AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Thursday, April 28, 2011

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Bolivia: The birth of the POR-9th April 1952: A situation of Dual Power.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The following passage is taken from the introduction (pp.LX-LXXV) by F. and C. Chesnais to the French edition of G. Lora’s Bolivie: de la Naissance du Parti Ouvrier Revolutionnaire ál’Assemblée Populaire. It has been translated by Ted Crawford, and was prepared for Revolutionary History Vol.4, No.3 – Bolivia: The Revolution Derailed?. It was not included there because of pressure on the available space. That volume did however include a review by Jean Lieven of Lora’s book, which takes issue with positions put forward here by Chesnais (and by Lora).

The notes, which ran from 52-67 in the original, have been renumbered.

We have tried to check all spellings of proper nouns in this article as carefully as possible, but as with all the material we post which contains non-English words, we will be grateful if you point out to us any corrections that are needed.

Bolivia: The birth of the POR-9th April 1952: A situation of Dual Power.

On the morning of the 9th April armed bands from the MNR, together with a section of the police, started an insurrection in La Paz. At the start it seemed to be a conspiracy that involved few people. As in many previous coups, in spite of the initial successes of the rebels the army had the situation pretty well in hand. At the end of the day the rising seemed almost smashed.

But next day the movement took on proportions which went far beyond the MNR. Throughout the country there were very serious clashes between the army and the masses: at Cochabamba, at Oruro, at Potosi and elsewhere, the workers armed themselves and marched on La Paz. The ‘fabriles’ (workshop workers) from the Viacha industrial zone swept towards the capital, and the miners from Milluni occupied the railway station at La Paz and seized a train carrying munitions, all of which shifted the situation in favour of the insurrection. In addition armed miners from the Catavi region surrounded the town of Oruro, thus removing any possibility of the government sending reinforcements to the capital.

On the 11th April the Ballivián military junta fell. The MNR took power. Armed bodies of workers converged on La Paz.

After the fall of the junta the army evaporated in a few days. Armed groups of civilians took over the barracks and the police stations and occupied local government buildings. In the mining districts and towns the movements became organised and rapidly created workers militias. Five days after the end of the fighting in La Paz a network of workers’ militias covered the country.

The Trade Unions played an essential rôle in the organisation of the movement during the first few days. They were the ones who organised the militias, they were the ones who filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of the authorities and they took on administrative and judicial rôles. It must be said that in the mines things went more slowly than in the towns. For example the mining unions did not occupy the mines and did not immediately impose workers control of the mines [1] through mass meetings of the workforce. This delay was to prove useful to the government. The power of the Trade Unions was to be decisive in the country with the creation, eleven days after the insurrection, at the initiative of Alandia Pantoja [2] of the Central Obrera Boliviano (COB) which grouped together the various unions, corporations and workers’ parties. Born as the expression of the mass movement which had struck an sudden blow at the bourgeois state, the COB appeared to be an organisation with immense power, capable of giving a national lead to the masses in the fight for the fulfilment of their hopes. Its birth in a situation of revolutionary upheaval, from the beginning gave it a true soviet character. Thus some of the characteristics of a dual power situation existed in April 1952, a paradoxical situation reminiscent of February 1917. In fact a revolutionary movement of the masses put a government in power which claimed that from its coming to power it drew its only legitimacy from the 1951 elections which had been annulled by the ‘mamertazo’ and Ballivián’s coup d’état. At the same time the workers regarded this government as quite different from any other. On his return from exile on the 17th April Paz Estenssoro was greeted by an enormous crowd to shouts of ‘Long Live the MNR!’, ‘Long Live Victor Paz!’, ‘Nationalisation!’ and ‘Land Reform!’. In welcoming Paz the workers were acclaiming someone, who in their opinion, was going to give a mortal blow to landowners, capitalists and imperialism. But the MNR had not the slightest intention of attacking private property because that would call in question the interests of the class that it represented and thus, at the same time, its own power. The mobilisation of the masses and their organisations to demand both nationalisation without compensation under workers’ control and land reform, carried within it the struggle for the working class’s own power. Correctly, all the COB’s proclamations which the activists of the POR had been able to initiate in this period, were focused on the need to establish a real workers’ and peasants’ government. [3] In addition the MNR had to find a way to defuse the revolutionary push of the masses without delay. It was around the COB that the issue of the revolution would be decided.

The raising of the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’
The Trade Union organisations and the COB were thought by the workers to be their exclusive leadership. Its very existence made the COB an organ of workers’ power – whether its leaders knew it or not – and posed all the elements of a situation of dual power In fact the COB very quickly became a very important stake in the class struggle. For, during this period, it was the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ that encapsulated the deep convulsion and permanent mass mobilisation that made the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government real.

The MNR government was aware that therein lay the real danger to itself. So it asked the COB to nominate three of its members to the Cabinet. The three ‘worker Ministers’ were J. Lechín, Minister of Mines & Petroleum, German Butrón, Minister of Labour and Nuflo Chavez Ortiz, Minister of Peasant Affairs. It was by means of this expedient, which provided a way to the integrate the top echelons of the COB into both the state and the MNR’s apparatus, that Paz Estenssoro opened his counter-attack to aid the defence of the threatened bourgeois order.

In the person of J. Lechín, the COB General Secretary, the MNR had a choice instrument to carry out its policy of controlling the workers movement. He was known to exhibit a reputation for independence as far as his own party was concerned (cf. the ‘Bloque Minero’ in 1947). He represented the ‘Left’ of the party and had been the target of violent attacks by its right wing. Thus the masses pinned their hopes on him transmitting their policies into the government. It was Lechín who was given the job of sowing illusions among the workers that their organisation ran Paz Estenssoro’s government through this expedient of ‘co-government’.

Thus Lechín was the indispensable screen between the masses and their own power, the road to which had been opened by the existence of the COB and by the mobilisation of the masses themselves for their own aims.

Guillermo Lora discussing how the ‘Co-government’ had been imposed, explained it thus:–

“The creation of the theory of ‘Co-government’ was nothing else but the Bolivian version of collusion between the upper reaches of the trade union leadership and a petit bourgeois government. In spite of a strong group of PORists this aim was achieved because the MNR captured the predominant mood among the majority of the middle classes and the workers which was one of enthusiastic support for the government of Paz Estenssoro. In the first stage of the revolution this feeling tended to grow (a phenomenon which explains the strengthening of the MNR ‘Centre’ in relation to its left wing) above all because of the errors committed by the leadership of the POR, a large part of whom were entrists and Pabloists, and who refused to point out the limitations of the MNR and encouraged the growth of popular illusions in the revolutionary potential of Lechínism.” [4]

In fact this is to connect the crisis in the POR, which is analysed later on, with the COB which, from April onwards, could be seen to be muzzled by ‘Co-Government’ without the vanguard waging the slightest struggle to expose this governmental manoeuvre, but, on the contrary, by putting forward the call ‘Complete Control of the Cabinet by the Left’, it nourished illusions.

Guillermo Lora goes on:–

“This slogan could, strictly speaking, be justified as a pedagogic measure meant to show the masses, who were blinded by their love of the MNR, that the MNR Left was quite incapable of taking power against imperialism. However in reality this call revealed an enormous error of principle which was to believe that the working class could take power through Lechínism. It would have been more correct to direct the mobilisation of the masses through the slogan ‘All Power to the COB!’” [5]

It is not only that it would have been ‘more correct’ to direct the mobilisation of the masses through this slogan. The slogan ‘All power to the COB’ was the only one that would allow the Lechínist leadership to be exposed whilst keeping a united front against the bourgeoisie at the same time. Only in this way could the COB assume the full character of a soviet linked to the living mobilisation of the working class involving the broadest working class democracy. It was this slogan that could unite and mobilise the masses through directly elected representatives from the rank and file and the old Trade Union leadership. And it was only thus, as G. Lora shows, that the isolation could be overcome:

“Perhaps one of the worst mistakes in the organisation of the COB was that it was created from the top by the trade union leaderships who were rapidly subjected to the petit-bourgeois government and that this orientation formed its middle layer cadre politically. The masses were mobilised around the slogan of powerful centralised Trade Union but this mobilisation did not find a proper organisational expression. It would have correct to start the other way round – that is to say from the bottom to the top. The workers joined the COB through the intermediary of their trade union leaderships, which, apart from their differing politics, had very different organisational forms. The founders of the COB made their appeal to the old leaders and not the shop-stewards elected by the membership. This organisational failure brought with it elements of weakness which made its bureaucratisation easy helping to isolate it from the masses and putting it under the artificial control of the government.” [6]

In reality it was not just a simple organisational problem but a highly political one. The COB, composed as it was of leaderships which were acknowledged by the masses, gave a huge boost to the movement because it enabled it to become centralised. But at the same time this centralisation became a trap if the actual slogan that was put forward did not enable the workers to make the seizure of power a COB demand. The struggle for workers’ democracy was inseparable from the struggle which had to be waged around the slogan ‘All Power to the COB.’ In a period of revolutionary convulsion workers democracy could not feel that it was outside the political struggle to accentuate the soviet type characteristics of the Trade Union Congress. It was here and nowhere else that the lack of experience and lack of homogeneity of the COB could be measured.

