In a previous post I argued that historical materialism should be explicitly counterfactual. In this article I apply this approach to the failure of the October Revolution. The October Revolution failed in terms of its own stated objectives. All power did not remain with the soviets, and — quite clearly —socialism was never created, neither globally as predicted nor ‘in one country’ as eventually attempted. I survey this failure through two counterfactual dimensions:
The counterfactual decision making of Lenin.
The counterfactuals used by contemporaneous Russian socialists.
This falls short of counterfactual materialism’s potential. I do not analyse the actual history of the October Revolution. I survey only how its failure has been understood, counterfactually, by some Leninists, Anarchists and Mensheviks. Nevertheless, this is still beneficial. It cuts to the chase, highlighting fundamental assumptions that can’t be proven with historical research. This isn’t done to dismiss. It is done because it is essential to historical materialism. For what can’t be tested with historical research can only be tested with political action. In this sense, counterfactuals are the necessary glue of historical materialism. They connect research about what actually happened with attempts at “learning from history”. Each historical materialist what if has a corresponding what is to be done.
Why the October Revolution?
The October Revolution is an important test case, because it was built with a consistent historical materialist praxis. It is not often that a decision is informed by historical materialist research. It is even rarer for any such decision to result in the overthrow of a capitalist state. The importance of Lenin to historical materialism was expressed recently with a provocative counterfactual. On the theory pleeb YouTube, Chris Cutrone argued that ‘we wouldn’t even be talking about Marx if the Russian Revolution had not happened’. According to Cutrone, without Lenin, ‘Marx would just be an obscure 19th century thinker.’
Nevertheless, the coherence of Lenin’s historical materialist praxis isn’t obvious. People still debate the apparent discontinuity between Lenin’s pre-October pamphlet, The State and Revolution, and his post-October practice. The State and Revolution was so pro workers’ control that it was seen favourably by many Russian anarchists, just as leading Bolsheviks attacked it for being anarchistic.1 To appreciate this anarchistic bent, it is necessary to first consider, in broad terms, what Anarchists struggle for. Let’s take a summary provided by Zoe Baker:
‘The end goal of anarchism – free or libertarian communism – is a stateless classless society in which workers collectively own the means of production and self-manage their workplaces and communities through councils in which everyone has a vote and a direct say in the decisions that affect them. These councils would coordinate action over large areas by associating together into a decentralised system of regional, national and international federations in which as many decisions as possible were made by the local councils themselves. This would be achieved through regular congresses at a regional, national and international level which would be attended by instantly recallable mandated delegates that councils elected to represent them. Crucially, delegates would not be granted the power to make decisions independently and impose them on others. Decision making power would remain in the hands of the council who had elected them.’2
Support for almost the entirety of this pitch can be found in Lenin’s State and Revolution. On the most famous goal of Anarchism, abolishing the state, Lenin draws upon Marx, writing that:
‘it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”.’
Lenin also quotes Marx’ support for the anarchist goal of recallable delegates:
‘“in order not to lose again its only just-gained supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old machinery of oppression previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any time….”
Clearly, there was strong overlap between anarchism and The State and Revolution. Nor was this limited to imaginative rhetoric. While Lenin backed calls for ‘all power to the soviets’, some soviets had already, as Trotsky explained, ‘become organs of power’:
‘The Krasnoyarsk Soviet quite independently introduced a system of cards for the purchase of objects of personal consumption. The compromisist soviet in Saratov was compelled to interfere in economic conflicts, to arrest manufacturers, confiscate the tramway belonging to Belgians, introduce workers’ control, and organize production in the abandoned factories. In the Urals, where ever since 1905 the Bolsheviks had enjoyed a predominant political influence, the soviets frequently instituted courts of justice for the trial of citizens, created their own militia in several factories, paying for its equipment out of the factory cash-box, organized a workers’ inspection which assembled raw materials and fuel for the factories, superintended the sale of manufactured goods and established a wage scale. In certain districts of the Urals the soviets took the land from the landlords and put it under social cultivation. At the Simsk metal works, the soviets organized a regional factory administration which took charge of the whole administration, the cash-box, the bookkeeping, and the sales department.’3
These passages make later Bolshevik actions seem like a complete reversal. Soviet democracy was a real phenomenon. It was part of the context that shaped The State and Revolution. And yet, as Simon Pirani has shown, after the civil war a movement seeking precisely this, a return to actual workers’ power, was quashed by the Bolshevik regime.4 To some, this betrayal of workers’ power was enough evidence to prove that Lenin had never meant the words he penned in The State and Revolution. This is to miss, however, Lenin’s revolutionary pragmatism.
In an inversion of a core anarchist principle, Lenin’s praxis could be described as a disunity of means and ends.5 For Anarchists it isn’t pragmatic, or a ‘necessary evil’, to abandon their methods of organisation. They believe the means employed will inevitably shape the ends achieved, making it impossible to use state power to create socialism. Lenin disagreed, siding explicitly with Marx and Engel’s willingness to wield the state:
‘The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population — the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians — in the work of organizing a socialist economy.’
