SEAN TARJOTO                                                                                                                                         PROF. S. McMEEKIN 
2/18/02 - Week 4                                                                                                                                     REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM

"The rapid disintegration of Russian unity gave the Bolsheviks the opportunity to loosen the Mensheviks' hold on organized labor.  As transport and communications disintegrated, and each region, no longer able to rely on the central government, had to take charge of its own affairs, the network of national trade unions weakened. Factory workers now began to shift their loyalties from unions organized horizontally, along professional lines, to those organized vertically, by enterprises. This development promoted syndicalism." (from "The October Coup", A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes) 

	What resides within the history of revolutions that must be gotten rid of, if the state is to be re-consolidated; if the revolution is to spin clockwise? Had the soviets organized with the SR, would the October revolution fallen into the hands of the Duma? Would there have been a democratic transfer of power, with Trotsky at the seat of the Petrograd Soviet? 

By October, none of the “bourgeois parties” could any longer assimilate themselves into any revolution, coup, or uprising. The Petrograd proletariat would look to themselves to organize within the city, while letting the trade unions stagnate with the economic and political infrastructure. Radically transformed through the meaning of their labor (as opposed to their product). They then saw the Bolsheviks as the only political alternative that could seize power.  Where or how does this kind of disintegration sever the seams of nationalism? And why were the trade unions abandoned in favor of syndicalism? 

	Lenin desired to seize the uniquely potent form of self-discipline that belonged to the proletariat and, through a radicalization, transform into a loyalty sworn to a social democratic party (the RSDLP). After July, the urban factories and the peasant fields, forged into the Red Guard, were united by the particular, dubious, details of the labor of defending and securing the state. Three years after the coup, Lenin resorted to a series of purges of these very same loyalists.