    How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?

   It is a truism of Leninism that Stalinism has nothing to do with the
   ideas of Bolshevism. Moreover, most are at pains to stress that these
   ideas have no relation to the actual practice of the Bolshevik Party
   after the October Revolution. To re-quote one Leninist:

     "it was overwhelmingly the force of circumstance which obliged the
     Bolsheviks to retreat so far from their own goals. They travelled
     this route in opposition to their own theory, not because of it --
     no matter what rhetorical justifications were given at the time."
     [John Rees, "In Defence of October," pp. 3-82, International
     Socialism, no. 52, p. 70]

   His fellow party member Duncan Hallas argued that it was "these
   desperate conditions" (namely terrible economic situation combined with
   civil war) which resulted in "the Bolshevik Party [coming] to
   substitute its own rule for that of a decimated, exhausted working
   class" anarchists disagree. [Towards a Revolutionary Socialist Party,
   p. 43]

   We have discussed in the appendix on [1]"What caused the degeneration
   of the Russian Revolution?" why the various "objective factors"
   explanations favoured by Leninists to explain the defeat of the Russian
   Revolution are unconvincing. Ultimately, they rest on the spurious
   argument that if only what most revolutionaries (including, ironically,
   Leninists!) consider as inevitable side effects of a revolution did not
   occur, then Bolshevism would have been fine. It is hard to take
   seriously the argument that if only the ruling class disappeared
   without a fight, if the imperialists had not intervened and if the
   economy was not disrupted then Bolshevism would have resulted in
   socialism. This is particularly the case as Leninists argue that only
   their version of socialism recognises that the ruling class will not
   disappear after a revolution, that we will face counter-revolution and
   so we need a state to defend the revolution! As we argued in [2]section
   H.2.1, this is not the case. Anarchists have long recognised that a
   revolution will require defending and that it will provoke a serious
   disruption in the economic life of a country.

   Given the somewhat unrealistic tone of these kinds of assertions, it is
   necessary to look at the ideological underpinnings of Bolshevism and
   how they played their part in the defeat of the Russian Revolution.
   This section, therefore, will discuss why such Leninist claims are not
   true. Simply put, Bolshevik ideology did play a role in the
   degeneration of the Russian Revolution. This is obvious once we look at
   most aspects of Bolshevik ideology as well as the means advocated by
   the Bolsheviks to achieve their goals. Rather than being in opposition
   to the declared aims of the Bolsheviks, the policies implemented by
   them during the revolution and civil war had clear relations with their
   pre-revolution ideas and visions. To quote Maurice Brinton's
   conclusions after looking at this period:

     "there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what
     happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of
     Stalinism. We know that many on the revolutionary left will find
     this statement hard to swallow. We are convinced however that any
     honest reading of the facts cannot but lead to this conclusion. The
     more one unearths about this period the more difficult it becomes to
     define - or even to see - the 'gulf' allegedly separating what
     happened in Lenin's time from what happened later. Real knowledge of
     the facts also makes it impossible to accept . . . that the whole
     course of events was 'historically inevitable' and 'objectively
     determined'. Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves
     important and sometimes decisive factors in the equation, at every
     critical stage of this critical period. Now that more facts are
     available self-mystification on these issues should no longer be
     possible. Should any who have read these pages remain 'confused' it
     will be because they want to remain in that state -- or because (as
     the future beneficiaries of a society similar to the Russian one) it
     is their interest to remain so." [The Bolsheviks and Workers'
     Control, p. 84]

   This is unsurprising. The Leninist idea that politics of the Bolsheviks
   had no influence on the outcome of the revolution, that their policies
   during the revolution were a product purely of objective forces, is
   unconvincing. The facts of the matter is that people are faced with
   choices, choices that arise from the objective conditions that they
   face. What decisions they make will be influenced by the ideas they
   hold -- they will not occur automatically, as if people were on
   auto-pilot -- and their ideas are shaped by the social relationships
   they experience. Thus, someone who favours centralisation and sees
   nationalisation as the defining characteristic of socialism will make
   different decisions than someone who favours decentralising power and
   sees self-management as the key issue. The former will also create
   different forms of social organisation based on their perceptions of
   what "socialism" is and what is "efficient." Similarly, the different
   forms of social organisation favoured will also impact on how a
   revolution develops and the political decisions they make. For example,
   if you have a vision which favours centralised, hierarchical
   organisation then those placed into a position of power over others
   within such structures will act in certain ways, have a certain world
   view, which would be alien to someone subject to egalitarian social
   relations.

   In summary, the ideas in people's heads matter, including during a
   revolution. Someone in favour of centralisation, centralised power and
   who equates party rule with class rule (like Lenin and Trotsky), will
   act in ways (and create structures) totally different from someone who
   believes in decentralisation and federalism. The organisation they
   create will create specific forms of social relationships which, in
   turn, will shape the ideas of those subject to them. This means that a
   centralised, hierarchical system will create authoritarian social
   relationships and these will shape those within them and the ideas they
   have in totally different ways than a decentralised, egalitarian
   system.

   Similarly, if Bolshevik policies hastened the alienation of working
   class people and peasants from the regime which, in turn, resulted in
   resistance to them then some of the "objective factors" facing Lenin's
   regime were themselves the products of earlier political decisions.
   Unwelcome and unforeseen (at least to the Bolshevik leadership)
   consequences of specific Bolshevik practices and actions, but still
   flowing from Bolshevik ideology all the same. So, for example, when
   leading Bolsheviks had preconceived biases against decentralisation,
   federalism, "petty-bourgeois" peasants, "declassed" workers or
   "anarcho-syndicalist" tendencies, this would automatically become an
   ideological determinant to the policies decided upon by the ruling
   party. While social circumstances may have limited Bolshevik options,
   these social circumstances were also shaped by the results of Bolshevik
   ideology and practice and, moreover, possible solutions to social
   problems were also limited by Bolshevik ideology and practice.

   So, political ideas do matter. And, ironically, the very Leninists who
   argue that Bolshevik politics played no role in the degeneration of the
   revolution accept this. Modern day Leninists, while denying Bolshevik
   ideology had a negative on the development of the revolution also
   subscribe to the contradictory idea that Bolshevik politics were
   essential for its "success"! Indeed, the fact that they are Leninists
   shows this is the case. They obviously think that Leninist ideas on
   centralisation, the role of the party, the "workers' state" and a host
   of other issues are correct and, moreover, essential for the success of
   a revolution. They just dislike the results when these ideas were
   applied in practice within the institutional context these ideas
   promote, subject to the pressures of the objective circumstances they
   argue every revolution will face!

   Little wonder anarchists are not convinced by Leninist arguments that
   their ideology played no role in the rise of Stalinism in Russia.
   Simply put, if you use certain methods then these will be rooted in the
   specific vision you are aiming for. If you think socialism is state
   ownership and centralised planning then you will favour institutions
   and organisations which facilitate that end. If you want a highly
   centralised state and consider a state as simply being an "instrument
   of class rule" then you will see little to worry about in the
   concentration of power into the hands of a few party leaders. However,
   if you see socialism in terms of working class managing their own
   affairs then you will view such developments as being fundamentally in
   opposition to your goals and definitely not a means to that end.

   So part of the reason why Marxist revolutions yield such anti-working
   class outcomes is to do with its ideology, methods and goals. It has
   little to do with the will to power of a few individuals (important a
   role as that can play, sometimes, in events). In a nutshell, the
   ideology and vision guiding Leninist parties incorporate hierarchical
   values and pursue hierarchical aims. Furthermore, the methods and
   organisations favoured to achieve (their vision of) "socialism" are
   fundamentally hierarchical, aiming to ensure that power is centralised
   at the top of pyramidal structures in the hands of the party leaders.

   It would be wrong, as Leninists will do, to dismiss this as simply a
   case of "idealism." After all, we are talking about the ideology of a
   ruling party. As such, these ideas are more than just ideas: after the
   seizure of power, they became a part of the real social situation
   within Russia. Individually, party members assumed leadership posts in
   all spheres of social life and started to apply their ideology. Then,
   overtime, the results of this application ensured that the party could
   not be done otherwise as the framework of exercising power had been
   shaped by its successful application (e.g. Bolshevik centralism ensured
   that all its policies were marked by centralist tendencies, simply
   because Bolshevik power had become centralised). Soon, the only real
   instance of power is the Party, and very soon, only the summits of the
   Party. This cannot help but shape its policies and actions. As
   Castoriadis argues:

     "If it is true that people's real social existence determines their
     consciousness, it is from that moment illusory to expect the
     Bolshevik party to act in any other fashion than according to its
     real social position. The real social situation of the Party is that
     of a directorial organ, and its point of view toward this society
     henceforth is not necessarily the same as the one this society has
     toward itself." [The role of Bolshevik Ideology in the birth of the
     Bureaucracy, p. 97]

   As such, means and ends are related and cannot be separated. As Emma
   Goldman argued, there is "no greater fallacy than the belief that aims
   and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This
   conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human
   experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the
   ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and
   social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence
   it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. . .
   The great and inspiring aims of the Revolution became so clouded with
   and obscured by the methods used by the ruling political power that it
   was hard to distinguish what was temporary means and what final
   purpose. Psychologically and socially the means necessarily influence
   and alter the aims. The whole history of man is continuous proof of the
   maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to Sink
   into the depths of utter demoralisation. In that lies the real tragedy
   of the Bolshevik philosophy as applied to the Russian Revolution. May
   this lesson not be in vain." In summary, "[n]o revolution can ever
   succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it
   be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved."
   [My Disillusionment in Russia, pp. 260-1]

   If this analysis of the anarchists against Bolshevism is true then it
   follows that the Bolsheviks were not just wrong on one or two issues
   but their political outlook right down to the core was wrong. Its
   vision of socialism was flawed, which produced a flawed perspective on
   the potentially valid means available to achieve it. Leninism, we must
   never forget, does not aim for the same kind of society anarchism does.
   As we discussed in [3]section H.3.1, the short, medium and long term
   goals of both movements are radically different. While both claim to
   aim for "communism," what is mean by that word is radically different
   in details if somewhat similar in outline. The anarchist ideal of a
   classless, stateless and free society is based on a decentralised,
   participatory and bottom-up premise. The Leninist ideal is the product
   of a centralised, party ruled and top-down paradigm.

   This explains why Leninists advocate a democratic-centralist
   "Revolutionary Party." It arises from the fact that their programme is
   the capture of state power in order to abolish the "anarchy of the
   market." Not the abolition of wage labour, but its universalisation
   under the state as one big boss. Not the destruction of alienated
   forces (political, social and economic) but rather their capture by the
   party on behalf of the masses. In other words, this section of the FAQ
   is based on the fact that Leninists are not (libertarian) communists;
   they have not broken sufficiently with Second International orthodoxy,
   with the assumption that socialism is basically state capitalism ("The
   idea of the State as Capitalist, to which the Social-Democratic
   fraction of the great Socialist Party is now trying to reduce
   Socialism." [Peter Kropotkin,
   The Great French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 31]). Just as one cannot
   abolish alienation with alienated means, so we cannot attack Leninist
   "means" also without distinguishing our libertarian "ends" from theirs.

   This means that both Leninist means and ends are flawed. Both will fail
   to produce a socialist society. As Kropotkin said at the time, the
   Bolsheviks "have shown how the Revolution is not to be made." [quoted
   by Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 75] If applied today, Leninist ideas
   will undoubtedly fail from an anarchist point of view while, as under
   Lenin, "succeeding" from the limited perspective of Bolshevism. Yes,
   the party may be in power and, yes, capitalist property may be
   abolished by nationalisation but, no, a socialist society would be no
   nearer. Rather we would have a new hierarchical and class system rather
   than the classless and free society which non-anarchist socialists
   claim to be aiming for.

   Let us be perfectly clear. Anarchists are not saying that Stalinism
   will be the inevitable result of any Bolshevik revolution. What we are
   saying is that some form of class society will result from any such a
   revolution. The exact form this class system will take will vary
   depending on the objective circumstances it faces, but no matter the
   specific form of such a post-revolutionary society it will not be a
   socialist one. This is because of the ideology of the party in power
   will shape the revolution in specific ways which, by necessity, form
   new forms of hierarchical and class exploitation and oppression. The
   preferred means of Bolshevism (vanguardism, statism, centralisation,
   nationalisation, and so on) will determine the ends, the ends being not
   communist anarchism but some kind of bureaucratic state capitalist
   society labelled "socialism" by those in charge. Stalinism, in this
   perspective, was the result of an interaction of certain ideological
   goals and positions as well as organisational principles and
   preferences with structural and circumstantial pressures resulting from
   the specific conditions prevalent at the time. For example, a Leninist
   revolution in an advanced western country would not require the
   barbaric means used by Stalinism to industrialise Russia.

   This section of the FAQ will, therefore, indicate the key areas of
   Bolshevik ideology which, when applied, will undermine any revolution
   as they did the Russian. As such, it is all fine and well for
   Trotskyist Max Shachtman (like so many others) to argue that the
   Bolsheviks had "convert[ed] the expediencies and necessities of the
   civil war period into virtues and principles which had never been part
   of their original program." Looking at this "original program" we can
   see elements of what was latter to be applied. Rather than express a
   divergence it could be argued that it was this that undermined the more
   democratic aspects of their original program. In other words, perhaps
   the use of state power and economic nationalisation came into conflict
   with, and finally destroyed, the original proclaimed socialist
   principles? And, perhaps, the "socialist" vision of Bolshevism was so
   deeply flawed that even attempting to apply it destroyed the
   aspirations for liberty, equality and solidarity that inspired it? For,
   after all, as we indicated in [4]section H.3.1, the anarchist and
   mainstream Marxist visions of socialism and how to get there are
   different. Can we be surprised if Marxist means cannot achieve
   anarchist (i.e. authentic socialist) ends? To his credit, Shachtman
   acknowledges that post-civil war salvation "required full democratic
   rights"
   for all workers, and that this was "precisely what the Bolsheviks . . .
   were determined not to permit." Sadly he failed to wonder why the
   democratic principles of the "original program" were only "honoured in
   the breach" and why "Lenin and Trotsky did not observe them." The
   possibility that Bakunin was right and that statism and socialism
   cannot go together was not raised. ["Introduction" to Trotsky's
   Terrorism and Communism, p. xv]

   Equally, there is a tendency of pro-Leninists to concentrate on the
   period between the two revolutions of 1917 when specifying what
   Bolshevism "really" stood for, particularly Lenin's book
   State and Revolution. To use an analogy, when Leninists do this they
   are like politicians who, when faced with people questioning the
   results of their policies, ask them to look at their election manifesto
   rather than what they have done when in power. As we discuss in
   [5]section 4 of the appendix [6]"What happened during the Russian
   Revolution?" Lenin's book was never applied in practice. From the very
   first day, the Bolsheviks ignored it. After 6 months none of its keys
   ideas had been applied. Indeed, in all cases the exact opposite had
   been imposed. As such, to blame (say) the civil war for the reality of
   "Bolshevik in power" (as Leninists do) seems without substance. Simply
   put, State and Revolution is no guide to what Bolshevism "really" stood
   for. Neither is their position before seizing power if the realities of
   their chosen methods (i.e. seizing state power) quickly changed their
   perspective, practice and ideology (i.e. shaped the desired ends).
   Assuming of course that most of their post-October policies were
   radically different from their pre-October ones, which (as we indicate
   here) they were not.

   With that said, what do anarchists consider the key aspects of
   Bolshevik ideology which helped to ensure the defeat of the Russian
   Revolution and had, long before the civil war started, had started its
   degeneration into tyranny? These factors are many and so we will, by
   necessity, concrete on the key ones. These are believe in
   centralisation, the confusion of party power with popular power, the
   Marxist theory of the state, the negative influence of Engels' infamous
   essay "On Authority", the equation of nationalisation and state
   capitalism with socialism, the lack of awareness that working class
   economic power was a key factor in socialism, the notion that "big" was
   automatically "more efficient," the identification of class
   consciousness with supporting the party, how the vanguard party
   organises itself and, lastly, the underlying assumptions that
   vanguardism is based on.

   Each one of these factors had a negative impact on the development of
   the revolution, combined they were devastating. Nor can it be a case of
   keeping Bolshevism while getting rid of some of these positions. Most
   go to the heart of Bolshevism and could only be eliminated by
   eliminating what makes Leninism Leninist. Thus some Leninists now pay
   lip service to workers' control of production and recognise that the
   Bolsheviks saw the form of property (i.e., whether private or state
   owned) as being far more important that workers' management of
   production. Yet revising Bolshevism to take into account this flaw
   means little unless the others are also revised. Simply put, workers'
   management of production would have little impact in a highly
   centralised state ruled over by a equally centralised vanguard party.
   Self-management in production or society could not co-exist with a
   state and party power nor with "centralised" economic decision making
   based on nationalised property. In a nutshell, the only way Bolshevism
   could result in a genuine socialist society is if it stopped being
   Bolshevik!

1 How did the Marxist historical materialism affect Bolshevism?

   As is well known, Marx argued that history progressed through distinct
   stages. After his death, this "materialist conception of history"
   became known as "historical materialism." The basic idea of this is
   that the "totality of [the] relations of production constitutes the
   economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a
   legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
   forms of social consciousness . . . At a certain stage of development,
   the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the
   existing relations of production or -- this merely expresses the same
   thing in legal terms -- with the property relations within the
   framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of
   development of productive forces these relations turn into their
   fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." [A Contribution to
   the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 20-1]

   Thus slavery was replaced by feudalism, feudalism with capitalism. For
   Marx, the "bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form
   of the social process of production" and "the productive forces
   developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions
   for a solution of this antagonism." [Op. Cit., p. 21] In other words,
   after capitalism there would be socialism:

     "The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
     production which has flourished alongside and under it. The
     centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of
     labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their
     capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of
     capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
     expropriated." [Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 929]

   Socialism replaces capitalism once the "proletariat seized political
   power and turns the means of production into state property." By so
   doing, "it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class
   distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state."
   [Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 713]

   Most Marxists subscribe to this schema of historical progress. For
   example, Tony Cliff noted that, "[f]or Lenin, whose Marxism was never
   mechanical or fatalistic, the definition of the dictatorship of the
   proletariat as a transition period meant that there could be two
   outcomes of this phase: going forward to socialism, or backsliding to
   capitalism. The policy of the party would tip the balance." [Revolution
   Besieged, p. 364]

   Marxists, like Marx, argue that socialism was the society which would
   come after capitalism. Thus the Bolsheviks had the mindset that
   whatever they did there was only two possibilities: (their version of)
   socialism or the restoration of capitalism. However, this is based on a
   false premise. Is it valid to assume that there is only one possible
   post-capitalist future, one that, by definition, is classless? If so,
   then any action or structure could be utilised to fight reaction as
   after victory there can be only one outcome. However, if there is more
   that one post-capitalist future then the question of means becomes
   decisive. If we assume just two possible post-capitalist futures, one
   based on self-management and without classes and another with economic,
   social and political power centralised in a few hands, then the means
   used in a revolution become decisive in determining which possibility
   will become reality.

   If we accept the Marxist theory and assume only one possible
   post-capitalist system, then all that is required of revolutionary
   anti-capitalist movements is that they only need to overthrow
   capitalism and they will wind up where they wish to arrive as there is
   no other possible outcome. But if the answer no, then in order to wind
   up where we wish to arrive, we have to not only overthrow capitalism,
   we have use means that will push us toward the desired future society.
   As such, means become the key and they cannot be ignored or downplayed
   in favour of the ends -- particularly as these ends will never be
   reached if the appropriate means are not used.

   This is no abstract metaphysical or ideological/theoretical point. The
   impact of this issue can be seen from the practice of Bolshevism in
   power. For Lenin and Trotsky, any and all means could and were used in
   pursuit of their ends. They simply could not see how the means used
   shaped the ends reached. Ultimately, there was only two possibilities
   -- socialism (by definition classless) or a return to capitalism.

   Once we see that because of their flawed perspective on what comes
   after capitalism we understand why, for the Bolsheviks, the means used
   and institutions created were meaningless. We can see one of the roots
   for Bolshevik indifference to working class self-management. As Samuel
   Farber notes that "there is no evidence indicating that Lenin or any of
   the mainstream Bolshevik leaders lamented the loss of workers' control
   or of democracy in the soviets, or at least referred to these losses as
   a retreat, as Lenin declared with the replacement of War Communism by
   NEP in 1921." [Before Stalinism, p. 44] There was no need, for such
   means had no impact on achieving the ends Bolshevik power had set
   itself. As we discuss in [7]section 6, such questions of meaningful
   working class participation in the workplace or the soviets were
   considered by the likes of Trotsky as fundamentally irrelevant to
   whether Bolshevik Russia was socialist or whether the working class was
   the ruling class or not, incredible as it may seem.

