'The Bolsheviks Come to Power'

It is indeed important to research this period of history and Rabinowitch and others perform a valuable service in showing how far the soviets, the Bolshevik party and the wider revolution was very much a from below mass movement.

Of course sadly most left groups today operate a very different form of organisation based on heirarchy, the banning of factions, attenuated democracy and a perspective based on building te group not the wider working class struggle.

If socialists are ever again to have mass influence we need a rigourous criticism of this, to uncover the reasons for this disastrous turn and thoroughly break from that highly damaging and counterproductive method of organisation.

Just finished reading this. A very interesting and indeed essential read.

However, I think the review is wrong to suggest that Rabinowitch's book is not pacy and lets the Bolsheviks off the hook too much.

Strangely enough I posted another commment on this that seems to have been mysteriously deleted! "Curiouser and curiouser!" as Alice said or is it just a weird technical glitch?

Both of the works by Rabinowitch are very interesting.
The statement in this part of your review of The Bolsheviks Come to Power is very apposite I think:
"The idea that the Bolshevik party was some kind of monolithic automaton, responsive only to the diktats of the central committee, or even just Lenin, has become entrenched by an alliance of bourgeois and Stalinist historians. It is reflected today in organisations like the SWP, which allow no factions and restrict debate to narrowly proscribed channels. This view of the revolutionary party is completely at variance with the entire history of Bolshevism. "

I'd largely agree with you and Rabinowitch that the Bolshevik party in 1917 was a mass democratic party with deciisons being openly debated and that the revolution was a mass from below act of the working class. Of course big parties have different people in them and there were incipient bureaucrats even in the party then but those who wanted to push for workers and soviet power won out- quite rightly. Obviously at some point the Bolshevik party was gutted of that democracy and later became a vehicle for the dictatorship of a bureaucratic caste over the working class. Trotsky argues that the decisive moment came after Lenin's death with the ascendancy of Stalin- certainly we can say that the Stalinist purges of the 30s showed the need for a political revolution against that caste power and for genuine working class democracy of the soviets.

However, did events such as the suppression of factions in 1921, the crushing of Kronstadt and some of the other decisions of Lenin and Trotsky play into the hands of the bureacrats and the destruction of party and soviet democracy. I;d argue yes and that this is a vital debate that socialists and communists and all those who beleive quite rightly in the need for class struggle, workers power and communism from below need to debate.

I suspect many even if not all in the AWL would agree and when I have written more based on notes from Rabinowitch and other accounts of this vital period of workers' history I will post it on here- presuming I am still alowed to. Perhaops as the AWL rightly criticise the SWP for proscribing debate one would assume so- but time will tell whether this discussion and comment is allowed to stand or whether it will like my last three comments be erased.

Jason

OK fine I said what I wanted to say which is that one of the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian revolution is that workers' democracy is essential.
Back to democracy- it will be essential in the coming fights over the cuts, attacks on welfare, job losses, privatisations (like academies and may be free schools), wage freezes and regressive tax rises to draw activists into vibrant campaigns.
We in left groups should not assume we have all the answers but encourage a wide range of debate and discussion over tactics and strategy- another lesson of October. Only when the left changes some of these inherently conservative tendencies will we begin and deserve to have wider influence I think.

Another way in which I agree with the article is emphasising that debates, discussions and free exchange of ideas are absolutely essential to building a mass movement. Lenin could argue for the need for revolution against the party line and win that argument precisely because of the high levels of internal democracy then present in the party.

As socialists we should be for the feee exchange of ideas, encouragement of discussion and debate, cross linking to campaigns. Not just action, action, action- the mantra we hear from the SWP for example.

Of course some left groups encourage debate- others fear it by either banning it or being extremely rude and hostile to those seeking to have it within the group or without. This is because some groups have slipped into beleiving that building the group is THE way forward. We need to escape that impasse.

This is in stark contrast and contradiction to one of the main arguments of the book this review endoreses
'"the phenomenal success of the Bolsheviks can be attributed in no small measure to the nature of the party in 1917," and above all to "the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant, and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character--in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist model"'
However, having savoured and presented that irony for reflection, I'll leave it there for now!

At least the AWL allow comments- in distinct contrast to most left websites. However, the degeneration of democratic norms runs deep on the left sadly something from which we need to emenacipate ourselves if we are going to contribute to the self-emancipation of the working class from the chains with which bourgeois culture entangles us and locks us down. "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery!" Bob Marley
"the mind forged manacles" Bill Blake
"This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries" Vladimir Lenin
"All that is solid melts into air!" Karl Marx

Jason, since you're big on fresh thinking, don't you think it might be time to reconsider your view that the Stalinist bureaucracy was just a "caste"? No soviets, no trade unions, no revolutionary party or any parties at all in fact, a totalitarian state which allowed no working-class or popular self-organisation, almost all the leaders of the revolution murdered... the idea that by the mid-1930s the USSR was any kind of workers' state is just fantastic.

