ven weaker than they already were. Simply put, Leninist ideology as well as difficult objective circumstances played its part in the degeneration of the revolution – particularly when the impact of that ideology made these circumstances far worse.
This can be seen from Bolshevik policies against the peasantry. As Heath notes in his excellent introduction, the peasant revolts were driven by the (usually brutal) seizure of crops by the state. A key problem with Bolshevism was its notion (like Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy) that individual exchange equals capitalism. If there were something the Bolsheviks hated more than the bourgeoisie, it was the petit-bourgeois. This can be seen from Lenin’s praise for big business and willingness to place ex-owners/managers into positions of power in the new “socialist” industrial hierarchy while, at the same time, crushing any attempts by the peasants to come to the towns and cities to sell their crops.
Given that the state food procurement agencies were incompetent (as Heath notes, seized crops often rotted in train sidings as the centralised structure did not know where they were) this was particularly harmful as workers did not get enough food to survive from official sources. It alienated the peasants, harmed food production and diverted resources to stopping attempts at trade. Luckily for the Bolsheviks, the Whites made no attempt to hide their desire to restore the landlords and so made them slightly more appealing to the bulk of the peasantry.
Ideology played its part. Marxism has two somewhat contradictory definitions of capitalism. The first is in volume 1 of Capital and stresses that capitalism is marked by wage-labour, not exchange. This implies that exploitation happens in production. The second can be found in The Poverty of Philosophy (and elsewhere) and this stresses that the market itself is the problem (hence oxymorons like “self-managed capitalism”). This implies that exploitation happens in exchange. Like most Marxists, the Bolsheviks subscribed to the second definition and singularly failed to recognise that peasants exchanging the product of their labour is not capitalistic.
It also did not help that the Bolsheviks were completely ignorant of village life and so exaggerated the number of farmers hiring wage-workers before 1917 (the kulaks). They were also failed to recognise the levelling effects of the revolution which reduced the small number of kulaks even more. Instead of listening to the Left-SRs (who did have a base in both peasantry and workers) they implemented an ideologically driven policy of “poor peasant committees” which were a disaster and soon ended (once the damage was done). These committees did, though, have the advantage of allowing the Bolsheviks to pack the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets so denying the Left-SRs their majority, but is another story…
Heath, as a communist-anarchist, addresses the issue of the frequent calls for trade raised by workers and peasants. He rightly places these demands into their social context, namely in response to Bolshevik mismanagement and the recognition that peasants made up the vast bulk of the Russian working class. He, rightly, argues that the peasants and workers “were not in favour of a free market but of a more equitable and harmonious system of distributions and exchange” and so the demands were “similar to demands of workers for better pay and conditions.” He does admit that there is “an ambiguity here that cannot fully be resolved” and is right to argue that “when the masses go into struggle a fully revolutionary programme rarely emerges at once. All revolutions contain contradictions within them.”
As Heath would be the first to agree, communism cannot be imposed and if a revolution breaks out in a country dominated by peasants who seek to exchange their goods then that must be taken into account. Ultimately, revolutions rarely unfold as revolutionaries desire and workers in revolt often make what to revolutionaries seem like mistakes. However, these mistakes can be fixed or transcended at late