THE MYTH OF THE PARTY

Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups, or cadres. Theyoccuras a result of deep‑seated historical forces and contradictionsthat activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely becausethe "masses" find the existing society intolerable (as Trotskyargued) but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between what‑is and what‑could‑be. Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain of the living like anightmare because it was largely the product of "intolerable conditions," of a devastating imperialistic war. Whatever dreams it had were virtually destroyed by an evenbloodier civil war, by famine, and by treachery. What emerged from the revolutionwere the ruins not of an oldsociety but of whatever hopes existed to achievea new one. The Russian Revolution failed miserably; it replaced czarism withstate capitalism. The Bolsheviks were the tragic victims of their own ideologyand paid with their lives in great numbers during the purges of the 1930s.To attempt to acquire any unique wisdom from this scarcity revolution is ridiculous.What we can learn from the revolutions of the past is what all revolutionshave in common and their profound limitations compared with the enormous possibilitiesthat are now open to us.

The most striking feature of the past revolutions is that they beganspontaneously. Whether it be the French Revolution of 1798, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the czar in 1917, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, or the French general strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally the same: a period of ferment explodes spontaneously into a mass upsurge. Whether the upsurge is successful depends on its resoluteness and on whether the troops go over to the people.

The "glorious party," when there is one, almost invariably lags behind the events. In February 1917 the Petrograd organization of theBolsheviks opposed the calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution that was destined to overthrow the czar. Fortunately, the workers ignored the Bolshevik "directives" and went on strike anyway. In the events that followed, no one was more surprised by the revolution than the "revolutionary" parties, including the Bolsheviks. As the Bolshevik leader Kayurov recalled: "Absolutely no guiding initiatives from the party were felt ... the Petrograd committee had been arrested and the representative from the Central Committee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming day." Perhaps this was fortunate. Before the Petrograd committee was arrested, its evaluation of the situation and its own role had been so dismal that, had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful that the revolution would have occurred when it did.

The same kind of story could be told of the upsurges that preceded 1917and those that followed ‑ to cite only the most recent, the studentuprising and general strike in France during May‑June 1968. There is a convenient tendency to forget that close to a dozen "tightly centralized" Bolshevik‑type organizations existed in Paris at this time. It is rarely mentioned that virtually every one of these "vanguard" groups disdained the student uprising up to May 7, when the street fighting broke out in earnest. The Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire was a notable exception ‑ and it merely coasted along, essentially following the initiatives of the March 22nd Movement. Up to May 7, all the Maoist groups criticized the student uprising as peripheral and unimportant; the Trotskyist Federation des Etudiants Revolutionnaires regarded it as "adventuristic" and tried to get the students to leave the barricades on May 10; the Communist Party, of course, played a completely treacherous role. Far from leading thepopular movement, the Maoists and Trotskyists were its captives throughout. Ironically, most of these Bolshevik groups used manipulative techniques shamelessly in the Sorbonne student assembly in an effort to "control" it, introducing a disruptive atmosphere that demoralized the entire body. Finally, to complete the irony, all of these Bolshevik groups were to babble about the need for "centralized leadership" when the popular movement collapsed ‑ a movement that occurred despite their "directives" and often in opposition to them.

Revolutions and uprisings worthy of any note not only have an initial phase that is magnificently anarchic but alsotend spontaneously to create their own forms of revolutionary self‑management. The Parisian sections of 1793‑4 were the most remarkable forms ofself‑management to be created by any of the social revolutions inhistory. More familiar in form were the councils or "soviets" that the Petrograd workers established in 1905. Although less democratic than thesections, the councils were toreappear in a number of later revolutions. Still another form of revolutionaryself‑management was the factory committees that the anarchists establishedin the Spanish Revolution of 1936. Finally, the sections reappeared as studentassemblies and action committees in the May‑June uprising and general strikein Paris in 1968. At this point we must ask whatrole the "revolutionary"party plays in all these developments. In the beginning, as we have seen,it tends to have an inhibitory function, not a "vanguard" role. Where it exercisesinfluence, it tends to slow down the flow of events, not "coordinate" therevolutionary forces. This is not accidental. The party is structured alonghierarchical lines that reflect the very society it professes to oppose. Despiteits theoretical pretensions, it is a bourgeois organism, a miniature state,with an apparatus and a cadre whose function it is to seize power, not dissolvepower. Rooted in the pre-revolutionary period, it assimilates all the forms,techniques, and mentality of bureaucracy. Its membership is schooled in obedienceand in the preconceptions of a rigid dogma and is taught to revere the leadership. The party's leadership, in turn, is schooled in habits born of command, authority, manipulation, and egomania. This situation is worsened when the party participates in parliamentary elections. In election campaigns, the vanguard party models itself completely on existing bourgeois forms and even acquires the paraphernalia of the electoral party. The situation assumes truly critical proportions whenthe party acquires large presses, costly headquarters, and a large inventory of centrally controlled periodicals and develops a paid apparatus ‑ in short, a bureaucracy with vested material interests.

