Rise of the working class
Source: Labor College lecture
First published: Labor College Review, November 1986
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
The creation of a working class soviet state would not have been possible unless two factors had been drawn together: a peasant war against the large landowners and a working class revolt directed against the propertied classes. What linked these two processes was not an identical aim but the inability of the industrial bourgeoisie to break politically from the large landowners. This inability pushed the peasantry (which in practice meant the army) and the workers into the same camp. The urban revolt could not have succeeded but for the sympathy of the largely peasant army. Nor could the peasants have waged a successful struggle unless led and welded together by a centralised external force. Only the working class was capable of providing this leadership.
The bourgeoisie and the landowners were expropriated but the peasant and the workers shared no simple long-term interest. This and the fact that the proletariat was a minority preoccupied Russian socialists long before the revolution. They believed (with the exception of Trotsky and Parvus) that the revolution would be a bourgeois one.
In fact, Lenin maintained this view up to 1917. When he and the Bolsheviks did accept that a socialist revolution was possible even though the workers were a minority it was on the basis that Russia’s was the first stage of a worldwide revolution.
In February 1917 Lenin wrote “that the Russian proletariat cannot by its own forces victoriously complete the socialist revolution” and after the revolution he repeated this basic Bolshevik assumption continually. “The absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany we shall perish,” (March 7, 1918).
The first years after the revolution brought encouraging signs of the world revolution. Communist parties were established in most countries, including the Communist Party of Australia (1920). In Germany and Austria, military defeat destroyed the monarchy while in Hungary and Bavaria, soviet governments took power briefly. An attempted uprising by the German Spartacists resulted in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
But reformism was too firmly entrenched in most countries for the revolutionary upsurge to be carried through to the establishment of soviet power. Communist groups with a mass base often failed to act, while those that revolted without this mass base suffered defeat.
Within Russia, the Bolsheviks saw revolution abroad and defence of the soviet republic as inseparable. Until this revolution came, Russia would have to be defended against the white armies and the foreign armies.
By a combination of will, organisation and revolutionary spirit the counter-revolutionary forces were driven out by 1920 but the price of this effort was enormous.
In 1920 the production of pig iron was only 3 per cent of the pre-war level, hemp 10 per cent, flax 25 per cent, cotton 11 per cent, beet 15 per cent. This collapse in production resulted in misery, starvation and famine on a wide scale.
Dislocation of production meant dislocation of the working class, which was reduced to 43 per cent of its former size. Remember, this was the class that was at the heart of soviet power and by the early 1920s it was less than half of its 1917 strength. Industrial output was only 18 per cent of the pre-war figure and labour productivity only a third of what it had been. Workers were forced to barter with peasants for the necessities of life. Not only was the working class devastated, but the very people in the factories had changed. The most militant workers went to fight at the front, while those who survived were required as cadets in the army, the factories and the state machinery. Their places were taken by peasants devoid of socialist aspirations.
The Bolsheviks had expected to be defeated by the invaders if the revolution did not spread. The invaders were repulsed, but at the cost of the class that led the revolution, which in turn was to produce distortions and the degeneration in the soviets.
The soviets of 1917 were organically connected with the class that had led the revolution. Between representative and worker there was no gap. When the mass was Menshevik, the soviets were Menshevik, when the mass began to follow the Bolsheviks, so did the soviets.
The Bolshevik Party was merely the body of class-conscious militants who could frame policies and provide the lead for working-class action. This was only possible if the mass of workers would follow them.
Even opponents of the Bolsheviks recognised this. Martov, a leading Menshevik, said:
Understand please that before us after all is a victorious uprising of the proletariat — almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising.
Until the civil war this democratic dialogue between the party and the class continued. Until June 1918 the Mensheviks continued to operate and to compete with the Bolsheviks for support.
The weakening of the working class changed this. Those who were the lifeblood of the soviets, the socialist workers, were spread all over Russia. They required co-ordination by a centralised government apparatus increasingly independent of their control and the control of the soviets.
