CHAPTER 5

THE LOGIC OF BOLSHEVIK POST- CAPITALIST SOCIETY

Few, if any, of the anti-capitalist followers of Lenin have identified major mistakes in the practices of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the construction of a post-capitalist society. nOR have they Sufficiently considered the logic of Bolshevik policies, dialectical or otherwise. The same statement applies also to the followers of Trotsky, who simply position Trotsky alongside Lenin. Blinded by their own hero worship these followers imagine that the Bolsheviks, whilst guided by Lenin and/or Trotsky, achieved unimaginable heights of revolutionary anti-capitalist insight. More often than not they conclude that the reason the Bolsheviks didn't succeed in bringing about a non-oppressive society in the long run, was because circumstances conspired against them. Such uncritical deference, together with the overwhelming tendency toward sectarianism, has meant that those who have followed in the footsteps of Bolshevism have been unable in practice to defend the revolutionary anti-capitalist theories of Marx, let alone advance or develop them. Their analysis of Stalinist and Bolshevik degeneration often produces more heat than light and adds little to that provided by Trotsky.

The failure to develop non-exploitative communal practices in Russia and of revolutionary theory to take root in any working class communities since that time, is invariably attributed, by them, to external or 'historic' factors. Instead of self-criticism, so-called 'objective' circumstances are repeatedly wheeled into discussions to explain each and every setback. So unconvincing are these explanations that they persuade few outside their small groups and not everyone within them. Yet in the post-capitalist socio-economic experiment undertaken by the Bolsheviks in Russia between 1917 and 1923, mistakes were undoubtedly made - and fundamental ones at that! So fundamental, that in the eyes of many working people, the anti-capitalist struggle has been rejected or abandoned as a realistic option. This is also true of many middle-class citizens who would perhaps otherwise be attracted not only to the vision, but to the practice of a better and more humane society.

Despite protestations from the sectarian Leninist and Trotskyist left, that socialist egalitarian political and economic forms were still surviving until the untimely (!) death of Lenin and the loss of the 'cream' of the working class, large numbers of class-conscious workers and anti-capitalists remain unconvinced. Such one-sided apologetic views also fail to recognise that for such a scenario to be even remotely true, then the successful outcome of an anti-capitalist revolution would depend, not upon the mass of ordinary people in struggle, as Marx considered, but on the political elite leading it. This would be nothing other than a bourgeois view of politics. Such an outlook does not bode well for ordinary working people and, as we shall see, is at odds with the opinions held by Marx. Yet a serious question remains for those still convinced of the need for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system; to what extent did the mistakes of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks actually contribute to the ultimate collapse of the large-scale international anti-capitalist struggle and the triumph of the ultra-oppressive and exploitative system of Stalinism?

In one sense it would be wrong to attribute any mistakes of the dominant tendency within Bolshevism to all members of the Bolshevik Party. There were many internal party groups in the Bolshevik Party who opposed the policies of Lenin and the majority after the revolutionary overthrow in October 1917. Not all the oppositional writings are available to assess whether their views represented a better way forward than the majority position. However, from the little that is known, it would appear, at least to this author, that some of these internal oppositions had begun to grasp, no matter how imperfectly, the nature of the wrong turnings made by the Bolshevik majority under the leadership of Lenin. Nonetheless, even these opposition groups still remained within the Bolshevik (and later Communist) Party, their differences being considered by themselves as insufficient for them to leave. As we saw in the last chapter they also accepted the rule against factions passed at the Tenth Congress. Since it is the majority position which is accepted within politics, then those who stayed within the party must bear some share of responsibility for the policies they then went on to collectively implement. In this context it must also be said, that more often than not the Bolshevik majority position was, as we have seen in the last chapter, also the position of Lenin.

The logical starting point for an analysis of Bolshevik mistakes would seem to be any mistakes openly admitted by the Bolsheviks themselves. However, as with their followers, such admissions are few and far between and where they do occur they are usually over secondary issues. An example is Lenin's assertion that the Bolsheviks had made a mistake by being too easy on the Mensheviks. Lenin's contention in 1920 that the party was sick, was a further example. Acknowledgements by Lenin, as early as 1918, that bribery and corruption had a firm grip within the party and state, is another. Admitting that unreliable elements were gaining entry into the Bolshevik ranks and that red-tape and bureaucratic practices were endemic by 1923, are others. These may seem bad enough in a party dedicated to bringing an end to Capitalist exploitation, oppression and corruption, but there is worse. Yet even such public admissions, whilst serious, were more in the nature of symptoms rather than causes.

The sickness, identified by Lenin, was clearly a symptom of old party traditions and practices being continued in a new situation. The bribery and corruption he identified was undoubtedly a symptom, and not a cause, of unequal power relationships which then became intensified during a situation of food and other material shortages. Unreliable elements creeping into the Bolshevik party organisation and state departments were a direct consequence of having an elitist political power structure which acted as a pole of attraction. The Red-tape he frequently decried was simply a symptom of bureaucratic methods of working. Bureaucracy, a frequent target of fierce criticism by Lenin and Trotsky, was itself a direct result of organisational specialism, centralism and hierarchy introduced by the Bolsheviks. Thus a pursuit of such openly made, but secondary admissions, would be somewhat sterile for our purposes. If a bureaucracy is created, and organisationally sustained, for example, then it is to be expected that bureaucratic practices and red-tape will emanate from it. In this case we must question whether the creation of a centralised hierarchy (bureaucracy) was an appropriate mechanism with which to progress toward non-oppressive and non-exploitative forms of economic production and social organisation.

If we are to advance our understanding of the degeneration of Bolshevik anti-capitalism beyond the reiteration of the symptoms identified by Lenin and Trotsky, we must probe beyond these important but not fundamental problems. For our purposes we must look at mistakes, which led directly or indirectly to many of the difficulties identified by Lenin and later generations of revolutionary anti-capitalists. This should include those factors attributed to external or 'objective' circumstances. Such an appraisal should be done from the standpoint of the needs and interests of the working and oppressed classes. Either of these reference points requires us to examine Bolshevism and Leninism, in terms of the purposes of revolution and the organisational methods used to achieve success.

Hierarchy, Centralism and Party dictatorship.

We have seen from the previous chapter that a reasonably detailed review of the writings of Lenin over the years the Bolsheviks were in power provides a pattern of responses to events and working people, which is quite revealing. Although not using Lenin's exact words, these Bolshevik views can be summarised in the following way.

A) Socialism can only be realised on the basis of a highly industrialised, centralised, planned, state-run economy.

B) Workers will have to voluntarily accept the work discipline of the state planners or be compelled to accept it.

C) Workers cannot consider themselves trusted as communists until they are tested and approved by the Bolshevik Party. (In Lenin's terms until they voluntarily give their labour for nothing.)

D) Workers and peasants are by and large too uncultured to run their own affairs.

E) The politics of Bolshevism/Leninism alone must guide all aspects of post-capitalist political, economic and social life.

To put such concepts forward as logical, as Lenin did repeatedly, requires accepting the logic which flows from them. If we subscribe to any one of those points as valid, then a top-down model of society emerges. Accepting all of these creates a top-down coercive and oppressive model of society. If a post-capitalist society is envisaged to be a definite set of economic and social relations, as is implicit in the concept of a centralised planned economy (point A), then certain things flow from this. If all the above concepts are adhered to then such a society would of course need a centralised structure and detailed plans. According to such a model, an elite group of technical specialists (chosen incidentally by another elite group of political officials) would be necessary to draw up the plans. A further, middle group would be required to distribute instructions, organise and oversee the implementation of the plans. Then there would need to be a mass of workers who would do the building, the construction and the production. This scenario leads to anything but a classless society. It might not have capitalists at the top, but it leads directly to a new class-dominated structure in society. This was exactly the result achieved under the Bolshevik form of anti-capitalism and post-capitalist reconstruction.

We have read Lenin on the use of specialists; his insistence on appointing officials and the need for differential pay levels. We have also noted his stress on the need for trusted and capable men to be placed in key positions in the state and we have recognised his concern for workers to raise the productivity of their labour. Furthermore if post-capitalist forms of production were eventually to become world-wide economic and social systems, as Lenin also considered, then these hierarchical structures would need to exist on a world wide scale. Lenin's perspective of bringing together, the 'advanced' revolutionary politics of Russia, with the 'advanced' economies of Europe, was implicitly based upon such international hierarchical concepts of planning and organisation.

Working people, in such a national and eventually international, post-capitalist system, would simply have to accept the work discipline (point B above) decided upon by the planners and organisers. In this context we have already noted Lenin's emphasis on propaganda and the education of workers to accept managerial discipline. If persuasion failed, workers would be declared counter-revolutionary and be forced into a pattern of work discipline. In relation to this latter possibility we read of Lenin's support for compulsion and his repeated concern to punish the work shy and lazy.

The logic of the aims of a centralised planned economy unfold in precisely this manner, as did the reality of the form of post-capitalist social production practised by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The concept of a national top-down centralised planned economy envisaged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks was a utopian dream, or rather an idealistic nightmare, for it could only be realised under a massively oppressive regime. Without instant forced obedience the plan would break down all over the place as it often did even under the brutal heel of Stalinist surveillance and punishment. Allow the mass of people any rights and freedom at all and they, or at least enough of them could, and if oppressed would, resist, mediate, subvert or even ignore the plan and it would repeatedly break down.

On a wider scale the concept of a centralised and planned world economy could only be approximately realised under fascist type regimes and never under anything remotely connected with the humanist ideas of most anti-capitalists and oppressed classes. This process of trying to realise the Centralised Planned Economy is why Soviet Russia in the end resembled more a Fascist dictatorship than it did a rational and humane social system. Something quite different is required to create the latter and it also requires a completely different starting point. A similar problem arises if we carry through the logic of not being able to trust the workers (point C above) because they are too uncultured, divided and corrupted by capital. If we accept this, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks clearly did, then a post-capitalist economic and social system cannot allow the self organisation of the working and oppressed masses. Instead, social and communal forms must be created for them by the patronising efforts of a cultured, uncorrupted, undivided, powerful, centralised elite. But just who are these 'pure' individuals who have escaped the deforming pressures of the capitalist system and are fit to lead the masses toward the new Jerusalem of a planned economy? Does the Capitalist system not divide, degrade and corrupt other classes in society? Of course it does, and in many cases it does so much more thoroughly.

