Jairus Banaji: A Hundred Years After October Revolution, Rethinking the Origins of Stalinism
It should be obvious by now that the regime that came to be known as Stalinism
wasn’t born overnight, but emerged in a succession of fatal steps over the
greater part of the early 1920s. If this was not sufficiently clear already
from E.H. Carr’s magisterial, multi-volume History of Soviet Russia,
it is now abundantly evident in the most recent accounts to appear, based on
the wealth of new documentation that has been thrown open in the post-Soviet
state and party archives, in work like Barbara Allen’s
fascinating biography of Alexander Shlyapnikov and Simon Pirani’s
methodical analysis of the revolution’s “retreat” which deals with the period
from 1920 to 1924. To this new, post-Soviet scholarship one can now add the
expanded translation of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary published
in 2012, restoring nearly 200 cuts that Serge’s translator Peter Sedgwick had
been forced to make to the original translation.
That the October
Revolution ended in the monstrous counter-finality of Stalinism remains the
real challenge for the Left, especially those sectors of it that claim some
part of the revolution’s legacy. To learn from October is to learn from and
about its defeat, about why a truly workers’ state never emerged and developed
in the years when it should have, and what went wrong to preempt that from
happening. Given the fact that
Bolshevism stemmed from a tradition of revolutionary socialism, the most
startling fact about the revolution itself was how rapidly the goal of workers’
control of the economy was given up. “Workers’ control had been
abandoned in the winter of 1917–18,” Carr states laconically in The
Interregnum 1923–1924. “The factory committees launched the slogan of
workers’ control of production quite independently of the Bolshevik party”, but
it was the “willingness of the Bolsheviks to support this demand which was a
central reason for their growing appeal”, so runs a crucial argument in Steve
Smith’s book Red Petrograd.
Yet Vladimir Lenin
saw the factory committees “as a means of helping the Bolshevik Party to seize
power”. They were, for him, simply organs of insurrection, not, as the Turin
factory councils would be for Antonio Gramsci in 1919, “embryos of the
proletarian state”. If Lenin abandoned the factory committees in the early part
of 1918, as Allen tells us, this was doubtless
because “the ‘proletarian’ nature of the regime was seen by nearly all the
Bolshevik leaders as hinging on the proletarian nature of the
Party that had taken state power” (this is the substance of Brinton’s
critique in The Bolsheviks and
Workers’ Control). Embedded in this assimilation between party and
class was the ‘ultra-Bolshevik’ idea that the party was by definition a sort of
distilled repository of class consciousness, an incarnation of the ‘advanced
sectors’ of the working class… read more:
See also:
Alexander Rabinowitch:
The Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections
Marcel van der Linden:
Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same
The Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections
Marcel van der Linden:
Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same