As the party expands, the distance between the leadership and the ranks invariably increases. Its leaders not only become personages, they lose contact with the living situation below. The local groups, which know their own immediate situation better than any remote leader, are obliged to subordinate their insights to directives from above. The leadership, lacking any direct knowledge of local problems, responds sluggishly and prudently. Although it stakes outa claim to the larger view, to greater theoretical competence, the competence of the leadership tends to diminish as one ascends the hierarchy of command. The more one approaches the level where the real decisions are made,the more conservative is the nature of the decision‑making process, the more bureaucratic and extraneous are the factors that come into play, the more considerations of prestige and retrenchment supplant creativity, imagination,and a disinterested dedication to revolutionary goals.

The party becomes less efficient from a revolutionary point of view the more it seeks efficiency by means of hierarchy, cadres, and centralization. Although everyone marches in step, the orders are usually wrong, especially when events move rapidly and take unexpected turns ‑ as they do in all revolutions. The party is efficient in only one respect ‑ in molding society in its own hierarchical image if the revolution is successful. It recreates bureaucracy, centralization, and the state. It fosters the very social conditions that justify this kind of society. Hence, instead of "withering away," the state controlled by the "glorious party" preserves the very conditions that “necessitate" the existence of a state ‑ and a party to guard it.

On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vulnerable in periods ofrepression. The bourgeoisie has only to grab its leadership to destroy virtuallythe entire movement. With its leaders in prison or in hiding, theparty becomesparalyzed; obedient membership has no one to obey and tends to flounder. Demoralizationsets in rapidly. The party decomposes not only because of the repressive atmospherebut also because of its poverty of inner resources.

The foregoing account is not a series of hypothetical inferences. It is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century the SocialDemocrats, the Communists, and the Trotskyist party of Ceylon (the onlymassparty of its kind). To claim that these parties failed to take their Marxianprinciples seriously merely conceals another question: Why did this failurehappen in the first place? The fact is, these parties were co‑opted into bourgeoissociety because they were structured along bourgeois lines. The germ of treacheryexisted in them from birth....

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Bolsheviks tended to centralize their party to the degree that they became isolated from the working class. This relationship has rarely been investigated in latter-day Leninist circles, although Lenin was honest enough to admit it.

The story of the Russian Revolution is not merely the story of the Bolshevik Party and its supporters. Beneath the veneer of official events described by Soviet historians there was another, more basic development ‑ the spontaneous movement of the workers and revolutionary peasants, which later clashed sharply with the bureaucratic policies of the Bolsheviks. With the overthrow of the czar in February 1917, workers in virtually all the factories of Russia spontaneously established factory committees, staking out an increasing claim on industrial operations. In June 1917 an all‑Russian conference of factory committees washeld in Petrograd that called for the"organization of thorough control bylabor over production and distribution." The demands of this conference arerarely mentioned in Leninist accounts of the Russian Revolution, despite thefact that theconference aligned itself with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, who describes thefactory committees as "the most direct and indubitable representation of the proletariat in the whole country," deals with them only peripherally in his massive three‑volume history of the revolution. Yet so important were these spontaneous organisms of self‑management that Lenin,despairing of winning the soviets in the summer of 1917, was prepared to jettison the slogan "All power to the soviets" for "All power to the factory committees." This demand would have catapulted the Bolsheviks into an anarchosyndicalist position, although it is doubtful that they would have remained there very long.

With the October Revolution, all the factory committees seized control of the plants, ousting the bourgeoisie and completely taking control of industry. In accepting the concept of workers' control Lenin's famous decree of November 14, 1917 merely acknowledged an famous decree of November 14, 1917, merely acknowledged accomplished fact: the Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workers at this early date. But they began to whittle down the power of the factory committees. InJanuary 1918, a scant two months after "decreeing" workers' control, Lenin began toadvocate that the administration of the factories be placed under trade unioncontrol. The story that the Bolsheviks "patiently" experimented with workers'control, only to find it "inefficient" and "chaotic," is a myth. Their "patience"did not last more than a few weeks. Not only did Lenin oppose direct workers'control within a matter of weeks after the November 14 decree, even unioncontrol came to an end shortly after it had been established. By the summerof 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed under bourgeois formsof management. As Lenin put it, the "revolution demands . . . precisely inthe interests of socialism that the masses unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process.", Thereafter, workers' control was denounced not only as "inefficient,""chaotic," and "impractical" but also as "pettybourgeois"!

