Sandino, how about I introduce you to a former professor of mine? He can tell you all about how “great” Lenin was…
(He refers to Lenin as Russia’s worst criminal).
:rolleyes:
Originally posted by eponymous
Pardon me for being dense (and someone correct me if my history is incorrect), why was it necessary for Lenin to actively “crush” some of these soviets whenever he and the Bolsheviks assumed power (and whatever happended to the Mensheviks - or were they not proper revolutionaries)?
*Originally posted by Sandino *
This imaginary event was not necessary, no.
I see - how silly of me. So I suppose that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no role in the betrayal of the Makhnovists?
Some Bolshevik party-line stuff snipped…
Ooh - the poor, oppressed Bolsheviks! What to do? What to do? I know, screw the ideals of the revolution!
"The Makhnovist movement was one of the most important events of the Russian Revolution. It was a mass movement of working people who tried and succeeded to implement libertarian ideas in extremely difficult circumstances.
As such, the most important lesson gained from the experience of the Makhno movement is simply that “objective factors” cannot and do not explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution or Bolshevik authoritarianism. Here was a movement which faced the same terrible circumstances as the Bolsheviks faced (White counter-revolution, economic disruption, and so on) and yet did not act in the same manner as the Bolsheviks. Where the Bolsheviks completely abolished army democracy, the Makhnovists extensively applied it. Where the Bolsheviks implemented party dictatorship over the soviets, the Makhnovists encouraged and practised soviet self-management. While the Bolsheviks eliminated freedom of speech, press, assembly, the Makhnovists defended and implemented them."
From the following link: http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/makfaq.html#sech61.
.
Or a deep hatred by those who spout Bolshevik propoganda against those that truly exemplified the ideals of the Russian Revolution (the Makhnovistas being one such group).
Other die-hard Bolshevik party line stuff snipped…
Sorry, Leon - what you sow, so shall ye reap. It’s to bad that the Bolsheviks devolved into the dictatorship of the party rather than uphold the ideals of the revolution.
Obviously I cannot. The best I can do at this point is illustrate by negative example.
Capitalism is based on the means of production as private property. This means that only a handful of people in the entire world’s population have active control over what is made, how it is made, how much of it is made, and where it goes once it is made. The goal, of course, is not to meet human need, but to generate a profit for that same handful of people.
In order to generate a profit, obviously expenses must remain lower than income. Expenses not only include manufacturing costs, but wages (and benefits) for employees. It is therefore imperative that employees be induced to produce as much as possible while keeping wages at an acceptably low level - barring any sort of fightback from the employees themselves. Of course, since these same capitalists are trying to sell their products at the highest price possible, we come up against the contradiction that the people most physically involved in production are most often the ones who can’t afford the goods they produce. Safety measures also cost money, and it’s not beyond capitalists to skimp on those if it’ll save them a buck or two. Which means employees can be injured, maimed, or killed on the job. Environmental concerns are often swept aside as well, since the cheapest way to make goods may not necessarily also be the cleanest. What’s more, if too much money is required to develop an area into a profitable venture, capitalism will pass it by - which results in entire global regions thrust into the direst poverty while other regions are knee-deep in opulence.
Secondly, privatized means of production implies that individual capitalists engaged in the same area of production are going to end up competing against each other for a share of a given market. On the local level, that means the workers in a given company could lose their jobs and their livelihood should that company lose market share to a competitor. The victor isn’t going to absorb all those employees, even if they do the exact things that company needs, since the added cost of employing them would eat into the higher profits. On the international level, competition for markets turns into colonialism and imperialism - using another country as a source of cheaper labor and as a dumping ground for domestic surplus - and ultimately war, as business increasingly relies on its native state to protect its interests abroad.
Finally, the state itself is not a neutral body - it is the political arm of the ruling class and as such is a tool of class oppression. The more organized the capitalist class is, the more efficiently it can influence the state to serve its interests. (I cite the “no-bid” contracts Halliburton got after the invasion of Iraq as a highly illustrative example.) Of course this isn’t something the capitalists just took over from someone else, or even the rest of us - the bourgeois state was a creation of the emerging capitalist classes during and after the European revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Essentially, then, the classes dominated by the ruling class of a capitalist society only have a voice in the affairs of a state to the extent that ruling class lets them have one. For us here in the States, that means elections every two or so years and not much more. Sure, we have the right of recall, but how many elected national government officials have been recalled by the electorate in the past century? The only reason the Gray Davis recall effort got off the ground is because some rich Republican ponied up $2 million of his own personal fortune to kickstart it.