The strategic differences between Lenin and Anarchism were not limited to the use of the state. Anarchistic organisational forms, like the soviets,6 were for Lenin only viable under certain levels of economic productivity. More specifically, Lenin and Trotsky had always maintained that socialism was only possible with the levels of technological development seen in advanced capitalist states. On the night of the insurrectionary coup, Trotsky declared that the Bolsheviks:
‘rest all our hope on the possibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the revolting peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be crushed – that is indubitable. Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution’.7
The same theory is espoused earlier, in May 1917, by Lenin:
‘Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward of European countries. Socialism cannot triumph there directly and immediately. But the peasant character of the country, the vast reserve of land in the hands of the nobility, may, to judge from the experience of 1905, give tremendous sweep to the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia and may make our revolution the prologue to the world socialist revolution, a step toward it.’8
It was for these reasons that Lenin explained how a ‘correct appraisal of our revolution is possible only from an international point of view.’9 At the heart of this ‘correct appraisal’ of his own strategy had always been, for Lenin, a counterfactual analysis: if socialists could not take power in an advanced capitalist state, the revolution would fail.10 The problem was that this counterfactual became factual, and so the revolution became failure.
This explains the apparent contradiction between The State and Revolution’s ideals and Lenin’s post-October practice. The Bolshevik’s post-civil-war repression of workers’ power ran counter to the anarchistic vision of The State and Revolution, but it remained true to Lenin’s strategy. With state power theorised as a necessary tool for creating socialism, it was on standby. By the time Lenin realised that a global socialist revolution had failed, the Bolshevik state had already militarised. Amidst civil war and poverty, this state was more than happy to help.11
The “necessity” of crushing soviet democracy with a centralised state was justified with counterfactuals. Lenin would have supported workers control if the revolution had not been defeated in Germany. So many human lives, and so much liberty, were thrown away because of such counterfactual thought experiments. This can be seen in the reflections of Trotsky:
‘If the revolution had triumphed, even if only in Germany, the need of prohibiting the other Soviet parties would have immediately fallen away. It is absolutely indisputable that the domination of a single party served as the juridical point of departure for the Stalinist totalitarian regime. The reason for this development lies neither in Bolshevism nor in the prohibition of other parties as a temporary war measure, but in the number of defeats of the proletariat in Europe and Asia.’12
But, as we will see, other counterfactual materialisms are possible.
Anarchist Counterfactuals
The most obvious anarchist counterfactual asks what if Lenin had actually given all power to the soviets? Asking this can provide a simple but powerful reply to claims that there was no alternative to authoritarian statism. It responds by asking: really? And because power wasn’t kept with the soviets, the counterfactual lives on. Take this pithy summary from a commemorative article by the ‘Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group’. There, ablokeimet writes that:
‘Things could have been otherwise. If the All-Russia Congress had not set up a Council of People’s Commissars to act as an executive cabinet, and if relations between the Soviets had been established on the basis of consistent federalism, then the Soviets would have been working bodies where workers came together to make decisions and implement them directly, without coercion or hierarchy. The Factory Committees would have been able to take over inside the workplace, being the basic organs of workers’ self-management.’ [https://melbacg.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/hail-the-october-revolution/]13
Importantly, Anarchists can ponder such scenarios without ignoring the difficult material circumstances following the October Revolution. Anarchists need not claim that a truly Anarchist approach would have created an anarcho-communist heaven on earth. The poverty of a peasant-based economy riddled by civil war would have made any Anarchist experiment difficult. It is even possible that Lenin and Trotsky’s fears would have been proven correct. Perhaps the economic recovery of the 1920s would have been far worse if an anarchistic strategy had been pursued.
Anarchists can concede this as a possibility, insofar as they assess socialist practice with a much longer scope. This was the view of Errico Malatesta. He wrote that: ‘Anarchism cannot come but little by little slowly, but surely’. What matters is not ‘whether we accomplish Anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards Anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.’14 Through this lens, it is almost taken for granted that neither an Anarchist nor a Leninist strategy could have “succeeded” in establishing socialism in the 1920s. The important point is not short-term success or failure but which failure would have been more beneficial for the eventual creation of socialism. If workers’ control was supported, rather than repressed, workers would have learned from their own experiments in socialist organisation. This counterfactual doesn’t bother wondering whether a specific Anarchist practice might have succeeded in creating socialism. It claims only that experiments in workers’ control would have been more beneficial to socialism, whenever it is eventually built, than crushing workers with a so-called vanguard. For at least then the workers would have learned directly from their own failures.
