Abstract
The Long Russian Revolution climaxed in the Red Army overthrow of the Kronstadt Commune in March 1921, and with it died the idea of freedom as universal participation in all the aspects of deciding and implementing public policy. This, Marx’s idea of the socialism of the Paris Commune, had been ardently embraced by Lenin as constitutive of both the means and the goal of the revolution in Russia. It breathed the ethos and practice of the soviets, which were the revolution’s real driving forces and the source of its international appeal. By 1921, the Bolsheviks were isolated both internationally and internally. Peasants were in revolt, towns depopulated, the proletariat decimated by war, hunger and disease. Industry was at a virtual standstill. Bolshevik support had shrunk disastrously. It was in this setting that a new legitimating rationale was appealed to that had some warrant in Marx’s accounts of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but derived more from Bukharin’s analysis of the deep costs of revolution and the consequent leading role of the Party/State in redeeming them. As the minoritarian monopoly capitalists had sustained their class power through control of the state apparatus and the heights of the economy, so the Communists could only keep the glimmer of socialism alive by doing likewise. They would, however, have to redefine socialism itself. It was no longer the realization of a mode of free activity and being, it was, rather, a condition of things. It inhered in the rational application of investments, the acquisition of managerial expertise, and the discipline and organization of labor best fitted to the extraction of the maximal production of goods from scarce resources. Socialism would stand or fall as a more rational and scientific mode of production than capitalism.
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- 1.
V.I. Lenin, Collected Works in 45 vols., Moscow, 1960–1970, vol. 21, p. 107. Hereafter references to this edition will be rendered LCW, 21/107.
- 2.
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works 2 vols., Moscow 1960, hereafter MESW, 1/37.
- 3.
Ibid., loc. cit.
- 4.
N. I. Bukharin , ‘k teorii imperialistichsogo gosudarstva in Revoliutsia Prava, Sbornik pervyi, no. 25, Moscow, 1925, p. 30.
- 5.
LCW, 25/363.
- 6.
Loc. cit.
- 7.
LCW, 26/106.
- 8.
Loc. cit.
- 9.
MESW, 1/37.
- 10.
LCW, 25, pp. 385–497.
- 11.
Karl Marx , The Civil War in France, Peking, 1970, pp. 165–166.
- 12.
Ibid., loc cit.
- 13.
MESW, 1/522.
- 14.
LCW, 24/23.
- 15.
LCW, 24/88.
- 16.
See S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918, Cambridge, 1983, and M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917–1921, London, 1975.
- 17.
LCW, 26/114.
- 18.
LCW, 26/113.
- 19.
LCW, 25/334.
- 20.
LCW, 25/44–45.
- 21.
LCW, 26/362.
- 22.
Ibid., loc. cit.
- 23.
LCW, 25/364. I have explored this ambiguity further in “Lenin, socialism and the State” in E.R. and J. Frankel and B. Knei Paz, eds. Revolution in Russia, Reassessments of 1917, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 287–305.
- 24.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow, 1961. Marx too inveighed against those who portrayed socialism as the land of lotus eaters breeding excess and intemperance, where every need becomes “a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot” P116. Marx’s contempt for commercial society is profoundly Rousseauian.
- 25.
By a strange quirk of history, the man whom Lenin was to overthrow and replace as the master of Russia was the son of his headmaster who had bravely written the glowing reference that enabled Lenin to enter Petersburg law school despite being the brother of a self-confessed regicide.
- 26.
LCW, 26, p. 114.
- 27.
MECW, 5, p. 58.
- 28.
LCW, 27/32.
- 29.
LCW, 26/89.
- 30.
LCW, 26/443.
- 31.
LCW, 32, p. 436.
- 32.
The Development of Capitalism in Russia, LECW, 3/607.
- 33.
A. Nove, The Economic History of the USSR, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 68.
- 34.
He wrote in 1920 and 1921 a series of articles and pamphlets of increasingly authoritarian tone, which were condensed into his book Terrorism and Communism, Ann Arbor, 1961.
- 35.
In his Testament, his last message to the party and appraisal of the qualities of its leading personnel, Lenin warned the comrades about Trotsky ’s high-handed tendency to settle matters in a purely administrative way. LCW, 36/595.
- 36.
A.L. Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR, London, 1981, p. 26.
- 37.
Smith, Red Petrograd.
- 38.
London, 1971, p. 26.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 40.
Unger, op. cit., p. 31.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 42.
O. Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, NY 1974, pp. 234–236.
- 43.
See, in particular, M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, London, 1969. See also the final three chapters of vol. 2 of my Lenin’s Political Thought, London, 1978.
- 44.
The Workers’ Opposition was perhaps the last remaining voice of the libertarian and workerphile tendency within the Communist Party . Its spokespersons were Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov . It had persistently protested against the marginalization of the workers’ own organisations and the unstoppable rise of a bureaucratic centralism that paralyzed the initial goals of the revolution. Support for the group was strong among the industrial workers and, for that reason no doubt, it was shortly to be banned.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 47.
