r stages by the masses themselves – unlike ideologically correct one imposed from above, as the Bolsheviks with their Marxist confusion over what defines capitalism.
Of course, the modern-day Leninist apologist would argue that it was the breakdown of the urban economy which forced the Bolsheviks into the key policy of what is now termed “war communism” but was then just “communism”, the forced seizure of grain from the peasants. Suffice to say, this defence of Bolshevism is premised on the false assumption that Bolshevik industrial policy was unproblematic.
While the revolution did see a massive economic problems (which, incidentally, confirmed Kropotkin’s arguments in Conquest of Bread and elsewhere), Bolshevik prejudices in favour of centralisation and utilising state-capitalist institutions and against workers’ self-management all contributed to making the drop in industrial production fall worse (see section H.6.2 of An Anarchist FAQ). The pressing need was (as Kropotkin stressed) for decentralisation, local knowledge and mass participation, all of which was alien to Bolshevik ideology.
As Heath notes, the massive revolt of early 1921 forced the Bolsheviks to acknowledge reality to some degree and introduce the NEP. This, as the pamphlet correctly states, restored not only exchange but capitalism – unlike the peasant rebels and the Kronstadt sailors, it was not against the employment of wage-labour. Needless to say, this partial concession to popular economic demands was not meet by any concessions to popular political demands for genuine soviet democracy, freedom of speech, assembly, press and so forth. A step back from “war communism” economically was acceptable in order to secure (to quote Trotsky from 1927) “the Leninist principle, inviolable for every Bolshevik, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is and can be realised only through the dictatorship of the party.”
It must be noted that Bolshevik actions cannot be fully explained nor understood unless you realise that by late 1918 they had concluded that party dictatorship was an essential aspect of any successful revolution. Zinoviev, for example, was not shy in proclaiming it to the Communist International in 1920 while Trotsky was still wittering away about the “objective necessity” of “the party dictatorship” in 1937! So political ideology played its part, particularly in the vision of socialism (centralised planning), perspectives on the peasantry, the role of the party and the vanguard’s (self-proclaimed) embodiment of proletarian aspirations.
Such discussions are difficult to condense and such issues are somewhat outside the scope of the pamphlet. Given its aim, namely indicating peasant and worker resistance to the Bolsheviks, it does it task well. It gives a taste of popular movements during the Russian Revolution, movements which could have been the base of a socialist alternative to Bolshevik state-capitalism. It leaves you wanting to find out more and that raises an issue, namely that references are not as full as they could be. Given a reference as “in Skirda” makes it difficult to track them down, particularly when it’s the original French edition being pointed to! It would have been helpful to give page numbers to the AK Press translation in such cases.
Still, such issues are minor. As a pamphlet it can be nothing else than an introduction to these revolts. In this it achieves its aim well.
Appeared in Black Flag no. 234 (late 2011)