Sacha Ismail

It clearly is time for the organisation Jason is a member of to reconsider the view that the Stalinist bureaucracy was just a "caste" as Sacha says, something that is clearly overdue given it is descended from a group expelled from the International Socialists in 1974 which believed the Stalinists to be a state capitalist class. If I remember rightly, it was only "orthodox Trotskyist" pressure, in particular from the Sparts, that led them to "reconsider" their original position, around the time of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

I think we should always consider and reconsider things so yes, perhaps. Stalin and the clique around him were a barbaric dictatorship that destroyed every last vestige of workers' democracy and completed negated everything to do with socialism- they were an elite who oppressed the working class and denied them any freedom and used mass murder as a form of rule so I don't think 'caste' is an unfair word for them at all, a definition of which from one dictionary is "2 a : a division of society based on differences of wealth, inherited rank or privilege, profession, occupation"- however I think inherited may be a problem.

Were they a ruling class? Well they clearly weren't a capitalist class, so as a new historical formation it doesn't unreasonable to use a new term- 'caste' may have its problems, 'elite' may be better. They certainly were the negation of workers' power and socialism- it was a barbaric bureacratic elite which made the restoration of capitalism, whether a bureacratic state capitalism as in China in the 90s, 00s or gangster semi-state capitalism of Russia and east Europe in the 90s 00s all the more likely. almost inevtiable (excepting workers'political revolution), the longer it went on.

However, certainly worth a debate.

Hi Jason,

Our problem with the word "caste" isn't that it's somehow unfair to the bureaucracy; on the contrary, it's that it downplays the fundamental power over production and society the bureaucracy exercised in Russian society and in other Stalinist societies. You can sometimes talk about powerful or even dominant castes that are distinct from the ruling class as such (eg the white caste intertwined with the South African capitalist ruling class under apartheid, or castes in pre-capitalist and indeed capitalist India), but our whole argument is that the bureaucratic 'caste' WAS the ruling class in the USSR and the other Stalinist states.

By the 30s, it really wasn't true that the bureaucracy was merely a caste growing within/distorting the class rule of the workers. It was never just a "clique", not even when it was part of a workers' state (in the 20s), but by the 30s it was a very substantial social layer (hundreds of thousands, even millions of people) that directed production, the economy and the state and expropriated the surplus produced by the working class - "the sole master of the surplus product", as Trotsky put it.

You say they clearly weren't a form of capitalist class, but there are at least plausible Marxist arguments that they were. But even if they weren't, how does it follow that the Stalinist states were (degenerated/degenerate/deformed) working-class states? It was long established in Marxism, long before Stalinism, that non-capitalist does not = socialist or even working-class (eg the famous passages from Connolly and Labriola).

It's perfectly plain and logical, I think, in what sense the Bolshevik-dominated USSR in the early or even mid-20s was a degenerated workers' state. (You can debate quite legitimately to what extent Bolshevik policies contributed to the speed and extent of degeneration.) But things had changed qualitatively by the mid-30s at the very latest. In what meaningful sense can you have a workers' state when the working class - and the working population more generally - is subjected to totalitarian terror and hyper-exploitation - denied even the most elementary organisations and rights of self-defence (trade unions, basic civil and political liberties), let alone institutions through which it can control the economy and state as a ruling class (soviets, factory committees, revolutionary party/parties)?

Given all this, why would a workers' revolution against the bureaucracy be merely a political revolution, and not in fact a political AND social revolution? In fact, once the supposed ruling class needs to make a revolution to gain power, doesn't that in fact prove - according to both elementary Marxist theory and elementary logic - that it's not the ruling class at all? Trotsky's original criterion for determining whether the USSR was still a workers' state was "Can the working class subordinate the bureaucracy to itself by a process of reforms, without a new revolution?" When it became clear that a new revolution was necessary, he changed his criterion and the meaning of all sorts of Marxist concepts. He should instead have acknowledged that the working class had lost power to a new ruling class - as he came closer and closer to doing towards the end of his life.

Instead of developing this trend of thinking, many Trotskyists stuck with Trotsky's framework - leading in new circumstances, after World War 2, to the ultimate nonsense idea that workers' states of any sort can be created without a working-class revolution, as in every case of a Stalinist state except the USSR.