For want of this the workers were left completely defenceless in the presence of their treacherous leaderships and a gap opened up between the mobilisation of the masses and the body that could centralise their struggles because that body was tied to the government, so that it became an instrument directed against the masses. The Trade Union militants of the COB organised great demonstrations demanding nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control but had to explain that there was really no need to occupy the mines properly and have mass meetings which could impose workers’ control, since, given their weight in the government, they could be confident that the COB would achieve these demands.

This left the way open for the COB to be transformed into a bureaucratic body, closely controlled by the government, in which the militants of the MNR, PIR and the newly created PCB (Bolivian Communist Party) gave themselves a slice from the juicier parts and, little by little, pushed out the POR militants who refused to unite with this bureaucracy.

On the basis of this first retreat of the masses, whose complicated mechanism we have examined, the government was able to impose a solution to the problem of nationalisation, that is to say a solution that harmed the interests of imperialism and private property as little as possible.

The Bourgeois Nationalisation of the Mines
On the 13th May 1952 the government announced the creation of a committee to carry out a four month enquiry into the problems of mine nationalisation. This was, very simply, a way of saying what guarantees would be offered to imperialism and was a severe blow to the working class movement. The announcement even seemed a kind of provocation. Had not Lechín called for immediate nationalisation in the COB’s paper?

Greeted by the MNR as the ‘day of economic emancipation’, the nationalisation of the big mining companies with moderate compensation was decreed on the 31st October 1952. Under these circumstances, the nationalisation carried out by the MNR appeared to the large tin concerns as an unexpected escape. At the end of 1952 it was no mystery to anybody that the three large companies, looking simply at their tin mine investments, were on the edge of bankruptcy. The ownership of the nationalised mines on the other hand, was handed over to a mixed company – COMIBOL – whose capital was part state owned and part private, and to which American capital was immediately subscribed so that American interests even profited from the event by increasing their share in comparison with what had been the case with the ‘Three Great’ companies. The capitalist management was not disturbed. A simple reorganisation inside COMIBOL would be enough for a total return to finance capital.

Anyway, from now on Trade Union corruption on the one hand, and the exploitation of the workers on the other, bound together those in charge of production through the creation of a so-called system of ‘workers control’ under trade union management.

A word must said about this institution for it is this that best expressed the way in which the government, seizing on a demand of the workers, cleverly turned it against them. In the nationalisation decree it clearly says that the administration of the nationalised mines, that is to say COMIBOL, is based on individual workers’ control which occurs through their membership of the COB, which in turn selects some of its members to manage the mines. Here was created a whole layer of worker managers who were easily corrupted by the government since the salaries given to the worker managers were astronomical, about 100,000 Bolivian pesos a year when an unskilled worker got 4,000!

As was emphasised by G. Lora in his pamphlet El stalinismo en los sindicatos [7] COMIBOL acted as a ‘bank account for trade union bureaucrats’ which enabled the government to increase the COB’s bureaucratisation.

By the nationalisation of Oct 1952 the working class had been dispossessed of what it had struggled for in April 1952. From this moment on a very sharp retreat of the working class could be observed.

However, the bureaucratisation of the COB, even if it was a factor in the retreat of the masses, could not in any sense be the whole story. In fact the control of the masses by the government, which operated through the bureaucracy, was extremely fragile. This was demonstrated in January 1953 by the way that, once more, the masses mobilised behind the COB against an attempt at a coup d’état by the right wing of the MNR. This started a phase where the government had to move its politics to the left and where the rediscovered power of the COB gave meaning to the slogan, ‘All Power to the COB!’ for several days.

Once more the incompetence of the POR, which arose from its lack of experience and from the pressures within its ranks calling for this slogan, resulted in a weakening of the push leftwards by the urban masses at the moment when an explosive situation was developing in the countryside.

The Revolutionary Movement in the Countryside
It was only at this moment, when the workers’ movement started to enter its phase of retreat, that the peasantry, which had slowly started to organise during the year of 1952, actively intervened. In the course of the last few months of 1952 and the first few of 1952 the peasant movement developed and took on extraordinary strength.

As we have seen the Bolivian peasantry had a long tradition of struggle. Peasant wars had played an important rôle in Bolivian social history. In addition it was worked on, above all in some regions, in particular the region of Cochabamba and Potosi, by the political currents which came from the working class. So it was that the miners, who had fled the ‘white’ massacre in Potosi, settled in these regions and a good number being supporters of the POR or MNR, played an important rôle in radicalising the peasantry.

On the other hand from 1945 onwards that peasantry had started to organise with the setting up, under the auspices of the MNR, of the ‘Federacion de Campesinos’. It was in 1952 however that the organised movement took on any sort of size when Nuflo Chavez Ortiz, Minister of Peasant Affairs in the MNR government, adorned with the prestige of a leader of the COB, took part himself in a massive campaign for the creation of peasant unions. Naturally the aim of this operation was to control the peasantry through the COB, for the MNR who had written land reform into their programme, with some reason feared that, in the name of land reform, the peasantry would go beyond the limits of private property. [8]

Now to the extent that the unions developed, the peasants started to put into practice what they thought was the dominant content of the reform. They surrounded the haciendas and forced the owners to flee and even did the same with the local authorities who were the object of the same hatred as the owners. It was then that the peasant unions came to control the entire life of the countryside, above all in the case of Ucurena, in the Cochabamba valley, where the union took charge of distribution, administration and, through its use of the militia, policing. For a period, Lora thought that the peasant unions had clearly reached even more of a soviet stage than the workers’ unions.

It was at this point that a civil war of extreme violence developed in the countryside. The landowners organised to resist the occupation of their lands; in the small towns the townspeople, together with the MNR, organised military expeditions against the surrounding peasantry. The government sent the police against the peasants. In the opposite camp the POR, whose influence in the countryside has been mentioned, developed an agitation around calls for the creation of a single Peasant Federation, an alliance with the working class and the holding of a peasant conference while the peasants were mobilised to form a front against the intrigues of the landowners.

Under the pressure of events, the government, on the 20th January 1953, set up a commission of enquiry into agrarian reform and on the 2nd August 1953 Paz Estenssoro went to Ucurena to announce the reform and to sign the decree in front of an immense crowd of peasants.

The repression by the police, the MNR militias and the landowners’ armed bands went on throughout the year. The Commission of Enquiry, headed by a well-known member of the PIR, Arturo Urquidi Morales, sought to limit to the utmost the extent of the transformation of the countryside and to channel it into the consolidation of bourgeois order and of the MNR regime itself.

This aim was achieved as land reform led to widespread tiny plots of land, defusing the appeal of the call of land to the peasants and creating, it is true within narrow limits, an internal market for local manufacturing production.

Semi-serfdom (the pongueaje) was abolished for ever, the peasants became free men and the power of the great landowners was broken and never rebuilt, even under Barrientos. All that was grasped by the peasantry, in a few areas, was the direct purchase of the land – a formula which, to the peasants, appeared to have the advantage of more firmly guaranteeing the ownership of the land than the land reform decree, whose application was extremely slow and chaotic and which, in the years after 1953, kept a climate of uncertainty in existence in the countryside.

These gains, in particular the abolition of semi-serfdom, were not negligible. But they were little in comparison with the size and violence of the peasant and the explosive revolutionary potential which would have been possible if the alliance had been made with the working class. For want of the working class which could, through its revolutionary party, go onwards at the head of the peasant masses and focus this force to establish a workers’ and peasants’ government, the great upheavals of 1953, important as they were, did not deliver the Bolivian countryside from its misery.

For that, the triumph of the working class was needed and that, in its turn, meant that the revolutionary party would know what it was about and play its full part.

The Two Successive Crises of the POR
It was inevitable that the first phase of the radicalisation of the masses occurred in conditions which meant the temporary control of the movement by the MNR and the Lechí nist Trade Union bureaucracy. This is one of the laws of the revolutionary process: generally after the first phase it by-passes the party or the revolutionary nucleus.

Already it was almost inevitable, if entirely understandable, that the POR, the first Trotskyist Party (with the sole exception perhaps of the Indo-Chinese Party immediately before the Second World War) should have to face a situation that called for the formulation of totally practical demands which reflected the level of the working classes struggle for power, and should have let slip its first opportunity to put forward the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’.

The essential thing was that the party succeeded, on the basis of understanding what was going on, in keeping in good order; that it resisted the pressure of alien forces in its ranks and, in good order, grappled with the second phase of the revolutionary process which would start when the masses in movement broke with the parties to which they had at first given their confidence.