In opposition to this, Marxism says it’s possible to create a society, the goal of which is production to meet human need rather than generate profits. It can be structured in such a way as to provide safe and secure employment for everyone fit to work, while simultaneously aiming for increasing productivity and efficiency to the point where no-one has to work in order to survive. Not only that, but that democracy under socialism must expand not only within the political arena but into the economic sphere as well - everyone who works in a given workplace has full say in how the workplace operates. Furthermore, all officials with any sort of political power - governmental representatives, judges, and so on in the political sphere, workplace management in the economic - are directly electable by the general population and immediately recallable by a simple majority vote.
Me? Hell yeah, I’m all for something like that. But with the desire for a better world comes the understanding that it’s not going to happen by itself. It takes serious action to bring about. Working people are always fighting against the injustice and oppression of capitalism - sometimes individually, sometimes collectively (strikes, protests, and so on). People naturally want something better when it’s clear what they have isn’t enough; when that comes to include a better world, socialists want to be there with a political argument for the Marxist solution.
I’d like to respond to this sentiment with a quote at length from an excellent three-volume biography of Lenin by British socialist Tony Cliff:
[quote]
[T]o assert that the banning of all parties, except for the Bolshevik Party, must have had deleterious consequences, is one thing. To assert that the Bolsheviks could have acted differently, and could have allowed freedom of parties, is altogether different. In essence the dictatorship of the proletariat does not represent a combination of abstract, immutable elements like democracy and centralism, independent of time and place. The actual level of democracy, as well as of centralism, depends on three basic factors:[ul]
[li]the strength of the proletariat;[/li][li]the material and cultural legacy left to it by the old regime; and[/li][li]the strength of capitalist resistance.[/ul]The level of democracy feasible must be in direct proportion to the first two factors, and in inverse proportion to the third. The captain of an ocean liner can allow football to be played on his vessel; on a tiny raft in a stormy sea the level of tolerance is far lower.[/li][/quote]
-Tony Cliff, “Lenin 1917-1923: The Revolution Besieged”. London: Bookmarks Press, 1987, p. 179.
Yes, the Bolsheviks did resort to harsh, undemocratic measures during the Civil War and intervention (though not to the extent some posters here vehemently assert). But to damn them for making the choices they did in order to defend their power and the Revolution, and not sticking to some abstract principle of universal democracy and freedom at a time when 14 other countries were militarily and economically pounding the living daylights out of them, is lunacy.
Olentzero -
Are you alleging that freedom and democracy are always disposable when a nation is under attack, as a general principle, or is it only the Soviet Union who gets this pass?
In other words, if some other country were attacked, would it be acceptable to disregard human rights and political freedom in order to defend the power of the rulers?
Regards,
Shodan
I suugest you look at Lenin’s “What is to be done?” again. It’s quite clear the man has no time for any sort of democracy or the working classes for that matter.
Also I must object to your catertoization of the Russian civil war. To state that 14 other countries were pounding the Bolsheviks is lunacy. It’s widely accepted that foreign intervention was confused and ultimetey not terribly significant.
Also Lenin was clamping down on the SR’s and Mensheviks well before things got truly heavily on the civil war front. When was the constiteunt assembly dispersed, Jan 1918? Not a lot of external pressure on the Bolsheviks at that point.
Finally Try reading some books on Russian history published after the opening of the Soviet archives. Refusing to so is wilful ignorance.
I already live under socialism, no complaints. All Sandino would do is bring back the gay days of Stalinism. There is nothing like a bureaucrat with all the guns and no sense of intellectual balance.
“I’m right, or you’re dead!”
Modern capitalism bears no relationship to this intellectual construct. The modern consumer is stroked and focus-groped (sic for fun) that he no longer wants for much of anything. Socialism would certainly change that. Long lines and poverty await behind the gleaming gates of the collective hive mind.
