Hailing and Heeding Red October

Karl Marx enjoyed historical ironies, but I doubt he'd have been cheered by this one. The greatest event in human history is simultaneously its most tragic event, a people who reached for the heavens laid low by the harsh, hellish realities of war, starvation, repression and dictatorship. The Russian Revolution, Red October, has met its centennial. An occasion to celebrate or commemorate depends very much on your political persuasion, but what it is, what the whole Soviet experience should be is something too many on the left have resisted: an occasion for learning.

If the 1871 Paris Commune was the first breach in the international order of capital, the October Revolution posed it an existential threat. Not only did it expropriate the aristocracy and emergent bourgeoisie, it lit the touch paper of a revolutionary blaze that fanned outwards into Europe, into the colonies, into India and China and won it a global army of adherents. After the collapse of Imperial Germany the continent came close, very close, to turning red. Alas the revolutionary wave ebbed and socialism's outrider became its sole bastion. Nevertheless the establishments of Europe knew what the revolution represented. It was a warning, an unwelcome intrusion of the masses into history bearing one simple message: that capitalism was on notice. The propaganda aimed against the Soviet Republic, the soldiers and material the colonial powers shipped to Russia to strangle the experiment in its cradle, this was done not to restore democracy or prevent dictatorship. Its simple aim was to drown the revolution in blood. The Russian civil war that raged from 1918-1921 consumed the lives of 10 million people, but even that couldn't break it. Nevertheless the utter devastation - think 1990s Afghanistan on a much larger canvas - saw to its pacification in terms of the international game. Socialism in one country, Stalin's original sin as far as the Trotskyists were concerned, was a break with received Marxist understandings of the global character of revolution, but also a doctrinal adaptation to material circumstances and the rebadging of the old Tsarist bureaucracy as so many people's commissariats.

And here lies the first problem with coming to grips with the revolution. Marxist understandings of the revolution performed in its name are too often bogged down by factional debates and their attendant mythologies. For the Social Democrats it was a case of instant dismissal. They preached against the violence of putschism, fetishised constitutionalism and attacked the Bolsheviks for not respecting the political gradualism they were wedded to. Yet this condemnation was strangely absent when it was a matter of turning guns on colonised peoples or the revolutionary masses of Europe, as was the case in Germany after the Great War. The anarchists were simultaneously hostile for the revolution not being revolutionary enough and located Soviet authoritarianism in a red thread stretching back to Marx's expulsion of Bakunin from the First International for ... wanting to place the organisation under the control of a secret conspiratorial outfit with him as the head. Hmmm. For the Trotskyists everything was fine and dandy until the 1921 party congress banned factions and it was the slippery slope after then, and for your Stalinists (depending on the flavour) things were a-okay until Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956, or right up until the Berlin Wall fell.

Of course, this account leaves out much detail, but the point remains. There is little consensus about what the lessons of the Russian Revolution are, and therefore conclusions, be they scholarly or political, are footballs to be kicked about in the ebb and flow of interests. For much of the Cold War period, despite the prevalence of us-vs-themism, there were contesting interpretations. After the end and the temporary triumph of neoliberal capitalism and governance, the USSR and the revolution that spawned it were an aberration, something to be reviled if it was ever to be talked about at all. As politics opens up again and socialism and communism are once more at large, ambiguity is more the order of the day - of which this post is one of many left wing examples.

The crucial problem, the issue returned to time and again is the erroneous suggestion the Bolsheviks started out as a dictatorial outfit. After all, it's there in Lenin's What is to be Done?, an otherwise obscure pamphlet of boring polemics old Lenners aimed at his rivals and fellow exiles in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Indeed, Trotsky earned his spurs if not his notoriety in these self-same circles for attacking Lenin's "authoritarianism". He was more right than he could have ever supposed when he argued "... these methods lead, as we shall see below, to the Party organisation “substituting” itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee". And yet contrary to the standard interpretation of Lenin and the bureaucratic sects and cults who farcically claim to be repositories of the Bolshevik tradition, "these methods" were not Lenin's argument at all. As the sterling scholarship of Lars T Lih on the life and works of Lenin show, the model he favoured and worked to base the revolutionary party on was actually German Social Democracy, albeit adapted to conditions of Russian illegality. That was a tradition of relating democratically to workers and peasants, it meant a disciplined approach to political activity married to a noisy and dynamic culture of criticism and open debate. The RSDLP, which incubated the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions was never a monolith, and following the final split between the two and the transformation of both into parties, they inherited the characteristics of its defunct parent. The party that led the insurrection was also a party with a democratic culture and with open factions who published their own material. It was formally and substantively more democratic than the Labour Party. There was clearly a qualitative break between the Bolshevik Party of Lenin prior to the revolution and the mockery of workers' power it later became.

How did we arrive at the gulag from this? For Trotskyist accounts of the revolution, the young Soviet Republic was hampered by its narrow social base. Only small numbers clustered in the urban areas and attending the (then) limited transport network could be considered proletarian - the rest were the peasantry. In short, the revolution had to rely on winning over a much more numerous class whose immediate interests were in tension with socialist aims. Complicating this was the revolution coming under siege by internal reaction and the armies of the Allied Powers, who poured in once Germany and Austro-Hungary were put in their boxes. As the civil war persisted the Soviets, the constitutional bedrock of the new order, got sidelined and, to make matters worse, the most conscious and dedicated revolutionaries were killed in the slaughter or absorbed by the bureaucracy in directional roles. This, goes the story, provided the material base for the strangling of the revolution by the apparatus and the subsequent rise of Stalin as its champion and overlord. The Trotskyist account is right as far as it goes, but as anarchist criticisms make clear, the disruption and destruction of democratic functioning was a pronounced tendency from the very start. In her memoirs Alexandra Kollontai recalls weeping as she called in the heavies to disperse protesters at her commissariat, and this was before the civil war got properly underway.

Bolshevist authoritarianism came not from the party but the process of revolution itself. As Engels himself noted in a polemic with "anti-authoritarian" socialists,

... the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.

A revolution leaves very little room for democratic niceties, as every single one from the English Civil War to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah in Iran demonstrates. For all the fantasies of the cleansing violence of revolutionary action, revolutions have the tendency to consume everything, not least the people who made it, as the French and Russian examples attest. And that, ultimately, has to be the enduring lesson of what happened a century ago this evening. A peaceful putsch - more people were injured during the staged and filmed storming of the Winter Palace than the actual event - was a prelude to a war so bloody that only the Nazi invasion of Russia surpassed it. For Marx, socialism and communism was the immense majority moving in the interests of the immense majority, a position now opening up again by the confluence of rising culture, rising networks, and sharpening politics. Going beyond capitalism doesn't, at least in the advanced West, require an insurrection and civil war precisely because the character of class struggle is changing. There are no blueprints for what comes next, only pointers provided by the directions new struggles takes and what new constituent processes are tending towards. Therefore one should mark the October Revolution, even raise a toast to the comrades who made it, but never forget it's a warning as well.