But the revolutionary party is a gamble in the class war. On the one hand, even if some people wish to forget it, it is an organism built by men who are socially determined, whose activity takes place within classes and layers – the working class the peasantry, the radicalised petit bourgeoisie – which are themselves the constituent parts of a society in torment. It is inevitable that the hopes and the illusions, or their opposite, the deception and the discouragements come to be refracted in the ranks of the party. The marxist revolutionary party, of which the Bolshevik Party is the only successful one, is distinguished by its ability to resist these pressures, to weaken them and to neutralise them.

The POR as well as all the elements that Lora listed in La Revolución Boliviana [9], showed it had not reached such a level of development. It had tackled April 1952 when it was not only quite weak from a numerical point of view but above all not very politically homogenous. As a body it lacked the strength to resist the pressure of class enemy forces. The refraction of the illusions of the petty-bourgeois and even of the working class within its ranks, rapidly turned into a mass exodus of important militants who went over to the MNR and all too often occupied the highest positions in the apparatus of the COB and of the state. [10]

This was the first phase of the crisis of the POR. The second, which occurred eighteen months later, was in its essence different though superficially it had analogies with the first. As a direct consequence of Pablo’s victory over the Lambert-Bleibtreu tendency and the bureaucratic expulsion of the majority of the French section of the 4th International [11], this crisis was of a quite different order from the previous one. The departure of the ‘entrists’ was a serious blow to the Party and the attack of the directing centre of the 4th International, which had become liquidationist, all but completely destroyed it.

These attacks took place after the 10th Congress of the POR – whose resolutions are contained in this book – which marked a very serious attempt on the part of the Party leadership to rearm themselves after the last crisis and to give their members an analysis and activity which would help them to deal with the difficult situation. The resolutions of the 10th Congress included a precise analysis of the character of the Paz government and a balance sheet of its political record from April onwards. They included a long discussion on the meaning of the slogan for a workers’ and peasants’ government, which made a real effort to explain the very important indications given by Trotsky in the section of that name in the Transitional Programme. Then they linked up in paragraph five of the middle section on the central problem: how to position oneself in a period where simultaneously the masses were in retreat but the full experience of this government was yet to come.

The main thrust of the resolutions of the 1953 Congress can be summed up in the following way: Before winning power, the POR must win over the masses. It must succeed in educating them in the course of their daily struggles. The time to cry, ‘Down with the Government’ has not yet come, but rather the demand must be that the government must carry out the tasks of the revolution. It is only then that the masses will understand from their daily experience the need to replace the present government which is incapable of carrying out the tasks of the revolution with a workers’ and peasants’ government. Indeed the most combative and politicised sectors and the best elements of the Bolivian working class and peasantry have already turned towards the POR and see it as their leadership. But the majority of the workers are still grouped around the MNR. That is why the POR must carry on its strategy ‘To power through winning over the masses!’ [12]

It was this position to which Pablo was so bitterly opposed at the end of 1953. To understand both the factional game which occurred from that time on until the split of 1956 and the rôle played by the International Secretariat it is important to give this passage from an internal document, dated October 1954, where Lora made the point about the situation at a time when irreconcilable positions had hardened:

“The factional dispute started over the character of the Bolivian revolution, the development of mass consciousness and the attitude to take to the MNR, the only mass party in the country. On the basis of differences around these very important issues of revolutionary politics, two positions hardened about the way a party could be built. In the heat of a savage struggle it became clear that the so-called Internationalist Proletarian faction – who had adopted this title to underline their unconditional submission to the orders of the International Secretariat – had come to adopt a Stalinist conception of the party (it had supported a democratic centralism that had rather more centralism and rather less democracy so that the second element was completely subordinated to the first) and in the course of the factional dispute had recourse to bureaucratic methods. The Leninist Workers’ faction (they took the term Leninist to distinguish themselves from the Stalinist deviations of those who, to start with, were in the majority) defended Lenin’s concept of the party and became the standard bearer of the Trotskyist traditions of the POR. The political positions of the two factions could be summed up thus:

a) The Leninist Worker faction started to build around the defence of the political resolution approved by the 10th Congress which took place in La Paz in June 1953. After instructions from the Latin American Bureau of the International Secretariat this document began to be attacked. As is known the document of the 10th Congress states that the revolution was underdoing a temporary retreat whose consequences were the bureaucratisation of the trades union movement, the weakening of its fighting spirit, the organisational retreat of the party and the accentuation of the government’s lean to the right. The immediate task was not to take power but to win over the majority of the working class and peasantry to the POR positions. We said again and again that there was no other way to get a worker-peasant government.

b) The Internationalist Proletarian faction tried to undertake a revision of the political positions adopted by the 10th Congress, which it regarded as pessimistic and capitulationist. Its position was as follows: ‘It is wrong to talk of a retreat of the revolutionary movement; on the contrary the masses have kept their spirit and are marching rapidly towards power. As a result the demand for a workers’ and peasants’ government can be transformed into an agitational demand, for it can be achieved before too long.’ It added that the MNR was no longer the party of the masses because the latter were rapidly leaving this petty bourgeois leadership.

c) Party Building. The Leninist Workers’ faction thought that the strengthening of the party, as much organisationally as ideologically, was indispensable. The time was coming when the POR would be able to transform itself in the party of the masses which was indispensable if the exploited were to seize power. The key problem which they had, was to tear the masses from the control of the MNR. The response they had to this problem was the tactic of the Anti-Imperialist Front oriented to the Left of the MNR and other Trade Union sectors. They tried to use this approach in certain areas, for example Sucre. They took account of the variations which this Front could assume, first it could be formed as a result of a vigorous push from the MNR rank and file and second it could serve merely as a propaganda slogan which would accelerate the split of the MNR rank and file activists from their leadership.

On the other hand the Internationalist Proletarian faction felt that by virtue of the rapidity with which the masses were moving to power, it was impossible, (for reasons of time) to make the POR the party of the masses, and that the latter would achieve power, undoubtedly under the command of Lechín, without the need for its own vanguard. It did not deny the usefulness of the Anti-Imperialist Front tactic but only questioned its correct timing, and, since the left of the movement was not well organised, the party’s most important job would be to help it achieve its aim.

These differences over the problem of Bolivian policy were connected to the differences in the heart of the 4th International which led to one of the sharpest crises in its history. The split of the North American section from the International Secretariat led to the formation of two ‘4th Internationals’. The repercussions of these events became known to the activists, not directly, but through the clumsy and disastrous behaviour of the Pabloite body called the Latin-American Bureau. Faced with the crisis in the 4th International the Internationalist Proletarian faction had no other position but to follow the orders of the International Secretariat. Its votes and its decisions were adopted as instructions and not because they had any knowledge of the problems. Faced with Stalinist and Pabloite deviations, the Leninist faction put the necessity for preserving the unity of the International and its Bolshevik structure above every other consideration.” [13]

The line advocated by the Internationalist Proletarian faction consisted of a permanent and total capitulation to the Trade Union bureaucracy at every turn of the class struggle, recourse to the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ at a time when retreat of the masses turned this into a simple formula for a policy of unconditional support for Lechín, and eventually a very clear turn towards ‘entrism’.

This conformed in every respect to the orientation ‘to penetrate and to act in the real movement of the masses in as fully and deeply as possible ’ as defined by Pablo in the preparatory document for the Fourth World Congress [14] after the expulsion of the PCI and the creation of the International Committee. This line is one of capitulating to difficulties, including the building of parties and the International, and, to achieve these tasks, implies a search for substitutes whose the precise forms and nature evidently vary in the particular circumstances of different countries and time periods. The task of building organisations is reduced to playing the rôle of a pressure group at best and eventually the whole historical necessity for them is removed.

At the time of the Third World Congress in 1951 Lora was in prison [15] and was not able to help in the battle that the PCI had opened up against the propositions put forward by Pablo in Where Are We Going? It is more than likely that he heard only a faint distorted echo of this. In July 1952 at the end of the 8th Congress of the PCI, which saw the defeat of Pablo’s supporters, there was, by means of a bureaucratic diktat of the International Secretariat, the expulsion of the French section. The POR delegation at the 4th World Congress included a representative from each of the two tendencies of whom Lora was from the Leninist Worker faction. In the internal bulletin which he wrote after his return, Lora made clear that he had voted against the main document put forward by Pablo and that he had defended these positions during the meetings of the Latin-American Commission which met after the Congress. [16]

In this article Lora went further than before in his characterisation of the positions of Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso. He wrote:

“The position of the liquidators was that, without the leadership of the POR, the masses would come to power through their own methods and guided by their present organisations, that is to say through the Left of the MNR. The strategic consequence was defined in that the leading rôle of the POR was not to be asserted until after the seizure of power by the masses. To the extent that it is held that the victory of the masses is possible without the leadership of their vanguard, the revision of Marxism is total. The main aim is defined as helping the building of Lechínism since it is stated categorically that the workers’ and peasants’ government will be a government of the MNR Left stiffened by the POR militants. Implicitly the necessity for the POR is denied and its tasks are attributed to a sector of the MNR.” [17]

The extreme gravity with which this crisis of the 4th International was attended arose from the fact that positions such as these were developed at the very top of the International. The thesis of Gonzalez was in perfect accord with the preparatory documents of the 4th Congress. They only had a particular application in Bolivian conditions. By definition they benefited from the total support of Pablo and his lieutenants in the International Secretariat, Frank, Mandel and the others.

