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Violent insurrectionary adversaries of democracyby Janet Burstall How do we ensure that self-managing democracy when created, is not snuffed out by the forces of the global corporate machine which exploit and repress the world? Different answers have been employed by Marxists and anarchists. Read on. State power and a free and equal society - what connection? The anarchist view is that the former must be abolished, in order to reach that latter. The Marxist view is that the working class needs to conquer the former in order to create the conditions for the latter. For anarchism, state power per se is the problem. For Marxists, the class relations which the state enforces and maintains are the problem, which when solved make it possible for the entire state to wither away. Anarcho-syndicalism combines some anarchist and Marxist ideas - the working class, by organising in one big union, and conducting a general strike, can overthrow the capitalist state, and create socialism. In common with anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism claims reliance on the mass movement to achieve everything, without a consciously organised leadership. They seem unembarrassed by the contradiction that they are only able to put forward this point of view, because they themselves are consciously organised and trying to influence others. Many anarchists focus on workers' councils and workers' control, drawing on the history of experience of workers councils, particularly the Paris Commune, the Soviets in Russia and the Spanish Revolution. These are periods where democracy attained a thoroughness and meaning which expose the shallowness, the hollowness, of parliamentary democracy. The anarchist view of the Russian Revolution is at odds with Workers Liberty's view. Our view is that the Bolsheviks led the Soviets (workers councils) to seize power from the crumbling government of Kerensky. The Bolsheviks saw the moment when the workers could seize the power, and organised to take it. An anarchist analysis by Brinton(1) portrays the Bolsheviks as usurpers of the power of the factory councils in Russia. Brinton rejects the Bolshevik government, and regards the Bolsheviks as being manipulators of the factory councils, purely for the purpose of establishing themselves in government, who would always turn against and destroy the factory councils. Brinton accuses Leninism of seeing in workers' control "just a slogan to be used for manipulatory purposes in specific and very limited historical contexts." By implication of this pamphlet, there were two competing revolutions underway in 1917, one the revolution led by the Bolsheviks, the other a revolution by the factory councils which would have been victorious if not for the Bolsheviks. The anarchists regarded the Bolsheviks' power as simply self-serving, impossible that it could be anything else, since it was state power. The Marxists had learnt from the first experience of workers power in the Paris Commune of 1871, that bourgeois state power will not simply crumble in the face of workers exercising power. The bourgeoisie counter-attacks with all its might, and the lack of a centralised and effective military force in the hands of the Communards was a significant reason for the brevity of the life of the Commune. In Russia, the Bolsheviks organised the insurrection which handed state power to the Soviets, a multi-tiered system of councils, factory councils, other workers organisations, including trade unions, poor peasants and soldiers. Under seige, the Bolsheviks tried to preserve the power of the Soviets, expecting, hoping for victory to workers in Hungary, Germany and the rest of Europe. The Bolsheviks did all they could to work for the spread of the revolution, including founding the Communist International. But instead, the European workers were defeated, and Russian workers were slaughtered in their thousands, exhausted and starved in a war against the Whites. If today it might be considered that there has been a level of hypocritical hysteria directed by the USA against certain targeted dictators, followed up by the bombing and or starvation of the residents of their countries, this is nothing in comparison to the viciousness and resources that the international bourgeoisie put into trying to overturn the power of the workers in Soviet Russia. Yes, the Bolsheviks did adopt extreme measures against 'their violent, insurrectionary adversaries', but it was a defensive response to attack. There were debates and criticisms among supporters of the Bolsheviks, as to the best way to reinforce the workers power in Russia, but it was supportive of the workers power, not its enemy. The enormous array of attacks and difficulties faced by the mass workers' movement, and of the Bolsheviks in trying to ensure the survival of workers' power, are swept aside in the anarchist account by a single minded focus on factory councils, and a presumed opposition between them and the Bolsheviks. The anarchists see Stalin not as diametrically opposed to the Bolsheviks, but as their continuation. But this is not so. Stalin