Lenin and Trotsky (and their present day imitators) considered this incorruptible and trustworthy group were those organised in the Bolshevik Party in Russia - the vanguard! Yet it is common knowledge that this group was full of doubtful and shady characters. As we have seen, Lenin himself acknowledged that the Bolshevik ranks contained place seekers, hangers on, bribe takers, power hungry mini-tyrants and the like. He eloquently testified to the fact that even the reliable ones did not understand their own party programme, and knew very little of how to organise production properly, even after five years of experience.

To fail to trust the working and oppressed people and to see only the brutalised side of their characters and cultures, as the Leninists did, was to introduce a further elitist twist to an already elitist concept in the programme of anti-capitalist revolution. But let us follow this particular logic a little further and explore what Lenin meant by a lack of culture? Did he mean that the peasants couldn't work the land, plant crops and utilise livestock? Were they ignorant of how to make the implements, furniture and fabrics they needed? Was their non-work time devoid of jokes, crafts, music and dance? Did they not know how to cook food, make drinks, embroider fabrics? Were they unable to pass on to future generations the essential knowledge of well-being and survival? Had they not for generations fed themselves and contributed a surplus to feed the landed gentry? Of course they had and Lenin was not meaning they lacked these aspects of culture. What he and other Bolsheviks were referring to was their lack of mathematical ability, their inability to read and write and above all else, their deficiency in understanding the language of intellectual, scientific and political discourse. It was this which constituted real capitalist and post-capitalist 'culture' for Lenin. Anything less than this elitist level of political and technical culture was considered backward by him.

But the peasants were not all backward by any means, nor did a lack of political theory prevent them developing egalitarian and collective practices. Their so-called 'primitive' socio-economic culture did not stop at the boundaries of the village commune or the boundaries of their fields. Fifty years before the 1917 revolution when the agricultural season was completed, many peasant villages were regularly forming manufacturing or artisan communes. Writing in 1856, for example, Von Haxthausen noted that;

"The members of the artisan communes also constantly assist each other with their capital and labour; purchases and sales are transacted in common and they send their commodities together to the markets and towns, where they have shops for the sale of them: they do not form exclusive corporations, like those of the German artisans; but their associations are open to all and the members united only by the bonds of communal life. Everyone is at liberty to assume a profession, or to give it up, commence another and enter a commune where his new occupation is carried on. This however is seldom the case, as a change would not often be advantageous; but no restraint is imposed by any of the communal regulations." (Von Haxthausen. 'The Russian Empire: its People, Institutions and Resources. London 1856. Excerpts reproduced in 'Documents of European History'. Volume. 1. page 301.)

The same was essentially true of the average working class person, because in Russia at that time, workers had not been long removed from the rural commune. For Lenin, it was not really that the peasants lacked the culture of the workplace or industry, but that apart from a small section of them - whom he termed the vanguard - they could not be completely trusted to follow Bolshevik directives. He considered this was because they lacked the ability to understand and agree with the sophisticated constructs and language of Bolshevism. It was this which was their real failing in the eyes of Lenin. We can recall, this was also the reason that, as Lenin phrased it, '"the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship". The non-party workers and peasants, however, were no more brutalised, divided and uncultured, than the overwhelming majority of the Bolsheviks themselves. Yet it was the divided, sectarian, bureaucratic, bribe-taking Bolsheviks, who exercised the dictatorship. As it turned out, these latter individuals were a group of people so brutalised by their experiences, that they ended up exercising this so-called 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in the form of extreme exploitation of the workers. They also frequently exercised it in the form of thinly disguised slavery, (gulags) and using the Cheka to torture and murder their own immediate friends, comrades and supporters.

From reading the concerns and proposals put forward by Lenin we cannot fail to draw certain conclusions. From the standpoint of the working and oppressed classes, Leninism, and thus Bolshevism, was very clearly the theory and practice of a political elite. They did not see their task as helping and supporting the working class to achieve power, but as exercising power themselves. Politically, Leninist and Bolshevik ideas of anti-capitalism, were only a variant of the bourgeois principle of political rule by a group of superior elites. The democratic-centralist organisation of the Bolshevik Party was a mirror image of the democratic centralism of all revolutionary democratic bourgeois political elites and finished up treading a similar path. In the circumstances of Russia, the people operating this principle of government called themselves, and even in many cases believed themselves to be, socialist. In Russia this bourgeois elite leadership principle, advocated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was introduced into, and later forced onto, a proletarian model of grassroots anti-capitalist organisation - the Committees of Workers and Peasants. Bolshevik-led state centralism was a practice in direct contradiction with the needs of working people to manage their own affairs. It was also parasitic on their surplus labour and in direct contradiction to the needs of working people to prevent a new governing elite taking over once the previous oppressors had been deposed.

At first the workers, peasants and soldiers elected the Bolsheviks to majorities within their soviets in order to achieve the radical anti-capitalist restructuring of society promised by the Bolsheviks. In the early days this is precisely what appeared to be happening. However, before long the position was reversed, appearances belied reality, as they often do. Very soon it wasn't the workers and peasants telling their Bolshevik representatives what they needed and wanted, but the Bolshevik commissars telling the workers and peasants what they must do. Before Stalin suspended them altogether, the pattern of Party meetings was always before Congresses of Soviets. The Bolsheviks did not meet after the Soviets having listened to the workers' and peasants' delegates. They met before to get their line sorted out and then pushed it through the Congresses of Soviets. This is a strategy and tactic still universally practised by sectarian anti-capitalists. It wasn't a case of the Bolsheviks listening to the needs of the workers and peasants, but the workers and peasants listening to the desires of the Bolsheviks. The workers' representatives of 1917-18 had become the workers' managers, directors, state officials and political fixers of 1920-24.

Even after this process had become firmly established and backed up by armed force (the Cheka), this top-down centralised model was resisted by the factories and district soviets. The resistance took various forms. Orders were ignored, carried out reluctantly, misinterpreted or openly challenged - even in some cases by rank and file Bolsheviks. Workers and peasants, organised in their own local soviets, were keen to do things their own way, using their own initiative. Thus we find that much of the energy devoted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks between 1917 and 1923 was not only to produce economic plans, but to bring the local and regional soviets under central control. In this way they hoped to overcome the resistance of the local organisations to implementing these plans. This much we can conclude from what we have already read, but there is, not surprisingly, much more. Consider the following statement by Lenin, which came after he had accepted that the Bolshevik state machinery was in a mess. Nonetheless he neatly pointed the finger of blame elsewhere.

"This new state organisation is being born in travail because it is far more difficult, a million times more difficult, to overcome our disruptive, petty-bourgeois laxity than to suppress the tyrannical landowners or the tyrannical capitalists,," (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 29. page 375)

Amazingly, Lenin argued that it was more difficult to overcome laziness or slackness than it was to overthrow the ruling class; that revolutionary overthrow was easier than getting ordinary people back to work afterwards. Lenin, in this passage, introduces the ridiculous notion that the so-called lazy habits and attitudes of workers were a greater barrier to a better society than were an armed and organised ruling class. It also proposes the idea that the reason the state and its economic plan wasn't functioning well was not that the kind of political structure being built was wrong, but that the problems were all caused by various deficiencies in the workers and peasants. It was a clear case of blaming the victims. Lenin's repeated demand for strict labour discipline and punishment for violations of labour discipline were measures calculated to force workers and peasants to do exactly as they were told. Lenin's assertion that there was no contradiction between post-capitalist democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals, was about making local groups of workers and peasants conform to the wishes of party appointed managers and/or political commissars. When Lenin complained about party members using their power over workers and peasants crudely, it was not a recognition that this authority over workers shouldn't exist, but that it should be exercised more skilfully and effectively. It is here that we come to the crux of the matter. How is economic and political power organised in post-capitalist society and who holds and controls it? Having correctly raised the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets' and having helped put this into practice by their actions during October, the Bolsheviks under Lenin, went a stage further.

Although it was never raised in advance openly, they effectively achieved 'All Power to the Bolsheviks'. They transformed the network of Committees of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Deputies, originally organs of the working class, into the organs of a state machine standing above the workers, soldiers and peasants. We need only recall that when the Bolsheviks were being reproached at the time with having established a dictatorship of one party, Lenin responded unequivocally:

"Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position.." (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 29. page 535.)

The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat for Lenin was identical with the dictatorship of his Party. Since he and the other Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, did not limit themselves to struggling for a society based upon the power of working people (and defending this power) but also fought for and defended the points (A to E) noted earlier, Leninism and Bolshevism could not create anything other than a hierarchical oppressive and exploitative society. Despite Lenin's detailed analysis of the state in his pre-October pamphlet 'State and Revolution', in which he appeared to agree with Marx that the existing state should be smashed and the politico-organisational forms which were needed allowed to wither away, nothing of the sort occurred. Instead the Bolshevik post-capitalist state grew stronger and more oppressive as each year passed. This process occurred because it flowed from the logic of attempting to implement Bolshevik economic and social policies. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the things which are normally associated with the Stalinist period can be found in existence or in embryo under Lenin. Take for example, the practice of arbitrary arrest and punishment, including shooting, usually associated with Stalin and his henchman Beria in the late 1920's and 1930's.

"January 1919

Kursk

Cheka

Immediately arrest Kogan, a member of the Kursk Central Purchasing Board, for refusing to help 120 starving workers from Moscow and sending them away empty handed.....all employees of the Central Purchasing Boards and food organisations should know that formal and bureaucratic attitudes to work and incapacity to help starving workers will earn severe reprisals, up to and including shooting."

Lenin." (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 36. page 499.)

