It looks like I will be posting even less material on this blog because of a not-so-unexpected development in my “other” life. But before I sink back into oblivion for a while (not that I have actual readers, and thanks if you happen to be one. Cheers.), I thought of posting my general notes on the Philippine Left.
Two questions: Why do I think anyone cares? And who the hell am I in the first place?
On the first question, which is partly rhetorical, my answer is, I don't. But this blog is of course written for those who do care. Political commentaries are not for everyone (people have different interests), Left-leaning ones even more so. On the second question, I have to admit that I am a nobody. As I said in my charming About page, I am a mere office guy. My immediate reason for keeping this blog is that I was once a student activist. I was drawn to Left politics in college. Like many that came from a struggling lower middle class family, the Left's language articulated the world to me – the poverty and its twin, social inequality; the ruling class and the power they hold over everyone; the what we often called “bankruptcy” of “bourgeois” culture; and the hope that all of it could be ended.
The other reason is that, for those who actually get absorbed by studies on society when they stare at it in all its frustrating existence, Leftist politics in its broadest sense remains the best hope humanity has for making things better. For two hundred years, it is the Left that has grappled with questions such as, “How does society really work” and “What can we do to change it?”
I would also like to think that my lack of a “Who's Who”-fitting identity supports one of the points I'm trying to make. One of the hopes of a new Left is that anyone can have a say in politics. As someone once said, politics is too important to be left to politicians, or in the case of the Left to academics and full-time activists, no matter how brilliant their insights. It is among my hopes that more and more people say out loud what they feel about issues such as social inequality and what they think should be done against it. Or, if they were self-proclaimed Leftists as I am, to speak out their own opinions on issues close to the Left – such as issues of strategy and organization.
The following points make up my account of things on precisely these issues.
1. The Philippines needs a new form because the Old Left no longer works.
What is the current status of the Philippine Left? Today it is dominated of course by the Communist Party and the organizations that, let's say, draw inspiration from it. Then there is the “broad Left” made up of all the other Leftist formations that split from the Party in 1992 in a debate over strategy. One thing they all have in common is their desire to be able to take over the state at some point, in a violent overthrow – a “revolution,” in keeping with the ideas of Karl Marx. I call them the Old Left (for purposes of simplification, I am obviously leaving out here the group Akbayan which supported the economically conservative Aquino administration in its entire duration. Akbayan was also formed after the 1992-1993 CPP split, but over the years it has become less and less critical of Capitalism, and more and more supportive of traditional politicians).
Did the Old Left work? Is it working now? In a way, the CPP, or the “NDs” as they are also called (for “National Democracy,” a programmatic term which is essentially their alternative to Socialism, a period of “socialist construction”), did get a taste of state power even if they didn't manage to capture the state (and perhaps thankfully so) in the manner they prefer, which is by building farmer armies in the countryside through a “protracted” guerilla war. They did it by being an ally of Rodrigo Duterte, another economically conservative politician and a mass murderer by command. Meanwhile, the other groups continue to exist as a marginal force in Philippine politics. How they intend to win – and what their criteria for winning are – are anybody's guess. But, again in keeping with Marxism, Leftist parties start with ideas around arousing and organizing if not the "peasants" then in particular the workers for the upcoming momentous war with the establishment.
The result? Fifty years since the CPP's founding, and 25 years after the split, there exists no genuine debate at all about anti-capitalism nor socialism in the Philippine political mainstream – in the minds of even the most educated ordinary Filipinos (groups like the Socialist Circle are very new entrants, and still have little activity). People associate the word “Left” with “ism” slogans and rallies in the streets that for them cause nothing more than traffic. The Left thus exists in the popular mind more as a method of protest, not an intelligent and necessary critique of capitalism and of the collective process of imagining alternatives to it.
I personally don't blame them. Perhaps during the 60s down to the 70s, the prospect of succeeding in a violent revolution was very real, and so all political strategies were tailored toward that end. This was after all a period of student revolt and the hippie culture. People, especially the youth, were asking questions and for many of them the ideas of the Left offered answers. So what they did was come up with a political strategy that seemed reasonable at the time. They had a different set of objectives, but those objectives continue to be their objectives now. And so their strategy based on that have not changed. Except that now, after half a century of sticking to the original plan, the unexpected happened – they managed to build well-established organizations whose survival in and of itself has become another main priority, and which committed them further to their original modes of operation.
Fast forward to 2018. Only more than year a ago, Filipinos elected a confessed murderer and rapist-wannabe. After more than 10,000 Filipinos died in the drug war – that mostly eliminated the poor – they kept silent. Support for Duterte is rising among the middle class. Meanwhile, membership in unions have declined over the years since the early 1990s. More and more Filipinos, a lot of them the so-called millennials, are getting suckered into investing in the stock market, perhaps not too oblivious to the notion that it is exactly a tool for wealth concentration into the upper and upper middle class more than anything else. Self-reported poverty is still hovering within the 40-50% level (i.e. half of the population identifying as poor). Yet in global surveys, Filipinos are found to be among the most “happy.”
Is this really a good time to think about building an army and taking over the state? Has not the period for this kind of strategy ended when the communists missed the chance to take over government during the political vacuum of the post-Snap Election Marcos years?
In our current state, it is becoming more and more obvious that the Left will never be able to overthrow government in a violent revolution. And even if they could, such a revolution will only end up being violent toward the people because a great part of them will be against it, for whatever reason. This is not mentioning the tragedy of the countless deaths of our best and brightest who devote their lives to their organizations' cause along the way. The strategy of a long-term force build-up in anticipation of a great rupture against the state, led by a group of ideologically correct super-activists believing in a singular ideology just no longer seems to work.
2. The task of the new Left is to disseminate and propagate the anti-Capitalist critique and the alternatives to it.
Capitalism is an economic and social system based on the private ownership of society's productive assets. Its end result has become, on the one hand, the concentration of wealth in the top section of society, and on the other the massive poverty of the masses of people below. Marx observed that value is really something that only the workers can generate through their labor, and it is this value from worker labor that the entire “ruling class” expropriates in the form, ultimately, of money. The overall end result is massive social inequality – the very few live very well, while the greatest majority suffer in unspeakable conditions.
Its ideological defense is safely enshrined in society's legal “superstructure” (i.e. private property) but also finds expression in all other human cultural activities (especially religion and formal education). A deeply unsustainable system, it was supposed to already have disintegrated. However, human technological achievements, in my opinion, just keeps delaying its demise. As technology advances, humans find more and more ways to produce goods cheaply, resulting in a situation where even ordinary workers can afford smart phones and feel somehow part of the community and its material and cultural “progress.” Of course, that stability is guaranteed by the people's default, pro-capitalist mentality.
Or at least, all of the above is just one version of it. There should be many more, and if there are it should be upon all members of society to talk about it and eventually do something about what they've agreed upon.
The problem here is that “What do Filipinos think about these concepts,” is not the next question. The next question really is, how come there exists practically no discussion of these issues in our daily lives? And given this, how can Philippine society suddenly become socialist-oriented when we don't even have open socialists in mainstream politics (don't count Risa, she has barely criticized Capitalism in the Senate, which is understandable) or, and more telling of our situation, even just in social media that will articulate the anti-capitalist critique and the alternatives to it? Surely, a society that has boasted one of the longest running Leftist revolutionary movements in Asia should by now have had the most conscious people when it comes to socialism and anti-capitalism? Surely in places like Facebook we would even now be having many groups whose sole discussion point is capitalism vs. socialism, say? Surely we would even now have a single NGO, out of the hundreds of NGO's out there, called the Center for Alternative Economies, generously funded by open-minded donors, with scholars devoted to the study of our non-capitalist future? Or surely even just one decent, well-cited and loved Socialist newspaper/website that's not tied to the NDs?
Alas, nada. It is because this part was specifically left out. One of the consequences of an Old Left being obsessed with the violent state overthrow is the treatment of discussions around our problems as secondary to taking over the state. It's as if the Left never cared about the long term. All it wanted was Power. To handle the levers of government. And they will go as far as being allies with a potential dictator just to be able to taste some of it. But over the decades, I think we have learned that more important than the anticipation of the imagined final rupture with the state is the even more important question of what to do in the here and now.
So where I sit, the task is really to disseminate and struggle to popularize ideas that are critical of capitalism, exposing it in new, creative ways as a system that has brought so much misery to most of the people in our country, and that makes us all live collectively more depressing lives. For now I won't even go rah-rah for the S word – there will be a separate time for that. Right now, what we can do is attract politically interested individuals to this simple cause. We need something in the Philippines that will keep the discourse on anti-Capitalism and the alternatives to it alive and burning. Whether we succeed in forming a new organization or not, this should at least be our minimum aim before all really becomes lost.
3. The new Left has to try to do things differently this time.
Just by observing the Old Left, we can know instinctively the things we ought not to repeat if we are to form a new one. First of all, the commitment to a single ideology seems passe. History is a witness to the mistakes and heartbreaking waste that have resulted from the fanatical commitment to a specific set of beliefs – beliefs that are interpreted faultlessly by a supposedly enlighted few. “Question everything,” is a dictum that's sometimes mentioned by the Old Left's youth groups. Everything – except the ideology of your own organization, and the methods it employs.
When it comes to politics and social life, none of us really are experts. All we can ever do is hope that somehow we agree to certain values such as social justice, and proceed from there. And this is because no amount of theorizing can really accommodate a world that is fundamentally mysterious and many times unrecognizable. Randy David, in a recent piece, is said to have mentioned that the best minds of his generation were so busy with structural debates in the 70's to the 80's. As a result, the single phenomenon that would define Philippine society over the next decades – Overseas Filipino Workers – was largely left unstudied, its full impacts not appreciated until it was a bit too late.
I think the single reason many Leftist parties the world over insist on a violent revolution is simply this – because 170 years ago, Marx said it. It was really his word, above all else. All the things they ever did were in strict observance with canonical Marxism. They treated Marxism as religion, only they shrouded it in scientific rigor. They are never wrong, and all those who oppose them deserve to be ridiculed and more, being the non-believers that they are. And incidentally this is also the reason for the triteness of the language that much of the Philippine Left still uses – calls and ways of saying them that make the only occasionally political cringe. “Ibagsak ang Imperyalismo! Labanan ang pasismo ng Estado!” These are great ideas, but they somehow feel so boring, so suffocating in the hands of the Old Left.
The anti-Capitalist position is not an ideological position. It is a position of common sense. Or, where is the sense in privatizing basic social services? Or in protecting absolute inheritance rights? Where is the sense in depressing wages in a calculated way just so the owning class retains profits? Where is the sense in dismantling all our local industries to take on the role of manual labor suppliers all over the world? And where is the sense in crafting a tax law that limits taxes from the rich while imposing a consumption tax on the millions of families that live hand-to-mouth? (Don't believe the bourgeois economist bigotry that states that the rich “reinvest” their profits and thus make jobs. Sure, they reinvest some of it, but they keep a disproportionate amount for themselves.) All of these questions require a reasonably non-capitalist solution – solutions not even whose shadows hover in mainstream political discourse. Yet we commit to these positions because they are simply reasonable, especially after decades and decades of capitalist failure.
Would it be too much to ask for new Left movements that they be ideologically open? That they make their positions based on nothing more than a reasoned argument?
Also based on what we've seen with the Old Left, it appears that the era of being a full-time cadre in a self-sustaining ideological party is past. Of course we want to be self-sustaining. We want our organization to have its own finances. But there will be many pitfalls here. The moment we become a self-sustaining organization, automatically issues of bureaucratization will arise.
I personally think that an activist's source of income must not be completely tied to her politics. That way, if you find out the politics was wrong all along, you'll still have the courage step out of it and not cower in fear at the prospect of losing what by then would have practically become your livelihood, your financial source for feeding you and your family. (This is not to mention the perks – and they are many – of working in an organization that's often a recipient of funding from international donors.)
In a sense, this is what some NGO's are. The Philippine NGO scene is one other distant cousin of the broad Left following the CPP split. As the “rejectionist” faction crumbled over their inability to match the rigor of ND ideology (Marxism-Leninism-Mao thought), many of their old cadres, still infused with social values, turned to the NGO institutions. NGOs became a good way to engage the ruling class, while at the same time maintaining a job for people who did not want to be a sell-out to the corporate world.
NGO's are nice. However, without a radical infusion (read: one that states that Capitalism in the final analysis will be a dead end for humanity), all they ever will become is at best a proposer of palliative measures. At worst, they will become handmaidens of the ruling class – helping delay the inevitable destruction of humanity, but not attempting to stop it in any way.
4. Direct participation in mainstream politics will be necessary at some point and when we already have the strength to do it.
Finally, another way we can do things differently in the future is by once and for all tackling intently the question that has stared us in the face for the longest time – do we, as Socialists, actively participate in mainstream political processes?
This is the part I am most unsure of. It is standard knowledge in the Left that we just cannot fight the ruling class on their own turf. You fight them there, you lose. You won't be able to match their resources. But more than that, the game operates by their rules, and it can always be rigged for their sake if they want to.
And yet it seems very obvious that participation in the political process is a must. Leftists who miss out on electoral participation forego a great opportunity – if not the only one – to appeal to ears willing to listen. And whether we like it or not, the Philippine political mainstream has come to be accepted as a legitimate institution and a legitimate source of political power. The best time to be political is during the electoral season.
By “participation as Socialists,” I mean running in elective posts (at the most) with a clearly, openly, matter-of-factly Socialist platform. Active and serious participation in the electoral process, of course, has huge implications, one of which is central to the debate in the entire Left – it implies that we believe that society progresses and reaches more humane aims, if not socialism itself, via elections. Or put bluntly, that the state can be “reformed.” And so, “Reformists!,” will cry the extreme Leftists. Luckily, we now have an answer to the latter. I would borrow Bhaskar Sunkara's reference to “non-reformist reforms” for the content that a Socialist platform may include. You may read about it here.
