From: "George Pennefather" <poseidon-AT-tinet.ie>
Subject: AUT: The Soviets
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 21:46:46 -0000


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The 1917 Russian Revolution entailed the insurrection of the workers and peasants against Czarist Russia. The workers organised themselves through their own self-activity in the form of soviets, factory committees, workers' militias etc. The peasants on the whole organised themselves through the mir which the Bolsheviks had discounted and misleadingly believed had all but disappeared as a force.

However the Bolsheviks carried out what was in effect a coup against the Provisional Government and over the heads of the Soviets. The executive committee of the Congress of Soviets would have been the correct and revolutionary way by which state power was seized from the Provisional government. The executive committee could have passed stating that power was now in the hands of the Soviets and that the Provisional government no longer exists. This would have been a more directly democratic and revolutionary form for the Bolsheviks to have promoted.     This would have invested the seizure of state power with a popular legitimacy which the Bolshevik coup never had.

The Bolsheviks, even though there were elements within it that sought a contrary course, took the role of effectively bypassing the Soviets because Lenin and his friends did not trust the working class --did not trust Soviet power. Had he proceeded through the Soviet organisational form he would have had to subject the transfer of power to proletarian direct democracy which would have meant that non-Bolshevik elements would have have been more directly involved in the exercise of proletarian state power. Indeed even after the coup Lenin set up the Council of People's Commissars as the government when the  politically correct course, as a revolutionary communist, would have been the transfer of governmental power to the Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets.


George

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