At first glance this letter from Lenin to the secret police may seem heavily on the side of the workers against officials and therefore justified in a society orientated to working people. However, five points are worthy of note in this brief letter. First, workers are starving in this so-called workers' state. Second, economic relationships in this set-up are such that workers are not negotiating with other workers or sorting the situation out themselves but are having to go to a state official and beg for essential supplies - in this case food. Third, the problem is not that there isn't any food at all, for food is available with the permission of the Central Purchasing Board or it could not have been refused by Kogan. Fourth, Lenin ordered the immediate arrest of Kogan, with no mention of a proper investigation of the incident. Fifth, the severe reprisals advocated by Lenin included shootings of employees, simply for formal and bureaucratic attitudes to work which were occurring within a formal and bureaucratic state organisation!

Before we join Lenin too quickly in condemning comrade Kogan's lack of flexibility in the Central Purchasing Board we should also recall Lenin's repeated fierce condemnation of any lack of strict accounting and control in the management of state affairs. Kogan, at this point in time, could well have been tied down by red tape or morbid fear of taking any initiative. Of course this incident occurred in 1919 when conditions were severe, but if we allow this defence to Lenin, then we must allow it to Stalin, for conditions when Stalin was head of state were frequently severe. If we defend this action by Lenin, we also accept the existence, and defend the right of anyone with high authority within a post-capitalist state, to order the immediate arrest and punishment of someone else, merely on his or her personal assertion.

A further example of the direction the state was taking under Lenin's chairmanship is over the existence of Forced Labour Camps. Such camps, or Gulags as they became known in Russia, were prison-like establishments. In them, people who had criticised the Bolsheviks were compelled to labour under exceptionally harsh conditions for no pay. It was a transparent form of slave labour since those in the camps were forced to work without remuneration for just the barest amount of food, clothing and shelter. They often died of severe exhaustion, starvation or illness. These 'concentration' camps are normally associated with the regime of Stalin and Hitler. Yet in the article on how to organise competition Lenin proposed a policy which shows he was certainly no stranger to the idea. He stated that;

"...not a single rogue (including those who shirk work) to be allowed to be at liberty, but kept in prison, or serve a sentence of compulsory labour of the hardest kind......In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the manner of rowdies, the manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party print shops shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with yellow tickets after they have served their time....In a fourth place one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot." Complete Works Volume 26 page 414)

It is implicit from the term - a sentence of compulsory labour of the hardest kind - that the Gulag, or forced labour camp, was more than hinted at here. A sentence of forced labour cannot be really served under normal prison conditions but requires a special prison or labour camp. It is also clear from the above quotation that Lenin had in mind not only those remnants of the Capitalist Class who might be trying to sabotage the war effort, but also those from among the workers who didn't work as hard as Lenin and other Bolsheviks thought they should.

Yet it is well known that factory and industrial workers tend not to be over industrious. This is not because they are work-shy or idlers, but because of the nature of their work. Industrial and factory work, which is the type Lenin was anxious to promote and develop, was, and still is arduous, boring, dangerous, dirty and unhealthy. Not surprisingly many workers (such as the print workers Lenin mentions, working as they did with the airborne poisonous substances of printing ink and lead type) took every opportunity to lighten or lessen their work. It was such forms of labour developed and perfected by industrial capital (but also taken over and developed under Russian Communism) which prompted Marx to observe that this form of working was so bad that "as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague." The conditions in Russian industry at the time Lenin was so incensed, were no less horrific than those described by Marx. Yet Lenin claimed to be a Marxist. However, unlike Marx, nowhere did Lenin display any real humanist understanding of workers and peasants and how they cope with their lives, how they experience the exploitation and oppression in their working conditions and how they try to ease it in various ways. Lenin demonstrated that he was not only concerned to simplistically demand hard, unremitting work, sacrifice and increased productivity, but that he was quite prepared to use force to achieve it.

A final example lies in the use of show trials and public prosecutions. A great deal has been written about the huge show trials orchestrated under Stalin's rule. The trials were used to place Stalin's former comrades and others, under public scrutiny and state terror. Often falsely accused of sabotage and espionage, former high-ranking and low-ranking Bolsheviks were paraded in front of hand-picked judges and subjected to the worst kind of abuse, torture, humiliation and falsehood. Innocent people by the thousands were sentenced and shot. This much is acknowledged and has been condemned by most, if not all, within the anti-capitalist left. It is less well broadcast that the idea was not an original thought of Stalins'. Take the following extract from a fairly long letter by Lenin.

"February 1922

Comrade Kursky

The activity of the People's Commissariat for Justice (P.C.J.) is apparently not yet at all adapted to the New Economic Policy....compulsory staging of a number of model (as regards speed and force of repression and explanation of their significance to the mass of the people through the courts and the press) trials in Moscow, Petrograd, Kharkov and several other key centres; influence on the people's judges and members of the revolutionary tribunals through the party in the sense of improving the activity of the courts and intensifying the reprisals -all of this must be conducted systematically. persistently, with doggedness.....if the P.C.J. fails to prove by a series of model trials that it knows how to trap offenders against this rule and chastise, not with the disgracefully stupid fine of 100 or 200 millions - which is short-sighted from the communist standpoint - but with shooting, then the P.C.J. is good for nothing and I shall deem it my duty to get the Central Committee to agree to a total replacement of all senior workers of the P.C.J....

Lenin." (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 36. page 560-564)

This was not the only demand for the use of model, or show, trials by Lenin. Yet it is absolutely clear from the above that he was also not against 'selecting' judges and 'influencing' members of the tribunal in order to ensure what he considered the 'correct', and appropriately harsh, convictions. The concern about stupid fines was due to the fact that some revolutionary tribunals were taking a lenient position with regard to petty pilfering, black-marketing and to overt political criticism by so-called Mensheviks. Some of these tribunals were obviously aware of the difficulties and desperate conditions which accompanied the New Economic Policy and were making allowances. Lenin, on the other hand, was clear about the fact that such activities and anti-Bolshevik criticism should be met with the severest penalties up to and including a bullet in the back of the neck.

We should notice again that Lenin, from his position in the hierarchy, felt able to threaten the use of the party Central Committee in order to replace all senior workers of the People's Commissariat for Justice. We should not be surprised therefore, that when Stalin later went about the same activities, albeit with far more regularity, brutality and resoluteness, he felt sure of support from senior Bolsheviks. This was because he was merely carrying out policies initiated and already advocated by Lenin. Working people then (and anti-capitalists now) were and are entitled to ask; did such ideas and actions make Lenin and the Bolsheviks fit to help found a new form of post-capitalist society?

A number of sectarian positions were revealed by the Bolsheviks in the episode of the mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921. The revolt of the Kronstadt garrison, and its brutal suppression, has long haunted the annals of Bolshevism. Both Lenin and Trotsky felt they had to defend the suppression personally in order to supplement the efforts of the Party newspapers. It is not the intention of this section to delve into the detail of the incident. However, in the context of discussing Bolshevik contradictions and mistakes a few points are worthy of note. The first is that according to Lenin, the changes being called for by the Kronstadt mutineers were actually quite slight. As we saw in the last chapter, he stated, "They do not want either the white-guards or our government". The second point is that at that moment (the eve of the 10th Congress of the Bolsheviks) when they forcibly crushed the rebellion, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were on the point of debating and adopting measures which were a much more radical departure from genuinely social and communal forms than anything put forward by the workers, peasants and soldiers at Kronstadt. Those at Kronstadt merely echoed the thoughts and opinions of millions of others, including many within the Bolshevik lower ranks. They were expressing the need for an end to requisitioning, the introduction of free trade unions and an end to Bolshevik dominated soviets. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were preparing to reintroduce a limited but rigorous form of capitalist exploitation. Yet they declared the workers at Kronstadt counter revolutionary and considered themselves to be revolutionary anti-capitalist forces.

In fact from the extent of the vilification and condemnation, by Lenin and Trotsky of those at Kronstadt, it should have been the rebels who were proposing a return to capitalistic forms and the Bolsheviks who were proposing a few slight changes. Yet from the standpoint of the exploitation and oppression of working people it was the Bolsheviks at their 10th congress who in the content of their measures, were far more counter revolutionary. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was the ditching of some of the top-down economic planning, not in favour of co-operative worker and peasant-led planning, but in favour of the private anarchy of capitalist competition. More importantly the Bolsheviks had the means - control of state propaganda and state power - to fulfil their counter revolution, whilst those at Kronstadt had only limited propaganda and limited arms. Why did the Bolsheviks not seriously negotiate with those at Kronstadt as they had done previously with the Social Revolutionaries, or for that matter the German High Command at Brest Litovsk?

The fact that certain counter revolutionaries were welcoming this explicit criticism of Bolshevism and waiting to overturn the Soviet system, an argument put forward by Lenin, Trotsky and many of the Bolsheviks against those at Kronstadt, is irrelevant. The white-guard counter revolutionaries also welcomed the return to capitalist forms of production announced by the Bolsheviks and were hoping to use this to overturn the Soviets. The contrast between the complete Bolshevik acceptance in 1917 of the Social Revolutionaries entire rural programme and the complete repudiation of workers' demands in Kronstadt in 1921, is most revealing. The real issue at stake in the changes advocated by those at Kronstadt was not that the nature of the demands were counter revolutionary or pro-capitalist, or that they opened up exceptional counter revolutionary possibilities, or were controlled by white-guards, but the changes advocated, slight as they were, struck at the Bolshevik monopoly of political power and struck a chord among millions of workers and peasants.

The Kronstadt rebellion, therefore, represented a potential threat to Bolshevism and had to be stamped upon. The two sides were so clearly unequal in the ensuing battle that the savage repression used by the Bolsheviks was clearly a symptom of acute nervousness. Their inability to consider giving any concessions to the workers and peasants at Kronstadt, whilst granting massive concessions to international capitalists, was also clearly a symptom of the utter bankruptcy of their anti-capitalist theory and post-capitalist practice. It also clearly indicated their lack of any commitment to the self-activity of the working and oppressed in a post-capitalist society. The real significance of the Kronstadt mutiny was that by this time the Bolsheviks no longer represented the interests of the workers and peasants. This fact is evidenced by many other expressions of workers' dissatisfaction and numerous and large peasant uprisings around this time. The demands of Kronstadt and the Workers Opposition within their own party also gave a clear indication that Bolshevism, by 1921, no longer represented the interests of broad layers of the working class. Yet by this time the Bolsheviks had absolute control of state power.

