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ERISS
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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Tue Jan 31, 2017 8:04 am

The "Dictatorship of the proletariat":
it is against the end of the proletariat, against the abolition of waged labor: for the dictatorship of the upper class proletariat, their party becoming a new State being the boss, upon the common proletariat. A petty bourgeois trap

"Dictatorship of the proletariat": it is like to say that the slaves become masters, remaining slaves. "Those who are not free are against the freedom: they are so accustomed to not being responsible that they are afraid. Let us govern them, profit on their fear. Those who want to be responsible have to be with us new masters, else dead or in jail. People have not to be free"

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Trotsky derides the anarchists!

Wed Feb 01, 2017 11:32 am

"The bourgeoisie says: don’t touch the state power; it is the sacred hereditary privilege of the educated classes. But the Anarchists say: don’t touch it, it is an infernal invention, a diabolical device, don’t have anything to do with it. The bourgeoisie says, don’t touch it, it’s sacred. The Anarchists say: don’t touch it, because it’s sinful. Both say: don’t touch it. But we say: don’t just touch it, take it in your hands, and set it to work in your own interests, for the abolition of private ownership and the emancipation of the working class."

Leon Trotsky

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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Sun Aug 13, 2017 10:26 pm

Touch the State, the hard way: Smash it.
Democracy is power of the people, not of representatives/commissaries over them: republics are against democracy, so the true democrats are against republics, being (untruthfully) democratic republics or popular republics.

Gaston Leval died some months ago. He was in 1921 the main, almost alone, voice of the truth about bolshevism. Far before Soljenitsyne.
Victor Serge wrote in the revolutionary press and proclaimed his adhesion to this new Bolshevism,
He presented it in such a way that it appeared to us amiable and promising,
But when I went to see him in Petrograd, he opened his heart to us, admitting the very opposite of what he wrote in his articles. He warned us against the Cheka, against the dictatorship of the party, etc.
He explained that the (bolshevik) trade unions were a caricature based on the piston and the bureaucracy, and that there were companions in prison, despite the secretary of the Cheka was saying that "They were not anarchists but simple bandits and counter-revolutionary "

http://www.socialisme-libertaire.fr/201 ... leval.html
Lenin finally agreed to receive us. I remember that we went up to the first floor and then we were in a sort of antechamber, he appeared before us. He greeted us in French, one by one; When you gave him his hand, he would hold it tight and look at you for thirty seconds (30 seconds is long when someone looks at you in the way he did), asked you who you were, who you represent, with much ease, "without manner" as we say Frenchmen; It almost made you dizzy. He led us into a large room with a rectangular table. The delegate for England, Tom Mann, who was a left-wing unionist who had fought hard and was the one with us who had more weight, took his seat next to him. He spoke in English with Lenin, and while he was responding, I could see Mann changing his face and the doubt in his face instead of the affirmative nods he used at the beginning. While both spoke, I passed behind them and could sit at the end of the table. Then Lenin spoke to all of us and told us that in view of the way the English delegate had spoken, we were very uninformed because the prisoners who were there were not anarchists but bandits who had agreed with the white generals, derailed trains, murdered hundreds of people ... Then I intervened: "Excuse me, Comrade Lenin, but I went to Taganka prison and spoke with Voline, and what he said to me does not at all agree with all this, this is what Voline did ... "; I then spoke of his diary, his lectures, his engagement in the struggle against General Denikin, etc., with much precision, given in support. I saw Lenin surprised, I will not say astonished, but almost. There was a characteristic in him, when others spoke, he looked on the ceiling and smiled with a kind of cynicism so that the speaker lost his inspiration after a few minutes. But he listened to me, and when I was finished, he remained visibly disconcerted and began to ruminate the question: "If it is really as you say, it completely changes the aspect of the problem, And we will see what we can do, because the information I have is not consistent ... "At that moment he found his point of departure:" ... You have to understand that we must struggle not only against the traditional counter-revolutionists but also against revolutionaries who have gone on to the counter-revolution, as is the case with many anarchists ... ".
Several delegates and I then asked that freedom of expression should be recognized for the revolutionaries on the left of Bolshevism, Lenin then said that he could not satisfy it. We then demanded the release of the prisoners on hunger strike, to which he replied that he would ask the question before the politburo, but that he needed a formal request from us attached to a signed document of Trotsky, by which he took all the responsibility, and we made a mutual comedy: pretending that he could not decide it, and pretending to believe it. It was agreed that we should be answered the next day at the Hotel Lux, where we were staying. About noon we were brought a signed note from Trotsky, in which he assumed full responsibility for the affair, took up the accusations against the anarchists, and replied that all he could do was to release them on condition that they leave for the foreign. We had to accept, otherwise they would have died in prison.


