Re: dictatorship of proleteriat

Mine wrote:

>In order to understand what Lenin meant by the dictatorship of 
>proletariat, we
>have to understand the circumstances of Lenin's writing.  to say that Lenin
>diverted from Marx or aimed at "socialism in one country" is not enough.

Mine's digging into the political archeology of Leninism and 
contextualising of
the concept of 'dictatorship of the proletariat' moves the discussion 
helpfully
along.

The Bolsheviks did not only face resistance external resistance from the 
Whites
and Interventionists. At the height of the Civil War, 1918-21, they faced
opposition from the Mensheviks and Left S-Rs who were still operating 
legally in
the new Soviet Republic. How Lenin dealt with this went far in practice to 
decide
the contours of the internal political settlement which framed all of 
subbsequent
Soviet history and which balanced and complemented the external settelment 
which
took place after the Rapallo Pact.

The Mensheviks remained powerful within the most organised and advanced 
sections
of the proletariat. Richard Sakwa, in his book "Soviet Communists in Power",
described the situation in some Moscow trade unions: the Mensheviks won 
elections
to the leadership in the office workers' unions, print unions and others. 
The
anarchists controlled the bakers' union. Mensheviks predominated in parts 
of the
Moscow-region chemical, tobacco and metallurgical trades. Disaffection with
Bolshevik rule spread to the burgeoning co-operative moment where Menshevik 
and
other non-Bolshevik leftists began to be elected toleading positions in 
1918-19.
On 20 July 1918 a Moscow conference of socialists was held: the Bolsheviks 
refused
to attend and anti-Bolshevik sentiments were expressed. Next day the Cheka 
raided
the meeting (held in Co-op premises) and arrested the delegates. Among 
railway
workers too, which had traditionally been Menshevik strongholds, the 
Mensheviks
staged a come-back, organised strikes, votes and petitions in favour of
reconvening the Constituent Assembly which the Bolsheviks had disbanded in 
January
1918.

In the Civil War control of the railways was of course a crucial strategic
consideration. Who ran the railways, controlled the whole country.

The non-Bolshevik trade unionists sought real not just formal independence 
from
the state and they consolidated their support among the rank and file by
successfully negotiating increased wages including wages-in-kind (food,
clothing) -- at a time when the Whites were nearing Moscow and the Soviet 
power
was fighting for its existence.

The print union (whose obvious importance needs no emphasising) remained a 
centre
of hot resistance to Bolshevik power. Elections held repeatedly in 1918 
resulted
only in more support for the Mensheviks, culminating inthe election of 
Martov
(leader of the Menshvik-Internationalists who fiercely resisted the October
Rising) as honorary president in place of Lenin.

Bolshevik printworkers tried to form a separate union, failed and were 
obliged to
rejoin the Menshevik dominated printworkers union by the end of 1918. By 
December
1919 in a ballot of Moscow members with a 50% turnout, Mensheviks won 7000 
votes
to the Bolshevik 2000.

Six months later, as Pilsudsky was defeating the Red Army on the Vistula, 
the
print union was purged. Striking members and leaders were arrested by the 
Cheka.
>From this time onward Menshevik and other non-bolshevik leftists in the 
>trade
unions were driven underground and the final internal breaches in Bolshevik
supremacy were sealed.

Within a year War Communism was abandoned in favour of NEP market-reforms. 
One-man
management became the norm. Taylorism was enthusiastically touted if little
understood. This appeared to end the debate about workers' control of 
industry.
Henceforth Soviet trade unions became integrated as the familiar 
transmission-belt
of centralised state power, and they were used to distribute benefits and 
bonuses
and enforce labour-discipline. Worker participation in the management of the
nationalised factories and the socialist economy as awhole was to be 
indirect, not
direct. A fundamental question about the nature of Soviet power was 
answered, and
the answer has been disliked ever since by libertarians, anarchists, council
communists, co-operators and all those opposed to Lenin/Stalin supposed
skulduggery.

