Russian Revolution: 1. The Road to October (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the other articles in the series, click on the following links: TWO, THREE, FOUR.

There was not one revolution in Russia in 1917, but two. Yet because history is written chiefly about the victors, historians usually know more of the second revolution than the first. 'This series of articles will analyse the events which gave rise to and followed from the October revolution, but we would be in error to regard the second revolution as the first's inevitable consequence.

There are numerous interpretations of the causes of the February revolution, ranging from Trotsky’s false claim that it was the act of workers who had swallowed the propaganda of the Bolsheviks to Miliukov’s absurd suggestion that the workers revolted because they wanted the Duma (the consultative parliament set up by Nicholas II in 1906) to pursue a more vigorous war policy. In fact, ideological preoccupations aside, the revolution can be viewed as a spontaneous act of resistance against the feudal autocracy of Tsarism by war- weary soldiers, starving workers and landless peasants. A secret police report written at the time clearly explains the situation:

. . .  the proletariat in the capital is on the verge of despair. It is believed that the slightest disturbance, on the smallest pretext, will lead to uncontrollable riots with thousands of victims. In fact, the conditions for such an explosion already exist. The economic condition of the masses, despite large rises in wages, is near the point of distress. .  . . Even if wages are doubled, the cost of living has trebled. The impossibility of obtaining goods, the loss of time spent queuing up in front of stores, the increasing mortality rate because of poor housing conditions, the cold and the dampness resulting from the lack of coal . . .  all these conditions have created such a situation that the mass of industrial workers is ready to break out in the most savage of hunger riots. (The Red Archive, Vol. 26, Chap. XXV, p. 14.)

The February revolution was an expression of different class aspirations: the capitalists longed for the liberty of the West, the workers wanted better conditions, the peasants wanted the land which they believed was rightly theirs; apart from these, the soldiers wanted the end of the war. The three Provisional governments set up between February and October were however unable to fulfil the needs of the Russian population. This was because their leaders waited in vain for the problems to be solved by a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. While the Cadets (the bourgeois constitutional democrats) and the social democrats waited for the masses to decide on the matters affecting them, the Bolsheviks stepped in and decided for everyone. How were they able to do this?

Three factors
Three factors primarily contributed to the Bolshevik success. The first was the Provisional government’s abysmal attempt to win the war, which lost it the support of those who had risen in February to bring about peace. The Bolsheviks, who were the only party to unequivocally expose the war as an imperialist exercise, had a powerful stick with which to beat the government of Kerensky and Miliukov. The disastrous failure of the June 18 offensive and the dangers presented by the attempted military coup by General Kornilov in August did much to accelerate this popular swing towards the Bolsheviks.

Secondly, the Bolsheviks were the most capable political organisers in the chaotic conditions then prevailing. The Leninist concept of the professional revolutionaries guiding the masses in a direction which the latter were too ignorant to perceive, while a travesty of the Marxist theory of revolutionary activity, was successful. The Bolsheviks were able to mobilise vast masses of people behind a disciplined vanguard, while their rivals—the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries—argued amongst themselves about the ‘best tactics’. In the face of war and chaos the workers sought new leadership; the Bolsheviks volunteered themselves as leaders.

The third reason for the Bolshevik success was that they offered everything to everybody. By demanding immediate peace, land for the peasants, workers’ control and soviet rule the Bolsheviks could play the role of the Father Christmas of Russian politics. These objectives were inconsistent and sometimes secretly rejected by their advocates; what mattered before October 1917 was political power: and for the Bolsheviks the end justified the means.

Party manipulation
The Bolsheviks aimed to convert the soviets from workers’ councils which put political pressure on the bourgeois government to revolutionary bodies through which the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could be achieved. What made easier their conquest of the soviets was the increasing burcaucratisation of he soviet machinery: more and more, as the year went on, were the soviets dominated by their executive organs. The creation of hierarchies allowed Leninist ‘professional revolutionaries’ to occupy positions of authority without direct responsibility. As spontaneous self-expression declined, party manipulation grew. Large urban soviets began to control surrounding soviets. By the time of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June the process of centralisation became national and a controlling executive was set up (two thirds of the members of which were provided by the Petrograd soviet). At first the disproportionate influence of the Petrograd Executive benefitted the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries but, as the year went on and discontent grew, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in Petrograd and so had control of the entire soviet network.