Marxism, like any religion, survives because the adherents to the faith repeat their slogans as answers to arguments over and over.
What makes the new boss better than the old boss? Class struggle. What? bang Any more questions.
Only a “handful” of people make economic decisions? That’s absurd. Under capitalism, everyone makes economic decisons. Price, quantity, graphs. It’s all available in book form.
Lenin’s “What is To Be Done?” was written in 1903, at the beginning of his political career, when the extent of radical political activity in Russia was limited to a few study circles only just beginning to make contact with radicalizing members of the working class, and they were operating under heavy political restrictions. Lenin himself referred to it less and less frequently as Bolshevik contact with the Russian working class grew, and ultimately he admitted he’d been wrong in his ideas on how the working class could be introduced to socialist arguments.
Overall, WTD is a book written for a specific situation at a specific time and should in no way be viewed as a document that represents fully developed Leninist thought. There are some ideas that still have value for socialists, but they have largely to do with party organization and tasks. Nothing about the nature of the working class and how socialists should relate to it were held by Lenin to be correct by 1917. As Sandino said, “State and Revolution”, is much more representative of Leninist thought, as well as “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder”.
Take a look at this map of the various fronts during the Russian Civil War. Admiral Kolchak to the east had pushed as far westward as Kazan and Samara. On this map of the old USSR, you can see just how much territory the Bolsheviks didn’t have to the east in 1919 and 1920. Then there’s the fact that the Germans held on to Ukraine (thanks in part to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), followed by the White general Denikin through 1919. Ukraine, of course, was far more important since it was the largest source of grain for foodstuffs in Russia, so the Entente and the Whites holding on to it for two years after the Revolution certainly didn’t help the Bolsheviks feed the workers of Moscow and Petrograd.
Now look up north on the military map - Yudenich, the US, and Britain had choked off Russia’s northern ports for a good two years after 1917 so nothing could be shipped in or out. The French were doing the same job down by the Crimea. Now it may not be the case that all of the foreign armies sent to occupy Russia did an efficient job, but that doesn’t mean none of them did. This map shows quite clearly that the Entente was doing its damnedest to choke the Revolution in its cradle.
As for the SRs and the Mensheviks, it’s not like they were simply disagreeing with the Bolsheviks on minor political matters. Some of them were actively campaigning for their overthrow, with some SRs going so far as to assassinate some leading Bolsheviks, including one woman (Fanny Kaplan) who made an attempt on Lenin’s life. Were the Bolsheviks just supposed to let them continue those activities in the name of working-class democracy?
As for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, I shall let Trotsky reply to the question, as he did a much better job of it in 1919 than I could today.
It was? Just out of curiousity, is the US and Western Europe capitalist? Is the economic system that China has instituted in the past decade capitalist?
Capitalism != imperialism. And your huge advance over capitalism caused the starvation of huge numbers of peasants and kept them in poverty for decades.
Wrong. The soviets didn’t control squat and were merely rubber stamp organizations for the Central Committee. Moreover, the workers were not free to elect whoever they wanted to the councils. Members had to be OKed by the higher ups and if they were found to be lacking, they were dismissed and new elections were held whether the workers wanted them or not.
Central Asia was kept on as a brutally oppressed colony under Lenin, despite pleas for self-determination.
Finland, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Denmark and Iceland all had full women’s suffrage before the Russian revolution. The UK, Canada, and others had limited suffrage for women. Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Michigan, Kansas, Oregon and Arizona had all granted full suffrage for women by 1912. The idea that the Soviets came up with the idea out of nowhere and were some sort of pioneers in the field is laughable. And the idea that the US granted it out of some sort of sense of competition with the USSR rather than as the result of a long standing movement that had been gaining steam since the mid-1800s is equally laughable.
*Originally posted by Olentzero *
Sorry, Olentzero, while I respect you as a poster, the above argument loses much of its power given that there was a viable alternative - one that faced the same circumstances as the Bolsheviks.
Excerpts below
“The key Leninist defence of the actions of the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution is that they had no other choice. Complaints against the Bolshevik attacks on the gains of the revolution and the pro-revolutionary Left in Russia are met with a mantra involving the white terror, the primitive state of Russia and the reactionary peasantry, the invading imperialist armies (although the actual number can, and does, vary depending on who you are talking to) and other such ‘forces of nature’ which we are to believe could only be met by a centralised authoritarian regime that would flinch at nothing in order to survive.”