Learning from failure is exactly what Russian Anarchists did. Faced with the repression of an authoritarian state, Anarchists, like Nestor Makhno, asked why. Why were Anarchists, and the anarchistic vision of The State and Revolution, crushed by the Bolsheviks? This question was asked not in the abstract, but in terms of the decision making of Anarchists themselves. Russian Anarchists were concerned with what their own movement could have done to avoid Bolshevism. This was of especial concern because Anarchists had been active participants of the October Revolution. Indeed, giving all power to the soviets was an anarchist slogan. In this sense, the failure of the October Revolution was just as much a failure for anarchism as it was for Leninism.15
In reflecting on their own failures, Russian Anarchists acknowledged the strengths of a party organisation. Lenin had built a strong party structure, which was able to act decisively in moments of crisis. The Anarchists, on the other hand, had been disparate, had been insufficiently organised. This led them to work towards a more organised form of anarchist revolutionary practice. As Petr Arshinov wrote in the introduction to the Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft):
‘It was during the Russian revolution of 1917 that the need for a general organization was felt most acutely, since it was during the course of that revolution that the anarchist movement displayed the greatest degree of fragmentation and confusion. The absence of a general organization induced many anarchist militants to defect to the ranks of the Bolsheviks. It is also the reason why many other militants find themselves today in a condition of passivity that thwarts any utilization of their often immense capacities.’16
This was not just a problem for Anarchists, but for all grass-roots, worker-led struggles. As Simon Pirani has noted, one of the reasons that the post-Civil War movement for genuine workers’ control failed was because of a lack of coordination. With worker resistance sparking off at various times and various places, it was much easier for the Bolshevik regime to play whack-a-mole.17
Having reflected upon the failure of anarchists to assist such worker-led politics, Russian anarchists developed ‘The Organisational Platform’. This was an an attempt at a ‘way out’ from the ‘tragedy of the anarchist movement’ that had followed the October Revolution. The proposed solution was a General Union of Anarchists, or:
‘the recruitment of anarchism's active militants on the basis of specific theoretic, tactical and organizational positions, which is to say on the basis of a more or less perfected, homogeneous programme.'18
The counterfactual analysis underlying the Organisational Platform suggested that if anarchists had been guided by the platform, the workers may not have been crushed by authoritarian statism. As Makhno wrote:
‘Lenin's Bolshevism had placed an X against every free revolutionary organization and anarchism alone was still enough of a danger to it, for, had it but learned to act in an organized and strictly consistent way among the broad masses of the workers and peasants, so as to steer them to victory in political and strategic terms, anarchism alone could have conjured up all that was healthy and utterly committed to the revolution in the country and expected to make the ideas of freedom, equality and free labor practical living realities through its struggle.’19
This shows that the Organisational Platform emerged from a sincere counterfactual materialist analysis of the October Revolution. Rather than use counterfactuals to justify past actions, Russian Anarchists used them to learn from failure. What ifs of the past were used to determine what is to be done in the future. Of course, not all anarchists agreed. To Malatesta, a very different counterfactual was posed. In his response to Makhno, he claimed that the Organisational Program would have led to the same mistakes as Leninism:
‘Your organisation, or your managerial organs, may be composed of anarchists but they would only become nothing other than a government. Believing, in completely good faith, that they are necessary to the triumph of the revolution, they would, as a priority, make sure that they were well placed enough and strong enough to impose their will. They would therefore create armed corps for material defence and a bureaucracy for carrying out their commands and in the process they would paralyse the popular movement and kill the revolution. That is what, I believe, has happened to the Bolsheviks.’
Martov’s Menshevism
Martov, who became leader of the Mensheviks after the October Revolution, didn’t win any of his objectives.
He failed to prevent Lenin’s insurrectionary coup.
He failed to prevent Lenin’s turn to authoritarian statism.
After supporting the Bolsheviks during the civil war, the Menshevik party was crushed.
Despite these political failings, hindsight is still on Martov’s side. He had believed that an attempt at socialist revolution in Russia should await successful revolution in an advanced capitalist state.20 Patience was required because without material surpluses, socialism was doomed to fail. All that a Russia isolated from a global socialist revolution could achieve, Martov predicted, was a bourgeois revolution. Any attempt at fighting this would result only in heightened civil war, and so increased poverty. On this point, Martov was proven correct.21 Amidst isolation and civil war, Lenin’s immediate goal became not a socialist but a bourgeois revolution. The top-down scientific management pioneered by capitalist firms replaced workers’ power.22 Free market reforms, as advocated by the Mensheviks, were brought to agriculture, the largest sector of Russia’s economy.23
Martov’s prescience provokes questions about what might have been. If Lenin’s party was only going to introduce a bourgeois revolution, what was the point of an insurrectionary coup? Couldn’t a bourgeois revolution have been achieved without a coup, and wouldn’t it have come with less scarcity and fewer deaths? Nevertheless, Martov did not indulge in such counterfactuals. Instead, his Menshevik party looked back on the October Revolution as ‘historically necessary.’24 For Martov, there was simply no chance of socialism succeeding in 1917. In his book World Bolshevism he argued that all hope had been lost well before October 1917, and because of events outside of Russia. For Martov, it was the collapse of the Second International, or the ability of a global socialist movement to meaningfully resist the war, which proved ‘how historically inevitable the crisis was and how deeply its origins were rooted in profound changes in the historical existence of the proletariat, changes that had not yet resulted in corresponding changes in its collective consciousness.’25 With the global socialist movement in disarray, Martov concluded that no socialist strategy could ever have succeeded in Russia. In the early 1920s, following the utter defeat of his revolutionary ambitions, Martov wrote that ‘nothing other than what we are now witnessing could have been expected.’26
As theoretically consistent as Martov’s position is, it is also convenient. It absolves him of the need to consider the efficacy of his own decision making. In place of this, Martov preferred to imagine counterfactuals about what Marx would think, if only he were alive today. With many quotes, and much clarity, Martov tried to demonstrate that Marx would have been a Menshevik: 27
‘Marx, then, allowed for the possibility of a political victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie at a point in historical development when the prerequisites for a socialist revolution were not yet mature. But such a victory, he said, would prove to be fleeting, and he predicted with ingenious foresight that such a premature—from a historical viewpoint—conquest of political power by the proletariat would “only be . . . an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution.” We must conclude, therefore, that, in the case of an obviously premature conquest of power, Marx would consider it obligatory for the conscious elements of the proletariat to pursue a policy that takes account of the fact that such a conquest objectively represents “only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution” and would serve the latter by aiding its further development, a policy based on the “self-limitation” of the proletariat in defining and resolving revolutionary tasks. For the proletariat will be able to score a real victory over the bourgeoisie—instead of for the bourgeoisie—only when “in the course of history, in its ‘movement,’ the material conditions have . . . been created which make necessary [not merely objectively possible!—Martov] the elimination of the bourgeois mode of production.” ’ p. 118.