   So if we accept Marx's basic schema, then we simply have to conclude
   that what means we use are, ultimately, irrelevant as there is only one
   outcome. As long as property is nationalised and a non-capitalist party
   holds state power, then the basic socialist nature of the regime
   automatically flows. This was, of course, Trotsky's argument with
   regard to Stalinist Russia and why he defended it against those who
   recognised that it was a new form of class society. Yet it is precisely
   the rise of Stalinism out of the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks which
   exposes the limitations in the Marxist schema of historical
   development.

   Simply put, there is no guarantee that getting rid of capitalism will
   result in a decent society. As anarchists like Bakunin argued against
   Marx, it is possible to get rid of capitalism while not creating
   socialism, if we understand by that term a free, classless society of
   equals. Rather, a Marxist revolution would "concentrate all the powers
   of government in strong hands, because the very fact that the people
   are ignorant necessitates strong, solicitous care by the government.
   [It] will create a single State bank, concentrating in its hands all
   the commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific
   production; and they will divide the mass of people into two armies --
   industrial and agricultural armies under the direct command of the
   State engineers who will constitute the new privileged
   scientific-political class." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p.
   289] As Bolshevism proved, there was always an alternative to socialism
   or a reversion to capitalism, in this case state capitalism.

   So libertarians have long been aware that actually existing capitalism
   could be replaced by another form of class society. As the experience
   of Bolshevik tyranny proves beyond doubt, this perspective is the
   correct one. And that perspective ensured that during the Russian
   Revolution the Makhnovists had to encourage free soviets and workers'
   self-management, freedom of speech and organisation in order for the
   revolution to remain socialist (see the appendix on [8]"Why does the
   Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?"). In
   contrast, the Bolsheviks implemented party dictatorship,
   nationalisation and one-man management while proclaiming this had
   something to do with socialism. Little wonder Trotsky had such
   difficulties understanding the obvious truth that Stalinism has nothing
   to do with socialism.

2 Why did the Marxist theory of the state undermine working class power?

   As discussed in [9]section H.3.7, anarchists and Marxists have
   fundamentally different definitions of what constitutes a state. These
   different definitions resulted, in practice, to the Bolsheviks
   undermining real working class power during the Russian Revolution in
   favour of an abstract "power"
   which served as little more than a fig-leaf for Bolshevik power.

   For anarchists, the state is marked by centralised power in the hands
   of a few. The state, we argue, is designed to ensure minority rule and,
   consequently, cannot be used by the majority to manage their own
   affairs. Every bourgeois revolution, moreover, has been marked by a
   conflict between centralised power and popular power and,
   unsurprisingly, the bourgeois favoured the former over the latter. As
   such, we would expect centralised power (i.e. a state) to be the means
   by which a minority class seized power over the masses and never the
   means by which the majority managed society themselves. It was for this
   reason that anarchists refuse to confuse a federation of self-managed
   organisations with a state:

     "The reader knows by now that the anarchists refused to use the term
     'State' even for a transitional situation. The gap between
     authoritarians and libertarians has not always been very wide on
     this score. In the First International the collectivists, whose
     spokesman was Bakunin, allowed the terms 'regenerate State,' 'new
     and revolutionary State,' or even 'socialist State' to be accepted
     as synonyms for 'social collective.' The anarchists soon saw,
     however, that it was rather dangerous for them to use the same word
     as the authoritarians while giving it a quite different meaning.
     They felt that a new concept called for a new word and that the use
     of the old term could be dangerously ambiguous; so they ceased to
     give the name 'State' to the social collective of the future."
     [Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, pp. 60-1]

   This is no mere semantics. The essence of statism is the removal of
   powers that should belong to the community as whole (though they may
   for reasons of efficiency delegate their actual implementation to
   elected, mandated and recallable committees) into the hands of a tiny
   minority who claim to act on our behalf and in our interests but who
   are not under our direct control. In other words it continues the
   division into rulers and ruled. Any confusion between two such
   radically different forms of organisation can only have a seriously
   negative effect on the development of any revolution. At its most
   basic, it allows those in power to develop structures and practices
   which disempower the many while, at the same time, taking about
   extending working class "power."

   The roots of this confusion can be found at the root of Marxism. As
   discussed in [10]section H.3.7, Marx and Engels had left a somewhat
   contradictory inheritance on the nature and role of the state. Unlike
   anarchists, who clearly argued that only confusion would arise by
   calling the organs of popular self-management required by a revolution
   a "state," the founders of Marxism confused two radically different
   ideas. On the one hand, there is the idea of a radical and
   participatory democracy (as per the model of the Paris Commune). On the
   other, there is a centralised body with a government in charge (as per
   the model of the democratic state). By using the term "state" to cover
   these two radically different concepts, it allowed the Bolsheviks to
   confuse party power with popular power and, moreover, replace the
   latter by the former without affecting the so-called "proletarian"
   nature of the state. The confusion of popular organs of self-management
   with a state ensured that these organs were submerged by state
   structures and top-down rule.

   By confusing the state (delegated power, necessarily concentrated in
   the hands of a few) with the organs of popular self-management Marxism
   opened up the possibility of a "workers' state" which is simply the
   rule of a few party leaders over the masses. The "truth of the matter,"
   wrote Emma Goldman, "is that the Russian people have been locked out
   and that the Bolshevik State -- even as the bourgeois industrial master
   -- uses the sword and the gun to keep the people out. In the case of
   the Bolsheviki this tyranny is masked by a world-stirring slogan . . .
   Just because I am a revolutionist I refuse to side with the master
   class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party." [My
   Disillusionment in Russia, p. xlix] In this, she simply saw in practice
   that which Bakunin had predicted would happen. For Bakunin, like all
   anarchists, "every state power, every government, by its nature and by
   its position stands outside the people and above them, and must
   invariably try to subject them to rules and objectives which are alien
   to them." It was for this reason "we declare ourselves the enemies of
   every government and state every state power . . . the people can only
   be happy and free when they create their own life, organising
   themselves from below upwards." [Statism and Anarchy, p. 136]

   The "workers' state" proved no exception to that generalisation. The
   roots of the problem, which expressed itself from the start during the
   Russian revolution, was the fatal confusion of the state with organs of
   popular self-management. Lenin argued in "State and Revolution" that,
   on the one hand, "the armed proletariat itself shall become the
   government" while, on the other, that "[w]e cannot imagine democracy,
   not even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions."
   If, as Lenin asserts, democracy "means equality" he has reintroduced
   inequality into the "proletarian" state as the representatives have, by
   definition, more power than those who elected them. [Essential Works of
   Lenin, p. 363, p. 306 and p. 346] Yet, as noted in [11]section H.1.2,
   representative bodies necessarily place policy-making in the hands of
   deputies and do not (and cannot) mean that the working class as a class
   can manage society. Moreover, such bodies ensure that popular power can
   be usurped without difficulty by a minority. After all, a minority
   already does hold power.

   True equality implies the abolition of the state and its replacement by
   a federation of self-managed communes. The state, as anarchists have
   long stressed, signifies a power above society, a concentration of
   power into a few hands. Lenin, ironically, quotes Engels on the state
   being marked by "the establishment of a public power, which is no
   longer directly identical with the population organising itself as an
   armed power." [quoted by Lenin, Op. Cit., p. 275] As Lenin supported
   representative structures rather than one based on elected, mandated
   and recallable delegates then he has created a "public power" no longer
   identical with the population.

   Combine this with an awareness that bureaucracy must continue to exist
   in the "proletarian" state then we have the ideological preconditions
   for dictatorship over the proletariat. "There can be no thought,"
   asserted Lenin, "of destroying officialdom immediately everywhere,
   completely. That is utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine
   at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will
   enable all officialdom to be gradually abolished is not utopia." In
   other words, Lenin expected "the gradual 'withering away' of all
   bureaucracy." [Op. Cit., p. 306 and p. 307]

   Yet why expect a "new" bureaucracy to be as easy to control as the old
   one? Regular election to posts does not undermine the institutional
   links, pressures and powers a centralised "officialdom"
   will generate around itself, even a so-called "proletarian" one.
   Significantly, Lenin justified this defence of temporary state
   bureaucracy by the kind of straw man argument against anarchism "State
   and Revolution" is riddled with. "We are not utopians," asserted Lenin,
   "we do not indulge in 'dreams' of dispensing at once with all
   administration, with all subordination: these anarchist dreams . . .
   are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to
   postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No,
   we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with
   human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and
   'managers.'" [Op. Cit., p. 307] Yet anarchists do not wish to
   "dispense" with "all administration," rather we wish to replace
   government by administration, hierarchical positions ("subordination")
   with co-operative organisation. Equally, we see the revolution as a
   process in which "human nature" is changed by the struggle itself so
   that working class people become capable of organising itself and
   society without bosses, bureaucrats and politicians. If Lenin says that
   socialism "cannot dispense" with the hierarchical structures required
   by class society why should we expect the same kinds of structures and
   social relationships to have different ends just because "red" managers
   are in power?

   Thus Lenin's work is deeply ambiguous. He is confusing popular
   self-management with a state structure. Anarchists argue that states,
   by their very nature, are based on concentrated, centralised, alienated
   power in the hands of a few. Thus Lenin's "workers' state" is just the
   same as any other state, namely rule by a few over the many. This is
   confirmed when Lenin argues that "[u]nder socialism, all will take part
   in the work of government in turn and will soon become accustomed to no
   one governing." In fact, once the "overwhelming majority" have "learned
   to administer the state themselves, have taken this business into their
   own hands . . . the need for government begins to disappear. The more
   complete democracy becomes, the nearer the moment approaches when it
   becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the 'state' of the armed
   workers -- which is 'no longer a state in the proper sense of the word'
   -- becomes, the more rapidly does the state begin to wither away."
   Moreover, "[u]ntil the 'higher' phase of communism arrives, the
   Socialists demand the strictest control, by society and by the state,
   of the amount of labour and of consumption." [Op. Cit., p. 361, p. 349
   and p. 345]

   Clearly, the "proletarian" state is not based on direct, mass,
   participation by the population but, in fact, on giving power to a few
   representatives. It is not identical with "society," i.e. the armed,
   self-organised people. Rather than look to the popular assemblies of
   the French revolution, Lenin, like the bourgeoisie, looked to
   representative structures -- structures designed to combat working
   class power and influence. (at one point Lenin states that "for a
   certain time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state
   remains under communism, without the bourgeoisie!" This was because
   "bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of articles of
   consumption inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois
   state, for right is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing
   the observance of the standards of right." [Op. Cit., p. 346]).

   Can we expect the same types of organs and social relationships to
   produce different results simply because Lenin is at the head of the
   state? Of course not.

   As the Marxist theory of the state confused party/vanguard power with
   working class power, we should not be surprised that Lenin's "State and
   Revolution" failed to discuss the practicalities of this essential
   question in anything but a passing and ambiguous manner. For example,
   Lenin notes that "[b]y educating the workers' party, Marxism educates
   the vanguard of the proletariat which is capable of assuming power and
   of leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organising
   the new order." [Op. Cit., p. 288] It is not clear whether it is the
   vanguard or the proletariat as a whole which assumes power. Later, he
   states that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was "the organisation
   of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of
   crushing the oppressors." [Op. Cit., p. 337] Given that this fits in
   with subsequent Bolshevik practice, it seems clear that it is the
   vanguard which assumes power rather than the whole class. The negative
   effects of this are discussed in [12]section 8.

   However, the assumption of power by the party highlights the key
   problem with the Marxist theory of the state and how it could be used
   to justify the destruction of popular power. It does not matter in the
   Marxist schema whether the class or the party is in power, it does not
   impact on whether the working class is the "ruling class" or not. As
   Lenin put it. "democracy is not identical with the subordination of the
   minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognises the
   subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e. an organisation for
   the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one
   section of the population against another." [Op. Cit., p. 332] Thus the
   majority need not actually "rule" (i.e. make the fundamental decisions)
   for a regime to be considered a "democracy" or an instrument of class
   rule. That power can be delegated to a party leadership (even
   dictatorship) without harming the "class nature" of the state. This
   results of such a theory can be seen from Bolshevik arguments in favour
   of party dictatorship during the civil war period (and beyond).

   The problem with the centralised, representative structures Lenin
   favours for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is that they are
   rooted in the inequality of power. They constitute in fact, if not
   initially in theory, a power above society. As Lenin put it, "the
   essence of bureaucracy" is "privileged persons divorced from the masses
   and superior to the masses." [Op. Cit., p. 360] In the words of
   Malatesta, a "government, that is a group of people entrusted with
   making laws and empowered to use the collective power to oblige each
   individual to obey them, is already a privileged class and cut off from
   the people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively
   seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to impose its
   own policies and to give priority to its special interests. Having been
   put in a privileged position, the government is already at odds with
   the people whose strength it disposes of." [Anarchy, p. 34] As we
   discussed in appendix [13]"What happened during the Russian
   Revolution?", Lenin's regime provides more than enough evidence to
   support such an analysis.

   This is the fatal flaw in the Marxist theory of the state. As Bakunin
   put it, "the theory of the state" is "based on this fiction of
   pseudo-popular representation -- which in actual fact means the
   government of the masses by an insignificant handful of privileged
   individuals, elected (or even not elected) by mobs of people rounded up
   for voting and never knowing what or whom they are voting for -- on
   this imaginary and abstract expression of the imaginary thought and
   will of the all the people, of which the real, living people do not
   have the faintest idea." Thus the state represents "government of the
   majority by a minority in the name of the presumed stupidity of the one
   and the presumed intelligence of the other." [Op. Cit., pp. 136-7]

   By confusing popular participation with a state, by ignoring the real
   inequalities of power in any state structure, Marxism allowed Lenin and
   the Bolsheviks to usurp state power, implement party dictatorship and
   continue to talk about the working class being in power. Because of
   Marxism's metaphysical definition of the state (see [14]section H.3.7),
   actual working class people's power over their lives is downplayed, if
   not ignored, in favour party power.

   As parties represent classes in this schema, if the party is in power
   then, by definition, so is the class. This raises the possibility of
   Lenin asserting the "working class" held power even when his party was
   exercising a dictatorship over the working class and violently
   repressing any protests by it. As one socialist historian puts it,
   "while it is true that Lenin recognised the different functions and
   democratic raison d'etre for both the soviets and his party, in the
   last analysis it was the party that was more important than the
   soviets. In other words, the party was the final repository of
   working-class sovereignty. Thus, Lenin did not seem to have been
   reflected on or have been particularly perturbed by the decline of the
   soviets after 1918." [Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism, p. 212] This can
   be seen from how the Marxist theory of the state was changed after the
   Bolsheviks seized power to bring into line with its new role as the
   means by which the vanguard ruled society (see [15]section H.3.8).

   This confusion between two radically different concepts and their
   submersion into the term "state" had its negative impact from the
   start. Firstly, the Bolsheviks constantly equated rule by the Bolshevik
   party (in practice, its central committee) with the working class as a
   whole. Rather than rule by all the masses, the Bolsheviks substituted
   rule by a handful of leaders. Thus we find Lenin talking about "the
   power of the Bolsheviks -- that is, the power of the proletariat" as if
   these things were the same. Thus it was a case of "the Bolsheviks"
   having "to take the whole governmental power into their own hands," of
   "the complete assumption of power by the Bolsheviks alone," rather than
   the masses. Indeed, Russia had been "ruled by 130,000 landowners" and
   "yet they tell us that Russia will not be able to be governed by the
   240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party -- governing in the interests of
   the poor and against the rich." [Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?,
   p. 102, p. 7 and pp. 61-2]

   However, governing in the "interests" of the poor is not the same as
   the poor governing themselves. Thus we have the first key substitution
   that leads to authoritarian rule, namely the substitution of the power
   of the masses by the power of a few members who make up the government.
   Such a small body will require a centralised state system and,
   consequently, we have the creation of a hierarchical body around the
   new government which, as we discuss in [16]section 7, will become the
   real master in society.

   The preconditions for a new form of class society have been created
   and, moreover, they are rooted in the basic ideas of Marxism. Society
   has been split into two bodies, the masses and those who claim to rule
   in their name. Given this basic inequality in power we would, according
   to anarchist theory, expect the interests of the masses and the rulers
   to separate and come into conflict. While the Bolsheviks had the
   support of the working class (as they did in the first few months of
   their rule), this does not equal mass participation in running society.
   Quite the reverse. So while Lenin raised the vision of mass
   participation in the "final" stage of communism, he unfortunately
   blocked the means to get there.

   Simply put, a self-managed society can only be created by self-managed
   means. To think we can have a "public power" separate from the masses
   which will, slowly, dissolve itself into it is the height of naivety.
   Unsurprisingly, once in power the Bolsheviks held onto power by all
   means available, including gerrymandering and disbanding soviets,
   suppressing peaceful opposition parties and violently repressing the
   very workers it claimed ruled in "soviet" Russia (see [17]section 6 of
   the appendix [18]"What happened during the Russian Revolution?").
   Significantly, this conflict developed before the start of the civil
   war (see [19]section 3 of the appendix on [20]"What caused the
   degeneration of the Russian Revolution?" for details). So when popular
   support was lost, the basic contradictions in the Bolshevik position
   and theory became clear. Rather than be a "soviet" power, the Bolshevik
   regime was simply rule over the workers in their name, nothing more.
   And equally unsurprising, the Leninists revised their theory of the
   state to take into account the realities of state power and the need to
   justify minority power over the masses (see [21]section H.3.8).

   Needless to say, even electoral support for the Bolsheviks should not
   and cannot be equated to working class management of society. Echoing
   Marx and Engels at their most reductionist (see [22]section H.3.9),
   Lenin stressed that the state was "an organ or machine for the
   subjection of one class by another . . . when the State has become
   proletarian, when it has become a machine for the domination of the
   proletariat over the bourgeoisie, then we shall fully and unreservedly
   for a strong government and centralism." [Op. Cit., p. 75] The notions
   that the state could have interests of its own, that it is not simply
   an instrument of class rule but rather minority class rule are nowhere
   to be found. The implications of this simplistic analysis had severe
   ramifications for the Russian Revolution and Trotskyist explanations of
   both Stalinism and its rise.

   Which brings us to the second issue. It is clear that by considering
   the state simply as an instrument of class rule Lenin could downplay,
   even ignore, such important questions of how the working class can
   "rule" society, how it can be a "ruling" class. Blinded by the notion
   that a state could not be anything but an instrument of class rule, the
   Bolsheviks simply were able to justify any limitation of working class
   democracy and freedom and argue that it had no impact on whether the
   Bolshevik regime was really a "dictatorship of the proletariat"
   or not. This can be seen from Lenin's polemic with German
   Social-Democrat Karl Kautsky, where he glibly stated that "[t]he form
   of government, has absolutely nothing to so with it." [Collected Works,
   vol. 28, p. 238]

   Yet the idea that there is a difference between who rules in a
   revolutionary situation and how they rule is a key one, and one raised
   by the anarchists against Marxism. After all, if the working class is
   politically expropriated how can you maintain that a regime is remotely
   "proletarian"? Ultimately, the working class can only "rule" society
   through its collective participation in decision making (social,
   economic and "political"). If working class people are not managing
   their own affairs, if they have delegated that power to a few party
   leaders then they are not a ruling class and could never be. While the
   bourgeoisie can, and has, ruled economically under an actual
   dictatorship, the same cannot be said to be the case with the working
   class. Every class society is marked by a clear division between order
   takers and order givers. To think that such a division can be
   implemented in a socialist revolution and for it to remain socialist is
   pure naivety. As the Bolshevik revolution showed, representative
   government is the first step in the political expropriation of the
   working class from control over their fate.

   This can best be seen by Trotsky's confused analyses of Stalinism. He
   simply could not understand the nature of Stalinism with the simplistic
   analytical tools he inherited from mainstream Marxism and Bolshevism.
   Thus we find him arguing in 1933 that:

     "The dictatorship of a class does not mean by a long shot that its
     entire mass always participates in the management of the state. This
     we have seen, first of all, in the case of the propertied classes.
     The nobility ruled through the monarchy before which the noble stood
     on his knees. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie took on
     comparatively developed democratic forms only under the conditions
     of capitalist upswing when the ruling class had nothing to fear.
     Before our own eyes, democracy has been supplanted in Germany by
     Hitler's autocracy, with all the traditional bourgeois parties
     smashed to smithereens. Today, the German bourgeoisie does not rule
     directly; politically it is placed under complete subjection to
     Hitler and his bands. Nevertheless, the dictatorship of the
     bourgeoisie remains inviolate in Germany, because all the conditions
     of its social hegemony have been preserved and strengthened. By
     expropriating the bourgeoisie politically, Hitler saved it, even if
     temporarily, from economic expropriation. The fact that the
     bourgeoisie was compelled to resort to the fascist regime testifies
     to the fact that its hegemony was endangered but not at all that it
     had fallen." [Trotsky, The Class Nature Of The Soviet State]

   Yet Trotsky is confusing the matter. He is comparing the actions of
   class society with those a socialist revolution. While a minority class
   need not "participate" en mass the question arises does this apply to
   the transition from class society to a classless one? Can the working
   class really can be "expropriated" politically and still remain "the
   ruling class"? Moreover, Trotsky fails to note that the working class
   was economically and politically expropriated under Stalinism as well.
   This is unsurprising, as both forms of expropriation had occurred when
   he and Lenin held the reins of state power. Yet Trotsky's confused
   ramblings do serve a purpose in showing how the Marxist theory of the
   state can be used to rationalise the replacement of popular power by
   party power. With such ideological baggage, can it be a surprise that
   the Bolshevik replacement of workers' power by party power could be a
   revolutionary goal? Ironically, the Marxist theory of the state as an
   instrument of class rule helped ensure that the Russian working class
   did not become the ruling class post-October. Rather, it ensured that
   the Bolshevik party did.

