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version of Appendix 4.5.
Were any of the Bolshevik oppositions a real alternative?
The real limitations in Bolshevism can best be seen by the
various oppositions to the mainstream of that party. That
Bolshevik politics were not a suitable instrument for working
class self-liberation can be seen by the limited way which
opposition groups questioned Bolshevik orthodoxy -- even,
in the case of the opposition to the rising Stalinist
bureaucracy. Each opposition was fundamentally in favour
of the Bolshevik monopoly of power, basically seeking reforms
on areas which did not question it (such as economic policy).
This does not mean that the various oppositions did not
have valid points, just that they shared most of the key
assumptions of Bolshevism which undermined the Russian
revolution either by their application or their use to
justify specific (usually highly authoritarian) practice.
We will not cover all the various oppositions with the
Bolshevik party here (Robert V. Daniels' The Conscience
of the Revolution discusses all of them in some detail,
as does Leonard Schapiro's The Origin of the Communist
Autocracy). We will concentrate on the "Left
Communists" of 1918,
the "Workers' Opposition" of 1920/1 and the Trotsky-led
"Left Opposition" of 1923-7. It can be said that each
opposition is a pale reflection of the one before it
and each had clear limitations in their politics which
fatally undermined any liberatory potential they had.
Indeed, by the time of the "Left Opposition" we are
reduced to simply the more radical sounding faction of
the state and party bureaucracy fighting it out with the
dominant faction.
To contrast these fake "oppositions" with a genuine opposition,
we will discuss (in section 4) the "Workers' Group" of
1923 which was expelled from the Communist Party and repressed
because it stood for (at least until the Bolshevik party
seized power) traditional socialist values. This repression
occurred, significantly, under Lenin and Trotsky in 1922/3.
The limited nature of the previous oppositions and the
repression of a genuine dissident working class group
within the Communist Party shows how deeply unlibertarian the
real Bolshevik tradition is. In fact, it could be argued that
the fate of all the non-Trotskyist oppositions shows what
will inevitably happen when someone takes the more democratic
sounding rhetoric of Lenin at face value and compares it to
his authoritarian practice, namely Lenin will turn round and
say unambiguously that he had already mentioned his practice
before hand and the reader simply had not been paying attention.
The first opposition of note to Lenin's state capitalist
politics was the "Left Communists" in early 1918. This
was clustered around the Bolshevik leader Bukharin. This
grouping was focused around opposition to the Brest-Litovsk
peace treaty with Germany and Lenin's advocacy of "state
capitalism" and "one-man management" as the means of
both achieving socialism and getting Russia out of its
problems. It is the latter issue that concerns us here.
The first issue of their theoretical journal Kommunist
was published in April 1920 and it argued vigorously
against Lenin's advocacy of "one-man management" and
state capitalism for "socialist" Russia. They correctly
argued "for the construction of the proletarian society
by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not
by the Ukases of the captains of industry . . . If the
proletariat itself does not know how to create the
necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation
of labour, no one can do this for it and no one can
compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the
workers, will find itself in the hands of a social
force which is either under the influence of another
social class or is in the hands of the soviet power;
but the soviet power will then be forced to seek
support against the proletariat from another class
(e.g. the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself
as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and
socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat
itself, or they will not be set up at all: something
else will be set up -- state capitalism." [Osinsky,
quoted by Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control,
p. 39]
Lenin reacted sharply, heaping insult upon insult on the
Left Communists and arguing against their ideas on workers'
self-management. Rather than see self-management (or
even workers' control) as the key, he argued forcefully
in favour of one-man management and state capitalism as
both the means of solving Russia's immediate problems and
building socialism. Moreover, he linked this with his
previous writings, correctly noting his "'high' appreciation
of state" had been given "before the Bolsheviks seized
power." For Lenin, "Socialism [was] inconceivable without
large scale capitalist engineering . . . [and] without
planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions
of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard
in production and distribution." Thus "our task is to
study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no
effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting
dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it."
[Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 636 and p. 635] This
required appointing capitalists to management positions,
from which the vanguard could learn.
So, as long as a workers' party held power, the working
class need not fear "state capitalism" and the lack of
economic power at the point of production. Of course,
without economic power, working class political power
would be fatally undermined. In practice, Lenin simply
handed over the workplaces to the state bureaucracy
and created the social relationships which Stalinism
thrived upon. Unfortunately, Lenin's arguments carried
the day (see see section 9
of the appendix "What happened
during the Russian Revolution?"). How this conflict was resolved
is significant, given that the banning of factions (which
is generally seen as a key cause in the rise of Stalinism)
occurred in 1921 (a ban, incidentally, Trotsky defended
throughout the 1920s). As one historian notes:
"The resolution of the party controversy in the spring of 1918
set a pattern that was to be followed throughout the history of
the Communist Opposition in Russia. This was the settlement of
the issues not by discussion, persuasion, or compromise, but
by a high-pressure campaign in the party organisations, backed
by a barrage of violent invective in the party press and in the
pronouncements of the party leaders. Lenin's polemics set the
tone, and his organisational lieutenants brought the membership
into line." [Daniels, Op. Cit., p. 87]
Indeed, "[s]oon after the party congress had approved the peace
[in the spring of 1918], a Petrograd city party conference produced
a majority for Lenin. It ordered the suspension of the newspaper
Kommunist which had been serving as a Left Communist organ . . .
The fourth and final issue of the Moscow Kommunist had to be
published as a private factional paper rather than as the official
organ of a party organisation." Ultimately, "[u]nder the conditions
of party life established by Lenin, defence of the Opposition
position became impossible within the terms of Bolshevik discipline."
[Op. Cit., p. 88 and p. 89] So much for faction rights -- three
years before they were officially prohibited in the 10th Party
Congress!
However, the "Left Communists," while correct on socialism
needing workers' economic self-management, were limited in
other ways. The major problems with the "Left Communists"
were two-fold.
Firstly, by basing themselves on Bolshevik orthodoxy they
allowed Lenin to dominate the debate. This meant that their
more "libertarian" reading of Lenin's work could be nullified
by Lenin himself pointing to the authoritarian and state
capitalist aspects of those very same works. Which is ironic,
as today most Leninists tend to point to these very same
democratic sounding aspects of Lenin's ideas while downplaying
the more blatant anti-socialist ones. Given that Lenin had
dismissed such approaches himself during the debate against
the Left Communists in 1918, it seems dishonest for his latter
day followers to do this.
Secondly, their perspective on the role of the party undermined
their commitment to true workers' power and freedom. This can
be seen from the comments of Sorin, a leading Left Communist.
He argued that the Left Communists were "the most passionate
proponents of soviet power, but . . . only so far as this
power does not degenerate . . . in a petty-bourgeois
direction." [quoted by Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik
Party in Conflict, p. 135] For them, like any Bolshevik,
the party played the key role. The only true bastion of the
interests of the proletariat was the party which "is in every
case and everywhere superior to the soviets . . . The soviets
represent labouring democracy in general; and its interest,
and in particular the interests of the petty bourgeois
peasantry, do not always coincide with the interests of the
proletariat." [quoted by Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists
in Power, p. 182] This support for party power can also
be seen in Osinsky's comment that "soviet power" and the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" could "seek support"
from other social classes, so showing that the class
did not govern directly.
Thus soviet power was limited to approval of the party line
and any deviation from that line would be denounced as "petty
bourgeois" and, therefore, ignored. "Ironically," the historian
Kowalski notes, "Sorin's call for a revived soviet democracy
was becoming vitiated by the dominant role assigned, in the
final analysis, to the party." [Op. Cit., p. 136] Thus their
politics were just as authoritarian as the mainstream
Bolshevism they attacked on other issues:
"Ultimately, the only criterion that they appeared able to
offer was to define 'proletarian' in terms of adherence to
their own policy prescriptions and 'non-proletarian' by
non-adherence to them. In consequence, all who dared to
oppose them could be accused either of being non-proletarian,
or at the very least suffering from some form of 'false
consciousness' -- and in the interests of building socialism
must recant or be purged from the party. Rather ironically,
beneath the surface of their fine rhetoric in defence of
the soviets, and of the party as 'a forum for all of
proletarian democracy,' there lay a political philosophy
that was arguably as authoritarian as that of which they
accused Lenin and his faction." [Lowalski, Op. Cit.,
pp. 136-7]
This position can be traced back to the fundamentals of
Bolshevism (see section H.5 on vanguardism). "According
to the Left Communists, therefore," notes Richard Sakwa,
"the party was the custodian of an interest higher than
that of the soviets. Earlier theoretical considerations
on the vanguard role of the party, developed in response
to this problem, were confirmed by the circumstances of
Bolshevism in power. The political dominance of the party
over the soviets encouraged an administrative one as well.