It was this that gave them their absolutely devastating character. Even where, as in Bolivia, a faction with the necessary strength to fight them was developed, the difficulties of this fight were multiplied tenfold by the fact that it was against the leadership of the International itself – fortified with all its prestige – that this faction had to measure itself.

Lora’s deep hatred of Pablo and his lieutenants, and also his distrust for the whole international organisation, comes out clearly in this reading from La Revolución Boliviana:

“We understand that the POR could only struggle and overcome its whole heritage of past errors through a broad internal discussion. The assimilation of international experience can be done in no other way. Pabloism and the Latin-American Bureau enjoined us to follow a very particular form of party organisation. According to them we would have the duty of limiting ourselves to servilely obeying the orders of the International Secretariat and Michael Pablo and to vowing fealty to Michael Pablo, who had been declared the official heir of Trotsky’s ability. We have never abandoned a critical attitude towards the marxist classics and Trotsky – we would find it difficult to worship a puppet. According to the curious theory of the bureaucrats of the Latin American Bureau – incompetent bureaucrats into the bargain – the only job of the POR was to circulate documents written in Buenos Aires and, so that we could do such an ‘important’ job properly, we were told not to form factions or tendencies. Thus the ‘Heirs’ of Trotsky showed how they had adopted the worst vices of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a normal way of working.”

Pabloism – the tendency which had revised Trotskyism in the most serious way – believed that its illegitimate interests would only be satisfied when it had succeeded in smashing the Revolutionary Workers Party. This disastrous enterprise was so conscientiously carried out that the party almost disappeared. The bureaucracy which obeyed the International Executive Committee of the 4th International, used every means, from illegal expulsions to the bribing of oppositionists (reminiscent of Stalinist methods), to divide the party and to make sure of a section that was totally submissive to its decisions.

In 1956, after a battle that left the Party drained of life, the two factions finally split. On the 3rd May 1956 at the Congress of Oruro, with a tiny band of militants grouped round the paper Masas, Lora undertook to rebuild the party, all the while under heavy fire from the MNR which thought that it had finished with the POR.

Footnotes
1. Mine occupations and the debates on workers control in the mines are frequent according to the Pulacayo Theses which put forward these demands. G. Lora in La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit p.330, writes ‘The lack of a workers party was one of the reasons why the masses, who were formed and trained in the mine occupations, did not put this into practice (in 1952). If occupation had taken place the life of the MNR government would have been considerably shortened.’

[Note by JJP – An English translation of the Pulacayo Theses can be found in Permanent Revolution No.2, Summer 1984 (Published by Workers Power)]

2. It was a militant of the POR, Alandia Pantoja, who had actually started the organisation of the COB, and this had put such pressure on Lechín that he had called the first mass meeting. For this he was praised in the first issue of Rebelión, the paper of the COB. Equally it was for that he had a seat in the Popular Assembly in 1971 and, in as much as he represented the COB, he had the heavy responsibility of organising the armed militias on behalf of the COB and the Popular Assembly.

3. cf. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, University of Pittsburg, 1970, op. cit., pp.224-5 quoting the first numbers of Rebelión.

4. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit., p.263.

5. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviano, op. cit., p.267.

6. G. Lora La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit., p.262.

7. On p.13 G. Lora explains how the two leaders of the PCB, Ireneo Pimental and Fedérico Escobar Zapata, apart from the money that they got from COMIBOL, allowed themselves to handle money belonging to the Siglo XX Trade Union. This came out as a result of a Trade Union enquiry.

8. J.-M. Malloy, op.cit., Chapter 10, as well as P. Scali, La Révolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, in La Verité, 22 April 1954 p.28 and seq. can be consulted on this.

9. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, Chapter 9, The Building of the Revolutionary Party on all these issues.

10. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, op.cit., p.330 explains that ‘entrism’ started from 1952 giving rise to a new crisis in the Party and not only in 1954. Lora writes ‘A group of Trotskyist militants, some of them being very able and having great influence in the Unions, went into the MNR under the pretext of carrying out revolutionary work inside the mass party’.

11. On the crisis of 1951-52 and the expulsion of the Parti Communist Internationaliste (PCI), cf. J-J.Marie, Le Trotskysme, Paris, Editions Flammarion, in the ‘Questions d’histoire’ series, pp.78 et seq., as well as Quelques enseignnements de notre histoire, p.75 et seq.

12. Pierre Scali, op. cit., p.36.

13. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, pp.16-17.

14. Notre intégration dans la réel movement des masses: notre expérience et ses perspectives, Quatriéme Internationale, January-February 1954, no.1-2.

15. ‘The Third Congress took place under the honourary presidency of the revolutionary militants who were victims of imperialist or Stalinist repression: the Bolivian, Vietnamese and Greek comrades, in particular the imprisoned comrade Guillermo Lora’, Quatriéme Internationale, vol.9 No.8-10, August-October 1951, p.1.

16. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, pp.17-18.

17. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, p.18. We are rightly astonished to learn when reading a recent pamphlet of the Ligue Communiste, La Revolution Permanente en Amerique Latine, p.42 that the POR was straightened out in 1954-55 by Gonzalez Moscoso in relation to its ‘opportunist deviations’ at the 10th Congress.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-The Birth of Bolshevism in Greece-by Loukas Karliaftis

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Leaving Leninism-Paul Levi

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Did the Bolsheviks Seize Power by Deception?By Paul Flewers

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
Did the Bolsheviks Seize Power by Deception?By Paul Flewers

The contrast between the promises and the end result of Bolshevism has often led its critics to claim that the Bolsheviks seized power by deception. By and large, these observers fall into two schools of thought. One school is largely comprised of an unlikely combination of conservative historians and libertarian left wingers, whose ideas on this subject coincide to a surprising degree, whatever their profound disagreements on other matters. They view the Bolsheviks as conscious deceivers, as power-hungry intellectual zealots posing as the friends of the oppressed, taking advantage of social problems and the discontent of the masses, in order to seize power and impose their authoritarian rule, irrespective of their lack of support amongst the population as a whole.

The other school of thought also combines different political outlooks within a common conceptual framework on this particular issue. This school sees the basis of Bolshevik practice in a combination of a problematic political theory and a highly over-optimistic estimation of the national and international situation. In short, the Bolsheviks were fooling themselves, and were victims of their own illusions, although it must be emphasised that with some adherents to this school, the charge of deception is implicit rather than stated. [1]

I. Bolshevism as Manipulation
The conservative and libertarian critics of Bolshevism consider that the Bolsheviks manipulated their way into positions of leadership within the Russian working class. A leading exponent of the conservative school, John Keep, says that the workers’ militias and the factory councils were established by workers in order to protect their neighbourhoods from unsocial elements, and to defend their jobs and wages, but they were infiltrated by Bolsheviks, who used them as weapons ‘of a single political party which made no secret of its intention to seize state power by insurrectionary means’:

‘Many ordinary red guardsmen, and also members of the factory committees, will scarcely have been able to comprehend the import of this transformation. Driven to near despair by the economic crisis, their nerves kept on edge by incessant propaganda, they responded uncritically to the appeals of a party that promised untold blessings once "soviet power" had been achieved.’ [2]

Keep says that intellectuals played a predominant role within the Bolshevik party due to ‘their natural self-assertiveness, nourished by the traditions of clandestine struggle, [which] encouraged these men to take advantage of their commanding position’, and this enabled them to form a new elite after the October Revolution. [3]

For the Russian anarchist Peter Arshinov, the October Revolution represented the accession to power of the intellectuals, the ‘socialist democracy’, of whom the Bolsheviks were merely the most artful. Comprising ‘a well-defined socio-economic group’, the intellectuals promoted a statist system as ‘the ideology of the new ruling caste’, and the Soviet system was ‘nothing other than the construction of a new class domination over the producers, the establishment of a new socialist power over them’, the plans for which having been ‘elaborated and prepared during several decades by the leaders of the socialist democracy’. [4]

The Bolsheviks promised that this revolution would lead directly ‘to the free realm of socialism and communism’, which seemed plausible to the masses, who were ‘inexperienced in politics’:

‘The participation of the Communist Party [sic] in the destruction of the capitalist regime gave rise to enormous confidence in it. The stratum of intellectual workers who were the carriers of the ideals of the democracy was always so thin and sparse that the masses knew nothing of its existence as a specific economic category. Consequently, at the moment of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the masses saw no one other than themselves who might replace the bourgeoisie. And it was precisely at this moment that the bourgeoisie was in fact replaced by these accidental leaders, the deceitful Bolsheviks, experienced in political demagogy …

‘Thanks to its revolutionary energy and its demagogic confusion of the revolutionary idea of the workers with its own idea of political domination, Bolshevism drew the masses to itself, and made extensive use of their confidence.’ [5]

The Bolsheviks keyed into the sentiments and demands of the popular masses, in order to impose upon them a new form of exploitative society, and used the political inexperience of the masses for their own ends. The Bolsheviks, therefore, hijacked the Russian Revolution in order to become a new ruling elite.