All these questions remain at the heart of debate about the meaning of the
transition to the post-capitalist future: above all, the question of 
democracy.
Lenin somewhat provocatively wrote:
'People talk of _industrial democracy_. I say that industry is 
indispensable,
but democracy is not.' [speech on Trade Unions, CW 32, 19-45]).

What are we to make of this?  How did Lenin manage to make of the
proletarian vanguard a transcendental historical entity which not
only stood outside and above the working class (and all other classes)
but even outside and above history itself, as the only repository of
the sacred truths about communist construction vouchsafed (allegedly)
by Marx and the other Founding Fathers?

What actually was Lenin's conception of the Party? A chaperone? Or was
it supposed to stand in locum tenens for the working class?  A bureaucracy
become hegemonic? A stepping stone to capitalist restoration? Or, as Lenin
seemed to say, was the Party no more than the front ranks of the class,
and inseparable from the ranks marching up behind, into which the
party was medled, and through which it conveyed historical destinies to
the people as a whole? Lenin said:

'A vanguard performs its tasks as vanguard only when it is able to
avoid being isolated from the mass of the people it leads and is
able to really lead the mass of the people forward.' [On the
Significance of Militant Materialism, CW 33])

CLR James, in 'Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin' (p146), describes the
puzzlement he felt at reading another Lenin speech about trade unions: 'I 
have
read those last articles of Lenin's till I understand, not only what he 
wrote, but
what was implicit. In the beginning of one of them, 'How to Reorganise the
Workers' and Peasants' Inspection', he[Lenin] says: "This crisis is a 
crisis like
the Civil War, in other words, it is the gravest crisis of the Russian
Revolution." He says then: "How did we meet the crisis of the Civil War? We 
dug
deep down into the deepest layers of the population, to find the most 
devoted,
self-sacrificing forces." Then the article seems to fall away from this 
level. He
goes into details about choosing good administrators and training them 
carefully.
But think of Lenin as he had always been. Also let us recall here this very 
Civil
War. In the Crisis of the Civil War, in his speech to, I think, the Fourth
Conference of Trade Unions, he makes what is the most revolutionary speech 
I have
ever read anywhere. It is possible to read that speech for years and not
understand it. On that I can give unimpeachable evidence. At any rate I 
understand
it now. It says approximately this: "The revolution is in desperate crisis. 
The
only thing that can save it is you, the workers, organised in your factory
committees (the basic organisation of the workers). Take over. RUN 
PRODUCTION. Run
everything. If you take over everything we can win. If you do not take 
over..."

'Those who read this _may_ understand it (CLR James continues). That I have 
leave
to doubt. It is very VERY, VERY hard to realise what this means. So 
ingrained is
the bourgeois habit of thinking in terms of organisation, leaders, policies,
instructions, discipline: discipline, which is very good medicine for
petit-bourgeois radicals but is not needed by the proletariat. But you do 
not
understand Lenin in 1923 [sic:the speech was made in 1920 or 21, I think: 
MAJ]
unless you understand this uncompromising appeal to the masses _in their 
factory
committees_to take over.'

James ends this thought with the notion that before his death Lenin was 
proposing
to embark on a kind of Cultural Revolution: 'a tremendous appeal in the old
leninist manner to the great masses of the workers --the deepest layers'.
In these pages, incidentally, the great Trotskyite CLR James 
criticisesTrotsky's
stance on trade unions and workers control as ruthlessly as Lenin himself 
had,
when he harshly castigated, time after time, the emptiness of Trotsky's 
posturing
about 'democracy' while always couching his demands in a kind of abstract,
bureaucratic formalism of shuffling functionaries around. And James adds: 
'In
these last articles [of Lenin's] the emphasis that Trotsky has given to the
attacks on Stalin and the petty measures about the administrators is totally
false'. Rereading some of this material, I too was struck with the degree 
to which
Lenin's bete noire, in his very last writings, was Trotsky, not Stalin, 
although I
don't offer this thought as some kind of reflexive protectiveness about 
Stalin,
far from it. In terms of their administrative methods, there wasn't much to 
choose
between Stalin and Trotsky.