Instead of Lenin and the majority of the Bolsheviks at their Tenth Congress looking at themselves and examining how they were failing to fit into the new post-capitalist circumstances, they looked at the workers and peasants and found it was these classes of people who mainly failed to fit into the new circumstances. Many excuses were articulated concerning the episode at Kronstadt. A further excuse was that those people occupying Kronstadt weren't the same peasants and they weren't the same workers, as the previous occupants, a conclusion put forward by both Lenin and Trotsky. Of course they weren't; many had died or been transferred to the war fronts, but neither were the Bolsheviks the same Bolsheviks. However, the new workers and peasants in Kronstadt were still workers and peasants, whereas the new Bolsheviks were, on Lenin's own admission, increasingly authoritarian, incompetent, bureaucrats and careerists.

From 1917 to 1922 the workers and peasants were arguing and fighting for a better future for themselves and their families. The Bolsheviks, however, were fighting for their own political supremacy. Whereas workers and peasants were struggling for control over the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks were successfully struggling to keep control over workers and peasants. Throughout that period workers and peasants were beginning to fight against any political dictatorship, whilst the Bolsheviks were fighting to maintain theirs. Bolshevik type anti-capitalist politics proved incapable of adapting to the real needs and interests of the working and oppressed classes after the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class and the defeat of the armies of intervention. Unfortunately for the working and oppressed, the Bolsheviks had by this time enough specialist armed supporters to hang on to state power and defeat the self-activity of the working class and peasants.

Pre-October, Bolshevik politics played a positive role in the opposition to the Czar and in helping focus the working class challenge to the power of the Capitalist class. Post-October, whilst still positive in the Civil War and the wars of intervention, Bolshevik politics began to play a negative role. They succeeded in transforming workers' power into the power of a professional and political elite. Lenin at one meeting introduced the idea that '"the very strengths of individuals or organisations can in new conditions become their weakness". This was never more true than how it applied to Lenin, and Bolshevik politics. In the events that led from the conquest of power to the establishment of a strong coercive state under Lenin and its further development under Stalin, this was amply revealed.

The Bolshevik concept of anti-capitalist revolution was one of leaders and led - or to be more accurate - politically correct leaders and politically correct led. Those who did not fit into one of these two categories could be forced to obey or be eliminated. Those in doubt over this conclusion should recall the opinion of Lenin, expressed at the eleventh congress of the Soviet Communist Party, (1922) that those who expressed Menshevik viewpoints (i.e. similar views to those Trotsky had held prior to October) should be shot if they continued to publicise their ideas. Bolshevik politics, falsely described as Marxism, was said to be the 'correct' body of ideas leading the working class toward a pre-planned, top-down form of economic planning. Lenin frequently stated he was acting according to the theory of Karl Marx. In particular he claimed to be correctly implementing the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was a concept earlier proposed by Marx. This is something else we need to examine closely, for if the form of social or communal organisation of production identified by Marx is still relevant today, and I believe it is, then we must understand the meaning of this particular term.

Many things have changed since the time of Marx. The level of technology and the explosion of scientific knowledge are two areas which have radically changed. Yet other factors remain essentially the same whatever the technical or scientific base of capitalist exploitation. For example; the domination of money, the personal ownership of the means of production, the existence in each country of a class of citizens who appropriate most of the wealth and the existence of a large class, or classes, who exist in relative or absolute poverty. We have seen in the previous chapter that Lenin conceived the positive purposes of an anti-capitalist revolution to be the creation of a hierarchical system of production which the Bolsheviks called socialism and communism. This was to be achieved according to plans produced by experts and on the basis of an extended development of industrial mass production methods.

Whether these purposes complement or contradict those espoused by Marx will be considered in a later chapter, but for the moment let us establish the humanist purpose of revolution, from the standpoint of the working and oppressed masses. It is the same standpoint as the revolutionary humanist Karl Marx. This purpose should be the emancipation of the working class and other oppressed groups, from all forms of slavery and subjection, including wage-slavery. We have already noted that many policies advocated by Lenin and implemented by the Bolsheviks were directly oppressive to working people and provoked resistance from workers and peasants as well as criticism within their own party. It is not difficult to reach the conclusion that the end result of Bolshevik state planning, even prior to Stalin, was about as far removed from anything envisaged by Marx as you could get. This conclusion still leaves us with the task of exploring in more detail the question of the organisational methods used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to implement the so-called socialism in Russia.

Anti-capitalist forms of organisation.

In modern capitalist forms of democratic government, authority is derived from all sections of society, but power is exercised by a minority, which represents the fundamental interests of the dominant class in society. It is a representational democracy, based upon elections of candidates, from all classes who are supposed to represent that particular body of electors at the seat of power. In addition to this centralised power there are local or regional bodies which have powers and responsibilities delegated from the central power. The representatives on these local bodies are usually subject to local or regional elections.

In both these tiers of organisation, authority is formally derived from the base of society (the electorate), but power is dispensed from the top (the government). This system serves the bourgeoisie well, for it gives the illusion that because the electorate vote to put people in power, they in some way control that power. In fact they do not. Power is wielded over the electorate from the centre via 'the state' and through its appointed state functionaries. The only legal remedies open to the mass of the electorate within this system are to refuse to support this or that candidate, or to champion an alternative candidate to their existing representative. These remedies do not change, or even challenge, the system in any significant way. They merely substitute the personnel who staff the parliamentary part of it. This doubtful privilege in no way alters the fact that power is always concentrated at the centre and is directed from there, or delegated elsewhere, but at all times stands over the electorate as an alien force.

There are many variations of this type within the bourgeois world. Some have attached to them a federal structure, others a local. They differ also in what kind of facilities these structures provide for the various classes in society. Yet in all cases the 'state' is the organisational mechanism of administration and force by which the ruling class perpetuates its oppressive and exploitative rule, whilst its system of representative politics gives the illusion that it is possible to change things by electing alternative representatives.

The state itself becomes a burden on the workers and oppressed masses, who are forced to pay taxes to fund the state apparatus. At the same time the state becomes a source of comfortable well-paid jobs for some members of the middle and upper classes and a source of graft for others. However, no matter how they differ in detail, these forms of bourgeois democratic states all bear essentially the same characteristics of power concentrated at the top in the hands of a relatively small minority who thus, directly or indirectly, control the organs of state power. In capitalist systems of society with their unequal wealth distribution this representational method allows those with the money, resources and time, to gain or influence the source of power in three ways:

First, directly, by ensuring people from their class achieve a disproportionate access to the permanent positions of state power, (Civil Service, Law, Military); second, by ensuring people from the wealthy classes stand as candidates for those temporary elected positions of power; and thirdly, by efforts to tame, shame, bribe or seduce those representatives elected to pursue alternative class interests such as those of the working classes. This type of political system means that the odds are stacked against any oppressed class's attempts to alter their circumstances by 'normal' political methods. In face of these overwhelming odds most workers give up. They have neither the time, the resources, nor the energy for such an unequal battle.

Those among the workers who don't give up, but battle on within this system of representational farce, in most cases fail to see, or in some cases don't want to see, that real change cannot come about by a change in the personnel of the state or in its political representatives. Some among the so-called workers representatives, it must be said, are also content to serve the capitalist state, draw their high salaries as Members of Parliament, Congressmen (or whatever the term used) receive honours and perpetuate the fiction that they are effecting real or lasting change for working people. This is an issue which we will return to in a later chapter.

In contrast, the form of self-government envisaged by Marx was not simply a matter of replicating the bourgeois political forms under different economic and social conditions. Socialist forms of production would not just be an absence of capitalists involved in economic exploitation and politics but an end to economic exploitation and hierarchical politics. Marx's analysis of anti-capitalism involved the revolutionary change in all the essential features of the social structure under the domination of capital. In other words the revolution against the economic conditions under capital, would socialise the means of production and would present the need as well as the opportunity to remove that other oppressive structure of society - the State! An anti-capitalist revolution which would really benefit the majority - the working classes and poor peasants - would need to be more than just a political revolution. It would not be a matter of putting members of their own class in positions of power over them, but of doing away with positions of power. It would not be a question of taking over the state - but of completely destroying it!

Such an anti-capitalist revolution would also need to be a social, economic and political one. First, it would need to overturn the existing relations of production and take the privately-owned productive capacity into social and communal ownership. Second, it would need to dismantle the accumulated social and economic advantages of wealth created under the previous regimes of exploitation. Third, it would need to take measures to prevent a counter revolution. Fourth, it would need to create democratic structures of control and collective power that would ensure any group of individuals or new elites could not become powerful enough to become parasitic on the new economic and social conditions. In this way, not only would authority be derived from the bottom but collective power to do things and control of them would remain there and be exercised there.

These four main objectives of workers' anti-capitalist revolution would require the working and oppressed classes to dismantle the existing state staffed by the parasitic classes and create its own temporary organisation's wielding collective power. These new and often temporary organs (committees, soviets, communes etc.) would be of a new kind, the working and interaction of which would then set out to achieve the above objectives. It is this requirement to create a new and transitional form of organisation that gave rise to the term 'the dictatorship of the proletariat', which Marx used to describe it. He was absolutely clear that the organisation which replaced the old state would not be a new permanent, or even a special 'state', created by the working class for the working class.

Under conditions of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the state itself, as a form of organisation separate from society, would be unnecessary and therefore abolished. Its place would be taken by the whole of the working class organised in regionally and locally linked collectives. Even if all citizens did not attend these organisations, they would be able to. These committees, communes or soviets, would not only organise economic activity but also exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead of a capitalist minority dictating terms and conditions to the majority of the population, it would be the majority of the population dictating terms and conditions, to the former capitalist minority. Marx considered the need for repressive measures against the former capitalist class, would be only a temporary condition, for if classes and the inequalities on which they were based were abolished, then a special armed force, which only exists to defend conditions of inequality, would become unnecessary.