But again, I do not know. What do I know is what I feel. And what I feel is that the more we do not come in there openly, with new ideas as Socialists, the more we get literally “Left” out.
Of course we won't do it tomorrow. Or next year. Or maybe we can do it small by small, although not necessarily at the barangay level. These are questions that all of us can settle once we have already have the organization that is even willing to entertain the idea. And perhaps substantial participation in the political/electoral process is not limited to actually running for certain seats. What is clear is that we will not do it unthinkingly, and we will do it together.
Even the question of how the political Leftist party will be funded is a question for the organization. As individuals, we can do little. But as a single unit acting as one, maybe some things can be achieved. We may not be able to put out a 30-second spot in the major TV channels, but during the last elections, even the party-less Walden Bello was able to push some of it.
And in the end maybe this is where our faith in the people comes in. Maybe if there were masses of people with an anti-Capitalist politics, even the ruling class will have to concede things every now and then. Incidentally it is this same mass of people – all of us – that will be decisive in winning the "final rupture" if ever that scenario appears on the horizon.
And what a horizon we face. As I finish this, Rodrigo Duterte has just managed to revoke the legal right to exist of the online news website Rappler which has been critical of its regime. That is scary by itself. But if we'll look around, pretty much the same thing is happening everywhere. Duterte and his syndicate have launched a full-scale attack on every single official that has stood her (an apt pronoun as many of them are women) ground against the excesses of the regime. It started with Leila de Lima in the Senate. Then it was Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales -- a woman whose feet Duterte is not fit to kiss. Then Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, in Congress Duterte's allies are concocting all sorts of schemes either to extend his power some more, if not make him ruler for life.
Why is he doing this? Because as sure as the sun rises each day, eventually the massive social problems that Filipinos suffer from day by day will come crashing down on even the most euphoric of his supporters. Let us make one thing very clear here: Duterte will not be able to halt poverty, and he knows it. His economic policies are no different from that of all past administrations that the people have come to hate. There is nothing fundamentally different in his approach. And if the Left is to be believed, the recent tax intervention will do more harm for the common people than good. At the end of the day, it is the empty stomachs of those living in poverty that will disabuse people from the belief that change will finally come. It looks like Duterte is already trying to anticipate where this is all headed.
And yet, for the Old Left, before it even thinks of painting the streets red again in protest, it would do well to remember -- the Duterte Phenomenon is also partly a result of the Left's failures over the last half century of our nation's political life. When you show the public that protests are actually just a pretext for toppling regimes, which changes the faces in government but does not change its underlying terms, you teach them not to trust you in the future. The Left exists in the popular mind as a method of protest, true. But these are protests that have only led, for them, in failure.
The Philippine Left has always been a beacon of the Left in Asia. Perhaps it is time for us to return to form.
Makati, January 2018
xxx
Showing posts with label bhaskar sunkara. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bhaskar sunkara. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Sunday, December 24, 2017
The Few Who Won: The History of the Russian Revolution(s) and its Strategic Relevance Today
A repost from Jacobin, written by Bhaskar Sunkara. The original article is here.
The Few Who Won
How should we understand the October Revolution and its tragic aftermath?
A devout Polish Catholic, Felix Dzerzhinsky was once asked why he was sure there was a God. “God is in the heart,” the teenager replied. “If I ever come to the conclusion that there is no God, I would put a bullet in my head.”
A few years later, he realized just how alone humanity was. But instead of a bullet, he found a new faith, vowing “to fight against evil to the last breath” as a revolutionary socialist. By age forty, he was clad in black leather, designing a bloody terror as head of the young Soviet Union’s secret police.
This story of zealotry fits with the popular image of Bolshevism — a conspiratorial sect, singular in purpose. By virtue of their ruthlessness, they would take advantage of 1917’s democratic upheavals, perverting the noble February Revolution into the bloody excesses of October. That Stalinism emerged from its womb is no surprise — the extremism of men like Dzerzhinsky, confident the utopia they were building was worth any cost, made it all but certain.
The narrative is neat, and seemingly vindicated by history. The system that emerged out of the October Revolution was a moral catastrophe. But more than that, it was a tragedy — and tragedies don’t need villains.
Take Dzerzhinsky’s socialism. It was rooted in the humanist idea that the “present hellish life with its wolfish exploitation, oppression, and violence” could give way to an order “based on harmony, a full life embracing society as a whole.” The future executioner suffered for his beliefs — eleven out of twenty years underground spent in prison or exile — “in the torments of loneliness, longing for the world and for life.”
Poor, tortured, imprisoned, and martyred, the revolutionaries of Russia seemed destined to meet the same fate as radicals elsewhere in Europe. Only they didn’t. After half decade in solitary confinement, enduring beatings that permanently disfigured his jaw, Dzerzhinsky’s last letter from prison was resolute: “At the moment I am dozing, like a bear in his winter den; all that remains is the thought that spring will come and I will cease to suck my paw and all the strength that still remains in my body and soul will manifest itself. Live I will.”
Here’s what happens when noble, determined people win — and find themselves in an unwinnable situation.
The Bolsheviks Before Bolshevism
In the Cold War, both sides painted Vladimir Lenin and his party as special — unique in their brutality or their model for revolution. But despite being an underground movement, it’s striking just how ordinary they were. Lenin saw himself as an orthodox Marxist, trying to adapt the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) plan to a largely rural and peasant country with a weak civil society and mass illiteracy.
The supposed proto-totalitarian smoking gun, Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, does have unusual elements. Lenin calls for professional organizers capable of eluding police and places special emphasis on the role of print propaganda, for instance. But it wasn’t a blueprint for a radically different party; rather, these were tactics needed for a movement barred from the legal organizing and parliamentary work pursued by its counterparts elsewhere. Once tsarism was overthrown, backward Russia and its small working class could develop along Western lines and push the struggle further.
Siding with Karl Kautsky, Lenin took aim at Eduard Bernstein and others on the SPD’s right wing for trying to change “a party of social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms.” To be a revolutionary, for Lenin, meant smashing the capitalist state — it was a politics of rupture. But his project, unlike the “Blanquists” he also denounced, was about cohering a workers’ movement and placing it at the center of political struggle, not creating a hardened core of putschists. For Lenin the problem wasn’t that workers weren’t flocking to the vanguard party, but that socialists were underestimating workers. His goal, following the German example, was a merger of the two currents — a militant socialist workers’ movement.
Then perhaps if not by design, the Bolsheviks were forced by repression to adopt a military-like structure that they would take into power. This claim, too, is doubtful. Bolshevik organs even functioned with transparency and pluralism few organizations in much rosier conditions today can match.
Take the “economists,” the grouping Lenin criticized so thoroughly in What Is to Be Done? He thought that they, like every other faction, deserved “to demand the opportunity to express and advocate views.” Lenin was hardly a genial interlocutor — like Marx, he was a fan of personal invective. Still, the leader had to deal with not getting his way. Between 1912 and 1914, forty-seven of his articles were refused by Pravda, the “party paper.”
Dissent cut through Russian social democracy; no one’s marching orders were followed without debate. It wasn’t just Bolshevik, Menshevik, and Socialist Revolutionary (SR), but dozens of shades of opinions among the Bolsheviks themselves.
On important political issues, however, the main wings of Russian social democracy were close. When the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks split in 1903, it was over small points of emphasis, not because of Lenin’s supposed call for a professional vanguard party. When the 1905 revolution arrived, all parts of the movement fought side by side. Most Mensheviks, like most Bolsheviks, opposed the Great War, a clarity matched by few socialists elsewhere in Europe. In the lead-up to February 1917, they differed on how to view the liberal bourgeoisie, but agreed that the immediate task of Russian social democracy was overthrowing autocracy, not socialist revolution. Only in this period did it become obvious what set the Bolsheviks apart.
Goodbye, Social Democracy
Lenin didn’t leave social democracy, it left him. When he first got news that the SPD had voted for war credits on August 4, 1914, he thought it was capitalist propaganda.
His faith was misplaced. Only fourteen of ninety-two German socialist deputies opposed the decision. Following parliamentary norms, they voted with the majority as a bloc. An antiwar politician, Hugo Haase, was made to read the party’s pro-war statement in the Reichstag. Socialists in the French Chamber of Deputies followed suit the same day.
Kautsky wasn’t a parliamentarian, but he was present at the debate. He suggested abstaining, but agreed that Germany was waging a defensive struggle against an eastern threat. Within a year, he changed his tune and vigorously denounced the SPD’s pro-war leadership and the German state, but the damage was done. The longstanding social-democratic idea, affirmed by the Second International in congress after congress, was that the growing power of the working class would maintain peace “by resolute intervention.” If war did come to pass, the parties would not only oppose it, they would use the “crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”
That was the theory — in reality, social democracy’s flagship not only voted for war, but promoted Burgfriedenspolitik, a policy of class peace to help it along. Sixteen million people died in the conflict.
For more than a century, the Leninist narrative was that Kautsky had been an ideal Marxist until almost the outbreak of World War I. It was his stance on war in 1914 and his opposition to the October Revolution in 1917 that transformed him from revered “Pope of Marxism” to a “great renegade.” In his 1939 obituary for the German socialist, Trotsky sounds like a scorned lover: “We remember Kautsky as our former teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who separated himself from the proletarian revolution and from whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.”
Kautsky’s position on the war was indeed shocking. Within social democracy, a right-wing tendency had been growing among trade union leaders and parliamentarians who saw not just their own power, but that of the class they represented, as bound up more with the stability and prosperity of their respective nations than with vague notions of proletarian internationalism. But those were foes against whom Kautsky had waged intellectual and political battle for years.
“Modern society is ripe for revolution; and the bourgeoisie is not in a position to survive any insurrection.” Such a revolution would be won by “a well-disciplined minority, energetic and conscious of the goal.” Sounds like Lenin, but that was actually Kautsky.
There was, however, a growing gap between Kautsky’s ideas and those of his Russian admirers. He had developed a conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that differed from Lenin and Trotsky’s. Kautsky might have used language similar to theirs in the 1880s, just a decade removed from the Paris Commune and with the SPD still underground. But his thought subsequently evolved. He believed workers would win power through free elections, extend political and civil liberties, and radically reform, not smash, the existing state.
Kautsky was skeptical that direct democracy could operate at scale. Though never equating nationalization with socialism, neither did he advocate a council-based “soviet democracy.” He saw overcoming capitalism as a struggle that required political democracy and a long battle for popular support. Well before publishing The Road to Power and other late works praised by the Bolsheviks, he had developed ideas distinct from both social democracy’s reformist right and its revolutionary left.
But Lenin still looked to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the great revolutions of 1848 and 1789. This was the spirit that spawned the communist movement.
To the Finland Station
The 1905 revolution showed Lenin to be in step with his era. The “great dress rehearsal” came close to toppling tsarism and gave birth to the soviet.
Russia at that time was already pulsing with change. Rapid economic growth and social advance had taken place in the empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Industrial production doubled in the 1890s alone. Horses and carts and dusty tracks began to give way to vast railroads and, for a time, Russia even led the world in oil production.
But development was highly uneven. St Petersburg’s modern factories told little of life in an empire where, even in its European regions, only one in nine people lived in cities. Whatever Russia’s progress in absolute terms, it was falling ever further behind Western Europe.
In the countryside, agricultural development advanced at an even more glacial pace, failing to keep up with huge population growth. Land-hungry peasants pushed westward from their traditional communes into the steppes. Rural poverty was still endemic. With economic stagnation in the countryside and growing but patchy capitalist industry in a few cities, generalized scarcity went along with a small but highly politicized working class.
January 1905 caught the Bolsheviks by surprise. The timing and shape of the revolt was not what they expected. In October, St Petersburg workers established an organ to coordinate their actions. Factory delegates formed a soviet (council) in the city. The body soon became a kind of workers’ parliament, with representation from a range of trade unions and committees. It was essentially a functioning local government.
Trotsky, not Lenin, shined brightest in 1905. Neither Menshevik nor Bolshevik, but respected in both camps, he immediately grasped the revolution’s significance. Within the St Petersburg Soviet’s brief life, the twenty-six year old delegate emerged as an unparalleled orator and thinker. By the end of November, he was even elected its chair.
The situation by that point was untenable. As feared, Nicholas soon crushed the revolution and reneged on concessions promised to liberal forces. By April 1906, 14,000 people had been executed and 75,000 imprisoned.
But the revolutionaries now had a taste of real power. The transformation of Russian social democracy was stunning. Immediately before the 1905 revolution, the Bolsheviks had just 8,400 members. By the following spring, they could count 34,000 among them. The Mensheviks also drew thousands to their ranks.
The revolutionary movement finally had something Lenin had been aspiring to for years — a mass base of workers. Attempts to mend the divide between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would fail, but all had a sense that they were in a new era and that the tsar would soon fall.
But none came as close as Trotsky to guessing what would happen next. Grasping 1905’s implications, Trotsky refined a novel theory of “permanent revolution.” Marxists had traditionally thought that revolution would happen in stages. The first of these would be “bourgeois-democratic”: economically, this stage would pave the way for peasant land reform and further urban industrialization; politically, it would create a capitalist republic with freedom of speech and assembly. That would then allow social democrats to patiently organize for a second, socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed on this — they just argued over the role liberal capitalists would play. Mensheviks thought they would be at the heart of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, while Lenin thought workers could reconcile their interests with those of peasants and drive the process themselves.
Trotsky foresaw a different scenario. Instead of a bourgeois democratic revolution, the peasants would defeat the gentry in the countryside and the workers would conquer capitalists in the city. This “proletarian-socialist” revolution would merge democratic and socialist tasks into one. In underdeveloped Russia, however, this would create a situation of flux, with exploiting classes defeated but no material basis for large-scale socialist construction. As a result, the sequence would have to be “furthered by an international revolutionary process.”
