Left communists on the russian revolution?

What is the main left communist view of the Russian revolution? Where is the turning point where it looses support, when Lenin takes power? When Lenin ends worker's control?

Sorry it took a while to respond to this. The organisation I belong to (EKS) says that by 1921, it was clear that the Bolshevik party had become integrated into the state, and was acting on behalf of capital against the working class.

The ICC's position is explained here:
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/075/russ-rev-03

Devrim

The key issue is that the revolution did not spread outside Russia. The Bolsheviks made many errors from October 1917 - hardly surprising because there had never been a proletarian revolution on the scale of a whole country before - but the fate of the Russian revolution was probably sealed by the defeats suffered by the German working class, above all the crushing of the Berlin uprising in 1919. Had the revolution spread, the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks - in particular the idea of the party taking power and fusing with the transitional state - could have been overcome.

1921 was certainly a key moment: the clear retreat of the international revolutionary wave, the disaster of Kronstadt which showed the tragic consequences of the party identifying with the state rather than defending the needs of the class, the development of openly opportunist policies by the Communist International, such as the United Front. But on the whole the ICC would argue that over the next few years there was a real struggle within the Bolshevik party against the process of degneration and complete absorption by capital. At the foreground of this struggle was the Russian communist left, which was essentially the left wing of the Bolshevik party. We have produced a book-length study of the Russian left, containing an number of original documents. It can be bought here: http://en.internationalism.org/outlets/online

October 1917 wasn't a revolution at first, so... And more, Lenin was a State Capitalist since then.

For a time it looked like the Bolsheviks were doing their best (without a world revolution), but in fact all their politics wasn't Marxists nor Communists since their October Coup.

hello Silver
I see from your link that you are connected to a current that refers to itself as Luxemburgist; but Rosa certainly didn't think the October revolution was a 'coup' by the Bolsheviks, in spite of her criticisms of their mistakes. We (the ICC) have written about this here:
http://en.internationalism.org/wr/314/1918-errors-01
I would be interested in your comments on this article

In fact she did, in The Russian Revolution : "Oktoberumsturz", which translates in good english : October Coup.


Your article is not historically accurate ! For example : "Levi's motives for doing so were far from revolutionary" - of course it was revolutionary. Levi was at that time a member of the Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft. He was expelled from the KPD because he was revolutionary.

only the Bolsheviks were able to uncover the real alternative: bourgeois counter-revolution or proletarian dictatorship

That's simply untrue. As Rosa Luxemburg puts it, the Bolsheviks did only "the dictatorship of a handful of persons", the "dictatorship on the bourgeois model".

The "confusion" here is not in the Luxemburg's text, but in your article. Where are the "contradictory elements" ? Democracy needs Revolution, and Revolution needs Democracy.

The main idea of Rosa Luxemburg is clear, she said in "Our Program and the Political Situation" (December 1918) :

The struggle for socialism has to be fought out by the masses, by the masses alone, breast to breast against capitalism, in every factory, by every proletarian against his employer. Only then will it be a socialist revolution. Certainly, the thoughtless had a different picture of the course of events. They imagined it would be only necessary to overthrow the old government, to set up a socialist government at the head of affairs, and then to inaugurate socialism by decree. Once again, that was an illusion. Socialism will not and cannot be created by decrees; nor can it be established by any government, however socialistic. Socialism must be created by the masses, by every proletarian.

That's what Communism & Marxism is all about. And that's what Bolshevism is not, and never was.

And yet uxemburg has this to say about the Bolsheviks in the conclusion to her article: "theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problems of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism'"
Do you not think that this means that for Rosa the Bolsheviks had been at the head of a movement for the conquest of power by the proletariat?

On 'democracy', the weakness in Luxemburg's article is not that she defends 'workers democracy' (ie freedom of agitation for workers' organisations, open debate in the soviets...) in the face of growing tendency for the Bolsheviks to fuse with the state and so undermine the functioning of the councils. The weakness is where she seems to see the Constituent Assembly as an organ that the workers could use instead of rejecting it as a bourgeois institution, an obstacle to workers' power as expressed in the councils.

I'd like the take on the point on Levi.

"Levi's motives for doing so were far from revolutionary" - of course it was revolutionary. Levi was at that time a member of the Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft. He was expelled from the KPD because he was revolutionary.

Hardly. Paul Levi was the one who expelled the revolutionaries, the left wing majority from the party, among whom was other comrades of Luxemburg and Liebknecht from Spartacus League such as Schwab, Merges, Schroeder, Rühle, Jung and others. Levi, being a moderate always, was on the opportunist right wing of the party. And when he was expelled, we was for condemning the March Uprising which was, of course, organized unsuccessfully but regardless it was a time when the state was shooting at workers. Unsurprisingly Levi soon went back into the party of Noskes and Eberts which murdered Luxemburg and her comrades.

I understand why self-proclaimed Luxemburgist comrades like yourself would have sympathy for Levi, he had after all been a comrade of Luxemburg and was expelled from the KPD later on. But the point I'm trying to make is that the Spartacus League had a militant base as diverse as that of Bolshevism, giving rise later on to lots of different sorts of militants of tendencies from revolutionaries like Schwab, Merges and others to opportunist moderates like Levi, loyal Stalinists like Pieck and Zetkin and Bukharinists like Brandler and Thalheimer.