Their task was made easier by the fact that workers were outnumbered in the soviets by soldiers who were essentially peasants in uniform. These were the people who went over to the Bolsheviks in the second half of 1917; most experienced urban workers were more attracted by the programme of the Mensheviks, which was essentially a policy of trade unionism.

After Lenin’s return to Russia in April the Bolsheviks adopted his political thesis that ‘the bourgeois revolution should be turned into a revolution for the dictatorship of the workers and poor peasants’. After April they waged war on the other Left parties in the soviets, accusing them of being supporters of the Russian bourgeoisie. Many political theorists were attracted to the Bolsheviks by this prospect of creating socialism out of the backward Russian economy. But what did they mean by ‘the next stage of the revolution’? What did Lenin mean by socialism? Would Bukharin and the Moscow Bolsheviks agree with Lenin’s definition? Could the Bolsheviks control history or would historical conditions control them? These questions were provoked by the excitement of 1917.

Reformist aims

As the Bolsheviks used the soviets to realise their political ambitions, so they used the factory committees on the industrial level. After the February revolution the Russian workers did not set out to fundamentally restructure the economy. Their aims were mainly reformist, as can be seen from Marc Ferro’s analysis of 100 petitions from industrial workers to the central authorities in March 1917: 51 per cent demanded a reduction in working hours, 18 per cent called for higher wages, 15 per cent complained of insanitary conditions and 12 per cent demanded rights for the newly established factory committees. Ferro concludes that

. . . the workers sought to ameliorate their condition, not to transform it. (The Russian Revolution of February 1917.)

The factory committees were formed by workers after the strikes in February, their purpose being to put forward demands to management. At the end of May the Putilov workers called a Petrograd conference of factory committees which was used by the Bolsheviks to gain control of the new movement so as to counter the force of the trades unions. Lenin addressed the conference and a resolution ‘On Economic Measures to Combat the Chaos’ was moved by Zinoviev and overwhelmingly carried (297 votes to 21). The resolution was essentially a syndicalist demand for workers’ control—not the policy of the Bolshevik party, which was committed to state control. The contradiction between these two policies was to be discovered after October. The conference set up a central committee, dominated by Bolsheviks and under the chairmanship of the Bolshevik Derbyshev. So in the soviets the Bolsheviks had a machine to rival the power of the Provisional government and in the factory committees they were able to rival the more democratic trades unions.

The winning of the peasantry was completed by controlling the peasant soviets from their urban centres, by sending Bolshevik propagandists into the countryside with promises of land and bread, and by discrediting the Social Revolutionary leader Chernov who, after May, was Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional government. They were aided in their work by the split within the Social Revolutionaries and the failure of the government to redistribute the land.

Did the majority of Russian people support the Bolsheviks in October 1917? Without doubt, they did not. The majority of peasants still supported the Social Revolutionaries. Did the majority of peasants understand Lenin’s policies in October 1917? Certainly not. Many of them were deceived by lies, others were concerned with just one policy, but were ignorant of the others. Did the Bolsheviks have a coherent programme for establishing socialism in October 1917? No they did not. They were, as disagreements after October were to show, quite vague about what was to be done. The October revolution was from the very start a conspiracy led by an undemocratic party following in the tradition of Machiavelli.

Steve Coleman

(To be continued)

Russian Revolution: II. Dictatorship over the Proletariat (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the other articles in the series, click on the following links: ONE, THREE, FOUR.

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks staged an insurrection using the Military Revolutionary Committee which had been set up by the soviets after the attempted Kornilov coup. The result was a transfer of power from the hands of the soviets to the small party which followed Lenin. Two of the Bolshevik leaders, Kamenev and Zinoviev, opposed the insurrection on the following grounds:

A majority of workers and a significant part of the army in Russia are for us. But all the rest are in question. We are convinced, for example, that if it now comes to elections for the Constituent Assembly, then the majority of peasants will vote for the SRs.

Their dissent was ignored and, in years to come, used by Stalin to discredit them as counter-revolutionaries. Let there be no confusion about the nature of the Bolshevik seizure of power: it was a conspiratorial coup designed to subjugate what was left of spontaneous mass action to Leninist control. Those who look to the October coup with admiration, as do most of the current Left groups, show an anti-socialist contempt for democracy. 