L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London, 1979. I have examined the implications of the processes of interpellation and attribution of characteristics to the proletariat in my essay “Making and breaking the proletariat” in A. Kemp-Welch and J. Jennings, eds., Intellectuals in Politics, London, 1997, pp. 195–222.
- 48.
The Petropavlovsk Resolution is in I. Mett, The Kronstadt Commune , London, n.d.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
LCW, 32/228.
- 51.
At Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
- 52.
The group was led by Alexandra Kollontai and Mikhail Shlyapnikov . It is unsurprising that these were virtually the only Bolsheviks who, in 1917, had supported Lenin’s April Theses , and that Shlyapnikov was almost the only prominent Bolshevik leader with a genuinely proletarian background.
- 53.
LCW, 39/34.
- 54.
32/504.
- 55.
32/27.
- 56.
H. Saint-Simon , Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, trans. and ed. K Taylor, London, 1975. p. 230.
- 57.
29/437.
- 58.
Ibid., loc. cit.
- 59.
28/268.
- 60.
28/238.
- 61.
See the remarks on crude communism in Economic and Philosophic Mss, op cit. pp. 99–102.
- 62.
32/274.
- 63.
32/199.
- 64.
32/199.
- 65.
33/23–24.
- 66.
28/424–425.
- 67.
29/559.
- 68.
MESW, 1/46.
- 69.
In the Manifesto , Marx attributes the failings of the utopian socialists to the infancy of the proletariat , presenting a spectacle of “a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.” Ibid., p. 62.
- 70.
Ibid., loc. cit.
- 71.
MESW, 1/43.
- 72.
Marx (like many political theorists beginning with Plato) has to posit the existence of escapees from the egregious determinations of daily existence.
- 73.
LCW, 33/39.
- 74.
LCW, 32/38.
- 75.
LCW, 33/488.
- 76.
LECW, 32/31.
- 77.
This was the burden of Lenin’s pamphlet The Tax in Kind , 32/214–228.
- 78.
LCW, 33/65.
- 79.
32/420, cf. 182.
- 80.
32/334.
- 81.
32/224.
- 82.
33/68.
- 83.
32/21. In Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin had poured scorn on the idea of a class dictatorship, pointing to the impossibility of, for instance, gathering together 40 million Germans. What this dictatorship really meant was the “despotic rule… of genuine or sham scientists…No dictatorship can have any other aim than that of self-perpetuation.” Quoted in G.P. Maximoff, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, London, 1953, pp. 287–278.
- 84.
LCW, 31/258.
- 85.
MECW, 5/49.
- 86.
MECW, 4/37.
- 87.
MECW, 16/469.
- 88.
Lenin’s so-called Testament (Letter to the Congress) LCW, 36/ 593–597 contained his assessments of the leadership suitability of all the prominent contenders.
- 89.
This is Plato’s argument from techne; those best versed, through arduous study and reflection in the arts of governing, should assume the leadership of the polis. See The Republic, passim.
- 90.
Stalin insisted on authoring the chapter on dialectics in the compulsory textbook on the History of the CPSUb. Not to be outdone, Mao wrote his obligatory text, On Contradiction.
- 91.
A large proportion of Marx ’s literary output is devoted to painstaking and painful critique of all rival socialist theorists, with the possible exceptions of Blanqui and Saint-Simon. See also Marx’s account of the factions which he, as leader of the General Council, had to contend with in the First International. It was, he confided to Engels, “a continual struggle … against the sects and amateur experiments that attempted to assert themselves… against the genuine movement of the working class .” Marx-Engels , Correspondence, ed. D. Torr, London, 1936, p. 316. He concluded that “The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers’ movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other.” Ibid., p. 315.
- 92.
Bukharin, Economics, pp. 95–96.
- 93.
Ibid., loc. cit.
- 94.
LCW, 33/62 This was exactly the judgement that Saint-Simon had come to with regard to the French Revolution. It had radically destroyed the old order, but the costs had been enormous, and it had bequeathed no positive principles for building a new organic order for industry and society.
- 95.
Lenin, “Left wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, LCW, 31/21–118.
- 96.
N. Bukharin , Economics and Politics of the Transformation Period, New York, 1971.
- 97.
L. Trotsky , Terrorism and Communism, Ann Arbor, 1961.
- 98.
This had been Saint-Simon ’s conclusion about the French Revolution of 1789–1791. His positive programme for redressing the damage done was integrated into Marx ’s accounts of the dictatorship of the proletariat and now into the soviet communist version of socialism that was to predominate until 1991. See the introductory chapter of my The State in Socialist Society, London, 1984.
- 99.
29/431.
- 100.
Letter to the Congress, 29/506.
- 101.
28/236.
- 102.
29/373.
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Harding, N. (2018). Lenin on Socialism and the Party in the Long Revolution. In: Rockmore, T., Levine, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_10
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