zhalasta wrote:The provisional government that was set up to replace the Czar allowed Lenin and other exiled leaders back into Russia, much to their own demise. But what if they kept him in exile? Would the revolution have had a similar outcome? What do you think?
ERISS wrote:Soviets were for free elections (I mean free elections in the soviets, democracy is their base system), and people were for SR for they kept it (among other reasons).
Also forbidding a 'revolutionary' party which is for participating in the so-loved-by-SR parliament elections, would cost the SR very much, and could give the so 'bolsheviks' more weight in the soviets (the true power before Lenin cheated it) than their only 10% from parliament elections.
Also Lenin, exiled or not, would succeed in entering Russia and would steal the power with more people support.
That's I think what could have happened: the same, with less support for SR, for mainly sooner joining anarchists and green instead.
zhalasta wrote: if they had somehow managed to keep Lenin out of Russia (or eliminate him by other means) then, after the Civil War, assuming the soviets still emerged victorious, I think in the aftermath the soviets would have more say in the government instead of Lenin having taken advantage of them to put his himself and his party in dictatorial rule, and maybe the Kronstadt rebellion would not have occurred.
zhalasta wrote: hypothetically, if they had somehow managed to keep Lenin out of Russia (or eliminate him by other means)
stockwellpete wrote: the main point to understand here is the differentiation made between parliamentary or bourgeois representative democracy on the one hand, and proletarian or participatory democracy on the other.
The Bolsheviks, including Lenin, were orthodox Marxists and believed that capitalist forms of parliamentary democracy (e.g. Constituent Assembly) should be superseded by socialist forms of proletarian democracy (i.e. soviets). This was what the revolution was about. Lenin didn't "steal" anything
Once the European revolution went down to defeat then the revolution in Russia was completely isolated and it succumbed to Stalinist counter-revolution by 1929.
ERISS wrote:Yes there's a difference: Bourgeois republic is already own by the bourgeois, but in socialist republic the socialists become the new bourgeois.
zhalasta wrote:The provisional government that was set up to replace the Czar allowed Lenin and other exiled leaders back into Russia, much to their own demise. But what if they kept him in exile? Would the revolution have had a similar outcome? What do you think?
stockwellpete wrote:The hollowing out of the soviets during the Russian civil war was caused by economic dislocation due to the fighting - the Russian working class was largely atomised - it was not a product of Bolshevik doctrine.
Stalinism was also not the product of Bolshevik doctrine, which was internationalist in orientation - Stalinism was predicated on "socialism in one country" (1925) and was a complete betrayal of the October revolution. So I am someone who sees discontinuity between Lenin/Trotsky and Stalin, not continuity. Stalin was no longer a marxist by 1929, he had become a Great Russian tyrant, just like the Tsars really.
Trotsky(1904) wrote:"(...) the Party organization “substituting” itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee (...)
stockwellpete wrote:Victor Serge - Bolshevism also contained many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse – and which he may have carried with him since his birth – is this very sensible?’
Pat "Stonewall" Cleburne wrote:Interesting. So Girl Masturbation is different than male masturbation? I'm gonna need to take some notes from your wisdom sir.
stockwellpete wrote:Well, it was the Germans who facilitated Lenin's return to Russia. At that time there was no real reason for the Russian government to prevent him returning as socialists (Mensheviks and SR's) were in the government and were also dominating the Soviets. At that time all the socialist factions (including the Bolsheviks) agreed that Russia should go through a prolonged phase of capitalist development and that socialists should operate as a loyal "left opposition" in a bourgeois Parliament.
stockwellpete wrote:It was only after Lenin was back in Russia that he launched his April Theses - and then a debate started within the Bolshevik faction about whether socialism was on the agenda in Russia in 1917. It is a very interesting question as to what might have happened if Lenin had been kept out of Russia by the Germans because it is quite possible that the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks could have been reconciled during the course of 1917 without his intervention. Maybe Kerensky would have lasted longer? Or maybe Kornilov would have been able to overthrow him?
andatiep wrote:Russian provisionnal governement, who was to continue the WWI with the Entente, had a real good reason to prevent Lenin return. The main reason why the Germans helped Lenin to reach Russia is that he was one of the very rare European Socialist who was for ending the WWI with a White Peace. The aim of the Germans was that Russia leave the war the sooner the better so that they could move their troops from East to West front, and Lenin political plan was to remove Russia from that war as soon as possible when back in Russia because he know that he will get a lots of popular support for that. The German plan finally did succeed (but partially, because they chose to remove not enough troops from the east because they wanted to plunder it, and so they miss them in Western front).
stockwellpete wrote:Long after the revolution when Trotsky was in exile, he wrote:
"If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution:
the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring – of this I have not the slightest doubt!"
