Should we regret the Bolshevik Revolution?

[Anonymous]

David Aaronovitch and Richard Seymour battle this question out in the April 2017 issue of Prospect magazine.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-duel-should-we-regret-the-bolshevik-revolution

[ALB]

Here's Gilmac's classic article "Russia Puts the Clock Back" from the April 1962 Socialist Standard:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1962/no-694-june-1962/russia-puts-clock-back .

Quote:

Now, in the effort to build up Socialist parties, one supreme task has been added to the rest; the need to unveil the falsity of Russian propaganda and take the name of Socialism out of the mud in which the Russian leaders and their henchmen have immersed it. And still today the supporters of the Russian dictatorship everywhere carry out the intriguing, tortuous and hypocritical policy of their mentors.The Bolsheviks have certainly put the clock back and, in the name of Socialism, have built up one of the most ruthless Capitalist states that have ever existed. Even the forms of democracy that exist in the Western world cannot be found there.

Quote:

Hard as the road to Socialism always was, the Russians have made it harder, and have destroyed, or driven to despair, many genuine fighters for the workers' freedom from Capitalism, even if some of these have been mistaken in their methods.

[ALB]

Aaronovitch is good (making, by coincidence in view of his other views, the same points as we would). Seymour is pathetic (he might as well still be in the SWP).

[Capitalist Pig]

should we regret the bolshevik revolution…are you kidding me? 10s of millions dead and the emergance of one of the most oppressive states in modern history.

[Anonymous]

Capitalist Pig wrote:

should we regret the bolshevik revolution…are you kidding me? 10s of millions dead and the emergance of one of the most oppressive states in modern history.

You mean 100 millions ( that include China, Vietnan, and Korea ) . You must have read some review about the so called Black Book of Communism which in some way Harvard University has rejected some of the statistic indicated in that book, as well, one of the writer which was an ex-Maoist have backed down on some of the ideas that he wrote on the book. He said now that it is the black book of State Capitalism. The writers of that book do not have a clue of what communism really isProbably, you did not see the public pictures of Stalin and Roosevelt embracing each other when they were allied during world war ii, those pictures were exhibited  public in the US to make peoples  understand that the Soviet Union was the allied of the US ruling class, and then he became the Enemy of the Month Club ( like Gore Vidal said ) Probably, you have not read that the Soviet Union lost 34 millions of peoples during WWII, and they were the one who defeated the German on the Barbarrosa invasion, and they were already to finish dancing Paso Dobles in Spain, and England would have been forced to negotiate with them, even more, Churchill told to the US commanders to launch the invasion toward East Europe, because they knew that the Soviet had a very strong army and were ready to occupy Europe.The allied arrived to Europe in order to drink French coffee, the Nazis were already defeated, at the expenses of the Russian workers, and both powers distributed between each others all the German advanced technology, and both continued the killing around the world, some of the problems that exist in the middle east were originally created by the British empire and by the Butcher Winston CurchillProbably, you do not know that the Bolsheviks  were the ones who stopped WWI because they did not want to fight any more which show that peoples can stop war if they have the desires to do it, and the enemy became friends an allied later and they were known as the white soldiers, they did not want Russia to have self internal capitalist development, and they did it, in a few years they were competing with others powers Before the Nazis took power the Western Power such as France, USA and England already had  killed more than 100 millions of peoples around the world, and they controlled most of the natural resources of the world, and had many colonies. They were the ones who splitted the Ottoman Empire in pieces and nations, and controlled the natural resources, they also killed millions in Africa, and Asia. They can give dead body to the Bolsheviks and they would have many leftOur analysis of the Soviet Union is based on correct analysis, we do not repeat like parrot what the rulers say, we do research,  we do know that the Bolshevik revolution was not a socialist revolution, and we know about the coup, we are more versed than many historian about the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik revolution, we do not phrases we have books and pamphlets. Our problem is that the Bolshevik revolution retarded the real socialist revolution, and socialism we have been in a better stand in our times

[Anonymous]

Due to the Bolshevik revolution the Socialist Party has spent more time explaining what is not socialism, than what socialism really is. 