1917 saw Trotsky’s vision vindicated — but with one key exception: the international revolution didn’t come.
The Two Revolutions
Two years into the great war, three million Russians were dead, the empire’s economy was in ruins, yet the army pushed ahead with futile new offensives. In February 1917, the stalemate was broken from within.
As in 1905, St Petersburg (now Petrograd) and its working class led the upsurge. On International Women’s Day, February 23, women textile workers began a strike which spread across the city. By day’s end, 90,000 workers were involved; by the next day, 200,000. A similar situation developed in Moscow, where workers protested against skyrocketing inflation and bread shortages. Nicholas II refused concessions until he was forced to abdicate on March 1. The Romanov dynasty that had endured for three centuries was swept away in a week.
Its fall was almost universally celebrated. What to do next was less clear. The Bolsheviks’ doctrinal dispute with the Mensheviks over how to relate to the liberal bourgeoisie would prove important here. Though the Bolsheviks agreed that the time wasn’t ripe for socialism, they wanted workers and peasants to take power and carry out the revolution’s democratic tasks. But most workers were instead drawn to the Menshevik call to simply revive the soviets; these would assert the interests of the oppressed, but not capture state power themselves.
Liberals established a Provisional Committee to fill the void, but it had little social base. On March 1, the day of the tsar’s flight, soviet and liberal leaders came to an agreement: a new Provisional Government would form and agree to a wide range of reforms. Russia would have full civil liberties, with political prisoners released and the police and state apparatus transformed.
Important questions about the war, land reform, and elections remained unresolved, but the February Revolution was among the most sweeping the world had ever seen.
But a tense situation of “dual power” quickly emerged. Sovereign authority could now be claimed by the worker and soldier soviets and by the Provisional Government. Moderate socialists struggled to bridge the gap, believing they had to keep the “progressive bourgeoisie” within the February consensus.
They were right. Materially, Russia wasn’t ripe for socialism. But those finally released from tyranny weren’t going to wait patiently for Marxist schema to mature. Freed from generations of oppression, workers seized factories and peasants divided up estates. Popular committees sprang up across the country: rank-and-file soldier committees resisted their officers and peasant organizations oversaw unsanctioned land expropriations. Authority in all its forms was questioned: the aristocracy was gone, but for a supposed “bourgeois revolution,” the bourgeoisie was reeling.
Radicals didn’t drive the change, though they benefited from it. In February, there were 24,000 Bolsheviks; within months they became a mass organization ten times that size.
For now, however, the democratically elected soviets were still dominated by Menshevik and SR forces. And meanwhile, the dynamic between those bodies and the Provisional Government was frustrated by the latter’s lack of legitimacy. It’s not hard to understand why — Prince Georgy Lvov, a link to the old regime, was the nominal head of state and the Kadets and Octobrists that ran the government were terrified by the revolution that brought them to power. Liberals could pass decrees and try to restore order and continue the war effort, but their wishes simply weren’t carried out.
On March 1, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies published its famous Order Number One. It declared that military orders from the Provisional Government were to be carried out “except those which run counter to the orders and decrees issued by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” With Order Number One, the soviet demanded a key component of sovereignty, yet refused to actually make itself the functioning authority in the country.
Moderate socialists still looked to the Provisional Government, which had been reconstituted to include more left-wing forces, including Alexander Kerensky, himself an SR. The hope was that this alliance would calm the country and create an environment in which socialists could press democratic demands and find a route to end the war. For now the fighting would continue, but was to be strictly “defensive and without annexations.”
The Bolsheviks themselves were split on how to relate to the government. Returning from Siberian exile in March, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin saw the new republic as one that would stand for years, if not decades, and oriented the Bolsheviks along that time horizon.
Lenin, still in exile, was shocked by his party’s complacency. The day after his arrival at Finland Station he presented his April Theses, where he reaffirmed an uncompromising antiwar posture and essentially embraced Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Like Trotsky, Lenin thought that rather than let the revolution consolidate into a parliamentary republic, socialists should instead push it forward and build “a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.” This wasn’t empty rhetoric: the soviets already had more popular legitimacy than the Provisional Government.
Against the tamer position of Kamenev and Stalin, Lenin said “No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear.” The die was cast — there would be another revolution in 1917.
Trotsky was also in exile when the February Revolution broke out, rousing the “workers and peasants of the Bronx” an ocean away. After a perilous return home, conditions were set for him and his followers to eventually join the Bolsheviks and play a pivotal role in the events to come.
The reception to Lenin’s April Theses among many Bolsheviks was frosty at first, but it found some popular support. Lenin also had an ally in the young Nikolai Bukharin, then on the left of the party. Lenin’s return and radical line elevated his stature.
The party was still split in this period: there were those like Lenin and Bukharin who looked to insurrection and those with a more moderate perspective — like Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Viktor Nogin (who had long wanted to reunite with the Mensheviks), and Gregory Zinoviev. The latter wanted to replace the Provisional Government, but only with a broad coalition of socialist parties.
Lenin also didn’t want a premature uprising that would leave the Bolsheviks isolated and unable to last in power like the Communards of Paris. As late as June, he would stress that: “Even in the soviets of both capitals, not to speak now of the others, we are an insignificant minority . . . the majority of the masses are wavering but still believe the SRs and Mensheviks.”
But the party’s radical appeals were taking hold — tens of thousands of workers and soldiers joined. Some, inspired by slogans like “All Power to the Soviets,” launched spontaneous armed demonstrations in Petrograd against the Provisional Government in July. A crackdown followed — Trotsky was imprisoned for a time, Lenin fled, publications were banned, and the death penalty was reintroduced for soldiers. With the blessing of the Menshevik-SR majority, Kerensky’s Provisional Government claimed more power for itself.
During his two months hiding in Finland, Lenin finished The State and Revolution. His argument with reformists was premised on a simple point: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Like Marx and Engels, he saw the state as a tool of class oppression. A tiny minority used it to rule over a great majority. The state was, unsurprisingly, bloody and repressive. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat and its allies, by contrast, it would be the great majority repressing a tiny minority. There would be some violence, then, but by comparison it would be minimal.
“We are not Utopians,” Lenin writes, “we do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.” But as socialism triumphed, the need for a repressive apparatus would dissipate and the state would wither away. Many have portrayed The State and Revolution as a false flag — a libertarian socialist document from the father of socialist authoritarianism. But it seems to have been a genuine indicator of his political worldview. It was the simplicity with which Lenin made his case that prefigured the problems Bolshevism would face once in power.
In August, it was the Right’s turn at revolt. General Kornilov, sensing the instability of the Provisional Government, tried to restore order by way of a coup. With no one else to call on for help, Kerensky appealed to the Petrograd Soviet. It easily beat back Kornilov, with the Bolsheviks playing a decisive role. The party’s prestige was at a high and Kerensky was forced to release its captured leaders. In late September, Trotsky once again became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, now under the control of a Bolshevik majority. What was recently a small, radical party could now claim popular legitimacy. The stage was set for the October Revolution.
Yet before it could transpire, the Mensheviks and SRs had one last chance. The mood in the country had swung even further left. It was clear the Provisional Government had no independent means of defense in a country that now had six hundred radicalized soviets. Among the Mensheviks, steadily hemorrhaging support to the Bolsheviks, a left wing under Julius Martov was gaining strength. Martov was resolutely antiwar and in favor of more sweeping reforms than the Provisional Government could offer. His position was nearly indistinguishable from that of the moderate Bolsheviks.
The Mensheviks and SRs could have stepped in and taken power as part of a broad front of socialist parties to create a constituent assembly and a framework for reforms. The Bolsheviks could have formed a loyal opposition to such a government, or even directly joined it, as Kamenev and Zinoviev wanted. It was a moot point — the Mensheviks and SRs clung to the sinking Provisional Government, and even if they hadn’t, the parties were divided on the war. Lenin and Trotsky’s insurrection seemed like the only way.
With the Petrograd Soviet now under their control, Lenin finally convinced the Bolshevik Central Committee of that course. The “single greatest event in human history,” as socialists called it for decades, was anticlimactic. On October 24, Bolshevik units quickly occupied rail stations, telephone exchanges, and the state bank. The following day Red Guards surrounded the Winter Palace and arrested the cabinet ministers. One-sixth of the world had been conquered in the name of the proletariat with barely a drop of blood spilled.
Did Lenin lead a coup? Though certainly not as spontaneous as the February Revolution, October represented a genuine popular revolution led by industrial workers, allied with elements of the peasantry. After the Kornilov coup, the Bolsheviks could claim a mandate for such an action. Their support was bolstered by a straightforward call for “peace, land, and bread.” The Mensheviks demanded patience from the long-suffering masses; the Bolsheviks made concrete promises. Making those desires a reality would be another matter, but the Bolsheviks were the force most militantly trying to fulfill the February Revolution’s frustrated goals.
In the first months after October, the character of the regime was not yet clear. The Bolsheviks didn’t initially seek a one-party state — circumstances, as well as their decisions, conspired to create one. Immediately after the revolution, it fell to the Second Congress of Soviets to ratify the transfer of power from the Provisional Government. From 318 soviets, 649 delegates were elected to the body. Reflecting a dramatic shift in mood, 390 of them were Bolshevik and 100 Left SRs (those Socialist Revolutionaries who supported the October rising).
Now transformed into a small minority, the Right SRs and Mensheviks attacked the Bolshevik action. Even Martov denounced the “coup d’état,” but also put forth a resolution calling for an interim all-Soviet government and plans for a constituent assembly. Many Bolsheviks supported the motion and it carried unanimously. Martov’s plan would have created the broad socialist government that many had sought in September — only now, in a more radical context, it would be pressured into taking principled positions on the war and land reform.
But as in September, the Right SRs and the Menshevik majority refused to go along. They walked out of the Congress, ceding the revolution’s future to the Bolsheviks. Martov still wanted a compromise — negotiations for the creation of a coalition socialist government. But now, just two hours later, with the moderates no longer in the hall, the Bolshevik mood hardened. “The rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,” Trotsky lectured his former comrade bitingly from the floor. “No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!”
Here is Trotsky epitomized — grand, rhetorically masterful, but tragically overconfident in the ordination of history. The delegates didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. They erupted into applause. Martov began to leave with the other left-Mensheviks. A young Bolshevik confronted him on the way out, upset that a great champion of the working class would abandon its revolution. Martov stopped before the exit and turned to him: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.”
Almost exactly twenty years to the day, that worker, Ivan Akulov, was killed in a Stalinist purge.
The Workers’ State
“We will now build the socialist order.” Lenin’s words just after the revolution suggested a radical course, but the Bolsheviks moved cautiously. Though they had popular support in a few major cities, they knew it would be a struggle to assert authority in a massive, mostly rural and peasant country.
They tried to make good on their program, however. Against the old elites’ resistance, worker control over production was expanded. Homosexuality was decriminalized, women won divorce and reproductive rights. Land rights were expanded to peasants, antisemitism was combatted, and steps were made toward self-determination in the former empire Lenin called “a prison house of nations.”
In industry, Lenin’s vision of worker control wasn’t syndicalist (“the ridiculous transfer of the railways to the railwaymen, or the tanneries to the tanners”); in the long run, he looked to more coordinated class-wide methods of ownership. In the short term, he said, “the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible,” and argued instead for worker oversight of management, alongside the nationalization of key sectors. That wasn’t the limit of his horizons, of course. Lenin was impressed with the wartime economy in capitalist states. If planning in the service of chaos was already a reality, why shouldn’t planning in the service of human need — under the watch of democratic soviets — be possible?
The push for more extensive nationalizations came from the grassroots. A contradictory late November order gave factory committees a legal mandate to interfere in production and distribution, while still asserting management’s right to manage. Not surprisingly, it fueled disorder and further hampered production. Many workers took to taking over factories on their own accord. Often, these were honest attempts to restore production after capitalist sabotage or flight; at other times, workers responded to chaos by hoarding supplies and protecting their own interests.
Within months the Bolsheviks would have to clamp down on such actions — the immediate task was restoring basic productivity and order. It’s clear that the government intended to maintain a mixed economy at least until its rescue by revolutions elsewhere in Europe.
But the confusion of these months was helped along by the fact that Bolsheviks never clearly delineated between the overlapping jurisdictions of factory committees and trade unions and a sprawling complex of soviets, not to mention the central state. They had vacillated on these questions for tactical reasons in the pursuit of power. Centralization and the blurring of party and state were simple, pragmatic ways to resolve the dilemmas.
On the question of the war, the Bolsheviks also saw their hopes complicated. The situation was urgent. Though fighting was subsiding, between the February and October Revolutions one hundred thousand died on the Eastern Front. The Bolsheviks made a call to all governments for a “just and democratic peace.” If they refused, Lenin was confident that “the workers of these countries will understand the duty which now rests upon them of saving mankind from the horrors of war.”
The decree was ignored by the Entente powers and, for the moment, so was the call for revolution. Negotiations with the Central Powers began. Against Lenin’s advice, the Bolshevik Central Committee turned down an initial peace offer. “Left Communists” led by Bukharin wanted to continue the war and fan the flames of revolt in their enemies’ homes. It was a grave miscalculation. Taking advantage of strife within the young socialist state, the Germans and Austrians advanced, seizing a huge swathe of land from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s painful concessions followed, cutting the Soviet state from key agricultural and industrial heartlands and putting it in a weaker position to deal with growing civil unrest.