   To conclude, by its redunctionist logic, the Marxist theory of the
   state ensured that the substitution of popular power by party power
   could go ahead and, moreover, be justified ideologically. The first
   steps towards party dictatorship can be found in such apparently
   "libertarian" works as Lenin's "State and Revolution" with its emphasis
   on "representation" and "centralisation." The net effect of this was to
   centralise power into fewer and fewer hands, replacing the essential
   constructive working class participation and self-activity required by
   a social revolution with top-down rule by a few party leaders. Such
   rule could not avoid becoming bureaucratised and coming into conflict
   with the real aspirations and interests of those it claimed to
   represent. In such circumstances, in a conflict between the "workers'
   state" and the actual workers the Marxist theory of the state, combined
   with the assumptions of vanguardism, made the shift to party
   dictatorship inevitable. As we discussed in [23]section 3 of the
   appendix on [24]"What caused the degeneration of the Russian
   Revolution?", authoritarian tendencies had surfaced before the civil
   war began.

   The strange paradox of Leninism, namely that the theoretical
   dictatorship of the proletariat was, in practice, a dictatorship over
   the proletariat comes as no surprise. In spite of Lenin announcing "all
   power to the soviets" he remained committed to a disciplined party
   wielding centralised power. This regime soon expropriated the soviets
   while calling the subsequent regime "Soviet." Rather that create the
   authoritarian tendencies of the Bolshevik state the "objective factors"
   facing Lenin's regime simply increased their impact. The preconditions
   for the minority rule which the civil war intensified to extreme levels
   already existed within Marxist theory. Consequently, a Leninist
   revolution which avoided the (inevitable) problems facing a revolution
   would still create some kind of class society simply because it
   reproduces minority rule by creating a "workers' state" as its first
   step. Sadly, Marxist theory confuses popular self-government with a
   state so ensuring the substitution of rule by a few party leaders for
   the popular participation required to ensure a successful revolution.

3 How did Engels' essay "On Authority" affect the revolution?

   We have discussed Engels' infamous diatribe against anarchism already
   (see [25]section H.4 and subsequent sections). Here we discuss how its
   caricature of anarchism helped disarm the Bolsheviks theoretically to
   the dangers of their own actions, so helping to undermine the socialist
   potential of the Russian revolution. While the Marxist theory of the
   state, with its ahistoric and ambiguous use of the word "state"
   undermined popular autonomy and power in favour of party power, Engels'
   essay "On Authority" helped undermine popular self-management.

   Simply put, Engels essay contained the germs from which Lenin and
   Trotsky's support for one-man management flowed. He provided the
   Marxist orthodoxy required to undermine real working class power by
   confusing all forms of organisation with "authority" and equating the
   necessity of self-discipline with "subordination" to one will. Engels'
   infamous essay helped Lenin to destroy self-management in the workplace
   and replace it with appointed "one-man management" armed with
   "dictatorial powers."

   For Lenin and Trotsky, familiar with Engels' "On Authority," it was a
   truism that any form of organisation was based on "authoritarianism"
   and, consequently, it did not really matter how that "authority" was
   constituted. Thus Marxism's agnostic attitude to the patterns of
   domination and subordination within society was used to justify one-man
   management and party dictatorship. Indeed, "Soviet socialist democracy
   and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory
   . . . the will of a class may sometimes be carried by a dictator, who
   sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary." [Lenin,
   Collected Works, vol. 30, p. 476]

   Like Engels, Lenin defended the principle of authority. The
   dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat found its apology in
   this principle, thoroughly grounded in the practice of bureaucracy and
   modern factory production. Authority, hierarchy, and the need for
   submission and domination is inevitable given the current mode of
   production, they argued. And no foreseeable change in social relations
   could ever overcome this blunt necessity. As such, it was
   (fundamentally) irrelevant how a workplace is organised as, no matter
   what, it would be "authoritarian." Thus "one-man management" would be,
   basically, the same as worker's self-management via an elected factory
   committee.

   For Engels, any form of joint activity required as its "first
   condition" a "dominant will that settles all subordinate questions,
   whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee
   charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of
   persons interested. In either case there is very pronounced authority."
   Thus the "necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that."
   Collective life, he stressed, required "a certain authority, no matter
   how delegated" and "a certain subordination, are things which,
   independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us." [The
   Marx-Engels Reader, p. 732]

   Lenin was aware of these arguments, even quoting from this essay in his
   State and Revolution. Thus he was aware that for Engels, collective
   decisions meant "the will of the single individual will always have to
   subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an
   authoritarian way." Thus there was no difference if "they are settled
   by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour
   or, if possible, by a majority vote." The more advanced the technology,
   the greater the "despotism": "The automatic machinery of a big factory
   is much more despotic than the small capitalist who employ workers ever
   have been." [Op. Cit., p. 731] Thus Engels had used the modern factory
   system of mass production as a direct analogy to argue against the
   anarchist call for workers' councils and self-management in production,
   for workers' autonomy and participation. Like Engels, Lenin stressed
   the necessity of central authority in industry.

   It can be argued that it was this moment that ensured the creation of
   state capitalism under the Bolsheviks. This is the moment in Marxist
   theory when the turn from economics to technics, from proletarian
   control to technocracy, from workers' self-management to appointed
   state management was ensured. Henceforth the end of any critique of
   alienation in mainstream Marxism was assured. Submission to technique
   under hierarchical authority effectively prevents active participation
   in the social production of values. And there was no alternative.

   As noted in [26]section 8 of the appendix [27]"What happened during the
   Russian Revolution?"). and [28]section H.3.14, during 1917 Lenin did
   not favour workers' self-management of production. He raised the idea
   of "workers' control" after the workers spontaneously raised the idea
   and practice themselves during the revolution. Moreover, he interpreted
   that slogan in his own way, placing it within a statist context and
   within institutions inherited from capitalism (see [29]section H.3.12).
   Once in power, it was (unsurprisingly) his vision of socialism and
   workers' control that was implemented, not the workers' factory
   committees. The core of that vision he repeatedly stressed had been
   raised before the October revolution.

   This vision can be best seen in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet
   Government, written by Lenin and published on the 25th of April 1918.
   This occurred before the start of the civil war and, indeed, he starts
   by arguing that "[t]hanks to the peace which has been achieved" the
   Bolsheviks had "gained an opportunity to concentrate its efforts for a
   while on the most important and most difficult aspect of the socialist
   revolution, namely the task of organisation." The Bolsheviks, who had
   "managed to complete the conquest of power," now faced "the principal
   task of convincing people" and doing "practical organisational work."
   Only when this was done "will it be possible to say that Russia has
   become not only a Soviet, but also a socialist, republic." [The
   Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, p. 2 and p. 8]

   Sadly, this "organisation" was riddled with authoritarianism and was
   fundamentally top-down in nature. His "socialist" vision was simply
   state capitalism (see [30]section 10 of the appendix [31]"What happened
   during the Russian Revolution?"). However, what interests us here is
   that his arguments to justify the "socialist" policies he presented are
   similar to those put forward by Engels in "On Authority." As such, we
   can only reach the following conclusions. Firstly, that the "state
   capitalist" vision of socialism imposed upon Russia by the Bolsheviks
   was what they had always intended to introduce. It was their limited
   support for workers' control in 1917 that was atypical and not part of
   their tradition, not their policies once in power (as modern day
   Leninists assert). Secondly, that this vision had its roots in
   classical Marxism, specifically Engels' "On Authority" and the
   identification of socialism with nationalised property (see [32]section
   H.3.13 for more on this).

   That Engels diatribe had a negative impact on the development of the
   Russian revolution can easily be seen from Lenin's arguments. For
   example, Lenin argues that the "tightening of discipline" and
   "harmonious organisation" calls "for coercion -- coercion precisely in
   the form of dictatorship." He did not object to granting "individual
   executives dictatorial power (or 'unlimited' powers)" and did not think
   "the appointment of individual, dictators with unlimited power" was
   incompatible with "the fundamental principles of the Soviet
   government." After all, "the history of revolutionary movements" had
   "shown" that "the dictatorship of individuals was very often the
   expression, the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of
   revolutionary classes." He notes that "[u]ndoubtably, the dictatorship
   of individuals was compatible with bourgeois democracy." [Op. Cit., p.
   28 and p. 32] It would be churlish to note that previous revolutionary
   movements had not been socialist in nature and did not aim to abolish
   classes. In such cases, the government appointing people with
   dictatorial powers would not have harmed the nature of the revolution,
   which was transferring power from one minority class to another.

   Lenin mocked the "exceedingly poor arguments" of those who objected,
   saying that they "demand of us a higher democracy than bourgeois
   democracy and say: personal dictatorship is absolutely incompatible
   with your, Bolshevik (i.e. not bourgeois, but socialist) Soviet
   democracy." As the Bolsheviks were "not anarchists," he admitted the
   need "coercion" in the "transition from capitalism to socialism," its
   form being determined "by the degree of development of the given
   revolutionary class, and also by special circumstances." In general, he
   stressed, there was "absolutely no contradiction in principle between
   Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial
   powers by individuals." [Op. Cit., pp. 32-3 and p. 33] Which is, of
   course, sophistry as dictatorship by a few people in some aspects of
   live will erode democracy in others. For example, being subject to the
   economic power of the capitalist during work harms the individual and
   reduces their ability to participate in other aspects of social life.
   Why should being subject to "red" bosses be any different?

   In particular, Lenin argued that "individual dictatorial power" was
   required because "large-scale machine industry" (which is the
   "foundation of socialism") calls for "absolute and strict unity of
   will, which directs the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens
   of thousands of people. . . But how can strict unity of will be
   ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one." He
   reiterated that the "unquestioning subordination to a single will is
   absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the
   pattern of large-scale machine industry." The people must
   "unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labour." And so
   it was a case (for the workers, at least) of "[o]bedience, and
   unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions
   of Soviet directors, of the dictators elected or appointed by Soviet
   institutions, vested with dictatorial powers." [Op. Cit., p. 33, p. 34
   and p. 44]

   The parallels with Engels' "On Authority" could not be clearer, as are
   the fallacies of Lenin's assertions (see, for example, [33]section
   H.4.4). Lenin, like Engels, uses the example of modern industry to
   bolster his arguments. Yet the net effect of Lenin's argument was to
   eliminate working class economic power at the point of production.
   Instead of socialist social relationships, Lenin imposed capitalist
   ones. Indeed, no capitalist would disagree with Lenin's workplace
   regime -- they try to create such a regime by breaking unions and
   introducing technologies and techniques which allow them to control the
   workers. Unsurprisingly, Lenin also urged the introduction of two such
   techniques, namely "piece-work" and "applying much of what is
   scientific and progressive in the Taylor system." [Op. Cit., pp. 23-4]
   As Trotskyist Tony Cliff reminds us, "the employers have at their
   disposal a number of effective methods of disrupting th[e] unity [of
   workers as a class]. Once of the most important of these is the
   fostering of competition between workers by means of piece-work
   systems." He notes that these were used by the Nazis and the Stalinists
   "for the same purpose." [State Capitalism in Russia, pp. 18-9]
   Obviously piece-work is different when Lenin introduces it! Similarly,
   when Trotsky notes that "[b]lind obedience is not a thing to be proud
   of in a revolutionary," it is somewhat different when Lenin calls upon
   workers to do so (or, for that matter, Trotsky himself when in power --
   see [34]section 6 for Trotsky's radically different perspective on
   blind obedience of the worker to "his" state in 1920!). [Terrorism and
   Communism, p. xlvii]

   The economic dominance of the bourgeoisie ensures the political
   dispossession of the working class. Why expect the introduction of
   capitalist social relations in production to have different outcomes
   just because Lenin was the head of the government? In the words of
   libertarian socialist Maurice Brinton:

     "We hold that the 'relations of production' -- the relations which
     individuals or groups enter into with one another in the process of
     producing wealth - are the essential foundations of any society. A
     certain pattern of relations of production is the common denominator
     of all class societies. This pattern is one in which the producer
     does not dominate the means of production but on the contrary both
     is 'separated from them' and from the products of his own labour. In
     all class societies the producer is in a position of subordination
     to those who manage the productive process. Workers' management of
     production -- implying as it does the total domination of the
     producer over the productive process -- is not for us a marginal
     matter. It is the core of our politics. It is the only means whereby
     authoritarian (order-giving, order-taking) relations in production
     can be transcended and a free, communist or anarchist, society
     introduced.

     "We also hold that the means of production may change hands (passing
     for instance from private hands into those of a bureaucracy,
     collectively owning them) with out this revolutionising the
     relations of production. Under such circumstances -- and whatever
     the formal status of property -- the society is still a class
     society for production is still managed by an agency other than the
     producers themselves. Property relations, in other words, do not
     necessarily reflect the: relations of production. They may serve to
     mask them -- and in fact they often have."
     [The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. vii-viii]

   The net effect of Lenin's arguments, as anarchist Peter Arshinov noted
   a few years later, was that the "fundamental fact" of the Bolshevik
   revolution was "that the workers and the peasant labourers remained
   within the earlier situation of 'working classes' -- producers managed
   by authority from above." He stressed that Bolshevik political and
   economic ideas may have "remov[ed] the workers from the hands of
   individual capitalists" but they "delivered them to the yet more
   rapacious hands of a single ever-present capitalist boss, the State.
   The relations between the workers and this new boss are the same as
   earlier relations between labour and capital . . . Wage labour has
   remained what it was before, expect that it has taken on the character
   of an obligation to the State. . . . It is clear that in all this we
   are dealing with a simple substitution of State capitalism for private
   capitalism." [The History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 35 and p. 71]
   Moreover, Lenin's position failed to understand that unless workers
   have power at the point of production, they will soon loose it in
   society as a whole. Which, of course, they soon did in Bolshevik
   Russia, even in the limited form of electing a "revolutionary"
   government.

   So while the causes of the failure of the Russian Revolution were many
   fold, the obvious influence of Engels' "On Authority" on the fate of
   the workers' control movement should be noted. After all, Engels'
   argument confuses the issues that Bakunin and other anarchists were
   trying to raise (namely on the nature of the organisations we create
   and our relationships with others). If, as Engels' argues, all
   organisation is "authoritarian," then does this mean that there no real
   difference between organisational structures? Is a dictatorship just
   the same as a self-managed group, as they are both organisations and so
   both "authoritarian"? If so, surely that means the kinds of
   organisation we create are irrelevant and what really matters is state
   ownership? Such logic can only lead to the perspective that working
   class self-management of production is irrelevant to socialism and,
   unfortunately, the experience of the Russian Revolution tends to
   suggest that for mainstream Marxism this is the case. The Bolsheviks
   imposed distinctly authoritarian social structures while arguing that
   they were creating socialism.

   Like Engels, the Bolsheviks defended the principle of authority. The
   dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat in the workplace (and,
   indeed, elsewhere) ultimately found its apology in this principle,
   thoroughly grounded in the practice of bureaucracy and modern factory
   production. Authority, hierarchy, and the need for submission and
   domination is inevitable, given the current mode of production, they
   argued. And, as Engels had stressed, no foreseeable change in social
   relations could ever overcome this blunt necessity. As such, it was
   (fundamentally) irrelevant for the leading Bolsheviks how a workplace
   is organised as, no matter what, it would be "authoritarian." Thus
   "one-man management" would be, basically, the same as worker's
   self-management via an elected factory committee. As Trotsky made clear
   in 1920, for the Bolsheviks the "dictatorship of the proletariat is
   expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of
   production, in the supremacy over the whole Soviet mechanism of the
   collective will of the workers [i.e. the party, which Trotsky
   cheerfully admits is exercising a party dictatorship], and not at all
   in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered."
   Thus, it "would be a most crying error to confuse the question as to
   the supremacy of the proletariat with the question of boards of workers
   at the head of the factories." [Terrorism and Communism, p. 162]

   By equating "organisation" with "authority" (i.e. hierarchy) and
   dismissing the importance of revolutionising the social relationships
   people create between themselves, Engels opened the way for the
   Bolsheviks' advocacy of "one-man management." His essay is at the root
   of mainstream Marxism's agnostic attitude to the patterns of domination
   and subordination within society and was used to justify one-man
   management. After all, if Engels was right, then it did not matter how
   the workplace was organised. It would, inherently, be "authoritarian"
   and so what mattered, therefore, was who owned property, not how the
   workplace was run. Perhaps, then, "On Authority" was a self-fulfilling
   prophecy -- by seeing any form of organisation and any form of advanced
   technology as needing hierarchy, discipline and obedience, as being
   "authoritarian,"
   it ensured that mainstream Marxism became blinded to the key question
   of how society was organised. After all, if "despotism" was a fact of
   life within industry regardless of how the wider society was organised,
   then it does not matter if "one-man management" replaces workers'
   self-management. Little wonder then that the continued alienation of
   the worker was widespread long before Stalin took power and, more
   importantly, before the civil war started.

   As such, the dubious inheritance of classical Marxism had started to
   push the Bolshevik revolution down an authoritarian path and create
   economic structures and social relationships which were in no way
   socialist and, moreover, laid the foundations for Stalinism. Even if
   the civil war had not occurred, capitalist social relationships would
   have been dominant within "socialist" Russia -- with the only
   difference being that rather than private capitalism it would have been
   state capitalism. As Lenin admitted, incidentally. It is doubtful that
   this state capitalism would have been made to serve "the whole people"
   as Lenin naively believed.

   In another way Engels identification of organisation with authority
   affected the outcome of the revolution. As any form of organisation
   involved, for Engels, the domination of individuals and, as such,
   "authoritarian" then the nature of the socialist state was as
   irrelevant as the way workplaces were run. As both party dictatorship
   and soviet democracy meant that the individual was "dominated" by
   collective decisions, so both were "authoritarian." As such, the
   transformation of the soviet state into a party dictatorship did not
   fundamentally mean a change for the individuals subject to it. Little
   wonder that no leading Bolshevik called the end of soviet democracy and
   its replacement by party dictatorship as a "retreat" or even as
   something to be worried about (indeed, they all argued the opposite,
   namely that party dictatorship was essential and not an issue to be
   worried about).

   Perhaps this analogy by the SWP's Tony Cliff of the relationship
   between the party and the working class provides an insight:

     "In essence the dictatorship of the proletariat does not represent a
     combination of abstract, immutable elements like democracy and
     centralism, independent of time and space. The actual level of
     democracy, as well as centralism, depends on three basic factors: 1.
     the strength of the proletariat; 2. the material and cultural legacy
     left to it by the old regime; and 3. the strength of capitalist
     resistance. The level of democracy feasible must be indirect
     proportion to the first two factors, and in inverse proportion to
     the third. The captain of an ocean liner can allow football to be
     played on his vessel; on a tiny raft in a stormy sea the level of
     tolerance is far lower." [Lenin, vol. 3, p. 179]

   Ignoring the obvious points (such as comparing working class freedom
   and democracy to a game!), we can see shades of Engels in Cliff's
   words. Let us not forget that Engels argued that "a ship on the high
   seas" at a "time of danger" required "the necessity of authority, and
   of imperious authority at that." [Op. Cit., p. 732] Here Cliff is
   placing the party into the Captain's role and the workers as the crew.
   The Captain, in Engels argument, exercised "imperious authority." In
   Cliff's, the party decides the freedoms which working class people are
   allowed to have -- and so subjects them to its "imperious authority."

   Little wonder Bolshevism failed. By this simple analogy Cliff shows the
   authoritarian essence of Bolshevism and who really has "all power"
   under that system. Like the crew and passengers dominated by the will
   of the captain, the working class under Leninism will be dominated by
   the party. It does not bode well that Cliff thinks that democracy can
   be "feasible" in some circumstances, but not others and it is up to
   those in power (i.e. the party leaders) to determine when it was. In
   his rush to justify Bolshevik party dictatorship in terms of "objective
   conditions" he clearly forgot his earlier comments that the "liberation
   of the working class can only be achieved through the action of the
   working class. Hence one can have a revolution with more or less
   violence, with more or less suppression of civil rights of the
   bourgeoisie and its hangers-on [a general catch-all category which, if
   Bolshevik practice is anything to go by, can include rebel workers,
   indeed the whole working class!], with more or less political freedom,
   but one cannot gave a revolution, as the history of Russia conclusively
   demonstratives, without workers' democracy -- even if restricted and
   distorted. Socialist advance must be gauged by workers' freedom, by
   their power to shape their own destiny . . . Without workers' democracy
   the immediate means leads to a very different end, to an end that is
   prefigured in these same means." [Op. Cit., p. 110] Obviously if Lenin
   and Trotsky are the captains of the ship of state, such considerations
   are less important. When it is Lenin wielding "imperious authority"
   then workers' democracy can be forgotten and the regime remain a
   "workers' state"!