took advantage of the war, shortages and loss of life among the most militant workers. Stalin the bureaucratic policeman was able to take over the Communist Party and then to overturn all traces of workers' power. He ideologically disarmed generations of would-be working class revolutionaries who accepted the lies and crimes of Stalin as the necessary price to preserve the system which gave power and privelege to Stalin and his successors, falsely presented as a socialist system established by the October Revolution. The legacy of Stalinist influence on the Left, has lead to: a distortion of Lenin's idea of 'the revolutionary party', to a disregard for a workers mass movements, particularly self-organisation and to a reliance on a state apparatus. Most of the old left imagine that the state controlled economies established by outposts of the Stalinist regime after WWII in some way equated with socialism. The prime current example is the Democratic Socialist Party's applause for Castro's Cuba. Other left groups, such the ISO, rejected the claims of the Stalinist states to be socialist, but nevertheless operate on a cut down version of Stalinist anti-imperialism, which sees the world as divided into two camps, imperialist versus anti-imperialist. Workers' Liberty rejects this approach, and seeks to identify working class interests independently of fraudulent anti-imperialist demagogery. Workers Liberty supporters have been called anarchists by leaders of the DSP's forerunner (SWP) for pointing to the contrasts between Cuba and the history of workers' revolutions. We share with anarchists and syndicalists a recognition of the importance of working class self-organisation. We judge politics by whether they promote self-reliance by the working class, or offer false agencies to deter or distract workers from self-reliance. Recent examples of putting this perspective into practice are our opposition to calling for Australian troops in East Timor, and our opposition to the 'fair trade' campaign of the union leaders. The history of workers' attempts to take power with their own organisations, or where a workers' movement has come into fundamental conflict with the state over who has power, is critical for the education of socialists. These are the lived experiences from which we can learn about the potential of spontaneous mass movements, the strengths and weaknesses in the analysis and response of organised socialists and labour movement leaders. This is how we develop a working understanding of the relationship between the mass movement, the conscious active minority who sees the possibility of workers power, and the ruling class and its state which are the enemies of the working class and a free and equal society. 1. The Bolsheviks and workers control, 1917-1921: the state and counter-revolution, by Maurice Brinton, 1970. For the introduction and links to the rest of the pamphlet. |
The dividing line between socialism in theory and socialism in practicefrom a speech by Max Schachtman in 1949, as abridged under the title 'October is ours', in The fate of the Russian revolution: lost texts of critical Marxism, edited by Sean Matgamna. London: Phoenix Press, 1998. The Bolshevik revolution was the great dividing line between socialism in theory and socialism in practise - it was not yet socialism, but the end of socialism as theory and the beginning of socialism as living social practice. In the Paris Commune the people ruled their own destinies for the first time in history, but only for 10 weeks, without support from France, without support from Europe, without the strength, the time, the possibility of mustering such suport; without clear consciousness, without clear leadership. It was the dawn, but it was a false dawn. In the Russian revolution, the people ruled for years, the socialist proletariat ruled with an understanding of its status and its role, with a leadership such as no class in history ever equalled. They proved - in a backward, three-quarters ruined country! - and proved it once and for all, that the socialist proletariat itself can take power, and proceed to put the inherited chaos into socialist order. Beset by every conceivable foe, handicapped by every conceivable difficulty, they proved it beyond anybody's dreams, beyond what they were required to prove, beyond what an isolated working class encircled and isolated in one backward land could be expected to prove. They
proved at long last that the proletariat does not have to have a master
to exploit and oppress it, that there is no quality inherent in the proletariat
that precludes it taking power for itself. They proved that in the dark
mass for which all rulers and retainers have such lordly contempt are
hidden deep and powerful springs of resourcefulness, idealism, passion
for liberty, capacity for brotherhood [and sisterhood - ed.], enormous
creative genius, which await only revolutionary release to innundate and
fructify the social soil corrupted by the rule of man over man until it
blooms for a peaceful world.
Struggles for workers power: a brief chronology with some background reading and analysis. 1870
- Paris |