[Author's note: I realized halfway through this that a timeline of the Russian Revolution would be instructive. However, it would make this essay too long, so it will be my next post. Here.]
Some say Marxism is a religion. I don't know if I agree, but Leninism is a cult, as is evidenced by the Revolutionary Left podcast entitled "The German Revolution." Perhaps the greatest problem kettling the Left these days is not the endless, divisive bickering over theory and praxis, but the inability or unwillingness to agree on the facts. Each querulous faction has its own narrative above which it hovers protectively and which forms the justification for their point of view.
Nobody has ever benefited more from such tendentiousness than St. Vladimir of Smolny, aka Lenin. This episode's webpage declares "Alyson and Breht finally dive into the German Revolution of 1918! Together they discuss this rather ambigious [sic] revolution, give a detailed overview of events, and reflect on what lessons we can learn from it...they help listeners understand the importance, the successes, the failures, and the tragedies, of this often neglected revolution."
First, it takes a Leninist to describe a revolution as "ambiguous." The inability to see it for what it is, to see it as it is, devolves from the need to fit it to the Marxist paradigm--whether it does or not.
Second, they do not give "a detailed overview of events," as they make clear in the podcast.
Third, and most importantly, the "lessons" they derive are based upon a version of events which has been pre-formated to the aforesaid paradigm. The alterations, omissions, and dubious interpretations of previous inquiries inform and enable the conclusions upon which Alyson and Breht alight. The major flaws come at the end of Alyson's synopsis when she and Breht contrast the German and Russian Revolutions, demonstrating, in my view, that they don't understand either. In order to properly analyze revolutionary episodes, we must be considerably more conscientious with the facts than are Breht and Alyson, and every interpretation must be approached critically but objectively, even when, especially when, we are in disagreement with the postulate under discussion. At this too, Alyson and Breht fail.
Fourth, we cannot afford to venerate. No hagiography! I profoundly respect Che, Rosa, and Karl, but I do not beatify them. I refuse to mythmake, and if you really care about the socialist project, you should as well.
To begin: One podcaster says that Rosa Lux met her death courageously "like Che." We don't know how she met her death, however, the first thing Che said when trapped was "I am Che Guevara, and I'm worth more alive than dead." I have no issue with his trying to save his life--none, but it is simply untrue to say that he died courageously. So why say it?
Our two intrepid podsters then launch into a diatribe on everybody's favorite foil--the SPD. The are universally condemned for voting to fund WW1. Never is it necessary to engage with their motives. The descent into reformism occasioned, as inevitably it must, a descent into nationalism. As mentioned above, we must strive for objectivity as bias is inauthenticity. I'm an anarchist, and have no love for any political party nor do I support the SPD's decision to fund the war. However, their position should be given a fair hearing.
The SPD supported the war as they believed it might lead to the toppling of the tsar in Russia, and, with luck, the Kaiser too.
The tsar was seen as the greatest counterrevolutionary force in Europe. In the century leading up to WW1, Russian forces had on more than one occasion stormed across the continent to put down and/or contain revolutions. They did so with Napoleon; in multiple places in 1848 including Germany; and later in eastern Europe. The tsar maintained an extensive intelligence network throughout Europe and funded right-wing causes. Marx and Engels led the chorus in condemnation of tsarist Russia and its pernicious influence. The SPD argued that the tsar wouldn't survive the war, and they were correct. Would the February Revolution have occurred if the SPD had succeeded in preventing the war? Maybe not. The Romanovs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns all fell as a result. So as much as we may hate the SPD, revolutionary propriety demands we acknowledge that they were right.
Then Alyson states that the so-called Spartacist uprising occurred as a result of the hiring of the Berlin police chief. In reality, it was his firing which precipitated the rebellion. And she describes the revolt as "more or less organic," by which she means spontaneous.
This characterization is highly suspect, and cleaves with the view of neither belligerent. Ebert's government insisted that it had been planned by the Sparts and Red Rosa, which I do not believe. The Sparts, on the other hand, allege that the entire incident was manufactured by Ebert's counterrevolutionary point man, Noske, who brought in the Freikorps to crush the rebels. This I do believe.
The Sparts had as many as eight locations around Berlin where they stashed weapons and there were but a few people who knew where each were. When belatedly the Sparts realized they had to participate in the uprising, they found that each cache of weapons were gone, so they were left to confront the Freikorps largely unarmed. They lost.