Attempts to undermine the Bolshevik government started from the day it took power in Petrograd. The White movement was an unholy alliance spanning the political spectrum — from right-Mensheviks and SRs to the liberal Kadet party to extreme nationalists and monarchists. Thirteen thousand American troops along with British, Canadian, French, Greek, Italian, and Japanese forces joined to aid a brutal domestic opposition. Against remarkable odds, the Bolsheviks oversaw the creation of a Red Army and triumphed in a five-year conflict that claimed nine million lives.
As Trotsky, that great army’s organizer, put it, “Having mounted the saddle, the rider is obliged to guide the horse — at the risk of breaking his neck.” The Bolshevik government rode on. Their argument for doing so was at first less about the immediate prospects for socialism within Russia and more in terms of a “holding action.” The survival of the first workers’ state would be a boon to the revolutionary movements that would take power in more advanced countries. These states would then come to the Bolsheviks’ rescue and help rebuild the country as part of a broader proletarian confederation.
It wasn’t as fantastical as it sounds today: this was an era of upheaval. Not long after October, German communists launched an ill-fated series of revolts trying to follow the Russian example. Newly liberated Finland saw its democratically elected socialist government dislodged in a bloody civil war. In 1919, a Hungarian Soviet Republic briefly took power. Two red years of factory occupations and mass strikes shook Italy. Even Ireland boasted soviets for a time.
Though the Bolsheviks still hoped for a breakthrough through the newly formed Communist International, it was becoming clear that no salvation from abroad was on its way. Lenin’s party had made a justified gamble to protect and extend the February Revolution’s gains and help end not just one grisly war, but all future ones as well. That gamble failed. And now with the only apparent alternatives to their leadership being a right-wing military dictatorship or even a form of Judeocidal fascism, they pressed on. Faced with an impossible dilemma, what the Bolsheviks had to do to survive would only exacerbate the party’s worst tendencies.
Terrorism and Communism
The moment called for hardened men like Dzerzhinsky. His newly formed Cheka would collect information from across the empire and act on it immediately. Interrogations were quick, and those who failed to dispel suspicion were stood up against a wall and shot. With Lenin’s blessing, the Cheka grew two hundred thousand strong and led a Red Terror in which as many were killed.
Were such terrible acts necessary to win history’s most destructive civil war? Maybe, but the methods in which they were conducted certainly were not. There were no external controls on the Cheka’s arrests and executions — the example of Dzerzhinsky’s disciplined leadership would never be enough to curb excesses. Collective punishment, state terror, and intimidation — all these were initially exceptional measures that became norms when social conflict reemerged during Stalin’s reign.
Though one can overstate the comparison, Abraham Lincoln’s US Civil War government declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, detained thousands, and used military tribunals, among other extra-constitutional measures. But these were recognized as temporary deviations necessary for the restoration of normal republican government, which was restored before long.
The Bolsheviks didn’t delineate their state of exception clearly enough, blurring together actions taken out of necessity and those performed out of virtue. There was no clear bedrock of rights and protections that Soviet citizens could claim once the emergency of war subsided. Open debate within the newly formed Communist Party would continue for some time, including factions pushing for democracy and worker power. But the broader political culture of engagement and contestation — sustained by a network of parties and newspapers — that had survived underground for long decades under tsarism would never reemerge.
A central problem was the lack of clear agreement on what the dictatorship of the proletariat should look like. Like other wings of social democracy, the Bolsheviks focused on seizing power, not exercising it. Aside from vague sketches, they hadn’t thought much about politics after revolution. With the exploiting classes gone, would the proletariat need a socialist theory of jurisprudence or institutional checks on power? Caught in an unprecedented situation, they made it up as they went along.
From War Communism to the NEP
Moves toward “war communism” were spurred more by practical necessity than ideological zeal. Years of revolution and unrelenting war had disrupted agricultural production. Peasants had little incentive to direct what was still produced to the cities — there was a shortage of consumer goods and grain prices continued to decline in relation to those goods. A black market naturally developed, a market the tsarist state and Provisional Government both sought to combat.
The Bolsheviks continued that course, but even more ruthlessly — applying their class analysis to the countryside, which they saw as divided between poor peasants, middle peasants, and wealthy kulaks. They hoped to maintain support by focusing their actions on the latter, but divisions on the ground were less clear, and the presence of armed requisition squads searching for hoarders only served as a further disincentive to production. Despite the banning of private trade and energetic repression, it was largely thanks to the black market that Russian cities survived the Civil War.
The Bolshevik industrial policy also shifted in this period. The government nationalized the entire economy, instituted rationing, and imposed strict labor discipline. Not even the moderate visions of worker control survived the return to one-man management. No capitalist sabotage was necessary — shortages of parts and raw materials slowed production to a crawl. Highly ideological initiatives, like the attempt to construct moneyless budgets, coexisted with the reality of wholesale economic regression. By 1921, Russian industry was less than one-third its prewar size.
The Soviet state’s political base was decimated, too. Some industrial workers died in the Civil War, while others left starving cities and tried their chances in the countryside.
With the dream of German revolution buried for now, the issues were now practical ones: how to restore and expand Russian industry, and how to revive the worker- peasant alliance that sparked the revolution.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a step in this direction. The state still controlled the commanding heights of the economy — large industries, banking, and foreign trade — but markets were legalized elsewhere. A tax on food producers replaced counterproductive forced requisitions, with peasants free to dispose of their goods how they wished once the tax was paid. Though the partnership would have to be skewed — peasant surplus was needed to restore and expand industry — the hope was to replace the direct coercion of war communism with accumulation through gradual, unequal exchange. Rather than forced collectivization, many NEP supporters looked to the voluntary creation of agricultural cooperatives that, in time, would outcompete what they saw as needlessly inefficient traditional peasant production.
Politically, the NEP was a period of hardening, not liberalization. Party leaders feared that the peasantry’s newfound economic power might morph into a political opposition. Not only opposition parties, but even internal Bolshevik factions were banned in 1921. There would still be debate within the party, but the Bolsheviks made clear that they would not step away from power. For the moment, the arts and intellectual life flowered undisturbed. But the one-party state was an easy trap to fall into: with the Civil War, foreign intervention, blockade, and plots against the leadership, who could deny that Russia was under siege? Then, with the war over, the task of reconstruction required reliable men of action. One such man, Stalin, rose to general secretary in 1922.
Lenin was wary of what he saw. But though he decried the party-state elite’s abuses and excesses, he failed to see that democratic reform, however risky, was the only possible counterbalance to that power. Approaching death, he warned specifically about Stalin, encouraging the party congress to remove him, but his wishes went unfulfilled. Once Lenin was gone, Stalin used his post to scatter the supporters of his rival Trotsky within the party. Still, Stalin was not yet in control.
Debate within the party soon crystalized between three main camps: the left opposition of Trotsky, Stalin’s current, and those around Bukharin, who now found himself on the party’s right.
Trotsky pushed for party democracy and other anti-bureaucratic measures, faster industrialization and collectivization at home, and aggressive revolutionary exhortations abroad. Bukharin was more cautious, seeking to continue slowly “riding into socialism on a peasant nag,” with some adjustments. Stalin vacillated between the two positions, displaying a political savvy few knew the Georgian possessed.
Trotsky saw the real danger not in Stalin’s bureaucratic centrism, but in the risk that Bukharin’s program would accidently bring about the restoration of capitalism. Bukharin, too, took far too long to see Stalin as a threat. Yet even had they united, Stalin might have been destined to win: he applauded the party men Trotsky criticized.
Meanwhile, Trotsky’s call for industrial rejuvenation hardly won him goodwill among the peasant majority outside the party. And without the support of the bureaucracy or the peasantry — and with the old Bolshevik workers dead or exhausted — on what social basis could Trotsky hope to win? Confidence in the dialectic of history wasn’t enough.
Trotsky was removed from power in late 1927 and sent into exile shortly after. Until his murder thirteen years later, he remained Stalinism’s greatest critic. Yet he couldn’t admit that any part of the system he so despised had its genesis in the early repression that he himself had helped engineer.
Stalin and His Children
Despite the political turmoil in Russia, the NEP was working. By 1926, Soviet industry had surpassed prewar levels — a remarkable turnaround from just five years prior. What to do with this new wealth was hotly debated: agricultural improvements and light industry or heavy industry? These choices weren’t just technical. For a party that grounded its legitimacy in an industrial proletariat, continuing along the NEP route had profound political implications.
With the left opposition eliminated and his erstwhile ally Bukharin marginalized, Stalin was free to answer these questions as he saw fit. He was growing frustrated with the NEP. Industrial investment increased, yet grain prices were kept low. Peasants, naturally, clung to their stock. Periodic crises of this kind occurred throughout the 1920s, as industrial and agricultural prices fell out of sync.
In the past, these problems had been alleviated through price adjustments and other policy changes.
This time, however, Stalin made no such adjustment. Instead he sent police to commandeer legally produced and traded grain. Local officials who followed existing laws were dismissed. A new period of coercion against every layer of the peasantry was born. Stalin wanted a “revolution from above.” The first show trials took place, the first five-year plan was introduced, which called for the tripling of industrial output and investment.
And then, without warning, millions were forcefully collectivized into farms. Planners thought this would permanently solve food supply issues. It had the opposite effect — production fell dramatically and scapegoats had to be found. Collective punishment returned, not just against supposedly wealthy kulaks, but now also against “ideological kulaks,” that is, those who opposed the policy. At least six million perished in famine, and millions more would spend their lives in a vast network of forced-labor camps.
Many, of course, resisted the new serfdom. Stalin’s own wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932 to protest the new course. But there was no serious challenge to the dictator. Within a decade, a once-vibrant, fractious party became a monolithic sect.
Yet if we can close our eyes to the cost, the five-year plan was a success. The Soviet Union made an incredible advance — largely in spite of forced collectivization, rather than because of it. State planning led to a rapid rise in GDP, capital accumulation, and consumption. Foreign observers downplayed reports of mass famine and celebrated the achievement. (Not just the Daily Worker, but also liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Nation.) As the fascist threat grew, so did Communist prestige. But this economic breakthrough was accompanied by new political terror. A campaign of mass murder began in 1936, with thousands purged from the Communist Party, including lifelong Bolsheviks. Many of them were imprisoned as counterrevolutionaries, forced to confess to elaborate plots, and then executed. More than half a million were killed.
Stalin had used a food shortage to transform the Soviet Union from a slowly rebounding authoritarian state to a horrific totalitarian regime unlike any the world had ever seen.
Dzerzhinsky, who died of a heart attack in 1926, supposedly anguished over every execution order he signed. He was replaced by men with no such compunction.
Stalin’s Soviet Union did win a great war against a far greater evil. Yet for every action the leader took to defeat fascism, he took another to undermine the antifascist struggle —supporting the disastrous Third Period policy, purging the Red Army of capable officers, ignoring news of imminent Nazi invasion. The victorious regime was deeply conservative, pursuing great power policies on a scale even the tsars couldn’t have imagined, along with episodes of mass ethnic cleansing and even its share of antisemitism. Under Stalin, the worldwide Communist movement, too, became a tool of Russian national interests rather than one of working-class emancipation.
Once Stalin was gone, the Soviet system morphed into something profoundly different. His command economy remained, but the bureaucrats who now ruled remained haunted by the totalitarian terror that had cut through their own ranks. The new order was grey and repressive, but capable for a while of delivering peace and stability. Yet the ruling elite had no interest in building a free civil society from which socialist democracy might have sprung. Attempts to renovate the system only undermined the coercion that held it together. Its collapse gave way to an even more predatory order.
For a century, socialists have looked back at the October Revolution — sometimes with rose-colored glasses, sometimes to play at simplistic counterfactuals. But sometimes for good reason. Exploitation and inequality are still alive and well amid plenty. Even knowing how their story ended, we can learn from those who dared to fight for something better.
Yet both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution and an easy leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The Bolsheviks, having seen over ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an era of upheaval, can be forgiven. We can also forgive them because they were first.
What is less forgivable is that a model built from errors and excesses, forged in the worst of conditions, came to dominate a left living in an unrecognizable world.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/the-few-who-won
The Few Who Won
How should we understand the October Revolution and its tragic aftermath?
A devout Polish Catholic, Felix Dzerzhinsky was once asked why he was sure there was a God. “God is in the heart,” the teenager replied. “If I ever come to the conclusion that there is no God, I would put a bullet in my head.”
A few years later, he realized just how alone humanity was. But instead of a bullet, he found a new faith, vowing “to fight against evil to the last breath” as a revolutionary socialist. By age forty, he was clad in black leather, designing a bloody terror as head of the young Soviet Union’s secret police.
This story of zealotry fits with the popular image of Bolshevism — a conspiratorial sect, singular in purpose. By virtue of their ruthlessness, they would take advantage of 1917’s democratic upheavals, perverting the noble February Revolution into the bloody excesses of October. That Stalinism emerged from its womb is no surprise — the extremism of men like Dzerzhinsky, confident the utopia they were building was worth any cost, made it all but certain.
The narrative is neat, and seemingly vindicated by history. The system that emerged out of the October Revolution was a moral catastrophe. But more than that, it was a tragedy — and tragedies don’t need villains.
Take Dzerzhinsky’s socialism. It was rooted in the humanist idea that the “present hellish life with its wolfish exploitation, oppression, and violence” could give way to an order “based on harmony, a full life embracing society as a whole.” The future executioner suffered for his beliefs — eleven out of twenty years underground spent in prison or exile — “in the torments of loneliness, longing for the world and for life.”
Poor, tortured, imprisoned, and martyred, the revolutionaries of Russia seemed destined to meet the same fate as radicals elsewhere in Europe. Only they didn’t. After half decade in solitary confinement, enduring beatings that permanently disfigured his jaw, Dzerzhinsky’s last letter from prison was resolute: “At the moment I am dozing, like a bear in his winter den; all that remains is the thought that spring will come and I will cease to suck my paw and all the strength that still remains in my body and soul will manifest itself. Live I will.”