Sacha

"You say they clearly weren't a form of capitalist class, but there are at least plausible Marxist arguments that they were."

Interesting - tell me more.

On 'workers' states' I can only largely agree.

In 1917 to the 20s there was a workers' state in Russia based on workers' councils but these became incorporated into a bureaucratic state, into a rule of a few, an elite group of the privileged. The workers' revolution degenerated and became replaced instead by a form of rule over the working class.

Its point of degeneration was in my opinion quite early and 1921- with the ban on factions and the suppression of any meaningful party democracy and the crushing of Kronstadt- was a decisive turning point of if not no return then a point from which it would be very hard to come back. That of course was under Lenin and Trotsky and I'd argue goes back further still- but that is a longer debate to which no doubt we'll return and around which we are having a whole series of discussions in PR. However, yes by the late 20s and certainly mid 30s it was very different society again where no one even dared raise a word of criticism without risking imprisonment or death.

"It's perfectly plain and logical, I think, in what sense the Bolshevik-dominated USSR in the early or even mid-20s was a degenerated workers' state. (You can debate quite legitimately to what extent Bolshevik policies contributed to the speed and extent of degeneration.) But things had changed qualitatively by the mid-30s at the very latest. In what meaningful sense can you have a workers' state when the working class - and the working population more generally - is subjected to totalitarian terror and hyper-exploitation - denied even the most elementary organisations and rights of self-defence (trade unions, basic civil and political liberties), let alone institutions through which it can control the economy and state as a ruling class (soviets, factory committees, revolutionary party/parties)? "

Good point powerfully made.

By the mid 30s this was based on elite privilege, mass murder and a whole social system based on protecting the privileges of that elite. I agree that hundreds of thousands were in the ranks of the bureaucracy but any elite (including of course the one in Britain and all other capitalist societies) co-opts other social layers into its rule and stratifies society.

I can understand why Trotsky called Russia a 'degenerate workers' state' but think that if this term implies in any sense that it was still a workers' state (however deformed, degenerate or aborted) in the sense that the workers have some kind of power then it is an unhelpful and damaging term. There were social gains from the revolution of course and some of these material gains remained in the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorships until the restoration of capitalism.
However, even this shouldn't be taken to imply that in any sense workers were better off- even if you have housing, cheap transport, food (and this last point was far from always true) if you live in a society based on fear, on mass murder, on the rule of the gun, where you can be reported by your neighbour, work colleague, manger or party spy and taken off in the middle of the night then this is such a barbaric society to say it is in any form a workers' society or socialists does violence to the very meaning of the words.

Anyway I really must go as we've got an inspection at work and I need to get on.

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. A few things:

1. Your last point is the fundamental one: the presence of certain social gains (eg a free health service) does not make a society socialist or working-class ruled. No revolutionary socialist would apply such a criterion to capitalist societies like Britain (in fact to do so would be a pretty clear case of reformism), so why would we apply it to a society like the USSR or Cuba where there is in addition no space for working-class organisation or democracy?

2. I think the notion that until 1991 certain "gains of the revolution" remained embodied in the USSR is dubious in the extreme. Clearly the democratic gains of the revolution (both bourgeois democratic, like national self-determination and equality for women, and the democratic rights/rule of the working class) were destroyed by Stalinism. But it's also true that Stalinism meant a massive assault on the *living standards* of the working class and the working population. Even if we forget the fate of the peasants: until 1928 or so, workers' living standards rose about in line with production (ie slowly). After 1928, production increased massively but living standards fell sharply.
Certainly the idea that there were social gains which made this society qualitatively superior to Western-style capitalism is not true.
I think you need to question the extent to which the fall of the USSR was really a defeat for the working class *as such* at all. Of course, in the context of a capitalist offensive it has meant disaster for the Russian workers and the bourgeois ideological offensive against "socialism" was strengthened, but that's distinct from saying Stalinism was qualitatively better for our class than capitalism.

3. It's good that you're reassessing this. I hope you'll take it up in PR. But that should also involve a reassessment of the Workers Power tradition on these questions - why, for instance, WP had a state capitalist position but abandoned it in favour of "workers' statism" at the time of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (whereas for us, our opposition to the USSR's war was an important staging post in junking the workers' state theory).