The Sparts came to believe that the firing of the police chief was undertaken as part of a government plan in the knowledge that it would provoke an angry response. This in turn would provide justification for violence against the revolutionaries generally and the Sparts in particular. They also concluded that they had been betrayed by some one very high up in their party as the police may have followed people and learned where one or two weapons stashes were, but that all had been emptied meant that the police had to have an informant. The Sparts were blamed for the bloodshed by Ebert's government, and its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were hunted down and killed.
I believe the it-just-happened interpretation to be rather naive.
Alyson goes on to say that Karl and Rosa "refused to leave Berlin." How can anybody know this? They died a few days after the uprising during which time they were in hiding, maybe they had no opportunity to leave. Whether they intended to remain in Berlin or not is an inconsequential detail, and doesn't affect their legacy one way or the other, but this fawning, oleaginous lionizing of them is just sordid.
Another important aspect of this affair which is almost invariably omitted is the role of Wilhelm Pieck. As I remember it, Rosa was the first to return to/arrive at the not-so-safe house where the Freikorps lay in wait. She was made to be silent when next Karl entered the house. Later, fellow Spart, Pieck showed up. Of the three captives only Pieck survived. There are three versions of which I am familiar: just before he was to be shot he asked for a cigarette and he put some money in the case and told his executioner that more would follow if he was allowed to escape. The other is that Pieck was shot, played possum, and managed to escape. The last is that he was just released--even though the Sparts were being accused of trying to overthrow the government!
Some Sparts believed that Rosa and Karl had been betrayed. Given the three accounts of Pieck's escape/release are quite unlikely, they may have been correct. Pieck eventually made for Moscow, where he was received with honors. After WW2, he was sent from Russia to East Germany where he became its first president.
Breht to Alyson: "That was an absolutely masterful summary.' First, it was not masterful as it contained errors, and the two of you endlessly praising one another is a bit too much. Get a room.
Alyson says what went differently between German and Russian revolutions is that the bols acted decisively. No, not surprising as this is a central tenet of the Bolshevik Myth, but it's wrong. The Bols were caught unawares in Feb when the railroad union overthrew the tsar. When the Miliukov foreign policy controversy broke in April once again the Bols were late at the gate. Same for the June Crisis. During the July Days, when rank-and-file Bols were launching a revolution and showed up at Lenin's door he initially refused to speak with them. Eventually Zinoviev told him that the Bol leadership was finished if he didn't at least meet with them. Reluctantly, the boss appeared before the party and said it was great that they had revolutionary spirit but they really had to mind how the go. The "speech" lasted less than three mins and then he refused to answer questions or issue instructions and left.
The Bols, it must be remembered, were being sponsored by the German Army. To what extent Lenin was receiving instruction from Berlin in these cases is open to debate, but, nevertheless, this notion that Lenin and his party were efficient, organized, prepared and reacted to events in timely and efficacious manner is pure fiction. The Bols didn't outcompete the other Left parties or out-maneuver them, Lenin and crew were receiving money, arms and (wait for it) "logistical support" from the Germans from before day one. The Bols were backed by an industrial superpower, the Mens and the PSR had to rely on greater popular support. It was no contest from the get go and it had nothing whatever to do with decisiveness.
Alyson asserts that the KPD didn't have ties to the masses and the Bols did. Here we come to the crux of the Bol Myth: she is not merely wrong, but her delusion bespeaks a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the Russian Revolution and of the motives and aspirations which impelled its leaders, and the exigencies and encumbrances which constrained their activities. There is no hope of objective, empirical analysis and the guidance which it might bestow if the revolution is perpetually mired in competing partisan mythologies. The Left must overcome this sort of sectarianism as the Russian Revolution presents us with questions and challenges--critically important ones--which we must address, but we are prevented by factions so emotionally and psychologically invested in individuals and interpretations that no amount of contradictory evidence will move them. So dear is Lenin to some that for decades there was denial that he ever received money and weapons from the Germans. As late as the 80s this topic was taboo. Yet he did, and whether such odd alliances are or can be beneficial from a revolutionary perspective cries out for the attention which it never receives. Alyson is a victim of the distortion such failures induce. We will never learn anything if we favor hagiography over facts.
Fact: The Bols never had mass popular support--never. From the October Putsch to the capitalist restoration, all 70-odd hellish years, the Bols never commanded mass popular support. In order to understand the slave labor camps, the Cheka, the ascent and growth of the bureaucracy, the food detachments/forced requisitioning/forced collectivization, in order to understand what went wrong and what brought the Bolshevik regime to ruin, one has to understand that it was compelled to act as it did because it lacked popular support.