Here’s what happens when noble, determined people win — and find themselves in an unwinnable situation.
The Bolsheviks Before Bolshevism
In the Cold War, both sides painted Vladimir Lenin and his party as special — unique in their brutality or their model for revolution. But despite being an underground movement, it’s striking just how ordinary they were. Lenin saw himself as an orthodox Marxist, trying to adapt the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) plan to a largely rural and peasant country with a weak civil society and mass illiteracy.
The supposed proto-totalitarian smoking gun, Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, does have unusual elements. Lenin calls for professional organizers capable of eluding police and places special emphasis on the role of print propaganda, for instance. But it wasn’t a blueprint for a radically different party; rather, these were tactics needed for a movement barred from the legal organizing and parliamentary work pursued by its counterparts elsewhere. Once tsarism was overthrown, backward Russia and its small working class could develop along Western lines and push the struggle further.
Siding with Karl Kautsky, Lenin took aim at Eduard Bernstein and others on the SPD’s right wing for trying to change “a party of social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms.” To be a revolutionary, for Lenin, meant smashing the capitalist state — it was a politics of rupture. But his project, unlike the “Blanquists” he also denounced, was about cohering a workers’ movement and placing it at the center of political struggle, not creating a hardened core of putschists. For Lenin the problem wasn’t that workers weren’t flocking to the vanguard party, but that socialists were underestimating workers. His goal, following the German example, was a merger of the two currents — a militant socialist workers’ movement.
Then perhaps if not by design, the Bolsheviks were forced by repression to adopt a military-like structure that they would take into power. This claim, too, is doubtful. Bolshevik organs even functioned with transparency and pluralism few organizations in much rosier conditions today can match.
Take the “economists,” the grouping Lenin criticized so thoroughly in What Is to Be Done? He thought that they, like every other faction, deserved “to demand the opportunity to express and advocate views.” Lenin was hardly a genial interlocutor — like Marx, he was a fan of personal invective. Still, the leader had to deal with not getting his way. Between 1912 and 1914, forty-seven of his articles were refused by Pravda, the “party paper.”
Dissent cut through Russian social democracy; no one’s marching orders were followed without debate. It wasn’t just Bolshevik, Menshevik, and Socialist Revolutionary (SR), but dozens of shades of opinions among the Bolsheviks themselves.
On important political issues, however, the main wings of Russian social democracy were close. When the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks split in 1903, it was over small points of emphasis, not because of Lenin’s supposed call for a professional vanguard party. When the 1905 revolution arrived, all parts of the movement fought side by side. Most Mensheviks, like most Bolsheviks, opposed the Great War, a clarity matched by few socialists elsewhere in Europe. In the lead-up to February 1917, they differed on how to view the liberal bourgeoisie, but agreed that the immediate task of Russian social democracy was overthrowing autocracy, not socialist revolution. Only in this period did it become obvious what set the Bolsheviks apart.
Goodbye, Social Democracy
Lenin didn’t leave social democracy, it left him. When he first got news that the SPD had voted for war credits on August 4, 1914, he thought it was capitalist propaganda.
His faith was misplaced. Only fourteen of ninety-two German socialist deputies opposed the decision. Following parliamentary norms, they voted with the majority as a bloc. An antiwar politician, Hugo Haase, was made to read the party’s pro-war statement in the Reichstag. Socialists in the French Chamber of Deputies followed suit the same day.
Kautsky wasn’t a parliamentarian, but he was present at the debate. He suggested abstaining, but agreed that Germany was waging a defensive struggle against an eastern threat. Within a year, he changed his tune and vigorously denounced the SPD’s pro-war leadership and the German state, but the damage was done. The longstanding social-democratic idea, affirmed by the Second International in congress after congress, was that the growing power of the working class would maintain peace “by resolute intervention.” If war did come to pass, the parties would not only oppose it, they would use the “crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”
That was the theory — in reality, social democracy’s flagship not only voted for war, but promoted Burgfriedenspolitik, a policy of class peace to help it along. Sixteen million people died in the conflict.
For more than a century, the Leninist narrative was that Kautsky had been an ideal Marxist until almost the outbreak of World War I. It was his stance on war in 1914 and his opposition to the October Revolution in 1917 that transformed him from revered “Pope of Marxism” to a “great renegade.” In his 1939 obituary for the German socialist, Trotsky sounds like a scorned lover: “We remember Kautsky as our former teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who separated himself from the proletarian revolution and from whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.”
Kautsky’s position on the war was indeed shocking. Within social democracy, a right-wing tendency had been growing among trade union leaders and parliamentarians who saw not just their own power, but that of the class they represented, as bound up more with the stability and prosperity of their respective nations than with vague notions of proletarian internationalism. But those were foes against whom Kautsky had waged intellectual and political battle for years.
“Modern society is ripe for revolution; and the bourgeoisie is not in a position to survive any insurrection.” Such a revolution would be won by “a well-disciplined minority, energetic and conscious of the goal.” Sounds like Lenin, but that was actually Kautsky.
There was, however, a growing gap between Kautsky’s ideas and those of his Russian admirers. He had developed a conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that differed from Lenin and Trotsky’s. Kautsky might have used language similar to theirs in the 1880s, just a decade removed from the Paris Commune and with the SPD still underground. But his thought subsequently evolved. He believed workers would win power through free elections, extend political and civil liberties, and radically reform, not smash, the existing state.
Kautsky was skeptical that direct democracy could operate at scale. Though never equating nationalization with socialism, neither did he advocate a council-based “soviet democracy.” He saw overcoming capitalism as a struggle that required political democracy and a long battle for popular support. Well before publishing The Road to Power and other late works praised by the Bolsheviks, he had developed ideas distinct from both social democracy’s reformist right and its revolutionary left.
But Lenin still looked to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the great revolutions of 1848 and 1789. This was the spirit that spawned the communist movement.
To the Finland Station
The 1905 revolution showed Lenin to be in step with his era. The “great dress rehearsal” came close to toppling tsarism and gave birth to the soviet.
Russia at that time was already pulsing with change. Rapid economic growth and social advance had taken place in the empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Industrial production doubled in the 1890s alone. Horses and carts and dusty tracks began to give way to vast railroads and, for a time, Russia even led the world in oil production.
But development was highly uneven. St Petersburg’s modern factories told little of life in an empire where, even in its European regions, only one in nine people lived in cities. Whatever Russia’s progress in absolute terms, it was falling ever further behind Western Europe.
In the countryside, agricultural development advanced at an even more glacial pace, failing to keep up with huge population growth. Land-hungry peasants pushed westward from their traditional communes into the steppes. Rural poverty was still endemic. With economic stagnation in the countryside and growing but patchy capitalist industry in a few cities, generalized scarcity went along with a small but highly politicized working class.
January 1905 caught the Bolsheviks by surprise. The timing and shape of the revolt was not what they expected. In October, St Petersburg workers established an organ to coordinate their actions. Factory delegates formed a soviet (council) in the city. The body soon became a kind of workers’ parliament, with representation from a range of trade unions and committees. It was essentially a functioning local government.
Trotsky, not Lenin, shined brightest in 1905. Neither Menshevik nor Bolshevik, but respected in both camps, he immediately grasped the revolution’s significance. Within the St Petersburg Soviet’s brief life, the twenty-six year old delegate emerged as an unparalleled orator and thinker. By the end of November, he was even elected its chair.
The situation by that point was untenable. As feared, Nicholas soon crushed the revolution and reneged on concessions promised to liberal forces. By April 1906, 14,000 people had been executed and 75,000 imprisoned.
But the revolutionaries now had a taste of real power. The transformation of Russian social democracy was stunning. Immediately before the 1905 revolution, the Bolsheviks had just 8,400 members. By the following spring, they could count 34,000 among them. The Mensheviks also drew thousands to their ranks.
The revolutionary movement finally had something Lenin had been aspiring to for years — a mass base of workers. Attempts to mend the divide between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would fail, but all had a sense that they were in a new era and that the tsar would soon fall.
But none came as close as Trotsky to guessing what would happen next. Grasping 1905’s implications, Trotsky refined a novel theory of “permanent revolution.” Marxists had traditionally thought that revolution would happen in stages. The first of these would be “bourgeois-democratic”: economically, this stage would pave the way for peasant land reform and further urban industrialization; politically, it would create a capitalist republic with freedom of speech and assembly. That would then allow social democrats to patiently organize for a second, socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed on this — they just argued over the role liberal capitalists would play. Mensheviks thought they would be at the heart of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, while Lenin thought workers could reconcile their interests with those of peasants and drive the process themselves.
Trotsky foresaw a different scenario. Instead of a bourgeois democratic revolution, the peasants would defeat the gentry in the countryside and the workers would conquer capitalists in the city. This “proletarian-socialist” revolution would merge democratic and socialist tasks into one. In underdeveloped Russia, however, this would create a situation of flux, with exploiting classes defeated but no material basis for large-scale socialist construction. As a result, the sequence would have to be “furthered by an international revolutionary process.”
1917 saw Trotsky’s vision vindicated — but with one key exception: the international revolution didn’t come.
The Two Revolutions
Two years into the great war, three million Russians were dead, the empire’s economy was in ruins, yet the army pushed ahead with futile new offensives. In February 1917, the stalemate was broken from within.
As in 1905, St Petersburg (now Petrograd) and its working class led the upsurge. On International Women’s Day, February 23, women textile workers began a strike which spread across the city. By day’s end, 90,000 workers were involved; by the next day, 200,000. A similar situation developed in Moscow, where workers protested against skyrocketing inflation and bread shortages. Nicholas II refused concessions until he was forced to abdicate on March 1. The Romanov dynasty that had endured for three centuries was swept away in a week.
Its fall was almost universally celebrated. What to do next was less clear. The Bolsheviks’ doctrinal dispute with the Mensheviks over how to relate to the liberal bourgeoisie would prove important here. Though the Bolsheviks agreed that the time wasn’t ripe for socialism, they wanted workers and peasants to take power and carry out the revolution’s democratic tasks. But most workers were instead drawn to the Menshevik call to simply revive the soviets; these would assert the interests of the oppressed, but not capture state power themselves.
Liberals established a Provisional Committee to fill the void, but it had little social base. On March 1, the day of the tsar’s flight, soviet and liberal leaders came to an agreement: a new Provisional Government would form and agree to a wide range of reforms. Russia would have full civil liberties, with political prisoners released and the police and state apparatus transformed.
Important questions about the war, land reform, and elections remained unresolved, but the February Revolution was among the most sweeping the world had ever seen.
But a tense situation of “dual power” quickly emerged. Sovereign authority could now be claimed by the worker and soldier soviets and by the Provisional Government. Moderate socialists struggled to bridge the gap, believing they had to keep the “progressive bourgeoisie” within the February consensus.
They were right. Materially, Russia wasn’t ripe for socialism. But those finally released from tyranny weren’t going to wait patiently for Marxist schema to mature. Freed from generations of oppression, workers seized factories and peasants divided up estates. Popular committees sprang up across the country: rank-and-file soldier committees resisted their officers and peasant organizations oversaw unsanctioned land expropriations. Authority in all its forms was questioned: the aristocracy was gone, but for a supposed “bourgeois revolution,” the bourgeoisie was reeling.
Radicals didn’t drive the change, though they benefited from it. In February, there were 24,000 Bolsheviks; within months they became a mass organization ten times that size.
For now, however, the democratically elected soviets were still dominated by Menshevik and SR forces. And meanwhile, the dynamic between those bodies and the Provisional Government was frustrated by the latter’s lack of legitimacy. It’s not hard to understand why — Prince Georgy Lvov, a link to the old regime, was the nominal head of state and the Kadets and Octobrists that ran the government were terrified by the revolution that brought them to power. Liberals could pass decrees and try to restore order and continue the war effort, but their wishes simply weren’t carried out.
On March 1, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies published its famous Order Number One. It declared that military orders from the Provisional Government were to be carried out “except those which run counter to the orders and decrees issued by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” With Order Number One, the soviet demanded a key component of sovereignty, yet refused to actually make itself the functioning authority in the country.
Moderate socialists still looked to the Provisional Government, which had been reconstituted to include more left-wing forces, including Alexander Kerensky, himself an SR. The hope was that this alliance would calm the country and create an environment in which socialists could press democratic demands and find a route to end the war. For now the fighting would continue, but was to be strictly “defensive and without annexations.”
The Bolsheviks themselves were split on how to relate to the government. Returning from Siberian exile in March, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin saw the new republic as one that would stand for years, if not decades, and oriented the Bolsheviks along that time horizon.
Lenin, still in exile, was shocked by his party’s complacency. The day after his arrival at Finland Station he presented his April Theses, where he reaffirmed an uncompromising antiwar posture and essentially embraced Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Like Trotsky, Lenin thought that rather than let the revolution consolidate into a parliamentary republic, socialists should instead push it forward and build “a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.” This wasn’t empty rhetoric: the soviets already had more popular legitimacy than the Provisional Government.
Against the tamer position of Kamenev and Stalin, Lenin said “No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear.” The die was cast — there would be another revolution in 1917.
Trotsky was also in exile when the February Revolution broke out, rousing the “workers and peasants of the Bronx” an ocean away. After a perilous return home, conditions were set for him and his followers to eventually join the Bolsheviks and play a pivotal role in the events to come.
The reception to Lenin’s April Theses among many Bolsheviks was frosty at first, but it found some popular support. Lenin also had an ally in the young Nikolai Bukharin, then on the left of the party. Lenin’s return and radical line elevated his stature.
The party was still split in this period: there were those like Lenin and Bukharin who looked to insurrection and those with a more moderate perspective — like Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Viktor Nogin (who had long wanted to reunite with the Mensheviks), and Gregory Zinoviev. The latter wanted to replace the Provisional Government, but only with a broad coalition of socialist parties.