In the new conditions, therefore, this temporary 'dictatorial' state of affairs would wither away as the need for anti-capitalist and post-capitalist self-defence grew less, leaving only the organisation of production and distribution to be continued and developed. It stands to reason that the form of this dictatorship of the proletariat (a majority), would not only differ from the dictatorship of the owners of capital (a minority), but would also need to be in line with the whole purposes of the revolution. In other words, the form the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' took, would require it to be capable of fulfilling the four broad objectives outlined above. It would only 'dictate' social and economic conditions to the few former capitalist oppressors and not to everybody. The form of that directive would also be appropriately humanist. The new form of organisation would be committees or collectives of workers and peasants and they, or their elected representatives, would carry out only some of the remaining functions of the ex-state. This task was, and is, completely different to taking over the old state or creating a new one.

As already noted, these new organisational functions would include implementing the socialisation of the means of production; the elimination of advantages of existing wealth; defending the new status quo of economic and social equality, and ensuring against a future oppressive minority taking over. All of these objectives would require the entire working and peasant population to be armed and organised into workers and peasant militias, based upon their factory or locality, with their own elected commanders and staff of their own choosing. Such groups would not put themselves at the bidding of any state edifice or political party still left intact, but at the command of their local municipal council or commune. These militias would be augmented by any trained soldiers but these would also be subject to election, recall and at the command of the local council or commune. Armed detachments, such as these, would be worker/soldiers (i.e. not exclusively soldiers) who in case of counter revolution or hostile invasion, could be combined into an anti-capitalist army of defence.

We need to recognise from the outset that the soviet (a workers' and peasant committee) was an alternative form of organisation, created and developed by the working classes in Russia. It was these Committees of Workers, Peasants and later Soldiers, which marked the distinction between a Bourgeois form of Government, such as a Parliament or Constituent Assembly and a socialist form. The soviets, for example, were clearly anti-capitalist for they were not set up by the bourgeoisie nor by any centrally organised power and they excluded representatives of the Capitalist class. They were local, spontaneous and essentially bottom-up organs of democracy. As their names suggested they were organisations which were made up of workers, peasants and soldiers. They also excluded the upper professional classes if these groups considered themselves separate or above the working and peasant classes. Quite naturally, the local soviet committees wished to relate to each other in local networks and regional districts. These links were continually formed either by local initiatives or by delegates exporting the idea from cities and towns which had already formed them. In these Russian soviets the authority was certainly derived from the bottom and initially it remained there.

On the other hand a Constituent Assembly, as initially envisaged by the Bolsheviks, would not only have included capitalists but give them a prominent and controlling position. It was only after the success of the Petersburg Soviet in 1905, that Lenin, recognised the potential of this soviet organisational form. However, despite this recognition, the soviet, as a new organisational form, did not feature within the Bolshevik programme or perspective for a considerable time. This was probably because up until the April Theses of Lenin, the Bolsheviks were committed to the concept of a period of capitalist development in Russia, a period lasting until the conditions ripened for an anti-capitalist revolution. In such a scenario Committees of Workers and Soldiers would have little or no direct role to play. Even after the February 1917 events, which deposed the Czar, the Bolshevik position remained essentially the same and the call for a Constituent Assembly was still a firm platform of Bolshevik policy.

It was only after April 1917, with Lenin's return from exile and his recognition of the developments taking place, that the argument for going straight over to an anti-capitalist revolution, was taken up within Bolshevik circles. From that time Lenin considered the soviets could form a part of the dictatorship of the proletariat, provided they contained and maintained a majority of Bolsheviks. The slogan raised by the Bolsheviks, 'All Power to the Soviets', was a summons towards a post-capitalist transformation of society. Although the structure of soviets was widened they were not developed as organs of working class and peasant power in which decisions commenced at the bottom and worked up toward the centre. Instead, the soviets were used to transmit orders to the localities. This was done progressively over a short period of time and was given extra bursts of activity at particularly critical times. Despite Lenin's statements in his book, 'State and Revolution', these new organs of the working class were clearly not seen by him or the Bolsheviks as the new form of organisation independently controlled and staffed by the working and oppressed classes, as predicted by Marx. The soviets were seen by Lenin and the Bolsheviks as forming part of a new design of a permanent state once each soviet was staffed and controlled by Bolshevik members and backed up by an army pledged to support the Bolshevik State.

A degree of reverse flow of power down through the apparatus was perhaps an inevitable development during the civil war and the wars of intervention. It is difficult to envisage how a successful campaign against determined and highly organised enemies could have been met successfully by newly formed ad-hoc local and regional decision-making which had not had any previous practice in such matters. However, this top-down development in the workers and peasant committees, introduced by the Bolsheviks, was more than a tactic brought about by the requirements of the time. It was operated as a principle and thus continued well after the need for such centralised direction was over. The reason for that is clear - the economic plans required it!

We should also recall that top down centralism was a firm organisational principle of Bolshevism. It was the principle fought for by Lenin in 'What is to be Done' and defended by him until his death. Lenin and the Bolsheviks simply transferred it across to the soviets and made it an organising principle of the new state in peace time as well as in war. It was how they ran their party; so why should they not run Russia on the same lines? This explains why Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not in fact 'smash the machinery of state' but re-formed it and even staffed it with the former state bureaucrats; having first shuffled them and placed them in new posts. The state became just an intermediate cog deliberately fashioned by the Bolsheviks to transmit their political decision-making into the economic form of productive activity.

When Lenin, at the Bolshevik Eighth Congress, complained about the old bureaucrats taking advantage of the low cultural level within the state institutions, he did not call for a revolutionary smashing of the state apparatus which was beginning to strangle the social and economic development of Russia. Instead he called for the modest reform of the state bureaucracy by recruiting more workers to it. Lenin the revolutionary had by this time become Lenin the reformist, and so had all the other Bolsheviks, including Trotsky. In all their eyes, the permanent revolution, originally advocated by Marx, was permanently over.

It was taken for granted by all Bolsheviks, that in peace time as well as war, social and economic planning required the firm direction of the Bolshevik Party. As was noted earlier, a top down model of economic planning required the creation of a privileged class of bureaucrats and specialists. Under Bolshevism, authority would still nominally flow up, but power would always flow down. The Bolsheviks were only able to achieve this reversal, particularly after a revolution specifically against centralised state oppression, by convincing the active class-conscious workers and peasants that putting the new Soviet structure into reverse was still socialistic. Because parts of the new state were staffed by some workers and peasants and the whole state was led by a Party supposedly dedicated to something called 'socialism', it was supposed to be non-oppressive. In convincing workers of this, and in creating a special armed force, they effectively removed the ability of workers to collectively decide their own future. It also prevented them from defending themselves against counter revolution and anti-socialist 'take-over', particularly when both these came from within the Bolshevik Party itself. Thus we can see that the organisational methods and purposes used by the Bolsheviks in their version of post-capitalist society were fundamentally at odds with the needs of the working and oppressed, and at odds with the analysis of Marx.

Marx on post-capitalist society.

We have read sufficient of Lenin's thoughts to recognise his view of the purpose of anti-capitalist revolution. The revolutionary overthrow of the Provisional Government, would allow the construction of a planned, centralised, industrial, post-capitalist society. This would lead eventually to something called communism. In pursuit of this goal he claimed to be guided by Marx. It is time, therefore, to look at what Marx considered were the purposes of revolution. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx sketched out the fundamental viewpoints of a new and revolutionary humanism. Starting with the contemporary situation of workers' wages under Capitalist rule, Marx refuted the various reformist ideas of tinkering with wages and the capitalist system in order to improve the workers' lot. If working people adopted this strategy they would still remain wage slaves and any improvements would be short-lived.

Although in modern times Capital mostly appears to take the form of money, (which merely represents a claim on goods and services), land and means of production, Capital also represents the surplus production of previous generations of working people. It is an accumulated surplus of 'past labour'. This accumulated surplus creates a store from which 'present labour' can draw in order to produce new products for consumption. Money capital, as with money in general, is the socially agreed 'token' of value under capitalism which allows the past surplus products of human labour to be brought together with present human labour to create new production. This becomes more obvious when we reflect that money itself can do nothing, nor can it produce anything. It only lubricates the circulation of commodities and services, and allows those who control it, to bring together labour and raw materials (more past labour) to produce new commodities or services.

However, just who controls the use of these accumulated stores of previous labour, is crucial. Under collective or communal systems of society, the community determine how the products of their past labour should be used in the process of producing new products and services. Under systems where the products of past labour become privately owned, it is the private owner of the capital who determines when and how this store shall be used. This includes decisions on where, when, what and how, new production takes place. In this way, under capitalist ownership, the products of past labour (in the form of money, which capitalists control) are used to purchase and control present labour, rather than present labour controlling the products of past labour. This is true in all forms of society in which means of production are privately owned or monopolised by aristocratic or political minorities. Capital is merely the most recently developed and most powerful form of private property ownership. With the Capitalist system, money (as capital) has become, via its capitalist owners, the governing power over the working class and its products. This is not only undemocratic but causes huge discrepancies of wealth as well as periodic crises.

In these respects Capitalist society is merely the latest form in which the wealth created by a past generation of workers was used to dominate and govern a present generation of workers. As such it has some new and interesting features, particularly in the way competition between capitalists led to the constant updating of the technology of production. The Capitalist system is also unique in that labour power itself had become a commodity to be bought and sold along with all other commodities. The buyers of labour power, the capitalist class, try to purchase labour as cheaply as possible, the sellers of labour power, the workers, try to sell it as dearly as possible. This continual bargaining forms the basis of an open and permanent struggle between the two classes and under normal circumstances, the capitalist class is the stronger in this struggle. However, it was not merely the identification of this struggle which was important for Marx but the resolving of it in favour of the majority - the working and oppressed classes. Wage labour was just another form of slavery - wage slavery - and as such deserved to be ended. The form of post-capitalist society envisaged by Marx would reverse this relationship between past labour and present labour by removing the capitalist class as the custodians of past labour in its various elements such as land, buildings, machinery, tools, money and commodities. The key to the a future, more egalitarian society, lay in giving back to working people the control of their own labour power and the means of production. Very little more than this Marx was prepared to say. This was because he saw his role as taking part in the criticism of the capitalist system, in all its aspects, and certainly not in defining exactly what was to take its place. That process of future social development was for Marx, the task of collective groups of workers themselves.

