Democrats, offical CPs, and all other reformists. They sometimes have great radical-sounding rhetoric, especially when they&#39;re under pressure from below during times of crisis.

But they don&#39;t carry it out.

The Bolsheviks carried out their program. Their actions matched their words. That&#39;s the truly distinctive thing about them, compared to all other supposedly anti-capitalist groups. Their great, unforgiveable sin.


so they ended up being faced with undesireable choice of either being left out of government decision making about resources for the war effort, or else to join the national government. that&#39;s how the CNT national leadership were able to get the organization to join the Popular Front government.

Yes, reformists always have excuses. Often, exactly that excuse. But anarchism is supposed to be different, isn&#39;t it?





i agree you have to kill the state, and make sure it stays dead. you fail to demonstrate that their is anything inherintly reformist about anarchism.

i would point out that the tendancy to become reformist is not at all isolated to anarchists, it is infact rampant among communists. the difference is you can be a reformist communist without violating your basic principles, wheras becoming a refomist anarchist means deveating from the most basic anarchist position, namley: other people are not able to represent your interests only you can do that, only you can know what your interests are, the state is at BEST someone attempting to represnt your interests.

it&#39;s true the bolsheviks carried out their program, the carried it out and predicatably failed because they were not able to effectivley represent the peoples interests

[bezdomni]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 01, 2007 04:03 am

even in a democratic state people hold little conrol over the desions that affect them

Do you know what a state is and what is its purpose?


the purpose of the vanguard is to seize power, the effect of the vanguard is to take power out of the hands of the masses
Do you know what the vanguard is and what is its purpose?
Clearly he doesn&#39;t.

All he does is speak ignorantly, pretend to be very knowledgable, and then refuse to admit that he is wrong or mistaken. (usually by changing the subject or completely ignoring an argument).

I see little point in engaging that troll.

[syndicat]

severian:
Have you read anything the revolutionary Spanish anarchists, the Friends of Durruti, wrote at the time? Say, Towards a Fresh Revolution? It ougta be a good antidote for all the excuses for CNT reformist you make throughout your post.

I didn&#39;t make "excuses". I provided an explanation. To confuse an explanation with an excuse is a basic logical fallacy. Suppose we know what caused Jones to go berserk and shoot his wife. From the fact that we have an explanation, that doesn&#39;t mean we think it was justified. I already explained in detail in fact where I think the CNT went wrong.

And, yes, I&#39;ve read Hacia una revolucion nueva. It&#39;s not inconsistent with what I wrote. On the contrary, as I have pointed out here before, Friends of Durruti was formed by people like Jaime Balius and Liberto Callejas -- two journalists on the big CNT daily in Barcelona who were fired when they refused to go along with joining the Popular Front government in Nov 1936. What they advocated was that the CNT stick to, and carry out, the program the union federation had agreed to at its national convention in Sept 1936.

me: "The problem was that the Left Socialist leadership of the UGT vacillated about whether to go along with this proposal. "

severian:

We had a great idea to overthrow the Provisional Government, we just couldn&#39;t get the Mensheviks to go along with it.

Your analogy doesn&#39;t hold up. The mass organizations of the workers in the Spanish revolution were the unions, the UGT, CNT. This means they were analogous to the soviets not the parties in the Russian Revolution. The UGT was not analogous to the Mensheviks.

Also, the Bolsheviks did in fact enter into a coalition, with the Left SRs, because they were forced to for similar reasons to the CNT seeking a "revolutionary alliance" with the UGT. Namely, 80% of the Russian population were peasants and the Left SRs were the dominant group with a peasant base.

Moreover, Lenin didn&#39;t advocate trying to overthrow the Provisional Government til the Bolsheviks had gained majority support in elections to the main soviets. If your argument was correct, Lenin would have tried for an insurrection just based on the Bolshevik party alone. In fact he was smart enough to not do that. He knows they could not have held on. In the Spanish case, half the population were agricultural laborers, and the Left Socialists controlled the half-million strong Land Workers Federatation, the largest organization of the agricultural proletariat.

Therefore, your argument that the CNT could have taken power at the national level by itself is simply baseless.

me:"The problem is, they failed to carry out this program coherently and consistently. "

severian:

Yes, that&#39;s also the problem with Social Democrats, offical CPs, and all other reformists. They sometimes have great radical-sounding rhetoric, especially when they&#39;re under pressure from below during times of crisis.

But they don&#39;t carry it out.

No. "Reformists" don&#39;t typically have revolutionary programs and strategies. The problem with reformists is that they are, well, reformist. So your accusation of "reformism" is just name-calling. that&#39;s because you don&#39;t actually provide any argument that the CNT was "reformist" and this is why they didn&#39;t carry out their program coherently and consistently. You merely assert it. But just asserting something isn&#39;t an argument. Otherwise i could prove the moon is made of green cheese just by asserting it. Actually i provided an alternative explanation for their failure to act consistently in carryout their program. i suggested that it was a question of inadequate preparation, the failure to discuss concrete approach to working class unity in a revolution situation at their congress in Zaragoza in May 1936. Cesar Lorenzo in his book believes this was the source of the problem, and he was there.


The Bolsheviks carried out their program. Their actions matched their words. That&#39;s the truly distinctive thing about them, compared to all other supposedly anti-capitalist groups. Their great, unforgiveable sin.

Yes, they carried out their program. And it inevitably generated a coordinator class-dominated mode of production. That&#39;s because the whole programmatic and strategic orientation of the Bolsheviks doesn&#39;t work to empower the proletarian class but concentrates expertise and decision-making power in a professional/managerial-style hierarchy, and thus a new class system emerges.

me: "but it is incorrect to describe the Republican state at that point as a capitalist state. It would be more accurate to describe it as moving in the direction of a Stalinist-style coordinator class regime, which only became clear in 1937, when the Communists made their overt moves, kicked the unions out of the goverment, went on the warpath against the revolutionary left, set up secret police prisons, nationalized worker-managed industries, destroyed the CNT regional union government in Aragon, etc. "




In other words, the fact that the Republic crushed the working class - made it "clear" that it wasn&#39;t a capitalist regime&#33; Mind-boggling.

The Bolshevik party also presided over the crushing of working class power -- stripping the factory committees of their power, imposing one-man management, violently repressing the strikes in Petrograd in 1921, violently crushing the "free soviet" movement in the Ukraine, violently suppressing the Kronstadt soviet in 1921, etc.

The capitalists are not the only possible ruling class, that can dominate and exploit the working class.