The right-wing Social Revolutionaries were on the side of counter-revolution. The left Social Revolutionaries were unreliable allies. The Mensheviks supported the Bolsheviks against the counter-revolution with the demand that the Bolsheviks hand over power to the Constituent Assembly, which was one of the chief demands of the counter-revolution. Many Mensheviks in practice went over to the side of the Whites. The Bolsheviks allowed Menshevik members freedom, but after June 1918 they were not allowed a press. In all this the Bolsheviks had no choice. They could not allow opponents of soviet power to propagandise, particularly in a time of civil war, with the working class less and less organised to determine its own interests.
From 1920 the soviet state was single-party, although the Mensheviks continued to operate in the soviets until 1920. With the end of the civil war, tensions in soviet society did not abate but increased as the cord that bound workers and peasants was cut.
The peasants, now free from counter-revolution, had control of the land. They had individual aspirations that flowed from their productive activity. They sought to improve their own standard of living through their activities on their own plot of land and they retained their coherence only in opposing taxes and forcible collections of grain, which the cities demanded of them.
A week before the tenth congress of the Communist Party, in 1921, an uprising of sailors broke out in the Kronstadt fortress. The Kronstadt sailors had been the stoutest defenders of the Bolsheviks, but even opponents of the Bolsheviks agreed that the revolt should be put down. Why? Because Kronstadt of 1921 was not Kronstadt of 1917. Its class composition had changed.
Its socialist workers, now spread all over Russia defending the revolution, had been replaced by peasants whose devotion to the revolution was that of their class, which was reflected in their demands, the chief of which were soviets without Bolsheviks and a free market in agriculture. The latter is easily seen as peasant but the former is too, for the Bolsheviks were the only consistent supporters of the soviets.
They alone stood consistently for the socialist collectivist aims of the working class in the revolution. These demands would have meant liquidation of the socialist aims without a struggle.
The suppression of the Kronstadt revolt was not, as some claim, an attack on the socialist content of the revolution but a desperate attempt to prevent peasant opposition destroying the collective aims of the revolution.
The Kronstadt revolt was a warning — it questioned the leading role of the working class in the revolution.
It was clear that concessions to the peasantry were required, and the New Economic Policy made those concessions. Many of the peasant demands were accepted, allowing a limited range of freedom to private commodity production while maintaining a strong, centralised socialist state apparatus.
The working class had been demoralised and fragmented and this was also true of the workers’ party. It too had changed. The men who had made the 1917 revolution were, by 1919, only 10 per cent of the party, and by 1922 they were only 2.5 per cent. The party grew, of course, and although there was a tendency for militant workers to join it, many of the people who joined had little or no socialist conviction.
This dilution of the party was paralleled by developments in the state. The Bolsheviks had been forced to use thousands of members of the old tsarist bureaucracy to maintain a governmental machine. The Bolsheviks provided the overall direction but old pre-revolutionary attitudes and elitism towards the masses often persisted.
Lenin, in 1922, remarked:
Who is leading whom? The 4700 responsible Communists, the mass of bureaucrats, or the other way round? I do not believe you can honestly say the Communists are leading this mass. To put it honestly, they are not the leaders but the led. (Speech opening the eleventh congress of the RCP (B), March 27, 1922)
And in the countryside Bolsheviks were facing an environment of hostile class forces and bureaucratic inertness, while attempting to raise a peasant army and deal with small traders, kulaks (rich peasants) and small capitalists. The Bolsheviks’ immediate but limited co-operation with these elements was often more tangible than their links with a weak and demoralised working class.
Bureaucratic methods in the state spread into similar methods in the party, which of necessity had to act in many situations in place of the working class, and so required iron discipline within its ranks.
Formal factions were “temporarily” banned at the tenth congress, in 1921, although discussion was to continue within the party. This demand for internal cohesion easily degenerated into bureaucracy in the party.
By 1922 Lenin could write: “we have a bureaucracy not only in soviet institutions but in the institutions of the party”.
