cond 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 later 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