No, it was a capitalist regime. The "Communists" were a small group within the Spanish Socialist Party. (Which, BTW, doesn&#39;t stop some people from blaming their actions on....vanguardist concepts of party organization.) The Socialist Party was, IIRC, a minority in the Republic government.

You don&#39;t know what you&#39;re talking about. The Communist Party had been a separate party from the PSOE (Socialist Party) since the early &#39;20s. In spring of 1936 the CPE had around 30,000 members and had absorbed the socialist party in Catalonia, and thru manipulative means gained control of the 150,000 member Socialist Youth. But thru the Soviet arms sales to the Republic, and the massive recruitment within the middle classes against the worker revolution, by mid-1937 the CPE had grown to something like 250,000 members, and had gained control of about a third of the UGT union federation, and would soon gain ever more control of it in late 1937, through repression of the Left Socialists.


More importantly, the capitalist state structure was not replaced - the Assault Guards and whatnot were a capitalist army - and capitalist control of the means of production was not ended. There were some nationalizations, but that&#39;s hardly unusual for capitalist regimes under pressure from below. Most of the nationalizations were of stuff the capitalists had already lost, as you say.

again, you don&#39;t know what you&#39;re talking about. the capitalist state had collapsed in July of &#39;36. the old army and police no longer existed. the working class had built its own army and police forces. The issue was whether to unify these -- that was what the CNT proposed -- or rebuild a conventional hierarchical state, army and police, which the Communists proposed. The assault guards that had existed before July of &#39;36 no longer existed by August. At the end of Sept. the Popular Front goverment decided to create a NEW police, the National Republican Guard, which the Communists were able to gain control of.

Capitalist control WAS in fact ended in most of the country&#39;s economy. Virtually the entire economy of Catalonia was expropriated by the unions in the name of the people. And Catalonia was the location of 70% of Spain&#39;s manufacturing. 18,000 enterprises in Spain were expropriated -- railways, public utilities, telephone system, public transit, bakeries, garment and textile mills, the motion picture industry, and on and on. 14 milliion acres of agricultural land was seized by the UGT and CNT farm worker unions.

These were NOT "nationalizations." Nationalization didn&#39;t occur til after the Communists gained dominant influence over the governent in mid-1937, and this was an attack on worker power. You seem to think "nationalization" is what we should be for. "Nationalization" means workers are subject to a professional/managerial hierarchy in the state, that is the basis of a coordinatorist mode of production.


They had no intention of setting up a Soviet-style regime - they intended to facilitate the USSR&#39;s attempts at alliance with France and Britain by helping preserve capitalism in Spain. Obviously the overthrow of capitalist rule in Spain would not have pleased Britain and France or facilitated that alliance.

This is not correct. Read the documents that have been translated from the Soviet archives in the book "Spain Betrayed." The Communist International had a stagist conception of the revolution in Spain. they believed that the first stage, which they called the "bourgeois democratic" stage, involved rebuilding the Republican state and gaining control of it thru the army and police. From that position of state power they would then move towards nationalization of the economy. This is in fact what actually began to transpire in the last couple years of the Spanish civil war.

[syndicat]

red dali quoting de Santillan:
Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 1937

"We have not organized the economic apparatus which we had planned. We have been satisfied with throwing out the proprietors from the factories and putting ourselves in them, as committees of control. There has been no attempt at connections, there has been no coordination of the economy in due form. We have worked without plans and without real knowledge of what we were doing."

This was in a letter de Santillan wrote in Dec. 1936. De Santillan was an advocate of a planned, socialized economy, as was the CNT. Their proposal was that social plans were not be produced by a "workers state" (i.e. a bureaucratic hierarchy of professionals, managers and political apparatchiks) but through worker congresses, articulated regionally and nationally, and through inputs from "free municipalities" in regard to what should be produced. The "free municipalities" were to be based on general assemblies of residents in the neighborhoods and villages and elected and revocable committees. However, for the congresses and free municipalities to have authority to institute society-wide economic planning, the state had to be gotten rid of. Not being able to do this, the CNT was faced with a question of what to do, given that most of the county&#39;s industry had been expropriated by the unions.

they held a conference in Sept 1936 on what to do, and the stronger unions wanted to push forward for "integral socialization" -- and this was the period when the CNT was beating the drum for replacing the Republican state with the structure of defense councils, a unified militia, and regional and national worker congresses. however, at that congress the weaker unions preferred setting up coops as a stop-gap measure until complete unification of the economy could be arranged. a Catalan nationalist accountant named Joan Fabrigas gave the name "collective" to these coops. So that&#39;s the situation that existed that de Santillan was complaining about, because competing coops often had unequal conditions and other problems. the CNT had always been against the workers becoming "proprietors" (private owners) of their particular means of production, as opposed to a socialized economy. in Oct 1936 the Communists were able to get the regional government in Catalonia pass a collectivization decree making these "collectives" the only legal solution. For the next six months the CNT largely disregarded this law, as they were strong enough, in terms of armed power, to do so. nonetheless, the growing influence of the Communists did pose challenge to the CNT unions that wanted to fight for direct worker socialization, rather than the Communists&#39; ultimate solution, nationalization.

industry of Catalonia was only producing 70% of pre-civil war output because they&#39;d lost their markets in the fascist-held territories. so the expropriated industries had many people they were carrying working only small number of hours, and some unions like construction had many unemployed. to deal with this situation effectively required social planning, de Santillan argued. but the problem is, they were in no position to implement that without taking power and getting rid of the state, replacing the state with their proposed congresses and defense councils.

so, my point is here that there was a solution to the problems that de Santillan highlights in that letter. but it didn&#39;t involve a so-called "workers state".

[Rawthentic]

"workers state" (i.e. a bureaucratic hierarchy of professionals, managers and political apparatchiks)
That&#39;s a lie and you know it. Its based in worker&#39;s councils, assemblies, neighborhood militias, etc.

[syndicat]

me: ""workers state" (i.e. a bureaucratic hierarchy of professionals, managers and political apparatchiks) "

voz:

That&#39;s a lie and you know it. Its based in worker&#39;s councils, assemblies, neighborhood militias, etc.

when has this ever existed? Certainly not in Russia in 1918. The Soviets were controlled top-down by Bolshevik party cadres, often drawn from the intelligentsia. by the spring of 1918 workers were complaining that the Bolshevik-controlled factory committees were out of touch and hadn&#39;t held a new election for months. so much for "assemblies." by April 1918 the workplace and neighborhood militias were replaced by a conventional top-down army, run by a privilleged class of officers, with 30,000 former czarist officers recruited for this. the Bolsheviks didn&#39;t believe in participatory democracy. That&#39;s why assemblies were never important for them.