It is important to note that this is not counterfactual materialism, but counterfactual idealism. What Marx would have thought is irrelevant to the history of the October Revolution. It is useful only for debates about intellectual history. In defeat, Martov devised counterfactuals that highlighted his orthodox understanding of the world. Unfortunately, he avoided any analysis of his own failure to change it.
If we are to believe Trotsky, who famously told the Mensheviks to go where they belong, ‘into the dustbin of history!’, Martov’s counterfactuals shouldn’t be surprising. For if Trotsky and Lenin are to be believed, there had never been a Menshevik alternative. For them, civil war was inevitable. As Trotsky recounted in his History of the Russian Revolution, the inevitability of civil war was believed by both Lenin and a liberal member of the provisional government, Miliukov:
‘ “Either Kornilov or Lenin”: thus Miliukov defined the alternative. Lenin on his part wrote: “Either a soviet government or Kornilovism. These is no middle course.” To this extent Miliukov and Lenin coincided in their appraisal of the situation—and not accidentally. In contrast to the heroes of the compromise phrase, these two were serious representatives of the basic classes of society. According to Miliukov, the Moscow State Conference had already made it clearly obvious that “the country is dividing into two camps, between which there can be no essential conciliation or agreement.” But where there can be no agreement between two social camps, the issue is decided by civil war.’28
For Trotsky and Lenin, there was no question of avoiding civil war, as this would happen even without an insurrectionary coup.29 Avoiding a coup would have only achieved a more disengaged working class, and so a more likely loss of the impending civil war. As Trotsky wrote:
‘If the Bolsheviks had not seized the power in October and November, in all probability they would not have seized it at all. Instead of firm leadership the masses would have found among the Bolsheviks that same disparity between word and deed which they were already sick of, and they would have ebbed away in the course of two or three months from this party which had deceived their hopes, just as they had recently ebbed away from the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. A part of the workers would have fallen into indifferentism. Another part would have burned up their force in convulsive movements in anarchistic flare-ups, in guerrilla skirmishes, in a Terror dictated by revenge and despair. The breathing-spell thus offered would have been used by the bourgeoisie to conclude a separate peace with the Hohenzollern, and stamp out the revolutionary organisations. Russia would again have been included in the circle of capitalist states as a semi-imperialist, semi-colonial country. The proletarian revolution would have been deferred to an indefinite future. It was his keen understanding of this prospect that inspired Lenin to that cry of alarm: “The success of the Russian and world revolution depends upon a two or three days’ struggle.”’30
These counterfactuals, used to justify the insurrectionary coup of October 1917, reject any suggestion that there was anything that Martov could have done, given the circumstances. In other words, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov are in agreement: the October Revolution was ‘historically necessary’.
Martov’s biographer disagreed. According to Israel Getzler, Martov did have an opportunity to prevent the insurrectionary coup and civil war. For Getzler, things would have been different had Martov not remained in the Menshevik party after his colleagues betrayed themselves.31 Martov had originally opposed forming a government with the bourgeoisie.32 However, by the time Martov returned to Russia in 1917, his colleagues had already betrayed this original Menshevik tenet. They helped form the provisional government, entangling the Mensheviks with continued participation in the war. Despite this, Martov decided to remain in the Menshevik party, albeit as a force of opposition. For Getzler, this was fatal. Martov’s opposition to his Menshevik colleagues helped draw support away from them, but without an alternative political force, this only strengthened the hand of the Bolshevik Party.33 If Martov had broken away from his colleagues, he could have built a powerful counterweight to the Bolsheviks.34 That this might have succeeded in avoiding an insurrectionary coup is alluded to by the support Martov received even without this alternative strategy:
‘in the revolutionary upsurge which followed upon the defeat of the Kornilov putsch, Martov’s solution to the problem of power gained wider and wider support among Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and might even have been acceptable to many Bolshevik leaders, with the important exceptions of Lenin and Trotsky. In fact by the time of the Democratic Conference (14-22 September 1917) Martov seems to have been on the brink of victory.’
Of course, it is impossible to prove that some alternative strategy would have opened forth an alternative future. Nor does Getzler pretend to know about that which hasn’t happened. His point is more simple. It is to question why Martov failed. Did Martov fail, as Martov himself believed, because of structural forces beyond his control? Or, as Getzler’s counterfactual materialism suggests, was Martov’s agency more powerful than even he knew?
