(A Reply To Remarks In Labour Affairs, September ’26)
The Russian Revolution was envisaged in the first instance by its creator as a preliminary to an international Socialist Revolution against Capitalism. Socialist Revolution was seen by Lenin as having been made possible, even inevitable, in the immediate future, by developments within German capitalism during the War. These developments were brought about as a means of coping with the comprehensive Blockade of Germany by the British Navy—which cut it off from the medium of the world market in which it had been created.
The financial devices, in particular, by which it had kept itself going after Britain excluded it from the world market, and organised the world against it, were seen as an intensification of the social character of Capitalism, which would eventually lead to Socialism.
The future, in which Capitalism would undergo a transition into Socialism, had become the present under pressure of the exclusion of the freshest and most advanced form of Capitalism from the world market under pressure by the British Empire.
I don’t recall that much was written about the State in that socialist revolution—except that it would wither away very quickly. Capitalism would undergo a transition to Socialism, beginning in Germany, and the Socialism would be such that we could all, cooks and bottle-washers, take our turn at the running of the Government.
With Capitalism gone, what need would there be for a State? The function of the State was to protect the market from its victims. And with the market gone, gold will be used for making lavatory seats.
That is what I recall from State and Revolution, which I read a very long time ago, and do not have a copy to hand.
In his general view of the situation Lenin differed very little from Trotsky, or from Rosa Luxemburg. When the Tsarist State collapsed, and politics went into flux, Lenin and Trotsky set aside their theoretical differences of the past and were at ease with one another in what they were saying and doing in the present.
Rosa Luxemburg, however, retained a critical stance against Leninism because of certain features of it that became profoundly problematical a few years later.
Lenin/Trotsky made a revolution on socialist principles in Russia in 1917 on the understanding that it only be a holding operation until the actual Socialist Revolution happened in Europe. They governed in Coalition with the Socialist Revolutionaries for a few months.
In the Spring of 1918 they were requested by Germany to either make a peace treaty with it, or make war on it. “Peace” had been one of the slogans of the Revolution, but the signing of a Treaty with a major Capitalist state—which would enable it to transfer a large number of troops to the Western Front, increasing the probability that it would win the War, was seen by many as counter-revolutionary.
The Marxist theorist of the Bolshevik Party, Bukharin, was against making a Treaty, and he gained a majority on the Central Committee. The policy of the Party was that Socialists everywhere should oppose their own Governments in the War and desire its defeat, and thereby set free the elements making for socialist revolution. How could the Socialists in power in Russia go against their colleagues in Germany by making a Treaty with the German Government?
The thing to do was resist German pressure for a Treaty by declaring a revolutionary war with the object of precipitating European revolution. After all, they had only set up a Socialist State in pre-Capitalist Russian society as a holding operation until the general revolution happened and Russia could find a place within the medium of European Socialism.
However, at that point Lenin gave absolute priority to securing the State which he was in process of constructing. He did not think it could hold out against a German assault. The State in Russia must be secured by a Treaty with Germany, even though that would increase the German chances of victory in the War. And he threatened that, if the Central Committee did not agree to signing the Treaty, he would resign his Office and appeal to the Party membership against the Committee.
Trotsky, who had been for revolutionary war, resolved the crisis in Lenin’s favour by abstaining on the vote.
The Socialist Revolutionaries resigned from the Coalition and tried to assassinate Lenin for having betrayed the cause.
That was the beginning of Socialism in a single country. A Communist Party had taken power in a pre-capitalist society, and it committed itself to constructing a post-capitalist socialist economy by by-passing the capitalist phase of development. Lenin explained that it could do this by acquiring the culture that Capitalism had produced and applying it to bring about the results of capitalist development, as far as they were necessary to Socialism, without capitalists.
That is what Lenin set in motion. And what it required was not a World State but a very Russian State—a State that would not be functional in the advanced capitalist societies from which Socialism was to emerge.
I can see no grounds for the statement that: “Lenin created the Soviet Union as the liberated portion of a planned World State”.
If he ever wrote about the possibility of a World State, then I missed it. And I don’t know that anybody else, who was a competent politician, has advocated, or written about the possibility of, a World State.
Is it the case that “Lenin authorised a Mixed Economy, but unfortunately the system failed to work well. Stalin produced a viable alternative” ?
I assume the Mixed Economy was the freedom of the market, introduced when what was called War Communism failed to produce any economy at all.
The peasants, with ownership of the land established by the Revolution, were allowed to sell their produce on the market, so that they could buy industrial products produced by their demand, and an economy should be brought into existence.
The New Economic Policy worked very well by comparison with what preceded it, and it would possibly have blossomed into a vigorous capitalist economy if it had been let be. What it failed to do was produce Socialism.
Rosa Luxemburg had pointed out right at the start that the peasant proprietorship advocated by Lenin would become an obstacle to the Socialism he stood for. He knew that as well as she did. But he needed the support of the peasants in order to take power. And, when the future of War Communism led him to exhort the peasants to engage in market activity in order to create an economy, he described it as laying the seed-bed of Capitalism.
But a bit of actual Capitalism was needed so that there would be an actual economy to start with. The mere culture of Capitalism was not enough.
What Stalin did, when the New Economic Policy became a real obstacle to non-Capitalist industrial production organised by the State, was abolish the NEP—in conflict with a substantial part of the peasantry. That was in accordance with the future Lenin had envisaged for the NEP when introducing it.