Such a development was further encouraged by the emergence
of a massive and unwieldy bureaucratic apparatus in 1918
. . . The Left Communists and the party leadership were
therefore in agreement that . . . the party should play
a tutelary role over the soviets." Furthermore, "[w]ith
such a formulation it proved difficult to maintain the
vitality of the soviet plenum as the soviet was
controlled by a party fraction, itself controlled by
a party committee outside the soviet." [Op. Cit., p. 182
and p. 182-3]
With this ideological preference for party power and the
ideological justification for ignoring soviet democracy,
it is doubtful that their (correct) commitment to workers'
economic self-management would have been successful. An
economic democracy combined with what amounts to a party
dictatorship would be an impossibility that could never
work in practice (as Lenin in 1921 argued against the
"Workers' Opposition").
As such, the fact that Bukharin (one time "Left Communist")
"continued to eulogise the party's dictatorship, sometimes
quite unabashedly" during and after the civil war becomes
understandable. In this, he was not being extreme:
"Bolsheviks no longer bothered to disclaim that the
dictatorship of the proletariat as the 'dictatorship
of the party.'" [Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the
Bolshevik Revolution, p. 145 and p. 142] All the leading
Bolsheviks had argued this position for some time (see
section H.1.2, for example). Bukharin even went so far as
to argue that "the watchword" taken up by some workers
("even metal workers"!) of "For class dictatorship, but
against party dictatorship!" showed that the proletariat
"was declassed." This also indicated that a "misunderstanding
arose which threatened the whole system of the proletarian
dictatorship." [contained in Al Richardson (ed.), In
Defence of the Russian Revolution, p. 192] The echoes of
the positions argued before the civil war can be seen in
Bukharin's glib comment that proletarian management of the
revolution meant the end of the "proletarian" dictatorship!
Lastly, the arguments of the Left Communists against
"one-man management" were echoed by the Democratic Centralists
at the Ninth Party Congress. One member of this grouping (which
included such "Left Communists" as Osinsky) argued against
Lenin's dominate position in favour of appointed managers
inside and outside the party as follows:
"The Central Committee finds that the [local] party committee
is a bourgeois prejudice, is conservatism bordering on the
province of treason, and that the new form is the replacement
of party committees by political departments, the heads of
which by themselves replace the elected committees . . . You
transform the members of the party into an obedient gramophone,
with leaders who order: go and agitate; but they haven't the
right to elect their own committee, their own organs.
"I then put the question to comrade Lenin: Who will appoint the
Central Committee? You see, there can be individual authority
here as well. Here also a single commander can be appointed."
[Sapronov, quoted by Daniels, Op. Cit., p. 114]
Obviously a man before his time. As Stalin proved, if one-man
management was such a good idea then why wasn't it being
practised in the Council of People's Commissars. However,
we should not be surprised by this party regime. After all,
Trotsky had imposed a similar regime in the Army in 1918,
as had Lenin in industry in the same year. As discussed in
section 3 of the appendix
"What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?", the Bolshevik preference for centralised
"democracy" effectively hollowed out the real democracy at
the base which makes democracy more than just picking masters.
The next major opposition group were the "Workers' Opposition"
of 1920 and early 1921. Significantly, the name "Workers'
Opposition" was the label used by the party leadership to
describe what latter became a proper grouping within the
party. This group was more than happy to use the label
given to it. This group is generally better known
than other oppositions simply because it was the focus for
much debate at the tenth party congress and its existence
was a precipitating factor in the banning of factions within
the Communist Party.
However, like the "Left Communists," the "Workers' Opposition"
did not extend their economic demands to political issues.
Unlike the previous opposition, however, their support for
party dictatorship was more than logically implied, it was
taken for granted. Alexandra Kollontai's pamphlet, for example,
expounding the position of the "Workers' Opposition" fails
to mention political democracy at all, instead discussing
exclusively economic and party democracy. Thus it was a
case of the "Workers' Opposition" expressing the "basis
on which, in its opinions, the dictatorship of the
proletariat must rest in the sphere of industrial
reconstruction." Indeed, the "whole controversy boils
down to one basic question: who shall build the communist
economy, and how shall it be build?" [Selected Writings
of Alexandra Kollontai, p. 161 and p. 173]
Kollontai was right to state that the working class "can
alone by the creator of communism" and to ask the question
of "shall we achieve communist through the workers or
over their heads, by the hands of Soviet officials." As
she argued, "it is impossible to decree communism."
However, her list of demand were purely economic in
nature and she wondered "[w]hat shall we do then in order
to destroy bureaucracy in the party and replace it by
workers' democracy?" She stressed that the "Workers'
Opposition" struggle was "for establishing democracy
in the party, and for the elimination of all bureaucracy."
[Op. Cit., p. 176, p. 174, p. 187, p. 192 and p. 197] Thus
her demands were about the internal regime of the party,
not a call for wider democratic reforms in the state
or society as a whole.
As one historian notes, the "arguments of Kollontai were
. . . strictly limited in their appeal to the communist
party . . . Nor did they in any form criticise the
domination of the communist minority over the majority
of the proletariat. The fundamental weakness of the case
of the Workers' Opposition was that, while demanding more
freedom of initiative for the workers, it was quite content
to leave untouched the state of affairs in which a few
hundred thousand imposed their will on many millions. 'And
since when have we [the Workers' Opposition] been enemies
of komitetchina [manipulation and control by communist
party committees], I should like to know?' Shlyapnikov
asked at the Tenth Party Congress. He went on to explain
that the trade union congress in which, as he and his
followers proposed, all control of industry should be
vested would 'of course' be composed of delegates nominated
and elected 'through the party cells, as we always do.'
But he argued that the local trade union cells would
ensure the election of men qualified by experience and
ability in pace of those who are 'imposed on us at present'
by the centre. Kollontai and her supporters had no wish
to disturb the communist party's monopoly of political
power." [Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist
Autocracy, p. 294]
Even this extremely limited demand for more economic
democracy were too much for Lenin. In January, 1921,
Lenin was arguing that the Bolsheviks had to "add to
our platform the following: we must combat the ideological
confusion of those unsound elements of the opposition who
go to the lengths of repudiating all 'militarisation of
economy,' of repudiating not only the 'method of appointing'
which has been the prevailing method up to now, but all
appointments. In the last analysis this means repudiating
the leading role of the Party in relation to the non-Party
masses. We must combat the syndicalist deviation which
will kill the Party if it is not completely cured of it."
Indeed, "the syndicate deviation leads to the fall of
the dictatorship of the proletariat." [quoted by Brinton,
Op. Cit., pp. 75-6] Maurice Brinton correctly notes that
by this Lenin meant that "working class power ('the
dictatorship of the proletariat') is impossible if there
are militants in the Party who think the working class
should exert more power in production ('the syndicalist
deviation')." Moreover, "Lenin here poses quite clearly
the question of 'power of the Party' or 'power of the
class.' He unambiguously opts for the former -- no doubt
rationalising his choice by equating the two. But he
goes even further. He not only equates 'workers power'
with the rule of the Party. He equates it with acceptance
of the ideas of the Party leaders!" [Op. Cit., p. 76]
At the tenth party congress, the "Workers' Opposition"
were labelled "petty-bourgeois," "syndicalist" and
even "anarchist" simply because they called for limited
participation by workers in the rebuilding of Russia.
The group was "caused in part by the entry into the ranks
of the Party of elements which had still not completely
adopted the communist world view." Significantly, those
who had the "communist world view" did not really debate
the issues raised and instead called the opposition
"genuinely counter-revolutionary," "objectively
counter-revolutionary" as well as "too revolutionary."
[quoted by Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 79]
For Lenin, the idea of industrial democracy was a nonsense.
In this he was simply repeating the perspective he had
held from spring 1918. As he put it, it was "a term that
lends itself to misinterpretations. It may be read as a
repudiation of dictatorship and individual authority."
Industry, he argued, "is indispensable, democracy is not"
and "on no account must we renounce dictatorship either."
Indeed, "[i]ndustry is indispensable, democracy is a
category proper only to the political sphere"." He did
admit "[t]hat [the opposition] has been penetrating
into the broad masses is evident" however it was the duty
of the party to ignore the masses. The "bidding for or
flirtation with the non-Party masses" was a "radical
departure from Marxism." "Marxism teaches," Lenin said,
"and this tenet has not only been formally endorsed by the
whole Communist International in the decisions of the
Second (1920) Congress of the Comintern on the role of
the political party of the proletariat, but has also been
confirmed in practice by our revolution -- that only the
political party of the working class, i.e. the Communist
Party, is capable of uniting, training and organising a
vanguard of the proletariat . . . . that alone will be
capable of withstanding the inevitable petty-bourgeois
vacillation of this mass . . . Without this the
dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible."
[Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 82, p. 27, p. 26, p. 197
and p. 246] In other words, "Marxism" teaches that workers'
democracy and protest (the only means by which "vacillation"
can be expressed) is a danger to the "dictatorship of
the proletariat"! (see also
section H.5.3 on why this
position is the inevitable outcome of vanguardism).