I spoke to Alexandra Kollontai, who was militant in a leftist fraction of the Russian Communist Party, called The Workers' Opposition. I remember one day she bitterly confessed to me: "We can not do any propaganda, we are forbidden, we can not publish a bulletin, nor we can meet more than half a dozen people ...". And it was the same Alejandra Kollontai who had defended Lenin when Kerensky persecuted him!

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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Tue Oct 17, 2017 11:42 am

There is little doubt that the Soviet regime was much less democratic than it had been in October 1917. The real question is why this was.

Right wing historians and some on the centre and left, including the anarchists so beloved of ERISS, argue that this was an evitable consequence of Bolshevik doctrine. Some have even ludicrously suggested that Lenin's "What is to be Done?" (1903) provides a blueprint for the totalitarianism of the Stalinist era!

An alternative explanation would emphasise factors such as the devastating impact of the civil war on the Russian economy which, in turn, led to the atomisation of the relatively small working class and the hollowing out of the Soviets (workers' councils). This led to the creation of a bureaucracy and put the Bolshevik party in a managerial relationship in relation to the workers and peasants who had made the revolution. This had nothing to do with Bolshevik doctrine and everything to do with the state of the Soviet Union as the civil war came to an end.

And at the 10th Party Congress in 1920 measures were introduced to limit political freedom of action to prevent the complete collapse of the regime . . .

"There should not be the slightest trace of factionalism – whatever its manifestations in the past. That we must not have on any account [when there is a] tremendous preponderance of peasants in the country, when their dissatisfaction with the proletarian dictatorship is mounting, and when the demobilisation of the peasant army is setting loose hundreds and thousands of broken men who have nothing to do, whose only accustomed occupation is war and who breed banditry. The atmosphere of the controversy is becoming extremely dangerous and constitutes a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat." (Lenin)

But . . .

"We cannot deprive the party and the members of the Central Committee of the right to appeal to the party in the event of disagreement on fundamental issues. Supposing we are faced with a question like, say, the conclusion of the Brest peace? Can you guarantee that no such question will arise? No, you cannot. In the circumstances, the elections may have to be based on platforms." (Lenin)

Note: the Marxist term "dictatorship of the proletariat" means rule by the working class, not dictatorship by a single party.

For more on this please see the three new books that are available this year on the revolution. I have put the details of them in the bibliography thread.

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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Wed Oct 18, 2017 7:11 am

stockwellpete wrote:the devastating impact of the civil war on the Russian economy which, in turn, led to the atomisation of the relatively small working class and the hollowing out of the Soviets (workers' councils). This led to the creation of a bureaucracy and put the Bolshevik party in a managerial relationship in relation to the workers and peasants who had made the revolution. This had nothing to do with Bolshevik doctrine and everything to do with the state of the Soviet Union as the civil war came to an end.

It has to do with bolshevik doctrine: for them, paesants count for nothing, like you say, despite there were many more paesant soviets (which were workers) than industrial or army soviets. So, for the bolsheviks this is the dictatorship of industry over people.

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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Fri Nov 23, 2018 2:00 pm

ERISS wrote:It has to do with bolshevik doctrine: for them, paesants count for nothing, like you say, despite there were many more paesant soviets (which were workers) than industrial or army soviets. So, for the bolsheviks this is the dictatorship of industry over people.


It is not true that the peasants counted for nothing. The first government after the October Revolution was actually a coalition between workers and peasants, represented by the Bolsheviks and the Left SR's. It was envisaged by the Bolsheviks that a bargain could be struck between workers and peasants whereby food for the cities was exchanged for machinery to raise agricultural output. This never came to pass because of foreign intervention and the prolonging of the civil war.

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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Fri Nov 23, 2018 2:40 pm

stockwellpete wrote:The first government after the October Revolution was actually a coalition between workers and peasants, represented by the Bolsheviks and the Left SR's.

Yes, bolsheviks needed people for their take of power. Once in power, this 1st government didn't live long.

a bargain between workers and peasants never came to pass because of foreign intervention and the prolonging of the civil war.

Some bargains were passed, that the bolsheviks betrayed, such as with the makhnovists.

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Re: What if they kept Lenin in exile?

Fri Nov 23, 2018 4:08 pm

ERISS wrote:Yes, bolsheviks needed people for their take of power. Once in power, this 1st government didn't live long.


But it was the Left SR's who broke the coalition because they were opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that had been negotiated with the Germans. They started to shoot leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin.

Some bargains were passed, that the bolsheviks betrayed, such as with the makhnovists.


What I meant was that the new regime in Russia did not have a period of peace whereby machinery could have been provided for the countryside to raise productivity and make the life of the peasants easier. In that way it may have been possible for a democratic collectivisation of agriculture to develop whereby more peasants eventually became wage labourers, thereby both increasing the social weight of the working class and strengthening Soviet democracy.

Makhno was a law unto himself and was completely untrustworthy. Sometimes he assisted the Bolsheviks, sometimes he fought against them. When the Whites were defeated in the Ukraine the Bolsheviks were completely correct to force him out of the country, in my view.

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