The Left Communist Osinsky bitterly attacked all of these spuriousclaimsand warned the party, "Socialism and socialist organization must beset upby the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; somethingelsewill be set up ‑ state capitalism."  In the "interests of socialism"the Bolshevik party elbowed the proletariat out of every domain it had conqueredby its own efforts and initiative. The party did notcoordinate the revolutionor even lead it; it dominated it. First workers'control and later union control were replaced by an elaborate hierarchy asmonstrous as any structure that existed in pre-Revolutionary times. In lateryears Osinsky's prophecy became reality.

The problem of "who is to prevail" ‑ the Bolsheviks or the Russian "masses" ‑ was by no means limited to thefactories. The issue reappeared in the countryside as well as in the cities. A sweeping peasant war had buoyed up the movement of the workers. Contrary to official Leninist accounts, the agrarian upsurge was by no means limited to a redistribution of the land into private plots. In the Ukraine, peasants influenced by the anarchist militias of Nestor Makhno and guided by the communist maxim "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs," established a multitude of rural communes. Elsewhere,in the northand in Soviet Asia, several thousand of these organisms wereestablished,partly on the initiative of the Left Social Revolutionaries andin large measure as a result of traditional collectivist impulses that stemmedfrom theRussian village, the mir. It matters little whether these communeswere numerous or embraced large numbers of peasants; the point is that theywere authentic popular organisms, the nuclei of a moral and social spiritthat ranged far above the dehumanizing values of bourgeois society.

The Bolsheviks frowned upon these organisms from the very beginning andeventually condemned them. To Lenin, the preferred, the more"socialist" form of agricultural enterprise was the state farm anagricultural factory in which the state owned the land and farming equipment, appointing managers who hired peasants on a wage basis. One sees in these attitudes toward workers' control and agricultural communes the essentially bourgeois spirit and mentality that permeated the Bolshevik Party ‑ a spirit and mentality that emanated notonly from its theories but from its corporate mode of organization. In December 1918 Lenin launched an attack on the communes on the pretext thatpeasants were being forced to enter them. Actually, little if any coercion was used to organize these communistic forms of self-management. As Robert G. Wesson, who studied the Soviet commune in detail, concludes, "Those who went into communes must have done so largely of their own volition. The communes were not suppressed, but their growth was discouraged until Stalin merged the entire development into the forced collectivization drives of the late 1920s and early1930s.

By 1920, the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves from the Russian workingclass and peasantry. Taken together, the elimination of workers' control, the suppression of the Makhnovtsy, the restrictive political atmosphere in the country,the inflated bureaucracy, and the crushing material poverty inherited from the civil war years generated a deep hostility toward Bolshevik rule. With the end of hostilities, a movement surged up from the depths of Russian society for a"third revolution" ‑ not to restore the past, as the Bolsheviks claimed, but to realize the very goals of freedom, economic as well as political, thathad rallied the masses around the Bolshevik program of 1917.The new movement found its most conscious form in the Petrograd proletariat and among the Kronstadtsailors. It also found expression in the party: the growth of anti-centralist and anarchosyndicalist tendencies among the Bolsheviks reached a point where a bloc of oppositional groups, oriented toward these issues, gained 124 seats at a Moscow provincial conference, as against 154 for supporters of the Central Committee.

On March 2, 1921, the "red sailors" of Kronstadt rose in open rebellion, raisingthe banner of a "Third Revolution of the Toilers."The Kronstadt program centeredon demands for free elections to the soviets, freedom of speech and pressfor the anarchists and the left socialist parties,free trade unions, andthe liberation of all prisoners who belonged to socialist parties. The mostshameless stories were fabricated by the Bolsheviksto account for this uprising,acknowledged in later years as brazen lies. The revolt was characterized asa "White Guard plot" despite the fact that the great majority of Communist Party members in Kronstadt joined the sailors‑ precisely as Communists in denouncing the party leaders as betrayers of the October Revolution. As R. V. Daniels observes in his study of Bolshevik oppositional movements, "Ordinary Communists were indeed so unreliable ...that the government did not depend upon them either in the assault on Kronstadtitself or in keeping order in Petrograd, where Kronstadt's hopes for support chiefly rested. The main body of troops employed were Chekists and officer cadets from Red Army training schools. The final assault on Kronstadt was ledby the top officialdom ofthe Communist Party ‑ a large group of delegates to the Tenth Party Congresswas rushed from Moscow for this purpose."' So weak was the regime internallythat the elite had to do its own dirty work.