In January 1918 the Constituent Assembly was elected by universal suffrage. The voting figures were as follows:

Votes cast for each party

Social Revolutionaries                                                                                                          15,848,004

Ukranian SRs                                                                                                                          1,286,157
Mensheviks                                                                                                                             1,364,826
Cadets                                                                                                                                     1,986,601
Bolsheviks                                                                                                                              9,844,637
Others                                                                                                                                   11,356,651

Seats in the Constituent Assembly
Social Revolutionaries                                                                                                                      370
Left SRs                                                                                                                                              40
Bolsheviks                                                                                                                                         175
Mensheviks                                                                                                                                         16
Popular Socialists                                                                                                                                 2
Cadets                                                                                                                                                 17
National groups                                                                                                                                  86
Unknown                                                                                                                                              1

(Data taken from O.H. Radkey, The Elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917, pp.16-17.)

The Bolsheviks crushed the democratically elected assembly, and Lenin’s argument for doing so was an inevitable consequence of the elitist line taken in What Is To Be Done?:

The petty-bourgeois democrats . . . are suffering from illusions when they imagine that the working people are capable, under capitalism, of acquiring the high degree of class consciousness, firmness of character, perception and wide political outlook that will enable them to decide, merely by voting, or at all events, to decide in advance, without long experience of struggle, that they will follow a particular party . . . Capitalism would not be capitalism if it did not, on the one hand, condemn the masses to a downtrodden, crushed and terrified state of existence, to disunity and ignorance, and if it did not, on the other hand, place in the hands of the bourgeoisie a gigantic apparatus of falsehood and deception to hoodwink the masses of workers and peasants, to stultify their minds and so forth.

(Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 30, pp.266-67.)

Not only was Lenin’s contention — that socialist consciousness by the majority is an impossible dream — an arrogant slander, but it led directly to a system of brutal dictatorship. The fact is that a socialist revolution can only be enacted by a majority of socialists.

The Bolshevik dictatorship over the proletariat was maintained in three ways: rival political organisations were either suppressed or sterilised; widespread political terror was employed; the party and the state became one. The suppression of rival political organisations was probably not the premeditated intention of most Bolsheviks. At the Second Congress of Soviets which was meeting at the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Mensheviks and Right SRs stormed out, leaving only the Bolsheviks and Left SRs. The Mensheviks and Right SRs left because they recognised the coup for the undemocratic conspiracy that it was. The Left SRs stayed, but it is instructive to consider their fate.

In December 1917 they formed a coalition with the Bolsheviks and joined the new government. Then the Bolsheviks stole the SR land policy and the Left SRs were satisfied. By February 1917 Lenin probably made up his mind to break with the Left SRs because of their opposition to some of the activities of the Cheka — the Bolshevik political police. The split between the two parties came in March 1918 over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which the Left SRs considered to be defeatist. The Left SRs were a party based upon anti-German patriotism, and in July 1918 some of their members conspired to murder the German ambassador, Von Mirbach. Their punishment for this was the suppression of their press and expulsion from the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. So here was a group which had supported the rule of one party in the hope that they would gain some of the political spoils. Within a year they, like the Mensheviks and Right SRs, had no free press, no free voice in the soviets and even restricted freedom of association. The trade unions and factory committees were similarly sterilised.

The use of terror was the second means of defending Bolshevik hegemony. The Cheka’s use of brutal police methods was legalised by a decree of Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars) on 5 September 1918:

Sovnarkom, having heard the report of the chairman of the Cheka, finds that under present circumstances it is necessary to safeguard the rear by means of terror. In order to strengthen the work of the Cheka its forces must be increased by reliable party comrades. The Soviet Republic must be safeguarded from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, by shooting all persons associated with White Guard associations, plots and conspiracies, and by publishing the names of all those shot and the reason for the shooting.

The All-Ukranian Trade Union Council tried in vain to protest against the Bolshevik methods of control:

When a government pretending to act in defence of workers makes use of the same methods of political struggle as those employed by reactionaries in their fight . . . against the insurgent masses, then the proletariat must raise its voice and declare openly: ‘The responsibility for terror falls on those who use it’. The working class never has and never will have anything in common with these methods of struggle. We appeal to the organised proletariat to support our protest. (Posledniia Novosti, No.5, 213, 28 September 1918, evening edition.)

The third method of maintaining the dictatorship was by bureaucratisation and centralisation of the party and the state until both were controlled by a small caucus of leaders. The civil war provided a useful justification for this process. By the time of Lenin’s death the state machine was no less powerful and anti-working class than that presided over by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

The Bolshevik dictatorship has provided one of the most compelling arguments used by the enemies of socialism. The only lesson to be learnt from the Russian Revolution is that a society based upon human freedom cannot be created by a faction which sees the mass of humanity as incapable of self-emancipation.

