slackbastard

From a disco on Facebook…

To recapitulate:

R, you made some comments about state repression of anarchists under the Bolsheviks, the status of the death penalty, and recommended Serge (‘The Bolsheviks’ pet anarchist’) on Kronstadt. I pointed out that the first major Cheka action against anarchists took place in April 1918: that is, prior to the re-introduction of the death penalty. I also noted that I’d read Serge on Kronstadt (‘Exchange of Views on Kronstadt’ (pp.124–141) in Kronstadt, V.I. Lenin & Leon Trotsky, Monad Press, 1979), and quoted him on the Cheka.

On a point of clarification: the Cheka did not, apparently, murder 40 anarchists during the raids, but this is the number est to have been killed OR wounded (hundreds more were arrested) by Avrich. Further, while Avrich provides a v brief description of the context (which I quoted), Maximoff (The Guillotine At Work, Vol 1: The Leninist Counter-Revolution, Cienfuegos Press, 1979 (1940), p.57) writes:

On the night of April 12 [1918], an armed force, acting upon government orders, smashed the Anarchist organizations of Moscow. Against those organizations the government forces threw in action not only rifles and machine guns, but also cannons. This “military expedition” resulted, according to M. Y. Latzis, “in 30 casualties–killed and wounded–on our part–12″[.] All that was done under the slogan of fighting “banditry in the Anarchist ranks”, but the real cause lies elsewhere. It was laid open by Lenin in his, “A letter to the Comrades” (issued September, 1917) in which he wrote that: “All agree in characterizing the prevailing mood of the masses of people as one nearing despair and as one giving rise to the generally acknowledged fact of growing Anarchist influence”.

In addition to the eighteen killed and wounded Anarchists, it is rather difficult to ascertain the exact number, the Che-Ka killed the arrested Anarchist Khodounov, during an alleged “attempt to escape”. From that time on persecutions of Anarchists continued at an ever growing rate and by the use of all kinds of means and methods.

In any event, there’s a long disco on my blog on the subject of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution here.

More broadly, the question is (or was): are anarchists socialists? The title of the meeting implies not. However, you wrote that, in a broad sense, yes, anarchists might be considered socialists; a position Vincent Kolo maintains in his essay on anarchism–an important document if only in the sense that it appears to constitute the fullest expression of the CWI’s position as a whole. As noted, according to Kolo: “Anarchism represents a pre-socialist ideology”, a “fundamentally middle-class perspective with the individual rather than the position of social classes as its focus.”

So, @R:

Inre yr questions and comments:

1. By definition, anarchism is not ‘petit-bourgeois’, terrorist, unorganised or undemocratic. This is not to suggest that some anarchists have such social origins (that is, the lower-middle class), have not engaged in political violence (they have), are ‘unorganised’ or hostile to ‘democracy’.

As I see it, the argument being advanced by Kolo et al (it’s quite common among Marxists, of var hues) with regards anarchism being a petit-bourgeois ideology has to do with Marx and Engel’s understanding of ideology as being a reflection of class interests (cf. ‘The German Ideology’: 1845). Thus, while anarchism represents the interests of a 19th C social strata (the artisans or skilled, semi-independent workers), Marxism, it is argued, is, or should be properly considered as being, the ideology of the industrial working class (proletariat). This idea is also closely-related to the status of Marxism as a science as opposed to an ideology, one taken up w great gusto by Engels in, eg, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’ (1880).

2. A recent survey of the movement in Britain is Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms by Benjamin Franks (2006). John Quail’s The Slow Burning Fuse: The lost history of the British Anarchists (1978) is a good source on the movement’s origins in the mid- to late-19th C.

3. Bakunin’s role in the IWMA is hotly-contested. Paul Thomas’s Karl Marx and the Anarchists (1980) is worthwhile reading.

4. Anarchism has had a presence in the working class of many countries in addition to Spain. Eg: Argentina, Brazil, China, Cuba, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Portugal and Russia. On the origins of Spanish anarchism, George Esenwein’s Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain (1989) is good.

5. Afaik, I’ve not made any ref to the CNT.

6. I’m aware of the distinction b/w the early (EPM) and later Marx; there are many debates regard this supposed ‘epistemological break’ (cf. Althusser).

7. EH Carr’s 1937 bio of Bakunin is one of a number of (English language) bios: its status as an accurate portrayal is also hotly-contested by (among others) Mark Leier in Bakunin: The Creative Passion (2006).

8. The activities of anarchists and others on demos in the UK is another story, and I don’t feel obliged to defend the perspectives of ‘UK Uncut’. Note that this is not to suggest that these aren’t worthy of disco; rather that it departs from the focus of our own.

@D:

1. I understand yr point (I think) about Lenin not being in full control of events, and it therefore being unreasonable to assume he personally was responsible for all of the actions carried out by or in the name of the Bolshevik regime while he was leader. I also agree that the newly-formed Russian state evolved over time, and its policies and constitution were the subject (which is to say outcome) of multiple forces, both internal and external. In other words, the subject should be approached in the critical spirit with which any history should.

That said:

1. Part of this history (the history of the Russian Revolution) is the history of the Russian Social Democrats, which requires an understanding of its internal structure, as well as its policies, including the ones which Lenin advocated. I maintain that this structure was highly-authoritarian, and consciously so. Partly, this is (or was) a product of the circumstances of Tsarist Russia, and the brutality w which the regime acted against its political opponents. It was under these circumstances that the doctrine of ‘democratic centralism’ developed.

2. No, Lenin didn’t hold absolute power. But he did hold a good deal of power and authority as head of state, and moreover did a good deal to help construct a totalitarian political system, one which Stalin inherited from him. That Lenin engaged in furious polemics during the period 1917–1924 (in fact for his entire adult life) does not detract from these facts.

3. You write that you support the actions of the Bolshevik regime in suppressing the Left-SRs in July 1918. Supposedly, their revolt was triggered by the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. However, repression of the SRs began prior to this revolt. In May their eighth conference in Moscow was dispersed and in June both they and Menshevik delegates were expelled from the ‘All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviets’ (Maximoff, pp.73–74). I’m not esp familiar with this event (the assassination or revolt) or those surrounding it, but this essay offers some insight: Lutz Hafner, ‘The Assassination of Count Mirbach and the “July Uprising” of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in Moscow, 1918′, Russian Review, Vol.50, No.3 (July, 1991), pp. 324–344 [PDF]. It casts some doubt on the official line.

4. The r/ship of the SP to the Bolsheviks is another matter, but it may be placed in a particular context, which is the dev of post-WWII Trotskyism, esp in the UK, the history of the Revolutionary Socialist League/Militant Tendency and Ted Grant. How precisely the contemporary SP in Australia could be “mapped onto” the Bolshevik/Communist Party during the period 1917–1921 is a question I’ll leave it up to you to answer.

5. That Lenin and the Bolshevik regime made mistakes is an uncontroversial proposition. It’s also not one that’s in dispute. In other words, what is really at issue, I think, is not this or that policy but Bolshevik doctrine as a whole. Rightly or wrognly, the Bolsheviks actively suppressed their opposition, and in doing so created a one-party state (“the ones that took political power in the soviets, and tried to construct a state capable of defending the revolution”). You and the SP “don’t regard ['Stalinism'] as a natural extension of Bolshevism” whereas I do. The ‘excesses’ of the Cheka, for example, were not ‘excesses’ or extra-ordinary but routine and systematic.

Regarding the ‘degeneration’ of the regime, as suggested, I think Aufheben provides a useful summary of the var debates regarding the nature of the Soviet Union.

And oh yeah:

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