Bolsheviks

A detailed study of the workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils which sprung up across Russia in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

This collection of articles, published during August 1918 in the newspaper of the PPS-Left, while clearly supportive of the Bolsheviks, discusses many controversial aspects of their rule: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the peasantry, the terror, as well as the question of democracy. Koszutska encourages the international proletariat to take an active part in the events, and help guide them on the correct path to socialism, rather than remain critics on the outside.

In this essay first published in 1930 in France, the founder of the Workers Group denounces the bureaucracy that he claims seized power in a “coup d’état” in 1920 at the Ninth Congress of the CPSU(b)—its “latest deception” being its fraudulent appeals for “freedom of criticism” and “self-criticism” after a series of revolts by workers and peasants in the early to mid-1920s—and calls for a restoration of proletarian democracy (as exemplified by the Paris Commune) by democratizing the functions exercised by bureaucratic State institutions (production, distribution, oversight) and replacing them with Soviets (“Councils”), cooperatives and trade unions.

In this text first published in the journal of the Bolshevik left communists, The Communist, in April 1918, Osinsky attacks Lenin’s economic policies (which he attributes to Lenin’s erroneous support for the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty) from a “left” perspective that champions working class supremacy in the “organization of production” (in the economic councils, etc.), advocates a policy of rigorous nationalization and promotion of “heavy industry” (coal, steel, railroads), and concludes that economic reconstruction cannot be directed towards Russian “self-sufficiency”, but must be oriented towards the goal of the victory of the international proletarian revolution.