The erosion of inner party democracy can be seen in the fate of successive oppositions to the central leadership. Lenin himself was in a minority on several occasions and divisions within the party over the role of the trade unions were openly discussed in the press. As late as 1921 the program of the Workers Opposition was printed by the party. In 1923, the Left Opposition could still express its views in Pravda, although there was a preponderance of pro-leadership material.
Bureaucracy was most evident in the “triumvirate” of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin, which took over the party leadership during Lenin’s illness. When Zinoviev controlled the Leningrad party, he controlled all the delegates of that organisation, and when he moved into opposition to Stalin along with Kamenev and Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupsaya, so did his delegates.
By 1923, not only had the workers’ position relative to the peasant declined but their role in management of industry had also declined.
In 1922 65 per cent of managing personnel were workers and 35 per cent non-workers. Next year 36 per cent only were workers and 64 per cent were non-workers.
Red industrialists began to emerge as privileged groups with high salaries and powers, such as hiring and firing at will, which was inconsistent with workers’ control of industry.
In attempting to hold together the young soviet republic in the chaos of invasion, civil war, counter-revolution and famine, the socialist intentions determined the course of history, but these intentions often were contained in a social framework that was hostile to the democratic collectivist aims of socialism. Accommodations and deals with peasants and bureaucrats, and mediation between different social classes, was bound to reflect itself within the party itself and party factions began to define their socialist aspiration in terms of the interests of different classes. The only genuinely socialist class — the working class — was the weakest, most disorganised and least able to exert influence.
Let us look at some of the factions in the party (after 1920 it was called the Communist Party) and the social forces behind them.
Firstly the Left Opposition — this faction adhered most closely to the revolutionary socialist traditions of Bolshevism. It saw workers’ democracy as central to socialism and refused to forgo the world revolution for the reactionary chauvinistic slogan of building socialism in one country. The left opposition had three central planks, outlined by Trotsky in The New Course, published in 1923.
1. The socialist revolution could only make progress if the economic weight of the towns and industry as against the country and agriculture increased. This led to the demand for planning in industry and taxation policy that discriminated against the wealthy peasants, who if not controlled could by reason of their economic power subordinate the state to their interests.
2. This industrial development had to be accompanied by increased workers’ democracy so as to end bureaucratic tendencies in the party and state.
3. These policies would enable Russia to remain a citadel of the revolution, but Russia alone could not produce the material and cultural level that was the prerequisite of socialism. That required the extension of the revolution to at least several advanced capitalist countries.
Economically, the Left Opposition” program was realistic, and in fact industrialisation and squeezing of the kulaks was carried out in 1928 by Stalin in a bureaucratic and ruthless manner that contradicted the intentions of the opposition of 1923.
However, the class that provided the social basis of the Left Opposition, the working class, was struck by unemployment (more than 1.75 million in 1923-24) and its most militant workers had either died in the civil war or had risen in the bureaucracy. Add to this the fact that much of the class was composed of peasants fresh from the countryside and we find a group that was too tired and dispirited to fight.
It was the balance of social forces, not economics, that prevented the party from adopting the platform of the Left Opposition. The opposition to it consisted of two social forces, the first made up of elements who did not see concessions to the peasant as detrimental to socialist construction. They wanted the party to adjust its program to the needs of the peasants and they found their theoretical expression in Nikolai Bukharin, with his call to the peasants to enrich themselves.
The second faction in the party drew its strength as much from social forces within the party as outside and in the main it consisted of elements of the party apparatus itself, whose whole orientation was to maintain party cohesion through bureaucratic means. Its chief spokesman was the head of the party apparatus, Stalin.
Stalin, the son of a shoemaker, attended a seminary in his youth. He was appreciated for his practical organising ability, although Lenin commented that “he lacks the most elementary honesty” and Trotsky said of his intellectual efforts: “He is the greatest mediocrity in our party.”
His role in 1917 was secondary, although Stalin remedied that by rewriting the history of the revolution to give himself a central role and his opponents of later years, virtually all associates of Lenin, a non-existent or malevolent place.
With the weakening of the working class, the low level of culture, the reliance on experts, technicians and planners that this necessitated, factory managers, careerists, opportunists and a whole battery of party functionaries forced to take responsibilities and decisions as a matter of necessity during the civil war now regarded those roles as a right and workers democracy as a hindrance to their exercise of that right.
