Lenin's NEP

[ComradeJunichi]

What was Lenin's NEP? I think I've heard it come up in several conversations. What was it, what was it's significance?

[peaccenicked]

I find Jack Conrad's assessment useful.
''To inform our discussion, it is worth recalling Marx’s remarks in his Critique of the Gotha programme concerning base and superstructure: “Right,” he said, “can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines.”13 Socialist laws and institutions are in the last analysis only sustainable with a high level of civilisation.

The introduction of NEP was a necessary but nonetheless major retreat dictated by Russia’s lack of civilisation. The proletarian order and those administering it could not escape unaffected. In fact the dichotomy between Russia’s primitive economic base and the socialist state, which had no outside assistance, had to be resolved at the expense of the elevated superstructure. In a sense it was pulled down and modified to more accurately reflect the base. A sort of atavism developed.

Many measures, while fully in line with the transition to socialism, could not be supported by a culturally and economically weakened backward country. Free speech and soviets, intellectual and artistic innovation, the most advanced reforms and even workers’ and party democracy fell victim. That inevitably meant the collapse of the proletariat as the mediation between the party and history and the collapse of the party as the mediation between the proletariat and history.

Without democracy and the open exchange of ideas there can be no thinking, no conscious mass action. Isolated, the party as an institution was left to substitute for both the proletariat and history. Yet, as the ‘object’ and the ‘subject’ become disassociated in reality due to the absence of mediation, narrow sectionalism and dogmatism begins its own process of substitution - in this case for revolutionary universalism.

Let us more fully examine the problem of workers’ and party democracy.

The Kronstadt revolt was a staggering blow to the prestige and self-confidence of the party. It coincided not only with economic crisis but rumours of a new war of intervention and rumblings of anarchist insurrection in the countryside.

Moreover the counterrevolutionary rot began to affect the head. Besides the antidote of NEP Lenin demanded measures in the Party against what he called “unnecessary discussions”.

Factional opposition - let alone the polar opposites Lenin had once positively advocated in correspondence with Gorky - could no longer be contained within the Communist Party. Unless ranks were closed, it would, said Lenin, precipitate civil war. “Either on this side, or on that - with a rifle, not with an opposition,” he blood-curdingly, warned. Strict centralism was the order of the day.

During a retreat discipline and unity “is a hundred times necessary,” Lenin argued. At the party’s 10th Congress Lenin’s authority prevailed and a resolution was carried ordering the “complete abolition of all factionalism”. Discussion of disputed issues by party members was still tolerated. But the formation of distinct groups with their own organisation and platforms was temporarily forbidden. Showing the gravity of the situation, a secret clause was added to the resolution which stipulated that central committee members found guilty of factionalism could be “excluded from the party” by a majority of not less than two-thirds of a plenum of members of the central committee and the control commission.14

Brest-Litovsk, the treaty which secured peace with Germany, was synergetic with the dictatorial side of the regime waxing and its democratic side waning. Sensing weakness, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (Left and Right) had - in the uncompromising words of YM Svedlov, president of the Soviet’s central executive committee - begun “organising armed attacks against the workers and peasants in association with notorious counterrevolutionaries”. Hence during the civil war they were not only “excluded” from the soviets. They were banned. Latter the ban was lifted - from the Mensheviks in November 1918 and from the SRs in February 1919.

However, it was re-imposed on the eve of the introduction of NEP. The leadership of both parties found themselves incarcerated, in part due to real counterrevolutionary activities, but also no doubt in part due to fear that they could provide an alternative focal point for “unnecessary discussions”, which, it was believed, could only strengthen and encourage the forces of counterrevolution.

Ensuring maximum cohesion of the proletariat necessitated sweeping authoritarian measures. The rule of the working class could no longer be assured except through the dictatorship of the Communist Party15. As we know some, both from the bureaucratic left and the pro-capitalist right, such a dictatorship of the party in one form or another is synonymous with socialism.

‘Official communism’ of course defined itself according to that precept. So did its fellow travellers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, a semi-Marxist of considerable intellectual weight and talent. He considered that the dictatorship of the proletariat “was an optimistic notion, constructed too hastily through misunderstanding the formal laws of dialectical reason”. Indeed for Sartre the idea of the working class semi-state was “absurd”. Aggregation of bureaucracy, “the terror, and the cult of the individual” were inevitable.16

On the contrary what Bertell Ollman has called the Communist Party’s role as “regency of the proletariat” has to be approached far more critically. Party rule on behalf of the proletariat could not last long before becoming something else (it did not do so in 1991, as Ollman claims). The substitution of the party for the working class, as with the banning of other parties and internal opposition factions, NEP and state capitalism, was determined neither by principle nor the iron laws of a priori history. Such an extreme and inherently problematic measure was forced upon the Bolsheviks by specific, not to say unique, conditions - the retreat of a proletarian regime desperately trying to survive in an exceptionally cruel, isolated and aberrant environment.''

[man in the red suit]

Jesus man! I learned more in that post than I did, my whole sophmore year of high school. Chirist, you're like a walking history book. Do you study this stuff 24 hours a day? shorten the posts man! I like nateddi's better. He made it pure and simple. My attention span is too low to read such long posts...... Just kiddin

(Edited by man in the red suit at 8:29 am on July 21, 2002)