Steve Coleman

(To be continued.)

Russian Revolution: IV The Fate of the Peasantry (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the other articles in the series, click on the following links: ONE, TWO, THREE.

As early as August 1918, the Socialist Standard, armed with only a minimum of precise information on events in Russia during the previous ten months, and the insight of Marxist analysis, published a prophetic article entitled ‘The Revolution in Russia - Where It Fails'. There it was pointed out that

Leaving aside the subsidiary differences in the economic position of the different provinces, the one great fact common to most of the peasantry is their desire to be rid of the burden of the tax they have to pay for their land, whether to the local Lord or to the Government, so that they may gain a livelihood from their holdings. This applies to both the individual and the group holders. Hence the peasants' movements and demands are not for social ownership, but merely for the abolition of the tax burden and their right to take up new land as the population increases. In other words, they only wish to free the old system of individual or group cultivation and management from governmental taxes and control.

In other words, the Russian peasantry possessed the political ideology of peasants everywhere: they wanted more land. This ideal embraced the original Narodnik demand for the Black Repartition: an economic system in which the land is returned from the feudal aristocracy to the toiling peasant. It was this, and not socialism, that the vast mass of the Russian population aspired to.

After the February Revolution the Provisional Government set up a Main Land Committee and Local Land Committees to ‘prepare for'a major land reform after the election of the Constituent Assembly. Liberal reformers were optimistic: the peasantry were typically cynical about the prospect of legislative justice and the poorer peasants began immediately to seize land. The Bolsheviks were the only party to encourage this form of illegal appropriation, thus adding to their reputation as.a party which would advocate any policy in the quest for power. In May 1917, at the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies, Lenin advocated that the poor peasants should form separate factions in all peasant organisations — this was an attempt to unite the poor peasants with the Bolshevik workers whose interests Lenin believed to be the same. But the peasantry as a whole still supported their own party, the Social Revolutionaries, rather than the Bolsheviks. In August 1917 the journal of the All-Russian Peasants’ Congress, which was controlled by the SRs, published a model land decree compiled from 242 demands submitted by delegates to the first Congress in May. The model decree proposed expropriation of the land by the peasantry, the prohibition of hired labour, the prohibition of the buying and selling of land, and the fair distribution of land to all peasants. This demand for agrarian justice was straight out of the Narodnik fantasies of the nineteenth century and was welcomed by the mass of the politically ignorant peasantry. Realising its popularity, the policy was adopted by the Bolsheviks as their official agrarian programme. The Bolsheviks stole the SR land policy; the peasants supported them in October in return for the promise that they would at last become unrestricted landlords; on 26 October 1917 the Land Decree was declared law.

Did the enactment of the Black Repartition bring contentment to the peasants? An investigation carried out by Russian statisticians in 1919 showed that as far as the distribution of land and livestock after 1917 was concerned there was “a withering away of the two extremes and an inflation of the centre”. (A.V. Peshekonov)

Peasants with more than 8 dessyatine (or 21.6 acres) of land had fallen from 7.9 per cent to 3.1 per cent of the total peasant population: the proportion of landless peasants had fallen from 11.4 per cent to 6.5 per cent. Most peasants did not receive substantial benefits from the redistribution of land after the Bolshevik revolution and. in the light of the political consequences of the new regime, the benefits gained were nullified by the intensified pressures which were put upon the peasantry. In the words of one historian,

. . . the long-awaited ‘black repartition' did not bring the average peasant householder much additional wealth. If anything, it may be said to have simply spread the prevailing misery more widely than before. (John Keep. The Russian Revolution, chap. 30)

The peasants backed the Bolsheviks in 1917, but their loyalty was soon disappointed. The food shortages in the city led the Bolsheviks to form detachments of workers and poor peasants to confiscate grain from the peasant farmers. Many of the so-called kulaks destroyed the grain or ate it themselves rather than hand it over to the state; many of them died in order to.defend what a few months earlier the Land Decree had declared to be theirs.