It should be stresses that this opposition and the debate
it provoked occurred after the end of the Civil War in the
west. The Whites under Wrangel had been crushed in November,
1920, and the Russian revolution was no longer in immediate
danger. As such, there was an opportunity for constructive
activity and mass participation in the rebuilding of Russia.
The leading Bolsheviks rejected such demands, even in the
limited form advocated by the "Workers' Opposition." Lenin
and Trotsky clearly saw any working class participation
as a danger to their power. Against the idea of economic
participation under Communist control raised by the "Workers'
Opposition," the leading Bolsheviks favoured the NEP. This
was a return to the same kind of market-based "state
capitalist" strategy Lenin had advocated against the
"Left Communists" before the outbreak of the civil war
in May 1918 (and, as noted, he had argued for in 1917).
This suggests a remarkable consistency in Lenin's thoughts,
suggesting that claims his policies he advocated and
implemented in power were somehow the opposite of what
he "really" wanted are weak.
As with the "Left Communists" of 1918, Lenin saw his
opposition to the "Workers' Opposition" as reflecting
the basic ideas of his politics. "If we perish," he said
privately at the time according to Trotsky, "it is all the
more important to preserve our ideological line and give a
lesson to our continuators. This should never be forgotten,
even in hopeless circumstances." [quoted by Daniels,
Op. Cit., p. 147]
In summary, like the "Left Communists", the "Workers'
Opposition" presented a platform of economic demands
rooted in the assumption of Bolshevik party domination.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that leading members of
the "Workers' Opposition" took part in the attack on
Kronstadt and that they wholeheartedly rejected the
consistent demands for political and economic that
the Kronstadt rebels had raised (see appendix
"What was the Kronstadt Rebellion?"
for more information). Such a policy would be
too contradictory to be applied.
Either the economic reforms would remain a dead letter
under party control or the economic reforms would provoke
demands for political change. This last possibility may
explain Lenin's vitriolic attacks on the "Workers'
Opposition."
This opposition, like the "Left Communists" of 1918, was
ultimately defeated by organisational pressures within the
party and state. Victor Serge in
late 1920. [Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 123] Kollantai
complained that while officially one and a half million
copies of the "Workers' Opposition" manifesto was published,
in fact only 1500 were "and that with difficulty." [quoted
by Schaprio, Op. Cit., p. 291] This applied even more after
the banning of factions, when the party machine used state
power to break up the base of the opposition in the trade
unions as well as its influence in the party.
"Victimisation of supporters of the Workers' Opposition,"
notes Schapiro, "began immediately after the Tenth Party
Congress. 'The struggle,' as Shlyapnikov later recounted,
'took place not along ideological lines but by means . . .
of edging out from appointments, of systematic transfers
from one district to another, and even expulsion from the
party.' . . . the attack was levelled not for heretical
opinions, but for criticism of any kind of party shortcomings.
'Every member of the party who spoke in defence of the
resolution on workers' democracy [in the party -- see
next section] was declared a supporter of the Workers'
Opposition and guilty of disintegrating the party,' and
was accordingly victimised." [Op. Cit., pp. 325-6]
Thus "the party Secretariat was perfecting its technique of
dealing with recalcitrant individuals by the power of
removal and transfer, directed primarily at the adherents
of the Workers' Opposition. (Of the 37 Workers' Opposition
delegates to the Tenth Congress whom Lenin consulted when
he was persuading Shlyapnikov and Kutuzov to enter the
Central Committee, only four managed to return as voting
delegates to the next congress.)" [Daniels, Op. Cit.,
p. 161]
A similar process was at work in the trade unions. For
example, "[w]hen the metalworkers' union held its congress
in May 1921, the Central Committee of the party handed it
a list of recommended candidates for the union leadership.
The metalworkers' delegates voted down the party-backed
list, but this gesture proved futile: the party leadership
boldly appointed their own men to the union offices." This
was "a show of political force" as the union was a centre
of the Workers' Opposition. [Daniels, Op. Cit., p. 157]
This repression was practised under Lenin and Trotsky, using
techniques which were later used by the Stalinists against
Trotsky and his followers. Lenin himself was not above
removing his opponents from the central committee by
undemocratic methods. At the Tenth Party Congress he had
persuaded Shlyapnikov to be elected to the Central Committee
in an attempt to undermine the opposition. A mere "five months
later, Lenin was demanding his expulsion for a few sharp
words of criticism of the bureaucracy, uttered at a private
meeting of a local party cell. If he was looking for a
pretext, he could scarcely have picked a weaker one."
[Schapiro, Op. Cit., p. 327] Lenin failed by only one
vote short of the necessary two thirds majority of the
Committee.
In summary, the "Workers' Opposition" vision was limited.
Politically, it merely wanted democracy within the party.
It did not question the party's monopoly of power. As
such, it definitely did not deserve the labels "anarchist"
and "syndicalist" which their opponents called them. As
far as its economic policy goes, it, too, was limited.
Its demands for economic democracy were circumscribed
by placing it under the control of the communist cells
within the trade unions.
However, Kollontai was right to state that only the working
class "can alone by the creator of communism," that it was
impossible to "achieve communist . . . over [the workers']
heads, by the hands of Soviet officials" and that "it is
impossible to decree communism." As Kropotkin put it
decades before:
"Communist organisation cannot be left to be constructed by
legislative bodies called parliaments, municipal or communal
council. It must be the work of all, a natural growth, a
product of the constructive genius of the great mass.
Communism cannot be imposed from above." [Kropotkin's
Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 140]
Finally, there is Trotsky's opposition between 1923 and
1927. Since 1918 Trotsky had been wholeheartedly in
favour of the party dictatorship and its economic regime.
This position started to change once his own power came
under threat and he suddenly became aware of the necessity
for reform. Unsurprisingly, his opposition was the last
and by far the weakest politically. As Cornelius
Castoriadis points out:
"From the beginning of 1918 until the banning of factions
in March 1921, tendencies within the Bolshevik party were
formed that, with farsightedness and sometimes an
astonishing clarity, expressed opposition to the Party's
bureaucratic line and to its very rapid bureaucratisation.
These were the 'Left Communists' (at the beginning of 1918),
then the 'Democratic Centralist' tendency (1919), and finally
the 'Workers' Opposition' (1920-21). . . these oppositions
were defeated one by one . . . The very feeble echoes of their
critique of the bureaucracy that can be found later in the
(Trotskyist) 'Left Opposition' after 1923 do not have the
same signification. Trotsky was opposed to the bad policies
of the bureaucracy and to the excesses of its power. He never
put into question its essential nature. Until practically the
end of his life, he never brought up the questions raised by
the various oppositions of the period from 1918 to 1921 (in
essence: 'Who manages production?' and 'What is the proletariat
supposed to do during the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,'
other than work and follow the orders of 'its' party?')."
[Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 98]
While the "Left Communists" and "Workers' Opposition" had
challenged Lenin's state capitalist economic regime while
upholding the Bolshevik monopoly of power (implicitly
or explicitly), Trotsky did not even manage that. His
opposition was firmly limited to internal reforms
to the party which he hoped would result in wider
participation in the soviets and trade unions (he did
not bother to explain why continuing party dictatorship
would reinvigorate the soviets or unions).
Politically, Trotsky was unashamedly in favour of
party dictatorship. Indeed, his basic opposition to
Stalinism was because he considered it as the end of
that dictatorship by the rule of the bureaucracy.
He held this position consistently during the civil
war and into the 1920s (and beyond -- see
section
H.3.8). For example, in April 1923, he asserted
quite clearly that "[i]f there is one question which
basically not only does not require revision but does
not so much as admit the thought of revision, it is
the question of the dictatorship of the Party."
[Leon Trotsky Speaks, p. 158] And was true to his
word. In "The New Course" (generally accepted as being
the first public expression of his opposition), he
stated that "[w]e are the only party in the country,
and in the period of the dictatorship it could not
be otherwise." Moreover, it was "incontestable that
factions [within the party] are a scourge in the
present situation" and so the party "does not want
factions and will not tolerate them." [The Challenge
of the Left Opposition (1923-25), p. 78, p. 80 and
p. 86] In May 1924, he even went so far as to proclaim
that:
"Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right
against his party. The party in the last analysis is
always right, because the party is the sole historical
instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of
its basic problems . . . I know that one cannot be right
against the party. It is only possible to be right with
the party and through the party, for history has not
created other ways for the realisation of what is right."
[quoted by Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution,
p. 240]
However, confusion creeps into the politics of the
Left Opposition simply because they used the term
"workers' democracy" a lot. However, a close reading
of Trotsky's argument soon clarifies this issue.
Trotsky, following the Communist Party itself, had
simply redefined what "workers' democracy" meant.