First and most importantly, the Bols were a tiny faction before the February Revolution. Subsequently they received buckets of money from the Germans and used it to buy printing presses, open offices in cities where they previously had no presence etc. This German support anticipated the Bols getting into power and removing Russia from the war. Many Bols supported this policy (and many didn't favoring a revolutionary war), but to deviate would not only be to surrender all the support they were receiving and be relegated to their previous impotence, quite likely Germany would have gone looking for a new dance partner and the Bol leadership would almost certainly be rounded up and shot. In the secret alliance with the Junkers, the Bols were the junior partner. Germany was their new best friend and patron, whether the Bols liked it or not.
German imperial interest cleaved with that of the Bols in very, very narrow and specific ways. They primarily wanted Russia out of the war. Germany favored a dictatorship in Russia as it didn't want its war plans in the west foiled by the vagaries of popular assemblies, consequently they supported neither soviet nor constituent assembly. Lenin supported peace and likewise deplored elective institutions and favored a dictatorship, if for very different reasons. The Junkers wanted a strong, centralized government in Russia to pull Russia out of the war and to keep it out and were prepared to offer aid to such a government. German documents leave no room for debate on this point.
Soon after jumping into bed with German capital Lenin produces his April Theses, which is the greatest reversal of opinion that perhaps the world has ever seen. Lenin's wife noted that her husband was strangely quiet and withdrawn while composing these theses, and when she finally read them she wondered "if Ilyich had lost his mind." For decades--decades!--Lenin had maintained that Russia had to go through a capitalist stage before the workers' revolution could take place and had been scathing in his criticism of those who disagreed. Now, he reverses. Forever had Lenin advocated for a vanguardist party to lead the proletariat to revolution and to rule in its aftermath. In 1905 and after, he did endorse the workers' councils, the soviets, but only as a means to hasten the bourgeois revolution, on more than one occasion he expressly rejected any role for the councils in effecting proletarian revolution favoring the party dictatorship model. Now he not only endorses the soviets, but lobbies for the adoption of the anarchist slogan of "all power to the soviets."
It should pass unchallenged that he was sincere when advocating party power and lying when he chortled all power to workers' assemblies. Whether Lenin came to this charade on his own or rather the Germans suggested it is unknown, but from April onward he talked in favor of soviet power and against the provisional government and abandoned his previous, full-throated advocacy of the rule of a vanguard party. Once the scepter was in his hands, Lenin began shutting down soviets and sending in the army and/or Cheka to shutter workers' councils which refused to obey orders. There was immediate widespread protest after the October putsch, what policies they pursued must be viewed with this in mind. It was never lonelier at the top than when the Bols ruled Russia.
No wonder Nadezhda thought he her husband had gone mad. Did Mr. Vanguard actually have a change of heart or was la grande volte-face suggested/ordered by Berlin? Subsequent events reveal Lenin reverting to form quickly after his party and their Junker patrons engineered his enthronement. Scenting himself in the cache of the workers' councils was a brilliant political move as what support the Bols did enjoy came from the conflation of Bolshevism and sovietism. Those few who did support the Bols did so because they were the only party favoring soviet power over Kerensky's government. There may have been agreement with their clandestine partners, but it must be understood that were the Bols to defy imperial Germany it would almost certainly mean the end of Bolshevik rule and a life-or-death flight for its leaders. The Bolshevik wagon was soddered to the German ruling class.
This secret alliance with Germany began in February/March of 1917 and went on until the end of WW1. It resumed after Rapallo and continues uninterrupted up until the Hitler administration and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The history of Russia in the 20th century cannot be honestly rendered or meaningfully assessed absent an open discussion of these facts. Unimaginably, the history of Bol foreign policy during its first years of existence settles unexamined while debates about the Cheka, the food detachments, NEP, collectivization etc. rage endlessly on as though they were uninfluenced by geo-political circumstance and occurred in a diplomatic vacuum.
Throughout 1917, the Bols and the German Army acted in concert to place Lenin in power. These are the very strangest of bedfellows, the question for the Left is whether such an unlikely partnership did, in the long run or short, avail to the benefit of the workers' movement in Russia or worldwide. And whether such cross-class, cross-border covenants--pacts with the enemy--ever can be of benefit. Can the interests of antagonistic classes ever really converge? This question mocks dismissive, doctrinaire answers. There are many variables each with a constellation of contingencies which weigh upon them: What if all power had gone to the soviets and not a political party? What if the other socialist parties had been strong enough to overcome the power of the Junker/Bolshevik conspiracy, would they then have ruled, or would they construct a polity based upon workers' councils? Would any of these possibilities have led to socialism, or were the exogenous factors too formidable and contrary to permit anything like it to take hold in Russia in that historical moment? Big questions, but it's moot as we are prevented from posing them by the St. Vladimir of Smolny cult whose devotion to their idol will brook no suggestion of intrigue or duplicity.