Marx on estranged or 'alienated labour'.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx introduced the concept of 'estranged labour'. He described how under the wages system of capital the products of labour do not belong to the worker, but belong to someone else. Thus the things workers produce exist as something not belonging to them, as separate and alien to them. To the workers under the exploitation of capital the products they create have an existence and power which has become independent of them. In this way the work of the worker becomes 'estranged'. It is not work undertaken by workers to create products for themselves or each other directly, but in exchange for money. Thus the natural bond between worker and product is broken, just as the previous bond between the worker and the process of making things is broken. The process by which products are created ceases to have any immediate concern for the workers, just as the finished product of work can be of little or no interest to them. Creating useful things instead of being a natural and welcome activity often becomes, under capitalist forms of production, a displeasing chore undertaken just for money.

In addition, the more effort the workers put into production the greater the surplus production which is alienated from them. The greater the surplus production, the greater the resultant power of those surplus products over them. For by selling these products, the capitalists become richer and thus more powerful. In other words the more effort workers put into production, the richer they make the capitalists, and the richer they make the capitalists the more powerful the capitalist class becomes. Thus the Capitalist class control an ever increasing stock of wealth to use in production or to withhold from it. They can also use it to influence political support and to defend their wealth and positions.

The concept of estranged (or alienated) labour is a crucially important one and nowhere is it expressed more forcefully than in the 1844 Manuscripts. It is in these manuscripts that Marx demonstrates his complete understanding of workers as human beings in their own right and not just as a means of producing commodities or wealth for various elites and ruling classes. Marx noted that in his work for a capitalist, therefore, the worker;

"...does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it." (Marx and Engels. Complete Works. Volume 3. page 274)

Under any system in which labour is 'estranged' this desire to avoid work remains an essential problem. This is particularly so where the work is dirty, difficult, tedious or dangerous, and as we have noted already, many working class occupations under industrial capital combine all four of these negative characteristics. A thorough understanding of this relationship of the worker to work in the modern era is absolutely essential to considerations of what should follow the rule of Capital from the standpoint of the working class. It is not merely, that the capitalist class do not pay the full value of labour and thus cream off surplus labour. This fact creates the vast inequalities of wealth which are symptomatic of the capitalist system and create problems of poverty amid plenty. Nor is it simply that the process of capitalist production creates periodic crises of relative over-production which in turn causes unemployment, economic downturn and, occasionally, economic collapse. From the standpoint of the working class all these symptoms need to be abolished along with economic and political domination of the Capitalists over other sections of society. But as repulsive as these attributes of Capital are, they are symptoms rather than the cause. These causes arise as a result of the private ownership of the means of production and the resulting situation of workers not owning and being in control of their own labour power. Under the rule of capital workers cannot create their own world, their own collective existence, but must daily create and re-create the world of capital, of capitalist existence. As we know it is an existence containing vast inequalities, exploitation, violence and alienation, with all the emotional and physically deforming outcomes which this process entails.

Marx was the first to point out that private property arises as a result of estranged labour and not the other way around. This understanding is important, for a process of abolishing only certain aspects of private property does not solve the historical problem of overcoming alienated and estranged labour. Nationalising everything or transferring all property into State property does not of itself free the working classes from a life of toil, forced labour and exploitation. It merely changes the form (and name) under which this exploitation takes place, and how the surplus products of that labour are appropriated. Even if nationalisation was done thoroughly, as it was in Russia, there would still remain the fundamental contradiction of labour being forced and estranged, of it being directed and dominated by forces external (or alien) to the worker.

It matters little in this sense whether the name of the alien force bears a more political characterisation such as Fascism or Communism, or a more economic term such as Capitalism, Feudalism, or Slavery. Any labour not undertaken voluntarily is forced labour. Workers not in collective control of their own labour are under someone else's control. A process of production which has direct or indirect compulsion or another form of estranged labour will be, or will quickly become, a dehumanising process. A further result of such a situation is that any such system of production will be resisted by the workers engaged in it. For if labour is estranged and the products of labour confront the working class as estranged products, then the character of work will always remain predominantly alien and abhorrent to working people. As we have commented already, Marx was not slow to note that under Capital, work is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification and in this case;

"It's alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague."....."Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it does not belong to him, that in it (the work) he belongs, not to himself but to another." (ibid.)

It has already been indicated that this perspective refutes the reformist 'socialist' (i.e. keep capital but pay higher wages) position. Higher pay, whilst an essential demand under any system which threatens working people with poverty and destitution whilst they work, merely slightly increases the rewards (usually temporarily) for what amounts to forced labour. Better wages do not alter the nature of their work. Even exceptionally high wages do not prevent the physically deforming aspects of the work, from injuring and shortening the life of the worker, nor do higher wages remove the drudgery, monotony and lack of creativity which accompanies most working class occupations. Thus an anti-capitalist revolution which removes the Capitalist class and retains state compulsion, from the standpoint of the working class (and their humanist aspirations) is bound to be opposed by them in the longer or shorter term. A revolution which abolishes the social, economic and political rule of one elite and replaces it with another does not change very much from the standpoint of the oppressed. Such a new elite would need to employ political persuasion, and eventually physical compulsion, to ensure that working people staffed the factories and fields.

Under a further section of the 1844 Manuscripts, entitled 'Private Property and Communism' Marx made probably his clearest exposition of his concept of Communism as the a term for the first stage of a thoroughgoing revolutionary humanism. The terms 'human' or 'humanism' are used no less than eighty times in this short section, often in italics and always in a way which is in contrast to the way in which working people are viewed as factory fodder under capitalist or other forms of exploitative society. The communism Marx proposed, is the positive transcendence of private property and a return to the real essence of the human species.

"This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism;" (Marx And Engels. Complete Works. Volume 3. page 296)

Communism equals humanism. How far the degeneration of Marx's terms have gone when the inhumanity of Stalinist macho savagery and sectarian bully boy tactics are equated with the word Communism and the word humanism, is seen as so liberal that few in the anti-capitalist struggle wish to use it. However, Marx cannot be reproached for soiling the concept of Communism, nor for failing to assert his ideas as humanist. Nor was this use merely a youthful immaturity. All Marx's later works are also permeated with humanist wrath at the inhumanity of the capitalist system. Communism, as envisaged by Marx, was a stage in the process of what this author feels is best described as the 'revolutionary-humanist' transformation of society. A stage which would not simply negate private property by merely abolishing certain forms of it, but positively transcend the form of estranged labour. Science, through the medium of industry, stated Marx, had prepared the ground for human emancipation, although its immediate effect has been the further dehumanising of mankind by the subordination of science and industry to the profit motive. In contrast, the development of industry and natural science, together with real community involvement and control, would ensure a fairer, cleaner and safer planet. The natural sciences under the capitalist system, generally exhibit a blind spot in relation to the capitalist system and its savage exploitation of human and natural resources. Science could only be free from this corrupting influence under communal forms of production. The natural sciences could then become the basis for a really human science for;

"...to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is a matter of course a lie. The nature which develops in human history - the genesis of human society - is man's real nature;" (Marx and Engels. Complete Works. Volume 3. page 303)

The natural sciences, or the social sciences, as they have become known today, include those which could provide a critical understanding of how society functions politically if freed of capitalist distortions. For Marx, the essence of humanity is created by the fundamental aspects of all life and therefore all science reflects this. A society overwhelmingly distorted by oppression and exploitation creates an overwhelmingly distorted science. Only a form of human society not distorted by oppression and exploitation could develop a science and technology which is humane.

From all that has been said so far it is impossible to claim that the experiment carried out in the name of Bolshevism in Russia, and which scandalously used the name of Marx (i.e. Marxism) was at any time even close to the humanist propositions outlined by Marx. Marx's name, reputation and terminology were employed to dress up a political dogma, which was then paraded as a science, and used to justify the actions and policies carried out by the Bolshevik elite. The previous chapter has identified in some detail the statements and opinions of Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks. These show that at no time did Lenin come close to understanding the fundamental scope and nature of the problem of social reconstruction from the standpoint of revolutionary-humanism.

In translating and mediating Marx's proposals into his own Bolshevik politics, Lenin had the self-activity of the working class written out of the project. At the same time, Marx's ideas were gutted of their real humanist essence. Lenin's dialectics became a set of superior political concepts to be picked up and wielded in order to win arguments and debates and to damage political opponents. In this he was unsurpassed, but this undoubted ability was no guarantee against mistakes. Nor was his sincere hatred of capital accompanied by any understanding of the real essence of the post-capitalist society espoused by Marx. For Lenin, it was simply one top-down system of industrial production (capitalism) being replaced by a superior top-down system (communism). For Marx, on the other hand, it was a question of reuniting human society with its roots in its own socially determined nature and creative potential. For Marx it was workers self-activity, for Lenin it was compulsory Taylorism and electrification.

According to Marx, the revolutionary humanism implicit in socialistic forms and communism would harmonise and develop the real human essence for all men and women. This was, for him, the real human and humane basis of co-operative and communal forms of production. Lenin, however, considered that the basis of the new social form lay in completing a grand industrial plan.

Marx ended the aforementioned section of the 1844 Manuscripts with an extremely important proposition. It is constructed using the somewhat obscure Hegelian dialectical terminology, but if it is considered carefully its meaning is nonetheless clear.

"Communism is the position as the negation of the negation and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society." (Marx and Engels Complete Works. Volume 3. page 306)

In the modern epoch for which Stalinism and sectarianism has obscured the real humanist substance of Marx's post-capitalist society, it is important to understand this view. Let us consider the statement that communal production is the negation of the negation. Negation is a term which in this instance means that something has become the opposite (the negative) of its original positive reality. Marx considered that previous societies had successively negated the positive voluntary act (and control of) labour from the majority of human individuals. In doing so these societies had created various forms of slavery. Actual slavery and coloni in the ancient world; the later condition of serfdom in the middle ages; and wage slavery in the modern world. These various stages of human development had destroyed the earlier egalitarian economic and social freedom of humans. The previous voluntary adult membership of a human socio-economic group had become involuntary bondage to an elite for the majority of human beings. Their essentially positive human essence had been negated. Human beings were captured, bought and sold, or transferred with the land as exploitable units of production. Now under capitalism it is the workers' labour power which is purchased, and for exactly the same reason.

