Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Workers against the Bolsheviks (2008)

Book review from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24. Soviet workers and the new communist elite. By Simon Pirani, Routledge, 2008.

One of the consequences of the fall of state capitalism in the USSR at the beginning of the 90s has been the opening up of the archives of the old regime, including those of its secret police. This book is a fascinating study, based on the minutes of meetings of soviets and factory committees as well as police reports, of the fight put up by factory workers in Moscow in the period 1920-24 to defend their interests under, and at times against, the Bolshevik government. Pirani also describes the beginnings of the emergence of members of the Bolshevik Party as a new, privileged elite.

In 1920 and 1921 during the civil war and its immediate aftermath, conditions in Russia were dire. Workers were paid in kind, but the rations often arrived late and were sometimes reduced. This led to protests and strikes, which the Bolshevik government was prepared to accommodate as long as these were purely economic and did not challenge their rule. The government was particularly edgy in 1921 at the time of the Krondstadt Revolt, whose demands for free elections to the soviets and a relaxation of the ban on private trading, had the sympathy of many workers. In fact, in the still not entirely unfree elections, to the local soviets that year members of other parties (Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists) and non-party militants made gains at the expense of the Bolsheviks. Pirani concentrates on these “non-partyists” who seemed to have been factory militants who wanted to concentrate on economic issues, but with an acute understanding of the balance of forces and what could extracted from the government.

In 1923 the government cracked down on the other parties, including their factory activists, and stopped them carrying out any open activity. Pirani notes that “no non-communist political organization worked openly in Moscow again until the end of the Soviet period”. The non-partyists survived a little longer while the Bolsheviks tried to co-opt them into their party. What political opposition there was was confined to dissident Bolsheviks, inside and outside the party, some of whom adopted a pro-working class stand over wages and conditions, but eventually they too were silenced and many of them joined the members of the other parties in the labour camps of Central Asia and Siberia.

Lenin’s attitude was typical of the one he had displayed twenty years earlier in his notorious pamphlet What Is To Be Done? : that workers were not to be trusted to know their own best interest; judging this had to be left to an intellectual elite organised as a vanguard party. Pirani summarises part of Lenin’s speech to the 11th Bolshevik Party Congress in 1921:
“Lenin argued that the Russian working class could not be regarded as properly proletarian. ‘Often when people say ‘workers’, they think that that means the factory proletariat. It certainly doesn’t’, he said. The working class that Marx had written about did not exist in Russia, Lenin claimed. ‘Wherever you look, those in the factories are not the proletariat, but casual elements of all kinds.’”
Pirani comments that “the practical consequence of this was that political decision-making had to be concentrated in the party”. This distinction between the actual working class (who cannot be trusted) and the “proletariat” (organised in a vanguard party who know best) has been inherited by all Leninist groups ever since and used to justify the dictatorship of the party over the working class.

Pirani’s book should be read by those who think, or who want to refute, that the state in Russia under the Bolsheviks could ever have been described as “workers”. The workers there always had to try to defend their wages and conditions against it, even in the time of Lenin and Trotsky.
Adam Buick

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (57)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 57th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1319 friends!

Recent blogs:

  • Marx's Basic Theory
  • Another world
  • Marxian Economics in the Modern World
  • Quote for the week:

    "In conflict with them ['social democrats'] for a generation are those who would sacrifice immediate success to sound principles, who have been content to be fewer in numbers if clearer in understanding, who have given transient political issues the 'go-by' and have harped upon social revolution, who have expounded economics and the class struggle, when others were shouting against taxes and tariffs, who have earned for themselves the name of Impossiblist, and have been content therewith. The war has justified them. . . The 'practical socialists' are cutting one another's throats in the trenches." [Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Canada, 4th Edition, 1915.]

    Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

    Robert and Piers

    Socialist Party of Great Britain

    Cooking the Books: Profits Before Homes (2008)

    The Cooking the Books column from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

    “One of Britain’s biggest brick makers is to close two of its largest factories”, reported the (London) Times (9 June). A few days later the same paper was reporting, as an example of what is happening all over the country in the building trade, that “Heatco Midlands has laid off its apprentices and told its employees that it cannot afford to pay them for a full week’s work because building work has dried up in the space of a month” (12 June).

    Why? Why are brickworks being closed? Why are building workers being laid off or put on short-time? It is certainly not because the need for new or refurbished houses has been met. According to Shelter, “England is suffering a massive housing crisis. There simply aren’t enough decent, affordable homes.” Here are some of the figures they provide to back up this statement:

  • 8.1 million homes in England fail to meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.
    more than one million children in England live in bad housing.
  • in 2006/07, 554,000 households in England were overcrowded.
  • in 2007, almost 100,000 households were found to be · homeless by local authorities - almost twice as many as in 1997.
  • at the end of December 2007, 79,500 households were living in temporary accommodation arranged by local authorities. Nearly 60,000 of these households had · dependent children.
  • Nearly 1.7 million households are currently on local authority housing waiting lists.
  • So, the need for more houses and better housing is still there. The problem is that under capitalism houses are not built with the primary aim of providing somewhere for people to live. They are built to be sold on a market with a view to profit. And, at the moment, there’s a slump in what is openly called “the housing market”. Which is expected to last for years; at least that’s what the speculators think. On the futures market, “traders are betting that house prices will fall 50 per cent in four years and they do not expect prices to recover until 2017”
    (London Times, 12 June).

    Wienerberger’s chief executive, Wolfgang Reithofer, was perfectly frank about why the two factories were being closed: “It is a question of finance and this has impact. It will impact the strategy of housebuilders. They will not start new projects or will delay some other project.”

    He thinks that demand will eventually recover but by “demand” he doesn’t mean the needs identified by Shelter but only paying demand, what the economists cynically call “effective” demand. The demand of the millions of people suffering from bad housing doesn’t count – isn’t effective – because it’s not backed up by money. This, in accordance with the harsh economic law of capitalism of “can’t pay, can’t have”.

    The building industry has set up a charity to help the homeless called, ominously, “Crash” (www.crash.org.uk). This handing out of a few pennies to charities for the homeless while cutting back on housebuilding is just adding insult to injury.

    Not that the solution to the housing crisis is to give people more money to spend on housing. That’s not going to happen anyway. The solution is simple: build houses just for people to live in. But that’s not going to happen until and unless we move on to a society where things will be produced precisely to satisfy people’s needs instead of, as under capitalism, to make a profit and leave people homeless or in bad housing if they can’t pay.