Counterfactual hindsight
Hindsight is a tantalising troll, and it will forever lurk beneath the bridges of historical materialism. For if we are to learn anything from history, we must draw on hindsight. We must compare what historical actors thought would happen with what actually did. Nevertheless, we can’t be too careful. While hindsight is essential for assessing the causal significance of strategic choices, it shouldn’t be used to assess what should have happened. Lenin’s insurrectionary coup serves as a great example of this. Hindsight shows that Lenin’s strategy failed, but this does not mean that the insurrectionary coup of October shouldn’t have happened. To explain why, we must, like Trotsky, embrace the counterfactual imaginary. We should ask what might have happened if the insurrectionary coup had not been carried through. Most obviously, we would not now know what happened. Without the insurrectionary coup, there would be no evidence for or against the insurrectionary coup. Trotsky believed that if the insurrectionary coup had not taken place, historians would assume that it had been impossible:
‘It is not difficult to imagine how history would have been written, had the line of evading the battle carried in the Central Committee. The official historians would, of course, have explained that an insurrection in October 1917 would have been sheer madness; and they would have furnished the reader with awe-inspiring statistical charts of the military cadets and Cossacks and shock troops and artillery, in fanlike formation, and army corps arriving from the front. Never tested in the fire of insurrection, these forces would have seemed immeasurably more terrible than they proved in action. Here is the lesson which must be burned into the consciousness of every revolutionist!’35
This is an important legacy of Lenin. His historical materialist strategy failed in terms of its own stated objectives, but it got a result. The result was tragic for socialism, and continues to weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living, but we wouldn’t know any of this if it was never tested in practice.
If socialists are ever again to fail as victoriously as Lenin, we must pick back up the pieces. We should not and can not, however, put them back the same way. In this sense, history is Humpty Dumpty. That’s a good thing, though. Rather than pretending that history can prove one definitive path forwards, counterfactual materialism demands curiosity about all possible strategies. Its goal is to form a pluralistic historical materialism. Only then will socialist struggle be truly democratic. For, as the failures of both neoliberalism and Lenin have shown, democracy loses all meaning when there is no alternative.
Marcel Liebman (1985), Leninism Under Lenin, pp. 196-197, 198:
‘The anarchists did not hide their surprise or their satisfaction at the way the Bolsheviks were changing. Their organ in Kharkov, for example, wrote: 'Since the time of the [February] revolution they have decisively broken with Social Democracy and have been endeavouring to apply anarcho-syndicalist methods of struggle.'[34] One anarchist leader, returning to Petrograd during the summer, expressed his conviction that Lenin had overcome his Marxist errors and was now intending to establish in Russia an anarchist regime based on destruction of the state.[35] Voline, in the highly anti-Leninist work that he wrote about the revolution, in a period of hostility between Communists and anarchists, acknowledged that in 1917 Lenin and his Party 'arrived at an almost libertarian conception of the revolution, with almost Anarchist slogans'.[36]’ p. 198.
Black Flag Sydney has written of this more specifically in relation to The State and Revolution:
‘This anti-state position, in a way, places Lenin in the company of the anarchists. Much of the time, he restates basic anarchist positions: the state as an inherently oppressive force, the product of class relations, universal suffrage as an instrument of bourgeois rule, the necessity of a violent revolution, and the democratic republic as the “best possible political shell” for capitalism.’
Zoe Baker (2019), Means and Ends: The Anarchist Critique of Seizing State Power: https://blackrosefed.org/anarchopac-critique-of-seizing-state-power/
Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books, pp. 569-570.
Pirani (2008), The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24, p. 78. Pirani introduces the book as arguing ‘that one of the most important choices the Bolsheviks made’ after the civil war:
‘was to turn their backs on forms of collective, participatory democracy that workers briefly attempted to revive. It challenges the notion, persistent among left-wing historians, that political power was forced on the Bolsheviks because the working class was so weakened by the civil war that it was incapable of wielding it. In reality, non-party workers were willing and able to participate in political processes, but, in the Moscow soviet and elsewhere, were pushed out of them by the Bolsheviks. The party’s vanguardism, i.e. its conviction that it had the right, and the duty, to make political decisions on the workers’ behalf, was now reinforced by its control of the state apparatus. The working class was politically expropriated; power was progressively concentrated in the party, and specifically in the party elite. These were the most important features of the new political order established by the Bolsheviks after the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, and on the basis of a dynamic economic revival. Workers benefited from this set-up –most significantly by regaining, and starting to surpass, the living standards achieved on the eve of the First World War. But the quid pro quo for this was the surrender of political power to the party. In terms of the development of the workers’ movement and socialism, this latter aspect of the party-worker relationship was the most important, and the most destructive.’ p. 4.
See Zoe Baker (2019), Means and Ends: The Anarchist Critique of Seizing State Power, published by Black and Rose Anarchist Federation:
‘Given the above, anarchists concluded that seizing and wielding state power was necessarily based on a means — minority rule by a political ruling class — which was incompatible with achieving the ends of creating a communist society based on the self-determination of the working class as a whole.’
Contrast this with a quote from Trotsky:
‘Who aims at the end cannot reject the means. The struggle must be carried on with such intensity as actually to guarantee the supremacy of the proletariat. If the Socialist revolution requires a dictatorship – ”the sole form in which the proletariat can achieve control of the State” – it follows that the dictatorship must be guaranteed at all cost.’