During the 1920s the entrenched bureaucrats began to give themselves material privileges. The theoretical justification for this inequality was embodied in the soviet constitution of 1936 by the motto “to each according to his work”. This was a reflection of what had been established for some time before and constituted an explicit revision of Marx’s formula “each according to his need”.
Such unequal distribution according to output is not a socialist norm, which the soviet constitution claimed had been established. The judge of the value of this work was the bureaucrat who rewarded the intellectuals, the officials, the managers and of course himself in grossly disproportionate amounts. In 1935 the ratio of the salaries of high-ranking engineers to those of janitors, porters and nightwatchmen was twenty to one.
The devastation of the working class and the increasing hollowness of the organs of working class democracy in the soviets left power in the state, the army, the police and the factory in the hands of the bureaucrats, who began to settle accounts with those elements that still adhered to the revolutionary socialist tradition.
The first confrontation was in 1923 with the Left Opposition, whose chief spokesman was Leon Trotsky. Abuse replaced debate, while control of the secretariat of the party over appointments was used for the first time to remove sympathisers of the Left Opposition from their posts.
With such bureaucratic manoeuvres came ideological myths to justify them. One was a cult of “Leninism”, which was bitterly opposed by Lenin’s wife, as it elevated Lenin into a semi-divine being who was never wrong.
The other was “Trotskyism”, supposedly opposed to Leninism, based on odd quotes from Lenin from ten and twenty years before, while ignoring Lenin’s last statements, which described Trotsky as the most able member of the central committee and called for the removal of Stalin.
Zinoviev, an ally of Stalin at the time, later admitted that these myths were fostered to ward off threats to bureaucratic control of the party. The bureaucracy saw theory simply as the language of its own ambitions and growing privileges. By 1925 the alliance of Stalin, Zinoviev and the right-wing peasant supporters had defeated the Left Opposition.
Zinoviev, although an ally of the bureaucrats, controlled the Leningrad sector of the bureaucracy with some degree of independence from the rest of the apparatus. As such he represented an obstacle to the central bureaucracy and was removed from his leading position in the party.
With the fall of Zinoviev, he and Kamenev turned to the historical traditions of the party now represented by the Left Opposition. In the meantime Stalin completed the job of packing all the party secretariats with his creatures and by 1926 he was master of the party and announced his policy of socialism in one country.
This revision of a basic tenet of both Marxism and Bolshevism reflected not the global interests of soviet society nor of the world’s workers but of a particular social layer in a society characterised by a basically conservative attitude to the world situation and by a desire to maintain the international status quo.
The Soviet Union was no longer seen as an instrument of furthering world revolution, which would have strengthened and relieved the soviet working class. Rather, the international communist movement was viewed as an instrument of the twists and turns of soviet diplomacy.
The various communist parties, which each conducted their own witch-hunts against Trotskyism, had to ruthlessly sacrifice the militant consciousness and self-confidence of the working class of their respective countries. This slavish following of Stalin’s policies led to defeat after defeat for the working class: in China 1927, Germany 1928-33, France 1936, and it brought the Soviet Union close to collapse in World War II.
The bureaucracy is instinctively afraid of disturbances in the international status quo not only for psychological reasons reflecting its fundamentally conservative nature in Soviet society, but also because it feared and still fears the profound transformation that an extension of the international revolution would provoke, both in the political apathy of the soviet working class and in the international relationship of forces inside the world communist movement. By 1936 Stalin could say that it was “a tragi-comic misunderstanding to attribute to the Soviet Union plans any intentions of world revolution”.
By 1928 the Stalinist faction had consolidated its control in the party and state. When Bukharin and the right wing split from it, horrified at what they had created, they found themselves with even less strength than the left earlier had. The bureaucracy had usurped the gains of the revolutionary working class, but the peasantry remained unaffected.
A mass refusal of the peasants to sell their grain brought this home to the bureaucracy. The resulting assertion of the power of the towns over the countryside, which the Left Opposition had been demanding for years, was in spirit the opposite of the proposals of the left some five years earlier.
