[illegible] the Soviet Experience, by Carmen Sirianni, New Left Books, 1982, £8.95.
Since the fateful days of October 1917 the Bolshevik revolution, with its triumphs and failures, has transfixed the world.
The 'Russian question' still dominates any serious discussion of socialism from the loftiest academic enclaves to the factory floor. The degeneration of the revolution still leaves open the biggest question humanity has faced, is socialism possible? Every intellectual and political apologist for capitalism has given and continues to give a resounding 'no' in response. But, since the 1960s, a new chapter of the revolution has opened. A new generation of workers and intellectuals has begun again to sift the evidence. Ritual rehearsals of Stalin's crimes no longer suffice. The terrain has shifted. We are examining Lenin and Leninism. What is the balance sheet of the architect, not just the building? We can accept that the materials for construction were in short supply. We know that the building skills were scant. But was the planning flawed?
The latest with an answer is Sirianni. His starting point is the massively popular character of the revolution. He uses evidence from the cities and the burgeoning movement for workers' control to mark at every decisive stage of the revolution the growing support for the Bolsheviks. The decisive turning point of Lenin's April Theses is underlined; the Bolshevik workers were those who pressed for the showdown with all the oppressing classes, and to whom Lenin turned for support for his radical proposal, the proletarian dictatorship. In fact, according to Sirianni, what is revealed by the Bolshevik revolution, is the political domination of the cities.
Despite the undoubted power and authority of the Soviet, and despite the proposal from the Left Mensheviks and others for a 'united revolutionary democracy' which was aimed at encompassing the workers, the peasants in rebellion and radical sections of the urban petty bourgeoisie, the workers pushed for political power to pass decisively into their hands. And this was the historical strength of the Bolshevik Party, re-armed by Lenin. Only workers' power could guarantee the interests of all of the oppressed.
For writers like Liebman (Leninism under Lenin) there was a contradiction between the 'libertarian' Lenin of State and Revolution and the hyper-centralising and administrative Lenin of later years. Sirianni views the former as hardly surfacing at all, extinguished at birth by 'production evolutionism.' But this apparent dichotomy owes more to partial appreciations of the revolution than Lenin's contradictions. Viewed as a totality, the 'administrative' and semi-internalised struggle which Lenin conducted in these years was part of the same process, with the same political content as his views in 1917. The reality was that class relations and relations within the oppressed classes had become narrowed and concentrated in the relations within the state and party. Lenin's insistence on the expansion of production at all costs was the immediate material route out of this dangerous situation. It is an obvious and material reality that such an advance could only be established on the basis of importing advanced western technique: a position recognised as temporary and a retreat.
Nevertheless, despite the fusion between the mass of the working class and Bolshevik leadership in this most revolutionary period, Sirianni argues there were two crucial ambiguities in this fusion which go to the heart of the weakness of Leninism, and which were to prove fatal to the health of the revolution.
The first, and the least important (Sirianni himself explains later that this was a generalised development in Europe, and likely to remain the pattern) was the effective tendency to subordinate the workers' committees to the control of the trade unions. This is important, not so much for its own sake, but because of what it illustrates about the Bolshevik and Leninist approach to all the expressions of popular power, from the workers' committees in the factories, to the Soviets, to political and economic power in general.
Sirianni's central idea is that Lenin was entirely instrumental in his approach to the revolution. This is not to subscribe to the risible notions of Lenin popular in schoolbooks; the power-hungry schemer who had no principle except the establishment of his own dictatorial power. Rather it is Lenin's blinkered vision of socialism and communism that the Bolshevik revolution finally fell foul of. In essence Lenin is accused of denying any independent role in political life for the working class outside that led directly by the party. Soviet and other political institutions were viewed with suspicion unless under party control. It was Lenin who in 1921 first characterised the Soviet state as a 'workers' state with a bureaucratic twist.' 'All the departments are [illegible].' Fundamentally this approach dovetails with Lenin's notions of the economic and social relations of socialism and of communism. Lenin has elevated a 'positivist determinist' strand in Marx and made of it a 'productivist evolutionism' in his theories of socialist transformation: 'The questions of socialist consciousness and cultural transformation were subsumed under those of administrative organisation and technical control.'