[alanjjohnstone]

I always cite this when discussing the Russian Revolution"Diseased and infected at infancy" 

Quote:

"DURING the whole period I was active in the Trotskyist movement, I accepted the view that the revolution of October 1917 was a great leap forward on the road to socialism, and that the regime it established was a healthy workers’ state until it started degenerating from 1923-24 onwards with the ascendancy of Stalinism and the defeat of the Trotskyist opposition. Since then a closer examination of the actual history of the revolution has led me to question this view. As early as the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks had lost the support of large sections of the working class and of the peasantry, and were ruling dictatorially……The disillusion of the workers was expressed in a declaration by the striking workers at the Sormovo factory in June 1918: "The Soviet regime, having been established in our name, has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the workers socialism, but has brought them empty factories and destitution." A workers’ protest movement, the Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives, was formed in March 1918 with a membership of several hundred thousand at the height of its influence in June.The response of the Bolsheviks was to nationalise the factories, replace workers’ control by one-man management, and dissolve the oppositional Soviets. By the summer of 1918 with the departure of the Left SRs from the government and the suppression of their uprising, and the Red Terror unleashed by the Cheka, the Bolshevik one-party dictatorship was in place. Any popular control from below of the Soviets or the government had disappeared.In addition, there is ample evidence that the hard core of devoted self-sacrificing Bolshevik party cadres were already being swamped by careerists and corrupt elements in the party and Soviet institutions. In September 1919, a report landed on Lenin’s desk showing that the Smolny was full of corruption.In the light of these facts, one can no longer uphold the Trotskyist thesis that from 1917 to 1923-24 the Soviet Union was a "healthy" workers’ state, and that the degeneration into bureaucratic dictatorship took off only afterwards……All one can say is that the "workers’ state" that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism.My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once said to me: "It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred." What factors or actions by the participants might have resulted in the non-occurrence of October and a different outcome? Assuming that nothing is inevitable until it has happened, and that "men make their own history", there are three possibilities.Firstly, that Lenin’s April Theses that set the Bolshevik party on the road to the October insurrection had been rejected by the party. Let us recall that up till Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, the Bolshevik leadership was pursuing a policy of critical support for the Provisional government. They felt this was consistent with the view that since the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of bringing about a bourgeois revolution, this task would have to be carried out by the proletariat supported by the peasantry, but that the revolution could not go immediately beyond the stage of establishing a bourgeois republic. In February, the Petrograd proletariat had carried out this "bourgeois revolution" with the support of the peasant soldiers. Now that the bourgeois republic was in place, the next stage was not the immediate struggle for working-class power, but a relatively prolonged period of bourgeois democracy. Lenin now abandoned this view which he had himself defended under the slogan of "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry", and argued for no support for the Provisional Government, and for agitation for power to the Soviets. He swung the Bolshevik party to this policy. But it was not inevitable that he should have done. The Bolshevik party might have continued its policy of critical support for and pressure on the February regime.Secondly, even after his steering the party on its new course, Lenin had to fight again in October to commit the party to insurrection against the opposition of Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. It is not inconceivable that Zinoviev and Kamenev might have carried the day. Then there would have been no October.Thirdly, even after October there was, as I have pointed out, a very real possibility of a coalition Bolshevik-Menshevik-SR government, based either on the Soviets or a combination of the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets as organs of local power and administration. This possibility foundered against the mutual intransigence of the Bolshevik hardliners on one side and the Menshevik and SR right-wing on the other. But in both camps there were conciliatory wings, the Menshevik Internationalists and some Left SRs and the Bolshevik "moderates" – Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, etc……..A coalition government of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs, having a much broader based support than a purely Bolshevik one, would have been able to confront the White Armies more successfully, and thus shortened the Civil War, and reduced the destruction of the economy……..It can also be argued that the attitudes and actions of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, their leaderships and individuals, were themselves determined by the whole of their past histories and ideological roots, and they could not have acted otherwise than they did. That what happened was inevitable. But this is to look at events from a distance and with the hindsight of 1997. What happened happened. But in 1917-18, these parties, leaderships and individuals did have a choice of actions….

