The Russian and Iranian Revolution shared the factor of the working
class, the proletariat, being its main strength and backbone. Likewise, both revolutions turned on these
foot-soldiers and destroyed their freedom, and in many cases their very lives.
The central tenets of Leninism are state capitalism, Taylorism,
democratic centralism, and the party as the vanugard of the proletariat. Lenin was a fairly effective propagandist,
one of the best in the world in fact. It
would have been nice if he’d meant a damn thing he said.
The tools for the establishment of socialism, first and foremost control
of the means of production by the workers and of the military by the soldiers
and farms by the peasants, were already in place in the spring of 1917. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks
destroyed these. In the case of
industrial workers, the classic proletariat, Lenin and the Bolsheviks took
control of the means of production from the workers and placed it in the hands
of the state. Lenin remarked in several
writings that the ideal at this stage was the state capitalism of the Prussian
Junkers, the very people against whom Marx first rose. God forbid anyone violate ideological
protocol by taking advantage of existing workers’ control to build a system
based upon that very thing. Much better
to destroy that budding socialism in order to save it.
After taking away control of the means of production, Lenin outlawed
independent trade unions and instituted the form of work management know then
as Taylorism. In Taylorism, individual
workers have to account for every single minute of their workday with bosses
micromanaging their time and methods of work.
Taylorism at the time was one of the main targets against which trade
unions in the UK and USA were then struggling.
In democratic centralism, the emphasis is on centralism Sometimes literally in writing. This means that a central organ or “collective”
makes a decision and all subordinate bodies have to fall in line. Within Russia itself, decisions were made by
the five members of the political bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, and all subordinate bodies of the party were expected to fall in
line. Kind of like the way the
Democratic National Committee in the USA demands of the members of its party.
Democratic centralism was adopted explicitly by the Russian Communist
Party in 1921, but the year before, Zinoviev, then Lenin’s right-hand, had
imposed it as standard operating procedure upon the new Third or Communist International,
thereby subordinating the interests of working class people in other countries
and the working class in general to those of the Russian Communist Party, or
more specifically, to that party’s five member Polituro. The Comintern ceased to be anything but a
tool from thence forward.
Nowhere in Marx or Engels is there anything about a party of intellectuals
and professional revolutionaries acting in the name of working people as the
vanguard of the proletariat. That was an
invention of Lenin all on his own.
Because, you know, how dare the workers—and peasants and soldiers—act
without the guidance of their betters who know more about what’s better for
them than they themselves, just as in capitalist society the bourgeois know
better than the proletariat and in agrarian society the planter and the
landlord know better than the slave and the peasant.
Leninism and its offspring, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., did
not come to fullfill the socialism but to destroy it.
And Karl Marx had a comment relevant to those who cling to the
illusions of the past the way too many would-be socialists cling to the discredited
ideas of men a century dead. In “The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” of 1852, Marx wrote, “The tradition of
all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with
revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist
before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure
up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle
slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in
time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
I want the needs of the many to outweigh the greed of the very
few. I want a national health service
and hospitals run by nurses, committees of practicing nurses rather than by
administrative specialists. Doctors
should be subordinate to nurses, in charge of medical issues only. Whether owned by the state or the workers
themselves, I want the means of production to be run by the workers for the
benefit of themselves and their community and the world around them. I want a legal system in which the state
finances defense of the accused at the same level it finances prosecution. I want an America disarmed with
Australian-style gun control and police forces dominated by unarmed officers
trained in de-escalation tactics. I want
free education for all at all levels. I
want an end to private prisons, private schools, private probation agencies,
private food production, private armies, private corporations. In
a free market, the only things free are the corporations.
Contrary to the pompous pronouncements of its detractors, the
Occupy movement achieved its purpose, one which conservatives, neoliberals, and
the media cannot co-opt, subvert, undercut, or cast as a reflection of
themselves. Concensus councils, free
lending libraries, and communal organizations of the Occupy camps were not the
point, which the 1% now find buried in their chests, figuratively speaking. Occupy changed the conversation from
evaluating the worth of individuals by how much profit they can make for the
few to focus on correcting the results of the gross inequality that ideology created
and ending the Second Gilded Age.
* * * * *
Socialism without democracy is pseudo-socialism, just as democracy without socialism is pseudo-democracy. – Wilhelm Liebknecht, “On the Political Position of Social-Democracy”, 1869
Socialism without democracy is unthinkable. – Karl Kautsky, Chapter II “Democracy and the Conquest of Political Power”, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918
There is no democracy without socialism, and there is no socialism without democracy. – Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918
Socialist Democracy does not come as some kind of Christmas present for the worthy people who have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. – Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of one party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all. – Rosa Luxemberg, The Russian Revolution, 1918
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