Opportunism, deception, duplicity, dishonesty: these are the reasons given by conservative and libertarian critics of Bolshevism. The conclusion to be drawn is that the Russian masses were suffering from some form of collective naivety in order for them to have believed and followed the Bolsheviks. Despite – or rather because of – the fact that he has amassed considerable evidence to show the rise of the Bolsheviks within the Russian working class, Keep is obliged to explain their success by producing an image of the Russian workers as, on the one hand, essentially naive, gullible and simple-minded, and, on the other hand, scheming, narrow-minded and selfish. Not only were the workers unable to understand that their organisations had been hijacked, they were not really interested in anything outwith the factory gates. Referring to the support for the concept of workers’ control at the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees in October 1917, he asserts:

‘There is little doubt that the majority of the delegates took this slogan in its literal sense as meaning a real transfer of power within the enterprise to the men’s chosen representatives, who were to exercise the function of management in the interests of their electors. Needless to add, they showed no concern whatever for the effects which the full "democratisation" of industrial relations would be bound to have on productivity and the national economy as a whole.’ [6]

And for all the celebration by his political current of the spontaneity of the masses, the anarchist Arshinov is obliged to refer, albeit delicately, to the politically ‘inexperienced’ masses. [7]

Recent scholarship has gone far to dispel many of the orthodoxies of the conspiratorial school, and is able to present a more rational and realistic view of the rise of Bolshevism, especially in respect of the Russian working class. In his study of Petrograd factory workers, Steven Smith considers that ‘it was the struggles of workers in the world of work, and the activities of the work-based organisations, such as the factory committees and trade unions, which were of central importance in promoting revolutionary consciousness in 1917’. He does not deny the ‘crucial part’ played in that development by Bolshevik propaganda and activity, but ‘the Bolsheviks did not themselves create revolutionary feeling; it developed primarily out of attempts by workers to grapple with problems of survival’. [8] Workers’ control developed very rapidly in some sectors, particularly in metalworking (engineering). It was initiated in a spontaneous manner, for various purposes, and developed to varying degrees in different localities and industries. It became more politically aware, especially after May 1917, when the condition of the economy deteriorated, and employers started to take a hard line.

Not having prior to 1917 any idea of actually leading a proletarian seizure of power in the immediate future, and having developed within the traditions of the Second International, the Bolsheviks had no practical theories of workers’ control when it started to appear in the factories. In late May, however, Lenin drafted a resolution which recognised the growth of workers’ control, particularly in Petrograd, and connected it with the need for popular control over not merely industry, but the finance sector, and therefore the economy as a whole, in order to stave off economic collapse. [9] He elaborated this in later pieces, in which he looked at the need for the nationalisation of big business, centralised state control of the economy, and workers’ control of production. [10]

The Bolsheviks were therefore developing a strategy that aimed to shift the concept of workers’ control in individual factories towards popular control of the national economy, which necessitated the soviet seizure of state power. They were attempting to develop a revolutionary consciousness amongst the working class by engaging with them in their struggles over issues within the factories, and showing the workers that the resolution of their problems both at work and in the wider political field could only be solved through their seizing of state power.

Like any political theory, this would be rejected by its audience unless it actually meant something to them. Smith shows how the experiences of many workers made them receptive to the ideas of the Bolsheviks:

‘Strikes were a politicising experience for those who took part in them: they saw with their own eyes how employers were going on investment strike, engaging in lockouts, refusing to accept new contracts or to repair plant; how the government was colluding with the employers, curbing the factory committees and sending troops to quell disorder in the Donbass. The strikes were important, therefore, in making hundreds and thousands of workers aware of political matters and in making the policies of the Bolshevik party attractive to them.’ [11]

In other words, workers were drawn to the Bolsheviks because Bolshevik politics started to make sense. What seemed outlandish or irrelevant during and just after the February Revolution, now increasingly appeared to be quite rational.

Modern scholars do not overlook the less positive features of the workers’ movement. They would not dispute Keep’s statement that some committees tried to keep their factories open by preventing work being sent to provincial enterprises. But they would not move on, as Keep does, from this example to say that the committees in general were only interested in their own factory and not with the working class as a whole. [12] Even if some factory committees were parochially minded, many were forced by necessity to take a broader view. Many workers drew political conclusions from this. Ziva Galili says:

‘These actions implied a two-part position: first, that the state could and should take over the economy in order to regulate it, ensure production and jobs, and redress the imbalance in the apportionment of wealth between workers and employers; and second, that only under the guidance of a government dedicated to the interests of the revolution and democracy would the state perform these functions.’ [13]

These workers recognised that their control of an individual factory would be pointless if there was no overall state administration of industry as a whole:

‘It is thus clear that the issue of industrial order raised that of political order, and the practice of "kontrol", whatever its origins, gave rise to a concept of what the new political order should be. Of course, the connection between the industrial and political orders did not appear with equal clarity to all workers; to some it was merely a dim perception, but the Bolsheviks were ready to articulate, legitimise and exploit it.’ [14]

Bolsheviks had won leading positions in certain trade unions and many factory committees quite early on, and they steadily gained ground at the expense of the moderate socialists, especially in organisations where representatives were directly elected by the workers. Although the Bolsheviks lost popularity after the July Days, they soon revived, and support for the moderate socialists within the working class and the armed forces was soon to start an irreversible slide. The hostility of the moderate socialists to the factory committees, their continued attempts to act as arbitrators under conditions of sharpening class polarisation, their continued support for the war, and their ever louder calls for a coalition government, led to a steady rise in support for the Bolsheviks in the factory committee, union, soviet and municipal elections. [15] An analogous trend, if less developed and defined, was occurring within the armed forces around the demands of the soldiers. [16]

The Bolsheviks’ numerical size and influence grew considerably during 1917, and the rise of the party paralleled the deepening politicisation of the working class, and was indeed part of that process. In her study of the Moscow workers, Diane Koenker says that ‘the process by which the majority of workers identified their interests with the Bolshevik party programme was a product of rational, logical choices that corresponded to the changing political and economic nexus’. [17] This process, which occurred to varying degrees in most urban centres in Russia and its former empire, ultimately brought the overwhelming majority of workers to accept the need for a government based upon the soviets, as they demanded a government that would introduce economic management which they could trust, and make a real effort to gain peace:

‘By October, a wide spectrum of workers favoured soviet power; but since only the Bolshevik party advocated this power as part of their political programme, support for soviet power inevitably translated into support for the Bolshevik party.’ [18]

The Bolsheviks won support within the mass institutions thrown up in 1917 because their policies coincided with the desires and experiences of large numbers of people, particularly amongst the urban working class. Unlike those of other organisations, their policies appeared to correspond to reality, and to show a way forward.

Lenin’s State and Revolution comes under heavy criticism from the conservative-libertarian axis. The council communist Paul Mattick sees the book as an example of gross opportunism:

‘Everything Lenin wrote prior to State and Revolution, and every step taken after the seizure of power, turns the apparent radicalism displayed in this pamphlet into a mere opportunistic move to support the immediate aim of gaining power for the Bolshevik party … It was … not a momentary emotional aberration on the part of Lenin that induced him to grant so much revolutionary self-determination to the workers, but a pragmatic move in the manipulation of the revolution in accordance with his own party concept of the socialist state.’ [19]

A prominent conservative historian, Adam Ulam, says of State and Revolution that ‘no work could be more unrepresentative of its author’s political philosophy and his general state of mind’. But it is not surprising that this work – ‘almost a straightforward profession of anarchism’ – bore so little relationship to his political practice:

‘How indeed could the Bolsheviks come to power if they chose to remind the peasant that Marxism demanded that he forsake his small plot and work as a hired hand on a state-run farm? Or the worker that he must submit to the state-appointed factory director, the soldier that the proletarian dictatorship would not tolerate the lax discipline of the post-February army?’ [20]

It is true that State and Revolution stands in marked contrast with much of Lenin’s other writings. But does that make it a work of mere opportunism or trickery? If anything, State and Revolution is a theoretical work that is extremely abstract in its approach. Most of it consists of a polemic against the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. Lenin never managed to write the chapter that dealt with Russia, and its practical use in the October Revolution was ruled out as it was not published until 1918.