Humanity needed to be emancipated by undoing this negation, by negating the negation; by transforming the historically derived negative into a new positive. The negation of this earlier negation was what working people and the oppressed wanted and needed even if they did not articulate it in these Hegelian terms. Human society, and thus its individuals, needed this transformation in order to be rehabilitated; in order to fully return to their humanist essence. Communal production was to be a post-capitalist phase which undid this wage slavery - the form of society which broke the circumstances of oppression and exploitation. It would be the stage, or process, in which private ownership of the means of production would be abolished. Ownership and control of the stock of past labour (disguised at the moment by the term capital) would be returned to those (or rather their descendants) who had created it in the first place. At the same time, labour would cease to be forced or estranged labour.

Ownership of their own labour would be returned to workers not in order to sell it again but to control and utilise it for themselves. Groups of working people would voluntarily get together and use the available industrial techniques to lighten the intensity of work, not increase it, and certainly not use it to support a class of economic or political parasites ruling over them. The workers and peasants, organised in their local communities, would decide what to produce, based upon their needs - including the need to exchange goods with other groups of workers - and their available resources. In this way their labour would be voluntary and under their own control. It would not be forced and it would not be alien. The need and desire to exchange goods and services with other groups of workers would lead in its own way to organised, but flexible, systems of exchange as working communities discussed their experiences, changed their priorities, adjusted the amount and type of surplus production created and also considered the effects upon the environment.

Such voluntary, reciprocal and egalitarian economic and social relationships would be the real humanist basis of social production or communal production. No doubt such grassroots type developmental planning would take longer to create than a plan created by a committee of 'experts' but it would not need to be imposed and it would be more sure of realisation. Also such bottom-up plans leave a large degree of initiative with the producers thus enabling them to rectify or modify the inevitable unforeseen consequences of all types of planning. Indeed, in Russia, such a process had already begun embryonically in the aftermath of the February revolution in 1917. At that time many factory owners had abandoned their factories and production schedules. Workers in response had created outreach workers and committees to locate sources of raw materials and outlets for their finished products. Such local and regional developments would also be more 'rational' than the anarchy of the competitive 'free for all' much preferred by capitalists in which a few individuals decide what we all need and then try to persuade the rest of us to buy it by overt and subliminal advertising.

If this new form of social and community organisation sounds utopian, on the grounds that if people were so free no one would work - a common outcry of the bourgeoisie and their supporters - then this is another matter, one which will be taken up again in chapter eight. It is enough at this stage if we have understood that this critical understanding was the basis of the revolutionary-humanism of Karl Marx. For those who really follow in the footsteps of Karl Marx, I suggest it is necessary to recognise and accept that revolutionary-humanist ideas are the central part and the future goal of this tradition. Those who do not, have broken with Marx altogether and have simply not yet stopped using and smearing his name. It is also essential for anti-capitalists to embrace the principle of ending forced and estranged labour and to condemn the Bolshevik-type programme of forcing workers to implement some elitist grand plan.

Lenin's sectarianism and idealism -1.

The main objective of part two of this study has been to describe and examine the role played by the centralist methods and ideas which determined the direction, the style and the methods used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In the final analysis, the anti-democratic economic base of Russia established under the Bolsheviks determined that an anti-democratic superstructure would arise. This much has been established by a close examination of the Bolshevik policies under Lenin. However, given the scope of the examination of sectarianism within part one, it cannot have escaped our attention that much of their behaviour was also sectarian. During the period 1917 to 1923 Leninist/Bolshevism was not only centralist and anti-democratic with regard to the working class, but also sectarian. It did not always exhibit the more bizarre characteristics of sectarianism identified in chapter 3, by many of the imitators of Lenin, but the extracts reproduced in Chapter 4 do reveal that Leninism/Bolshevism;

a) Demanded the subordination of the workers movement to itself. (i.e. Co-operatives, Soviets, Communes Kronstadt etc.) [sectarian characteristic 10.]

b) Maintained that it had the answers, the 'solution' to the problems facing the working class. (i.e. Centralised Plans, One-man management, Concessions, N.E.P.) [sectarian characteristic 1.]

c) Was religious in the sense of having an unshakeable belief in its correctness despite the contradiction between that conviction and the actual historical development. (i.e. blaming cultural deficiencies, lack of political understanding, interventions, civil war etc.) [sectarian characteristic 3.]

d) Justified its existence not by what it had in COMMON with the working class but by what criteria distinguished it from the movement as a whole. (i.e. resoluteness, steadfastness, so-called theoretical correctness, being the vanguard etc.) [sectarian characteristic 2.]

e) Frequently operated by abstractions and logical deductions. (i.e. Soviets + Electricity = Socialism; the number of shoes required for electrification.) [sectarian characteristic 9.]

Evidence suggests that other sectarian characteristics also surfaced from time to time during the period Lenin was in leadership of the Bolsheviks. Certainly, Leninism and Bolshevism during Lenin's lifetime was completely sectarian (and thus thoroughly reactionary) in relation to the revolutionary self-organisation of the working class. A question arises as to how the views identified and discussed so far can be consistently held by a person whose avowed intention was not just to make the lot of the working class better, but to elevate them to power.

Lenin was an anti-capitalist and a great patron of the working classes. It cannot be denied that he wanted something better for them than being dominated by feudal absolutism or capital. He also listened to them frequently and with great patience, but it must be said that he did so in order to 'lead' them better. His views about the low level of culture and lack of education of the oppressed are too numerous and unequivocal to conclude that he considered working people as equals or equal to the task of building an alternative society without him. But it is not the undoubted patronising of workers (shared by most senior Bolsheviks) which reveals the reason for the chasm between a humanist rhetoric of social equality and a physical reality of brutal exploitation. A clue lies in the fact that although Lenin was a consummate political intellectual, he was also at root, an idealist.

Although expounding materialism and Marxism repeatedly he was in fact an inconsistent materialist. The power of ideas, the medium through which he exclusively worked, was perhaps just too close and dominant for him. He was just too good at it to give it a rest or give it up altogether. His whole working life was spent analysing, criticising, developing and promoting ideas. At this he was exceptionally good. But this very intellectual strength was at the same time his weakness. To Lenin, everything could be solved by working out and correctly implementing, the right ideas. He wanted Industrialisation for Russia, a materialist aim, but to achieve it he proposed a solution which was idealist - the single economic plan.

Despite his advocacy of dialectical materialism, he frequently fell victim to idealism. The dialectic was still there, (giving the impression of great subtlety and power to his arguments and ideas), but so was the view that ideas were primary. For example, in addition to the many shrewd materialist observations of the practical struggle in 'What is to be Done', when it came to a question of revolutionary theory he was at pains to assert that;

"Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement."

...the role of a vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory." (Selected Works. Volume 1 page 148/139)

Accepting such an assertion places intellectuals firmly at the head of the revolutionary movement. In fact with regard to the first statement the reverse is true. Without a revolutionary anti-capitalist class (and its movement) there can be no real anti-capitalist revolutionary theory. In fact it is not revolutionary theory which create revolutionary developments, but revolutionary developments which give rise to revolutionary theory and its development. With regard to the second statement; if we accept this, then workers and peasants can never be vanguard revolutionary fighters in the overthrow of established oppressive regimes, for they are rarely guided by any advanced theories. Yet we know that very early on, the sans-culottes frequently played a leading role in the French Revolution and they did so without a revolutionary theory to guide them. The Paris Commune certainly involved individuals with revolutionary ideas, but revolutionary theory, as Lenin outlined it, did not guide the majority of them. In fact it was the practical creative activity of the Paris citizens which provided the basis for Marx to develop revolutionary theory once he had carefully studied their actions.

Closer to the time of Lenin, the experience of Russia itself in the revolution of 1905 and 1917 saw the revolutionary energy of the working class along with its own creativity, shake the crumbling Czarist regime to its foundations, knowing little or nothing of Marxism and the dialectic. The two revolutionary upsurges, 1905 and 1917 started without the Bolsheviks and even caught them completely by surprise. Where was theory then? This is not to argue that ideas and theories are unimportant, but simply to remind us that they are not the prime movers of change, including revolutionary change. A further example of Lenin's idealism which we have already noted in another context is in relationship to the notion of a Centralised Planned Economy. In this complex set of ideas and proposals, everything was worked out in advance in great detail down to how many pairs of shoes would be needed for the electrification plan. The socio-economic development of Soviet Russia involving millions of human beings was treated as if it was the planning and erection of a building or series of buildings. We know however, that real life does not adhere to, nor can it be made to conform to, such abstract and rigid forms of planning.

More to the point, developing a post-capitalist society isn't anything like erecting buildings, nor do real living people in new and experimental social conditions act in such predictable and planned ways. Just as the natural world creates its apparent evolutionary order (or rather 'balance') out of variety, diversity, selection, adaptation, contradiction, failure and success, so too do human societies. No two hunter-gatherer groups were identical. No pair of cultivator bands were the same. No two agricultural settlements were equal. No brace of slave plantations or feudal peasant farms conformed to an exact pattern. Human life, including its organisational forms, is diverse, uncertain, changing and often contradictory.

It is simply not possible, nor desirable, to construct a society of human beings according to a centralised plan. It never was and it never will be, yet Lenin and the Bolsheviks proceeded as if it could be done. They acted as if they were the great architects and draughtsmen of all humanity creating something they called socialism or communism. If the workers allowed themselves to be slotted into the Bolshevik plan) then this fantasy 'socialism' would be built and everyone would live relatively happily ever after. This idea (or rather idealised vision) was obviously a nonsense. When things didn't turn out the way he thought they should, Lenin always found fault with actual people and not with his ideas and plans.

