The Russian Revolution and Its Fate

The "Bolshevisation" of the KPD, 1924-5

Werner Scholem, Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow - leaders of the KPD in 1924-5 Hermann Weber's Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus gives a detailed account of "Bolshevisation" in 1924-5 in the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD was then an authentic revolutionary-socialist party, not the Stalinist organisation it later became. It was the biggest communist party outside the USSR. It was also morally and intellectually the most weighty, with many activists and writers trained in Rosa Luxemburg's "left-radical" wing of the old German Social Democracy. In November 1918 it had been the first...

Hipster reformism and the technological fix

Bruce Robinson reviews Aaron Bastani's 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' Back in 2013-14 there was a lot of excitement on the left about “left accelerationism” and the prospect of a transition to a “post-capitalism” fuelled by technological advances based on information. Aaron Bastani coined the meme of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (FALC), and it led a fitful life on the Internet. It has now returned in the form of a book which sets out to be a manifesto. Since 2015 Bastani has moved from a politics rooted in “post-workerist” thinkers to become a born-again supporter of Jeremy Corbyn...

Poland and Trotsky's theory of bureaucracy

August Grabski's obituary of Karol Modzelewski (Solidarity 511, bit.ly/ag-km) was interesting, but I want to take issue with what he says about Trotsky's theory of the Stalinist bureaucracy. "Without the analysis of the bureaucracy by Trotsky expressed in his Revolution Betrayed from 1936", write August, we can't understand what happened in Poland. Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed was about the bureaucracy in the USSR. Essential to his idea of the bureaucracy as a fragile stratum, without the solidity and historical clout of a class , was that part of the bureaucracy was linked back to the...

How not to quote Lenin

“The October Revolution is an imperishable page in the history of the great movements of the masses to take their destiny into their own hands that began with the French Revolution..."

1919 - Hands Off Russia!

The British left hailed the Russian revolution in 1917. On 18 January 1919 in London, a mass meeting launched the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign to oppose British military intervention in support of the White armies’ attack on Bolshevik Russia. The campaign’s National Committee brought together the scattered sections of the British left: the British Socialist Party, Independent Labour Party, Workers’ Socialist Federation and Socialist Labour Party. On 8 February, Hands Off Russia held an even larger mass meeting, at the Royal Albert Hall. Shows of support took place beyond London too, with a...

The Bolsheviks: mistakes and limits

Barry Finger's review ( Solidarity 497) of In Defence of Bolshevism quotes approvingly Max Shachtman's statement, in Shachtman's 1943 article on "The Mistakes of the Bolsheviks", that "we must... defend Bolshevism". In its last sentence, though, it declares: "The Bolsheviks themselves – Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin — nevertheless 'took the theoretical lead', in Hal Draper's words, 'in gutting socialism of its organic enrootment in the mass of the people' paving the 'juridical' framework for the counter-revolution in class power." This has some truth to this, but only within limits, and it is...

Pioneering work on Lenin and Bolshevism

Paul Le Blanc reviews "In Defence of Bolshevism" by Max Shachtman. (Picture: Shachtman in later years.) This is an important work on Lenin and the Bolshevik tradition. While many have been profoundly impressed by the valuable work of Lars Lih in Rediscovering Lenin (2006), Max Shachtman was articulating and documenting many of the same points in the late 1930s, through the 1940s and 1950s, and into the early 1960s. His defence of Bolshevism was articulated over and over, with facts and citations buttressed with brilliant turns of phrase, sometimes with entertaining (even hilarious) flourishes...

The Russian civil war, 1917-22

A discussion of Jean-Jacques Marie's book La guerre civile russe, 1917-22 Notice the dates: 1917-22. Jean-Jacques Marie, in his history, establishes that the conventional account, according to which the civil war was over by the start of 1921, and all the “emergency” measures by the Bolsheviks after that stemmed only from the Bolsheviks’ supposed lack of democratic understanding, is false. In spring and summer 1921, the Bolsheviks faced huge peasant uprisings in Tambov and other areas, as well as the Kronstadt revolt. And that in a country exhausted by years of war, with a total of maybe 14...

The historians and the Bolsheviks

On Tsarism, the bourgeois liberals under Tsarism, the Provisional Government in 1917, the Whites in the Civil War, and even the Mensheviks and the SRs, what Figes has to say is pretty much what the Bolsheviks said of them. Thus, for example: “Trotsky described Martov as the ‘Hamlet of Democratic Socialism’ – and this is just about the sum of it… [His qualities] made him soft and indecisive when just the opposite was required”. The Mensheviks, Figes notes, “had practically ceased to exist in Petrograd by the end of September [1917]: the last all-city party conference was unable to meet for lack...

Bolshevism, the civil war, and Stalinism

A review of Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism (Polity Press, 1990), re-posted from here . Sam Farber, justly respected for his critical Marxist writings on Cuba, sums up his attitude in this book by quoting Victor Serge, an anarchist who rallied to the Bolsheviks after October 1917, became an activist in the Left Opposition, and then parted ways with Trotsky over his, Serge’s, rejection of Trotsky’s criticisms of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. “It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many...

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