Lenin also didn’t want a premature uprising that would leave the Bolsheviks isolated and unable to last in power like the Communards of Paris. As late as June, he would stress that: “Even in the soviets of both capitals, not to speak now of the others, we are an insignificant minority . . . the majority of the masses are wavering but still believe the SRs and Mensheviks.”
But the party’s radical appeals were taking hold — tens of thousands of workers and soldiers joined. Some, inspired by slogans like “All Power to the Soviets,” launched spontaneous armed demonstrations in Petrograd against the Provisional Government in July. A crackdown followed — Trotsky was imprisoned for a time, Lenin fled, publications were banned, and the death penalty was reintroduced for soldiers. With the blessing of the Menshevik-SR majority, Kerensky’s Provisional Government claimed more power for itself.
During his two months hiding in Finland, Lenin finished The State and Revolution. His argument with reformists was premised on a simple point: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Like Marx and Engels, he saw the state as a tool of class oppression. A tiny minority used it to rule over a great majority. The state was, unsurprisingly, bloody and repressive. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat and its allies, by contrast, it would be the great majority repressing a tiny minority. There would be some violence, then, but by comparison it would be minimal.
“We are not Utopians,” Lenin writes, “we do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.” But as socialism triumphed, the need for a repressive apparatus would dissipate and the state would wither away. Many have portrayed The State and Revolution as a false flag — a libertarian socialist document from the father of socialist authoritarianism. But it seems to have been a genuine indicator of his political worldview. It was the simplicity with which Lenin made his case that prefigured the problems Bolshevism would face once in power.
In August, it was the Right’s turn at revolt. General Kornilov, sensing the instability of the Provisional Government, tried to restore order by way of a coup. With no one else to call on for help, Kerensky appealed to the Petrograd Soviet. It easily beat back Kornilov, with the Bolsheviks playing a decisive role. The party’s prestige was at a high and Kerensky was forced to release its captured leaders. In late September, Trotsky once again became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, now under the control of a Bolshevik majority. What was recently a small, radical party could now claim popular legitimacy. The stage was set for the October Revolution.
Yet before it could transpire, the Mensheviks and SRs had one last chance. The mood in the country had swung even further left. It was clear the Provisional Government had no independent means of defense in a country that now had six hundred radicalized soviets. Among the Mensheviks, steadily hemorrhaging support to the Bolsheviks, a left wing under Julius Martov was gaining strength. Martov was resolutely antiwar and in favor of more sweeping reforms than the Provisional Government could offer. His position was nearly indistinguishable from that of the moderate Bolsheviks.
The Mensheviks and SRs could have stepped in and taken power as part of a broad front of socialist parties to create a constituent assembly and a framework for reforms. The Bolsheviks could have formed a loyal opposition to such a government, or even directly joined it, as Kamenev and Zinoviev wanted. It was a moot point — the Mensheviks and SRs clung to the sinking Provisional Government, and even if they hadn’t, the parties were divided on the war. Lenin and Trotsky’s insurrection seemed like the only way.
With the Petrograd Soviet now under their control, Lenin finally convinced the Bolshevik Central Committee of that course. The “single greatest event in human history,” as socialists called it for decades, was anticlimactic. On October 24, Bolshevik units quickly occupied rail stations, telephone exchanges, and the state bank. The following day Red Guards surrounded the Winter Palace and arrested the cabinet ministers. One-sixth of the world had been conquered in the name of the proletariat with barely a drop of blood spilled.
Did Lenin lead a coup? Though certainly not as spontaneous as the February Revolution, October represented a genuine popular revolution led by industrial workers, allied with elements of the peasantry. After the Kornilov coup, the Bolsheviks could claim a mandate for such an action. Their support was bolstered by a straightforward call for “peace, land, and bread.” The Mensheviks demanded patience from the long-suffering masses; the Bolsheviks made concrete promises. Making those desires a reality would be another matter, but the Bolsheviks were the force most militantly trying to fulfill the February Revolution’s frustrated goals.
In the first months after October, the character of the regime was not yet clear. The Bolsheviks didn’t initially seek a one-party state — circumstances, as well as their decisions, conspired to create one. Immediately after the revolution, it fell to the Second Congress of Soviets to ratify the transfer of power from the Provisional Government. From 318 soviets, 649 delegates were elected to the body. Reflecting a dramatic shift in mood, 390 of them were Bolshevik and 100 Left SRs (those Socialist Revolutionaries who supported the October rising).
Now transformed into a small minority, the Right SRs and Mensheviks attacked the Bolshevik action. Even Martov denounced the “coup d’état,” but also put forth a resolution calling for an interim all-Soviet government and plans for a constituent assembly. Many Bolsheviks supported the motion and it carried unanimously. Martov’s plan would have created the broad socialist government that many had sought in September — only now, in a more radical context, it would be pressured into taking principled positions on the war and land reform.
But as in September, the Right SRs and the Menshevik majority refused to go along. They walked out of the Congress, ceding the revolution’s future to the Bolsheviks. Martov still wanted a compromise — negotiations for the creation of a coalition socialist government. But now, just two hours later, with the moderates no longer in the hall, the Bolshevik mood hardened. “The rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,” Trotsky lectured his former comrade bitingly from the floor. “No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!”
Here is Trotsky epitomized — grand, rhetorically masterful, but tragically overconfident in the ordination of history. The delegates didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. They erupted into applause. Martov began to leave with the other left-Mensheviks. A young Bolshevik confronted him on the way out, upset that a great champion of the working class would abandon its revolution. Martov stopped before the exit and turned to him: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.”
Almost exactly twenty years to the day, that worker, Ivan Akulov, was killed in a Stalinist purge.
The Workers’ State
“We will now build the socialist order.” Lenin’s words just after the revolution suggested a radical course, but the Bolsheviks moved cautiously. Though they had popular support in a few major cities, they knew it would be a struggle to assert authority in a massive, mostly rural and peasant country.
They tried to make good on their program, however. Against the old elites’ resistance, worker control over production was expanded. Homosexuality was decriminalized, women won divorce and reproductive rights. Land rights were expanded to peasants, antisemitism was combatted, and steps were made toward self-determination in the former empire Lenin called “a prison house of nations.”
In industry, Lenin’s vision of worker control wasn’t syndicalist (“the ridiculous transfer of the railways to the railwaymen, or the tanneries to the tanners”); in the long run, he looked to more coordinated class-wide methods of ownership. In the short term, he said, “the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible,” and argued instead for worker oversight of management, alongside the nationalization of key sectors. That wasn’t the limit of his horizons, of course. Lenin was impressed with the wartime economy in capitalist states. If planning in the service of chaos was already a reality, why shouldn’t planning in the service of human need — under the watch of democratic soviets — be possible?
The push for more extensive nationalizations came from the grassroots. A contradictory late November order gave factory committees a legal mandate to interfere in production and distribution, while still asserting management’s right to manage. Not surprisingly, it fueled disorder and further hampered production. Many workers took to taking over factories on their own accord. Often, these were honest attempts to restore production after capitalist sabotage or flight; at other times, workers responded to chaos by hoarding supplies and protecting their own interests.
Within months the Bolsheviks would have to clamp down on such actions — the immediate task was restoring basic productivity and order. It’s clear that the government intended to maintain a mixed economy at least until its rescue by revolutions elsewhere in Europe.
But the confusion of these months was helped along by the fact that Bolsheviks never clearly delineated between the overlapping jurisdictions of factory committees and trade unions and a sprawling complex of soviets, not to mention the central state. They had vacillated on these questions for tactical reasons in the pursuit of power. Centralization and the blurring of party and state were simple, pragmatic ways to resolve the dilemmas.
On the question of the war, the Bolsheviks also saw their hopes complicated. The situation was urgent. Though fighting was subsiding, between the February and October Revolutions one hundred thousand died on the Eastern Front. The Bolsheviks made a call to all governments for a “just and democratic peace.” If they refused, Lenin was confident that “the workers of these countries will understand the duty which now rests upon them of saving mankind from the horrors of war.”
The decree was ignored by the Entente powers and, for the moment, so was the call for revolution. Negotiations with the Central Powers began. Against Lenin’s advice, the Bolshevik Central Committee turned down an initial peace offer. “Left Communists” led by Bukharin wanted to continue the war and fan the flames of revolt in their enemies’ homes. It was a grave miscalculation. Taking advantage of strife within the young socialist state, the Germans and Austrians advanced, seizing a huge swathe of land from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s painful concessions followed, cutting the Soviet state from key agricultural and industrial heartlands and putting it in a weaker position to deal with growing civil unrest.
Attempts to undermine the Bolshevik government started from the day it took power in Petrograd. The White movement was an unholy alliance spanning the political spectrum — from right-Mensheviks and SRs to the liberal Kadet party to extreme nationalists and monarchists. Thirteen thousand American troops along with British, Canadian, French, Greek, Italian, and Japanese forces joined to aid a brutal domestic opposition. Against remarkable odds, the Bolsheviks oversaw the creation of a Red Army and triumphed in a five-year conflict that claimed nine million lives.
As Trotsky, that great army’s organizer, put it, “Having mounted the saddle, the rider is obliged to guide the horse — at the risk of breaking his neck.” The Bolshevik government rode on. Their argument for doing so was at first less about the immediate prospects for socialism within Russia and more in terms of a “holding action.” The survival of the first workers’ state would be a boon to the revolutionary movements that would take power in more advanced countries. These states would then come to the Bolsheviks’ rescue and help rebuild the country as part of a broader proletarian confederation.
It wasn’t as fantastical as it sounds today: this was an era of upheaval. Not long after October, German communists launched an ill-fated series of revolts trying to follow the Russian example. Newly liberated Finland saw its democratically elected socialist government dislodged in a bloody civil war. In 1919, a Hungarian Soviet Republic briefly took power. Two red years of factory occupations and mass strikes shook Italy. Even Ireland boasted soviets for a time.
Though the Bolsheviks still hoped for a breakthrough through the newly formed Communist International, it was becoming clear that no salvation from abroad was on its way. Lenin’s party had made a justified gamble to protect and extend the February Revolution’s gains and help end not just one grisly war, but all future ones as well. That gamble failed. And now with the only apparent alternatives to their leadership being a right-wing military dictatorship or even a form of Judeocidal fascism, they pressed on. Faced with an impossible dilemma, what the Bolsheviks had to do to survive would only exacerbate the party’s worst tendencies.
Terrorism and Communism
The moment called for hardened men like Dzerzhinsky. His newly formed Cheka would collect information from across the empire and act on it immediately. Interrogations were quick, and those who failed to dispel suspicion were stood up against a wall and shot. With Lenin’s blessing, the Cheka grew two hundred thousand strong and led a Red Terror in which as many were killed.
Were such terrible acts necessary to win history’s most destructive civil war? Maybe, but the methods in which they were conducted certainly were not. There were no external controls on the Cheka’s arrests and executions — the example of Dzerzhinsky’s disciplined leadership would never be enough to curb excesses. Collective punishment, state terror, and intimidation — all these were initially exceptional measures that became norms when social conflict reemerged during Stalin’s reign.
Though one can overstate the comparison, Abraham Lincoln’s US Civil War government declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, detained thousands, and used military tribunals, among other extra-constitutional measures. But these were recognized as temporary deviations necessary for the restoration of normal republican government, which was restored before long.
The Bolsheviks didn’t delineate their state of exception clearly enough, blurring together actions taken out of necessity and those performed out of virtue. There was no clear bedrock of rights and protections that Soviet citizens could claim once the emergency of war subsided. Open debate within the newly formed Communist Party would continue for some time, including factions pushing for democracy and worker power. But the broader political culture of engagement and contestation — sustained by a network of parties and newspapers — that had survived underground for long decades under tsarism would never reemerge.
A central problem was the lack of clear agreement on what the dictatorship of the proletariat should look like. Like other wings of social democracy, the Bolsheviks focused on seizing power, not exercising it. Aside from vague sketches, they hadn’t thought much about politics after revolution. With the exploiting classes gone, would the proletariat need a socialist theory of jurisprudence or institutional checks on power? Caught in an unprecedented situation, they made it up as they went along.
From War Communism to the NEP
Moves toward “war communism” were spurred more by practical necessity than ideological zeal. Years of revolution and unrelenting war had disrupted agricultural production. Peasants had little incentive to direct what was still produced to the cities — there was a shortage of consumer goods and grain prices continued to decline in relation to those goods. A black market naturally developed, a market the tsarist state and Provisional Government both sought to combat.
The Bolsheviks continued that course, but even more ruthlessly — applying their class analysis to the countryside, which they saw as divided between poor peasants, middle peasants, and wealthy kulaks. They hoped to maintain support by focusing their actions on the latter, but divisions on the ground were less clear, and the presence of armed requisition squads searching for hoarders only served as a further disincentive to production. Despite the banning of private trade and energetic repression, it was largely thanks to the black market that Russian cities survived the Civil War.
The Bolshevik industrial policy also shifted in this period. The government nationalized the entire economy, instituted rationing, and imposed strict labor discipline. Not even the moderate visions of worker control survived the return to one-man management. No capitalist sabotage was necessary — shortages of parts and raw materials slowed production to a crawl. Highly ideological initiatives, like the attempt to construct moneyless budgets, coexisted with the reality of wholesale economic regression. By 1921, Russian industry was less than one-third its prewar size.
The Soviet state’s political base was decimated, too. Some industrial workers died in the Civil War, while others left starving cities and tried their chances in the countryside.