The Bolshevik leaders, faced with starvation in the city and resistance in the countryside, began to learn what is meant by a revolution which is dependent upon politically unconscious masses. They set up committees of poor peasants (kombedy) in which they relied upon the support of those peasants with the least stake in the land to wage a battle for the grain produced by the slightly wealthier peasants. The Bolshevik government began to set up large-scale farms on many of the confiscated estates and established a central authority (Narkomzen) to administer them. How distant was this from the peasant ideal of unrestricted, individual land ownership. Rather than abolish taxation of the peasants, the new regime introduced a tax in kind in October 1918 which was to be supplementary to the grain requisition policy already in operation.

Having supported Lenin on the basis of his promises the peasants, like the wage workers in the cities, ended up as the tools of state capitalism. In order to retain control the new regime had to dragoon and exploit them. Engels, writing of The Peasant War in Germany, explained what must happen if a party standing for the interest of one class takes power and is forced to depend upon another class:

The worst that can befall the leader of an extremist party is to be compelled to take over the government at a time when the moment is not yet ripe for the rule of the class he represents . . .  He finds himself necessarily in an insoluble political dilemma: what he can do is in conflict with his entire previous attitudes, his principles, and the immediate interest of his parts: what he is supposed to do cannot be done . . .  he is compelled to represent not his party, his class, but the class for the rule of which the movement happens to be right. For the sake of that movement he must act for the interests of an alien class, and must feed his own class with phrases and promises along with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are really their own. He who gets himself in that false position is irredeemably lost.

This was the fate of Bolshevism. Without the conscious support of the majority of the world's working class socialism was impossible: only state capitalism could be established, the heritage of which was the brutality of Stalinism.

Conclusion

Some readers may ask, why does the Socialist Standard devote a series of four articles to the consideration of a revolution which happened sixty two years ago? We answer that our lessons must be drawn from history. Thirty years after the Bolshevik seizure of power Mao led his party to dictatorship in China on the basis of Lenin's political principles. Today, hundreds of political organisations — some mass parties, others minute factions — repeat the Bolshevik formula. In Britain, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, the International Marxist Group, the Worker's Revolutionary Party and the International Communist Current (to name but a few) invite workers to respect the ideas of Leninism. As a party hostile to all parties which stand for capitalism, ‘whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist', we will scrutinise and publicly expose the anti-socialist ideas of those who led the Russian Revolution and those who follow in their footsteps. In order to do this we have to know exactly what took place in Russia in 1917.

An enormous amount of literature on the Russian Revolution has been published. The first three volumes of E.H. Carr’s History of Soviet Russia are recommended, as is John Keep’s The Russian Revolution. David Shub's biography of Lenin, Stephen Cohen’s biography of Bukharin and especially Israel Gctzler's biography of Martov, are worth reading. Martin McCauley’s The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State provides a useful collection of documents. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution gives the orthodox Bolshevik account in a manner which is very readable, but often mistaken. Tony Cliffs four volume biography of Lenin is the product of mental sterility, incomprehension of historical fact and approval of undemocratic tactics. Two pamphlets on Russia have been published by the SPGB, and there are numerous articles dealing with Russian capitalism in past issues of the Socialist Standard.

Steve Coleman

Correction. The Russian Revolution

In the November Socialist Standard, the article, The Russian Revolution III - State Capitalism implies that our member Harry Young was in Russia and saw the effects of currency inflation, at the time of the Revolution. In fact, Harry arrived in Russia in November 1922 and it was then that he experienced the worthlessness of the rouble, which was revalued in 1923.

We apologise to our readers, and to Harry, for the inference in this article.

Editorial Committee

Russian Revolution: III State Capitalism (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the other articles in the series, click on the following links: ONE, TWO, FOUR.

Although modern Leninists expound the myth of ‘Russian Socialism' as if there was a transformation from capitalism to socialism in the post-October days, it is doubtful whether Lenin seriously had any such illusion. He recognised, and stated on many occasions, that only state capitalism could be established in Russia. Within months of receiving information about the October revolution, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, despite acknowledging the Bolsheviks’ anti-war policy, foresaw the inevitable state capitalist outcome of the coup. The Trotskyists, it should be added, maintain the most absurd position of all: they accept the Leftist myth that Russia became socialist in 1917 and then claim that it reverted to capitalism when Stalin fell out with Trotsky!