Rather than mean what you would expect it would mean,
the Bolsheviks had changed its meaning to become
"party democracy." Thus Trotsky could talk about
"party dictatorship" and "workers' democracy" without
contradiction. As his support Max Eastman noted in
the mid-1920s, Trotsky supported the "programme of
democracy within the party -- called 'Workers'
Democracy' by Lenin." This "was not something new
or especially devised . . . It was part of the
essential policy of Lenin for going forward toward
the creation of a Communist society -- a principle
adopted under his leadership at the Tenth Congress of
the party, immediately after the cessation of the
civil war." [Since Lenin Died, p. 35] In the words
of historian Robert V. Daniels:
"The Opposition's political ideal was summed up in the slogan
'workers' democracy,' which referred particularly to two
documents [from 1920 and 1923] . . . Both these statements
concerned the need to combat 'bureaucratism' and implement
party democracy." [Op. Cit., p. 300]
That this was the case can be seen from the Fourth
All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in 1921:
"At the meeting of delegates who were party members,
Tomsky submitted for routine approval a set of these
on the tasks of trade unions. The approval was a matter
of form, but an omission was noted, The theses made
no reference to the formula of 'proletarian democracy'
with which the Tenth Congress had tried to assuage the
rank and file. Riazanov . . . offered an amendment to
fill the breach, in language almost identical with the
Tenth Congress resolution: 'The party must observe with
special care the normal methods of proletarian democracy,
particularly in the trade unions, where most of all the
selection of leaders should be done by the organised party
masses themselves.' . . . The party leadership reacted
instantaneously to this miscarriage of their plans for
curtailing the idea of union autonomy. Tomksy was
summarily ejected from the trade union congress. Lenin
put in appearance together with Bukharin and Stalin
to rectify the unionists' action." [Daniels, Op. Cit.,
p. 157]
The "New Course Resolution" passed in December, 1923,
stresses this, stating that "Workers' democracy means
the liberty of frank discussion of the most important
questions of party life by all members, and the election
of all leading party functionaries and commissions . . .
It does not . . . imply the freedom to form factional
groupings, which are extremely dangerous for the ruling
party." [Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 408] It made it clear
that "workers' democracy" was no such thing:
"Worker's democracy signifies freedom of open discussion by all
members of the party of the most important questions of party
life, freedom of controversy about them, and also electiveness
of the leading official individuals and collegia from below
upwards. However, it does not at all suggest freedom of
factional groupings . . . It is self-evident that within the
party . . . it is impossible to tolerate groupings, the
ideological contents of which are directed against the party
as a whole and against the dictatorship of the proletariat
(such as, for example, the 'Workers' Truth' and the 'Workers'
Group')." [quoted by Robert V. Daniels, Op. Cit., p. 222]
As "Left Oppositionist" Victor Serge himself pointed out,
"the greatest reach of boldness of the Left Opposition
in the Bolshevik Party was to demand the restoration of
inner-Party democracy, and it never dared dispute the
theory of single-party government -- by this time, it
was too late." Trotsky had "ever since 1923 [been] for the
renovation of the party through inner party democracy and
the struggle against bureaucracy." [The Serge-Trotsky
Papers, p. 181 and p. 201]
Thus Trotsky's opposition was hardly democratic. In 1926,
for example, he took aim at Stalin's dismissal of the
idea of "the dictatorship of the party" as "nonsense"
the previous year. If he were the heroic defender of
genuine workers democracy modern day Trotskyists assert,
he would have agreed with Stalin while exposing his
hypocrisy. Instead he defended the concept of "the
dictatorship of the party" and linked it to Lenin (and
so Leninist orthodoxy):
"Of course, the foundation of our regime is the dictatorship
of a class. But this in turn . . . assumes it is class that has
come to self-consciousness through its vanguard, which is to
say, through the party. Without this, the dictatorship could
not exist . . . Dictatorship is the most highly concentrated
function of function of a class, and therefore the basic
instrument of a dictatorship is a party. In the most fundamental
aspects a class realises its dictatorship through a party. That
is why Lenin spoke not only of the dictatorship of the class
but also the dictatorship of the party and, in a certain sense,
made them identical." [Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left
Opposition (1926-27), pp. 75-6]
Trotsky argued that Stalin's repudiation of the "dictatorship of
the party" was, in fact, a ploy to substitute the dictatorship of
the party "apparatus" for the dictatorship of the party (a theme
which would be raised in the following year's Platform of the
Opposition). Such a substitution, he argued, had its roots in a
"disproportion" between workers' democracy and peasants' democracy
(or "the private sector of the economy" in general). As long as
there was a "proper 'proportion'" between the two and "the advance
of democratic methods in the party and working class organisations,"
then "the identification of the dictatorship of the class with
that of the party is fully and completely justified historically
and politically." Needless to say, Trotsky did not bother to
ask how much democracy (of any kind) was possible under a party
dictatorship nor how a class could run society or have "democratic"
organisations if subjected to such a dictatorship. For him it was
a truism that the "dictatorship of a party does not contradict
the dictatorship of the class either theoretically or practically,
but is an expression of it." [Op. Cit., p. 76] Needless to say,
the obvious conclusion to draw from Trotsky's argument is that
if a revolution occurred in a country without a peasantry then
the "dictatorship of the party" would be of no real concern!
This was no temporary (7 year!) aberration. As indicated
in section H.3.8,
Trotsky repeated this support for party
dictatorship ten years later (and after). Furthermore,
Trotsky's defence of party dictatorship against Stalin was
included in the 1927 Platform of the Opposition. This
included the same contradictory demands for workers'
democracy and the revitalising of the soviets and trade
unions with deeply rooted ideological support for party
dictatorship. This document made his opposition clear,
attacking Stalin for weakening the party's
dictatorship. In its words, the "growing replacement
of the party by its own apparatus is promoted by a
'theory' of Stalin's which denies the Leninist principle,
inviolable for every Bolshevik, that the dictatorship
of the proletariat is and can be realised only through
the dictatorship of the party." It repeats this principle
by arguing that "the dictatorship of the proletariat
demands a single and united proletarian party as the
leader of the working masses and the poor peasantry."
As such, "[w]e will fight with all our power against
the idea of two parties, because the dictatorship of
the proletariat demands as its very core a single
proletarian party. It demands a single party." [The
Platform of the Opposition] Even in the prison camps
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, "almost all the
Trotskyists continued to consider that 'freedom of
party' would be 'the end of the revolution.' 'Freedom
to choose one's party -- that is Menshevism,' was the
Trotskyists' final verdict." [Ante Ciliga, The Russian
Enigma, p. 280]
Once we understand that "workers' democracy" had a
very specific meaning to the Communist Party, we can
start to understand such apparently contradictory
demands as the "consistent development of a workers'
democracy in the party, the trade unions, and the
soviets." Simply put, this call for "workers' democracy"
was purely within the respective party cells and not
a call for genuine democracy in the unions or
soviets. Such a position in no way undermines the
dictatorship of the party.
Economically, Trotsky's opposition was far more backward
than previous oppositions. For Trotsky, economic democracy
was not an issue. It played no role in determining the
socialist nature of a society. Rather state ownership did.
Thus he did not question one-man management in the workplace
nor the capitalist social relationships it generated. For
Trotsky, it was "necessary for each state-owned factory,
with its technical director and with its commercial director,
to be subjected not only to control from the top -- by the
state organs -- but also from below, by the market which
will remain the regulator of the state economy for a long
time to come." In spite of the obvious fact that the workers
did not control their labour or its product, Trotsky asserted
that "[n]o class exploitation exists here, and consequently
neither does capitalism exist." Moreover, "socialist industry
. . . utilises methods of development which were invented by
capitalist economy." Ultimately, it was not self-management
that mattered, it was "the growth of Soviet state industry
[which] signifies the growth of socialism itself, a direct
strengthening of the power of the proletariat"! [The First
5 Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, p. 237
and p. 245]
Writing in 1923, he argued that the "system of actual one-man
management must be applied in the organisation of industry
from top to bottom. For leading economic organs of industry
to really direct industry and to bear responsibility for its
fate, it is essential for them to have authority over the
selection of functionaries and their transfer and removal."
These economic organs must "in actual practice have full
freedom of selection and appointment." He also tied payment
to performance (just as he did during the civil war), arguing
that "the payment of the directors of enterprises must be
made to depend on their balance sheets, like wages depend
on output." [quoted by Robert V. Daniels, A Documentary
History of Communism, vol. 1, p. 237]
Moreover, Trotsky's key idea during the 1920s was to
industrialise Russia. As the 1927 Platform argued, it
was a case that the "present tempo of industrialisation
and the tempo indicated for the coming years are obviously
inadequate" and so the "necessary acceleration of
industrialisation" was required. In fact, the "Soviet
Union must nor fall further behind the capitalist
countries, but in the near future must overtake them."