With the dream of German revolution buried for now, the issues were now practical ones: how to restore and expand Russian industry, and how to revive the worker- peasant alliance that sparked the revolution.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a step in this direction. The state still controlled the commanding heights of the economy — large industries, banking, and foreign trade — but markets were legalized elsewhere. A tax on food producers replaced counterproductive forced requisitions, with peasants free to dispose of their goods how they wished once the tax was paid. Though the partnership would have to be skewed — peasant surplus was needed to restore and expand industry — the hope was to replace the direct coercion of war communism with accumulation through gradual, unequal exchange. Rather than forced collectivization, many NEP supporters looked to the voluntary creation of agricultural cooperatives that, in time, would outcompete what they saw as needlessly inefficient traditional peasant production.
Politically, the NEP was a period of hardening, not liberalization. Party leaders feared that the peasantry’s newfound economic power might morph into a political opposition. Not only opposition parties, but even internal Bolshevik factions were banned in 1921. There would still be debate within the party, but the Bolsheviks made clear that they would not step away from power. For the moment, the arts and intellectual life flowered undisturbed. But the one-party state was an easy trap to fall into: with the Civil War, foreign intervention, blockade, and plots against the leadership, who could deny that Russia was under siege? Then, with the war over, the task of reconstruction required reliable men of action. One such man, Stalin, rose to general secretary in 1922.
Lenin was wary of what he saw. But though he decried the party-state elite’s abuses and excesses, he failed to see that democratic reform, however risky, was the only possible counterbalance to that power. Approaching death, he warned specifically about Stalin, encouraging the party congress to remove him, but his wishes went unfulfilled. Once Lenin was gone, Stalin used his post to scatter the supporters of his rival Trotsky within the party. Still, Stalin was not yet in control.
Debate within the party soon crystalized between three main camps: the left opposition of Trotsky, Stalin’s current, and those around Bukharin, who now found himself on the party’s right.
Trotsky pushed for party democracy and other anti-bureaucratic measures, faster industrialization and collectivization at home, and aggressive revolutionary exhortations abroad. Bukharin was more cautious, seeking to continue slowly “riding into socialism on a peasant nag,” with some adjustments. Stalin vacillated between the two positions, displaying a political savvy few knew the Georgian possessed.
Trotsky saw the real danger not in Stalin’s bureaucratic centrism, but in the risk that Bukharin’s program would accidently bring about the restoration of capitalism. Bukharin, too, took far too long to see Stalin as a threat. Yet even had they united, Stalin might have been destined to win: he applauded the party men Trotsky criticized.
Meanwhile, Trotsky’s call for industrial rejuvenation hardly won him goodwill among the peasant majority outside the party. And without the support of the bureaucracy or the peasantry — and with the old Bolshevik workers dead or exhausted — on what social basis could Trotsky hope to win? Confidence in the dialectic of history wasn’t enough.
Trotsky was removed from power in late 1927 and sent into exile shortly after. Until his murder thirteen years later, he remained Stalinism’s greatest critic. Yet he couldn’t admit that any part of the system he so despised had its genesis in the early repression that he himself had helped engineer.
Stalin and His Children
Despite the political turmoil in Russia, the NEP was working. By 1926, Soviet industry had surpassed prewar levels — a remarkable turnaround from just five years prior. What to do with this new wealth was hotly debated: agricultural improvements and light industry or heavy industry? These choices weren’t just technical. For a party that grounded its legitimacy in an industrial proletariat, continuing along the NEP route had profound political implications.
With the left opposition eliminated and his erstwhile ally Bukharin marginalized, Stalin was free to answer these questions as he saw fit. He was growing frustrated with the NEP. Industrial investment increased, yet grain prices were kept low. Peasants, naturally, clung to their stock. Periodic crises of this kind occurred throughout the 1920s, as industrial and agricultural prices fell out of sync.
In the past, these problems had been alleviated through price adjustments and other policy changes.
This time, however, Stalin made no such adjustment. Instead he sent police to commandeer legally produced and traded grain. Local officials who followed existing laws were dismissed. A new period of coercion against every layer of the peasantry was born. Stalin wanted a “revolution from above.” The first show trials took place, the first five-year plan was introduced, which called for the tripling of industrial output and investment.
And then, without warning, millions were forcefully collectivized into farms. Planners thought this would permanently solve food supply issues. It had the opposite effect — production fell dramatically and scapegoats had to be found. Collective punishment returned, not just against supposedly wealthy kulaks, but now also against “ideological kulaks,” that is, those who opposed the policy. At least six million perished in famine, and millions more would spend their lives in a vast network of forced-labor camps.
Many, of course, resisted the new serfdom. Stalin’s own wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932 to protest the new course. But there was no serious challenge to the dictator. Within a decade, a once-vibrant, fractious party became a monolithic sect.
Yet if we can close our eyes to the cost, the five-year plan was a success. The Soviet Union made an incredible advance — largely in spite of forced collectivization, rather than because of it. State planning led to a rapid rise in GDP, capital accumulation, and consumption. Foreign observers downplayed reports of mass famine and celebrated the achievement. (Not just the Daily Worker, but also liberal outlets like the New York Times and the Nation.) As the fascist threat grew, so did Communist prestige. But this economic breakthrough was accompanied by new political terror. A campaign of mass murder began in 1936, with thousands purged from the Communist Party, including lifelong Bolsheviks. Many of them were imprisoned as counterrevolutionaries, forced to confess to elaborate plots, and then executed. More than half a million were killed.
Stalin had used a food shortage to transform the Soviet Union from a slowly rebounding authoritarian state to a horrific totalitarian regime unlike any the world had ever seen.
Dzerzhinsky, who died of a heart attack in 1926, supposedly anguished over every execution order he signed. He was replaced by men with no such compunction.
Stalin’s Soviet Union did win a great war against a far greater evil. Yet for every action the leader took to defeat fascism, he took another to undermine the antifascist struggle —supporting the disastrous Third Period policy, purging the Red Army of capable officers, ignoring news of imminent Nazi invasion. The victorious regime was deeply conservative, pursuing great power policies on a scale even the tsars couldn’t have imagined, along with episodes of mass ethnic cleansing and even its share of antisemitism. Under Stalin, the worldwide Communist movement, too, became a tool of Russian national interests rather than one of working-class emancipation.
Once Stalin was gone, the Soviet system morphed into something profoundly different. His command economy remained, but the bureaucrats who now ruled remained haunted by the totalitarian terror that had cut through their own ranks. The new order was grey and repressive, but capable for a while of delivering peace and stability. Yet the ruling elite had no interest in building a free civil society from which socialist democracy might have sprung. Attempts to renovate the system only undermined the coercion that held it together. Its collapse gave way to an even more predatory order.
For a century, socialists have looked back at the October Revolution — sometimes with rose-colored glasses, sometimes to play at simplistic counterfactuals. But sometimes for good reason. Exploitation and inequality are still alive and well amid plenty. Even knowing how their story ended, we can learn from those who dared to fight for something better.
Yet both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution and an easy leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The Bolsheviks, having seen over ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an era of upheaval, can be forgiven. We can also forgive them because they were first.
What is less forgivable is that a model built from errors and excesses, forged in the worst of conditions, came to dominate a left living in an unrecognizable world.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/the-few-who-won
Sunday, September 3, 2017
What Should Socialists Do?
[This is a repost from Jacobin. The original article is here https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/socialist-left-democratic-socialists-america-dsa. I am aware, fortunately, that Philippine Leftists can't just "copy" movements from a completely different social context, or "mode of production" if you wish. But that kind of suffocating thinking is what has left the Philippine Left what it is now today -- a bunch of small Leninist parties that still use off-putting Marxist terms and world view, and a big party some of whose stalwarts are now collaborators of a murderous regime. Is it 13,000 dead? I've lost count.]
What Should Socialists Do?
Joseph M. Schwartz /
Bhaskar Sunkara
Democratic socialism needs to become a mass presence in US society.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has 25,000 members. Its growth over the past year has been massive — tripling in size — and no doubt a product of the increasing rejection of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus that has visited severe economic insecurity on the vast majority, particularly among young workers.
No socialist organization has been this large in decades. The possibilities for transforming American politics are exhilarating.
In considering how to make such a transformation happen, we might be tempted to usher those ranks of new socialists into existing vehicles for social change: community organizations, trade unions, or electoral campaigns — organizations more likely to win immediate victories for the workers that are at the center of our vision. Why not put our energy and hone our skills where they seem to be needed the most? Workers’ needs are incredibly urgent; shouldn’t we drop everything and join in these existing struggles right now?
While it’s crucial to be deeply involved in such struggles as socialists, we also have something unique to offer the working class, harnessing a logic that supports but is different from the one that organizers for those existing vehicles operate under. Here’s a sketch of a practical approach rooted in that vision that can win support for democratic social change in the short run and a majority for socialist transformation in the long run.
Fighting for “Non-Reformist Reforms”
For socialists, theory and practice must be joined at the hip. Socialists work for reforms that weaken the power of capital and enhance the power of working people, with the aim of winning further demands — what André Gorz called “non-reformist reforms.” We want to move towards a complete break with the capitalist system. Socialists, unlike single-issue activists, know that democratic victories must be followed by more democratic victories, or they will be rolled back.
Single-payer health care is a classic example of a “non-reformist” reform, one that would pry our health system free from capital’s iron grip and empower the working class by nationalizing the private health insurance industry. But socialists conceive of this struggle differently than single-issue advocates of Medicare for All.
Socialists understand that single payer alone cannot deal with the cost spiral driven by for-profit hospital and pharmaceutical companies. If we do achieve a national (or state-level) single-payer system, the fight wouldn’t be over; socialists would then fight for nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry. A truly socialized health care system (as in Britain and Sweden) would nationalize hospitals and clinics staffed by well-paid, unionized health care workers.
Socialists can and should be at the forefront of fights like this today. To do so, we must gain the skills needed to define who holds power in a given sector and how to organize those who have a stake in taking it away from them. But we can’t simply be the best activists in mass struggles. Single-issue groups too often attack a few particularly bad corporate actors without also arguing that a given crisis cannot be solved without curtailing capitalist power.
Socialists not only have to be the most competent organizers in struggle, but they have to offer an analysis that reveals the systemic roots of a particular crisis and offer reforms that challenge the logic of capitalism.
Building a Majority
As socialists, our analysis of capitalism leads us to not just a moral and ethical critique of the system, but to seeing workers as the central agents of winning change.
This isn’t a random fetishizing of workers — it’s based on their structural position in the economy. Workers have the ability to disrupt production and exchange, and they have an interest in banding together and articulating collective demands. This makes them the key agents of change under capitalism.
This view can be caricatured as ignoring struggles for racial justice, immigrant rights, reproductive freedom, and more. But nothing could be further from the truth. The working class is majority women and disproportionately brown and black and immigrant; fighting for the working class means fighting on precisely these issues, as well as for the rights of children, the elderly, and all those who cannot participate in the paid labor market.
Socialists must also fight on the ideological front. We must combat the dominant ideology of market individualism with a compelling vision of democracy and freedom, and show how only in a society characterized by democratic decision-making and universal political, civil, and social rights can individuals truly flourish.
If socialist activists cannot articulate an attractive vision of socialist freedom, we will not be able to overcome popular suspicion that socialism would be a drab, pseudo-egalitarian, authoritarian society. Thus we must model in our own socialist organizations the democratic debate, peaceful conflict, and social solidarity that would characterize a socialist world.
A democratic socialist organization that doesn’t have a rich and accessible internal educational life will not develop an activist core who can be public tribunes for socialism. Activists don’t stay committed to building a socialist organization unless they can articulate to themselves and others why even a reformed capitalism remains a flawed, undemocratic society.
The Power of a Minority
But socialists must also be front and center in struggles to win the short-term victories that empower people and lead them to demand more. Socialists today are a minority building and pushing forward a potential, progressive anti-corporate majority. We have no illusions that the dominant wing of the Democrats are our friends. Of course, most levels of government are now run by Republicans well to the right of them. But taking on neoliberal Democrats must be part of a strategy to defeat the far right.
Take the Democrats, who are showing what woeful supposed leaders of “the resistance” they are every day. Contrary to the party leadership’s single-note insistence, the Russians did not steal the election for Trump; rather, a tepid Democratic candidate who ran on expertise and competence lost because her corporate ties precluded her articulation of a program that would aid the working class — a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, free public higher education.
Clinton failed to gain enough working-class votes of all races to win the key states in the former industrial heartland; she ended up losing to the most disliked, buffoonish presidential candidate in history. If we remain enthralled to Democratic politics-as-usual, we’re going to continue being stuck with cretins like Donald Trump.
Of course, progressive and socialist candidates who openly reject the neoliberal mainstream Democratic agenda may choose for pragmatic reasons to use the Democratic Party ballot line in partisan races. But whatever ballot line the movement chooses to use, we must always be working to increase the independent power of labor and the Left.
Sanders provides an example: it’s hard to imagine him offering a radical opening to using the “s” word in American politics for his openly independent campaign if he had run on an independent line. Bernie also showed the strength of socialists using coalition politics to build a short-term progressive majority and to win people over to a social-democratic program and, sometimes, to socialism. Sanders gained the support of six major unions; if we had real social movement unionism in this country, he would have carried the banner of the entire organized working-class movement.
Bernie’s weaker performance than Clinton among voters of color — though not among millennials of color — derived mostly from his being a less known commodity. But it also demonstrated that socialists need deeper social roots among older women and communities of color. That means developing the organizing strategies that will better implant us in the labor movement and working-class communities, as well as struggles for racial justice and gender and sexual emancipation.
Socialists have the incumbent obligation to broaden out the post-Sanders, anti-corporate trend in US politics into a working-class “rainbow coalition.” We must also fight our government’s imperialist foreign policy and push to massively cut wasteful “defense” spending. We should be involved in multiracial coalitions, fighting for reforms like equitable public education and affordable housing.