Everything flows. Socialism is simply proletarian political power on top of the most advanced available capitalist technique. Lenin never supported workers' control, or later workers' management because he saw only 'things' produced in factories, not social relations. Naturally he was disarmed in the face of the rise of the bureaucracy. Quoting from Lenin in 1920, 'as soon as the question of property was settled practically, the domination of the class was assured,' Sirianni goes on: 'Later developments were to prove otherwise.' As indeed they were.
The fundamental fault lies with the theory of politics and communism. Sirianni's view challenges the state as simply the regulator of relations between antagonistic classes. He explains that there are political relations between sections of the same class. He denies that communism could ever be simply a condition of the administration of 'things'. (Naturally, again according to Sirianni, Lenin never understood relations within the working class. He took them as a whole, whose interests were unilinearly represented by the party.) Consequently politics will not die out with communism, it is rather a question of defining new politics, appropriate to the dissolution of the power of oppressing classes. Part of the answer, he seems to imply, comes out of the struggle for workers' control and management.
Sirianni's theoretical edifice is a massive sophisticated cultural economism. In the course of its construction it does great violence to Lenin. Even at the most rudimentary level, was it not Lenin who first identified and explained the divisions within the working class? His theory of the labour aristocracy and its relationship to imperialism explained both the material [illegible] in the labour movement and the consequent political differentiation among the oppressed. He also proposed and built a solution. Was it the case that the Leninist party was designed to overcome such divisions in the working class, fostered materially and politically by the ruling class? The form of centralisation of that party may differ according to conditions (Czarist dictatorship to mass revolutionary upsurge) but its essential political content remained constant in Lenin's thought and action. It was designed, through discussion and clash of ideas (war of contending factions, as Trotsky was later to put it) to summarise the experience and orientation of the whole of the working class.
From this perspective was it the extension of Leninism which gave life to the Stalinist monstrosity? Here is the key political conclusion of the Sirianni book. But surely the contrary is true. Stalin's bureaucracy rose through the defeat of the Leninist party.
The facts are not in dispute. Sirianni lists them. By the summer of 1918 one third of Russia's industrial proletariat had vanished. By 1920-21 (despite the rises in production at two points, noted by Sirianni) four fifths of the Russian working class had 'disappeared'. The remainder of that workers' movement of February and October 1917 had been seconded to the new state. It was administering and organising out of chaos and civil war. This meant that the Bolshevik party no longer centralised the experience and action of the actual and living working class. That working class, as a historical agent, had been destroyed. The only place where that workers' movement was still alive was in the cadre and formations of the Bolshevik Party itself. Many of those cadre now administered the revolutionary state. It was this reality which underlined the drives to centralise in the early Soviet state. For a temporary period, first under conditions of invasion and civil war, and then under the conditions of the ebbing of the international revolution, the Bolshevik Party itself became the fulcrum of the future of the Russian revolution.
It is in this context that a crucial mistake was made. The banning of tendencies and factions in 1921 could only reduce the party's capacity for self-reform — and given its specific weight in the early Soviet society — had a disproportionate effect on the struggle to defeat the bureaucracy, as Trotsky was to freely admit in later years. (See his comments on the French Socialist Party in 1936.) Nevertheless it was possible to win the fight against the bureaucracy. But it did mean the party winning a new layer of workers (the actual number of wage earners increased in Russia by 50 per cent from 1923-36.) It also meant reopening the democratic life of the party, so that these new layers would have their experiences and perspectives democratically centralised. These, together with a rational plan for industrialisation, were key planks in the programme of the Left Opposition.
It is strange that this programme, together with the years of analysis and struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy conducted by the Opposition and its later followers, never features in Sirianni's text. It is the only existing coherent Marxist analysis of the development of the USSR and its global effects, and yet it is never contrasted with Sirianni's own findings. Instead it is the importance of the cultural and ideological revolution in tandem with the struggle against authority at the point of production which provides the only shady outlines of an alternative to Stalinism. Sirianni's book is deeply flawed and pessimistic.