Its theoretical nature is clear as it does not refer to the specific features of Russia in 1917. The only references to Russia are brief criticisms of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. [21] If anything, it was aimed at a country more suited for a ‘classical’ socialist revolution. State and Revolution investigates the question of socialist revolution in the abstract. Whilst it is unwarranted to consider it as a work of deception on Lenin’s part, it was not – nor could be – a blueprint for Bolshevism in Russia. [22]

II. Bolshevism as Self-Delusion
Bolshevism underwent a dramatic change in early 1917. The experience of the February Revolution led Lenin to re-evaluate the Bolsheviks’ strategy. Up until then, the party had considered that the bourgeois revolution in Russia would lead to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry within the confines of a bourgeois republic, a theory which Hal Draper has rightly described as ‘an invitation to a muddle’. [23] In his April Theses Lenin declared that the Provisional Government could not be supported as it could not solve the problems facing Russia, and that power must reside in a government based upon the soviets. Despite encountering opposition from various leading Bolsheviks (not to mention the bemusement of most other Russian socialists), his call for a soviet government struck a positive chord with many party members [24], and the Bolshevik conference in April 1917 endorsed this position.

EH Carr refers to the ‘real problem’ flowing from the Bolsheviks’ political re-evaluation:

‘It may well have been true, as the rapid disintegration of the February Revolution seemed to show, that bourgeois democracy and bourgeois capitalism on the Western model, which was what the Mensheviks wanted and expected, could not be rooted in Russian soil, so that Lenin’s policy was the only conceivable one in the empirical terms of current Russian politics … But what this policy committed its sponsors to was nothing less than to make a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organisation.’ [25]

It is this question which, to a large degree, forms the basis of the criticisms of Bolshevism presented by the second school of thought, rather than a preoccupation with political manipulation.

The Mensheviks’ paper Rabochaia Gazeta responded to Lenin’s April Theses by saying that counter-revolution could only be staved off so long as the Russian Revolution was ‘able to remain within the limits’ which were ‘predetermined by the objective necessity (the state of the productive forces, the level of mentality of the masses of people corresponding to it, etc)’. Lenin’s ultra-radicalism, whilst appealing to ‘the most cherished aspirations of the proletariat’, was playing into the hands of reaction, as the possibility of bringing those aspirations into being was ‘illusory’, and ‘the backward majority’ of Russia would be roused against the gains of the February Revolution. [26] In July 1917 the Mensheviks’ leadership denied that the ‘internal chaos’ in Russia, the disruption of the economy, the imminent famine and unemployment could be countered by the Bolsheviks seizing power: ‘No, because no seizure whatever will furnish bread to the people; on the contrary it will merely aggravate the general disorganisation, will create a panic, that is, an absurd, senseless fear, mutual distrust and bitterness.’ The statement condemned the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’ as they were supported by only a minority of the population, and it was essential to retain the support of ‘those bourgeois elements’ who still wished ‘to defend … the conquests of the revolution’. [27] The Mensheviks considered that the October Revolution represented the foisting upon Russia of ‘a utopian programme’ that was ‘radically out of keeping with the backward state of the country’, and which could only be pursued in opposition to the majority of the population. [28]

In early 1919 the left wing Menshevik Yuli Martov produced a substantial critique of Bolshevism. He said that the Bolsheviks’ methods were derived from their political impatience. Wishing ‘to jump over the historic inertia of the masses’, their desire to find ‘political instruments that might best express the genuine will of the majority’ resulted in ‘the organisation of a minority dictatorship’. [29] Their impatience was greatly reinforced by the ‘economic retrogression’ that had occurred during the war. The organisation of society appeared to be an easy task, and the most militant workers had reverted to a crude anarchistic conception of the transition towards socialism through ‘the destruction of the state and not by the conquest of the state’. Although ‘Lenin himself did not realise it’, this would lead to the creation of a bureaucratic and repressive state, which would be presented to the masses ‘as the destruction of the old state machinery, as the rise of a society based on a minimum of repression and discipline, as the birth of a stateless society’:

‘On the one hand, such illusions are manipulated by certain extremist minorities of the socialist proletariat. On the other hand, these groups are themselves the slaves of these illusions. It is under the influence of this double factor that these minorities act when they seek to find a practical medium by which they might elude the difficulties connected with the realisation of a real class dictatorship… Fundamentally, this anarchist illusion of the destruction of the state covers up the tendency to concentrate all the state power of constraint in the hands of a minority, which believes neither in the objective logic of the revolution nor in the class consciousness of the proletarian majority and, with still greater reason, that of the national majority.’ [30]

Martov considered that the Bolsheviks did manipulate their constituency, but this was due more to their own illusions than to purely political manoeuvring. Dubious tactics were not the main problem, there was a deeper factor. As part of a long-standing tradition of revolutionary impatience, they reflected the consciousness of part of the working class. Martov considered Bolshevism to be a dangerous political deviation, which could only be a disaster for the Russian working class and for the cause of socialism in general.

The international dimension of the October Revolution is of prime importance, indeed, it is the axis around which Bolshevik policies revolved in 1917, and their whole political orientation during this period cannot be understood unless the international dimension is taken into account. The Bolsheviks recognised that the inability of a government based upon parliamentary democracy to deal with the deepening problems which it was confronting meant that the choice of government for Russia was between one based upon the organisations thrown up from below during and after the February Revolution, and some form of right wing authoritarian administration.

Trotsky recognised shortly after the 1905 Revolution that the leading role played by the working class in any future revolution in Russia would necessarily present it with the need to seize state power. However, he also recognised that proletarian power could only be guaranteed through the proletariat seizing power in the advanced capitalist countries. The Russian proletariat would ‘have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and hence the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe’. [31] The adoption by the Bolsheviks of Trotsky’s schema meant that whilst they were impelled to seize power in Russia, their regime could only survive through proletarian revolutions occurring in the advanced capitalist countries.

This was a high risk strategy, but, as Alexander Rabinowitch says, Lenin ‘was obsessed by the thought that all of the major European countries were on the threshold of socialist revolution and that a proletarian insurrection in Russia would be the spark that would spur desperate, peace-hungry workers everywhere to rise against their governments’. [32] Everything ultimately hinged upon this, and the Bolsheviks’ rivals appeared not to have recognised its centrality. [33] Isaac Deutscher speaks of the Bolsheviks’ ‘passionate, almost Messianic, belief’ in this, and how ‘the dazzling blaze of this great vision brightened in their eyes even the darkest aspects of the legacy they were taking over’. [34] Robert Service says that Lenin was hopelessly over-optimistic, and ‘was mistaking war-weariness and political discontent for a pan-European revolutionary situation’, although he recognises that conservatives and liberals across Europe thought much the same. [35]

Whilst many scholars reject the conspiratorial view of the Bolsheviks’ relationship with the working class, they do not overlook the problems involved with it, and with the closely related issue of the Bolsheviks’ industrial policy. Service considers that Lenin gravely underestimated the depth of the economic crisis in Russia during 1917, and that his statements that the economic problems in Russia could easily be rectified by a soviet regime were due to his own underestimation of the problems. [36] He concludes: ‘If Lenin fooled the workers in 1917, it was partly because he fooled himself to a considerable extent. The same could be said for many other leading Bolsheviks.’ [37]

Whilst the Bolsheviks played an active part in the factory committees and other mass institutions, and help to widen the scope of workers’ control into the quest for the regulation of the national economy by a soviet regime, they were unable to devise an economic strategy that could combine local initiative with central planning. Lenin’s writings on the subject show, as Marcel Liebman says, a ‘deeply democratic inspiration’ [38], but they are not much more than a statement of intent, and are only a little more substantial than the abstractions of State and Revolution. In 1917 Lenin saw the basis of a new society in the activity of the masses and in the vast array of institutions they had formed. As Liebman says:

‘The men and women whom he called upon to govern independently, and to whom he wished to see entrusted the conduct of public affairs, were the same working men and women who had succeeded in breaking through the innumerable forms of conservative conditioning …’ [39]

In the rising tide of mass activity in 1917, it was as if Lenin could only see the positive side of the masses, and was temporarily blind to the negative aspects: the low cultural level (illiteracy, drunkenness, etc.). The Bolsheviks were to find that the running of the economy was far more problematic than they had anticipated.

Nevertheless, it would be one-sided to see this purely as self-delusion. It was also a political problem. The Bolsheviks were faced with issues which had never been a practical matter for the socialist movement. Smith says that the general industrial theory of the Second International, from which the Bolsheviks had not broken, had limited its conception of production to its technical aspects, and ignored the wider social issues involved in modern industry. [40] Sam Farber dismisses the idea that the Bolsheviks were cynically using the factory committees as a means to help them to seize power, and says:

‘In the last analysis, the key political problem was that Lenin and the mainstream of the Bolshevik party, or for that matter the Mensheviks, paid little if any attention to the need for a transformation and democratisation of the daily life of the working class on the shopfloor and in the community. These political traditions were even less likely to see this transformation and democratisation as an essential part of the process by which that class could indeed become the ruling class.’ [41]

In power with the economy in a state of collapse and the working class starting to disintegrate, with no common policy or concrete ideas within the party on how to combine local industrial initiatives with central economic administration, not to mention a whole host of other problems, the Bolsheviks took the easy option of imposing a strictly centralised industrial policy, and restricting the scope of activity of factory committees.

