This pamphlet from "Solidarity" is an explosive one. I+ attempts "a new kind of analysis of the fate of the Russian revolution” (p.1) by presenting ‘factual material’ on the struggles over control and management of - industry between 1917 and 1921. Fundamental to its whole interpretation of this period is a total rejection of the Leninist party. Bolshevism is described as
"...a monstrous aberration, the last garb donned by a bourgeois
ideology as it.was being subverted at the roots." (p. 85 aa
The. author identifies its ‘hierarchically structured vanguard party' concept, its ‘centralization’ and belief that the party could be absolutely identified with the class because it embodied the historical destiny of the class, as fragments of bourgeois ideology which made the degeneration of the party and the revolution inevitable. Brinton argues thet the Bolsheviks were never committed to workers' self-management - workers’ power at the point of production + and that they cynically advocated workers’ control only as a tactical stage in the seizure of power. From the beginning, he argues, the Bolsheviks fought every manifestation of autonomous revolutionary. workers’ initiative; they implemented a hierarchical system of control over economic and political life, dominated by members of a party cut off from the class it was supposed to represent and ending as a party in opposition to that class.
"In other words within a year of. the capture of state power by the
Bolsheviks, the relations of production...ehad reverted to the classical
euthoritarien pattern seen in sll class societies." (p. 48
Before considering the value of the pamphlet as a whole, a number of criticisms must be made. First the form of the pamphlet necessarily distorts its content. The author describes it as "..eat best a selective industrial chronology. In most instances the facts speak for themselves." Facts do not speak for themselves. This is among the worst outrages committed on history by bourgeois ideclogists. Comrade Brinton cannot hope to sustain an argument as fundamental and far reaching as the one he poses on the basis of an ‘industrial notebook’. The fact that it is documented in great depth does nothing to offset this fundamental disability. It is not that the themes he argues around are swamped by factual information, but that they are left suspended in mid-air by the lack of a full exposition and analysis.
in fact the pamphlet is profoundly ahistorical.
The eim is to trace the struggles in the working class movement and the Bolshevik party over industrial policy; the rise of the factory comm ittee movement, its defeat by the Trade Unions and the Bolsheviks, the subordination of the trade unions to the party-dominated state apparatus, and the role of the various oppositional platforms. No amount of documentation will sailow the author to lift these struggles out of the concrete historical situation ~ both objective and subjective ~- which existed at the time. But this is precisely what is attemBted. The total failure to provide any analysis of the objective historical conditions, and perhaps the reason why, is revealed in the scathing comment on page 44, under the heading May 25th.
, "Those who wish to incriminate the civil war for anti-proletarian
Bolshevik practices may do so from now on."
'Is the author not aware of the state of economic collapse in Russia before the civil war began? But if Bolshevik apologetics have been one-sided that is all the more reason for the author not to fall into the same trap.
This serious mistake leads to a total failure to deal correctiy with Lenin's writings of this period. The validity or otherwise of Lenin's ' position on the employment of bourgeois technicians, his concept of workers' control, one-man management etc, are all rooted in his analysis of the objective. conditions limiting revolutionary development. In "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government", on the question of payment of bourgeois specialists, he freely admits that, "...this measure is a compromise, a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of every prolctarian power..." But Lenin cannot be challenged simply on this statement but only on the reasons for this departure. Here there would be enormous scope for debate = but the debate must centre on the total historical situation, not just on what happened. Brinton is quite right to reject the view that the whole course of events was objectively determined.
"Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves important and
sometimes decisive factors in the equation at every critical stage of
this critical period." (p. 84)
But equally history is not made by the subjective will of human actors as this pamphlet would apparently have us believe. In this pamphict its most disastrous consequences are to reduce Lenin to an advocate of state capitalism pure and simple, and to reduce genuine social struggle to the _Llevel of Bolshevik intrigue.
Nevertheless this pamphlet is important. Within the limitations described above it is an extremely full documentation of struggies which have a profound importance for the marxist left. Obvious and crucial is ' the relationship between class and party, but more specifically in terms of the period 1917 to 1921, the validity of the various oppositional. platforms the nature of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party, anda critical re-appraisal of Lenin's leadership. The potential impact of this pa:iphlet in demanding a re-appraisal of the serly years of the Russian revolition could be immense ~ and I probably have not done it justice in this review. BUT it would need to be re-worked inte a total historical analysis of the period.
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