The Revolution Defeated

In the debates over the role of the trade unions in a so-called 'workers' state' the party was talking to itself. The class lines had already been drawn with the emasculation of the factory committees and the soviets. On one side stood Lenin, the bureaucrats and state capitalism; on the other were the workers (both Bolshevik and non-party) and socialism. As Lenin took away the factories he gave the workers -- the right to strike ! As if the revolution had been all for that. The crushing of the Kronstadt revolt in March 1921 consummated the counter-revolution in the open. For workers, Trotsky was not the Red Army hero but the bloody executioner of the Kronstadt soldiers and sailors. The end of the civil war in late 1920 and the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy, called the 'New Exploitation of the Proletariat' by the Workers' Opposition) led to unemployment. As industries were reorganised and rationalised, workers got the sack. The growing famine in the countryside kept these workers in the towns and cities: their dire poverty meant the state could now direct them without coercion. In September 1921 a decree declared that the wage system was "a fundamental factor in the development of industry", and further, that "any thought of egalitarianism must be excluded". Even to think of socialism was now out of the question. At the 5th All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in September 1922 the bureaucrats rubbed in their victory. It was decided that if a worker failed to reach the set norm, their wage would be knocked down by a third, and that workers could be sacked without any compensation if they did not fulfil their contracts. Despite all this, there were wildcat strikes against managements and unions as late as July and August 1923.

In the, mid-1920s, workers were cheated by the 'NEP man' and the bureaucrat, paying high prices and getting low wages. The managers and the state employer drove them hard; they had no say at all in running the factories. The local trade union branch and the party cell were in with management, while the unemployed waiting outside kept workers at their places, keeping wages down and conditions bad. The party 'oppositions' appealed to the workers but were ignored by them. "The workers seemed to say by their silence: it is all very well but what does it mean to us?" [36] From the workers' point of view, what did the 'struggle' within the Party mean to them ? It wasn't a question of 'correct' slogans or actions, but rather, who was carrying them out. The party could call for a 'struggle against bureaucracy' and the workers could ignore it while hating the bureaucrats none the less. The in-fighting at the top levels of the party was, nothing to do with socialism or workers, but with power, an imitation of bourgeois politics. Lenin's 'struggle against the bureaucracy' was not for workers to tackle the bureaucracy, but rather for yet another bureaucratic organ to be set up to watch over bodies like itself.

Similarly Trotsky's appeals and protests were directed to the party: when he was finally forced to turn to the workers, who all, along had been a mere object to him, there was no way they'd pay any attention to him. Trotsky was not against bureaucracy, nor against privileges or inequalities; but he wanted a 'better' bureaucracy less 'exaggerated' privileges, less 'extreme' inequalities. Everything he protested about was a consequence of a system he defended till he was killed. Trotskyism then was nothing but a Stalinism in opposition : it still is today. Unlike Trotsky, the Workers' Group attacked the whole political and economic regime established by Lenin before the NEP: they traced the defeat of the revolution to Lenin's whole approach. The basis of their programme was the old but still valid slogan "The emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves". They were against the dictatorship of the single party and the bureaucratic organisation of production. For them, socialism was the free creative act of the workers. In 1923 they produced a manifesto that attacked the 'leader cult', and led some of the strikes that took place that year.

The 'Decemist' Volodya Smirnov went further than the Workers' Group : "There never has been a proletarian revolution, nor a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, there has simply been a 'popular revolution' from below and a dictatorship from above. Lenin was never an ideologist of the proletariat. From beginning to end he was an ideologist of the intelligentsia." The workers in Russia in 1917 went further than Lenin intended in his schema of the stages the revolution ought to go through, so he held them back. He wanted the workers to supervise the capitalists who would still run the factories -- a policy of class collaboration. But the real class struggle was fought out with owners sabotaging the economy and workers taking over the factories. Against the socialist aspirations of the factory committees Lenin and the Bolsheviks offered state capitalism. In destroying the factory committees the Bolsheviks ended all moves to socialism; in securing their unchallenged rule, they had to defeat the working class completely, and that they did. The fatal failing of the factory committees was that they left politics to the soviets and the Bolsheviks, concentrating their efforts on economics.

In Spring 1928 a Yugoslav railwayman who'd been in Russia during the revolution said "The situation today is very different from what it was in my time; the manual worker is once more caught in the trap, the bureaucrats live as the bourgeois used to live and their wives play a corresponding part. What is needed is a new revolution," A skilled worker commented: "We live worse now than at the time of the capitalists. If we had to face such starvation, if our salaries had been so low in the days of our old masters, we would have gone on strike a thousand times. But what can we do now?" Finally, the comment of a textile worker, himself a foreign Communist: "Never in my life have I known such slavery as there is in my factory. If such a thing existed in a bourgeois country, I would have thrown a bomb at it a long time ago !" [37]

[36] quoted in Ciliga, p21.

[37] quotes from Ciliga, p280, p33, p108-9.