The establishment of state capitalism presented a problem for the Bolsheviks. How could a revolution designed to overthrow capitalism be considered successful when it merely initiated a new form of capitalism? The myth of the transition period between state capitalism (referred to as socialism) and socialism (referred to as communism) was created by Lenin in order to disguise the reality. Broken promises, persecution, murder and tyranny were justified because Russia was still in the first, socialist, stage of revolution. Much has been written about the theory of the transition period which need not be repeated here, except to say that the idea that there must be a transition between consciousness and unconsciousness, between oppression and freedom, between property society and common ownership, is both illogical and historical nonsense. Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Preobrazhensky appear to have swallowed the theory:

Communist society will know nothing of money. Every worker will produce goods for the general welfare. He will not receive any certificate to the effect that he has delivered a product to society; in other words, he will receive no money. Likewise, he will pay no money to society when he receives from the common store what he requires . . .
Socialism, however, is communism in the process of construction . . . and in the proportion that the work of construction is successfully carried on the need for money will disappear.

Like the English Fabians, they thought that the system would wither away. Before the Bolshevik seizure of power in September 1917, Lenin predicted the nature of the state capitalist economy: “All citizens become employees and workers of one all national State syndicate.” (State and Revolution)

On 14 November 1917 Lenin presented a draft decree on workers’ control to the Congress of Soviets. This decree, far from meeting the aspirations of the factory committees which wanted direct control of each productive unit by the workers employed in that unit, established a centralised hierarchy of state control. Significantly, the leading Bolshevik trade unionist, Lozovsky, only agreed to vote for the decree on the condition that “. . . the workers in each enterprise should not get the impression that the enterprise belongs to them.” Shortly after the decree was passed a Supreme Council of National Economy (Vesenkha) was set up “. . . to organise the economic activity of the nation and the financial resources of the government.”

For the first five months of the Bolshevik regime, despite the erection of the machinery of State control, the economy was anything but regulated. Anarchy prevailed, born of the frustration and poverty of the masses: before they had been denied the fulfilment of their needs, now they were going to take according to their needs. Money became worthless, production all but ceased, peasant producers resorted to barter. Harry Young, an SPGB member who was in Russia at the time, describes how he had to pay millions of roubles in exchange for the most basic commodities. Economic anarchy resulted in chaos and the short taste of freedom was a prelude to rigid state coercion. In March 1918 the government signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, bringing Russia out of the war. The Congress of Soviets which approved the treaty resolved to put an end to the anarchy in the economy. Larin and Milyutin, two dedicated state capitalists, replaced Bukharin, Obolensky and Lomov (with their idealistic thoughts of the future communist society) as leaders of Vesenkha. On 28 June 1918 Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars) issued a decree nationalising every important category of industry.

Nationalisation is not socialism. The soviet state was increasingly becoming the monopoly of the party leadership. As the control of the economy by the state continued, the pious ideals of fairness and equality dwindled. The party bureaucracy prospered at the expense of the exploitation of the working class. State capitalism is the accumulation of capital by the state officials. Where there is capital there must be wage labour and where there is wage labour there must be capitalism.

In the post Brest-Litovsk period, from 1918 to 1921, often referred to by historians as ‘War Communism’, two main industrial probems prevailed: excessive bureaucratisation and the erosion of the workers’ democracy which had developed in the post-revolutionary days.

A highly centralised economy required a bureaucracy which was removed from the centres of production and was primarily concerned with reaching planning norms. A division between state control and local needs developed. The former predominated.

Immediately after the revolution the workers did have a degree of control over their working lives. Committees were set up at the point of production to allow workers to have a say in the way things were run. Lenin, seeing the need for rapid industrialisation if Russia was to move on from its semi-feudal form of economic organisation, had no time for such democratic niceties as collegial management. In Current Tasks of the Soviet Power he argued that 

Unqualified submission to a single will is unconditionally necessary for the success of the process of labour organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry.

Some Bolsheviks, such as Tomsky, vigorously opposed the transition to one-man management, but their cries of protest were wasted. State capitalism meant the total subordination of the worker to the State. It is estimated that by 1920 one-man management existed in 88 per cent of nationalised enterprises. By then the trade unions had become sterile appendages of the state.

Leninists blame the failure of Bolshevism to make capitalism run in the interest of the working class on to external circumstances, such as the civil war. Certainly, the war did account for falling production levels and the absolute reduction in the size of the working class. But to portray the Bolsheviks as genuine socialists, overcome by unforeseeable events, is a gross distortion. Read what Lenin said before October 1917. It is clear that he advocated state capitalism, not world socialism.

Steve Coleman

(To be continued.)