Democratic socialists can be the glue that brings together disparate social movement that share an interest in democratizing corporate power. We can see the class relations that pervade society and how they offer common avenues of struggle. But at 25,000 members, we can’t substitute ourselves for the broader currents needed to break the power of both far-right nativist Republicans and pro-corporate neoliberal Democrats.
We have to work together with broader movements that may not be anti-capitalist but remain committed to reforms. These movements have the potential to win material improvements for workers’ lives. If we stay isolated from them, we will slide into sectarian irrelevance.
Of course, socialists should endeavor to build their own organizational strength and to operate as an independent political force. We cannot mute our criticism against business unionist trends in the labor movement and the middle-class professional leadership of many advocacy groups. But in the here and now, we must also help win those victories that will empower workers to conceive of more radical democratic gains. Our members are disproportionately highly educated, young, male, and white. To win victories, we must pursue a strategy and orientation that makes us more representative of the working class.
Grasping the Moment
In the final analysis, socialists must be both tribunes for socialism and the best organizers. That’s how the Communist Party grew rapidly from 1935-1939. They set themselves up as the left wing of the CIO and of the New Deal coalition, and grew from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand members during that period.
The Socialist Party, on the other hand, condemned the New Deal as “a restoration of capitalism.” In saying so they were partly right: the New Deal was in part about saving capitalism from itself. But such a stance was also profoundly wrong in that it distanced the Socialist Party from popular struggles from below, including those for workers’ rights and racial equality that forced capital to make important concessions. This rejection was rooted in a concern that those struggles were “reformist”; it led the SP to fall from twenty thousand members in 1935 to three thousand in 1939.
Of course, there are also negative lessons to be learned from the Communist growth during the Popular Front period. They hid their socialist identity in an attempt to appeal to the broadest swath of Americans possible. When forced to reveal it, they referred to an authoritarian Soviet Union as their model. And by following Moscow’s line on the Hitler-Stalin Pact and then the no-strike pledge during World War II, the party abandoned the most militant sectors of the working class. Thus, the Communists put themselves in a position that prevented them from ever winning hegemony within the US working-class movement from liberal forces.
Still, the Popular Front was the last time socialism had any mass presence in the United States — in part because, in its own way, the Communists rooted their struggles for democracy within US political culture while trying to build a truly multiracial working-class movement.
The road to DSA becoming a real working-class organization runs through us becoming the openly socialist wing of a mass movement opposed to a bipartisan neoliberal consensus. If we only become better organizers, with more practical skills in door-knocking and phone-banking and one-on-one conversations, we will likely see the defection of many of our most skilled organizers who will take those skills and get jobs doing “mass work” in reformist organizations.
Such a defection bedeviled DSA in the 1980s, leading to a “donut” phenomenon — thousands of members embedded in mass movements, but few building the center of DSA as an organization. We must avoid this. Simultaneously, if we don’t relate politically to social forces bigger than our own, DSA could devolve into merely a large socialist sect or subculture.
The choice to adopt a strategy that would move us towards becoming a mass socialist organization with working-class roots is ours. This is the most promising moment for the socialist left in decades. If we take advantage of it, we can make our own history.
About the Author
Joseph M. Schwartz is the national vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and professor of political science at Temple.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin.
What Should Socialists Do?
Joseph M. Schwartz /
Bhaskar Sunkara
Democratic socialism needs to become a mass presence in US society.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has 25,000 members. Its growth over the past year has been massive — tripling in size — and no doubt a product of the increasing rejection of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus that has visited severe economic insecurity on the vast majority, particularly among young workers.
No socialist organization has been this large in decades. The possibilities for transforming American politics are exhilarating.
In considering how to make such a transformation happen, we might be tempted to usher those ranks of new socialists into existing vehicles for social change: community organizations, trade unions, or electoral campaigns — organizations more likely to win immediate victories for the workers that are at the center of our vision. Why not put our energy and hone our skills where they seem to be needed the most? Workers’ needs are incredibly urgent; shouldn’t we drop everything and join in these existing struggles right now?
While it’s crucial to be deeply involved in such struggles as socialists, we also have something unique to offer the working class, harnessing a logic that supports but is different from the one that organizers for those existing vehicles operate under. Here’s a sketch of a practical approach rooted in that vision that can win support for democratic social change in the short run and a majority for socialist transformation in the long run.
Fighting for “Non-Reformist Reforms”
For socialists, theory and practice must be joined at the hip. Socialists work for reforms that weaken the power of capital and enhance the power of working people, with the aim of winning further demands — what André Gorz called “non-reformist reforms.” We want to move towards a complete break with the capitalist system. Socialists, unlike single-issue activists, know that democratic victories must be followed by more democratic victories, or they will be rolled back.
Single-payer health care is a classic example of a “non-reformist” reform, one that would pry our health system free from capital’s iron grip and empower the working class by nationalizing the private health insurance industry. But socialists conceive of this struggle differently than single-issue advocates of Medicare for All.
Socialists understand that single payer alone cannot deal with the cost spiral driven by for-profit hospital and pharmaceutical companies. If we do achieve a national (or state-level) single-payer system, the fight wouldn’t be over; socialists would then fight for nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry. A truly socialized health care system (as in Britain and Sweden) would nationalize hospitals and clinics staffed by well-paid, unionized health care workers.
Socialists can and should be at the forefront of fights like this today. To do so, we must gain the skills needed to define who holds power in a given sector and how to organize those who have a stake in taking it away from them. But we can’t simply be the best activists in mass struggles. Single-issue groups too often attack a few particularly bad corporate actors without also arguing that a given crisis cannot be solved without curtailing capitalist power.
Socialists not only have to be the most competent organizers in struggle, but they have to offer an analysis that reveals the systemic roots of a particular crisis and offer reforms that challenge the logic of capitalism.
Building a Majority
As socialists, our analysis of capitalism leads us to not just a moral and ethical critique of the system, but to seeing workers as the central agents of winning change.
This isn’t a random fetishizing of workers — it’s based on their structural position in the economy. Workers have the ability to disrupt production and exchange, and they have an interest in banding together and articulating collective demands. This makes them the key agents of change under capitalism.
This view can be caricatured as ignoring struggles for racial justice, immigrant rights, reproductive freedom, and more. But nothing could be further from the truth. The working class is majority women and disproportionately brown and black and immigrant; fighting for the working class means fighting on precisely these issues, as well as for the rights of children, the elderly, and all those who cannot participate in the paid labor market.
Socialists must also fight on the ideological front. We must combat the dominant ideology of market individualism with a compelling vision of democracy and freedom, and show how only in a society characterized by democratic decision-making and universal political, civil, and social rights can individuals truly flourish.
If socialist activists cannot articulate an attractive vision of socialist freedom, we will not be able to overcome popular suspicion that socialism would be a drab, pseudo-egalitarian, authoritarian society. Thus we must model in our own socialist organizations the democratic debate, peaceful conflict, and social solidarity that would characterize a socialist world.
A democratic socialist organization that doesn’t have a rich and accessible internal educational life will not develop an activist core who can be public tribunes for socialism. Activists don’t stay committed to building a socialist organization unless they can articulate to themselves and others why even a reformed capitalism remains a flawed, undemocratic society.
The Power of a Minority
But socialists must also be front and center in struggles to win the short-term victories that empower people and lead them to demand more. Socialists today are a minority building and pushing forward a potential, progressive anti-corporate majority. We have no illusions that the dominant wing of the Democrats are our friends. Of course, most levels of government are now run by Republicans well to the right of them. But taking on neoliberal Democrats must be part of a strategy to defeat the far right.
Take the Democrats, who are showing what woeful supposed leaders of “the resistance” they are every day. Contrary to the party leadership’s single-note insistence, the Russians did not steal the election for Trump; rather, a tepid Democratic candidate who ran on expertise and competence lost because her corporate ties precluded her articulation of a program that would aid the working class — a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, free public higher education.
Clinton failed to gain enough working-class votes of all races to win the key states in the former industrial heartland; she ended up losing to the most disliked, buffoonish presidential candidate in history. If we remain enthralled to Democratic politics-as-usual, we’re going to continue being stuck with cretins like Donald Trump.
Of course, progressive and socialist candidates who openly reject the neoliberal mainstream Democratic agenda may choose for pragmatic reasons to use the Democratic Party ballot line in partisan races. But whatever ballot line the movement chooses to use, we must always be working to increase the independent power of labor and the Left.
Sanders provides an example: it’s hard to imagine him offering a radical opening to using the “s” word in American politics for his openly independent campaign if he had run on an independent line. Bernie also showed the strength of socialists using coalition politics to build a short-term progressive majority and to win people over to a social-democratic program and, sometimes, to socialism. Sanders gained the support of six major unions; if we had real social movement unionism in this country, he would have carried the banner of the entire organized working-class movement.
Bernie’s weaker performance than Clinton among voters of color — though not among millennials of color — derived mostly from his being a less known commodity. But it also demonstrated that socialists need deeper social roots among older women and communities of color. That means developing the organizing strategies that will better implant us in the labor movement and working-class communities, as well as struggles for racial justice and gender and sexual emancipation.
Socialists have the incumbent obligation to broaden out the post-Sanders, anti-corporate trend in US politics into a working-class “rainbow coalition.” We must also fight our government’s imperialist foreign policy and push to massively cut wasteful “defense” spending. We should be involved in multiracial coalitions, fighting for reforms like equitable public education and affordable housing.
Democratic socialists can be the glue that brings together disparate social movement that share an interest in democratizing corporate power. We can see the class relations that pervade society and how they offer common avenues of struggle. But at 25,000 members, we can’t substitute ourselves for the broader currents needed to break the power of both far-right nativist Republicans and pro-corporate neoliberal Democrats.
We have to work together with broader movements that may not be anti-capitalist but remain committed to reforms. These movements have the potential to win material improvements for workers’ lives. If we stay isolated from them, we will slide into sectarian irrelevance.
Of course, socialists should endeavor to build their own organizational strength and to operate as an independent political force. We cannot mute our criticism against business unionist trends in the labor movement and the middle-class professional leadership of many advocacy groups. But in the here and now, we must also help win those victories that will empower workers to conceive of more radical democratic gains. Our members are disproportionately highly educated, young, male, and white. To win victories, we must pursue a strategy and orientation that makes us more representative of the working class.
Grasping the Moment
In the final analysis, socialists must be both tribunes for socialism and the best organizers. That’s how the Communist Party grew rapidly from 1935-1939. They set themselves up as the left wing of the CIO and of the New Deal coalition, and grew from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand members during that period.
The Socialist Party, on the other hand, condemned the New Deal as “a restoration of capitalism.” In saying so they were partly right: the New Deal was in part about saving capitalism from itself. But such a stance was also profoundly wrong in that it distanced the Socialist Party from popular struggles from below, including those for workers’ rights and racial equality that forced capital to make important concessions. This rejection was rooted in a concern that those struggles were “reformist”; it led the SP to fall from twenty thousand members in 1935 to three thousand in 1939.
Of course, there are also negative lessons to be learned from the Communist growth during the Popular Front period. They hid their socialist identity in an attempt to appeal to the broadest swath of Americans possible. When forced to reveal it, they referred to an authoritarian Soviet Union as their model. And by following Moscow’s line on the Hitler-Stalin Pact and then the no-strike pledge during World War II, the party abandoned the most militant sectors of the working class. Thus, the Communists put themselves in a position that prevented them from ever winning hegemony within the US working-class movement from liberal forces.
Still, the Popular Front was the last time socialism had any mass presence in the United States — in part because, in its own way, the Communists rooted their struggles for democracy within US political culture while trying to build a truly multiracial working-class movement.
The road to DSA becoming a real working-class organization runs through us becoming the openly socialist wing of a mass movement opposed to a bipartisan neoliberal consensus. If we only become better organizers, with more practical skills in door-knocking and phone-banking and one-on-one conversations, we will likely see the defection of many of our most skilled organizers who will take those skills and get jobs doing “mass work” in reformist organizations.
Such a defection bedeviled DSA in the 1980s, leading to a “donut” phenomenon — thousands of members embedded in mass movements, but few building the center of DSA as an organization. We must avoid this. Simultaneously, if we don’t relate politically to social forces bigger than our own, DSA could devolve into merely a large socialist sect or subculture.
The choice to adopt a strategy that would move us towards becoming a mass socialist organization with working-class roots is ours. This is the most promising moment for the socialist left in decades. If we take advantage of it, we can make our own history.
About the Author
Joseph M. Schwartz is the national vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and professor of political science at Temple.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin.
Sunday, July 9, 2017
A definition for Socialism
In his recent article for the New York Times, Jacobin Magazine founder Bhaskar Sunkara writes:
How do we get there?
Of course, in the Philippines, true believers within the Left have automatic contempt for the "SD" word, helped in no small way by Akbayan which ended up as an apologist for a neoliberal regime . But as Philippine society descends into barbarism, perhaps it is time to think of alternatives to the RA-RJ paradigm?
Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy. In an era when liberties are under attack, it seeks to empower civil society to allow participation in the decisions that affect our lives. A huge state bureaucracy, of course, can be just as alienating and undemocratic as corporate boardrooms, so we need to think hard about the new forms that social ownership could take.
Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care) guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of their birth.
How do we get there?
That project entails a return to social democracy. Not the social democracy of François Hollande, but that of the early days of the Second International. This social democracy would involve a commitment to a free civil society, especially for oppositional voices; the need for institutional checks and balances on power; and a vision of a transition to socialism that does not require a “year zero” break with the present.
Of course, in the Philippines, true believers within the Left have automatic contempt for the "SD" word, helped in no small way by Akbayan which ended up as an apologist for a neoliberal regime . But as Philippine society descends into barbarism, perhaps it is time to think of alternatives to the RA-RJ paradigm?
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