For an Anarchist view on Soviets, see Kropotkin:
‘The idea of soviets, that is to say, of councils of workers and peasants, conceived first at the time of the revolutionary attempt in 1905, and immediately realized by the revolution of February, 1917, as soon as Czarism was overthrown, – the idea of such councils controlling the economic and political life of the country is a great idea. All the more so, since it necessarily follows that these councils should be composed of all who take a real part in the production of national wealth by their own efforts.
But as long as the country is governed by a party dictatorship, the workers' and peasants' councils evidently lose their entire significance. They are reduced to the passive role formerly played by the "States General," when they were convoked by the king and had to combat an all-powerful royal council.’
Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books, pp. 865-866; This logic is also at work in Trotsky’s later reflections:
‘The bloody struggle breaks out only after the conquest of power by the Bolshevik soviets when the overthrown classes, with material support from the governments of the Entente, make desperate efforts to get back what they have lost. Then come the years of civil war. The Red Army is created, the hungry country is put under the régime of military communism and converted into a Spartan war camp. The October revolution step by step lays down its road, beats back all enemies, passes over the solution of its industrial problems, heals the heaviest wounds of the imperialist and civil war, and achieves gigantic successes in the sphere of the development of industry. There arise before it, however, new difficulties flowing from its isolated position with mighty capitalistic lands surrounding it. That belatedness of development which had brought the Russian proletariat to power, has imposed upon that power tasks which in their essence cannot be fully achieved within the framework of an isolated state. The fate of that state is thus wholly bound up with the further course of world history.’ p. 332.
Lenin, ‘Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers’, Jugend-Internationale No. 8, May 1, 1917. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/mar/26b.htm]; As Trotsky commented, it was in ‘this sense Lenin now first wrote that the Russian will begin the socialist revolution.’ Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books, p. 230.
As quoted in: Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books, p. 890.
It is important to note that this is not only a ‘Leninist’ belief. Rather, it comes straight from orthodox Marxism. This was expressed well with a counterfactual from Steve Paxton (2021) in Unlearning Marx: Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx:
‘Had the Soviets succeeded in building a socialist utopia, that news would have been welcomed by socialists, and no doubt by Marxists too, but it would have required conscientious Marxists to revise that allegiance, since such an outcome would have delivered a fatal blow to important Marxian1 theses. Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail – not in a random moment of Nostradamus-like clairvoyance, but in detailed historical explanation, such that his whole approach to history would have been discredited had the Soviet Union succeeded in building a viable and genuinely socialist society.’
Marcel Liebman (1985), Leninism Under Lenin, p. 267:
‘Lenin sometimes denounced the demands raised by the Russian workers as evidence of an egoistic attitude at a time when the Soviet power (or what was left of it) could be saved only by sacrifice. Faced with the rising wave of discontent, the reaction of the Communist leaders, headed by Lenin, was often to denounce the petty-bourgeois mentality which had evidently not disappeared, and was still doing harm. However, this argument was facile and dangerous. The Leninist rulers, backs to the wall, never made a serious attempt to introduce any mechanism of 'social defence' apart from the institutions of repression that operated during the civil war. They did not really permit the working class to develop any autonomous activity in pursuit of its own demands. In this sphere, Lenin opted for an authoritative and even authoritarian line.’
Leon Trotsky, 1937, Stalinism and Bolshevism. Trotsky even tried to assess the likelihood of such a German revolution:
‘With respect to Germany, the case is quite a clear one. The German revolution might have been triumphant both in 1918 and in 1919, had a proper party leadership been secured. We had an instance of this same thing in 1917 in the case of Finland. There, the revolutionary movement developed under exceptionally favorable circumstances, under the wing of revolutionary Russia and with its direct military assistance. But the majority of the leaders in the Finnish party proved to be social democrats, and they ruined the revolution.’
This counterfactual was also made by Bookchin. See Listen, Marxist! (1969):
‘’Only one force could have arrested the growth of bureaucracy in Russia: a social force. Had the Russian proletariat and peasantry succeeded in increasing the domain of self-management through the development of viable factory committees, rural communes and free Soviets, the history of the country might have taken a dramatically different turn. There can be no question that the failure of socialist revolutions in Europe after the First World War led to the isolation of the revolution in Russia. The material poverty of Russia, coupled with the pressure of the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militated against the development of a socialist or a consistently libertarian society. But by no means was it ordained that Russia had to develop along state capitalist lines; contrary to Lenin's and Trotsky's initial expectations, the revolution was defeated by internal forces, not by invasion of armies from abroad. Had the movement from below restored the initial achievements of the revolution in 1917, a multifaceted social structure might have developed, based on workers' control of industry, on a freely developing peasant economy in agriculture, and on a living interplay of ideas, programs and political movements. At the very least least, Russia would not have been imprisoned in totalitarian chains and Stalinism would not have poisoned the world revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascism and the Second World War.’ p. 228.
Malatesta, Towards Anarchism:
‘And as the conscience, determination, and capacity of men continuously develop and find means of expression in the gradual modification of the new environment and in the realisation of the desires in proportion to their being formed and becoming imperious, so it is with Anarchism; Anarchism cannot come but little by little slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension.
Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards Anarchism today, tomorrow, and always.