[Rawthentic]

And when has your dream ever existed? Its the same thing that you advocate, I just don&#39;t make any bones about calling it a worker&#39;s state, because that&#39;s what it is in the end.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 03, 2007 02:15 pm
And, yes, I&#39;ve read Hacia una revolucion nueva. It&#39;s not inconsistent with what I wrote.
I gotta disagree. "Towards a Fresh Revolution" denounces the CNT&#39;s actions, not excuses them. It "explains" them, if you like, by the CNT&#39;s political weaknesses, not by difficulties in the situation as you do - as if revolutions weren&#39;t always made in difficult situations.


This means they were analogous to the soviets not the parties in the Russian Revolution. The UGT was not analogous to the Mensheviks.

Seeing as how the Soviets, for months, were Menshevik and SR-led, and the Bolsheviks followed a revolutionary course anyway....


Moreover, Lenin didn&#39;t advocate trying to overthrow the Provisional Government til the Bolsheviks had gained majority support in elections to the main soviets. If your argument was correct, Lenin would have tried for an insurrection just based on the Bolshevik party alone....Therefore, your argument that the CNT could have taken power at the national level by itself is simply baseless.


Dude, where did I say the CNT should have tried for an immediate insurrection or could have taken power by itself? This is exactly the straw man the CPUSA and similar reformists always use: if you oppose a Popular Front approach, you must be for immediate insurrection.

The Bolsheviks didn&#39;t join the Provisional Government; they worked all along to eventually overthrow it. The CNT joined the bourgeois government in Spain, they supported it, they refused to work...."Towards a Fresh Revolution." They acted like the Mensheviks and SRs, and the "explanations" you&#39;ve made for it are the same ones the Mensheviks and SRs made.


No. "Reformists" don&#39;t typically have revolutionary programs and strategies.
They often claim to, e.g. most Communist Parties.

that&#39;s because you don&#39;t actually provide any argument that the CNT was "reformist" and this is why they didn&#39;t carry out their program coherently and consistently. [/quote]

I think joining a bourgeois government is sufficient evidence of reformism. Actions speak louder: if you act like a reformist, you are a reformist.

Now as for why they became reformists, I haven&#39;t gotten into that here, but I did comment on it in the study group discussion on "Towards a Fresh Revolution". Feel free to check that out (Learning Forum, Study Group subforum.)




In other words, the fact that the Republic crushed the working class - made it "clear" that it wasn&#39;t a capitalist regime&#33; Mind-boggling.

The Bolshevik party also presided over the crushing of working class power --

I&#39;m not going to have that argument yet again, right now. Because what you&#39;re evading, is that obviously the capitalist class is capable of crushing the working class.

So crushing the working class does not "make it clear" that the Republic is not a capitalist regime, as you claimed earlier.


You don&#39;t know what you&#39;re talking about. The Communist Party had been a separate party from the PSOE (Socialist Party) since the early &#39;20s.

My bad, I was thinking of the merger of the Socialist and Communist youth groups to form the Unified Socialist Youth in 1936 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juventudes_Socialistas_Unificadas). So wrong there. But not about the small numbers of the Spanish Stalinists. Lemme quote the anarchist writer Murray Bookchin: (http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bookchin/sp001642/fifty.html)

In Catalonia, the POUM outnumbered by far the Communist and Socialist Parties which united to form the predominantly Communist-controlled Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC). The Communist Party (PCE) at the inception of the revolution was inconsequential in numbers and influence, lagging far behind the three major left-wing organizations and their unions.

Now as you say, it grew some in numbers and more in influence:


In spring of 1936 the CPE had around 30,000 members and had absorbed the socialist party in Catalonia, and thru manipulative means gained control of the 150,000 member Socialist Youth. But thru the Soviet arms sales to the Republic, and the massive recruitment within the middle classes against the worker revolution,

The kind of recruitment you&#39;d expect the most hardened reformist group to experience in that kind of situation.

You don&#39;t ask why the few CPE members were so influential over other reformists, so successful in their "manipulative means". It wasn&#39;t just Soviet weapons: the CPE expressed most consistently what the Spanish capitalist class and its labor lieutenants needed. That&#39;s why they had an influence all out of proportion to their numbers.


again, you don&#39;t know what you&#39;re talking about. the capitalist state had collapsed in July of &#39;36. the old army and police no longer existed. the working class had built its own army and police forces.

Unfortunately, the two existed side by side. If you don&#39;t finish off the capitalist state, it&#39;ll make a comeback.


These were NOT "nationalizations." Nationalization didn&#39;t occur til after the Communists gained dominant influence over the governent in mid-1937, and this was an attack on worker power. You seem to think "nationalization" is what we should be for.

See, you&#39;re just not reading my post. I wrote: " Most of the nationalizations were of stuff the capitalists had already lost, as you say." The point is, they don&#39;t prove the Republic was not capitalist. It&#39;s not unusual for capitalist regimes to nationalize some industry, not unheard of for them to nationalize all of it, as a way to foster the creation of new billionaires - or in this case, as a way of saving their system. What&#39;s more, it worked.


The Communist International had a stagist conception of the revolution in Spain. they believed that the first stage, which they called the "bourgeois democratic" stage, involved rebuilding the Republican state and gaining control of it thru the army and police.

This is, of course, the same conception the Mensheviks had of the Russian Revolution. It&#39;s the same conception CPs worldwide have had. It does not generally lead to them taking power - it leads to them supporting the "national bourgeoisie" or some other group of allegedly progressive capitalists.


From that position of state power they would then move towards nationalization of the economy. This is in fact what actually began to transpire in the last couple years of the Spanish civil war.

Dude, I have to say you sound like J. Edgar Hoover writing about the world Communist conspiracy. They have these magic powers to overthrow capitalism and establish the rule of their own "coordinator class", by "manipulative means"...see, look at their evil plans&#33;

Anyway, nothing you&#39;ve said begins to show the Spanish republic was not a capitalist state.

The capitalists are not going to give up power without a fight - not to the working class, and not to any other class either. "Coordinator class" or whatever you want to call it.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 01, 2007 04:03 am

even in a democratic state people hold little conrol over the desions that affect them

Do you know what a state is and what is its purpose?


the purpose of the vanguard is to seize power, the effect of the vanguard is to take power out of the hands of the masses
Do you know what the vanguard is and what is its purpose?
yes and yes
you ought to know that anarchists define &#39;state&#39; differently than marxists
you also have to distinush between the vanguard&#39;s stated goals and it&#39;s actual effects

[syndicat]

severian:
I gotta disagree. "Towards a Fresh Revolution" denounces the CNT&#39;s actions, not excuses them. It "explains" them, if you like, by the CNT&#39;s political weaknesses, not by difficulties in the situation as you do - as if revolutions weren&#39;t always made in difficult situations.

