This is simply not correct because the Bolshevik leadership from the time before the civil war which began in the spring of 1918 took steps to neutralize the soviets and put the institution under the party state. The Bolshevik party leadership might have believed in the slogan of all power to the soviets up to the revolution in November 7 in 1917 but nevertheless established a system where soviets were denied to get control of the main economy simply because the whole concept of Bolshevism was about elitism. The soviets faced appointment from above and the main factories were ruled by people controlled by the party and Sovnarkom, Council of People’s Commissars. All Power to the Soviets was by the Bolshevik leadership understood as an instrument to delegate and handle all power to the top party elite. The party elite had by this power of the economic surplus and they only answered to themselves, not the soviets. In reality the new relationship echoed the relationship between an upper class in charge of the economy and the workers and peasants who produced the same or just plain state-capitalism.

From the spring/summer of 1918 the new state bourgeoisie sent Cheka troops to smash political opposition, forbidding strikes, shooting at demonstrations and imprisoned real communists. A state capitalist party-dictatorship was born and the rest is basically history where the Bolshevik government accepted to rearm capitalist Germany by for instance accepting its military to train and develop military gas production in Soviet Union. That this could be used against the working class population did not bother the new state bourgeois government i Kremlin.

In March 1921 more than half a year after the end of the civil war was the soviet at the huge Kronstadt base which included a civilian population crushed by military troops because the Bolshevik party elite did not want what the masses wanted, namely free elections to the soviets. As the party leaders celebrated the 50 year anniversary of the Paris Commune 1871 in the city of Petrograd – an anniversary of democratic elections to the popular institutions for the masses in France – was the Bolshevik party elite itself responsible for a counter-revolution against the soviets that claimed what Karl Marx supported fifty years earlier. This was a point of return where the rest is basically history. All kind of oppression under Stalin was used under Lenin and Trotsky with exception that party members could not be shot just like that. However, when someone had left or been expelled from the party did they not have any legal rights. Stalin did not come down from the sky. He was a result of totalitarian state-capitalism which can be seen in most developing countries up to our days.

The Bolshevik party elite became a state-capitalist elite and state-bourgeois the moment they managed to take away the power from the councils, soviets, concentrated it into the hands of themselves and became the real owners of the economic surplus. The Leninist/Trotskyist agenda is nothing than a road to state-capitalism ruled by a party apparatus with an internal top elite as collective state-capitalists. This happened because the political consciousness of the working class and the working class population was guided by the myth of being liberated by an elite party and state apparatuses, i.e. to delegate the power to the “own” leadership and put the masses in a position of spectators to their own class struggle. From that moment “socialism” was not understood as a collective class struggle with employees ruling the former capitalist enterprises allied and planned from factory to factory, region to region, land to land for a communist mode of production which only could be established international. Socialism was instead wrongly understood as a party state where its biggest supporters were Lenin and Trotsky allied to the state bureaucracy.

Any attempt to subordinate the working class and the working class population to a party – a structure not even controlled by the class – will ultimately lead to a society where the population is subordinated to a party state controlled and owned by an elite of political “specialists”, bureaucrats and career opportunist. In reality a society where those who produce the economic surplus are alienated from power over the economy, alienated from the power of the factories and working places.

Those groups which defend the positions of elitism and a party state inspired by former party dictatorship which crushed the soviets during 1918-1921 can only pave the way to state-capitalism.

https://libcom.org/library/the-bolsheviks-and-workers-control-solidarity-group
https://libcom.org/library/russian-labour-bolshevik-power-william-rosenberg

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All power to workers and popular councils – not any party. A socialist revolution is not a party task but the task of a political conscious working class population. It was a lie that a socialist society is a fatherland as Lenin and Trotsky described the soviet federation after October 1917.

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Read the real political positions of the Bolshevik leaders:

V.I.Lenin support of party dictatorship:

“The irrefutable experience of history has shown that… the dictatorship of individual persons was very often the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes”. “Large-scale machine industry – which is the material productive source and foundation of socialism – calls for absolute and strict unity of will… How can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.” “Unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labour processes that are based on large-scale machine industry . . . Today the Revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the
masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process.”
(V.I.Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VII, pages 332-333, 340-342)

“To our program will we add the following: we must fight the ideological confusion of the elements of the opposition who are not aware and do not mind to reject all ‘militarization of the economy’ and not only reject ‘the method of appointment’, which has been the dominating up to now, but all appointments. This means in fact a rejection of the leading role of the party in relation to the masses who have no party.”
(V.I.Lenin, januari 21, 1921, Selected Works, Vol IX, page 57)

L.D.Trotsky supported of party dictatorship:

“They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers right to elect representatives above the party. As if the party was not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy!”
(Party Congress, 8-16 March 1921.)

“Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? . . . This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive” . . . “Compulsory slave labour . . . was in its time a progressive phenomenon”. “Labour . . . obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism.” “Wages . . . must not be viewed from the angle of securing the personal existence of the individual worker”… “measure the conscientiousness, and efficiency of the work of every labourer.”
(Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, stenographic report, Moscow 1920, pages 87-97.)

“A competent, hierarchic organized civil administration had its advantages. Russia did not suffer from too big, but too small and ineffective bureaucracy.” “The militarization of the unions and the transport system was in need of an inner ideological militarization.”
(Sochineniya, XV, s. 422-423)
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Karl Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848:
The working class has no fatherland – Socialism is international.

Workers in all countries, unite!

Björn-Olav Kvidal,
Stockholm

As a Sandinista in Nicaragua this paragraph particularly grabbed my attention:

“The aim of the narodnaia vlast, the worker-peasant power, was to carry out the revolution “to the end” (do kontsa, another key term in Bolshevik discourse, unfortunately hidden from view in existing translations). Carrying out the revolution to the end meant obtaining the maximum amount of change possible during the revolutionary period. Thus the Bolsheviks set their sights on a vast social transformation of Russia.”

One of Augusto César Sandino’s. most profound insights is expressed in his affirmation that “Given the nature of the struggle, the cowards and faint-heats are abandoning us; only the workers and peasants (working farmers) will go all the way to the end; only their organized force will achieve victory.”

The Spanish original is; “Por el carácter que toma la lucha, los débiles, los cobardes y los pusilánimes nos abandonan. Sólo los obreros y campesinos irán hasta el final, sólo su fuerza organizada logrará el triunfo.”

One statue of Sandino on Managua’s Avenida Bolivar has a plaque with part of the quote: “Sólo los obreros y campesinos irán hasta el final” — (“Only the workers and peasants (working farmers) will go all the way to the end”).

Felipe Stuart C.

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