   By ignoring the key issue Bakunin and other anarchists drew attention
   to by attacking "authority" (and let us not forget that by that they
   meant hierarchical organisations in which power is concentrated at the
   top in a few hands -- see [35]section H.4), Engels opened up the way of
   seeing democratic decision as being less than important. This is not to
   suggest that Engels favoured dictatorship. Rather we are suggesting
   that by confusing two radically different forms of organisation as
   self-management and hierarchy he blunted latter Marxists to the
   importance of participation and collective decision making from below.
   After all, if all organisation is "authoritarian" then it matters
   little, in the end, how it is structured. Dictatorship, representative
   democracy and self-management were all equally "authoritarian" and so
   the issues raised by anarchism can safely be ignored (namely that
   electing bosses does not equate to freedom). Thus the Bolshevik
   willingness to equate their dictatorship with rule by the working class
   is not such a surprise after all.

   To conclude, rather than the anti-authoritarians not knowing "what they
   are talking about," "creating nothing but confusion," "betraying the
   movement of the proletariat" and "serv[ing] the reaction," it was
   Engels' essay that aided the Bolshevik counter-revolution and helped,
   in its own small way, to lay the foundations for Leninist tyranny and
   state capitalism. [Engels, Op. Cit., p. 733] Ultimately, Engels "On
   Authority" helped give Lenin the ideological premises by which to
   undermine workers' economic power during the revolution and recreate
   capitalist social relations and call it "socialism." His ill thought
   out diatribe had ramifications even he would never have guessed (but
   were obvious at the time to libertarians). His use of the modern
   factory system to argue against the anarchist call for workers'
   councils, federalism and workers' autonomy, for participation, for
   self-management, became the basis for re-imposing capitalist relations
   of production in revolutionary Russia.

4 How did the Bolshevik vision of "democracy" affect the revolution?

   As discussed in [36]section H.3.2, Marx and Engels had left their
   followers which a contradictory legacy as regards "socialism from
   below." On the one hand, their praise for the Paris Commune and its
   libertarian ideas pointed to a participatory democracy run from below.
   On the other, Marx's comments during the German Revolution in 1850 that
   the workers must "strive for . . . the most determined centralisation
   of power in the hands of the state authority" because "the path of
   revolutionary activity" can "proceed only from the centre"
   suggests a top-down approach. He stressed that centralisation of power
   was essential to overcome local autonomy, which would allow "every
   village, every town and every province" to put "a new obstacle in the
   path" the revolution due to "local and provincial obstinacy."
   [Marx-Engels Reader, p. 509]

   Building upon this contradictory legacy, Lenin unambiguously stressed
   the "from above" aspect of it (see [37]section H.3.3 for details). The
   only real exception to this perspective occurred in 1917, when Lenin
   was trying to win mass support for his party. However, even this
   support for democracy from below was always tempered by reminding the
   reader that the Bolsheviks stood for centralisation and strong
   government once they were in power (see [38]section 7).

   Once in power, the promises of 1917 were quickly forgotten.
   Unsurprisingly, modern day Leninists argue that this was due to the
   difficult circumstances facing the Bolsheviks at the time. They argue
   that the words of 1917 represent the true democratic vision of
   Bolshevism. Anarchists are not impressed. After all, for an idea to be
   useful it must be practical -- even in "exceptional circumstances." If
   the Bolshevik vision is not robust enough to handle the problems that
   have affected every revolution then we have to question the validity of
   that vision or the strength of commitment its supporters hold it.

   Given this, the question becomes which of these two aspects of Marxism
   was considered its "essence" by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Obviously, it
   is hard to isolate the real Bolshevik vision of democracy from the
   influence of "objective factors." However, we can get a taste by
   looking at how the Bolsheviks acted and argued during the first six
   months in power. During this period, the problems facing the revolution
   were hard but not as bad as those facing it after the Czech revolt at
   the end of May, 1918. Particularly after March, 1918, the Bolsheviks
   were in a position to start constructive work as in the middle of that
   month Lenin claimed that the "Soviet Government has triumphed in the
   Civil War." [quoted by Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, p. 53]

   So the question as to whether the Bolsheviks were forced into
   authoritarian and hierarchical methods by the practical necessities of
   the civil war or whether all this was inherent in Leninism all along,
   and the natural product of Leninist ideology, can be answered by
   looking at the record of the Bolsheviks prior to the civil war. From
   this we can ascertain the effect of the civil war. And the obvious
   conclusion is that the record of the initial months of Bolshevik rule
   point to a less than democratic approach which suggests that
   authoritarian policies were inherent in Leninism and, as such, pointed
   the revolution into a path were further authoritarian policies were not
   only easy to implement, but had to be as alternative options had been
   eliminated by previous policies. Moreover, Bolshevik ideology itself
   made such policies easy to accept and to justify.

   As discussed in [39]section 6 of the appendix [40]"What happened during
   the Russian Revolution?",it was during this period that the Bolsheviks
   started to gerrymander soviets and disband any they lost elections to.
   As we indicate in [41]section 9 of the appendix [42]"What happened
   during the Russian Revolution?", they undermined the factory
   committees, stopping them federating and basically handed the factories
   to the state bureaucracy. Lenin argued for and implemented one-man
   management, piecework, Taylorism and other things Stalinism is
   condemned for (see [43]section 3, for example). In the army, Trotsky
   disbanded the soldier committees and elected officers by decree.

   How Trotsky defended this policy of appointing officers is significant.
   It mirrors Lenin's argument in favour of appointed one-man management
   and, as such, reflects the basic Bolshevik vision of democracy. By
   looking at his argument we can see how the Bolshevik vision of
   democracy fatality undermined the Russian Revolution and its socialist
   content. The problems of the civil war simply deepened the abscess in
   democracy created by Lenin and Trotsky in the spring of 1918.

   Trotsky acknowledged that that "the soldier-workers and
   soldier-peasants" needed "to elect commanders for themselves" in the
   Tzarist army "not [as] military chiefs, but simply [as] representatives
   who could guard them against attacks of counter-revolutionary classes."
   However, in the new Red Army this was not needed as it was the
   "workers' and peasants' Soviets, i.e. the same classes which compose
   the army" which is building it. He blandly asserted that "[h]ere no
   internal struggle is possible." To illustrate his point he pointed to
   the trade unions. "The metal workers," he noted, "elect their
   committee, and the committee finds a secretary, a clerk, and a number
   of other persons who are necessary. Does it ever happen that the
   workers should say: 'Why are our clerks and treasurers appointed, and
   not elected?' No, no intelligent workers will say so." [Leon Trotsky
   Speaks, p. 112-3]

   Thus in less than six months, Lenin's call in "State and Revolution"
   that "[a]ll officials, without exception, [would be] elected and
   subject to recall at any time" was dismissed as the demand that "no
   intelligent workers" would raise! [Essential Works of Lenin, p. 302]
   But, then again, Trotsky was in the process of destroying another
   apparent "principle" of Leninism, namely (to quote, like Lenin, Marx)
   "the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of
   the armed people." [quoted by Lenin, Op. Cit., p. 300]

   Trotsky continues his argument. The Trade union committee, he asserts,
   would say "You yourselves have chosen the committee. If you don't like
   us, dismiss us, but once you have entrusted us with the direction of
   the union, then give us the possibility of choosing the clerk or the
   cashier, since we are better able to judge in the matter than you, and
   if our way of conducting business is bad, then throw us out and elect
   another committee." After this defence of elected dictatorship, he
   states that the "Soviet government is the same as the committee of a
   trade union. It is elected by the workers and peasants, and you can at
   the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, at any moment you like,
   dismiss that government and appoint another." Until that happens, he
   was happy to urge blind obedience by the sovereign people to their
   servants: "But once you have appointed it, you must give it the right
   to choose the technical specialists, the clerks, the secretaries in the
   broad sense of the word, and in military affairs, in particular." He
   tried to calm the nerves of those who could see the obvious problems
   with this argument by asking whether it was "possible for the Soviet
   government to appoint military specialists against the interests of the
   labouring and peasant masses?" [Op. Cit., p. 113]

   And the answer to that question is, of course, an empathic yes. Even
   looking at his own analogy, namely that of a trade union committee, it
   is obvious that an elected body can have interests separate from and in
   opposition to those who elected it. The history of trade unionism is
   full of examples of committees betraying the membership of the unions.
   And, of course, the history of the Soviet government under Lenin and
   Trotsky (never mind Stalin!) shows that just because it was once
   elected by a majority of the working people does not mean it will act
   in their best interests.

   Trotsky even went one better. "The army is now only in the process of
   formation," he noted. "How could the soldiers who have just entered the
   army choose the chiefs! Have they have any vote to go by? They have
   none. And therefore elections are impossible." [Op. Cit., p. 113] If
   only the Tsar had thought of that one! If he had, he would still be in
   power. And, needless to say, Trotsky did not apply that particular
   logic to himself. After all, he had no experience of holding
   governmental office or building an army (or even being in combat). Nor
   did any of the other Bolshevik leaders. By the logic of his argument,
   not only should the workers not been allowed to vote for a soviet
   government, he and his fellow Bolsheviks should not have assumed power
   in 1917. But, clearly, sauce for the goose is definitely not sauce for
   the gander.

   For all his talk that the masses could replace the Bolsheviks at the
   All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Trotsky failed to realise that these
   proposals (and other ones like it) ensured that this was unlikely to
   happen. Even assuming that the Bolsheviks had not gerrymandered and
   disbanded soviets, the fact is that the Bolshevik vision of "democracy"
   effectively hollowed out the grassroots participation required to make
   democracy at the top anything more than a fig-leaf for party power. He
   honestly seemed to believe that eliminating mass participation in other
   areas of society would have no effect on the levels of participation in
   soviet elections. Would people subjected to one-man management in the
   workplace and in the army really be truly free and able to vote for
   parties which had not appointed their bosses? Could workers who were
   disenfranchised economically and socially remain in political power
   (assuming you equate voting a handful of leaders into power with
   "political power")? And does being able to elect a representative every
   quarter to the All-Russian congress really mean that the working class
   was really in charge of society? Of course not.

   This vision of top-down "democracy" can, of course, be traced back to
   Marx's arguments of 1850 and Lenin's comments that the "organisational
   principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy" was "to proceed from the
   top downward." (see sections [44]H.3.2 and [45]H.3.3). By equating
   centralised, top-down decision making by an elected government with
   "democracy," the Bolsheviks had the ideological justification to
   eliminate the functional democracy associated with the factory
   committees and soldiers committees. In place of workers' and soldiers'
   direct democracy and self-management, the Bolsheviks appointed managers
   and officers and justified because a workers' party was in power. After
   all, had not the masses elected the Bolsheviks into power? This became
   the means by which real democracy was eliminated in area after area of
   Russian working class life. Needless to say, a state which eliminates
   functional democracy in the grassroots will not stay democratic in any
   meaningful sense for long. At best, it will be like a bourgeois
   republic with purely elections where people elect a party to
   misrepresent them every four or so years while real economic, political
   and social power rests in the hands of a few. At worse, it would be a
   dictatorship with "elections" whose results are known before hand.

   The Leninist vision of "democracy" is seen purely as a means of placing
   the party into power. Thus power in society shifts to the top, to the
   leaders of the centralised party in charge of the centralised state.
   The workers' become mere electors rather than actual controllers of the
   revolution and are expected to carry out the orders of the party
   without comment. In other words, a decidedly bourgeois vision of
   "democracy." Anarchists, in contrast, seek to dissolve power back into
   the hands of society and empower the individual by giving them a direct
   say in the revolution through their workplace and community assemblies
   and their councils and conferences.

   This vision was not a new development. Far from it. While, ironically
   enough, Lenin's and Trotsky's support for the appointment of
   officers/managers can be refuted by looking at Lenin's State and
   Revolution, the fact is that the undemocratic perspectives they are
   based on can be found in Lenin's What is to be Done?. This suggests
   that his 1917 arguments were the aberration and against the true
   essence of Leninism, not his and Trotsky's policies once they were in
   power (as Leninists like to argue).

   Forgetting that he had argued against "primitive democracy" in
   What is to Be Done?, Lenin had lambasted the opportunists and "present
   Kautskyists" for "repeat[ing] the vulgar bourgeois jeers at 'primitive'
   democracy." Now, in 1917, it was a case that "the transition from
   capitalism to socialism is impossible without some 'reversion' to
   'primitive' democracy (how else can the majority, even the whole
   population, proceed to discharge state functions?)" [Op. Cit., p. 302]
   Very true. As Leninism in power showed, the conscious elimination of
   "primitive democracy" in the army and workplace ensured that socialism
   was "impossible." And this elimination was not justified in terms of
   "difficult" circumstances but rather in terms of principle and the
   inability of working people to manage their own affairs directly.

   Particularly ironic, given Trotsky's trade union committee analogy was
   Lenin's comment that "Bernstein [the arch revisionist and reformist]
   combats 'primitive democracy' . . . To prove that 'primitive democracy'
   is worthless, Bernstein refers to the experience of the British trade
   unions, as interpreted by the Webbs. Seventy years of development . . .
   convinced the trade unions that primitive democracy was useless, and
   they substituted ordinary democracy, i.e. parliamentarism, combined
   with bureaucracy, for it." Lenin replied that because the trade unions
   operated "in absolute capitalist slavery" a "number of concessions to
   the prevailing evil, violence, falsehood, exclusion of the poor from
   the affairs of the 'higher' administration 'cannot be avoided.' Under
   socialism much of the 'primitive' democracy will inevitably be revived,
   since, for the first time in history of civilised society, the mass of
   the population will rise to independent participation, not only in
   voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of
   affairs" [Op. Cit., p. 361] Obviously things looked a bit different
   once he and his fellow Bolshevik leaders were in power. Then the
   exclusion of the poor from the affairs of the "higher" administration
   was seen as normal practice, as proven by the practice of the trade
   unions! And as we note in [46]section H.3.8, this "exclusion" was taken
   as a key lesson of the revolution and built into the Leninist theory of
   the state.

   This development was not unexpected. After all, as we noted in
   [47]section H.5.5, over a decade before Lenin had been less than
   enthralled by "primitive democracy" and more in agreement with
   Bernstein than he lets on in State and Revolution. In What is to Be
   Done?, he based his argument for centralised, top-down party
   organisation on the experiences of the labour movement in democratic
   capitalist regimes. He quotes the same book by the Webb's to defend his
   position. He notes that "in the first period of existence in their
   unions, the British workers thought it was an indispensable sign of
   democracy for all members to do all the work of managing the unions."
   This involved "all questions [being] decided by the votes of all the
   members" and all "official duties" being "fulfilled by all the members
   in turn." He dismisses "such a conception of democracy" as "absurd" and
   "historical experience" made them "understand the necessity for
   representative institutions" and "full-time professional officials."
   Ironically, Lenin records that in Russia the "'primitive' conception of
   democracy" existed in two groups, the "masses of the students and
   workers" and the "Economists of the Bernstein persuasion." [Op. Cit.,
   pp. 162-3]

   Thus Trotsky's autocratic and top-down vision of democracy has its
   roots within Leninism. Rather than being forced upon the Bolsheviks by
   difficult circumstances, the eroding of grassroots, functional
   ("primitive") democracy was at the core of Bolshevism. Lenin's
   arguments in 1917 were the exception, not his practice after he seized
   power.

   This fundamentally undemocratic perspective can be found today in
   modern Leninism. As well as defending the Bolshevik dictatorship during
   the civil war, modern Leninists support the continuation of party
   dictatorship after its end. In particular, they support the Bolshevik
   repression of the Kronstadt rebellion (see appendix [48]"What was the
   Kronstadt Rebellion?" for more details). As Trotsky put it in 1937, if
   the Kronstadt demand for soviet elections had been implemented then "to
   free the soviets from the leadership [sic!] of the Bolsheviks would
   have meant within a short time to demolish the soviets themselves . . .
   Social-Revolutionary-anarchist soviets would serve only as a bridge
   from the proletarian dictatorship [sic!] to capitalist restoration." He
   generalised this example, by pointing to the "experience of the Russian
   soviets during the period of Menshevik and SR domination and, even more
   clearly, the experience of the German and Austrian soviets under the
   domination of the Social Democrats." [Lenin and Trotsky, Kronstadt, p.
   90] Modern day Leninists repeat this argument, failing to note that
   they sound like leftist Henry Kissingers (Kissinger, let us not forget,
   ensured US aid for Pinochet's coup in Chile and argued that "I don't
   see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the
   irresponsibility of its own people").

   Today we have Leninists combining rhetoric about democratic socialism,
   with elections and recall, with a mentality which justifies the
   suppression of working class revolt because they are not prepared to
   stand by and watch a country go capitalist due to the irresponsibility
   of its own people. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, previously in 1937 Trotsky
   expressed his support for the "objective necessity" of the
   "revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party" and, two years
   later, that the "vanguard of the proletariat" must be "armed with the
   resources of the state in order to repel dangers, including those
   emanating from the backward layers of the proletariat itself." (see
   [49]section H.3.8). If only modern day Leninists were as honest!

   So the Bolshevik contempt for working class self-government still
   exists. While few, however, explicitly proclaim the logic of this
   position (namely party dictatorship) most defend the Bolsheviks
   implementing this conclusion in practice. Can we not conclude that,
   faced with the same problems the Bolsheviks faced, these modern day
   Leninists will implement the same policies? That they will go from
   party power to party dictatorship, simply because they know better than
   those who elected them on such matters? That answer seems all too
   obvious.

   As such, the Bolshevik preference for centralised state power and of
   representative forms of democracy involved the substitution of the
   party for the class and, consequently, will facilitate the dictatorship
   over the proletariat when faced with the inevitable problems facing any
   revolution. As Bakunin put it, a "people's administration, according to
   [the Marxists], must mean a people's administration by virtue of a
   small number of representatives chosen by the people . . . [I]t is a
   deception which would conceal the despotism of a governing minority,
   all the more dangerous because it appears as a sham expression of the
   people's will . . . [T]he vast majority, the great mass of people,
   would be governed by a privileged minority . . . [of] former workers,
   who would stop being workers the moment they became rulers or
   representatives, and would then come to regard the whole blue-collared
   world from governmental heights, and would not represent the people but
   themselves and their pretensions." So the Marxist state would be "the
   reign of the scientific mind, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant
   and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new
   hierarchy of real of bogus learning, and the world will be divided into
   a dominant, science-based minority and a vast, ignorant majority. And
   then let the ignorant masses beware!" [Michael Bakunin: Selected
   Writings, p. 268, pp. 268-9 and p. 266]

   In summary, Trotsky's deeply undemocratic justification for appointing
   officers, like Lenin's similar arguments for appointing managers,
   express the logic and reality of Bolshevism far better than statements
   made before the Bolsheviks seized power and never implemented. Sadly,
   modern Leninists concentrate on the promises of the election manifesto
   rather than the grim reality of Bolshevik power and its long standing
   top-down vision of "democracy." A vision which helped undermine the
   revolution and ensure its degeneration into a party dictatorship
   presiding over a state capitalist economy.

5 What was the effect of the Bolshevik vision of "socialism"?

   As we discussed in [50]section H.3.1, anarchists and most Marxists are
   divided not only by means but also by ends. Simply put, libertarians
   and Leninist do not have the same vision of socialism. Given this,
   anarchists are not surprised at the negative results of the Bolshevik
   revolution -- the use of anti-socialist means to attain anti-socialist
   ends would obviously have less than desirable results.

   The content of the Bolshevik vision of "socialism" is criticised by
   anarchists on two main counts. Firstly, it is a top-down, centralised
   vision of "socialism." This can only result in the destruction of
   working class economic power at the point of production in favour of
   centralised bureaucratic power. Secondly, for Bolshevism
   nationalisation, not workers' self-management, was the key issue. We
   will discuss the first issue here and the second in the following
   section.