“However, this is not the case. This is for three reasons.”
“Firstly, there is the slight problem that many of the attacks on the revolution (disbanding soviets, undermining the factory committees, repressing socialists and anarchists, and so on) started before the start of the civil war. As such, its difficult to blame the degeneration of the revolution on an event which had yet to happen.”
"Secondly, Leninists like to portray their ideology as ‘realistic,’ that it recognises the problems facing a revolution and can provide the necessary solutions. Some even claim, flying in the face of the facts, that anarchists think the ruling class will just ‘disappear’ (see section H.2.1 ) or that we think ‘full-blown’ communism will appear ‘overnight’ (see section H.2.5). Only Bolshevism, it is claimed, recognises that civil war is inevitable during a revolution and only it provides the necessary solution, namely a ‘workers state.’ **Lenin himself argued that ‘[n]ot a single great revolution in history has escaped civil war. No one who does not live in a shell could imagine that civil war is conceivable without exceptionally complicated circumstances.’ [Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?, p. 81] **As such, its incredulous that modern day followers of Lenin blame the degeneration of the Russian Revolution on the very factors (civil war and exceptional circumstances) that they claim to recognise an inevitable!" (Bolding and italics are mine).
“Thirdly, and even more embarrassingly for the Leninists, numerous examples exist both from revolutionary Russia at the time and from earlier and later revolutions that suggest far from Bolshevik tactics being the most efficient way of defending the revolution other methods existed which looked to the massive creative energies of the working masses unleashed by the revolution.”
Granted, elements of the FAQ may have an idelogical axe to grind against the Bolsheviks, but I think it does a fair job of presenting its case (it does include information from non-anarchist sources). You can judge it for yourself - I suspect we’ll probably disagree in this regard.
I have never seen so many “No True Scotsman” fallacies than when dealing with Communists.
I have some bad news for Sandino. Lenin was every bit as bad as Stalin. The Man of Steel was doing little more than following in his big daddy’s footsteps. I’mtoo depressed to look up the figures, but after he took power, Lenin began his own purges. Its a dark and sad piece of histoy thats often forgotten with the legacy of Hitler and Stalin and Mao nearby.
As to the religion question:
It has Prophets. It has books of holy writ. It has inevitable divine victory according to their mystical - sorry, scientific - force of historical inevitability. It operates by and large on pure faith, having no evidence of success. Honestly, it bears more resemblance to radical Islam or fire-and-brimstone Baptists than philosophers. Face it - religion.
It is entirely possible, maybe even probable, that I am the only poster in this thread to have actually lived in a communist country, Cuba since you’re asking. It is also very likely that I am the only one to have taken classes on Marxism in the belly of the beast, sort of speak, and if you think I’m going to resurrect those portions of my brain killed during those learning sessions you’ve got another thing coming.
I will however offer a purely anecdotal and personal point of view, I will never, ever, as long as I live contemplate even the possibility of living in a communist country. Capitalism has many, many faults, but communism has all the same faults with the added bonus of no possibility of things ever improving, remember “…to each according to his needs.” So that if the state deems that my needs are a one room shack with no running water, it doesn’t matter how hard I bust my hump, a one room shack with no running water is all I’m getting. I say screw that.
That site makes a lot of assertions, throws in quotes that say pretty much the same thing as the main text, and utterly fails to provide any examples of what they’re talking about.
Firstly, the site doesn’t appear to actually cite any instances of the “undermining factory committees” and “disbanding soviets” of which they accuse the Bolsheviks. Do you have any further information on that?
Secondly, it is one thing to say an event is inevitable, and another thing to say the outcome is inevitable. Of course a civil war is inevitable - the dispossessed ruling class is going to fight like hell to gain back what it lost, and the dispossessing class is going to fight like hell to hold on to what it has taken. If the revolution had spread to Europe, however, the outcome of the civil war and the actions the Bolsheviks found it necessary to take would have been far different. The Bolsheviks took the course of action they did because they were completely isolated internationally. If even just Germany had successfully staged a socialist revolution, Russia would have had an economically powerful and organized sister Soviet republic ready to provide the assistance they so badly needed. That’s the other factor the Makhno site completely ignores.