Not having a discussion of basic strategy in the immediate situation at their congress in May 1936 was certainly "a political weakness". Not carrying out their own decisions of Sept 3, 1936 was certainly "a political weakness." You&#39;re just blowing smoke.


Seeing as how the Soviets, for months, were Menshevik and SR-led, and the Bolsheviks followed a revolutionary course anyway....

yes, and my main criticism of the CNT is that they should have taken power in the places where they were able to. But in regard to the taking of power by the working class at the national level, you object on the grounds that somehow the CNT should have seized power even tho they were the minority in Madrid, Asturias, the whole center of the country, and only about half the whole organized working class.

My point here was this: Lenin may have been pursuing "a revolutionary course" before Oct 1917 -- whatever the fuck that means -- but he very definitely did NOT favor trying an insurrection til the Bolsheviks had majority support in the major soviet elections.


Dude, where did I say the CNT should have tried for an immediate insurrection or could have taken power by itself? This is exactly the straw man the CPUSA and similar reformists always use: if you oppose a Popular Front approach, you must be for immediate insurrection.

The Bolsheviks didn&#39;t join the Provisional Government; they worked all along to eventually overthrow it.

i don&#39;t think the CNT not joining the government would have, by itself, made a difference to the outcome. If you think it would have, you need to give an argument. this was NOT the position of the Friends of Durruti by the way. they believed that the CNT was in a position to take over in Catalonia at least in July-August-Sept 1936 and should have, and I fully agree.

It&#39;s necessary to consider what was going on in August-October 1936. There were two starkly posed proposals for the way forward: Either the working class continues to control its own army but unified it, or the state will be rebuit and a new hierarchical army controlled by the Stalinists will be built.

The CNT not joining the goverment, by itself, would not have prevented the CPE from gaining control of the army and police. On the contrary, it would have made it all that much easier. The CPE could have simply continued to snow Caballero about their intentions and run roughshod over everything. They would have simply gotten to the point of dominating the Spanish government even more quickly and gotten their way about the building up of the state.

What the CNT needed to do was not only not join the government on Caballero&#39;s terms, but create facts on the ground that would make Caballero and the Left Socialists agree to their terms: replace the state with a system of worker congresses, defense councils, and a unified militia controlled by the unions.

Merely not joining the government by itself is consistent with a more passive course that fails to pose an alternative to the path the Communists were pushing for.


They acted like the Mensheviks and SRs, and the "explanations" you&#39;ve made for it are the same ones the Mensheviks and SRs made.

What the heck are you talking about? Are you talking about the position taken by the CNT ministers in government in May 1937? You&#39;re looking way too late in the game. by then the game was already pretty much lost. This is precisely why the Friends of Durruti pamphlet talks about what happened in the summer of 1936, what the CNT needed to do then but failed to do.

once they&#39;d joined the national Popular Front government in Nov 1936 and the Catalan government, the militants who took government positions and got officer positions in the newly rebuilt Republican army were corrupted by that experience, so that they changed their views. Garcia Oliver had advocated the CNT overthrowing the government of Catalonia and the unions taking power in July of 1936 but by May 1937 was a defender of Popular Front collaboration. He&#39;d been corrupted by the experience of being in the government.

taking a revolutionary course in Nov 1936 meant not going along with the CNT joining the government, but also building within the CNT to get it to continue to fight for the original program of worker congresses, defense councils, and a unified workers militia. This is what the Friends of Durruti group tried to do. this is also what the CNT in Aragon did, where the CNT did actually hold power. but Friends of Durruti were not formed til Mar 1937 and by then it was too little too late.

I&#39;m simply explaining here what happened. I&#39;m not "making excuses" for the simple reason that I don&#39;t agree with the CNT joining the national Popular Front government, and I think it was a huge mistake to not overthrow the Generalitat in Catalonia, and not use power there to push for power at the national level. I&#39;ve said this now several times in various posts on revleft on the Spanish revolution. I think they should have taken over governance in Catalonia via a worker congress and defense council (this is the "revolutionary junta" the Friends of Durruti talked about), and refused to accept Caballero&#39;s proposal of getting a few ministers in the existing Popular Front government.

I&#39;m not sure how many times I have to say this before you realize I&#39;m not justifying the course of joining the national Popular Front government that they actually took. On the other hand, you very blithely and easily suppose there would be some "revolutionary course" for them outside the Popular Front government that would have won. Well, what would that have been?

I&#39;ve given you my scenario: Do what Durruti suggested: Take over in the regions where they were a majority and create facts on the ground -- dual power -- that Caballero couldn&#39;t ignore.

Now, if you say, "Forget Caballero and the Left Socialists, they&#39;re just equivalent to the Mensheviks" what I&#39;d say in reply is that the left wing of the UGT was in fact a large part of the revolutionary forces, and the CNT could not win without winning them over. if you think otherwise, you&#39;ll need to provide some argument as to what else could have been done. The equivalent of the Mensheviks in the Spanish revolution are the Communists, who, like the Mensheviks, had a stagist theory of revolution which led them to oppose the actual revolution of the workers, in favor of an alleged "bourgeois democratic" phase.


I think joining a bourgeois government is sufficient evidence of reformism. Actions speak louder: if you act like a reformist, you are a reformist.

There were reformist tendencies in the CNT. The CNT was a mass union organization with 2 million members, not a centralized political party. There was a fight inside the CNT over direction. But the program the CNT was committed to was a revolutionary program and strategy. I don&#39;t think Communist parties that you would call "reformist" have revolutionary strategies.

Also, the national government of Nov 1936 was not a "bourgeois government," as I pointed out before. The dominant element were the Communists. the Communists&#39; aim was to create a nationalized economy like those in Eastern Europe after World War II. they moved in this direction continously after the ouster of the revolutionaries in May 1937 from the governments. This included continous moves to nationalize the industries which had previously been expropriated by the workers in the revolution of the summer of 1936. They were moving towards a coordinatorist mode of production, away from capitalism. This is shown also in who the CPE recruited: lawyers, managers, cops, shop keepers, farmers -- people from the middle strata of society who could become the cadres in a new coordinator class regime.


obviously the capitalist class is capable of crushing the working class.

So crushing the working class does not "make it clear" that the Republic is not a capitalist regime, as you claimed earlier.