2017 is the centenary of the revolution I am back playing the game again!
ERISS wrote: It was about Lenin alone, Trotsky wants to make us believe he might alone have decided this coup. Trosky was not as a political genius than Lenin (if he were, he would be later in place of Stalin..)
It was Lenin who had prevented it in the past, so the Party was following his habit against a coup (he didn't want to support workers if it did not give a better way to the Party). So, yes, only Lenin could change this own habit. Lenin was always making the Party to change direction to opposite from what they used to say or do, he was the greater opportunistic.
Report about what could be improved, by chance it may be usefull in future.
stockwellpete wrote:ERISS wrote:Trotsky wants to make us believe he might alone have decided this coup.
No, I think he is saying the opposite.
I cannot accept at all that October 1917 was a coup. The Bolshevik party was growing very rapidly
Lenin was always making the Party to change direction to opposite from what they used to say or do, he was the greater opportunistic.
I cannot accept that Lenin was motivated by opportunism though.
Report about what could be improved, by chance it may be usefull in future.
So the game has not reached the end of its development then?
ERISS wrote: Read again what I exactly quoted and wrote. Trotsky wrote "nor I", doing like he might be like Lenin.
He wants us to imagine there was a chance he might be a lenin. Stalin really broke his dream lol
It was still a coup, that Lenin feared it was not agreed by people. So he legalized all what was wanted by revolutionnaries, i.e. he wrote this on a paper. To later remove the soviet power (representation, a bourgeois governement crafted by bolsheviks for the soviets, is not power, as the Party decide in the end). As a bolshevik, Lenin had always be against the power of soviets, he suddenly wrote the countrary, for the bolsheviks not be trown away by them. When, after the White threat, soviets wanted to throw the Red state, it was too late.
It was not a motivation, its opportunism was a strategy. "The means decide the result": the bolsheviks were to take the power in a bourgeois governement, they didn't believe in the own power of people. But as Lenin saw he was wrong (the soviets grew strong without using the bourgeois power), and he was obsessed by the bourgeois kind of power (the representative government), he could not imagine more than to craft one using the soviets so the bolsheviks take the place of bourgeois.
I don't know. If you want to end it, you'll have more power to change some words lol.
stockwellpete wrote:I am not sure which "paper" you are referring to.
Lenin was an orthodox Marxists, and Marxism is the theory of working class self-emancipation so Lenin was not opposed to the soviets - he regarded them as organs of working class power.
Who have you been reading?
ERISS wrote:Mainly anarchists. But I read them because since long I was very often said being one, so I was curious about them. Before them I had almost only read encyclopedias!, so my 'anarchism' come first from my 'rationnal' culture, secondly confirmed by the waged work. Anarchist readings explain more or/and better what I already thought.
Often I believed I had new ideas, but they were in fact written since long. It was just that anarchists had been forbidden for a century, by usual/Western/liberal or bolshevik/state/Eastern capitalisms.
stockwellpete wrote:So you would be a supporter of Makhno at this time then?
There is a collection of his writings in the Marxist Internet Archive . . .
https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /index.htm
stockwellpete wrote:Another really interesting "what if" question about Lenin is what if he had lived for another ten or twenty years.
I think we can certainly say that Stalin would definitely not have become leader of the Russian Communist Party and that his policy of "socialism in one country" would not have been adopted. The Russian regime would have retained its revolutionary outlook and this may have had significant impact in the inter-war period, particularly with regards to events in Germany (1923-4) and China (1927). Inside Russia, there would have been no 5 Year plans, no forced collectivisation of agriculture, and no show trials (Trotsky would have stayed in Russia too).
social democratic workers and communist workers in Germany were hostile to each other instead of uniting against the Nazis
no Hitler would have meant no second world war.
the Spanish revolution would not have been attacked by Nazi Germany and Italy or strangled by Russian (i.e. Stalinist) intervention,
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