   The Bolshevik vision of "socialism" was inherently centralised and
   top-down. This can be seen from the organisational schemas and
   arguments made by leading Bolsheviks before and immediately after the
   Revolution. For example, we discover Trotsky arguing in March 1918 that
   workplaces "will be subject to policies laid down by the local council
   of workmen's deputies" who, in turn, had "their range of discretion . .
   . limited in turn by regulations made for each class of industry by the
   boards or bureaux of the central government." He dismissed Kropotkin's
   communalist ideas by saying local autonomy was not "suited to the state
   of things in modern industrial society" and "would result in endless
   frictions and difficulties." As the "coal from the Donets basin goes
   all over Russia, and is indispensable in all sorts of industries" you
   could not allow "the organised people of that district [to] do what
   they pleased with the coal mines" as they "could hold up all the rest
   of Russia." [contained in Al Richardson (ed.), In Defence of the
   Russian Revolution, p. 186]

   Lenin repeated this centralised vision in June of that year, arguing
   that "Communism requires and presupposes the greatest possible
   centralisation of large-scale production throughout the country. The
   all-Russian centre, therefore, should definitely be given the right of
   direct control over all the enterprises of the given branch of
   industry. The regional centres define their functions depending on
   local conditions of life, etc., in accordance with the general
   production directions and decisions of the centre." He continued by
   explicitly arguing that "[t]o deprive the all-Russia centre of the
   right to direct control over all the enterprises of the given industry
   . . . would be regional anarcho-syndicalism, and not communism." [Marx,
   Engels and Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 292]

   Thus the Bolshevik economic ideal was centralised and top-down. This is
   not unsurprising, as Lenin had promised precisely this when the
   Bolsheviks got into power. As in the Bolshevik party itself, the lower
   organs were controlled by the higher ones (and as we will discuss,
   these higher ones were not directly elected by the lower ones). The
   problems with this vision are many fold.

   Firstly, to impose an "ideal" solution would destroy a revolution --
   the actions and decisions (including what others may consider mistakes)
   of a free people are infinitely more productive and useful than the
   decisions and decrees of the best central committee. Moreover, a
   centralised system by necessity is an imposed system (as it excludes by
   its very nature the participation of the mass of the people in
   determining their own fate). Thus real socialisation must proceed from
   below, reflecting the real development and desires of those involved.
   Centralisation can only result in replacing socialisation with
   nationalisation and the elimination of workers' self-management with
   hierarchical management. Workers' again would be reduced to the level
   of order-takers, with control over their workplaces resting not in
   their hands but in those of the state.

   Secondly, Trotsky seems to think that workers at the base of society
   would be so unchanged by a revolution that they would hold their fellow
   workers ransom. And, moreover, that other workers would let them. That,
   to say the least, seems a strange perspective. But not as strange as
   thinking that giving extensive powers to a central body will not
   produce equally selfish behaviour (but on a wider and more dangerous
   scale). The basic fallacy of Trotsky's argument is that the centre will
   not start to view the whole economy as its property (and being
   centralised, such a body would be difficult to effectively control).
   Indeed, Stalin's power was derived from the state bureaucracy which ran
   the economy in its own interests. Not that did not suddenly arise with
   Stalin. It was a feature of the Soviet system from the start. Samuel
   Farber, for example, notes that, "in practice, [the]
   hypercentralisation [pursued by the Bolsheviks from early 1918 onwards]
   turned into infighting and scrambles for control among competing
   bureaucracies" and he points to the "not untypical example of a small
   condensed milk plant with few than 15 workers that became the object of
   a drawn-out competition among six organisations including the Supreme
   Council of National Economy, the Council of People's Commissars of the
   Northern Region, the Vologda Council of People's Commissars, and the
   Petrograd Food Commissariat." [Before Stalinism, p. 73]

   In other words, centralised bodies are not immune to viewing resources
   as their own property and doing as they please with it. Compared to an
   individual workplace, the state's power to enforce its viewpoint
   against the rest of society is considerably stronger and the
   centralised system would be harder to control. The requirements of
   gathering and processing the information required for the centre to
   make intelligent decisions would be immense, thus provoking a large
   bureaucracy which would be hard to control and soon become the real
   power in the state. A centralised body, therefore, effectively excludes
   the mass participation of the mass of workers -- power rests in the
   hands of a few people which, by its nature, generates bureaucratic
   rule. If that sounds familiar, it should. It is precisely what did
   happen in Lenin's Russia and laid the basis for Stalinism.

   Thirdly, to eliminate the dangers of workers' self-management
   generating "propertarian" notions, the workers' have to have their
   control over their workplace reduced, if not eliminated. This, by
   necessity, generates bourgeois social relationships and, equally,
   appointment of managers from above (which the Bolsheviks did embrace).
   Indeed, by 1920 Lenin was boasting that in 1918 he had "pointed out the
   necessity of recognising the dictatorial authority of single
   individuals for the pursue of carrying out the Soviet idea" and even
   claimed that at that stage "there were no disputes in connection with
   the question" of one-man management. [quoted by Brinton, Op. Cit., p.
   65] While the first claim is true (Lenin argued for one-man management
   appointed from above before the start of the Civil War in May 1918) the
   latter one is not true (excluding anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and
   Maximalists, there were also the dissent "Left Communists" in the
   Bolshevik party itself).

   Fourthly, centralism was not that efficient. The central bodies the
   Bolsheviks created had little knowledge of the local situation and
   often gave orders that contradicted each other or had little bearing to
   reality, so encouraging factories to ignore the centre: "it seems
   apparent that many workers themselves . . . had now come to believe . .
   . that confusion and anarchy [sic!] at the top were the major causes of
   their difficulties, and with some justification. The fact was that
   Bolshevik administration was chaotic . . . Scores of competitive and
   conflicting Bolshevik and Soviet authorities issued contradictory
   orders, often brought to factories by armed Chekists. The Supreme
   Economic Council. . . issu[ed] dozens of orders and pass[ed] countless
   directives with virtually no real knowledge of affairs." [William G.
   Rosenberg, Russian Labour and Bolshevik Power, p. 116] The Bolsheviks,
   as Lenin had promised, built from the top-down their system of "unified
   administration" based on the Tsarist system of central bodies which
   governed and regulated certain industries during the war. [Brinton, Op.
   Cit., p. 36] This was very centralised and very inefficient (see
   [51]section 7 for more discussion).

   Moreover, having little real understanding of the circumstances on the
   ground they could not compare their ideological assumptions and
   preferences to reality. As an example, the Bolshevik idea that "big"
   was automatically "more efficient" and "better" had a negative impact
   on the revolution. In practice, as Thomas F. Remington notes, this
   simply resulted generated waste:

     "The waste of scare materials at [the giant] Putilov [plant] was
     indeed serious, but not only political unrest had caused it. The
     general shortage of fuel and materials in the city took its greatest
     toll on the largest enterprises, whose overhead expenditures for
     heating the plant and firing the furnaces were proportionally
     greater than those for smaller enterprises. This point -- explained
     by the relative constant proportions among needed inputs to
     producers at any given point in time -- only was recognised latter.
     Not until 1919 were the regime's leaders prepared to acknowledge
     that small enterprises, under the conditions of the time, might be
     more efficient in using resources: and not until 1921 did a few
     Bolsheviks theorists grasp the economic reasons for this apparent
     violation of their standing assumption that larger units were
     inherently more productive. Thus not only were the workers accused
     of politically motivated resistance, but the regime blamed them for
     the effects of circumstances which the workers had no control."
     [Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 106]

   All in all, the Bolshevik vision of socialism was a disaster.
   Centralism was a source of massive economic mismanagement and,
   moreover, bureaucratisation from the start. As anarchists had long
   predicted. As we discuss in [52]section 12 of the appendix [53]"What
   happened during the Russian Revolution?", there was an alternative in
   the form of the factory committees and the federation. Sadly this was
   not part of the Bolshevik vision. At best they were tacked onto this
   vision as a (very) junior partner (as in 1917) or they were quickly
   marginalised and then dumped when they had outlived their usefulness in
   securing Bolshevik power (as in 1918).

   While some Leninists like to paint the economic policies of the
   Bolsheviks in power as being different from what they called for in
   1917, the truth is radically different. For example, Tony Cliff of the
   UK's "Socialist Workers Party" asserts, correctly, that in April 1918
   the "defence of state capitalism constituted the essence of his
   economic policy for this period." However, he also states that this was
   "an entirely new formulation," which was not the case in the slightest.
   [Cliff, Op. Cit., p. 69] As Lenin himself acknowledged.

   Lenin had always confused state capitalism with socialism. "State
   capitalism," he wrote, "is a complete material preparation for
   socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history
   between which and the rung called socialism there are no gaps." He
   argued that socialism "is nothing but the next step forward from state
   capitalist monopoly. In other words, Socialism is merely state
   capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people; by this token it
   ceases to be capitalist monopoly." [The Threatening Catastrophe and how
   to avoid it, p. 38 and p. 37] This was in May, 1917. A few months
   latter, he was talking about how the institutions of state capitalism
   could be taken over and used to create socialism (see [54]section
   H.3.12). Unsurprisingly, when defending Cliff's "new formulation"
   against the "Left Communists" in the spring of 1918 he noted that he
   gave his "'high' appreciation of state capitalism" "before the
   Bolsheviks seized power." [Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 636]

   And, indeed, his praise for state capitalism and its forms of social
   organisation can be found in his
   State and Revolution:

     "the post-office [is] an example of the socialist system . . . At
     present . . . [it] is organised on the lines of a state capitalist
     monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into
     organisations of a similar type . . . the mechanism of social
     management is here already to hand. Overthrow the capitalists . . .
     Our immediate object is to organise the whole of national economy on
     the lines of the postal system . . . It is such a state, standing on
     such an economic basis, that we need." [Essential Works of Lenin,
     pp. 307-8]

   Given this, Lenin's rejection of the factory committee's model of
   socialism comes as no surprise (see [55]section 10 of the appendix
   [56]"What happened during the Russian Revolution?" for more details).
   As we noted in [57]section H.3.14, rather than promote workers'
   control, Lenin effectively undermined it. Murray Bookchin points out
   the obvious:

     "In accepting the concept of worker's control, Lenin's famous decree
     of November 14, 1917, merely acknowledged an accomplished fact; the
     Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workers at this early date. But they
     began to whittle down the power of the factory committees. In
     January 1918, a scant two months after 'decreeing' workers' control,
     Lenin began to advocate that the administration of the factories be
     placed under trade union control. The story that the Bolsheviks
     'patiently' experimented with workers' control, only to find it
     'inefficient' and 'chaotic,' is a myth. Their 'patience' did not
     last more than a few weeks. Not only did Lenin oppose direct
     workers' control within a matter of weeks . . . even union control
     came to an end shortly after it had been established. By the summer
     of 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed under
     bourgeois forms of management." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, pp. 200-1]

   Significantly, even his initial vision of workers' control was
   hierarchical, centralised and top-down. In the workplace it was to be
   exercised by factory committees. The "higher workers' control bodies"
   were to be "composed of representatives of trade unions, factory and
   office workers' committees, and workers' co-operatives." The decisions
   of the lower bodies "may be revoked only by higher workers' control
   bodies." [quoted by Cliff, Op. Cit., p. 10] As Maurice Brinton notes:

     "there [was] . . . a firm hierarchy of control organs . . . each
     Committee was to be responsible to a 'Regional Council of Workers'
     Control', subordinated in turn to an 'All-Russian Council of
     Workers' Control'. The composition of these higher organs was
     decided by the Party.

     "The trade unions were massively represented in the middle and
     higher strata of this new pyramid of 'institutionalised workers'
     control.' For instance the All-Russian Council of Workers' Control
     was to consist of 21 'representatives': 5 from the All-Russian
     Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, 5 from the Executive of
     the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions, 5 from the Association of
     Engineers and Technicians, 2 from the Association of Agronomists, 2
     from the Petrograd Trade Union Council, 1 from each All-Russian
     Trade Union Federation numbering fewer than 100,000 members (2 for
     Federations of over this number)... and 5 from the All-Russian
     Council of Factory Committees! The Factory Committees often under
     anarcho-syndicalist influence had been well and truly 'cut down to
     size'."
     [Op. Cit., p. 18]

   As we note in [58]section 10 of the appendix [59]"What happened during
   the Russian Revolution?", this was a conscious preference on Lenin's
   part. The factory committees had started to federate, creating their
   own institutional framework of socialism based on the workers own class
   organisation. Lenin, as he had explained in 1917, favoured using the
   institutions created by "state capitalism" and simply tacked on a form
   of "workers' control" distinctly at odds with the popular usage of the
   expression. He rejected the suggestions of factory committees
   themselves. The Supreme Economic Council, established by the Soviet
   government, soon demonstrated how to really mismanage the economy.

   As such, the economic developments proposed by Lenin in early 1918 and
   onwards were not the result of the specific problems facing the Russian
   revolution. The fact is while the dire problems facing the Russian
   revolution undoubtedly made many aspects of the Bolshevik system worse,
   they did not create them. Rather, the centralised, bureaucratic and
   top-down abuses Leninists like to distance themselves from where, in
   fact, built into Lenin's socialism from the start. A form of socialism
   Lenin and his government explicitly favoured and created in opposition
   to other, authentically proletarian, versions.

   The path to state capitalism was the one Lenin wanted to trend. It was
   not forced upon him or the Bolsheviks. And, by re-introducing wage
   slavery (this time, to the state) the Bolshevik vision of socialism
   helped undermine the revolution, workers' power and, sadly, build the
   foundations of Stalinism.

6 How did Bolshevik preference for nationalisation affect the revolution?

   As noted in the [60]last section, unlike anarchism, for Bolshevism
   nationalisation, not workers' self-management, was the key issue in
   socialism. As noted in [61]section 3, Lenin had proclaimed the
   necessity for appointed one-man managers and implementing "state
   capitalism" in April 1918. Neither policy was thought to harm the
   socialist character of the regime. As Trotsky stressed in 1920, the
   decision to place a manager at the head of a factory instead of a
   workers' collective had no political significance:

     "It would be a most crying error to confuse the question as to the
     supremacy of the proletariat with the question of boards of workers
     at the head of factories. The dictatorship of the proletariat is
     expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of
     production, in the supremacy of the collective will of the workers
     and not at all in the form in which individual economic
     organisations are administered." [Terrorism and Communism, p. 162]

   Nor was this considered a bad thing or forced upon the Bolsheviks as a
   result of terrible circumstances. Quite the reverse: "I consider if the
   civil war had not plundered our economic organs of all that was
   strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should
   undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere
   of economic administration much sooner and much less painfully." [Op.
   Cit., pp. 162-3] As discussed in the [62]previous section, this
   evaluation fits perfectly into Bolshevik ideology and practice before
   and after they seized power. One can easily find dozens of quotations
   from Lenin expressing the same idea.

   Needless to say, Trotsky's "collective will of the workers" was simply
   a euphemism for the Party, whose dictatorship over the workers Trotsky
   glibly justified:

     "We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the
     dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of the party. Yet it
     can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the
     Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the
     party. It is thanks to the . . . party . . . [that] the Soviets . .
     . [became] transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the
     apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this 'substitution' of the
     power of the party for the power of the working class there is
     nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all.
     The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working
     class." [Op. Cit., p. 109]

   While Trotsky's honesty on this matter is refreshing (unlike his
   followers today who hypocritically talk about the "leadership" of the
   Bolshevik party) we can say that this was a fatal position to take.
   Indeed, for Trotsky any system (including the militarisation of labour)
   was acceptable as the key "differences . . . is defined by a
   fundamental test: who is in power?" -- the capitalist class or the
   proletariat (i.e. the party) [Op. Cit., pp. 171-2] Thus working class
   control over their own affairs was of little importance: "The worker
   does not merely bargain with the Soviet State; no, he is subordinated
   to the Soviet State, under its orders in every direction -- for it is
   his State." [Op. Cit., p. 168] This, of course, echoed his own
   arguments in favour of appointment (see [63]section 4) and Lenin's
   demands for the "exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals" in the
   workplace (see [64]section 3) in early 1918. Cornelius Castoriadis
   points out the obvious:

     "The role of the proletariat in the new State was thus quite clear.
     It was that of enthusiastic and passive citizens. And the role of
     the proletariat in work and in production was no less clear. On the
     whole, it was the same as before -- under capitalism -- except that
     workers of 'character and capacity' [to quote Trotsky] were to be
     chosen to replace factory managers who had fled." [The Role of the
     Bureaucracy in the birth of the Bureaucracy, p. 99]

   Trotsky's position, it should be noted, remained consistent. In the
   early 1930s he argued (in respect to Stalin's regime) that "anatomy of
   society is determined by its economic relations. So long as the forms
   of property that have been created by the October Revolution are not
   overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class." [The Class
   Nature of The Soviet State] Obviously, if the prime issue is property
   and not who manages the means of production (or even "the state") then
   having functioning factory-committees becomes as irrelevant as having
   democratic soviets when determining whether the working class is in
   power or not.

   (As an aside, we should not by that surprised that Trotsky could think
   the workers were the "ruling class" in the vast prison-camp which was
   Stalin's USSR, given that he thought the workers were the "ruling
   class" when he and Lenin headed the Bolshevik party dictatorship! Thus
   we have the strange division Leninists make between Lenin's
   dictatorship and Stalin's (and those of Stalin's followers). When Lenin
   presides over a one-party dictatorship, breaks up strikes, bans
   political parties, bans Bolshevik factions, and imprisons and shoots
   political dissidents these are all regrettable but necessary steps in
   the protection of the "proletarian state." When Stalin does the exact
   same thing, a few years later, they are all terrible examples of the
   deformation of this same "proletarian state"!)

   For anarchists (and other libertarian socialists) this was and is
   nonsense. Without workers' self-management in production, socialism
   cannot exist. To focus attention of whether individuals own property or
   whether the state does is fundamentally a red-herring. Without workers'
   self-management of production, private capitalism will simply have been
   replaced by state capitalism. As one anarchist active in the factory
   committee movement argued in January, 1918, it is "not the liberation
   of the proletariat when many individual plunders are changed for one
   very powerful plunder -- the state. The position of the proletariat
   remains the same." Therefore, "[w]e must not forget that the factory
   committees are the nuclei of the future socialist order" nor must we
   forget "that the state . . . will try to maintain its own interests at
   the expense of the interests of the workers. There is no doubt that we
   will be witnesses of a great conflict between the state power in the
   centre and the organisations composed exclusively of workers which are
   found in the localities." He was proved right. Instead of centralised
   the Bolshevik vision of state capitalism, the anarchists argued that
   factory committees "be united on the basic of federalism, into
   industrial federations . . . [and] poly-industrial soviets of national
   economy." Only in that way could real socialism be created. [quoted by
   Frederick I. Kaplan, Bolshevik Ideology and the Ethics of Soviet
   Labour, p. 163 and p. 166] (see [65]section 7 of the appendix [66]"What
   happened during the Russian Revolution?" for more on the factory
   committee movement).

   The reason is obvious. It is worth quoting Cornelius Castoriadis at
   length on why the Bolshevik system was doomed to failure:

     "So we end up with the uncontested power of managers in the
     factories, and the Party's exclusive 'control' (in reality, what
     kind of control was it, anyway?). And there was the uncontested
     power of the Party over society, without any control. From that
     point on, nobody could prevent these two powers from merging, could
     anyone stop the two strata embodying them from merging, nor could
     the consolidation of an irremovable bureaucracy ruling over all
     sectors of social life be halted. The process may have been
     accelerated or magnified by the entry of non-proletarian elements
     into the Party, as they rushed to jump on the bandwagon. But this
     was a consequence, and not a cause, of the Party's orientation . . .

     "Who is to manage production . . .? . . . the correct answer [is]
     the collective organs of labouring people. What the party leadership
     wanted, what it had already imposed -- and on this point there was
     no difference between Lenin and Trotsky -- was a hierarchy directed
     from above. We know that this was the conception that triumphed. We
     know, too, where this 'victory' led . . .

     "In all Lenin's speeches and writings of this period, what recurs
     again and again like an obsession is the idea that Russia ought to
     learn from the advanced capitalist countries; that there are not a
     hundred and one different ways of developing production and labour
     productivity if one wants to emerge from backwardness and chaos;
     that one must adopt capitalist methods of 'rationalisation' and
     management as well as capitalist forms of work 'incentives.' All
     these, for Lenin, are just 'means' that apparently could freely be
     placed in the service of a radically different historical end, the
     building of socialism.

     "Thus Trotsky, when discussing the merits of militarism, came to
     separate the army itself, its structure and its methods, from the
     social system it serves. What is criticisable in bourgeois
     militarism and in the bourgeois army, Trotsky says in substance, is
     that they are in the service of the bourgeoisie. Except for that,
     there is nothing in them to be criticised. The sole difference, he
     says, lies in this: 'Who is in power?' Likewise, the dictatorship of
     the proletariat is not expressed by the 'form in which individual
     economic enterprises are administered.'

     "The idea that like means cannot be placed indifferently into the
     service of different ends; that there is an intrinsic relationship
     between the instruments used and the result obtained; that,
     especially, neither the army nor the factory are simple 'means' or
     'instruments,' but social structures in which are organised two
     fundamental aspects of human relations (production and violence);
     that in them can be seen in condensed form the essential expression
     of the type of social relations that characterise an era -- this
     idea, though perfectly obvious and banal for Marxists, was totally
     'forgotten.' It was just a matter of developing production, using
     proven methods and structures. That among these 'proofs' the
     principal one was the development of capitalism as a social system
     and that a factory produces not so much cloth or steel but
     proletariat and capital were facts that were utterly ignored.