Apologies for the full quote. The original website link seems to have disappeared

[ALB]

I found the link here:http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/Ratner/Prematur.htmlhttp://revolutionary-history.co.uk/index.php/315-marxist-writers/harry-ratner/5496-1997-premature-and-diseased-from-infancyIt seems to have first appeared in New Interventions in 1997/8 by Harry Ratner, a dissident Trotskyist. He makes some good points but answers this question:

Quote:

So were Kautsky and the Mensheviks right to oppose the October Revolution from the start, as an attempt prematurely to go beyond the bourgeois stage of the Russian revolution? Were they right to declare a socialist working-class revolution in a backward Russia premature and doomed to failure because the conditions for socialism were not ripe – both as regards the economic base and the social and cultural level of the working class? On the face of it, subsequent history would seem to justify them.

which was essentially the position we took, by saying

Quote:

Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks and the supporters of the October Revolution could – and did – argue with some justification that the Mensheviks were looking at Russia in isolation, and ignoring the international context. The war of 1914-18 had demonstrated the terminal crisis of imperialism – the last stage of capitalism – on a world scale. Proletarian revolutions in several advanced capitalist countries were an immediate possibility; the mass slaughter of the imperialist war was driving the proletariat of the belligerent countries to revolution. Tsarist Russia was the weakest link in the chain. The October Revolution would trigger further revolutions in Europe. If these assumptions were correct, then the Bolsheviks were justified. And one must admit that in 1917-18, these assumptions seemed reasonable

The trouble is these assumptions were neither reasonable nor correct.There was one justification for overthrowing the Provisional Government and that was to stop the war on the Eastern Front, which (to its credit) the Bolshevik government did. But this is not a justification for the Bolsheviks establishing the dictatorship of their party, as this could have been done by the sort of coalition government that Ratner speculates about. Nor did it change the fact that socialism was out of the question in isolated backward Russia in 1917 and that any attempt to establish it there was doomed to fail.

[Dave B]

It was Lenin’s position in 1905 that if self described socialists attempted to take Russia from feudalism straight to a socialist revolution they would discredit themselves. [In an early Menshevik translation of that passage into English they used translated it as disgrace themselves.] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm  That position hadn’t changed in 1914. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/19.htm    I think it is a mistake to fall into the Leninist narrative of focusing on the October revolution of overthrowing the provisional revolutionary government rather than phase II; the armed overthrow of the constituent assembly in January 1918. The Bolsheviks in October 1917 [in fact Trotsky himself as spokesperson for the Bolsheviks] justified the imminent overthrow of the provisional revolutionary government as necessary to guarantee the convocation of the constituent assembly. The overwhelming majority of the members of the constituent assembly wanted to end the [imperial] war. I think small details can alter the details of historical outcomes. The Bolshevik leadership were not totally behind Lenin’s plans to seize power and keep it. I think Lenin was trying to save his own political neck from a constituent assembly ‘Chilcot Inquiry’ of the German funding of the Bolshevik party; an inquiry that Lenin had agreed to in the middle of 1917. [The German funding of the Bolsheviks was not that dissimilar to the US support for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, al-Qaida in Afghanistan, ISIS in Syria etc, etc]    Subsequently they basically adopted the political programme of the left SR’s who almost succeeded in their own anti Bolshevik coup in July 1918. If the left SR’s had succeeded our 20th century neo-Leninists would all be flying under a slightly different ‘flag’ less tinged with ‘Marxism’.

[ALB]

The conclusion of this article from the April 1928 Socialist Standard raises some questions:

Quote:

In conclusion, it may be as well to point out that this is in no sense a condemnation of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Our criticism was and, is that they claimed to be able to achieve the impossible. Certain definite tasks lay before them and have been achieved. They brought Russia out of the war, exposed the purely capitalist nature of the conflict to the workers in both camps, and hastened the building of capitalism in Russia at a time when there was no other party with sufficient experience or determination to tackle so great an administrative work. They cannot, however, by legislation solve the fundamental conflicts between contending classes in Russia. They cannot permanently make the working class content with the capitalist economic system, and it would be better that they should recognise before it is too late that if they remain in office the discontent of the workers will come to be directed against them.

I think that some Party members at the time admired Lenin for admitting that capitalism was the way forward for Russia (as of course, objectively, it was) and seemed to think that he had made a fairly good job of it. Also, the conclusion appears to be saying, that, now they've put capitalism back on the rails, they should leave "office", i.e hand over power, but to who?Of course that was never going to happen. They didn't leave office and Stalin agreed that the only alternative would be a government based on the peasants and so decided to clamp down on them (and how). It worked but was of no benefit to the workers. They got stamped on too.

[Capitalist Pig]

mcolome1 wrote:

Capitalist Pig wrote:

should we regret the bolshevik revolution…are you kidding me? 10s of millions dead and the emergance of one of the most oppressive states in modern history.