III. The Sins of Omission
The Bolsheviks have been accused of deliberate chicanery or short-term opportunism in policy formulation, and of failing to point out the longer-term consequences of their policies. Most observers, including many modern scholars, consider that the Bolsheviks promoted an opportunist agrarian policy. Lenin’s policy shifted in 1917, moving away from the demand to nationalise the land towards permitting the entire peasantry to divide it up amongst themselves. Indeed, he lifted his entire agrarian programme from the Socialist Revolutionaries. Service says that Lenin ‘was not at all disconcerted by the accusation that he had stolen another party’s policy’:

‘The result was not intellectual coherence… He desired theoretical consistency and Marxist justification if he could obtain it; but it was not his absolute priority. He had a revolutionary’s urgent sense that something needed to be done and that mistakes and uncertainties had to be accepted as an unavoidable cost.’ [42]

And yet it can be legitimately argued that the Bolsheviks had little choice in this matter. As Deutscher says, ‘they sanctioned the share-out accomplished by the peasantry itself’. [43] The Bolsheviks were not in a position to influence to any real degree the peasants’ redistribution of the land.

The Bolsheviks have been accused of hiding their ultimate policy of agricultural collectivisation, so as not to alienate the peasantry. [44] Carr’s explanation is a little more ambiguous, saying that ‘in the turbulent atmosphere of revolutionary tactics a proposition of little immediate relevance and no appeal to the peasant easily dropped into the background’. [45] Nevertheless, whatever the short-term benefits to the Bolsheviks of their adaptation to and endorsement of the peasants’ struggle for land during 1917, the consequences of these tactics were soon to pose severe problems for them.

Similarly, the Bolsheviks have been accused of opportunism in respect of the national question, although modern scholars see it as being due to political expediency, rather than to pure deception and dishonesty. Richard Pipes, a leading conservative writer, says that the inability of the Provisional Government to assert its authority within the non-Russian areas of the former empire permitted the Bolsheviks, who were ‘concentrating on the seizure of power and unhampered by any moral scruples or constitutional considerations’, to manipulate the aspirations of the non-Russian masses for their own advantage, as they ‘had no intention of respecting the principle of national self-determination’ once in power. Lenin saw national struggles ‘as something to exploit’, as ‘a psychological weapon’. [46] Service, on the other hand, says that Lenin considered it ‘wiser to leave the non-Russian areas’ of the former empire ‘to stoke up their own anger against the Provisional Government and to await further developments’. [47]

Here too it can be argued that the situation was largely outwith their control, as although, as Stephen Jones says, ‘non-Russian perceptions of the Bolshevik stance on the national question, involving a commitment to national self-determination and to the defence of national rights, were probably not unfavourable’ [48], they were weak in many non-Russian areas, and the party was more divided on this issue than on any other. Once again, however, once in power, democratic slogans, however sincerely believed in, and tactics based upon short-term political expediency, were soon to clash with policies based upon reasons of state.

Conservative and libertarian commentators customarily claim that the Bolsheviks deliberately concealed their real intentions of one party rule. Others would dispute this conspiratorial view, yet they would concur with this statement from Keep:

‘Most ordinary members of urban soviets, and even the political activists to whom they looked for guidance, expected the overthrow of the "bourgeois" Provisional Government to lead to the creation of a coalition regime representing all those factions and tendencies that stood for immediate peace and radical social change. Hardly anyone wanted single party rule.’ [49]

It is true that many of those who supported the concept of a soviet government visualised it as some kind of coalition of the various socialist parties, but it is equally true, as we have seen, that as 1917 drew by the Bolsheviks were increasingly seen as the only party that would bring about a soviet government.

But were the Bolsheviks intending to introduce a one party state? Whilst Lenin and Trotsky did not wish to share power with the mainstream Menshevik and right wing Socialist Revolutionary leaders, other party leaders called for a broad coalition after the establishment of a Soviet regime, and even resigned from the government when this failed to materialise. The mainstream Mensheviks and right wing Socialist Revolutionaries, in a move which Keep calls ‘politically short-sighted’ [50], walked out of the national Soviet congress that was held subsequent to the overthrow of the Provisional Government, followed by the Menshevik Internationalists, thus giving the Bolsheviks more or less full sway to form a government of their choice. The Mensheviks and right wing Socialist Revolutionaries then proposed a government with the conditions that Lenin and Trotsky be excluded, key posts be held by non-Bolsheviks, no single party to have a majority, and that it be responsible to an assembly along the lines of the State Conference, which would not reflect the true strength of the Bolsheviks. Such conditions, as Deutscher puts it, ‘amounted to a demand that the Bolsheviks should declare the October Revolution null and void, that they should disarm themselves in the face of their enemies, and that they themselves should ostracise the inspirer and leader of the insurrection’, [51] things which were unacceptable even to the most moderate Bolshevik.

A coalition Soviet government was established with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Its members played important roles in both the government and state apparatus, including the secret police. They resigned from the government after the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, they were not expelled from it, and they only fell into direct conflict with the Bolsheviks after they had staged an armed uprising against the government.

Rather than envisaging a one party state, the evidence points to Lenin and Trotsky seeking a soviet government in which the Bolsheviks, as the party which enjoyed mass support in increasing numbers of soviets and committees and was the main driving force for a soviet government, would play a predominant role, but which would work with other parties that wholeheartedly supported the concept of a soviet government. This explains both their hostility towards the Mensheviks and the right wing Socialist Revolutionaries, and their willingness to work with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. This is not to deny that by the fact of being the party that most consistently demanded and fought for a soviet government, the Bolsheviks identified the revolution with their political pre-eminence, and predicated the survival of the revolution upon it, and this, especially under the increasingly difficult conditions after the October Revolution, led to them monopolising political power. But it is wrong to assume that this course of events was either premeditated or preordained.

Some commentators have pointed to the gaps in Lenin’s public statements during the period between the February and October Revolutions. Service, for example, says that ‘Lenin cannot have wanted to upset popular sensibilities unnecessarily’ with talk about terror and dictatorship, and he ‘never satisfactorily explained precisely how to effect’ his political strategy of ‘a combination of the revolution from above with the revolution from below’, although he does not think that this was necessarily due to deviousness on Lenin’s part. [52]

There were many significant lacunae in Lenin’s writings. Many of the problems involved in the seizure of power by a proletarian party and in the exercise of power under a soviet regime could not be addressed in advance. The quest for a soviet government in 1917 was very much a step into the dark. The Bolsheviks had no historical precedents apart from the short-lived Paris Commune on which they could base themselves and from which they could learn. The Second International, from which the Bolsheviks had only recently broken, had had no experience of leading a revolution, let alone wielding power. The lack on the part of the Bolsheviks of any worked out theories in respect of the issues involved during 1917 and afterwards – not least the crucial factors of the relationship between the revolutionary party and the working class, and the mechanics of a regime based upon mass organisations – was not accidental. It was not a deceitful attempt to hide the future subordination of the proletariat to the ruling party, rather, it was a question of imponderables.

IV. Conclusion: Time For an Objective Assessment
The re-evaluation of Bolshevik strategy in early 1917 shifted the further development of the revolution in Russia from a national to an international dimension. The establishment of the Soviet regime in backward Russia was in response to the inability of the Provisional Government to deal with domestic problems, and was to be a detonator for proletarian revolutions in the advanced countries of Western Europe. Indeed, Trotsky said that Lenin ‘regarded the very conquest of power in Russia primarily as the impetus for a European revolution, a thing which, as he often repeated, was to have incomparably more importance for the fate of humanity than the revolution in backward Russia’. [53] It was this factor that encouraged the Bolsheviks to work for the seizure of power in a country which was backward and unready in itself for a socialist transformation, and it was the urgency of firing this detonator which encouraged them to take all manner of short cuts to weaken the political and administrative authority of the Provisional Government. That is why they encouraged the struggles of the peasants for land redistribution and the nationalities for autonomy and independence, irrespective of the longer-term problems that would ensue.

Nobody can deny that the Bolsheviks employed opportunist tactics in their day to day work, politicians invariably do, and the other parties in Russia were by no means innocent in this respect. But it is incorrect to claim, as the conservative and libertarian observers do, that this constituted the entirety of Bolshevik practice. The Bolsheviks’ push for state power was not based upon a narrow quest for power as such. They saw themselves as the only organisation that could seize power in Russia and thus spark off the European revolutionary upsurge. In many respects, Bolshevism in power was a holding operation, clinging onto state power under very difficult conditions whilst waiting for proletarian revolutions to occur in Western Europe. In doing so, the consequences of their opportunist tactics became clear as discontent arose amongst the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. Similarly, their political shortcomings in respect of the relationship between the party and the working class led them to tackle economic problems through bureaucratic centralising measures, which alienated sections of their working class constituency, and brought to the forefront a paternalistic attitude that had been transcended to a large extent during 1917.