Except there&#39;s a little problem for your thesis: the capitalists were gone. they&#39;d been expropriated. so who were doing the crushing? In fact it was the Communists, who were moving clearly towards a statized, hierarchical system, a class system based on publically owned property, in which the administrators, professionals, generals, party apparatchiks etc make up the new ruling class.


You don&#39;t ask why the few CPE members were so influential over other reformists, so successful in their "manipulative means". It wasn&#39;t just Soviet weapons: the CPE expressed most consistently what the Spanish capitalist class and its labor lieutenants needed. That&#39;s why they had an influence all out of proportion to their numbers.

This is completely ridiculous. Who were these capitalists the Stalinists were shilling for? The Stalinists grew because the middle strata -- managers, shop keepers, expropriated small business owners, lawyers, farmers etc. -- hated and feared the working class revolution which was destroying their power. These segments of society had previously voted for the liberal Republican parties. But those parties were mere electoral machines. They didn&#39;t have the toughness and discipline of the Communists. the middle classes saw the Communists as the best defense of their class privilege. But the only way the middle strata could become a ruling class is through a coordinatorist type of regime, that is, based on their collective control over the state.


Unfortunately, the two existed side by side. If you don&#39;t finish off the capitalist state, it&#39;ll make a comeback.

this is true. they needed to get rid of the state apparatus. the state had been disarmed. it lost its armed bodies which are essential for its power. but the institutional shell remained and has great weight, especially for rallying the threatened middle strata.


See, you&#39;re just not reading my post. I wrote: " Most of the nationalizations were of stuff the capitalists had already lost, as you say." The point is, they don&#39;t prove the Republic was not capitalist. It&#39;s not unusual for capitalist regimes to nationalize some industry, not unheard of for them to nationalize all of it, as a way to foster the creation of new billionaires - or in this case, as a way of saving their system. What&#39;s more, it worked.

you write as if this "stuff the capitalists had lost" was some inconsequetial thing, a building here or there, or some isolated industry. but it was almost the whole Spain&#39;s manufacturing, all its transportation, telecom, public utiltiies, and in fact most of the economy. the only significant industries that weren&#39;t expropriated were being operated under "worker control commmittees", i.e. union committees that could veto management at any time, a situation preparatory to expropriation.
so, if virtually the whole economy had been expropriated by the workers, and the Communists were now moving to nationalize all this -- and in fact the UGT program of 1938 called for complete nationalization of the economy -- this is obviously no longer capitalism we&#39;re looking at, but an emerging coordinatorist economy.


This is, of course, the same conception the Mensheviks had of the Russian Revolution. It&#39;s the same conception CPs worldwide have had. It does not generally lead to them taking power - it leads to them supporting the "national bourgeoisie" or some other group of allegedly progressive capitalists.

Except that the CPs have taken power in some places, like China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba.

And in Spain, as I&#39;ve pointed out, they held de facto state power after May 1937. Juan Negrin, the social democrat prime minister was pro-CP and did their bidding. They operated their own secret police, they were nationalizing the whol economy. The capitalists had been expropriated.

[Rawthentic]

yes and yes
you ought to know that anarchists define &#39;state&#39; differently than marxists
you also have to distinush between the vanguard&#39;s stated goals and it&#39;s actual effects

What you define as state is wrong as has no bearing on a class or materialist analysis. Objectively, it is a repressive organ that enforces capitalist class rule, under capitalism. Under a worker&#39;s state, is a repressive organ that enforces the rule of the proletariat. Keep in mind that this is not the same capitalist state, since that state has been smashed, and new one is ultra democratic and controlled by the working class. Its an objective fact that all class societies have states to enforce the rule of the dominant class. A post-capitalist revolutionary society is no different.

And the vanguard is the forward thinking and class conscious section of the proletariat, those who put forward their basic interests at all times. You know, just like Bush&#39;s clique is the vanguard of the capitalist class, they put forward and represent their interests.

[Nusocialist]

Abbielives can I ask you why you care what Leninists think?

We don&#39;t need these people as allies anarchism, libertarian communism and socialism doesn&#39;t need to be contaminated by trying to work with such people. In fact there are probably other groups we are closer to.

[CornetJoyce]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 04, 2007 06:49 am


And the vanguard is the forward thinking and class conscious section of the proletariat, those who put forward their basic interests at all times. You know, just like Bush&#39;s clique is the vanguard of the capitalist class, they put forward and represent their interests.
A helluva role model: bush consistently places himself above the law and empowers himself to have anybody he chooses imprisoned and tortured, and Cheney places himself even above bush&#33; But give the bushmen credit: theydon&#39;t shoot rich guys for thinking incorrectly.

[Random Precision]

Originally posted by [email protected] 04, 2007 07:19 am
A helluva role model: bush consistently places himself above the law and empowers himself to have anybody he chooses imprisoned and tortured, and Cheney places himself even above bush&#33; But give the bushmen credit: theydon&#39;t shoot rich guys for thinking incorrectly.
Both insulting and misleading. In no way does a proletarian vanguard behave like a capitalist one.

The principle for the proletarian vanguard is simply this: When there is a revolution by the working class, someone has to lead it. I&#39;m sure that even anarchists can recognize the need for leadership at that time.

[CornetJoyce]

Originally posted by [email protected] 04, 2007 01:14 pm

Both insulting and misleading. In no way does a proletarian vanguard behave like a capitalist one.

The principle for the proletarian vanguard is simply this: When there is a revolution by the working class, someone has to lead it. I&#39;m sure that even anarchists can recognize the need for leadership at that time.
The equation was someone else&#39;s offhand remark, not mine. It&#39;s a bad metaphor, nothing more.

[Random Precision]

Originally posted by CornetJoyce+July 04, 2007 04:47 pm--> (CornetJoyce @ July 04, 2007 04:47 pm)
[email protected] 04, 2007 01:14 pm

Both insulting and misleading. In no way does a proletarian vanguard behave like a capitalist one.

The principle for the proletarian vanguard is simply this: When there is a revolution by the working class, someone has to lead it. I&#39;m sure that even anarchists can recognize the need for leadership at that time.
The equation was someone else&#39;s offhand remark, not mine. It&#39;s a bad metaphor, nothing more. [/b]
Alright. On that we agree.

[syndicat]

The principle for the proletarian vanguard is simply this: When there is a revolution by the working class, someone has to lead it. I&#39;m sure that even anarchists can recognize the need for leadership at that time.