     "Obviously, behind this 'forgetfulness' is hidden something else. At
     the time, of course, there was the desperate concern to revive
     production as soon as possible and to put a collapsing economy back
     on its feet. This preoccupation, however, does not fatally dictate
     the choice of 'means.' If it seemed obvious to Bolshevik leaders
     that the sole effective means were capitalist ones, it was because
     they were imbued with the conviction that capitalism was the only
     effective and rational system of production. Faithful in this
     respect to Marx, they wanted to abolish private property and market
     anarchy, but not the type of organisation capitalism had achieved at
     the point of production. They wanted to modify the economy, not the
     relations between people at work or the nature of labour itself.

     "At a deeper level still, their philosophy was to develop the forces
     of production. Here too they were the faithful inheritors of Marx --
     or at least one side of Marx, which became the predominant one in
     his mature writings. The development of the forces of production
     was, if not the ultimate goal, at any rate the essential means, in
     the sense that everything else would follow as a by-product and that
     everything else had to be subordinated to it. . .

     "To manage the work of others -- this is the beginning and the end
     of the whole cycle of exploitation. The 'need' for a specific social
     category to manage the work of others in production (and the
     activity of others in politics and in society), the 'need' for a
     separate business management and for a Party to rule the State --
     this is what Bolshevism proclaimed as soon as it seized power, and
     this is what it zealously laboured to impose. We know that it
     achieved its ends. Insofar as ideas play a role in the development
     of history -- and, in the final analysis, they play an enormous role
     -- the Bolshevik ideology (and with it, the Marxist ideology lying
     behind it) was a decisive factor in the birth of the Russian
     bureaucracy."
     [Op. Cit., pp. 100-4]

   Therefore, we "may therefore conclude that, contrary to the prevailing
   mythology, it was not in 1927, or in 1923, or even in 1921 that the
   game was played and lost, but much earlier, during the period from 1918
   to 1920. . . . [1921 saw] the beginning of the reconstruction of the
   productive apparatus. This reconstruction effort, however, was already
   firmly set in the groove of bureaucratic capitalism." [Op. Cit., p. 99]
   In this, they simply followed the economic ideas Lenin had expounded in
   1917 and 1918, but in an even more undemocratic way. Modern-day
   Leninism basically takes the revolutionised Russia of the Bolsheviks
   and, essentially, imposes upon it a more democratic form of government
   rather than Lenin's (and then Stalin's). Anarchists, however, still
   oppose the economy.

   Ironically, proof that libertarians are right on this issue can be
   found in Trotsky's own work. In 1936, he argued that the
   "demobilisation of the Red Army of five million played no small role in
   the formation of the bureaucracy. The victorious commanders assumed
   leading posts in the local Soviets, in economy, in education, and they
   persistently introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured
   success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were pushed away
   gradually from actual participation in the leadership of the country."
   [The Revolution Betrayed] Needless to say, he failed to note who had
   abolished the election of commanders in the Red Army in March 1918,
   namely himself (see [67]section 4). Similarly, he failed to note that
   the "masses" had been "pushed . . . from actual participation in the
   leadership of the country" well before the end of the civil war and
   that, at the time, he was not concerned about it. Equally, it would be
   churlish to note that back in 1920 he thought that "'Military'
   qualities . . . are valued in every sphere. It was in this sense that I
   said that every class prefers to have in its service those of its
   members who, other things being equal, have passed through the military
   school . . . This experience is a great and valuable experience. And
   when a former regimental commissary returns to his trade union, he
   becomes not a bad organiser." [Terrorism and Communism, p. 173]

   In 1937 Trotsky asserted that "liberal-anarchist thought closes its
   eyes to the fact that the Bolshevik revolution, with all its
   repressions, meant an upheaval of social relations in the interests of
   the masses, whereas Stalin's Thermidorian upheaval accompanies the
   reconstruction of Soviet society in the interest of a privileged
   minority." [Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism] Yet Stalin's "upheaval"
   was built upon the social relations created when Lenin and Trotsky held
   power. State ownership, one-man management, and so on where originally
   advocated and implemented by Lenin and Trotsky. The bureaucracy did not
   have to expropriate the working class economically -- "real" Bolshevism
   had already did so. Nor can it be said that the social relations
   associated with the political sphere had fundamentally changed under
   Stalin. He had, after all, inherited the one-party state from Lenin and
   Trotsky. In a nutshell, Trotsky is talking nonsense.

   Simply put, as Trotsky himself indicates, Bolshevik preference for
   nationalisation helped ensure the creation and subsequent rise of the
   Stalinist bureaucracy. Rather than be the product of terrible objective
   circumstances as his followers suggest, the Bolshevik state capitalist
   economic system was at the heart of their vision of what socialism was.
   The civil war simply brought the underlying logic of vision into the
   fore.

7 How did Bolshevik preference for centralism affect the revolution?

   The next issue we will discuss is centralisation. Before starting, it
   is essential that it be stressed that anarchists are not against
   co-ordinated activity and organisation on a large scale. Anarchists
   stress the need for federalism to meet the need for such work (see
   [68]section A.2.9, for example). As such, our critique of Bolshevik
   centralism is not a call for "localism" or isolation (as many Leninists
   assert). Rather, it is a critique of how the social co-operation
   essential for society will be conducted. Will it be in a federal (and
   so bottom-up) way or will it be in a centralised (and so top-down) way?

   It goes almost without saying that Bolshevik ideology was centralist in
   nature. Lenin repeatedly stressed the importance of centralisation,
   arguing constantly that Marxism was, by its very nature, centralist
   (and top-down -- [69]section H.3.3). Long before the revolution, Lenin
   had argued that within the party it was a case of "the transformation
   of the power of ideas into the power of authority, the subordination of
   lower Party bodies to higher ones." [Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 367]
   Such visions of centralised organisation were the model for the
   revolutionary state. In 1917, he repeatedly stressed that after it the
   Bolsheviks would be totally in favour of "centralism" and "strong state
   power." [Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 374] Once in power, they did
   not disappoint.

   Anarchists argue that this prejudice in favour of centralisation and
   centralism is at odds with Leninist claims to be in favour of mass
   participation. It is all fine and well for Trotskyist Tony Cliff to
   quote Lenin arguing that under capitalism the "talent among the people"
   is "merely suppressed" and that it "must be given an opportunity to
   display itself" and that this can "save the cause of socialism," it is
   something else for Lenin (and the Leninist tradition) to favour
   organisational structures that allow that to happen. Similarly, it is
   fine to record Lenin asserting that "living, creative socialism is the
   product of the masses themselves" but it is something else to justify
   the barriers Leninist ideology placed in the way of it by its advocacy
   of centralism. [quoted by Tony Cliff, Lenin, vol. 3, p. 20 and p. 21]

   The central contradiction of Leninism is that while it (sometimes)
   talks about mass participation, it has always prefers an organisational
   form (centralism) which hinders, and ultimately destroys, the
   participation that real socialism needs.

   That centralism works in this way should come as no surprise. After
   all, it based on centralising power at the top of an organisation and,
   consequently, into a few hands. It was for this precise reason that
   every ruling class in history has utilised centralisation against the
   masses. As we indicated in [70]section B.2.5, centralisation has always
   been the tool of minority classes to disempower the masses. In the
   American and French revolutions, centralisation of state power was the
   means used to destroy the revolution, to take it out off the hands of
   the masses and concentrate it into the hands of a minority. In France:

     "From the moment the bourgeoisie set themselves against the popular
     stream they were in need of a weapon that could enable them to
     resist pressure from the bras nus [working people]; they forced one
     by strengthening the central power . . . [This was] the formation of
     the state machinery through which the bourgeoisie was going to
     enslave the proletariat. Here is the centralised state, with its
     bureaucracy and police . . . [it was] a conscious attempt to reduce
     . . . the power of the people." [Daniel Guerin, Class Struggle in
     the First French Republic, p. 176]

   The reason is not hard to understand -- mass participation and class
   society do not go together. Thus, "the move towards bourgeois
   dictatorship" saw "the strengthening of the central power against the
   masses." [Guerin, Op. Cit., pp. 177-8] "To attack the central power,"
   argued Kropotkin, "to strip it of its prerogatives, to decentralise, to
   dissolve authority, would have been to abandon to the people the
   control of its affairs, to run the risk of a truly popular revolution.
   That is why the bourgeoisie sought to reinforce the central government
   even more." [Words of a Rebel, p. 143]

   Can we expect a similar concentration of the central power under the
   Bolsheviks to have a different impact? And, as discussed in appendix
   [71]"What happened during the Russian Revolution?" we find a similar
   marginalisation of the working class from its own revolution. Rather
   than being actively participating in the transformation of society,
   they were transformed into spectators who simply were expected to
   implement the decisions made by the Bolsheviks on their behalf.
   Bolshevik centralisation quickly ensured the disempowerment of working
   class people. Unsurprisingly enough, given its role in class society
   and in bourgeois revolutions.

   In this section of the FAQ, we will indicate why this process happened,
   why Bolshevik centralisation undermined the socialist content of the
   revolution in favour of new forms of oppression and exploitation.

   Therefore, anarchists argue, centralism cannot help but generate
   minority rule, not a classless society. Representative, and so
   centralised, democracy, argued Malatesta, "substitutes the will of a
   few for that of all . . . and in the name of a fictitious collective
   interest, rides roughshod over every real interests, and by means of
   elections and the vote, disregards the wishes of each and everyone."
   [Life and Ideas, p. 147]

   This is rooted in the nature of the system, for democracy does not
   mean, in practice, "rule by all the people." Rather, as Malatesta
   pointed out, it "would be closer to the truth to say 'government of the
   majority of the people." And even this is false, as "it is never the
   case that the representatives of the majority of the people are in the
   same mind on all questions; it is therefore necessary to have recourse
   again to the majority system and thus we will get closer still to the
   truth with 'government of the majority of the elected by the majority
   of the electors.'" This, obviously, "is already beginning to bear a
   strong resemblance to minority government." And so, "it is easy to
   understand what has already been proven by universal historical
   experience: even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a
   small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force."
   And so centralism turns democracy into little more than picking
   masters. Therefore, anarchists argue, "those who really want
   'government of the people' . . . must abolish government." [The
   Anarchist Revolution, p. 78]

   The Russian Revolution is a striking confirmation of this libertarian
   analysis. By applying centralism, the Bolsheviks disempowered the
   masses and concentrated power into the hands of the party leadership.
   This places power in a distinct social class and subject to the
   pervasive effects of their concrete social circumstances within their
   institutional position. As Bakunin predicted with amazing accuracy:

     "The falsehood of the representative system rests upon the fiction
     that the executive power and the legislative chamber issuing from
     popular elections must, or even can for that matter, represent the
     will of the people . . . the instinctive aims of those who govern .
     . . are, because of their exceptional position diametrically opposed
     to the instinctive popular aspirations. Whatever their democratic
     sentiments and intentions may be, viewing society from the high
     position in which they find themselves, they cannot consider this
     society in any other way but that in which a schoolmaster views the
     pupils. And there can be no equality between the schoolmaster and
     the pupils. . . Whoever says political power says domination. And
     where domination exists, a more or less considerable section of the
     population is bound to be dominated by others. . . those who do the
     dominating necessarily must repress and consequently oppress those
     who are subject to the domination . . . [This] explains why and how
     men who were democrats and rebels of the reddest variety when they
     were a part of the mass of governed people, became exceedingly
     moderate when they rose to power. Usually these backslidings are
     attributed to treason. That, however, is an erroneous idea; they
     have for their main cause the change of position and perspective . .
     . if there should be established tomorrow a government . . . made up
     exclusively of workers, those . . . staunch democrats and
     Socialists, will become determined aristocrats, bold or timid
     worshippers of the principle of authority, and will also become
     oppressors and exploiters." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunun, p.
     218]

   However, due to the inefficiencies of centralised bodies, this is not
   the end of the process. Around the new ruling bodies inevitably springs
   up officialdom. This is because a centralised body does not know what
   is happening in the grassroots. Therefore it needs a bureaucracy to
   gather and process that information and to implement its decisions. In
   the words of Bakunin:

     "where is the head, however brilliant it may be, or if one wishes to
     speak of a collective dictatorship, were it formed of many hundreds
     of individuals endowed with superior faculties, where are those
     brains powerful enough and wide-ranging enough to embrace the
     infinite multiplicity and diversity of the real interests,
     aspirations, wishes and needs whose sum total constitutes the
     collective will of a people, and to invent a social organisation can
     which can satisfy everybody? This organisation will never be
     anything but a Procrustean bed which the more or less obvious
     violence of the State will be able to force unhappy society to lie
     down on. . . Such a system . . . would lead inevitably to the
     creation of a new State, and consequently to the formation of a
     governmental aristocracy, that is, an entire class of people, having
     nothing in common with the mass of people . . . [and would] exploit
     the people and subject them." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings,
     pp. 204-6]

   As the bureaucracy is permanent and controls information and resources,
   it soon becomes the main source of power in the state. The
   transformation of the bureaucracy from servant to the master soon
   results. The "official" government is soon controlled by it, shaping
   its activities in line with its interests. Being highly centralised,
   popular control is even more limited than government control -- people
   would simply not know where real power lay, which officials to replace
   or even what was going on within the distant bureaucracy. Moreover, if
   the people did manage to replace the correct people, the newcomers
   would be subject to the same institutional pressures that corrupted the
   previous members and so the process would start again (assuming their
   did not come under the immediate influence of those who remained in the
   bureaucracy). Consequently, a new bureaucratic class develops around
   the centralised bodies created by the governing party. This body would
   soon become riddled with personal influences and favours, so ensuring
   that members could be sheltered from popular control. As Malatesta
   argued, they "would use every means available to those in power to have
   their friends elected as the successors who would then in turn support
   and protect them. And thus government would be passes to and fro in the
   same hands, and democracy, which is the alleged government of all,
   would end up, as usual, in an oligarchy, which is the government of a
   few, the government of a class." [Anarchy, p. 34]

   This state bureaucracy, of course, need not be dictatorial nor the
   regime it rules/administers be totalitarian (for example, bourgeois
   states combine bureaucracy with many real and important liberties).
   However, such a regime is still a class one and socialism would still
   not exist -- as proven by the state bureaucracies and nationalised
   property within bourgeois society.

   So the danger to liberty of combining political and economic power into
   one set of hands (the state's) is obvious. As Kropotkin argued:

     "the state was, and continues to be, the chief instrument for
     permitting the few to monopolise the land, and the capitalists to
     appropriate for themselves a quite disproportionate share of the
     yearly accumulated surplus of production. Consequently, while
     combating the present monopolisation of land, and capitalism
     altogether, the anarchists combat with the same energy the state, as
     the main support of that system. Not this or that special form, but
     the state altogether . . . The state organisation, having always
     been, both in ancient and modern history . . . the instrument for
     establishing monopolies in favour of the ruling minorities, cannot
     be made to work for the destruction of these monopolies. The
     anarchists consider, therefore, that to hand over to the state all
     the main sources of economical life -- the land, the mines, the
     railways, banking, insurance, and so on - as also the management of
     all the main branches of industry, in addition to all the functions
     already accumulated in its hands (education, state-supported
     religions, defence of the territory, etc.), would mean to create a
     new instrument of tyranny. State capitalism would only increase the
     powers of bureaucracy and capitalism. True progress lies in the
     direction of decentralisation, both territorial and functional, in
     the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and
     of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the
     present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery." [Kropotkin's
     Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 286]

   Thus we have the basic argument why centralism will result in the
   continuation of class society. Does the Bolshevik experience contradict
   this analysis? Essentially, it confirms to Kropotkin's predictions on
   the uselessness of "revolutionary" government:

     "Instead of acting for themselves, instead of marching forward,
     instead of advancing in the direction of the new order of things,
     the people confiding in their governors, entrusted to them the
     charge of taking initiative. This was the first consequence of the
     inevitable result of elections. . . Shut up in the city hall,
     charged to proceed after the forms established by the preceding
     governments, these ardent revolutionists, these reformers found
     themselves smitten with incapacity and sterility. . . but it was not
     the men who were the cause for this failure -- it was the system.. .

     "The will of the bulk of the nation once expressed, the rest would
     submit to it with a good grace, but this is not how things are done.
     The revolution bursts out long before a general understanding has
     come, and those who have a clear idea of what should be done the
     next day are only a very small minority. The great mass of the
     people have as yet only a general idea of the end which they wish
     realised, without knowing much how to advance towards that end, and
     without having much confidence in the direction to follow. The
     practical solution will not be found, will not be made clear until
     the change will have already begun. It will be the product of the
     revolution itself, of the people in action, -- or else it will be
     nothing, incapable of finding solutions which can only spring from
     the life of the people. . . The government becomes a parliament with
     all the vices of a middle-class parliament. Far from being a
     'revolutionary' government it becomes the greatest obstacle to the
     revolution and at last the people find themselves compelled to put
     it out of the way, to dismiss those that but yesterday they
     acclaimed as their children.

     "But it is not so easy to do so. The new government which has
     hastened to organise a new administration in order to extend it's
     domination and make itself obeyed does not understand giving up so
     easily. Jealous of maintaining it's power, it clings to it with all
     the energy of an institution which has yet had time to fall into
     senile decay. It decides to oppose force with force, and there is
     only one means then to dislodge it, namely, to take up arms, to make
     another revolution in order to dismiss those in whom the people had
     placed all their hopes."
     [Op. Cit., pp. 240-2]

   By the spring and summer of 1918, the Bolshevik party had consolidated
   its power. It had created a new state, marked as all states are by the
   concentration of power in a few hands and bureaucracy. Effective power
   became concentrated into the hands of the executive committees of the
   soviets from top to bottom. Faced with rejection at soviet election
   after soviet election, the Bolsheviks simply disbanded them and
   gerrymandered the rest. At the summit of the new state, a similar
   process was at work. The soviets had little real power, which was
   centralised in Lenin's new government. This is discussed in more detail
   in [72]section 6 of the appendix [73]"What happened during the Russian
   Revolution?". Thus centralisation quickly displaced popular power and
   participation. As predicted by Russia anarchists in November 1917:

     "Once their power is consolidated and 'legalised', the Bolsheviks --
     who are Social Democrats, that is, men of centralist and
     authoritarian action -- will begin to rearrange the life of the
     country and of the people by governmental and dictatorial methods,
     imposed by the centre. The[y] . . . will dictate the will of the
     party to all Russia, and command the whole nation. Your Soviets and
     your other local organisations will become little by little, simply
     executive organs of the will of the central government. In the place
     of healthy, constructive work by the labouring masses, in place of
     free unification from the bottom, we will see the installation of an
     authoritarian and statist apparatus which would act from above and
     set about wiping out everything that stood in its way with an iron
     hand. The Soviets and other organisations will have to obey and do
     its will. That will be called 'discipline.'" [quoted by Voline, The
     Unknown Revolution, p. 235]

   From top to bottom, the new party in power systematically undermined
   the influence and power of the soviets they claimed to be ensuring the
   power of. This process had begun, it should be stressed before the
   start of the civil war in May, 1918. Thus Leninist Tony Cliff is wrong
   to state that it was "under the iron pressure of the civil war" which
   forced the Bolshevik leaders "to move, as the price of survival, to a
   one-party system." [Revolution Besieged, p. 163] From the summer of
   1918 (i.e. before the civil war even started), the Bolsheviks had
   turned from the first of Kropotkin's "revolutionary" governments
   (representative government) to the other, dictatorship, with sadly
   predictable results.

   So far, the anarchist predictions on the nature of centralised
   revolutionary governments had been confirmed. Being placed in a new
   social position and, therefore, different social relationships,
   produced a dramatic revision on the perspectives of the Bolsheviks.
   They went from being in favour of party power to being in favour of
   party dictatorship. They acted to ensure their power by making
   accountability and recall difficult, if not impossible, and simply
   ignored any election results which did not favour them.