Thus industrialisation "must be sufficient to guarantee
the defence of the country and in particular an adequate
growth of war industries." [The Platform of the
Opposition]
In summary, Trotsky's "opposition" in no way presented any
real alternative to Stalinism. Indeed, Stalinism simply
took over and applied Trotsky's demands for increased
industrialisation. At no time did Trotsky question the
fundamental social relationships within Soviet society.
He simply wished the ruling elite to apply different
policies while allowing him and his followers more space
and freedom within the party structures. Essentially,
as the 1927 Platform noted, he saw Stalinism as the
victory of the state bureaucracy over the party and
its dictatorship. Writing ten years after the Platform,
Trotsky reiterated this: "The bureaucracy won the upper
hand. It cowed the revolutionary vanguard, trampled
upon Marxism, prostituted the Bolshevik party . . .
To the extent that the political centre of gravity has
shifted form the proletarian vanguard to the bureaucracy,
the party has changed its social structure as well as
its ideology." [Stalinism and Bolshevism] He simply
wanted to shift the "political centre of gravity" back
towards the party, as it had been in the early 1920s
when he and Lenin were in power. He in no significant
way questioned the nature of the regime or the social
relationships it was rooted in.
This explains his continual self-imposed role after his
exile of loyal opposition to Stalinism in spite of the violence
applied to him and his followers by the Stalinists. It
also explains the lack of excitement by the working class
over the "Left Opposition." There was really not that much
to choose between the two factions within the ruling
party/elite. As Serge acknowledged: "Outraged by the
Opposition, they [the bureaucrats] saw it as treason
against them; which in a sense it was, since the
Opposition itself belonged to the ruling bureaucracy."
[Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 225]
This may come as a shock to many readers. This is because
Trotskyists are notorious for their rewriting of the
policies of Trotsky's opposition to the rise of what
became known as Stalinism. This revisionism can take
extreme forms. For example, Chris Harman (of the UK's
SWP) in his summary of the rise Stalinism asserted
that after "Lenin's illness and subsequent death" the
"principles of October were abandoned one by one."
[Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, p. 14]
Presumably, in that case, the "principles of October"
included the practice of, and ideological commitment
to, party dictatorship, one-man management, banning
opposition groups/parties (as well as factions within
the Communist Party), censorship, state repression of
working class strikes and protests, piece-work,
Taylorism, the end of independent trade unions and
a host of other crimes against socialism implemented
under Lenin and normal practice at the time of his
death.
Harman is correct to say that "there was always an
alternative to Stalinism. It meant, in the late 1920s,
returning to genuine workers' democracy and consciously
linking the fate of Russia to the fate of world revolution."
Yet this alternative was not Trotsky's. Harman even goes
so far as to assert that the "historical merit of the Left
Opposition" was that it "did link the question of the
expansion of industry with that of working-class democracy
and internationalism." [Op. Cit., p. 19]
However, in reality, this was not the case. Trotsky, nor
the Left Opposition, supported "genuine" working-class
democracy, unless by "genuine" Harman means "party
dictatorship presiding over." This is clear from Trotsky's
writings for the period in question. The Left Opposition did
not question the Bolshevik's monopoly of power and explicitly
supported the idea of party dictatorship. This fact helps
explains what Harman seems puzzled by, namely that Trotsky
"continued to his death to harbour the illusion that somehow,
despite the lack of workers' democracy, Russia was a 'workers'
state.'" [Op. Cit., p. 20] Strangely, Harman does not explain
why Russia was a "workers' state" under Lenin and Trotsky,
given its "lack of workers' democracy." But illusions are
hard to dispel, sometimes.
So, for Trotsky, like all leading members of the Communist
Party and its "Left Opposition", "workers'
democracy" was not
considered important and, in fact, was (at best) applicable only
within the party. Thus the capitulation of many of the Left
Opposition to Stalin once he started a policy of forced
industrialisation comes as less of a surprise than Harman seems
to think it was. As Ante Ciliga saw first hand in the prison
camps, "the majority of the Opposition were . . . looking for
a road to reconciliation; whilst criticising the Five Year
Plan, they put stress not on the part of exploited class
played by the proletariat, but on the technical errors made
by the Government qua employer in the matter of insufficient
harmony within the system and inferior quality of production.
This criticism did not lead to an appeal to the workers against
the Central Committee and against bureaucratic authority; it
restricted itself to proposing amendments in a programme of
which the essentials were approved. The socialist nature of
State industry was taken for granted. They denied the fact that
the proletariat was exploited; for 'we were in a period of
proletarian dictatorship.'" [The Russian Enigma, p. 213]
As Victor Serge noted, "[f]rom 1928-9 onwards, the
Politbureau turned to its own use the great fundamental
ideas of the now expelled Opposition (excepting, of
course, that of working-class democracy) and implemented
them with ruthless violence." While acknowledging that
the Stalinists had applied these ideas in a more extreme
form than the Opposition planned, he also acknowledged
that "[b]eginning in those years, a good many Oppositionists
rallied to the 'general line' and renounced their errors
since, as they put it, 'After all, it is our programme
that is being applied.'" Nor did it help that at "the
end of 1928, Trotsky wrote to [the Opposition] from his
exile . . . to the effect that, since the Right represented
the danger of a slide towards capitalism, we had to
support the 'Centre' -- Stalin -- against it."
[Op. Cit., p. 252 and p. 253]
However, Serge's comments on
"working-class democracy" are somewhat incredulous, given
that he knew fine well that the Opposition did not stand
for it. His summary of the 1927 Platform was restricted to
it aiming "to restore life to the Soviets . . . and above
all to revitalise the Party and the trade unions. . . In
conclusion, the Opposition openly demanded a Congress for
the reform of the Party, and the implementation of the
excellent resolutions on internal democracy that had been
adopted in 1921 and 1923." [Op. Cit., pp. 224-5]
Which is essentially correct. The
Platform was based on redefining "workers' democracy"
to mean "party democracy" within the context of its
dictatorship.
We can hardly blame Harman, as it was Trotsky himself who
started the process of revising history to exclude his own
role in creating the evils he (sometimes) denounced his
opponents within the party for. For example, the 1927
Platform states that "[n]ever before have the trade unions
and the working mass stood so far from the management of
socialist industry as now" and that "[p]re-revolutionary
relations between foremen and workmen are frequently found."
Which is hardly surprising, given that Lenin had argued for,
and implemented, appointed one-man management armed with
"dictatorial powers" from April 1918 and that Trotsky himself
also supported one-man management (see
section 10 of the appendix
"What happened during the Russian Revolution?").
Even more ironically, Harman argues that the Stalinist
bureaucracy became a ruling class in 1928 when it implemented
the first five year plan. This industrialisation was provoked
by military competition with the west, which forced the
"drive to accumulate" which caused the bureaucracy to attack
"the living standards of peasants and workers." He quotes
Stalin: "to slacken the pace (of industrialisation) would
mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten . . .
We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do so or
they crush us." Moreover, the "environment in which we are
placed . . . at home and abroad . . . compels us to adopt a
rapid rate of industrialisation." [Harman, Op. Cit., pp. 15-6]
Given that this was exactly the same argument as Trotsky in
1927, it seems far from clear that the "Left Opposition"
presented any sort of alternative to Stalinism. After
all, the "Left Opposition took the stand that large-scale
new investment was imperative, especially in heavy industry,
and that comprehensive planning and new sources of capital
accumulation should be employed immediately to effect a
high rate of industrial expansion . . . They also stressed
the necessity of rapidly overtaking the capitalist powers
in economic strength, both as a guarantee of military
security and as a demonstration of the superiority of the
socialist system." [Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of
the Revolution, p. 290]
Would the Left Opposition's idea of "primitive socialist
accumulation" been obtained by any means other than
politically enforced exploitation and the repression of
working class and peasant protest? Of course not. Faced with
the same objective pressures and goals, would it have been
any different if that faction had become dominant in the
party dictatorship? It is doubtful, unless you argue that
who is in charge rather than social relationships that
determine the "socialist" nature of a regime. But, then
again, that is precisely what Trotskyists like Harman do
do when they look at Lenin's Russia.
As for Harman's assertion that the Left Opposition stood for
"internationalism," that is less straight forward than he would
like. As noted, it favoured the industrialisation of Russia
to defend the regime against its foreign competitors. As such,
the Left Opposition were as committed to building "socialism"
in the USSR as were the Stalinist promoters of "socialism in
one country." The difference was that the Left Opposition
also argued for spreading revolution externally as well. For
them, this was the only means of assuring the lasting victory
of "socialism" (i.e. statised industry) in Russia. So, for the
Left Opposition, building Russia's industrial base was part
and parcel of supporting revolution internationally rather,
as in the case of the Stalinists, an alternative to it.
The contradictions in Trotsky's position may best be seen
from the relations between Lenin's Russia and the German
military. Negotiations between the two states started as
early as 1920 with an important aide of Trotsky's. The
fruit of the German military's negotiations were "secret
military understandings." By September 1922 German officers
and pilots were training in Russia. An organisation of
German military and industrial enterprises in Russia
was established and under it's auspices shells, tanks
and aircraft were manufactured in Russia for the German
army (an attempt to produce poison gas failed). [E.H.
Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, p. 327 and
pp. 431-2] In April, 1923, the German High Command ordered
35 million gold marks worth of war material. [Aberdeen
Solidarity, Spartakism to National Bolshevism, p. 24]
These relations had their impact on the politics of
the German Communist Party who enforced its so-called
"Schlageter Line" of co-operation with nationalist and
fascist groups. This policy was first promoted in the
Comintern by leading Communist Radek and inspired by
Zinoviev. According to Radek, "national Bolshevism" was
required as the "strong emphasis on the nation in
Germany is a revolutionary act." [quoted in E.H. Carr,
The Interregnum 1923-1924, p. 177] During the summer
of 1923, joint meetings with them were held and both
communist and fascist speakers urged an alliance with
Soviet Russia against the Entente powers. So, for
several months, the German Communists worked with the
Nazis, going so as far as to stage rallies and share
podiums together. The Communist leader Ruth Fischer even
argued that "he who denounces Jewish capital . . . is already a
warrior in the class war, even though he does not know it"
(she latter said her remarks had been distorted). [quoted
in E.H. Carr, Op. Cit., p. 182f] This continued until "the
Nazis leadership placed a ban on further co-operation."
[E.H. Carr, Op. Cit., p. 183] Thus the activities of the
German communists were tailored to fit into the needs of
Lenin's regime and Trotsky played a key role in the
negotiations which started the process.
How "internationalist" was it to arm and train the very
forces which had crushed the German revolutionary workers
between 1919 and 1921? How sensible was it, when pressing
for world revolution, to enhance the power of the army
which would be used to attack any revolution in Germany?
Which, of course, was what happened in 1923, when the
army repressed the Comintern inspired revolt in November
that year. Trotsky was one of the staunchest in favour of
this insurrection, insisting that it be fixed for the 7th
of that month, the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of
power. [E.H. Carr, Op. Cit., p. 205] The attempted revolt
was a dismal failure. Rather than a revolution in Berlin
on the 7th of November, there was a diner at the Russian
embassy for German officers, industrialists and officials
to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian revolution.
[Carr, Op. Cit., p. 226] The big question is how many
Communists and workers killed in the revolt had been at
the receiving end of weapons and training supplied to the
German army by Trotsky's Red Army?
Moreover, the nature of any such revolution is what counts.
The Left Opposition would have encourage revolutions which
followed (to re-quote the Platform of the Opposition) the
"Leninist principle" ("inviolable for every Bolshevik") that
"the dictatorship of the proletariat is and can be realised
only through the dictatorship of the party." It would have
opposed workers' self-management in favour of nationalisation
and one-man management. In other words, the influence of the
Left Opposition would have been as detrimental to the global
workers' movement and other revolutions as Stalin's was (or,
for that matter, Lenin's) although, of course, in a different
way. Generalising Lenin's state capitalism would not have
resulted in socialism, no matter how many revolutions in the
west the Left Opposition encouraged.
Finally, the fate of the "Left Opposition" should be noted.
As befell the previous oppositions, the party machine was
used against it. Ironically, the Stalinists began by using
the very techniques the Trotskyists had used against their
opponents years before. For example, the Eighth Party
Congress in December 1919 agreed that "[a]ll decisions of
the higher jurisdiction are absolutely binding for the lower."
Moreover, "[e]ach decision must above all be fulfilled, and
only after this is an appeal to the corresponding party organ
permissible." Centralism was reaffirmed: "The whole matter of
assignment of party workers is in the hands of the Central
Committee of the party. Its decision is binding for everyone..."
These decisions were used as a weapon against the opposition:
"Translating this principle into practice, the Secretariat under
Krestinsky [a Trotsky supporter] began deliberately to transfer
party officials for political reasons, to end personal conflicts
and curb opposition." In 1923, the Secretariat "brought into
play its power of transfer, which had already proven to be an
effective political weapon against the Ukrainian Leftists and
the Workers' Opposition." [Robert V. Daniels, Op. Cit.,
p. 113 and p. 229]
The party itself had been reorganised, with "the replacement of
local party committees, which were at least democratic in
form, by bureaucratically constituted 'political departments.'
With the institution of such bodies, all political activity
. . . was placed under rigid control from above. This innovation
was taken from the army; as its origin suggests, it was strictly
a military, authoritarian institution, designed for transmitting
propaganda downward rather than opinion upward." [Op. Cit.,
p. 114] Needless to say, it was Trotsky himself who implemented
that regime in the army to begin with.
It should also be remembered that when, in early in 1922, the
"Workers' Opposition" had appealed to the Communist abroad in
the form of a statement to a Comintern Congress, Trotsky defended
the party against its claims. These claims, ironically, included
the accusation that the "party and trade-union bureaucracy . . .
ignore the decisions of our congresses on putting workers'
democracy [inside the party] into practice." Their "effort to
draw the proletarian masses closer to the state is declared to
be 'anarcho-syndicalism,' and its adherents are subjected to
persecution and discrediting." They argued that the "tutelage
and pressure by the bureaucracy goes so far that it is prescribed for
members of the party, under threat of exclusion and other repressive
measures, to elect not those whom the Communists want themselves,
but those whom the ignorant high places want." [quoted by Daniels,
Op. Cit., p. 162]
Even more ironically, the dominant faction of the bureaucracy
heaped upon Trotsky's opposition faction similar insults to
those he (and Lenin) had heaped upon previous oppositions
inside and outside the party. In 1924, the Trotskyist
opposition was accused of having "clearly violated the
decision of the Tenth Congress . . . which prohibited the
formation of factions within the party" and has "enlivened
the hopes of all enemies of the party, including the
West-European bourgeoisie, for a split in the ranks of
the Russian Communist Party." In fact, it was a "direct
departure of Leninism" and "also a clearly expressed
petty-bourgeois deviation" reflecting "the pressure
of the petty bourgeois on the position of the proletarian
party and its policy." [contained in Daniels, A
Documentary History of Communism, vol. 1, pp. 247-8]
In 1927 the "United Opposition" was "[o]bjectively
. . . a tool of the bourgeois elements." [quoted by
Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 318]
One of the ways which supporters of Leninism seek to
differentiate it from Stalinism is on the issue of
repression within the Communist Party itself. However,
the suppression of opposition currents within Bolshevism
did not start under Stalinism, it had existed to some
degree from the start. Ironically, Trotsky's belated
opposition faced exactly the same measures he had approved
for use against groups like the "Workers' Opposition"
within a party regime he himself had helped create.
Of course, the Stalinists did not stop there. Once the "Left
Opposition" was broken its members were brutally repressed.
Some were simply murdered, many more arrested and placed
into prison camps where many died. Which shows, in its own
way, a key difference between Lenin's and Stalin's regime.
Under Lenin, the opposition outside the party was brutally
repressed. Stalin simply applied the methods used by Lenin
outside the party to oppositions within it.
The history and ideas of these oppositions are important in
evaluating the claims of pro-Bolsheviks. If, as modern-day
supporters of Bolshevism argue, Leninism is inherently
democratic and that before the revolution it stood for
basic civil liberties for the working class then we have
to come to the conclusion that none of the party oppositions
represented the "true" Leninist tradition. Given that
many Trotskyists support the "Left Opposition" as the
only "real" opposition to Stalin, defending the true
essence of Bolshevism, we can only wonder what the "real"
Bolshevik tradition is. After all, the "Left Opposition"
wholeheartedly supported party dictatorship, remained
silent on workers' control and urged the speeding up of
industrialisation to meet competition from the west.
However, there are groups which did raise more substantial
critiques of mainstream Bolshevism. They raised their ideas
between 1921 and 1923. How Lenin and Trotsky responded to
them is significant. Rather than embrace them as expressing
what the (according to Leninists) really stood for, they
used state repression to break them and they were kicked
out of the Communist Party. All with the approval of Lenin
and Trotsky.
The only groups associated with the Bolshevik party which
advocated democracy and freedom for working people were
the dissidents of the "Workers' Truth" and "Workers' Group."
Material on both is hard to come by. The "Workers' Truth"
group was labelled "Menshevik" by the ruling party while
the "Workers' Group" was dismissed as "anarcho-syndicalist."
Both were expelled from the party and their members arrested
by the Bolsheviks. The latter group is better known than the
former and so, by necessity, we will concentrate on that.