"Leadership" is a slippery term, with various meanings. The important thing, if the working class is to liberate itself, is that confidence, knowledge, skills and participation is as widely shared as possible. This means that a critical aim of the layer of activists, organizers and publicists within the working class has to be to develop these capacities for self-management as broadly as possible within the working class.

It is a mistake to try to concentrate expertise, knowledge, control, and skills needed for running movements in the hands of a few. And this becomes doubling compounded if the alleged "need for leadership" ends up being a rationalization for setting up top-down structures of control over mass organizations and the overall revolutionary movement. This is the error of vanguardism.

This would simply prefigure the emergence of a new bureaucratic dominating class. The layer of activists, organizers and publicists within the working class includes those who have influence over the direction of the movement and in that sense provide "leadership." But this leadership does not have to consist in concentrating expertise and decision-making into the hands of a few, but can be used to build and ensure the broadest participation in decision-making and effective self-management of mass movements by the masses.

[Random Precision]

"Leadership" is a slippery term, with various meanings. The important thing, if the working class is to liberate itself, is that confidence, knowledge, skills and participation is as widely shared as possible. This means that a critical aim of the layer of activists, organizers and publicists within the working class has to be to develop these capacities for self-management as broadly as possible within the working class.

Agreed. What you describe is part of the vanguard&#39;s purpose.


It is a mistake to try to concentrate expertise, knowledge, control, and skills needed for running movements in the hands of a few.

Agreed. The central purpose of the vanguard in a time of revolution is to fight for the proletariat, ensure their triumph, and to show them the way toward their own emancipation. Nothing more.


And this becomes doubling compounded if the alleged "need for leadership" ends up being a rationalization for setting up top-down structures of control over mass organizations and the overall revolutionary movement. This is the error of vanguardism.

The error that you describe is one of application rather than one of theory. Unfortunately, the unique circumstances of the Bolsheviks before and during the Revolution, and later the Civil War forced them to centralize control, which later allowed Stalin to take full control of the revolutionary process. Even more unfortunately, future revolutionaries, looking to his example, would think that these measures were part of the job of any normal vanguard.


This would simply prefigure the emergence of a new bureaucratic dominating class. The layer of activists, organizers and publicists within the working class includes those who have influence over the direction of the movement and in that sense provide "leadership." But this leadership does not have to consist in concentrating expertise and decision-making into the hands of a few, but can be used to build and ensure the broadest participation in decision-making and effective self-management of mass movements by the masses.

Agreed once again.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 04, 2007 06:49 am

yes and yes
you ought to know that anarchists define &#39;state&#39; differently than marxists
you also have to distinush between the vanguard&#39;s stated goals and it&#39;s actual effects

What you define as state is wrong as has no bearing on a class or materialist analysis. Objectively, it is a repressive organ that enforces capitalist class rule, under capitalism. Under a worker&#39;s state, is a repressive organ that enforces the rule of the proletariat. Keep in mind that this is not the same capitalist state, since that state has been smashed, and new one is ultra democratic and controlled by the working class. Its an objective fact that all class societies have states to enforce the rule of the dominant class. A post-capitalist revolutionary society is no different.

And the vanguard is the forward thinking and class conscious section of the proletariat, those who put forward their basic interests at all times. You know, just like Bush&#39;s clique is the vanguard of the capitalist class, they put forward and represent their interests.

but that is exactly the problem, a state requires representation (distingushed from delegation) which removes it from the working class. they cannot know our interests because they do not live in our situation.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 04, 2007 06:55 am
Abbielives can I ask you why you care what Leninists think?

We don&#39;t need these people as allies anarchism, libertarian communism and socialism doesn&#39;t need to be contaminated by trying to work with such people. In fact there are probably other groups we are closer to.

i don&#39;t work with Leninist groups, but it costs me little to engage them in conversation, i find that debate with people of different ideololgies helps me fill in my theoretical/historical/practical gaps.

[Labor Shall Rule]

I have noticed that "leadership" has been brought up in this thread; I answered the anarchist interpretation of it in a seperate topic.

So, this is the crust of anarchism? That since leadership could be bad in particular instances, it is a certain evil? That is the equivalent of saying that all apples are bad if you find a few with worms in them; the logic just isn&#39;t there. You can&#39;t take the concept of the "state" and "hierarchy" and immediately correlate these abstract forms as things that are bad. As so, it wasn&#39;t "leadership" that "destroyed the strikes", it was the class forces that had leadership over the organizations that had destroyed the strikes.

It also wasn&#39;t the "leadership" that destroyed the Russian Revolution, it was the class forces that slowly took over the degenerated Bolshevik Party that did.

[syndicat]

It also wasn&#39;t the "leadership" that destroyed the Russian Revolution, it was the class forces that slowly took over the degenerated Bolshevik Party that did.

but how did those "class forces" come to be? what was their basis?

the coordinator class is based on the relative monopolization of empowering conditions, expertise, decision-making authority in regard to social production.

if you have a political movement that is hierarchical, and thus concentrates decision-making and knowledge in its hands, and this movement sets up hierarchical structures that concentrate decision-making and knowledge in its hands, and sets up a central planning system where knowledge about the economy and planning (a type of work that empowers) is concentrated in a small set of planners, then you have the material basis for the emergence of a coordinator dominating class, assuming that this movement is able to win out in the social conflict swirling around, which in Russia they did.

so, yes, a certain conception of the role of "leadership" ends up being a justification and rationalization for a certain faction of the intelligentsia pursuing a course that consolidates a coordinator ruling class.

to say the Bolsheviks were "forced" to do these things suggests that there is something else they would have rather done, a claim for which there is no evidence. on the contrary, "democratic centralism", Lenin&#39;s "vanguard party" theory, the lack of any emphasis on participatory democracy (and thus the tendency to concentrate the decision-making in the leaders not the masses), the conception of socialism as centrally planned state run economy -- all these things tend to lead to the empowerment of a coordinator ruling class.

[Rawthentic]

the coordinator class is based on
Bullshit.


so, yes, a certain conception of the role of "leadership" ends up being a justification and rationalization for a certain faction of the intelligentsia pursuing a course that consolidates a coordinator ruling class.

Once again, no materialist analysis. You conveniently seem to forget that the environment that the Bolshevik Party was working in was highly repressive, something that called for a smaller knit of revolutionaries that could be able to organize and agitate within such conditions. The reason the intelligentsia had a more effect on Marxism and such was because during these times, and in such a backwards place like Russia, the workers never had time or the ability to read and study, something that of course isnt true today.