Lenin attempted to square the circle between proletarian
dictatorship becoming Party dictatorship, and the obvious fact that any
slackening of the Party's grip on power would result in the
destruction of the revolution and the restoration of capitalism. He
solved the conundrum by seizing on Trotsky's concept of
Permanent Revolution. But he changed the concept radically.
For Lenin, the task of creating World Revolution and overthrowing
the international bourgeoisie remained central to his thinking and
activity; but the form it took was the entrenching of Soviet power
and the development of a specifically Soviet society and economy.

This entailed embracing all the achievements of capitalist science
and productive technology; it meant superimposing the methods
of Frederick Winslow Taylor over the supposedly inviolable
and highly specific result of the revolution that was
Workers' Control of Production, a central Bolshevik
slogan in October 1917.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, in his _Intellectual and Manual Labour_ discusses
Taylorism at length, and without reading this seminal work, no
discussion of Taylorism and industrial democracy is worth much,
in my opinion. Sohn-Rethel tried to show just how
deeply, explosively contradictory this policy of Lenin's was,
for Taylorism only brought to new heights a fundamental feature
of the capitalist labour process, namely the inscribing within
machinery itself of capitalist relations of exploitation
and powerlessness.

Harry Braverman knew Sohn-Rethel and acknowledged the difference
between them: Braverman was an industrial sociologist of Marxist hue, 
Sohn-Rethel
a great philosopher, not a kantian as some who presumably have not read him
say, but the greatest Marxian critical-liquidator of kantianism. 
Sohn-Rethel's
principal contention was that in the monopoly capitalist labour-process the
division of mental and manual labour is inscribed in the Newtonian
(classical) physics which underpins the machinery of production.

Indeed, fixed plant and machinery, almost until the present day, has 
represented
the accumulation of capital (C) in relation to (V) in the form of the 
modification
of natural materials according to the simple dynamics and geometries of the
Newtonian synthesis. According to Sohn-Rethel, the essence of Newtonian 
mechanics
over its Cartesian competitor was not just that it worked, but that it was
based on an immanentism of space and time and the nature of objects 
suspended
within space and time, which Kant tried to capture theoretically.

Newton took the guesswork out of such things as describing the parabolas of 
cannon
balls or the shapes of engineering structures or the dynamics of steam 
engines.
Capitalism enshrined the objectification of labour in machinery by first of 
all
installing it inside the heads of the scientists, draughtsmen, engineers, 
who
designed the machinery according to the Newtonian calculus.

Artisans were downgraded not merely by the deskilling piece-production 
beloved of
Adam Smith but by the fact that the world they fashioned in iron, steel and
concrete, came to them preconceptualised, and the master-code of capitalist
control of all social reproduction processes was buried within the 
blueprints they
worked from. As for the manual labourer doing the actually shearing, 
grinding,
riveting, etc, while as Marx rightly said, there was gold also in his head,
nonetheless his objectification within the great Newtonian machinery was 
for all
practical purposes, absolute.

>From that moment, when the production of absolute surplus value in the
manufactory had become the production of relative s-v in the true industrial
factory, and capitalism at last stood on its 'adequate' (Newtonian) basis, 
labour
in production lost all objective possibility of control over its own 
process,
i.e., the capitalist labour process, and with that, the working class lost 
all
possibility of its own immediate emancipation and self-transcending. In 
Lenin's
terms, the Party that appealed to the 'Dark Forces', the people of the 
abyss, to
save the revolution, and promptly incarcerated them within its facsimile of
industrial capitalism -- that Party became an uneasy battleground, a two-way
transmission system, within which this truth was set after 1920 to work 
itself out
in history. But, as they say, there was No Alternative.