Women’s rights in Russia-actually again, it was not the Bolsheviks who granted women suffrage but the Provisional Government under Kerensky.
Prior to that, the BIG champion of women’s rights had been Catherine the Great. She gained a LOT for women in Russia.
EXACTLY, smiling bandit. The only reason we heard more about Stalin is that he was in charge longer. Lenin was in poor health during the last part of his reign and that I guess lead people to believe he was more benign. He was not.
Can we get some numbers, please?
Rummell puts Lenin’s death toll at 4 million people between 1917 and 1924 - this excludes deaths from war or just bad policies. About the same as Tojo in Japan during WWII.
Lenin was not nearly as bad as Stalin. Had Lenin kept up his pace for as long as Stalin was in charge, we’re only looking at about 14 million dead which is only a quarter of Stalin’s death toll while he was in charge.
Let’s not get carried away. Lenin wasn’t a nice guy, but he was no Stalin.
I’m with Larry Borgia. It’s kinda cute that there are still honest to-goodness ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ Communists out there who still want to liquidate the kulaks. Next thing you know, someone will be standing up for the Divine Right of Kings or the Universal Ummah. Oh, wait…
So many targets… where to begin.
First: I’d like Olentzero or Sandino to post a quote that defines Marxian exploitation.
Second: the distinction between ‘production for profit’ and ‘production for needs’ is an amateur’s mistake. Einstein made the same mistake, giving proof that intelligence and knowledge don’t carry well across boundries. A product is profitable exactly because the price someone is willing to pay for it is high (thus reflecting how much they need/want it) relative to the price of the resources needed to produce it (which is a summary measure of the value of alternative things that could have been used to produced with those means of production.) Larger profits are a signal that ‘this is an especially valuable economic actvity’. Various caveats are necessary in case of various market imperfections, monopolies, externalities, etc. Read an introductory colledge economics book to grok all this.
Olentzero writes:
Of course, since these same capitalists are trying to sell their products at the highest price possible, we come up against the contradiction that the people most physically involved in production are most often the ones who can’t afford the goods they produce.
If we look at the 1st world, most auto-workers can afford cars, most techno-grunts have a butt-load of electronics, and even most burger-flippers can routinely afford burgers and pot and nintendo. (Nintendo being the new opiate of the masses.)
If we look at the 3rd world, we will find some workers making designer garments, for instance, that they cannot afford to buy. But usually the problem here is it takes about 40 years from the embrace of capitalism and the rule of law to acheive a decent level of prosperity. I challenge our Marxist friends to show me a country that’s embraced those principles for 40 or so years and that is poorer than a comparable country that hasn’t.
Safety measures also cost money, and it’s not beyond capitalists to skimp on those if it’ll save them a buck or two. Which means employees can be injured, maimed, or killed on the job. Environmental concerns are often swept aside as well, since the cheapest way to make goods may not necessarily also be the cleanest.
And the Communist worker-safety and enviromental record is so wonderful?
What’s more, if too much money is required to develop an area into a profitable venture, capitalism will pass it by - which results in entire global regions thrust into the direst poverty while other regions are knee-deep in opulence.
Yes, the capitalist system aims to ‘pick the low hanging fruit’ of investing in highly profitable industries and regions before moving on to lower-return investments. This will cause some regions to become knee-deep in opulence, yes. But claiming that being bypassed, being left in dire poverty, is the fault of the person who bypassed you or the person who has become rich is rather strange.
Making high-return investments (in either a capitalist or socialist system) first is simply the sensible thing to do, since after you’ve done that you have more resources available to both increase consumption and investment in the poorer/less productive areas.
Who’s Rummell, and how does he break down those numbers?
*Originally posted by Olentzero *
Check here for an article that supports the undermining of factory workers.
For the disbanding of soviets, some of the sites I pulled up on the Internet reference Samuel Farber’s “Before Stalinism”.
But check out this site, as well as this one which is a commentary on Beyond Stalinsim by Farber.
And so were the Makhnovists. But that doesn’t absolve them of turning against allies (a shaky ally, I know), that were fighting the counterrevolutionaries as well.