4. You're right that by themselves struggles against bureaucratisation were, if the USSR remained isolated, probably doomed after 1921. But I think you miss two points:
a) That while the mistakes of Bolshevik policy may have played a role (and this is certainly a legitimate subject for debate)*, it was in the context of a workers' state in an underdeveloped, peasant-majority society which had been devastated by war and where the economy had collapsed. No Marxist should have been surprised that in these circumstances the workers' state would become bureaucratised and eventually be destroyed. What was surprising was the form this collapse took (ie not the bureaucracy opening the way to bourgeois restoration, but becoming the ruling class itself).
b) That the fundamental variable was the failure of revolutions in other countries - the pan-European crisis of 1918-19, Italy 1920, Germany 1923, Britain 1926, China 1925-7. I think it's clear that a working-class victory in any of these cases would have reawakened workers' confidence and self-activity and dealt a huge blow to the bureaucracy in Russia - and conversely their defeat massively entrenched and strengthened the bureaucracy. (Of course, the bureaucracy increasingly became a negative factor in preventing successful revolution in other countries.)

* See Martin Thomas' review of Sam Farber's book "Before Stalinism: the rise and fall of Soviet democracy" here.
See also Max Shachtman's "The Struggle for the New Course", written while he was still a revolutionary, here.

Sacha

Without commenting now whether it is right or wrong, here is a serious Marxist analysis of the USSR and other Stalinist states as "state capitalist", by a Workers' Liberty supporter.

Sacha

The Stalinist bureaucracy was a vicious ruling elite which thoroughly besmirched the name of socialism for generations and set back the cause of revolution immensely and to an extent that has not yet been repaired or recovered from.

When it fell communists everywhere should have rejoiced (some did) whilst also lamenting that it fell not at the hands of a victorious working class revolution but to capitalist restoration.

Was the bureaucracy a class? I have no great problem with the idea but if it is/ was a class then it was an extremely unstable one.

Was it a bourgeois and its system a form of state capitalism? The bureaucracy was certainly analogous to the bourgeois in terms of commanding, controlling the means of production, extracting surplus for itself based on exploitation of labour. However, it did not have many features of capitalism such as the law of value and ownership at the heart of the system (not discounting the importance of the informal economy which was huge but nonetheless not the dominant part of the economy). The very instability of the Stalinist elite suggests that in class terms they could be said to be more analogous to the petit-bourgeois.

That's why the bureaucratic caste (or class or even if you prefer state capitalist bourgeois) had every interest in and facilitated (in many cases) the restoration of capitalism (or if you subscribe to state cap the restoration of market norms at the heart of the system and incoporation into the world market).

Degenerated workers' state has the virtue of emphasising that in Russia the bureaucratic dictatorship, that monstrous trampling of workers' power and socialism, took place by defeating the power of the organised workers. But from the late 20s onwards it loses its power by implying that those states somehow had vestiges of workers' power instead of the truth that the workers had been defeated and smashed. That's not to say it was impossible for the organised working class to regroup and win- not at all although it was certainly an immense task.

If we are to renew socialism and win the working class to radical direct action necessary to establish working class power and socialism we need to have a thorough going critique not only of Stalinism but how it arose including analysing the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and learning the lessons- the central necessity of workers' democracy, control from below, mass organisations making decisions, subordination of the party to the mass organisations (not the other way round) so that the party is a resource for the wider struggle (not the wider struggle primarily figured as hunting ground for party recruitment.

It can be done but the fact that the left have got it so badly wrong time and again is part of the reason why I think that alongside action to fight the cuts, to fight racism, in all the struggles of the working class, free discussion and debate of ideas and tactics should not only be encouraged but seen as a necessity.

Hi Dan,

1. Yes, generally speaking a class is defined by its role in production. There may be exceptions to this (Engels somewhere describes merchants as a class), but no such exception is needed for the Stalinist bureaucracy. Trotsky's claim that the bureaucracy had "no independent position in the process of production and distribution" was not really true in 1933, when he wrote the article you cite; it was certainly not true, according to his own descriptions, by 1939-40; and manifestly not true for the other Stalinist states where the bureaucracy in fact *created* the planned economy rather than usurping it from the working class and transforming it.

Who do you think organised production and distribution in these large, complex societies over a period of decades? It wasn't the working class, as you admit? So who was it? If it was the bureaucracy, then doesn't that suggest that it had this basic, essential feature of a class?

2. "Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule....": implies that the bureaucracy expresses in a distorted form working-class rule. Yet a year later than this, the Trotskyists began calling for a revolution to destroy the bureaucracy and restore the working class to power. So even if this was true in 1933, which I don't think it was, it clearly wasn't later on.

