From: "chris wright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Russia without the Bolsheviks? (with some interesting quotes from Trotsky)
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 14:45:19 -0600


Scott,

This is a bit of a red herring, as no one has really taken up why the
revolution occurred, nor had you raised it til now.  However, and with the
'degeneration' aka counterrevolution, you are using a specious argument
reminiscent of the news media coverage of protests:  "Well, Jackie, they
don't all seem to be out here for the same reason so they must not know what
they want or think."  We all disagree on various aspects of the process, the
exact weight given to the Bolsheviks, etc.  However, I think that except for
you no one is saying that the Bolsheviks were anything but the enactors of
the counterrevolution.  The issue is more one of the specific weight to be
given to the Bolsheviks relative to the material conditions (decimation from
the war, isolation internationally, etc.) and the limitations of the class
itself in Russia.

> The inherent wickedness argument is not worth spending
> a great deal of time on - it is completely idealist
> and irrefutable, and will therefore always find
> advocates. Trotsky wrote to them in 1937:

Well, the 'inherent wickedness' argument is nothing more than your attempt
to ascribe to a critique of Bolshevism an implication that Bolshevism was
merely 'evil.'  You are right, that straw man argument deserves no time, but
it is your argument.  Rather, the problem for me remains the way in which
the Bolsheviks became, from within the workers' movement and not from
outside it, the means for the development of capital and the real
subsumption of labor to capital.  This is why I do not call Bolshevism 'red
fascism.'

The recent reply to Aufheben by Theorie Communiste in the new issue has a
very useful and intelligent set of thoughts and questions on this issue and
they are worth looking at.  As I would encourage everyone to support
Aufheben, I am not going to reproduce the argument here.  Since they are on
the list, maybe they would copy and paste the appropriate section if enough
people asked them.  It is worthwhile reading.

> one. We never sinned on historical subjectivism. We
> saw the decisive factor - on the existing basis of
> productive forces - in the class struggle, not only on
> a national scale but on an international scale.

In this separation of 'productive forces' as some objective moment and class
struggle as the subjective moment, you still obviously either do not
understand the real critique made by Alquati, Panzieri, Tronti, et al or you
disagree with it.  Why not take up a more interesting argument on this list
and lay out your disagreement with it in light of the revolution in Russi?

> In essence these gentlemen say: the revolutionary
> party that contains in itself no guarantee against its
> own degeneration is bad.

Au contraire.  If you read the SI and any number of people on this list, the
argument is that any organization which places its continued existence over
and above the workers' forms of self-organization will necessarily install
itself as the new managers of capital and will develop the capital-labor
relation, not the free association of producers.  that the Bolsheviks at
every turn placed their organization above all forms of working class
self-organization is historically beyond a doubt.  Whether or not the rest
of us agree with what kind of organization is therefore necessary is another
matter entirely.

> The argument from backwardness, as advanced on this
> list, does not explain how a revolution could have
> happened in such an inconvenient place in the first
> place. The October revolution is regarded a freak of
> history, a malformed miracle baby which could only
> have survived with the tender loving care of
> healthy-born revolutions in the West. If only the
> Bolsheviks had not existed, and Kerensky could have
> completeed bis good old fashioned bourgeois democratic
> revolution, creating space for anarchists to build
> their 'autonomous organsations'...

Well, to the extent that some people agree with the idea that ONLY the
'bourgeois democratic revolution' was possible, they remain on Lenin's
ground prior to 1917 or with Menshevism.  For my part, I suspect that with
the assistance of revolutions in other places that something else might have
been possible.  However, Bolshevism also played a role in causing the
failure of those other revolutions, esp. in Germany in 1921 and 1923 and in
Hungary (thank you Bella Kun.)

More importantly, if the revolution in one place does not spread, it will
never long survive.  But this also fails to take into account that the
'backwardness' of Russia was not isolated.  In some sense, all of the
revolutions in that period only succeeded in further developing the
capital-labor relation, and that is the problem we have to answer.  How is
it that the working class revolutions from 1917-1936 became the vehicle for
capital's further expansion and the real subsumption of labor to capital in
Europe as the nationalist revolutions from 1947-1980 would do so in the
Majority World?  What were not simply the problems of Bolshevism and the
Second International and anarchism, but how did they reflect the limitations
of the class composition of the time?  And could they have been overcome at
the time?  A history of the working class from this perspective has yet to
be written, but that makes it no less important or necessary.

> In a world where revolutionary situations seem located
> in the semi-colonies rather then the imperialist
> heartland, such an view of 1917 can only lead to a
> programme for the semi-colonies of bourgeois democracy
> and the winning of bourgeois democratic rights within
> capitalism. Socialist revolution beginning within
> national borders is just too much too ask for in a
> semi-colony - it's bound to degenerate or get crushed
> by imperialism. Workers of South Africa (ten years
> ago), Palestine, and perhaps even Argentina have to
> retreat from revolutionary situations and win as many
> democratic rights as they can and 'strengthen their
> autonomous struggles' until revolution kicks in in the
> wealthy countries.

yes, yes.  Repetitio ad nauseum.  Scott, you should re-read the posts on
South Africa and Palestine more carefully.  Until then, you will continue to
only give us straw arguments.

> the West? It is the theory of permanent revolution,
> with its emphasis on the interpenetration of
> capitalist economies in the era of imperialism - of
> 'combined and uneven development' - which gives us the
> conceptual tools to make these links, and which
> explains why socialist revolution was possible in
> October 1917, and why socialist revolution is possible
> today in backward countries like Palestine and
> Argentina.

Heh.  This is an old argument.  For my part, I am not denying that the
overthrow of capital was not possible in 1917, but I am in agreement with
Trotsky that it could never survive except as a moment of the world
revolution.  One major issue comes back, however, to the problem of what is
meant by revolution and the specifics of changing class compositions.
Imperialism was not a new class composition, but the expression of the
development of a new class composition, a process not merely 'pushed' by the
class struggle, but whose laws were nothing but the class struggle.  There
is no 'outside'/'inside' between capital and labor, between class struggle
and capitalist structures/laws.  Our arguments will continue to be somewhat
disappointing until you take up this problem in a satisfactory way (even if
you still disagree with the idea(s) of class composition.)

That would mean more than repetition of the same old stuff, by you and by
the other respondents as well.  Maybe that would mean fewer, but better,
messages.  To quote Lenin "Better fewer, but better."

Cheers,
Chris

ps Monty, you agree with Scott on the possible need for police and an army.
I think that it is necessary to be rather more specific on this, since what
I suspect what you mean and what Scott means are rather different matters,
as I suspect Scott has little problems with the reintroduction of a formal
military structure, of ranks and lapels, of the Cheka, and of a separate
body organized as the state.  I do not doubt the need for the armed defense
of the revolution either, but what that means and how we conceive of such a
task is wholly different from what Bolshevism meant by it, including as it
did forced requisitions, the rigidification of the state, Taylorism, one man
management, the quashing of the Soviets and factory councils (however only
slightly developed, but there and certainly NOT encouraged), etc.




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