But lie Lenin did, and boy did he ever. Is it ever acceptable for a socialist to mislead workers? Even if the liar believes what s/he is doing will be of great benefit to the deceived? Let's look at some of Lenin's biggest abuses.
It is not surprising that the program unveiled by the Bolsheviks after the Feb Revolution has received little Left scrutiny as it is rather embarrassing for the cult. They had a five-point platform:
1) Withdrawal from the war
2) Democratization of the army, by which they meant soldiers choosing their officers. Also the right of soldiers to demand explanations, post-battle, for any order and to replace/remove officers found to be unsatisfactory.
3) Worker management of industry. Not oversight of party officials who would run the economy and appoint managers to oversee workplaces, but actual worker control of industry.
4) Peasant seizure of all land without compensation, and for the formation of peasant committees with full autonomy to apportion land.
5) (brace yourselves) The convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and for it to be the governing body once duly elected and seated.
The Bol press, now awash in Deutschmarks, hammered away all summer on these talking points and, except for number 1, they didn't mean a goddam word of it. They are lying their asses off. Chided that he was now endorsing the PSR land program he had so viciously condemned as "childish," and "counterrevolutionary," Lenin managed to guffaw that he still favored nationalization, but that one had to tailor one's program to public opinion. Now, let's be honest, that might be the greatest lie of Lenin's career. St. Vlady, lest we forget, advocated a party dictatorship "unbound by law, custom, morality or public sentiment."
So is that acceptable? The Feb Revolution and German sponsorship offered an opportunity to emplace that unfettered dictatorship of the workers' vanguard, that centralized, hegemonic state, the first of its kind, a socialist beachhead in the capitalist world. Is not any price worth paying for this the greatest advance in the history of our species? Make no mistake: Lenin is sucker-punching the soldiers, workers, and peasants and their soviets here, is this too great a breach of trust? Can a person or party manipulate the proletariat into power? Can such deception ever lead to working-class power?
Big questions, but none of this would have been necessary if the Bols had mass popular support. They grew a bureaucracy by offering them a higher standard of living than the average worker, they would not have been able to recruit them otherwise. The food detachments procured grain, but they also stole everything they could get their hands on, and then would sell the loot on the black market quite often to the very peasants from which the items had been stolen. Despite literally thousands of complaints, Lenin looked the other way as that grain was so important that he needed the support of the requisitioners and allowing them to grow rich by these abuses secured their loyalty. The Cheka eliminated political enemies Left and Right--mostly Left. The bureaucrats, Chekists, the food detachment racketeers were the Bols' base, to whom they had to pander to remain in power. Providing the wealth for this state and state-adjacent elite in a low-GDP country necessitated draconian economic policies which created great hardship for workers and peasants. This in turn demanded greater bureaucracy, greater Cheka terror and greater capital extraction from the economy. The ever growing numbers sent to the gulag were an engine for this wealth extraction, and were required to keep the corrupt, Bolshevik, state-capitalist regime lumbering forward. And this dystopian nightmare can be attributed, at least in part, in large part, to the fact that the Bols never had mass popular support.
Alyson: the dictatorship of the proletariat is less scary than leaving the old state apparatus in place. I disagree, nothing is scarier than Bolshevism. But the point is moot as there is an infinity of possibilities between these two extremes. Between Lenin's literal party dictatorship over the prostrate, terrorized, disenfranchised incarcerated proletariat and the preservation of old statist forms of bourgeois oppression lies an entire ecosystem of better options.
Alyson, referring to Karl and Rosa; "Incredible story of bravery." This is pure fiction: they were in hiding. There was no "necessity of dying on your feet." This is pure myth building, pure invention. I don't wish diminish their legacy, but they did not die in open defiance. There was no "facing down of reaction." but rather an attempt to elude it.
Breht: [Luxemburg] is up there with the Malcolm X. Now that is diminishing her legacy. X was a right-wing, racist, religious, nationalist lunatic. They have nothing in common.
Breht; "They knew they were going to die." Really? I imagine at some point it crossed their minds. They were trying to escape, and there is absolutely nothing dishonorable in this. Trying to save their lives is precisely what they should have done, but it is infantile nonsense to say they knew they were going to die and faced down death heroically. It just didn't happen that way, so why lie about it?
No comments:
Post a Comment