Anarchism is the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is, the abolition of private property and government; Anarchism is the destruction of misery, of superstitions, of hatred. Therefore, every blow given to the institutions of private property and to the government, every exaltation of the conscience of man, every disruption of the present conditions, every lie unmasked, every part of human activity taken away from the control of the authorities, every augmentation of the spirit of solidarity and initiative, is a step towards Anarchism.’
This was, in any case, the view of the Menshevik Martov, who wrote that:
‘Fundamentally, this anarchist illusion of the destruction of the state covers up the tendency to concentrate all the state power of constraint in the hands of a minority, which believes neither in the objective logic of the revolution nor in the class consciousness of the proletarian majority and, with still greater reason, that of the national majority.’ p. 21.
http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/newplatform/introduction.htm, 20 June 1926.
Pirani (2008), The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24, p. 72:
‘The movement’s uneven character, and the lack of unity between Kronshtadt and the other main urban centres, cast doubt on claims that a revolutionary challenge was made to Bolshevik rule. The movement helped to force the party’s hand towards the fundamental policy shift that would soon be named NEP, though. The tenth congress, held in the first week of March while the Kronshtadt revolt was being put down, decided to replace grain requisitioning with a tax in kind. It also banned factions in the party and approved the further centralization of the apparatus; this, together with the suppression of Kronshtadt and the invasion of Georgia, confirmed the authoritarian, apparatus-centred direction that the Soviet state was to take.’
http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/newplatform/introduction.htm, 20 June 1926.
Nestor Makhno, 1928, ON THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MAKHNOVIST INSURGENT MOVEMENT IN THE UKRAINE, [http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/10anniv.htm].
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967):
‘This reaffirmed the bourgeois nature of the revolution, contained a strong injunction against the party’s presuming to capture or share power in a provisional government and defined its relation to whatever governments the revolution might throw up, as that of ‘a party of extreme revolutionary opposition’.[48] It allowed the seizure of power for the purpose of building socialism in one situation only: if the revolution should ‘leap over into the advanced countries of western Europe.’ p. 104.
‘Martov allowed only one possibility of the seizure of power by the social democrats: in the exceptional case that the victory of the revolution and of a democratic republic could not be secured otherwise; if, for example, those strong bourgeois revolutionary parties should wither away without ever blossoming. Only then would social democrats need to sacrifice their political independence and anti-Jacobin puritanism for the sake of liberty and take power, exclaiming in the words of the Montagne: ‘perisse notre nom pourvu que la liberte soit sauvee.’ In that case social democrats could not govern without pushing on the revolution— Marx’s Revolution in Permanent, transcending the limits of the bourgeois revolution to clash head-on with the whole of bourgeois society. The outcome would be a tragic repetition of the Paris Commune, unless it coincided with the beginning of a socialist revolution in the west and its spread to Russia.34 Barring only this exceptional case of the bourgeoisie’s failing in its historical duty, Martov saw the role of social democrats in the bourgeois democratic republic to be that of a revolutionary opposition whose task was to exert maximum pressure on the government, to make sure in the first place that it disarmed the reaction, armed the people, and convoked a Constituent Assembly, and later on to ensure that the revolutionary process was not checked but that the proletariat was provided with the best possible conditions for preparing for the final, the social, revolution of the future.35’ pp. 101-102.
Martov’s ‘correctness’ was noted in the words of Trotsky. This is ironic, because Trotsky had famously banished Martov and the Mensheviks to the ‘dust-bins of history’:
‘‘Were Russia to stand all on her own in the world’, Trotsky told his Menshevik critics in 1917, ‘then Martov’s reasoning (that Russia was not ripe yet for socialism] was correct.’’ p. 220.
Marcel Liebman (1985), Leninism Under Lenin:
‘In The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government written in early spring 1918, Lenin wrote: 'We must raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice.'195 He went even further, calling for the application of the Taylor system, which aroused the wrath of the 'Left Communists' and the opposition of many trade-union leaders.196 Lenin had himself described Taylorism, in 1914, as 'man's enslavement by the machine'.’ p. 336.
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967):
‘It may not be unreasonable to suggest that the Menshevik' What Is to be Done? advocated the New Economic Policies which the Bolsheviks were eventually to adopt in 1921, but only after the economy had ground to a halt at Nicolai Bukharin’s beloved ‘point zero’.’ p. 199.
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967): p. 185.
Iulii Martov, World Bolshevism, original 1923:
‘But it was clear to me that this prolonged, internal disintegration of class-based ideological unity, that this absence of a unifying ideology—which were consequences of the collapse of the International—would determine the whole picture of the reviving revolutionary movement. And it was because of the inevitability of these effects of the collapse of the International that revolutionary Marxists had the duty to work energetically to weld together the proletarian elements who had remained true to the class struggle and to react resolutely against “social-patriotism,” even at a time when the masses had not yet awakened from nationalist frenzy and military panic. To the extent that it would have been possible to achieve this welding together on an international level, there could be hope that in the spontaneous risings of the future, the ideological legacy of a half century of workers’ struggle would not sink without a trace and that it would be possible to build an ideological-organizational dam to contain the anarchist wave. This was the objective meaning of the Zimmerwald-Kienthal approach of 1915 and 1916.13 Unfortunately, the goal it set itself was far from realized. This failure must not be attributed, of course, either to accidents or to the mistakes of individual “Zimmerwaldists.” Evidently, the crisis of the world labour movement was too deep for the efforts of the internationalist minorities of the time to change its course or to lessen the birth pangs of a new proletarian consciousness and new proletarian organizations. The very fact of this serves as proof of how historically inevitable the crisis was and how deeply its origins were rooted in profound changes in the historical existence of the proletariat, changes that had not yet resulted in corresponding changes in its collective consciousness.’ p. 48-49.