It was also the largest, boldest and composed mainly of
workers. We find them labelled the NEP the "New Exploitation
of the Proletariat" and attacking, like the "Workers' Opposition",
the "purely bureaucratic way" industry was run and urging
"the direct participation of the working class" in it. However,
unlike the "Workers' Opposition", the "Workers' Group" extended
their call for workers' democracy to beyond the workplace and
party. They wondered if the proletariat might not be "compelled
once again to start anew the struggle . . . for the overthrow
of the oligarchy." They noted that ruling clique in the party
"will tolerate no criticism, since it considers itself just as
infallible as the Pope of Rome." [quoted by E.H. Carr, The
Interregnum 1923-1924, p. 82, p. 269]
The "Workers' Group" is associated with the old worker Bolshevik
G. T. Miasnikov, its founder and leading thinker (see Paul Avrich's
essay Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G. T. Miasnikov and the
Workers' Group for more details -- any non-attributed quotes
can be found in this essay). As Ante Ciliga recounted in his
experiences of political debate in the prison camps in the late
1920s and early 1930s (ironically, there had always been more
freedom of expression in prison than in Bolshevik society):
"In the criticism of the Lenin of the revolutionary period the
tone was set by . . . the Workers Group . . . [It was], in
origin, from the Bolshevik old guard. But . . . they criticised
Lenin's course of action from the beginning, and not on details
but as a whole. The Workers Opposition denounced Lenin's
economic line. The Workers Group went even farther and attacked
the political regime and the single party established by Lenin
prior to the NEP . . .
"Having put as the basis of its programme Marx's watchword for
the 1st International -- 'The emancipation of the workers must
be the task of the workers themselves' -- the Workers Group
declared war from the start on the Leninist concept of the
'dictatorship of the party' and the bureaucratic organisation
of production, enunciated by Lenin in the initial period of
the revolution's decline. Against the Leninist line, they
demanded organisation of production by the masses themselves,
beginning with factory collectives. Politically, the Workers
Group demanded the control of power and of the party by the
worker masses. These, the true political leaders of the country,
must have the right to withdraw power from any political party,
even from the Communist Party, if they judged that that party
was not defending their interests. Contrary to . . . the
majority of the Workers' Opposition, for whom the demand for
'workers' democracy' was practically limited to the economic
domain, and who tried to reconcile it with the 'single party,'
the Workers Group extended its struggle for workers' democracy
to the demand for the workers to choose among competing
political parties of the worker milieu. Socialism could
only be the work of free creation by the workers. While that
which was being constructed by coercion, and given the name
of socialism, was for them nothing but bureaucratic State
capitalism from the very beginning." [Op. Cit., pp. 277-8]
Years before, Miasnikov had exposed the abuses he has seen
first hand under Lenin's regimed. In 1921, he stated the
obvious that "[i]t stands to reason that workers' democracy
presupposes not only the right to vote but also freedom of
speech and press. If workers who govern the country, manage
factories, do not have freedom of speech, we get a highly
abnormal state." He urged total freedom of speech for all.
He discussed corruption within the party, noting that a
"special type of Communist is evolving. He is forward,
sensible, and, what counts most, he knows how to please
his superiors, which the latter like only too much."
Furthermore, "[i]f one of the party rank and file dares
to have an opinion of his own, he is looked upon as a
heretic and people scoff at him saying, 'Wouldn't Ilyitch
(Lenin) have come to this idea if it were timely now?
So you are the only clever man around, eh, you want to
be wiser than all? Ha, ha, ha! You want to be clever
than Ilyitch!' This is the typical 'argumentation' of
the honourable Communist fraternity." "Any one who
ventures a critical opinion of his own," he noted, "will
be labelled a Menshevik of Social-Revolutionist, with
all the consequences that entails." [quoted by G. P.
Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, p. 269 and p. 268]
Lenin tried to reply to Miasnikov's demand for freedom
of speech. Freedom of the press, Lenin argued, would,
under existing circumstances, strengthen the forces of
counter-revolution. Lenin rejected "freedom" in the
abstract. Freedom for whom? he demanded. Under what
conditions? For which class? "We do not believe in
'absolutes.' We laugh at 'pure democracy,'" he asserted.
"Freedom of press in the RSFSR," Lenin maintained,
"surrounded by bourgeois enemies everywhere means freedom
for the bourgeoisie" and as "we do not want to commit
suicide and that is why we will never do this" (i.e.
introduce freedom of speech). According to Lenin, freedom
of speech was a "non-party, anti-proletarian slogan" as
well as a "flagrant political error." After sober
reflection, Lenin hoped, Miasnikov would recognise his
errors and return to useful party work.
Miasnikov was not convinced by Lenin's arguments. He drafted
a strong reply. Reminding Lenin of his revolutionary credentials,
he wrote: "You say that I want freedom of the press for the
bourgeoisie. On the contrary, I want freedom of the press for
myself, a proletarian, a member of the party for fifteen years,
who has been a party member in Russia and not abroad. I spent
seven and a half of the eleven years of my party membership
before 1917 in prisons and at hard labour, with a total of
seventy-five days in hunger strikes. I was mercilessly beaten
and subjected to other tortures . . . I escaped not abroad,
but for party work here in Russia. To me one can grant at
least a little freedom of press. Or is it that I must leave
or be expelled from the party as soon as I disagree with
you in the evaluation of social forces? Such simplified
treatment evades but does not tackle our problems." [quoted
by Maximoff, Op. Cit., pp. 270-1] Lenin said, Miasnikov went
on, that the jaws of the bourgeoisie must be cracked:
"To break the jaws of international bourgeoisie, is all very
well, but the trouble is that, you raise your hand against
the bourgeoisie and you strike at the worker. Which class
now supplies the greatest numbers of people arrested on
charges of counter-revolution? Peasants and workers, to be
sure. There is no Communist working class. There is just
a working class pure and simple." [quoted by Maximoff,
Op. Cit., p. 271]
"Don't you know," he asked Lenin, "that thousands of proletarians
are kept in prison because they talked the way I am talking now,
and that bourgeois people are not arrested on this source for the
simple reason that the are never concerned with these questions?
If I am still at large, that is so because of my standing as a
Communist. I have suffered for my Communist views; moreover, I
am known by the workers; were it not for these facts, were I just
an ordinary Communist mechanic from the same factory, where would
I be now? In the Che-Ka [prison] . . . Once more I say: you raise
your hand against the bourgeoisie, but it is I who am spitting
blood, and it is we, the workers, whose jaws are being cracked."
[quoted by Maximoff, Ibid.]
After engaging in political activity in his home area, Miasnikov
was summoned to Moscow and placed under the control of the Central
Committee. In defiance of the Central Committee, he returned to
the Urals and resumed his agitation. At the end of August he
appeared before a general meeting of Motovilikha party members
and succeeded in winning them over to his side. Adopting a
resolution against the Orgburo's censure of Miasnikov, they
branded his transfer to Moscow a form of "banishment" and
demanded that he be allowed "full freedom of speech and press
within the party."
On November 25 he wrote to a sympathiser in Petrograd urging a
campaign of agitation in preparation for the 11th party congress.
By now Miasnikov was being watched by the Cheka, and his letter
was intercepted. For Lenin, this was the last straw: "We must
devote greater attention to Miasnikov's agitation," he wrote
to Molotov on December 5, "and to report on it to the Politburo
twice a month." To deal with Miasnikov, meanwhile, the Orgburo
formed a new commission. This commission recommended his expulsion
from the party, which was agreed by the Politburo on February 20,
1922. This was the first instance, except for the brief expulsion
of S. A. Lozovsky in 1918, where Lenin actually expelled a
well-known Bolshevik of long standing.
By the start of 1923, he had organised a clandestine opposition
and formed (despite his expulsion) the "Workers' Group of the
Russian Communist Party." He claimed that it, and not the
Bolshevik leadership, represented the authentic voice of
the proletariat. Joining hands in the venture were P. B.
Moiseev, a Bolshevik since 1914, and N. V. Kuznetsov, the
former Workers' Oppositionist. The three men, all workers,
constituted themselves as the "Provisional Central
Organisational Bureau" of the group. Their first act, in
February 1923, was to draw up a statement of principles
in anticipation of the Twelfth Party Congress called the
"Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist
Party." The manifesto was "denouncing the New Exploitation
of the Proletariat and urging the workers to fight for soviet
democracy," according to Trotskyist historian I. Deutscher.
[The Prophet Unarmed, p.107]
The manifesto recapitulated the program of Miasnikov's earlier
writings: workers' self-determination and self-management, the
removal of bourgeois specialists from positions of authority,
freedom of discussion within the party, and the election of new
soviets centred in the factories. It protested against
administrative high-handedness, the expanding bureaucracy, the
predominance of non-workers within the party, and the suppression
of local initiative and debate. The manifesto denounced the New
Economic Policy (NEP) as the "New Exploitation of the Proletariat."