This was the mode of production and its agents, which the Bolsheviks 
inherited.
Unsurprisingly, it was the most advanced sectors of the Russian proletariat 
who
proved most reactionary in practice, as we have seen, and they did their 
best to
advance their own sectional interests and to thwart the revolution even at 
its
direst moments of truth. Bolshevik distrust of intellectuals (engineers,
scientists) was born then as well as earlier; Stalin solved the problem of 
the
_trahison des clercs_ in his well-known way. Lenin time after time did it by
appealing over their heads, over the heads of his whole party in fact, to 
the
'deepest layers', the darkest forces whose emergence into the light of 
history
after July 1917 delighted him as much as it dismayed Menshevik members of 
the
aristocracy of labour and terrified the middle classes and true 
intelligentsia.

Was Lenin right to trust the people, to GIVE them the revolution to make 
their
own? Of course he was. This was their revolution, after all. No-one else's.

Lenin was trapped by certain unavoidable historical realities, just like
everyone else. First of all, the Bolsheviks inherited a devastated country
and were forced to act not so much as overturners but as conservers
of much of the old world, since without that even the most basic means
of life could not be securted. The social class on which they based 
themselves:
the industrial proletariat of Petrograd and the few other big cities - was 
soon
disspiated and scattered by war, famine, revolution. As Gorky said, it
was to disappear like a pinch of salt into the vast bog of the
Russian peasantry. The Party had to substitute for the missing class and
even create a new one; there was no alternative. And it was impossible to
rely on the most corrupt layers -- the skilled artisans and craftsmen. 
Unable
to get beyond the most circumscribed trade union consciousness, the
tended to put their self-interest, narrowly defined, against the interests
of the revolution and of society as a whole. Worse still, after the
Bolsheviks did manage to consolidate power they were obliged to
recreate the very division of mental and manual labour in production
which was the crystallisation of capitalist production relations
and the whole mechanism of oppression and exploitation.

The alternative was always the simple one of abandoning power
and surrendering to their enemies. It is hard to see any merit
in such a counsel of despair, then or now. Even in the 1990s such an
admission of defeat has had disastrous consequences for the
peoples of eastern Europe. The capitalist world system
proved incapable of carrying through the bourgeois revolution
in the Eurasion heartland before 1917 and is just as
incapable (more so) of doing it now. The literal alternative
for most of central and all of eastern Europe is between socialism
and barbarism.

Bolshevism was trapped by the impasse its own
arrival centre stage helped to create, for the emergence of the
USSR as a fundamental counterweight to imperialism only
helped stabilise the world-system and to usher not an era of
world revolution but a gigantic (and ongoing) process of counter-
revolution and black reaction. Lenin's answer to this seemingly
insolble contradiction was the extremely simple one of regarding the
USSR as not one state among others forming a world-system, but as a
bastion of working class power, a rear area for the marshalling of
new revolutionary forces, and a springboard for new
proletarian offenses aimed at the heart of capitalism.
That Lenin argued for 'peaceful coexistence', installed NEP,
and sought diplomatic recognition from the capitalist states
does not change the underlying facts, for these were only
tactics; and the real objective - World Revolution - remained
intact. The Soviet Union was able to survive and develop
through all danger and difficulty as long as the Party continued to
enshrine Lenin's policy at the heart of its activity; only when
it made of peaceful coexistence the ultimate goal, and not
just a tactic in continuing revolutionary warfare, did it begin to
fail. Khrushchev was the one who carried through this salutary
and terrible change; at the same time that he embarked on his historic
accommodation with imperialism, he also announced a socialism
of 'the whole people', thus setting the intelligentsia and the
bureaucracy on a political par with the working-class, and freeing
the forces which eventually undid the Soviet power and
restored capitalism. Khrushchev undercut both the internal settlement
and the external power modalities which had permitted the USSR
to survive against all the odds. The long term consequences of
this abandonment of the gains of October are potentially
catastrophic for humankind.



Mark Jones
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