   What of the second prediction of anarchism, namely that centralisation
   will recreate bureaucracy? That, too, was confirmed. After all, some
   means were required to gather, collate and provide information by which
   the central bodies made their decisions. Thus a necessary side-effect
   of Bolshevik centralism was bureaucracy, which, as is well known,
   ultimately fused with the party and replaced Leninism with Stalinism.
   The rise of a state bureaucracy started immediately with the seizure of
   power by the Bolsheviks. Instead of the state starting to "wither away"
   from the start it grew:

     "The old state's political apparatus was 'smashed,' but in its place
     a new bureaucratic and centralised system emerged with extraordinary
     rapidity. After the transfer of government to Moscow in March 1918
     it continued to expand . . . As the functions of the state expanded
     so did the bureaucracy, and by August 1918 nearly a third of
     Moscow's working population were employed in offices [147,134
     employed in state institutions and 83,886 in local ones. This was
     13.7% of the total adult population and 29.6% of the independent
     population of 846,095]. The great increase in the number of
     employees . . . took place in early to mid-1918 and, thereafter,
     despite many campaigns to reduce their number, they remained a
     steady proportion of the falling population . . . At first the
     problem was dismissed by arguments that the impressive participation
     of the working class in state structures was evidence that there was
     no 'bureaucratism' in the bureaucracy. According to the industrial
     census of 31 August 1918, out of 123,578 workers in Moscow, only
     4,191 (3.4 percent) were involved in some sort of public
     organisation . . . Class composition is a dubious criterion of the
     level of bureaucratism. Working class participation in state
     structures did not ensure an organisation against bureaucratism, and
     this was nowhere more true than in the new organisations that
     regulated the economic life of the country." [Richard Sakwa, "The
     Commune State in Moscow in 1918," pp. 429-449, Slavic Review, vol.
     46, no. 3/4, pp. 437-8]

   The "bureaucracy grew by leaps and bounds. Control over the new
   bureaucracy constantly diminished, partly because no genuine opposition
   existed. The alienation between 'people' and 'officials,' which the
   soviet system was supposed to remove, was back again. Beginning in
   1918, complaints about 'bureaucratic excesses,' lack of contact with
   voters, and new proletarian bureaucrats grew louder and louder." [Oskar
   Anweiler, The Soviets, p. 242]

   Overtime, this permanent collection of bodies would become the real
   power in the state, with the party members nominally in charge really
   under the control of an unelected and uncontrolled officialdom. This
   was recognised by Lenin in the last years of his life. As he noted in
   1922:

     "Let us look at Moscow . . . Who is leading whom? The 4,700
     responsible Communists the mass of bureaucrats, or the other way
     round? I do not believe that you can say that the Communists are
     leading this mass. To put it honestly, they are not the leaders, but
     the led." [quoted by Chris Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in
     Eastern Europe, p. 13]

   By the end of 1920, there were five times more state officials than
   industrial workers. 5, 880,000 were members of the state bureaucracy.
   However, the bureaucracy had existed since the start. As noted above,
   the 231,000 people employed in offices in in Moscow in August 1918
   represented 30 per cent of the workforce there. "By 1920 the general
   number of office workers . . . still represented about a third of those
   employed in the city." In November, 1920, they were 200 000 office
   workers in Moscow, compared to 231 000 in August, 1918. By July, 1921
   (in spite of a plan to transfer 10,000 away) their numbers had
   increased to 228,000 and by October 1922, to 243,000. [Richard Sakwa,
   Soviet Communists in Power, p. 192, p. 191 and p. 193]

   This makes perfect sense as "on coming to power the Bolsheviks smashed
   the old state but rapidly created their own apparatus to wage the
   political and economic offensive against the bourgeois and capitalism.
   As the functions of the state expanded, so did the bureaucracy . . .
   following the revolution the process of institutional proliferation
   reached unprecedented heights." [Op. Cit., p. 191] And with bureaucracy
   came the abuse of it simply because it held real power:

     "The prevalence of bureaucracy, of committees and commissions . . .
     permitted, and indeed encouraged, endless permutations of corrupt
     practices. These raged from the style of living of communist
     functionaries to bribe-taking by officials. With the power of
     allocation of scare resources, such as housing, there was an
     inordinate potential for corruption." [Op. Cit., p. 193]

   The growth in power of the bureaucracy should not, therefore, come as a
   major surprise given that had existed from the start in sizeable
   numbers. However, for the Bolsheviks "the development of a bureaucracy"
   was a puzzle, "whose emergence and properties mystified them." However,
   it should be noted that, "[f]or the Bolsheviks, bureaucratism signified
   the escape of this bureaucracy from the will of the party as it took on
   a life of its own." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 182 and p. 190] This was the
   key. They did not object the usurpation of power by the party (indeed
   they placed party dictatorship at the core of their politics and
   universalised it to a general principle for all "socialist"
   revolutions). Nor did they object to the centralisation of power and
   activity (and so the bureaucratisation of life). They only objected to
   it when the bureaucracy was not doing what the party wanted it to.
   Indeed, this was the basic argument of Trotsky against Stalinism (see
   [74]section 3 of the appendix on [75]"Were any of the Bolshevik
   oppositions a real alternative?").

   Faced with this bureaucracy, the Bolsheviks tried to combat it
   (unsuccessfully) and explain it. As the failed to achieve the latter,
   they failed in the former. Given the Bolshevik fixation for all things
   centralised, they simply added to the problem rather than solve it.
   Thus we find that "[o]n the eve of the VIII Party Congress Lenin had
   argued that centralisation was the only way to combat bureaucratism."
   [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 196]

   Unsurprisingly, Lenin's "anti-bureaucratic" policies in the last years
   of his live were "organisational ones. He purposes the formation of the
   Workers' and Peasants' Inspection to correct bureaucratic deformations
   in the party and state -- and this body falls under Stalin's control
   and becomes highly bureaucratic in its own right. Lenin then suggests
   that the size of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection be reduced and
   that it be merged with the Control Commission. He advocates enlarging
   the Central Committee. Thus it rolls along; this body to be enlarged,
   this one to be merged with another, still a third to be modified or
   abolished. The strange ballet of organisational forms continues up to
   his very death, as though the problem could be resolved by
   organisational means." [Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p.
   205]

   Failing to understand the links between centralism and bureaucracy,
   Lenin had to find another source for the bureaucracy. He found one. He
   "argued that the low cultural level of the working class prevented mass
   involvement in management and this led to bureaucratism . . . the new
   state could only reply on a minuscule layer of workers while the rest
   were backward because of the low cultural level of the country."
   However, such an explanation is by no means convincing: "Such
   culturalist assertions, which could neither be proved or disproved but
   which were politically highly effective in explaining the gulf, served
   to blur the political and structural causes of the problem. The working
   class was thus held responsible for the failings of the bureaucracy. At
   the end of the civil war the theme of the backwardness of the
   proletariat was given greater elaboration in Lenin's theory of the
   declassing of the proletariat." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 195] Given that
   the bureaucracy had existed from the start, it is hard to say that a
   more "cultured" working class would have been in a better position to
   control the officials of a highly centralised state bureaucracy. Given
   the problems workers in "developed" nations have in controlling their
   (centralised) union bureaucracies, Lenin's explanation seems simply
   inadequate and, ultimately, self-serving.

   Nor was this centralism particularly efficient. You need only read
   Goldman's or Berkman's accounts of their time in Bolshevik Russia to
   see how inefficient and wasteful centralisation and its resultant
   bureaucracy was in practice (see My Disillusionment in Russia and The
   Bolshevik Myth, respectively). This can be traced, in part, to the
   centralised economic structures favoured by the Bolsheviks. Rejecting
   the alternative vision of socialism advocated and, in part created, by
   the factory committees (and supported wholeheartedly by the Russian
   Anarchists at the time), the Bolsheviks basically took over and used
   the "state capitalist" organs created under Tsarism as the basis of
   their "socialism" (see [76]section 5). As Lenin promised before seizing
   power:

     "Forced syndicatisation -- that is, forced fusion into unions [i.e.
     trusts] under the control of the State -- this is what capitalism
     has prepared for us -- this is what the Banker State has realised in
     Germany -- this is what will be completely realisable in Russia by
     the Soviets, by the dictatorship of the proletariat." [Will the
     Bolsheviks Maintain Power?, p. 53]

   In practice, Lenin's centralised vision soon proved to be a disaster
   (see [77]section 11 of the appendix [78]"What happened during the
   Russian Revolution?" for details). It was highly inefficient and simply
   spawned a vast bureaucracy. There was an alternative, as we discuss in
   [79]section 12 of the appendix [80]"What happened during the Russian
   Revolution?", the only reason that industry did not totally collapse in
   Russia during the early months of the revolution was the activity of
   the factory committees. However, such activity was not part of the
   Bolshevik vision of centralised socialism and so the factory committees
   were not encouraged. At the very moment when mass participation and
   initiative is required (i.e. during a revolution) the Bolsheviks
   favoured a system which killed it. As Kropotkin argued a few years
   later:

     "production and exchange represented an undertaking so complicated
     that the plans of the state socialists, which lead to a party
     directorship, would prove to be absolutely ineffective as soon as
     they were applied to life. No government would be able to organise
     production if the workers themselves through their unions did not do
     it in each branch of industry; for in all production there arise
     daily thousands of difficulties which no government can solve or
     foresee . . . Only the efforts of thousands of intelligences working
     on the problems can co-operate in the development of a new social
     system and find the best solutions for the thousands of local
     needs." [Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 76-7]

   No system is perfect. Any system will take time to develop fully. Of
   course the factory committees made mistakes and, sometimes, things were
   pretty chaotic with different factories competing for scarce resources.
   But that does not prove that factory committees and their federations
   were not the most efficient way of running things under the
   circumstances. Unless, of course, you share the Bolsheviks a dogmatic
   belief that central planning is always more efficient. Moreover,
   attacks on the factory committees for lack of co-ordination by
   pro-Leninists seem less than sincere, given the utter lack of
   encouragement (and, often, actual barriers) the Bolsheviks placed in
   the way of the creation of federations of factory committees (see
   [81]section 9 of the appendix [82]"What happened during the Russian
   Revolution?" for further details).

   Lastly, Bolshevik centralism (as well as being extremely inefficient)
   also ensured that the control of production and the subsequent surplus
   would be in the hands of the state and, so, class society would
   continue. In Russia, capitalism became state capitalism under Lenin and
   Trotsky (see sections [83]5 and [84]6 for more discussion of this).

   So Bolshevik support for centralised power ensured that minority power
   replaced popular power, which, in turn, necessitated bureaucracy to
   maintain it. Bolshevism retained statist and capitalist social
   relations and, as such, could not develop socialist ones which, by
   their very nature, imply egalitarianism in terms of social influence
   and power (i.e. the abolition of concentrated power, both economic and
   political). Ironically, by being centralists, the Bolsheviks
   systematically eliminated mass participation and ensured the
   replacement of popular power with party power. This saw the rebirth of
   non-socialist social relationships within society, so ensuring the
   defeat of the socialist tendencies and institutions which had started
   to grow during 1917.

   It cannot be said that this centralism was a product of the civil war.
   As best it could be argued that the civil war extenuated an existing
   centralist spirit into ultra-centralism, but it did not create it.
   After all, Lenin was stressing that the Bolsheviks were "convinced
   centralists . . . by their programme and the tactics of the whole of
   their party" in 1917. Ironically, he never realised (nor much cared,
   after the seizure of power) that this position precluded his call for
   "the deepening and extension of democracy in the administration of a
   State of the of the proletarian type." [Can the Bolsheviks Maintain
   Power?, p. 74 and p. 55] Given that centralism exists to ensure
   minority rule, we should not be to surprised that party power replaced
   popular participation and self-government quickly after the October
   Revolution. Which it did. Writing in September 1918, a Russian
   anarchist portrays the results of Bolshevik ideology in practice:

     "Within the framework of this dictatorship [of the proletariat] . .
     . we can see that the centralisation of power has begun to
     crystallise and grow firm, that the apparatus of the state is being
     consolidated by the ownership of property and even by an
     anti-socialist morality. Instead of hundreds of thousands of
     property owners there is now a single owner served by a whole
     bureaucratic system and a new 'statised' morality.

     "The proletariat is gradually being enserfed by the state. The
     people are being transformed into servants over whom there has risen
     a new class of administrators -- a new class . . . Isn't this merely
     a new class system looming on the revolutionary horizon . . .

     "The resemblance is all too striking . . . And if the elements of
     class inequality are as yet indistinct, it is only a matter of time
     before privileges will pass to the administrators. We do not mean to
     say . . . that the Bolshevik party set out to create a new class
     system. But we do say that even the best intentions and aspirations
     must inevitably be smashed against the evils inherent in any system
     of centralised power. The separation of management from labour, the
     division between administrators and workers flows logically from,
     centralisation. It cannot be otherwise . . . we are presently moving
     not towards socialism but towards state capitalism.

     "Will state capitalism lead us to the gates of socialism? Of this we
     see not the slightest evidence . . . Arrayed against socialism are .
     . . thousands of administrators. And if the workers . . . should
     become a powerful revolutionary force, then it is hardly necessary
     to point out that the class of administrators, wielding the state
     apparatus, will be a far from weak opponent. The single owner and
     state capitalism form a new dam before the waves of our social
     revolution. . .

     "Is it at all possible to conduct the social revolution through a
     centralised authority? Not even a Solomon could direct the
     revolutionary struggle or the economy from one centre . . ."
     [M. Sergven, cited by Paul Avrich, Anarchists in the Russian
     Revolution, pp. 123-5]

   Subsequent developments proved this argument correct. Working class
   revolts were crushed by the state and a new class society developed.
   little wonder, then, Alexander Berkman's summary of what he saw first
   hand in Bolshevik Russia a few years later:

     "Mechanical centralisation, run mad, is paralysing the industrial
     and economic activities of the country. Initiative is frowned upon,
     free effort systematically discouraged. The great masses are
     deprived of the opportunity to shape the policies of the Revolution,
     or take part in the administration of the affairs of the country.
     The government is monopolising every avenue of life; the Revolution
     is divorced from the people. A bureaucratic machine is created that
     is appalling in its parasitism, inefficiency and corruption. In
     Moscow alone this new class of sovburs (Soviet bureaucrats) exceeds,
     in 1920, the total of office holders throughout the whole of Russia
     under the Tsar in 1914 . . . The Bolshevik economic policies,
     effectively aided by this bureaucracy, completely disorganise the
     already crippled industrial life of the country. Lenin, Zinoviev,
     and other Communist leaders thunder philippics against the new
     Soviet bourgeoisie, - and issue ever new decrees that strengthen and
     augment its numbers and influence." [The Russian Tragedy, p. 26]

   Bakunin would not have been remotely surprised. As such, the Bolshevik
   revolution provided a good example to support Malatesta's argument that
   "if . . . one means government action when one talks of social action,
   then this is still the resultant of individual forces, but only of
   those individuals who form the government . . . it follows. . . that
   far from resulting in an increase in the productive, organising and
   protective forces in society, it would greatly reduce them, limiting
   initiative to a few, and giving them the right to do everything
   without, of course, being able to provide them with the gift of being
   all-knowing." [Anarchy, pp. 36-7]

   By confusing "state action" with collective working class action, the
   Bolsheviks effectively eliminated the latter in favour of the former.
   The usurpation of all aspects of life by the centralised bodies created
   by the Bolsheviks left workers with no choice but to act as isolated
   individuals. Can it be surprising, then, that Bolshevik policies aided
   the atomisation of the working class by replacing collective
   organisation and action by state bureaucracy? The potential for
   collective action was there. You need only look at the strikes and
   protests directed against the Bolsheviks to see that was the case (see
   [85]section 5 of the appendix on [86]"What caused the degeneration of
   the Russian Revolution?" for details). Ironically, Bolshevik policies
   and ideology ensured that the collective effort and action of workers
   was directed not at solving the revolution's problems but resisting
   Bolshevik tyranny.

   That centralism concentrates power in a few hands can be seen even in
   Leninist accounts of the Russian revolution. To take one example, Tony
   Cliff may assert that the "mistakes of the masses were themselves
   creative" but when push comes to shove, he (like Lenin) simply does not
   allow the masses to make such mistakes and, consequently, learn from
   them. Thus he defends Lenin's economic policies of "state capitalism"
   and "one-man management" (and in the process misleadingly suggests that
   these were new ideas on Lenin's part, imposed by objective factors,
   rather than, as Lenin acknowledged, what he had advocated all along --
   see [87]section 5). Thus we discover that the collapse of industry
   (which had started in the start of 1917) meant that "[d]rastic measures
   had to be taken." But never fear, "Lenin was not one to shirk
   responsibility, however unpleasant the task." He called for "state
   capitalism," and there "were more difficult decisions to be accepted.
   To save industry from complete collapse, Lenin argued for the need to
   impose one-man management." So much for the creative self-activity of
   the masses, which was quickly dumped -- precisely at the time when it
   was most desperately needed. And it is nice to know that in a workers'
   state it is not the workers who decide things. Rather it is Lenin (or
   his modern equivalent, like Cliff) who would have the task of not
   shirking from the responsibility of deciding which drastic measures are
   required. [Op. Cit., p. 21, p. 71 and p. 73] So much for "workers'
   power"!

   Ultimately, centralism is designed to exclude the mass participation
   anarchists have long argued is required by a social revolution. It
   helped to undermine what Kropotkin considered the key to the success of
   a social revolution -- "the people becom[ing] masters of their
   destiny." [Op. Cit., p. 133] In his words:

     "We understand the revolution as a widespread popular movement,
     during which in every town and village within the region of revolt,
     the masses will have to take it upon themselves the work of
     construction upon communistic bases, without awaiting any orders and
     directions from above . . . As to representative government, whether
     self-appointed or elected . . . , we place in it no hopes whatever.
     We know beforehand that it will be able to do nothing to accomplish
     the revolution as long as the people themselves do not accomplish
     the change by working out on the spot the necessary new institutions
     . . . nowhere and never in history do we find that people carried
     into government by a revolutionary wave, have proved equal to the
     occasion.

     "In the task of reconstructing society on new principles, separate
     men . . . are sure to fail. The collective spirit of the masses is
     necessary for this purpose . . . a socialist government . . . would
     be absolutely powerless without the activity of the people
     themselves, and that, necessarily, they would soon begin to act
     fatally as a bridle upon the revolution."
     [Op. Cit., pp. 188-190]

   The Bolshevik revolution and its mania for centralism proved him right.
   The use of centralisation helped ensure that workers' lost any
   meaningful say in their revolution and helped alienate them from it.
   Instead of the mass participation of all, the Bolsheviks ensured the
   top-down rule of a few. Unsurprisingly, as mass participation is what
   centralism was designed to exclude. Wishful thinking on behalf of the
   Bolshevik leaders (and their later-day followers) could not (and can
   not) overcome the structural imperatives of centralisation and its role
   in society. Nor could it stop the creation of a bureaucracy around
   these new centralised institutions.

8 How did the aim for party power undermine the revolution?

   As well as a passion for centralisation and state capitalism,
   Bolshevism had another aim which helped undermine the revolution. This
   was the goal of party power (see see [88]section 5 of the appendix
   [89]"What happened during the Russian Revolution?" for details). Given
   this, namely that the Bolsheviks had, from the start, aimed for party
   power it should not come as too surprising that Bolshevik dictatorship
   quickly replaced soviet democracy.

   Given this obvious fact, it seems strange for modern day Leninists to
   blame the civil war for the Bolsheviks substituting their rule for the
   masses. After all, when strange for modern day Leninists to blame the
   civil war for the Bolsheviks substituting their rule for the masses.
   After all, when the Bolshevik Party took power in October 1917, it did
   "substitute" itself for the working class and did so deliberately and
   knowingly. As we note in [90]section 2, this usurpation of power by a
   minority was perfectly acceptable within the Marxist theory of the
   state, a theory which aided this process no end.

   Thus the Bolshevik party would be in power, with the "conscious
   workers" ruling over the rest. The question instantly arises of what
   happens if the masses turn against the party. If the Bolsheviks embody
   "the power of the proletariat," what happens if the proletariat reject
   the party? The undermining of soviet power by party power and the
   destruction of soviet democracy in the spring and summer of 1918
   answers that specific question (see [91]section 6 of the appendix
   [92]"What happened during the Russian Revolution?"). This should have
   come as no surprise, given the stated aim (and implementation) of party
   power plus the Bolshevik identification of party power with workers'
   power. It is not a great step to party dictatorship over the
   proletariat from these premises (particularly if we include the
   underlying assumptions of vanguardism -- see [93]section H.5.3). A
   step, we must stress, that the Bolsheviks quickly took when faced with
   working class rejection in the soviet elections of spring and summer of
   1918.

   Nor was this destruction of soviet democracy by party power just the
   result of specific conditions in 1917-8. This perspective had been in
   Russian Marxist circles well before the revolution. As we discuss in
   [94]section H.5, vanguardism implies party power (see, as noted,
   [95]section H.5.3 in particular). The ideas of Lenin's What is to be
   Done? give the ideological justification for party dictatorship over
   the masses. Once in power, the logic of vanguardism came into its own,
   allowing the most disgraceful repression of working class freedoms to
   be justified in terms of "Soviet Power" and other euphemisms for the
   party.