You mean 100 millions ( that include China, Vietnan, and Korea ) . You must have read some review about the so called Black Book of Communism which in some way Harvard University has rejected some of the statistic indicated in that book, as well, one of the writer which was an ex-Maoist have backed down on some of the ideas that he wrote on the book. He said now that it is the black book of State Capitalism. The writers of that book do not have a clue of what communism really isProbably, you did not see the public pictures of Stalin and Roosevelt embracing each other when they were allied during world war ii, those pictures were exhibited  public in the US to make peoples  understand that the Soviet Union was the allied of the US ruling class, and then he became the Enemy of the Month Club ( like Gore Vidal said ) Probably, you have not read that the Soviet Union lost 34 millions of peoples during WWII, and they were the one who defeated the German on the Barbarrosa invasion, and they were already to finish dancing Paso Dobles in Spain, and England would have been forced to negotiate with them, even more, Churchill told to the US commanders to launch the invasion toward East Europe, because they knew that the Soviet had a very strong army and were ready to occupy Europe.The allied arrived to Europe in order to drink French coffee, the Nazis were already defeated, at the expenses of the Russian workers, and both powers distributed between each others all the German advanced technology, and both continued the killing around the world, some of the problems that exist in the middle east were originally created by the British empire and by the Butcher Winston CurchillProbably, you do not know that the Bolsheviks  were the ones who stopped WWI because they did not want to fight any more which show that peoples can stop war if they have the desires to do it, and the enemy became friends an allied later and they were known as the white soldiers, they did not want Russia to have self internal capitalist development, and they did it, in a few years they were competing with others powers Before the Nazis took power the Western Power such as France, USA and England already had  killed more than 100 millions of peoples around the world, and they controlled most of the natural resources of the world, and had many colonies. They were the ones who splitted the Ottoman Empire in pieces and nations, and controlled the natural resources, they also killed millions in Africa, and Asia. They can give dead body to the Bolsheviks and they would have many leftOur analysis of the Soviet Union is based on correct analysis, we do not repeat like parrot what the rulers say, we do research,  we do know that the Bolshevik revolution was not a socialist revolution, and we know about the coup, we are more versed than many historian about the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik revolution, we do not phrases we have books and pamphlets. Our problem is that the Bolshevik revolution retarded the real socialist revolution, and socialism we have been in a better stand in our times

its great that your so well educated in history but can you be a little less condecending?

[Anonymous]

Capitalist Pig wrote:

its great that your so well educated in history but can you be a little less condecending?

The word you're (an abbreviation of you are, not your, which is a second person possessive adjective, used to describe something as belonging to you) struggling for is "condescending".

[Bijou Drains]

gnome wrote:

Capitalist Pig wrote:

its great that your so well educated in history but can you be a little less condecending?

The word you're (an abbreviation of you are, not your, which is a second person possessive adjective, used to describe something as belonging to you) struggling for is "condescending".

LMFAO

[Dave B]

I think that analysis of ours re Adam quote was unfortunate; but common. Based on the ‘confusing’ appearance of the new capitalist class in Russia in new uniforms ‘not dealt with in any theory’ ie  leather jackets and clutching copies of the communist manifesto etc rather than in frock coats and top hats. To avoid this we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society. …………We refuse to understand that when we say “state” we mean ourselves………. the vanguard …….. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the ………… the vanguard. We are the state. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm  There was obviously the stuff about state capitalism for the workers etc. But that is no different to bourgeois or ordinary capitalism for the British etc.

[Anonymous]

Capitalist Pig wrote:

mcolome1 wrote:

Capitalist Pig wrote:

should we regret the bolshevik revolution…are you kidding me? 10s of millions dead and the emergance of one of the most oppressive states in modern history.  its great that your so well educated in history but can you be a little less condecending?

That is not the issue, I am responding to your  message indicating that   the Bolsheviks ( you should have  said the leaders of the Soviet Union )  killed  10s millions  ( you meant 100 )  of peoples . The argument is to show that there were not difference between the Soviet Union and the other capitalist powers, and before the Soviet started to kill human beings, the others capitalist powers had already killed millions of peoples, and during the period of the Cold War both blocks had the same objective and purposes.  There were not any ideological differences among them, it was  just an economical and geopolitical struggle, and the same analysis can be applied to World War II. 

[Author]

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