3. "The privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations, peculiar to it as a ‘class,' but from those property relations which have been created by the October Revolution..."
In the first instance, the October revolution did not create "property forms". It created or rather consolidated the political power of the working class, in the form of the Soviet state, which only after this expropriated capitalist property (there was a period of some months where most big factories, while under workers' control, remained in private ownership). To talk about "property forms" here is mainly confusing. Better to talk about *property relations*: namely the fact that capital was expropriated by a state which embodied workers' power and that this allowed elements of workers' control over and management of that capital (highly restricted due to circumstances).

You can say that both the revolutionary USSR and the Stalinist USSR shared "property forms" because in both cases property was collectivised and the economy planned (though, far from the bureaucracy initially threatening "planned economy", the destruction of the last vestiges of workers' power coincided exactly with a massive expansion of state ownership and planning - what we would call the Stalinist counter-revolution). But this is confusing because the *property relations* in the two societies were totally different.

4. "Insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people, we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale..."
And yet by the end of his life Trotsky described the bureaucracy as the "sole master of the surplus product". So the workers produce surplus and the bureaucracy controls it, consumes it, disposes of it... in what sense is this not exploitation?

5. Btw, you introduce another element of confusion into the debate when you say, as you did when we spoke about it in person, that in the "degenerate/d workers' states" the workers were no longer/are not the ruling class and in fact there was/is no ruling class at all. This is in conflict with the ABCS of Marxism. How can you have a large complex society in which production is carried out over decades without a ruling class to organise it, or a state that does not express the rule of a class or classes? Your theory is more like that of Hillel Ticktin, who thinks there is *no* system of production in the Stalinist states, except bizarrely you put the label "workers' state" on it.

6. Why is inheritance essential for class to exist? There were pre-capitalist societies in which property was state owned and individual members of the ruling class had use of it but could not pass it on (eg Mameluke Egypt). We often argue against anti-socialists who say that there is no ruling class because individuals can move between classes. In any case, to a large extent the bureaucracy did pass on access to wealth and privilege to its offspring. I'm really not sure why Trotsky denies this.

7. In the late 20s and early 30s, Trotsky restates this criterion again and again: the USSR is a workers' state because it can return to healthy workers' power by means of a process of reform. This is, obviously to me, the right way to assess things. Then, when he sees that this is no longer tenable and a new revolution is necessary, he changes his criterion: now the USSR remains a workers' state (and on some level the workers' the ruling class - he differs from you in this) because property is nationalised and the economy planned. But the original criterion was right. When the alleged ruling class is excluded from all power (political, economic, social) and can only restore its rule by means of a revolution, that self-evidently it is not the ruling class. You, unlike Trotsky, accept that. But a "workers' state" where the workers are not the ruling class is just as confusing and self-contradictory as a state in which there is no ruling class.

8. Lastly:

"The state capitalists also cannot explain the devastation that befell the working class in the former Soviet Union after its collapse. The world has witnessed a decline in living standards and in lifespan unprecedented in modern history, a social retrogression even greater than during the years of the Great Depression. This has, in little more than a decade, created a social polarization and a social misery that is so enormous that it has even engendered nostalgia for Stalin."

Weimar Germany and the Third Reich were both capitalist - in that sense a sideways shift. Yet the Third Reich meant the destruction of the world's most powerful labour movement and unprecedented mistery misery for the working class. So I don't see why you find this so difficult to understand. From the social system of the USSR to a gangster version of bourgeois capitalism was basically a sideways shift (that's true whether you see the USSR as state-capitalist or a distinct, non-capitalist class society roughly parallel to capitalism). Within that there were both victories for the working class - the destruction of the autocracy and the winning of some democratic rights and the right to organise - and defeats - the huge offensive against living standards and social rights.

Sacha Ismail

"[The bureaucracy is] an excrescence upon the proletariat. A tumor can grow to tremendous size and even strangle the living organism, but a tumor can never become an independent organism."

If you think that's true, why do you say that in the Stalinist states the proletariat is not the ruling class, and in fact that there is no ruling class? For Trotsky, a dominant caste must in all cases be connected to a ruling class. All societies since the advent of class divisions and before the advent of communism are ruled by a class (or classes). Yet he contradicts himself, because by his own description the supposed ruling class of the USSR no longer rules. Your contradiction is different: for you the workers are no longer the ruling class; and there is *no* ruling class. How is this possible for a Marxist to believe? (And to add to the confusion you refer to this as a form of "workers' state", justifying this lack of logic with the all-sanctifying word "degenerated".)

In addition, Trotsky was wrong. The parasite had stifled the living organism of the workers' state and become a creature in its own right.

Sacha

For more articles debating the class character of the Stalinist states see here.