The Bolsheviks considered that their relationship with the working class was unproblematic, and they had no idea as to what they should do if their support within the working class fell away once they had taken power. But their holding onto power when disaffection amongst the working class became evident cannot be explained by a crude lust for power on their part. The Bolsheviks viewed their seizure of power as a qualitative historical shift forwards, not merely as part of the to and fro of a parliamentary regime. They assumed that the tide of history was running in their favour, and felt that any relinquishing of power would be disastrous, set the course of history into reverse, and cause great demoralisation within the proletariat on an international level. It was these factors, rather than any specific desire for power and predilection for manipulation and deceit, that lay behind the contrast between the aims of the Bolsheviks and the manner in which they came to power and subsequently acted.

Having long been confronted by a deluge of anti-Bolshevik material from the conspiratorial school, anti-Stalinist Marxists, particularly but not exclusively those in and around the Trotskyist movement, have clung to a rather romantic, uncritical view of Bolshevism, which does not challenge except in detail the Stalinist view of an unproblematic relationship between the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state and the proletariat during the period of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Sufficient scholarship on the subject has now been produced to undermine the conspiratorial school, specifically by proving the existence of a conscious mass base for the Bolsheviks in 1917. However, these very same commentators have brought into relief the problems that arose in respect of the relationship between the party and state and the proletariat once the Bolsheviks had taken power. If some of these problems were specific to the Russian experience, and are therefore of historical interest, then others are no less relevant to the development of a Marxian movement today, and need to be discussed.

The Russian Revolution remains a major landmark both in history in general and for the Marxian movement. We must neither demonise nor sanctify the Bolsheviks, but attempt to understand both their positive and negative aspects. Recent scholarship permits us to go beyond the traditional clichés and mythologies, and to attempt to construct a truly objective appraisal. This article is only a start, and I am sure that other contributors to New Interventions will develop the discussion.

Notes
1. The two schools of thought are by no means homogenous, and there are considerable differences of opinion and emphasis within them. Neither are they totally separate, and adherents to one school may well concur with ideas more generally associated with the other. Cf. R. Service, The Industrial Workers, and E. Acton, Epilogue, in R. Service (ed.), Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution, Basingstoke 1992, pp.147ff., 167ff.

2. J.L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilisation, London, 1976, p.95. ‘Mass Manipulation’ would be a more suitable subtitle.

3. Ibid., p.123.

4. P Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918-1921, London 1987, pp.34-5.

5. Ibid., pp.76-7.

6. Keep, op. cit., p.89.

7. Arshinov, op. cit., p.76.

8. S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917-1918, Cambridge 1983, p.3.

9. V.I. Lenin, Resolution on Measures to Cope with Economic Disorganisation, Collected Works, Volume 24, Moscow 1977, pp.513-5.

10. V.I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, Collected Works, Volume 25, Moscow 1977, pp.327ff., and Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Collected Works, Volume 26, Moscow 1977, pp.89ff.

11. Smith, op. cit., pp.116-8. Diane Koenker’s study of the Moscow workers makes the same point. She says that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries lost support amongst the workers due to their conciliatory approach to the employers:

‘The Bolsheviks… had offered the most consistent class interpretation of the revolution, and by late summer their interpretation appeared more and more to correspond to reality. The language of class struggle provided workers who had no theoretical understanding of Marx with a familiar conceptual tool with which to understand the actions of the Provisional Government… The combination of theory and experience had produced Moscow’s class consciousness.’ (D. Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, Princeton, 1981, p.364)

In his study of the red guards and workers’ militias, Rex Wade clearly shows the relationship between their politicisation and the rising influence of Bolshevism amongst them (cf. R.A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution, Stamford 1984, pp.285ff.).

12. Keep, op. cit., p.88.

13. Z. Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies, Princeton 1989, p.377.

14. Ibid.

15. For evidence of this cf. D. Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918, London 1984, pp.221ff., 345ff.; A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, London 1979, pp.154ff; T. Cliff, Lenin: All Power to the Soviets, London 1976, pp.285ff.; O.H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917, New York 1958, pp.430, 433.

16. Marc Ferro says that after July, ‘there was a Bolshevisation of slogans, watchwords and arguments’ in the army: ‘In both front and rear, the popularity of Lenin’s party went up, since he was thought to want an immediate peace, all power for the soviets, and a social revolution.’ (M. Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, London 1980, p.80)

17. Koenker, op. cit., p.362.

18. Ibid.

19. P. Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?, London 1983, pp.233-4.

20. A. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia, London 1966, pp.353-4, original emphasis.

21. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 25, op. cit., p.408, 421, 428.

22. In the second volume of his biography of Lenin, Tony Cliff describes State and Revolution as ‘a perfect synthesis of theory and practice’:

‘In State and Revolution there is a remarkable combination of scientific sobriety and real will for action. It is the apex of Lenin’s writing – his real testament. It became the guide for the first victorious proletarian revolution and is bound to grow in importance in future revolutionary struggles.’ (Cliff, op. cit., p.327)

Cliff overlooks the fact that on the practical level State and Revolution does not go beyond generalities, and ones which were to prove extremely difficult to adhere to in the harsh realities of Russia in 1917. Paul LeBlanc similarly overlooks the abstract nature of Lenin’s book (P. LeBlanc, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, New Jersey, 1990, pp.393-4). Marcel Liebman, however, says that State and Revolution ‘shows glaring weaknesses where one of the most important and most difficult problems is concerned, namely, that of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (M. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, London 1980, p.193).

23. H. Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin, New York 1987, p.86.

24. Cf. R. Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change 1917-1923, London 1979, p.39.

25. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Part 1, Harmondsworth 1977, pp.110-1.

26. Rabochaia Gazeta, 6 April 1917, cited in A Ascher (ed.), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, London 1976, p.94.

27. Statement of the RSDLP Organising Committee, July 1917, cited in ibid., p.98.

28. RSDLP Party Conference Resolution, 27 December 1918-1 January 1919, cited in ibid., p.109.

29. Y. Martov, Decomposition or Conquest of the State, The State and the Socialist Revolution, London, 1977, p.27.

30. Ibid., pp.47-8.

31. L.D. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York 1974, p.115.

32. Rabinowitch, op. cit., p.xix.

33. Draper says that in his polemics against the Bolsheviks, Kautsky also repeatedly ‘posed the problems of socialist revolution in Russia in its national isolation’ (Draper, op. cit., p.132).

34. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, Oxford 1979, p.318. But he also speaks of Trotsky’s ‘ever-recurring dialogue with the sceptic’ who doubted that Western Europe was on the verge of revolutionary upheavals (ibid., p.266).

35. R. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, Basingstoke 1991, p.242.

36. Ibid., p.233.

37. Service, The Industrial Workers, op. cit., p.160.

38. Liebman, op. cit., p.195.

39. Ibid., p.208, original emphasis.

40. Smith, op. cit., p.263.

41. S. Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, London 1990, pp.72-3, original emphasis. Maurice Brinton, a libertarian who has transcended the usual conspiracy theories of his political current, says that ‘the “proletarian” nature of the [Bolshevik] regime was seen by nearly all the Bolshevik leaders as hinging on the proletarian nature of the party that had taken state power’:

‘None of them saw the proletarian nature of the Russian regime as primarily and crucially dependent on the exercise of workers’ power at the point of production … The Bolshevik leaders saw the capitalist organisation of production as something which, in itself, was socially useful … What was wrong with capitalist methods of production, in Lenin’s eyes, was that they had in the past served the bourgeoisie. They were now going to be used by the workers’ state and would thereby become "one of the conditions of socialism".’ (M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921: The State and Counter-Revolution, London 1970, pp.42-3, original emphasis)

42. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, op. cit., p.237.

43. Deutscher, op. cit., p.315.

44. L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London 1970, p.189.

45. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Part 2, Harmondsworth 1966, p.37.

46. R. Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923, Cambridge 1957, pp.49, 51, 53.

47. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, op. cit., p.232.

48. S. Jones, The Non-Russian Nationalities, in Service (ed.), Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution, op. cit., p.41.

49. Keep, op. cit., p.306. Cf. Rabinowitch, op. cit., p.314.

50. Keep, op. cit., p.313.

51. Deutscher, op. cit., p.331.

52. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, op. cit., pp.226. In respect of the first factor, he adds that Lenin may well have thought that ‘resistance to Bolshevism would be small and that he would “need” to use little violence’ (ibid., p.291), and that, in respect of the second factor, his ‘general strategy’ of revolution, ‘for all its theoretical gaps and subterfuges, did not lack sincerity’ (ibid., p.298).

53. L.D. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, London 1977, p.980.