From: "George Pennefather" <poseidon-AT-tinet.ie>
Subject: AUT: Bolsheivism
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 21:49:26 -0000


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Hi Folks,

I have been reading a book by Orlando Figgis on The Russian Revolution. Despite its petty bourgeois character it is a book that merits reading. It is, in many ways superior to E.H. Carr, Deutshcer and certainly Schrub.

It. together with other material, confirms for me the conclusion that the Leninst project was anything but communist. The dispensing with the Red Guard and its supesession by a conventional standing army modelled on the bourgeois armies of the capitalist state. The bureaucratic replacement of the facotry committees by nationalization of the facotries. The organisation of the factories according to the bourgeois model of orgnaisation -non-democratic manaagement; Taylorism etc. The gutting of the soviets by transforming them effectively into one party bureacucratic soviets. The creation of the Cheka and its random and widescale state terror. The crusihing of all opossition  from the right and the left of the Bolsheviks and the eventual suppression of all intenral Bolshevik opposition. The wholesale brutal dcimation of the peasantry under the guise of the elimination of the kulak. The suppression in 1918 of worker oppositon to Bolshevik rule through strikes etc was clear evidence th\at they did not have the support of the working class.

Over and above all this questions have to be raised concerning the way in which the Bolsheviks seized power in October. Even the timing is questionable in terms of proletarian politics. One cannot but wonder too how Lenin was so naive as to assume that a Europan and. and if I recall correctly a world revolution was on the way.

It is clear to me that at the very least it is necessary to re-examine the Bolshevik legacy espeically in relation to the Russian Revolution of 1917.


George

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