Workers were too work-shy, undisciplined or uncultured. Officials employed in the state bureaucracy Lenin helped set up, were too bogged down in red-tape. Loyal Party members didn't understand the Party programme. Opposition groups within the Party didn't understand what they were doing. It was never the ideas of Lenin which were unrealistic or just plain wrong, it was always reality. Lenin's idealism is also revealed in his obsessive concern that so-called alien (Menshevik and Bourgeois) ideas could infect workers. Lenin couldn't countenance, let alone accept, that it was workers' own experiences which led them to disagree with Bolshevism, he could only conceive that it was the power of Menshevik ideas which were seducing them.

Yet it was Lenin who was able to follow sets of ideas which talked of an end to oppression and exploitation, for future ideal workers, whilst he simultaneously introduced oppressive and exploitative practices into the lives of real workers and peasants. In this context it is revealing to contrast what Lenin said before the Bolsheviks took power and what happened afterwards. Just one month before the October Revolution, Lenin advised;

"Don't be afraid of the people's initiative and independence. Put your faith in their revolutionary organisations and you will see in all realms of state affairs the same strength, majesty and invincibility of the workers and peasants as were displayed in their unity and their fury against Kornilov. Lack of faith in the people, fear of their initiative and independence, trepidation before their revolutionary energy instead of all-round and unqualified support for it - this is where the S.R. and Menshevik leaders have sinned most of all." (Collected Works Volume 25. Page 374)

Having written this, Lenin frequently expressed fear of the people's initiative, independence and repeatedly defended having a lack of faith in workers and peasants. In his early rhetoric, he projected a viewpoint of workers as sources of strength, majesty and invincibility, yet in reality, and not too long after, Lenin nonetheless, treated them as uncultured, lazy, and pettite-bourgeois. From all these instances we can see that Leninist/Bolshevik anti-capitalism and post-capitalism was motivated by an idealised centralism and abstract logical plans, complete with analogies of vehicles and machines.

Lenin's sectarianism and idealism -2.

Lenin remained a skilled, consummate and wily politician until shortly before his death. However, his own political ability became a liability in the new conditions of a post-capitalist society. Unfortunately his political brilliance blinded many of his contemporaries and subsequent generations of revolutionary thinkers. As we shall see in a later chapter, Lenin confirmed the correctness of Marx's analysis, in relationship to the political viewpoint; i.e. the more perfected the politics the less capable it is of discovering the source of social ills. Instead of society throwing off all politics, Lenin sought the reverse, the politicisation of all society. Instead of dissolving Bolshevism and joining with the working and peasant masses in organising post-capitalist society anew, Lenin sought to Bolshevise the masses. Whilst the first was possible, the second was a utopian dream. No amount of education, political or otherwise, would stir an entire class let alone an entire people to those levels of political sophistication and obedient dedication.

Lenin's vision, and that of his supporters within the Communist Party, was to organise the whole of social life - politically. This ideal was bound to fail. In the end it did and Lenin saw this, but drew the conclusion that it was the workers and peasants who were deficient and not his ideas. As was noted in the last chapter, one of his last works was 'Better fewer but Better'. Written, in 1923, after six years of total political power in Russia, this article is an admission of his own (and Bolshevik) political failure. Having failed to involve the whole population in the state and with corruption rife among those selected to become involved, he did not call for a revolutionary end to the state - not even its withering away - but its continuance under a smaller and more skilled elite. Better fewer, but better! The withering away of the new forms of revolutionary defence envisaged by Marx and its replacement by the profane economic organisation of mere mortals in their local communes had been rejected by Lenin in favour of establishing a highly centralised political state in the hands of a few so-called outstanding individuals. In other words in the exact opposite way envisaged by Marx and almost an exact replica of the Bolshevik Party!

It is not surprising therefore, that 'Better Fewer, but Better', repeats essentially the same 'professional' sentiments as those in 'What is to Be Done?' After the massive convulsions of working class and peasant self-activity, which created the Soviets, caused the overthrow of the Czar, won the Civil War, defeated the foreign armed intervention, Lenin's ideas had come full circle. After all the experience of revolution, and the numerous failures and shortcoming of Bolshevism in practice, Lenin's organisational understanding had not progressed or developed beyond those ideas expressed in 'What is to be Done'. In his dispute with Martov over the Party, in 1902, he had argued that fewer would be better than many. In evaluating the experience of 1917 to 1923 he concluded exactly the same, only he used slightly different words. Lenin's last writings demonstrate an enormous sectarian pessimism about his fellow revolutionaries (something he was perhaps justified in given their post 1920's track record) but also in the Russian working people and in struggling humanity.

Conclusion.

From the standpoint of the working and oppressed classes we can conclude that Leninist anti-capitalism was revolutionary only in a petty-bourgeois political sense. Once political power had been gained by Lenin and the Bolsheviks they ceased to be revolutionary and became reformists. From then on the very best they wanted was to improve the wages and conditions of workers rather than abolish the category of wage labour. They wished to reform the state, not smash it; to improve one-man management of production, not collectivise it; to Taylorise industrial exploitation, not to overcome it.

In addition, Lenin always saw his political ideas as being the key to understanding and solving all political, social and economic problems. To Lenin, Marxism was a superior system of ideas to all other ideas. Even when studying philosophy (Notebooks on Hegel, Materialism and Empirio Criticism) and economics ('Development of Capitalism in Russia', or 'Imperialism') Lenin's purpose was primarily political and ideological. It was research done to counter-pose his own ideas to those of his political opponents - to win the 'battle of ideas'. In contrast, Marx's revolutionary-humanism, whilst dealing with politics, transcended politics itself. As we shall see later, in more detail, Marx saw the limitation of politics and the reactionary nature of all political elites. He warned working people against both. Lenin's sharp political grasp lacked a corresponding social dimension and humanist motivation. It was therefore, one-sided and flawed. Lenin warned the working class about some aspects of politics, but only against rival politics to Bolshevism and only rival political leaderships within Bolshevism to his own.

As a result, the practical progress of Lenin's so-called 'dictatorship of the proletariat' was in the exact opposite to the way he depicted it in 'State and Revolution'. Lenin never once considered that any deficiency and ignorance may lie within his own political mentality itself and in the poverty of imposed political solutions in a post-capitalist society. Bolshevism, under Lenin, and well before the ascendancy of Stalin, promoted solutions arrived at by a narrow political elite and then imposed them by legal and military force. When this did not succeed a higher 'political' solution was considered (i.e. the Militarisation of Labour) before Stalin eventually followed this logic to its full extent and developed compulsory collectivisation, terror and the forced labour camp.

Through a study of Lenin's writings we have seen that the ideas of centralism and the planned economy were unalterable principles of Leninism. These together with the sectarian belief in the correctness and superiority of Bolshevism over the workers' movement, led inexorably (once they had been accepted by the vanguard of the workers) to a strengthening of the state against the workers and peasants. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, could not understand the fact that working people having thrown off the physical and economic compulsion of the oppressing classes, were beginning to readjust to a voluntary and natural rhythm of labour which did not have centralised economic and political compulsion as its basis.

Leninist, and thus Bolshevik ideology, was a product of a middle-class political elite who happened to become revolutionary during a period of Autocratic rule. In fact, as we have seen, they were only revolutionary up to the point of establishing themselves firmly in power. After that, although their language still spoke of anti-capitalism and revolution, their post-capitalist actions and policies first became reformist before becoming progressively more reactionary. However interesting and astute many of the works of Lenin are, from the standpoint of the working and oppressed classes, Leninism and Bolshevism, as foundations for building a post-capitalist society, are fatally flawed. Such a recognition of Leninist/ Bolshevism leads us to a consideration and reassessment of that other Russian anti-capitalist revolutionary of distinction, Leon Trotsky, for he claimed to continue in the tradition of Bolshevism and Leninism after Lenin died.

Below is not included in the chapter.

der that rule of the Czar which granted privilege and position on the basis of connection and favour rather than merit, the middle classes were constrained professionally and economically. This together with the oppression of the working classes created the conditions for a revolutionary opposition. One section of the middle-classes saw its best interests as being served by a development toward the capitalist system. Another section toward something they termed socialism.

However, with a strong and resolute political elite in control, things were quite different. Politics, driven by that elite, considered itself of the utmost important, if not of absolute importance, long after it had served its purpose. Long after it ceased to have a progressive role, Bolshevik politics was still trying (alas successfully) to dominate economic and social affairs. The political elite having no other 'trade' and no other point of view and convinced of their own correctness, many extended their job satisfaction and hung onto power. For them the revolution was, in fact, if not in rhetoric, synonymous with their holding of power. Their own history of political struggle had seemed to confirm this. Their own specialisation and ability in politics could lead them no other conclusion. Everyone else who argued against their positions in particular or general would appear as enemies of the revolution. Workers who failed to work under Bolshevik guidance and direction were seen as reactionary, degenerate, or at the very least, politically uneducated or politically misguided. Or as Lenin repeatedly commented, workers and peasants were culturally backward.

Unlike the purely economic viewpoint, which abstracts away from human affairs all that is human, (e.g. emotions, desires, non-work needs etc.), the political viewpoint accepts them but subordinates them to its own needs. The political viewpoint takes for granted (and fails to see the contradiction) the fact that it is based upon a minority ruling over a majority. That fundamentally it is an oligarchic and hierarchical solution to making decisions, whilst economic production continues without interuption. At the same time democratic politics rationalises this fact and creates the fiction that this process is serving the interests of the majority. Petty-bourgeois socialist politics also rationalises this rule of an elite minority, but at best creates the fiction that it is in the interests of the entire working and oppressed classes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This much Lenin established forcefully in his polemics against all other forms of bourgeois and socialist politics. All that is except his own brand of petty-bourgeois Jacobin-style 'revolutionary' politics. Lenin was from petty-bourgeois stock, but it was not simply being born into a middle class family, which automatically rendered his politics incapable of transcending bourgeois and pre-bourgeois forms. Marx and Engels were from relatively privileged bourgeois backgrounds, yet this did not prevent them from transcending bourgeois politics. In Lenin's case his idealism and distrust of the oppressed prevented him from breaking completely with bourgeois forms.