“Soviet Elites Reverting To A Ruling Class” is another assertion in the same piece.
The Soviet system was certainly governed by a political body that could be called anelite. If one chooses to describe it as elitist, then one must admit that elitism was inherent in Leninism from the start. It was the feature of Leninism that Rosa Luxemburg objected to strenuously.
She understood Socialism as an organic working-class development. Lenin saw Socialism as an alien intrusion into the working-class movement. Socialism would not be brought about by Trade Union action for pay and conditions. It would be brought about by a Party drawn from the organised working class to a considerable degree, but distanced from the spontaneity of the class by the principles of Scientific Socialism. It would to some extent be a manipulator of the ‘spontaneous’ development of the class, getting it to go beyond itself.
Soviet development in the 1930s was made possible by a stratum of managers trained and directed by the Party. A book has been published describing it as a managerial class. There was certainly managerial control—not workers’ control. When the matter arose in Lenin’s time, he insisted that Soviet managers must have dictatorial control. Amateur syndicalism would not do.
The Labour Affairs piece says:
“A real revolution is where the rich and powerful get swept away. This happened by stages in the French Revolution… If you think that a society can sweep away the existing rich and powerful without getting nasty and authoritarian, you are not dealing with reality”!
I had the notion that the rich in France were not very powerful. They had been disabled by the Crown by being required to play games at Court, and had become detached from society—unlike their British counterparts, who had acquired independent authority for themselves and continued to manage their estates.
I also thought that the Revolution opened the way for the accumulation of riches, and for the power that goes with it.
I would have thought that only a propertied class could be a ruling class.
The managers of the Soviet system did not own the properties that they managed. And I don’t know that there was ever a movement amongst them to become a ruling class by privatising the properties they managed.
When the intricate system of Soviet economy was demolished by the leaders of the State, it was not, as far as I could tell, done by them for their private advantage. It seemed to have become so intricate that they could not see how it could be made to keep pace with the free-enterprise Capitalism of America. [This was before the computer age, ed.]
When President Andropov announced that Scientific Socialism was to be supplemented by Sociology, I lost interest in the Soviet system, and waited for it to collapse.
When that happened, the floundering economy of privatisation showed how thoroughly Capitalism had been scotched in society.
Shares in an abandoned economy were distributed and were bought up by energetic individuals—largely members of the Party, who became “Oligarchs”. The name suggests that they became rulers. It was a misnomer.
I remember discussions of literature on BBC radio, probably in the late 1990s, in which a rebirth of literature was expected from the new dispensation. The oligarchs were seen as being of a kind with the English aristocrats of the 18th century who gave English society its cultural tone after the years of iconoclastic Puritanism.
But nothing came of it. They were not a ruling class.
They were the private owners of great wealth that had come to them by an act of fortune and that was out of keeping with everything else in the society. They became owners of pieces of the productive forces of the socialist system of the state, which the leaders of the state could not see their way to maintaining as a functional socialist system and had made capitalist by breaking it up and giving shares of it to everyone.
But, giving a share in it to everyone did not establish a capitalist system, nor did the buying up of shares into large accumulations. The privatised segments of socialist economy did not have a capitalist system to function in: The Oligarch owners could only realise the value of their properties in the Capitalism that existed outside Russia.
The fall of Communism produced a Russian phenomenon in the West that was very similar to that which followed the fall of Tsarism—Oligarchs with immense wealth congregated in London and other centres of Capitalism and indulged in a kind of ersatzaristocratic living in imitation of the authentic aristocracy of the fallen Tsarist system which had done much the same thing.
The Oligarchs did not become a ruling class when the ruling Party structure failed. They were not even a class. That could be because the social system in which they were formed was not run by a ruling class.
They had no experience of class. There was only one class in Russia after the peasants were collectivised: the working class. And one class means no class. And that one class had not in any real sense seized power, established itself in dominance, and become the whole society.
The seizing of power, etc., was done by Lenin’s party as a scientific project in which the working class, which was a minuscule part of society, was the effective instrument, but the purpose of action was decided by Scientific Socialism.
The ideas that are generated by working class life would of themselves not have brought about the developments that happened in Russia. And, when the socialist system crumbled, the working class—in the form in which it had existed as part of the socialist system—did not become an active working class of the old-fashioned kind, any more than the managers of the socialist system became capitalist entrepreneurs when that system fell apart.
And, with regard to revolution, is it really the case that “A real revolution is where most of the rich and powerful get swept away” ? Or is it where one political system replaces another?
The rich and powerful may, or may not, be swept away when one political system replaces another in dominance within a political system.
“From Socialist Globalism to Russian Imperialism”: Why did it become ‘Imperialist’ in 1956? The Soviet Union came into possession of the countries of eastern Europe after they attacked it in June 1941 with the objective of destroying it and, in order to defend itself from them, it had to defeat them—conquer them.
Having had to conquer them, it did not withdraw from them and leave them free to regroup for another assault. Until 1956 they maintained a semblance of democratic consent in the dominance they exerted. That form of control broke down in Hungary in 1956 when the nationalist protest movement called on the West—NATO—to come and join it.
None of the undisputed Empires in the rest of the world had been attacked by their subject peoples before subjecting to their control, and none of them was governed in the way that Russia governed the peoples that it conquered in the course of defending itself against them. Individual Communist movements with some domestic roots governed under Soviet oversight.
Brendan Clifford