We have discussed these events in detail because they lead to a conclusion that the latest crop of Marxist‑Leninists tend to avoid: the Bolshevik party reached its maximum degree of centralization in Lenin's day notto achieve a revolution or suppress a White Guard counterrevolution, but to effect a counterrevolution of its own against the very social forces it professed torepresent. Factions were prohibited and a monolithic party created not toprevent a "capitalist restoration" but to contain a mass movementof workers for soviet democracy and social freedom. The Lenin of 1921 stood opposed tothe Lenin of 1917.

Thereafter Lenin simply floundered. This man who above all had sought to anchorthe problems of his party in social contradictions found himselfliterally playing an organizational numbers game in a last‑ditch  attempt to arrest thevery bureaucratization he had himself created. There is nothing more pathetic and tragic than Lenin's last years. Paralyzed by a simplistic body of Marxist formulas, he could think of no better countermeasures than organizational ones. He proposes the formation of the Workers' and Peasants'Inspection to correct bureaucratic deformations in the party and state ‑and this body falls under Stalin's control and becomes highly bureaucratic inits own right. Lenin then suggests that the size of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection be reduced and that it be merged with the Control Commission. He advocated enlarging the Central Committee. Thus it rolls along: this body to beenlarged, that one to be merged with another, still a third to be modified or abolished. The strange ballet of organizational forms continues up to his very death, as though the problem could be resolved by organizational means. As Moshe Lewin, an obvious admirer of Lenin, admits, the Bolshevik leader "approached the problem of government more like a chief executive of astrictly elitist turn of mind. He did not apply methods of social analysis to the government and was content to consider it purely in terms of organizational methods."

If it is true that in the bourgeois revolutions the "phrase went beyond the content," in the Bolshevik revolution the forms replaced thecontent.

The soviets replaced the workers and their factory committees, the party replacedthe soviets, the Central Committee replaced the party, and the Political Bureaureplaced the Central Committee. In short, means replaced ends.This incrediblesubstitution of form for content is one of the most characteristic traitsof Marxism‑Leninism. In France during the May‑June events, all the Bolshevikorganizations were prepared to destroy the Sorbonne student assembly in orderto increase their influence and membership. Their principal concern was notthe revolution or the authentic social forms createdby the students but thegrowth of their own parties.

Only one force could have arrested the growth of bureaucracy in Russia:asocial force. Had the Russian proletariat and peasantry succeeded inincreasingthe domain of self‑management through the development ofviable factory committees, rural communes, and free soviets, the history of thecountry might have taken a dramatically different turn. There can be no question that the failure ofsocialist revolutions in Europe after the First World War led to the isolation of the revolution in Russia. The material poverty of Russia, coupled with the pressure of the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militated against the development of a socialist or a consistently libertarian society. But by no means was it ordained that Russiahad to develop along state capitalist lines; contrary to Lenin's and Trotsky's initial expectations, the revolution was defeated by internal forces, not by invasion of armies from abroad. Had the movement from below restored theinitial achievements of the revolution in 1917, a multifaceted social structuremight have developed, based on workers' control of industry, on a freelydeveloping peasant economy in agriculture, and on a living interplay of ideas, programs, and political movements. At the very least, Russia would not have been imprisoned in totalitarian chains, and Stalinism would not have poisoned the world revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascism and the Second World War.

The development of the Bolshevik party, however, precluded this development ‑ Lenin's or Trotsky's "good intentions" not withstanding. By destroying thepower of the factory committees in industry and by crushing the Makhnovtsy, the Petrograd workers, and the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolsheviks virtually guaranteed the triumph of the Russian bureaucracy over Russian society. The centralized party ‑ a completely bourgeois institution ‑ became the refuge of counterrevolution in its most sinister form. This was covert counterrevolution that draped itself in thered flag and the terminology of Marx. Ultimately, what the Bolsheviks suppressed in 1921 was not an ideology or a White Guard conspiracy but an elemental struggle of the Russian people to free themselves of their shackles and take control of their own destiny. For Russia, this meant the nightmare of Stalinist dictatorship; for the generation of the 1930’s, it meant the horror of fascism and the treachery of the Communist parties in Europe and the United States.