The Bolsheviks never did things that made then "evil", they were all responses to the problems that Russia faced, regardless of their outcome, since its not something I defend. But I do know that cute little decentralized communes would have never worked in such a place.

And lets just say that you don&#39;t have the ability to analyze what caused the defeat of the 1917 Revolution, you&#39;ve never shown to do so.

[syndicat]

voz:

Once again, no materialist analysis.

and what is a "materialist analysis" and why is that relevant?

what I&#39;m talking about is the basis of class power in social production. do you consider ownership of the means of production to be part of the "material conditions" in a society? if so, then the structure of monopolization of the conceptual and decision-making work in social production is also because it is also the basis of a class power.


You conveniently seem to forget that the environment that the Bolshevik Party was working in was highly repressive, something that called for a smaller knit of revolutionaries that could be able to organize and agitate within such conditions. The reason the intelligentsia had a more effect on Marxism and such was because during these times, and in such a backwards place like Russia, the workers never had time or the ability to read and study, something that of course isnt true today.

You&#39;re not responding to my argument. the argument is about how the coordinator class emerged as the dominant class in the Soviet Union out of the Russian revolution.

do you believe in democratic centralism? the "leading role of the vanguard party"? central planning? state ownership of the economy?

these things tend to lead to the consolidation of a coordinator ruling class if implemented successfully.

[Vargha Poralli]

but how did those "class forces" come to be? what was their basis?

In simple terms the isolation of the Russian Revolution. They did not arise magically out of thin air. With the failure of German and Hungarian revolutions the Bolsheviks were forced to defend the young workers state just after some 7 yeras of war and revolutions . At this time the party became an attarctive host to all careerists and oppurtunists and slowly began to degenerate.



if you have a political movement that is hierarchical, and thus concentrates decision-making and knowledge in its hands, and this movement sets up hierarchical structures that concentrate decision-making and knowledge in its hands, and sets up a central planning system where knowledge about the economy and planning (a type of work that empowers) is concentrated in a small set of planners, then you have the material basis for the emergence of a coordinator dominating class, assuming that this movement is able to win out in the social conflict swirling around, which in Russia they did.

But the Bolsheviks were not a hierarchial party. Lenin did not have any fianl say in any matters. The decisions were made by central commitee whose members have been in constant disagreements.

During the july days Lenin had to fight hard to convince the cadres to carry out the insurrection. He had to constantly appeal to the rank and file of the party against the central committee whose members disagreed heavily with him. So what you say loses ground here.



to say the Bolsheviks were "forced" to do these things suggests that there is something else they would have rather done, a claim for which there is no evidence. on the contrary, "democratic centralism", Lenin&#39;s "vanguard party" theory, the lack of any emphasis on participatory democracy (and thus the tendency to concentrate the decision-making in the leaders not the masses), the conception of socialism as centrally planned state run economy -- all these things tend to lead to the empowerment of a coordinator ruling class.


For one the Bolshevik concepts were firmly based on the condiotions of Russia at that time. Try running an organisation that is completely differnt from Bolsheviks in country like Saudi Arabia you will find the difference.

And yes some measures took by Bolsheviks themselves lead to the degenaration of Russian Revolution and their own party for which the majority of the same party padi the price with their own lives - do you really think they would have done those things if they had known what would those actions lead them to ?

[syndicat]

g.ram:
do you really think they would have done those things if they had known what would those actions lead them to ?

my argument wasn&#39;t about their intentions. I&#39;m not saying they were evil. i&#39;m talking about the real, objective consequences of a Leninist programmatic and strategic commitment. people may think they have good ideas but be mistaken.

and your point about the internal dynamics between members and Lenin doesn&#39;t respond to my argument. "democratic centralism" does tend to favor the conception of socialism as centrally planned state socialism. the emphasis on the "leading role of the vanguard" did in fact tend to lead to a preoccupation with getting their cadres in control of hierarchical institutions. the big city soviets were top-down, they concentrated power in the executive committee, they converted the plenaries into rubber stamps. the base assemblies didn&#39;t have power in the workplaces or power over the soviet institutions. the Bolsheviks set up a central planning system within a couple weeks of taking power. central planning inherently disempowers workers and residents of communities.

Leninism traditionally did not advocate centrally planned state socialism only for the adverse material conditions in Russia in 1917 or third world countries, but as a universal solution. in the 1950s-60s period a standard textbook in the USA used by Leninist groups was Huberman and Sweezy&#39;s "Introduction to Socialism." This little book identified centrally planned state-run economy as the essence of socialism.

[Rawthentic]

"democratic centralism" does tend to favor the conception of socialism as centrally planned state socialism
Democratic centralism is how the worker&#39;s party should be structured, freedom of discussion, unity in action.

[syndicat]

but the central commmittee is in control between conventions, according to the theory, and directs the work of everyone. this violates the self-management of the branches, at least in theory. i think in the Russian revolution, at least prior to the civil war, the Bolshevik Party was not as centralized in practice as it was in theory. actually a lot of the chaos after Oct 1917 was due to different centers of Bolshevik power contradicting each other. workers complained about "chaos from above."

but it&#39;s the theory that I disagree with -- the principle of central direction from above, and its bad influence on practice. There is a distinction between coordination, which is necessary, and top-down control. the purpose of coming to agreement on the policy and direction, via things like a congress or conferences, is to prevent chaos and dispersion of effort by people in different areas. coordination can be done horizontally without subordinating everyone to orders from a central committee.

[Rawthentic]

coordination can be done horizontally without subordinating everyone to orders from a central committee.

I agree. In the League, we have our "Central Committee", but the only power it has is to coordinate meetings and issue statements.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Syndicat, I don&#39;t want to get into another debate about the sanctity of the Bolsheviks. My friend actually did a study into the Bolsheviks and their relation to worker&#39;s control, and he discovered that they printed thousands of flyers that depicted stories from workers themselves that seized their factories; stating such things such as this how the occupaown factory; and there you have it, the Bolsheviks were clearly endorsing worker&#39;s control over the means of production. The Law on Workers&#39; Control and Draft Regulations on Workers&#39; Control were published shortly after their seizure of power. In the Central Executive Committee, Lenin actually broke with the recommendations of the Labour Commission and urged that workers&#39; control should be introduced everywhere to stimulate the workers&#39; initiative, while downplaying demands to only introduce it at the major factories and railroads. The Vesenka, along with other capitalistic measures, were subordinated under the worker&#39;s state; they were actions taken to reconstruct the economic superstructure as well as build up heavy industry within the Soviet Republic. You must not forget, these measures would not even be needed if the revolution was secured in more advanced capitalist countries.