In spite of the abolition of private ownership, the worst features
of capitalism had been preserved: wage slavery, differences of
income and status, hierarchical authority, bureaucratism. In the
words of the manifesto, the "organisation of this industry since
the Ninth Congress of the RCP(b) is carried out without the direct
participation of the working class by nominations in a purely
bureaucratic way." [quoted by Daniels, Op. Cit., p. 204]
The manifesto wondered whether the Russian proletariat might not be
compelled "to start anew the struggle -- and perhaps a bloody one
-- for the overthrow of the oligarchy." Not that it contemplated
an immediate insurrection. Rather it sought to rally the workers,
Communist and non-Communist alike, to press for the elimination
of bureaucratism and the revival of proletarian democracy. Within
the party the manifesto defended-the right to form factions and
draw up platforms. "If criticism does not have a distinct point
of view," Miasnikov wrote to Zinoviev, "a platform on which to rally
a majority of party members, on which to develop a new policy with
regard to this or that question, then it is not really criticism but
a mere collection of words, nothing but chatter." He went even further,
calling into question the very Bolshevik monopoly of power. Under a
single-party dictatorship, he argued, elections remained "an empty
formality." To speak of "workers' democracy" while insisting on
one-party government, he told Zinoviev, was to entwine oneself in a
contradiction, a "contradiction in terms."
Miasnikov was arrested by the GPU (the new name for the Cheka) on
May 25, 1923, a month after the Twelfth Party Congress (the rest
of the group's leadership was soon to follow). Miasnikov was
released from custody and permitted to leave the country and
left for Germany (this was a device not infrequently used by the
authorities to rid themselves of dissenters). In Berlin he formed
ties with the council communists of the German Communist Workers'
Party (KAPD) and with the left wing of the German Communist Party.
With the aid of these groups, Miasnikov was able to publish the
manifesto of the Workers' Group, prefaced by an appeal drafted by
his associates in Moscow. The appeal concluded with a set of slogans
proclaiming the aims of the Workers' Group: "The strength of the
working class lies in its solidarity. Long live freedom of speech
and press for the proletarians! Long live Soviet Power! Long live
Proletarian Democracy! Long live Communism!"
Inside Russia the manifesto was having its effect. Fresh recruits
were drawn into the Workers' Group. It established ties with
discontented workers in several cities and began negotiations
with leaders of the now defunct Workers' Opposition. The group
won support within the Red Army garrison quartered in the Kremlin,
a company of which had to be transferred to Smolensk. By summer
of 1923 the group had some 300 members in Moscow, as well as a
sprinkling of adherents in other cities. Many were Old Bolsheviks,
and all, or nearly all, were workers. Soon an unexpected
opportunity for the group to extend its influence arrived.
In August and September 1923 a wave of strikes (which recalled
the events of February 1921) swept Russia's industrial centres.
An economic crisis (named the "scissors' crisis") had been
deepening since the beginning of the year, bringing cuts in wages
and the dismissal of large numbers of workers. The resulting strikes,
which broke out in Moscow and other cities, were spontaneous and
no evidence existed to connect them with any oppositionist faction.
The Workers' Group, however, sought to take advantage of the unrest
to oppose the party leadership. Stepping up its agitation, it
considered calling a one-day general strike and organising a mass
demonstration of workers, on the lines of Bloody Sunday 1905,
with a portrait of Lenin (rather than the Tzar!) at the lead.
The authorities became alarmed. The Central Committee branded
the Workers' Group as "anti-Communist and anti-Soviet" and ordered
the GPU to suppress it. By the end of September its meeting places
had been raided, literature seized, and leaders arrested. Twelve
members were expelled from the party and fourteen others received
reprimands. As one Trotskyist historian put it, the "party leaders"
were "determined to suppress the Workers' Group and the Workers'
Truth." [I. Deutscher, Op. Cit., p. 108] Miasnikov was considered
such a threat that in the autumn of 1923 he was lured back to
Russia on assurances from Zinoviev and Krestinsky, the Soviet
ambassador in Berlin, that he would not be molested. Once in
Russia he was immediately placed behind bars. The arrest was carried
out by Dzerzhinsky himself (the infamous creator and head of the
Cheka), a token of the gravity with which the government viewed
the case.
This response is significant, simply because Trotsky was still
an influential member of the Communist Party leadership. As
Paul Avrich points out, "[i]n January 1924, Lenin died. By then
the Workers' Group had been silenced. It was the last dissident
movement within the party to be liquidated while Lenin was still
alive. It was also the last rank-and-file group to be smashed with
the blessing of all the top Soviet leaders, who now began their
struggle for Lenin's mantle." [Bolshevik Opposition To Lenin:
G. Miasnikov and the Workers Group]
The response of Trotsky is particularly important, given that
for most modern day Leninists he raised the banner of "authentic"
Leninism against the obvious evils of Stalinism. What was
his reaction to the state repression of the Workers' Group? As
Deutscher notes, Trotsky "did not protest when their adherents
were thrown into prison . . . Nor was he inclined to countenance
industrial unrest . . . Nor was he at all eager to support the
demand for Soviet democracy in the extreme form in which the
Workers' Opposition and its splinter groups [like the Workers'
Group] had raised it." [Op. Cit., pp. 108-9] Dzerzhinsky was
given the task of breaking the opposition groups by the central
committee. He "found that even party members of unquestioned
loyalty regarded them as comrades and refused to testify against
them. He then turned to the Politburo and asked it to declare
it was the duty of any party member to denounce to the GPU
people inside the party engaged aggressive action against the
official leaders." Trotsky "did not tell the Politburo plainly
that it should reject Dzerzhinsky's demand. He evaded the
question." [Op. Cit., p. 108 and p. 109]
Trotskyist Tony Cliff presents a similar picture of Trotsky's
lack of concern for opposition groups and his utter failure
to support working class self-activity or calls for real
democracy. He notes that in July and August 1923 Moscow and
Petrograd "were shaken by industrial unrest . . . Unofficial
strikes broke out in many places . . . In November 1923,
rumours of a general strike circulated throughout Moscow,
and the movement seems at the point of turning into a
political revolt. Not since the Kronstadt rising of 1921
had there been so much tension in the working class and
so much alarm in the ruling circles." The ruling elite,
including Trotsky, acted to maintain their position and
the secret police turned on any political group which
could influence the movement. The "strike wave gave a
new lease of life to the Mensheviks" and so "the GPU
carried out a massive round up of Mensheviks, and as
many as one thousand were arrested in Moscow alone."
When it was the turn of the Workers Group and Workers
Truth, Trotsky "did not condemn their persecution" and
he "did not support their incitement of workers to
industrial unrest." Moreover, "[n]or was Trotsky ready
to support the demand for workers' democracy in the
extreme form to which the Workers Group and Workers
Truth raised it." [Trotsky, vol. 3, p. 25, p. 26
and pp. 26-7]
By "extreme," Cliff obviously means "genuine" as Trotsky
did not call for workers' democracy in any meaningful form.
Indeed, his "New Course Resolution" even went so far as to
say that "it is obvious that there can be no toleration of
the formation of groupings whose ideological content is
directed against the party as a whole and against the
dictatorship of the proletariat. as for instance the
Workers' Truth and Workers' Group." Trotsky himself was
at pains to distance himself from Myainikov. [The
Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25), p. 408
and p. 80] The resolution made it clear that it
considered "the dictatorship of the proletariat" to be
incompatible with real workers democracy by arguing
"it is impossible to tolerate groupings, the ideological
contents of which are directed against the party as a
whole and against the dictatorship of the proletariat
(such as, for example, the 'Workers' Truth' and the
'Workers' Group')." [quoted by Robert V. Daniels,
Op. Cit., p. 222] Given that both these groups advocated
actual soviet and trade union democracy, the Politburo
was simply indicating that actual "workers' democracy"
was "against" the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e.
the dictatorship of the party).
Thus we come to the strange fact that it was Lenin and Trotsky
themselves who knowingly destroyed the groups which represent
what modern day Leninists assert is the "real" essence of
Leninism. Furthermore, modern day Leninists generally ignore
these opposition groups when they discuss alternatives to
Stalinism or the bureaucratisation under Lenin. This seems a
strange fate to befall tendencies which, if we take Leninists
at their word, expressed what their tradition stands for.
Equally, in spite of their support for party dictatorship,
the "Workers' Opposition" did have some constructive suggests
to make as regards combating the economic bureaucratisation
which existed under Lenin. Yet almost all modern Leninists
(like Lenin and Trotsky) dismiss them as "syndicalist" and
utopian. Which is, of course, significant about the real
essence of Leninism.
Ultimately, the nature of the various oppositions within the
party and the fate of such real dissidents as the "Workers'
Group" says far more about the real reasons the Russian
revolution than most Trotskyist books on the matter. Little
wonder there is so much silence and distortion about these
events. They prove that the "essence" of Bolshevism is not
a democratic one but rather a deeply authoritarian one hidden
(at times) behind libertarian sounding rhetoric. Faced with
opposition which were somewhat libertarian, the response of
Lenin and Trotsky was to repress them. In summary, they show
that the problems of the revolution and subsequent civil war
did not create but rather revealed Bolshevism's authoritarian
core.
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