WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY RUSSIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #21: The revolution and counter-revolution in Russia* (Part II) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

And now let us observe the subsequent stages of this retreat: the first
stage leading to the liquidation of the councils and to Kronstadt; and,
thanks to the crushing of all opposition inside and outside the
Bolshevik Party, creates the basis for the second stage: the NEP. In
this second period until Lenin's death, the organic prerequisites were
founded for the advent of the bureaucracy to power and for the complete
restoration of capitalism, achieved by Stalinism through a ruthless
internal struggle from Lenin's death to the beginning of the first
five-year plan which it also marks Russia's return to the orbit of
imperialism.
The decline of the Russian revolution began on November 7, 1917, the day
of victory, when the agitated and mobilized working masses launched into
the struggle behind the slogan "All power to the Soviets" found
themselves cheated of success and the direct exercise of power which
followed from a typical case of substitution of a legal person: it is in
fact the Bolshevik Party and its central committee which at the crucial
moment replaces the councils of workers, peasants and soldiers, taking
the power to itself and declaring itself the sole and greatest custodian.
The formula "all power to the Soviets" had been falling apart along its
own path so that at a certain point it had not been the party that
cleared the ground for the councils for their self-government, but it
had been the councils and their military committee who had cleared the
ground for the Bolshevik party for its dictatorship. The party thus took
its revenge; if in the previous months the councils had sometimes taken
the party's hand, now it is the party that wrests the initiative from
the councils and asserts its total hegemony. And the councils, as in the
pre-insurrection period they had served as a myth for the unleashing of
the masses (April Theses), in the post-insurrection period still serve
as mere symbolism (first Soviet constitution) to further delude the
masses about their alleged sovereignty .
In reality, the Bolshevik revolution is now moving towards restoration,
on the one hand reusing entire parts of the old state machine that was
not entirely destroyed, and on the other recomposing these parts on the
shape of the traditional class state which has not been rejected or
superseded at all.
The theory of the provisional dictatorship of the proletariat - a
dictatorship which by its very nature could not be provisional but
permanent and growing and which, again by its nature, could not be
exercised by the proletariat but inexorably over the proletariat - was
taken up by the social democratic literature and transported in Russia
to justify as theoretical errors a series of practical errors whose
roots, moreover, sunk in harsh reality, could not be objectively
eradicated except thanks to a broader and deeper global revolutionary
upheaval.
Hence the devaluation of the soviets, which had already arisen from the
1905 revolution as forms of workers' democracy and now reduced to the
role of local and peripheral organs of the state apparatus, as well as
emptied of any revolutionary content. Hence the extermination of the
most loyal, generous and faithful perpetrators of the red 1917 such as
the anarchists and the revolutionary socialists. Hence the extreme
centralization of the State and the party to the point of dampening or
annihilating any attempt aimed at re-establishing the revolution on the
pivot of its equilibrium.
In the Marxist field, authoritative voices such as those of Rosa
Luxemburg and Hermann Gorter are raised against the evident process of
reactionary involution favored by Bolshevik politics. And in 1921 within
the Bolshevik party itself there were visible symptoms of this malaise:
first Trotsky's proposals for the assumption of the unions to a leading
role in the life of the State (which entailed a weakening of the party's
influence and a strengthening of the regime's working class base); hence
the rise of the Schljapnikov and Lutovinov faction, also known as the
"workers' opposition" which openly supports a return to the autonomous
management of productive life by the Soviets; and finally the Kronstadt
insurrection, the last leap of the dying revolution, which establishes
in its fifteen points some conditions to save the October victory from
an inevitable counter-revolutionary Thermidor: freedom of the press and
speech, freedom of organization for anarchists and for the revolutionary
socialists, new council elections, release of all revolutionary
political prisoners, limits to the intrusiveness of the Bolshevik party.
  These are the demands that arise from Kronstadt, the cradle of the
revolution, and which are buried together with their staunch defenders