   The identification of workers' power with party power has deeply
   undemocratic results, as the experience of the Bolshevik proves.
   However, these results were actually articulated in Russian socialist
   circles before hand. At the divisive 1903 congress of the Russian
   Social Democrats, which saw the split into two factions (Bolshevik and
   Menshevism) Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, argued as
   follows:

     "Every particular democratic principle must be considered not in
     itself, abstractly, . . . the success of the revolution is the
     highest law. And if, for the success of the revolution's success, we
     need temporarily to restrict the functioning of a particular
     democratic principle, then it would be criminal to refrain from
     imposing that restriction. . . And we must take the same attitude
     where the question of the length of parliaments is concerned. If, in
     an outburst of revolutionary enthusiasm, the people elect a very
     good parliament . . . it would suit us to try and make that a long
     Parliament; but if the elections turned out badly for us, we should
     have to try and disperse the resulting parliament not after two
     years but, if possible, after two weeks." [RSDLP, Minutes of the
     Second Congress of the RSDLP, p. 220]

   Another delegate argued that "[t]here is not a single one among the
   principles of democracy which we ought not to subordinate to the
   interests of our Party . . . we must consider democratic principles
   exclusively from the standpoint of the most rapid achievement of that
   aim [i.e. revolution], from the standpoint of the interests of our
   Party. If any particular demand is against our interests, we must not
   include it." To which, Plekhanov replied, "I fully associate myself
   with what Comrade Posadovksy has said." [Op. Cit., p. 219 and p. 220]
   Lenin "agreed unreservedly with this subordination of democratic
   principles to party interests." [Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets, p. 211]

   Plekhanov at this time was linked with Lenin, although this association
   lasted less than a year. After that, he became associated with the
   Mensheviks (before his support for Russia in World War I saw him form
   his own faction). Needless to say, he was mightily annoyed when Lenin
   threw his words back in his face in 1918 when the Bolsheviks disbanded
   the Constituent Assembly. Yet while Plekhanov came to reject this
   position (perhaps because the elections had not "turned out badly for"
   his liking) it is obvious that the Bolsheviks embraced it and keenly
   applied it to elections to soviets and unions as well as Parliaments
   once in power (see [96]section 6 of the appendix [97]"What happened
   during the Russian Revolution?" for example). But, at the time, he
   sided with Lenin against the Mensheviks and it can be argued that the
   latter applied these teachings of that most respected pre-1914 Russian
   Marxist thinker.

   This undemocratic perspective can also be seen when, in 1905, the St.
   Petersburg Bolsheviks, like most of the party, opposed the soviets.
   They argued that "only a strong party along class lines can guide the
   proletarian political movement and preserve the integrity of its
   program, rather than a political mixture of this kind, an indeterminate
   and vacillating political organisation such as the workers council
   represents and cannot help but represent." [quoted by Oskar Anweiler,
   The Soviets, p. 77] Thus the soviets could not reflect workers'
   interests because they were elected by the workers!

   The Bolsheviks saw the soviets as a rival to their party and demanded
   it either accept their political program or simply become a trade-union
   like organisation. They feared that it pushed aside the party committee
   and thus led to the "subordination of consciousness to spontaneity" and
   under the label "non-party" allow "the rotten goods of bourgeois
   ideology" to be introduced among the workers. [quoted by Anweilier, Op.
   Cit., p. 78 and p. 79] In this, the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks were
   simply following Lenin's What is to be Done?, in which Lenin had argued
   that the "spontaneous development of the labour movement leads to it
   being subordinated to bourgeois ideology." [Essential Works of Lenin,
   p. 82] Lenin in 1905, to his credit, rejected these clear conclusions
   of his own theory and was more supportive of the soviets than his
   followers (although "he sided in principle with those who saw in the
   soviet the danger of amorphous nonpartisan organisation." [Anweilier,
   Op. Cit., p. 81]).

   This perspective, however, is at the root of all Bolshevik
   justifications for party power after the October revolution. The
   logical result of this position can be found in the actions of the
   Bolsheviks in 1918 and onwards. For the Bolsheviks in power, the
   soviets were less than important. The key for them was to maintain
   Bolshevik party power and if soviet democracy was the price to pay,
   then they were more than willing to pay it. As such, Bolshevik
   attitudes in 1905 are significant:

     "Despite the failure of the Bolshevik assault on the
     non-partisanship of the [St.] Petersburg Soviet, which may be
     dismissed as a passing episode . . . the attempt . . . is of
     particular significance in understanding the Bolshevik's mentality,
     political ambitions and modus operandi. First, starting in [St.]
     Petersburg, the Bolshevik campaign was repeated in a number of
     provincial soviets such as Kostroma and Tver, and, possibly,
     Sormovo. Second, the assault reveals that from the outset the
     Bolsheviks were distrustful of, if not hostile towards the Soviets,
     to which they had at best an instrumental and always party-minded
     attitude. Finally, the attempt to bring the [St.] Petersburg Soviet
     to heel is an early and major example of Bolshevik take-over
     techniques hitherto practised within the narrow confines of the
     underground party and now extended to the larger arena of open mass
     organisations such as soviets, with the ultimate aim of controlling
     them and turning them into one-party organisations, or, failing
     that, of destroying them." [Israel Getzler, "The Bolshevik Onslaught
     on the Non-Party 'Political Profile' of the Petersburg Soviet of
     Workers' Deputies October-November 1905", Revolutionary History, pp.
     123-146, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 124-5]

   The instrumentalist approach of the Bolsheviks post-1917 can be seen
   from their arguments and attitudes in 1905. On the day the Moscow
   soviet opened, a congress of the northern committees of the Social
   Democratic Party passed a resolution stating that a "council of workers
   deputies should be established only in places where the party
   organisation has no other means of directing the proletariat's
   revolutionary action . . . The soviet of workers deputies must be a
   technical instrument of the party for the purpose of giving political
   leadership to the masses through the RSDWP [the Social-Democratic
   Party]. It is therefore imperative to gain control of the soviet and
   prevail upon it to recognise the program and political leadership of
   the RSDWP." [quoted by Anweilier, Op. Cit., p. 79]

   This perspective that the party should be given precedence can be seen
   in Lenin's comment that while the Bolsheviks should "go along with the
   unpoliticalised proletarians, but on no account and at no time should
   we forget that animosity among the proletariat toward the Social
   Democrats is a remnant of bourgeois attitudes . . . Participation in
   unaffiliated organisations can be permitted to socialists only as an
   exception . . . only if the independence of the workers party is
   guaranteed and if within unaffiliated organisations or soviets
   individual delegates or party groups are subject to unconditional
   control and guidance by the party executive." [quoted by Anweilier, Op.
   Cit., p. 81] These comments have clear links to Lenin's argument in
   1920 that working class protest against the Bolsheviks showed that they
   had become "declassed" (see [98]section 5 of the appendix on [99]"What
   caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?"). It similarly
   allows soviets to be disbanded if Bolsheviks are not elected (which
   they were, see [100]section 6 of the appendix [101]"What happened
   during the Russian Revolution?"). It also ensures that Bolshevik
   representatives to the soviets are not delegates from the workplace,
   but rather a "transmission belt"
   (to use a phrase from the 1920s) for the decisions of the party
   leadership. In a nutshell, Bolshevik soviets would represent the
   party's central committee, not those who elected them. As Oskar
   Anweiler summarised:

     "The 'revolutionary genius' of the people, which Lenin had mentioned
     and which was present in the soviets, constantly harboured the
     danger of 'anarcho-syndicalist tendencies' that Lenin fought against
     all his life. He detected this danger early in the development of
     the soviets and hoped to subdue it by subordinating the soviets to
     the party. The drawback of the new 'soviet democracy' hailed by
     Lenin in 1906 is that he could envisage the soviets only as
     controlled organisations; for him they were the instruments by which
     the party controlled the working masses, rather than true forms of a
     workers democracy." [Op. Cit., p. 85]

   As we noted in [102]section H.3.11, Lenin had concluded in 1907 that
   while the party could "utilise" the soviets "for the purpose of
   developing the Social-Democratic movement," the party "must bear in
   mind that if Social-Democratic activities among the proletarian masses
   are properly, effectively and widely organised, such institutions may
   actually become superfluous." [Marx, Engels and Lenin, Anarchism and
   Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 210] Thus the means by which working class can
   manage their own affairs would become "superfluous" once the party was
   in power. As Samuel Farber argues, Lenin's position before 1917 was
   "clearly implying that the party could normally fulfil its
   revolutionary role without the existence of broad class organisations .
   . . Consequently, Lenin's and the party's eventual endorsement of the
   soviets in 1905 seems to have been tactical in character. That is, the
   Bolshevik support for the soviets did not at the time signify a
   theoretical and/or principled commitment to these institutions as
   revolutionary organs to overthrow the old society, let alone as key
   structural ingredients of the post-revolutionary order. Furthermore, it
   is again revealing that from 1905 to 1917 the concept of soviets did
   not play an important role in the thinking of Lenin or of the Bolshevik
   Party . . . [T]hese strategies and tactics vis-a-vis the soviets . . .
   can be fairly seen as expressing a predisposition favouring the party
   and downgrading the soviets and other non-party class organisations, at
   least in relative terms." [Before Stalinism, p. 37] Such a perspective
   on the soviets can be seen once the party was in power when they
   quickly turned them, without concern, into mere fig-leafs for party
   power (see [103]section 6 of the appendix [104]"What happened during
   the Russian Revolution?" for more details).

   It cannot be mere coincidence that the ideas and rhetoric against the
   soviets in 1905 should resurface again once the Bolsheviks were in
   power. For example, in 1905, in St. Petersburg "the Bolsheviks pressed
   on" with their campaign and, "according to the testimony of Vladimir
   Voitinskii, then a young Bolshevik agitator, the initial thrust of the
   Bolshevik 'plan' was to push the SRs [who were in a minority] out of
   the Soviet, while 'the final blow' would be directed against the
   Mensheviks. Voitinskii also recalled the heated argument advanced by
   the popular agitator Nikolai Krylenko ('Abram') for the 'dispersal of
   the Soviet' should it reject the 'ultimatum' to declare its affiliation
   with the RSDP." [Getzler, Op., Cit., pp. 127-8] This mirrored events in
   1918. Then "at the local political level" Bolshevik majorities were
   attained ("by means fair, foul and terrorist") "in the plenary
   assemblies of the soviets, and with the barring of all those not
   'completely dedicated to Soviet power' [i.e. Mensheviks and SRs] from
   the newly established network of soviet administrative departments and
   from the soviet militias. Soviets where Bolshevik majorities could not
   be achieved were simply disbanded." A similar process occurred at the
   summit (see [105]section 7). Thus "the October revolution marked [the
   soviets] transformation from agents of democratisation into regional
   and local administrative organs of the centralised, one-party Soviet
   state." [Israel Getzler, Soviets as Agents of Democratisation, p. 27
   and pp. 26-7]

   Can such an outcome really have no link at all with the Bolshevik
   position and practice in period before 1917 and, in particular, during
   the 1905 revolution? Obviously not. As such, we should not be too
   surprised or shocked when Lenin replied to a critic who assailed the
   "dictatorship of one party" in 1919 by clearly and unashamedly stating:
   "Yes, the dictatorship of one party! We stand upon it and cannot depart
   from this ground, since this is the party which in the course of
   decades has won for itself the position of vanguard of the whole
   factory and industrial proletariat." [quoted by E.H. Carr, The
   Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 236] Or when he replied to a critic in
   1920 that "[h]e says we understand by the words dictatorship of
   proletariat what is actually the dictatorship of its determined and
   conscious minority. And that is the fact." This "minority . . . may be
   called a party," Lenin stressed. [quoted by Arthur Ransome, The Crisis
   in Russia 1920, p. 35]

   This perspective can be traced back to the underlying ideology
   expounded by the Bolsheviks before and during 1917. For example, mere
   days after seizing power in the October Revolution Lenin was stressing
   that the Bolsheviks' "present slogan is: No compromise, i.e. for a
   homogeneous Boshevik government." He did not hesitate to use the threat
   to "appeal to the sailors" against the other socialist parties, stating
   "[i]f you get the majority, take power in the Central Executive
   Committee and carry one. But we will go to the sailors." [quoted by
   Tony Cliff, Lenin, vol. 3, p. 26] Clearly soviet power was far from
   Lenin's mind, rejecting soviet democracy if need be in favour of party
   power. Strangely, Cliff (a supporter of Lenin) states that Lenin "did
   not visualise one-party rule" and that the "first decrees and laws
   issued after the October revolution were full of repetitions of the
   word 'democracy.'" [Op. Cit., p. 161 and p. 146] He goes on to quote
   Lenin stating that "[a]s a democratic government we cannot ignore the
   decision of the masses of the people, even though we disagree with it."
   Cliff strangely fails to mention that Lenin also applied this not only
   to the land decree (as Cliff notes) but also to the Constituent
   Assembly. "And even if," Lenin continued, "the peasants continue to
   follow the Socialist Revolutionaries, even if they give this party a
   majority in the Constituent Assembly, we shall still say -- what of
   it?" [Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 26, pp. 260-1] But the Bolsheviks
   disbanded the Constituent Assembly after one session. The peasants had
   voted for the SRs and the Assembly went the same way as Lenin's
   promises. And if Lenin's promises of 1917 on the Assembly proved to be
   of little value, then why should his various comments to soviet
   democracy be considered any different? In a clash between soviet
   democracy and party power, the Bolsheviks consistently favoured the
   latter.

   Thus Bolshevik ideology had consistently favoured party power and had a
   long term ideological preference for it. Combine this aim of party
   power with a vanguardism position (see [106]section H.5) and party
   dictatorship will soon result. Neil Harding summarises the issue well:

     "There were a number of very basic axioms that lay at the very heart
     of the theory and practice of Leninism with regard to the party . .
     . It was the party that disposed of scientific or objective
     knowledge. Its analysis of the strivings of the proletariat was,
     therefore, privileged over the proletariat's own class goals and a
     single discernible class will was, similarly, axiomatic to both
     Marxism and Leninism. Both maintained that it was the communists who
     alone articulated these goals and this will -- that was the party's
     principal historical role.

     "At this point, Leninism (again faithful to the Marxist original)
     resorted to a little-noticed definitional conjuring trick -- one
     that proved to be of crucial importance for the mesmeric effect of
     the ideology. The trick was spectacularly simple and audacious --
     the class was defined as class only to the extent that it conformed
     to the party's account of its objectives, and mobilised itself to
     fulfil them. . . . The messy, real proletarians -- the aggregation
     of wage workers with all their diverse projects and aspirations --
     were to be judged by their progress towards a properly class
     existence by the party that had itself devised the criteria for the
     class existence."
     [Leninism, pp. 173-4]

   This authoritarian position, which allows "socialism" to be imposed by
   force upon the working class, lies at the core of Leninism. Ironically,
   while Bolshevism claims to be the party of the working class,
   representing it essentially or exclusively, they do so in the name of
   possessing a theory that, qua theory, can be the possession of
   intellectuals and, therefore, has to be "introduced" to the working
   class from outside (see [107]section H.5.1 for details).

   This means that Bolshevism is rooted in the identification of "class
   consciousness" with supporting the party. Given the underlying premises
   of vanguardism, unsurprisingly the Bolsheviks took "class
   consciousness" to mean this. If the workers protested against the
   policies of the party, this represented a fall in class consciousness
   and, therefore, working class resistance placed "class" power in
   danger. If, on the other hand, the workers remained quiet and followed
   the party's decision then, obviously, they showed high levels of class
   consciousness. The net effect of this position was, of course, to
   justify party dictatorship. Which, of course, the Bolsheviks did create
   and justified ideologically.

   Thus the Bolshevik aim for party power results in disempowering the
   working class in practice. Moreover, the assumptions of vanguardism
   ensure that only the party leadership is able to judge what is and is
   not in the interests of the working class. Any disagreement by elements
   of that class or the whole class itself can be dismissed as "wavering"
   and "vacillation." While this is perfectly acceptable within the
   Leninist "from above" perspective, from an anarchist "from below"
   perspective it means little more than pseudo-theoretical justification
   for party dictatorship over the proletariat and the ensuring that a
   socialist society will never be created. Ultimately, socialism without
   freedom is meaningless -- as the Bolshevik regime proved time and time
   again.

   As such, to claim that the Bolsheviks did not aim to "substitute" party
   power for working class power seems inconsistent with both Bolshevik
   theory and practice. Lenin had been aiming for party power from the
   start, identifying it with working class power. As the party was the
   vanguard of the proletariat, it was duty bound to seize power and
   govern on behalf of the masses and, moreover, take any actions
   necessary to maintain the revolution -- even if these actions violated
   the basic principles required to have any form of meaningful workers'
   democracy and freedom. Thus the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had
   long become equated with party power and, once in power, it was only a
   matter of time before it became the "dictatorship of the party." And
   once this did occur, none of the leading Bolsheviks questioned it. The
   implications of these Bolshevik perspectives came clear after 1917,
   when the Bolsheviks raised the need for party dictatorship to an
   ideological truism.

   Thus it seems strange to hear some Leninists complain that the rise of
   Stalinism can be explained by the rising "independence" of the state
   machine from the class (i.e. party) it claimed to in service of.
   Needless to say, few Leninists ponder the links between the rising
   "independence" of the state machine from the proletariat (by which
   most, in fact, mean the "vanguard" of the proletariat, the party) and
   Bolshevik ideology. As noted in [108]section H.3.8, a key development
   in Bolshevik theory on the state was the perceived need for the
   vanguard to ignore the wishes of the class it claimed to represent and
   lead. For example, Victor Serge (writing in the 1920s) considered it a
   truism that the "party of the proletariat must know, at hours of
   decision, how to break the resistance of the backward elements among
   the masses; it must know how to stand firm sometimes against the masses
   . . . it must know how to go against the current, and cause proletarian
   consciousness to prevail against lack of consciousness and against
   alien class influences." [Year One of the Russian Revolution, p. 218]

   The problem with this is that, by definition, everyone is backward in
   comparison to the vanguard party. Moreover, in Bolshevik ideology it is
   the party which determines what is and is not "proletarian
   consciousness." Thus we have the party ideologue presenting
   self-justifications for party power over the working class. Now, is the
   vanguard is to be able to ignore the masses then it must have power
   over them. Moreover, to be independent of the masses the machine it
   relies on to implement its power must also, by definition, be
   independent of the masses. Can we be surprised, therefore, with the
   rise of the "independent" state bureaucracy in such circumstances? If
   the state machine is to be independent of the masses then why should we
   expect it not to become independent of the vanguard? Surely it must be
   the case that we would be far more surprised if the state machine did
   not become "independent" of the ruling party?

   Nor can it be said that the Bolsheviks learned from the experience of
   the Russian Revolution. This can be seen from Trotsky's 1937 comments
   that the "proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. In
   itself the necessity for state power arises from the insufficient
   cultural level of the masses and their heterogeneity." Thus "state
   power" is required not to defend the revolution against reaction but
   from the working class itself, who do not have a high enough "cultural
   level" to govern themselves. At best, their role is that of a passive
   supporter, for "[w]ithout the confidence of the class in the vanguard,
   without support of the vanguard by the class, there can be no talk of
   the conquest of power."
   While soviets "are the only organised form of the tie between the
   vanguard and the class" it does not mean that they are organs of
   self-management. No, a "revolutionary content can be given . . . only
   by the party. This is proved by the positive experience of the October
   Revolution and by the negative experience of other countries (Germany,
   Austria, finally, Spain)." [Stalinism and Bolshevism]

   Sadly, Trotsky failed to explicitly address the question of what
   happens when the "masses" stop having "confidence in the vanguard" and
   decides to support some other group. After all, if a "revolutionary
   content" can only be given by "the party" then if the masses reject the
   party then the soviets can no only be revolutionary. To save the
   revolution, it would be necessary to destroy the democracy and power of
   the soviets. Which is exactly what the Bolsheviks did do in 1918. By
   equating popular power with party power Bolshevism not only opens the
   door to party dictatorship, it invites it in, gives it some coffee and
   asks it to make itself a home! Nor can it be said that Trotsky ever
   appreciated Kropotkin's "general observation" that "those who preach
   dictatorship do not in general perceive that in sustaining their
   prejudice they only prepare the way for those who later on will cut
   their throats." [Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 244]

   In summary, it cannot be a coincidence that once in power the
   Bolsheviks acted in ways which had clear links to the political
   ideology it had been advocating before hand. As such, the Bolshevik aim
   for party power helped undermine the real power of working class people
   during the Russian revolution. Rooted in a deeply anti-democratic
   political tradition, it was ideologically predisposed to substitute
   party power for soviet power and, finally, to create -- and justify --
   the dictatorship over the proletariat. The civil war may have shaped
   certain aspects of these authoritarian tendencies but it did not create
   them.

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  84. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append44.html#app6
  85. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append43.html#app5
  86. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append43.html
  87. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append44.html#app5
  88. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html#app5
  89. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html
  90. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append44.html#app2
  91. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html#app6
  92. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html
  93. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH5.html#sech53
  94. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH5.html
  95. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH5.html#sech53
  96. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html#app6
  97. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html
  98. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append43.html#app5
  99. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append43.html
 100. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html#app6
 101. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html
 102. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH3.html#sech311
 103. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html#app6
 104. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append41.html
 105. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append44.html#app7
 106. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH5.html
 107. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH5.html#sech51
 108. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH3.html#sech38