Without organization, you cannot withstand the capitalist reaction. Without something directing that organization, you cannot withstand the capitalist reaction. That directed organization is what a state is. If you have an organized power to suppress another class, in this case, the capitalists, then you have a state, even if you refuse to call it that. Mahkno had a state. Any anarchists that managed to hold off the capitalists had a state.

[syndicat]

reddali:
The Law on Workers&#39; Control and Draft Regulations on Workers&#39; Control were published shortly after their seizure of power. In the Central Executive Committee, Lenin actually broke with the recommendations of the Labour Commission and urged that workers&#39; control should be introduced everywhere to stimulate the workers&#39; initiative, while downplaying demands to only introduce it at the major factories and railroads.

the Russian word "kontrol" doesn&#39;t mean the same thing as "control" in English. it has a weaker meaning. Lenin&#39;s "workers control" decree only envisioned the workers&#39; committees as having a check on management, being able to force themn to "open the books", veto decisions about hiring and firing. These powers had already been won through direct struggle by the factory committee movement, so Lenin&#39;s decree merely legalized what actually existed. the workers control decree did not envision the workers themselves collectively managing.

The whole debate after the passage of Lenin&#39;s workers&#39; control decree shows its limitations. The St. Petersburg Regional Soviet of Factory Committees published a "practical manual" on workers&#39; control that advocated pushing past workers control to workers&#39; self-management, and invoking regional and national congresses of factory committees to plan the economy from below.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks then published a document that came to be called the "Counter-manual" that explicitly disallowed expropriations without authorization from the center, and explicitly discouraged workers&#39; self-management. the Bolshevik party was able to prevent the invoking of the proposed regional and national congresses of factory committees.

Marxists have traditionally argued against workers self-management on the grounds that this would necessarily mean uncoordinated market competition between worker-run workplaces. This has historically been one of the Marxist arguments for a centrally planned economy.

But the proposals for grassroots congresses and the possibility of horizontal coordination show that in fact industry directly managed by workers doesn&#39;t have to be a system of market competition.

i&#39;m not against "organization." but there are different ways that society can be "organized."

society needs to have some system of making rules about how things are put together, what is allowed and what isn&#39;t, and society needs a way to enforce these rules. so if the working class is to liberate itself, it needs to set up a new system of rules, to get rid of the elements of oppression, and it needs to be able to defend its new system. as far as "direction" is concerned, this should come from below. part of the process of working class liberation has to be breaking down the subordination of the working class to the professional/managerial elite, and habits of deference to them. retaining this under leftist language, encouraging a deference to leftist alternative managers for society, is not going to liberate the working class.

i think it is dangerously confusing to use the term "state" to refer to a system of governance based on the participatory democracy of workplace and neighborhood assemblies, congresses of delegates, directly accountable committees, and an egalitarian, popularly controlled militia. i prefer to use "state" to refer to the historical state, which is a top-down form of organization, with corporate-style hierarchies. this is because i want to emphasize the stark difference. i think it is a mistake to give people the idea that the existing state can be recuperated by the working class or wielded by the working class.

[CornetJoyce]

Syndicat, is this level of clarity common in the WSA?

[syndicat]

Syndicat, is this level of clarity common in the WSA?

i can always hope so, but i don&#39;t know. however, the points i&#39;m making here are part of the basic political positions of WSA. WSA advocates an economy based on workers self-management but not a market-governed society nor a statist centrally planned system, but a system of grassroots coordination and planning. WSA also advocates replacing the state with a new governance structure based on congresses of delegates accountable to base assemblies in workplaces and neighborhoods, and an egalitarian militia, democratically controlled by the working class mass organizations during a revolutionary period.

in the point about the Russian revolution, i&#39;m mainly just re-iterating what Maurice Brinton says in "Bolsheviks and Workers Control." This document is available online and is linked from the WSA website. I think many of the WSA members are familiar with it to various degrees because we&#39;ve used it a lot due to its historical depth, along with the essay by labor historian Pete Rachleff, "Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution," also linked on our website. I&#39;ve taught classes on the Russian revolution so i had to learn this stuff.

[Labor Shall Rule]

No, it meant worker&#39;s control over means of production. What do you think "open the books" means anyway? It gave the factory committees access to financial accounts and to answer questions of wages, working hours, and the hiring and firing and the monitoring of conscription of the workers. It was "control" in the strictest sense; labor relations had changed — the workers had the upper-hand over his own employers. Most workers were materially and physically unable to flex self-management over their workplace, considering that engineers, technicians, and other skilled workers were needed to fulfill these certain processes, and many of them fled in fear. Without this combination of technology and skilled labor-power, self-management seem to be a distant dream in that they couldn&#39;t even manage their workplaces. It was, according to a British observer, "industrial chaos".

But anyway, you have to keep in mind, these were decisions that were subordinated to the worker&#39;s state; the Soviets, the legitimate bodies of proletarian democracy, had control over all of these capitalistic measures. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were convinced that these measures would soon become unnecessary as the revolution expanded to advanced capitalist countries, they also held that the growing bureaucratic stratum would fade away as soon as this occurs. With the necessity of rebuilding a national economy — through capital investment and the reconstruction of the economic superstructure through ongoing industrial expansion, along with maintaining the international character of the Russian Revolution, the preconditions for socialist property relations would be established.

[syndicat]

No, it meant worker&#39;s control over means of production. What do you think "open the books" means anyway? It gave the factory committees access to financial accounts and to answer questions of wages, working hours, and the hiring and firing and the monitoring of conscription of the workers. It was "control" in the strictest sense; labor relations had changed — the workers had the upper-hand over his own employers. Most workers were materially and physically unable to flex self-management over their workplace, considering that engineers, technicians, and other skilled workers were needed to fulfill these certain processes, and many of them fled in fear. Without this combination of technology and skilled labor-power, self-management seem to be a distant dream in that they couldn&#39;t even manage their workplaces. It was, according to a British observer, "industrial chaos".

This passage seems self-contradictory. At the beginning it sounds as if you are saying that the workers were really in control, had collectively the power to manage, but then you seem to claim at the end that the workers unable to do this.

in numerous enterprises in 1917 workers took over after the managers and engineers had fled. This became a learning experience for them. you can see the same thing happening today in Argentina. at one factory the woman who now does the books had not only never done accounting but had been illiterate. yet she learned how to do the books, and she does it only half time, and works on the line with the workers the rest of the time.

not being able to learn the skilled and planning tasks will destroy worker self-confidence and their ability to control. and there was certainly no plan to teach workers these skills in the Russian revolution.