by the cannon fire of Trotsky and Tukachevsky.
Now the experiment, the adventure, the withdrawal of the NEP can have
free course without raising objections and resistance within the
defeated revolutionary front, within the party, liquidated in its
critical efficiency. Now all the swerves of an opportunist and
utilitarian policy can move from the field of hypotheses to the terrain
of reality without causing a resumption of the socialist revolution
against the anti-socialist Bolshevik power.
Now it is the State that must be saved, no longer the revolution. Now we
can renounce the world revolution, we can renounce the building of
communism in order to save the State, its unity, its prestige.
If the NEP is determined by the worsening of the international situation
in the workers' field, it in turn causes a further worsening of this
situation in a general sense and in that it postulates a new foreign
policy of the USSR, a policy which tends towards agreement with the
capitalist states and to the betrayal of the world proletariat, and
especially since it similarly entails a dangerous pause in becoming
socialist in Russia.
It is during this dangerous pause that we witness, hand in hand with the
re-flowering of capitalism and nationalism in the hothouse of the
Russian state, the formulation of new theories that strip the "new
politics" of any tactical, transitory, contingent character and elevate
its the principles and defined ideological canons. Here in the Bolshevik
doctrine the remote petty-bourgeois ferments of vague populism (peasant
politics) and vague patriotism (national politics) combined with the
Jacobin and big-bourgeois conception of "dictatorship" find an outlet,
after their ephemeral appearance in the insurrectional phase (see the
watchwords "division of the land" and "self-determination of peoples")
in the new economic policy and in the new foreign policy.
Lenin, dying, accepts and endorses these errors with all their
consequences. It will be up to Stalin to relentlessly develop these
errors until the ultimate consequence of the counter-revolution.
But just as the fact of the dictatorship of the party has changed into
the much more visible and corpulent fact of the dictatorship of the
bureaucracy, that is, of a new armed class against an entire disarmed
proletariat, so the original capitalism of the NEP will surpass itself
(expropriation of the kulaks) exalting itself as state capitalism and
the original Soviet nationalism, initially committed to the construction
of "socialism in one country" and indifferent to the fate of the world
proletariat, will then go on the offensive exalting itself as
imperialism, yoking of "workers'" parties and states» to the chariot of
his hegemony.
Against this backdrop of defeat, the news of Moscow's internal politics
lose all importance. which record the episodes, the manoeuvres, the
clashes, the combinations, the retreats of the various Bolshevik
fractions candidate to take on the embalming of the common victim on
their own.
The dispute between the bloc of the Bukharin-Rikov-Tomski and
Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev groups on the one hand and the Trotsky group on
the other; later the campaign launched by the Stalin group bloc with the
Bukharin-Rikov-Tomski group against the new Zinoviev-Kamenev-Trotski
group, finally after the defeat of Trotsky, the offensive of the Stalin
group now supported by Zinoviev-Kamenev against the Bukharin group
-Rikov-Tomski: here are the salient episodes of the historical course
that first leads to the triumph of the theses «for socialism in one
country» at the XV congress of the Bolshevik party (Dec. 1927) and then
to the launch of the first five-year plan at the XVI congress of the
Bolshevik Party (April 1929). It is the group that best interprets the
"capitalist" drive of the new class State that, prevailing over all the
others, assigns itself the task of planning overwork and
super-fruitfulness, the restoration of overthrown privileges and the
legitimation of new established interests, and finally hunger, prison,
death "for the socialist homeland".

*Initiative Group «For an oriented and federated movement» (ed.), Half a
century of struggle of the world working class (1900-1950), Piccola
Enciclopedia Anarchica, Handout N. 1, Stab. Tip. La Tribuna, Rome ,
1950, new edition Quaderni di Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA, October 2018.
It is possible to request the brochure from ilcantiere@autistici.org or
download it from
http://www.comunismolibertario.it/piccola%20Enciclopedia.pdf.

Photographic documents:
1. Assembly of workers of the Putilov factory in Petrograd, 1917;
2. Assembly of Soviets in Petrograd, 1917. (Public domain images).

* The first part published in the October issue

Construction site no. 21 November 2023 ilcantiere@autistici.org

ilcantiere@autistici.org

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