The left had argued that peasant production must be subordinate to worker-owned industry in the towns. The rich peasants were to provide the capital for rebuilding and industrialising the soviet state.
But industry in the towns by 1928 was no longer worker-controlled. The bureaucracy sought control, amidst great suffering, over the peasants, the only remaining part of society outside its control.
The first five year plan began in 1928; again this had been advocated by the Left Opposition years earlier. Industrialisation was begun, as was the complete expropriation of the peasantry (the so-called collectivisation). Peasants slaughtered their stock rather than hand them over to the state, whose methods by now they well knew. That led to starvation and immense suffering, which was entirely avoidable.
Amid the debacles and betrayals of revolutions in China and Europe, the Stalinist bureaucracy tightened its grip over soviet society. It hounded, persecuted and killed all who by their presence inside and outside Russia constituted a link to the revolutionary traditions of October.
Trotsky’s son mysteriously fell from a Paris building, Trotsky’s secretary was murdered. Trotsky was hounded from country to country by Soviet pressure, as he unceasingly exposed the lies of Moscow. He was finally murdered by an assassin in Mexico in 1940, but not before the remaining Marxist-Leninists established the Fourth International in 1938, the founding document of which was The transitional program.
The thirties also brought the great frame-up trials of the surviving old Bolsheviks, men who Lenin knew and worked with over decades. Tomsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Kamenev and hundreds of others were accused of being saboteurs, murderers and agents of the Gestapo, and convicted on their own forced confessions.
Photographs were doctored, history books banned or rewritten to suit the current needs of the bureaucracy. Each month brought fresh accusations and executions of men who were not abject enough, or who could remember what it was like before Stalin, and thousands simply vanished from view without explanation or trial.
The Bolshevik object as stated by Lenin: “We shall see the progressive withering away of the state and the soviet state will not be a state like the others but a vast workers’ commune” was rewritten by Stalin as: “We advance toward the abolition of the state by way of the strengthening of the state”.
What, then, should be our attitude to the Soviet Union? Have all the gains of the October revolution been negated by the degeneration of the workers’ state?
The principal gain of the revolution remains: namely the nationalised property relations. The principle of socialist planning has shown its ability to record results in production unheard of under other systems in a short space of time. From 1925 to 1932 the industrial production of Germany had diminished one and a half times, in America twice, in the Soviet Union it increased four times. Today, despite the bureaucracy, the loss of 20 million troops World War II and the destruction of Soviet industry, the Soviet Union is the second most powerful nation on earth.
The bureaucracy, which cannot be called a class, has a dual and contradictory character. On the one hand its existence depends on preservation of the nationalised property relations in which it plays merely a parasitic role. Accordingly, it will defend these relations, although this will only be done in a way that corresponds to its own power and privilege.
At the same time, its role is conservative, both internationally and locally, for it rests upon the passivity of the soviet working class. Time for the bureaucracy is running out, as successful revolutions elsewhere threaten soviet hegemony over the world’s communist parties, worker revolts in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland and the growth of dissent in the Soviet Union itself portend the time when the soviet working class, like a long-lost child, will again enter the political scene to claim its October inheritance.
The revolution betrayed, Leon Trotsky
The permanent revolution, Leon Trotsky
The class nature of the soviet state, Leon Trotsky
The Third International after Lenin, Leon Trotsky
Two tactics of Social Democracy in the democratic revolution, V.I. Lenin
Reminiscences of Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya
Lenin’s last struggle, Moshe Lewin
History of the Bolshevik Party, Grigory Zinoviev (Only lecture one is available online)
From Lenin to Stalin, Victor Serge
Marxist economic theory, Ernest Mandel (chapter on the Soviet Union)
Peaceful co-existence and world revolution, Ernest Mandel
Behind the Moscow trials, Max Schachtman
The tragedy of the Chinese revolution, Harold Isaacs
Revolution and counter-revolution in Spain, Felix Morrow
Fascism and big business, Daniel Guerin