Iulii Martov, World Bolshevism, original 1923:
‘The class movement called into existence by the war raised up new, deeper strata of the proletarian mass, strata that had not yet passed through the long school of organized struggle. These new strata did not find the guidance of a solid bloc of advanced comrades, united by the commonality of their ends and means, their program and their tactics. Rather, they found the crumpled edifice of the old parties and unions, the old International experiencing the deepest crisis the working-class movement had ever known, an International torn apart by irreconcilable warring factions, an International shaken in its beliefs, beliefs that for decades had seemed immutable. In these conditions, nothing other than what we are now witnessing could have been expected.’ pp. 46-47.
This isn’t to say that Martov didn’t play a role. It is only to say that nothing that he tried to achieve was ever achieved, and that Martov didn’t reflect on this.
Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books, pp. 608-609.
Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books:
‘ “A civil war is inevitable. We have only to organise it as painlessly as possible. We can achieve this not by wavering and vacillation, but only by a stubborn and courageous struggle for power.” ’p. 735.
Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Haymarket Books. p. 730.
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967):
‘On the fundamental matters of coalition and war, a large majority of his party disagreed with him. In this situation there were a number of ways open to him. He could have rallied his faithful, the Menshevik-Internationalists, split the party, and formed a new left-wing party with a small, but very able following. This new party would have had some assets: it would have controlled the Petrograd, Kharkov, and Don Basin party organizations28 and would have had a good number of extremely able and experienced party workers with whom Martov’s prestige was very high. When, before Martov’s arrival, Iurii Larin and Grigorii Binshtok launched their journal International, they described themselves as ‘editors—until the arrival of Martov’. The new party would probably have attracted a number of Internationalists like D. B. Ryazanov, V. Bazarov, B. V. Avilov, or A. V. Lunacharsky, and even some moderate or dissident Bolsheviks like L. B. Kamenev, A. Rykov, V. P. Miliutin, or V. Nogin, who found it difficult to put up with Lenin’s demagogy and reckless maximalism. Above all, this genuinely revolutionary peace party would have had the advantage of being distinct from Lenin’s party of revolutionary civil war, yet not being identified with those Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who supported the Provisional Government and its disastrous offensive. It might therefore have competed with the Bolsheviks, with some success, for the support of the workers and soldiers. With its name untainted by ‘defensism’ and ‘coalitionism’ and with a clear programme which made no concessions to official Menshevism as represented by Tseretelli and Dan, it could have become in the rising revolutionary tide an alternative party of the proletariat and the soldiers, pledged to peace, land reform, and speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly: a competitor to prevent the Bolsheviks from monopolizing this combination of policies.’ p. 160.
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967):
‘Barring only this exceptional case of the bourgeoisie’s failing in its historical duty, Martov saw the role of social democrats in the bourgeois democratic republic to be that of a revolutionary opposition whose task was to exert maximum pressure on the government, to make sure in the first place that it disarmed the reaction, armed the people, and convoked a Constituent Assembly, and later on to ensure that the revolutionary process was not checked but that the proletariat was provided with the best possible conditions for preparing for the final, the social, revolution of the future.’ pp. 101-102.
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967):
‘the cumulative effect of the propaganda and agitation of Martov and his followers was to assist the Bolsheviks; for in the eyes of the masses of workers and soldiers such criticism discredited the official leadership of the Soviets and of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties at a time when the Bolsheviks, as the only effective opposition party in the Soviets, offered the only real organizational alternative. Whatever damage they did to the official leadership of the Soviets and the party, the Menshevik-Internationalists did not increase their own following among the masses,30 for they were still too closely identified by the public with the Menshevik party of which they continued to be members. Some delegates, even, who arrived at the provincial conference of the Menshevik party in Yaroslavl at the end of July proved blissfully ignorant of differences in the opinions and policies of Martov and Dan.31 Small wonder then that the mass of the people lumped all Mensheviks together. When in the beginning of October the Menshevik-Internationalists did split off and form themselves into a separate curia in the Council of the Republic, it was far too late to have any useful effect on their public image.’ p. 161.
Getzler, Israel. Martov: A political biography of a Russian social democrat. Cambridge University Press, 2003 (originally published: 1967):
‘Above all, this genuinely revolutionary peace party would have had the advantage of being distinct from Lenin’s party of revolutionary civil war, yet not being identified with those Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who supported the Provisional Government and its disastrous offensive. It might therefore have competed with the Bolsheviks, with some success, for the support of the workers and soldiers. With its name untainted by ‘defensism’ and ‘coalitionism’ and with a clear programme which made no concessions to official Menshevism as represented by Tseretelli and Dan, it could have become in the rising revolutionary tide an alternative party of the proletariat and the soldiers, pledged to peace, land reform, and speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly: a competitor to prevent the Bolsheviks from monopolizing this combination of policies.’ p. 160.
Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October (1924), “Chapter 6: On the Eve of the October Revolution – the Aftermath”.