The Bolshevik party did not strive for a socialist revolution in the meaning that such a revolution would establish socialism in one country. Both Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and the rest of the revolutionary left just as Karl Marx correctly considered it impossible with a socialist mode of production in one country.

The Bolshevik party favoured workers’ and peasants’ revolution in one country as a phase of transmission to “socialism” which wrongly was understood as a party state. The soviets were not there to be in charge according to Lenin, only to legitimate a party led society.

*

The constitutional assembly from 25th of November to 9th December 1917 was dismissed even if the Bolshevik party received some 25% of the votes. The left fraction of the Socialist-Revolutionaries which was an ally of the Bolshevik party had a bigger share of the votes on the countryside than they got in the very short preparation up to the elections. It is therefore correct to say these elections were not fully democratic. That the leader of the official SR, Victor Chernov, wanted to continue the war was not told to the peasants who gave him their votes. An assembly ruled by elite parties linked to the state apparatus and the capitalist class was at that time as it was later expressing a doll theatre democracy called a parliamentary system.

The revolution 7th of November 1917 organized by the Bolshevik party and left revolutionaries did not in the end lead to a society were workers and other employees had direct collective power of the corporations through democratic elected soviets and factory committees. The Bolshevik party naively wanted the bourgeoisie to continue to manage the corporation under the leadership of what turned out to be a party state. Lenin in 1902 wrote the book ‘What is to be Done?’ that the class was not as Karl Marx believed the only real revolutionary class in history. The Bolshevik party did not believe the masses neither could nor should lead themselves simply because it claimed the working class was a reformist and trade unionist class. With such an elitist and belittling idea any direct power to the masses after the revolution would fail to continue the struggle to a class-less world society. For Lenin and in the end also Trotsky after he joined the Bolshevik party in the summer of 1917 believed the masses must be led by a party which delegated the task of the masses to control, check, take orders and supervise on behalf of the party state.

The Bolshevik party did nothing to prepare and support the masses in the city to manage the corporation up to October. After the provisional government of Kerensky which was not elected by the masses was overthrown Lenin sat down to negotiate with the richest families. This did of course failed. After October the Bolshevik party became a huge obstacle for the working class population to take over the economy where strikes and factory occupations often were met with police called Cheka troops. The new government, Sovnarkom, did not support the workers and other employees to be in charge and coordinate the production and the economy from below. The employees according to the Bolshevik party should only have a minority on the board of the corporations as it was decided at the First All-Russian Congress of Regional Economic Councils, Moscow May 24 – June 4, 1918. The masses faced a policy of capitalist oriented discipline and social divisions where former owners step by step came back as specialists through the back door. This disillusioned of the political struggle of the masses and opened for a hostile confrontation between the party state on one side and the majority of the working class on the other. Surprisingly not were free elections to workers and popular councils abandoned in favour of appointment from above. The point of no return came in Mars 1921 when the Kronstadt soviet claimed free elections to the soviets, but was crushed by military forces. Even the left opposition inside the ruling Bolshevik party supported this bloodbath on the last attempt to defend the aim and struggle of the October revolution simply because they too believed the party should lead the masses from above.

This opened the gate to a party and state elite which by the very logic became in charge of the economy and the real owners of the economic surplus. The ownership of the corporations changed from private to state ownership while the relation of the few leading the many remained unchanged. The rest is history but few have learned what went wrong with this parody of transmission to socialism Lenin in a moment of cold honesty wrote that “Socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people”. (V.I.Lenin, “The threatening catastrophe and how to fight it” or “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It”, October 1917.)

*

“Of course is a complete victory for socialism in one country impossible.”
(Collected Works, book 26, pp. 470-471, 3rd soviet congress, January 1918.)

“It is true that the final victory of socialism is impossible in a single country.”
(Report to the council of people’s commissaries, 3rd soviet congress, 11th of January 1918.)

“But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. ” V. I. Lenin, Notes of a Publicist, February 1922,
Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pages 204-211, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm

Read more here, some text in Norwegian:
http://www.bevegelsen.no/forumet/view.php3?site=bevegelsen&bn=bevegelsen_sosialisme&key=1129566748

Sincerely,
Bjorn-Olav Kvidal,
Stockholm – Sweden

Marot selects a passage from my article in which I summarize the position I am polemicizing against, and then, if I read him right, he seems to assume that the position I am critiquing is my position. Or am I misunderstanding something here?

“Lenin’s April Theses laid down for the Party a brilliant plan of struggle for the transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the Socialist revolution, from the first stage of the revolution to the second stage — the stage of the Socialist revolution. The whole history of the Party had prepared it for this great task. As far back as 1905, Lenin had said in his pamphlet, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, that after the overthrow of tsardom the proletariat would proceed to bring about the Socialist revolution. The new thing in the theses was that they gave a concrete, theoretically grounded plan for the initial stage of the transition to the Socialist revolution.”

According to Paul Le Blanc:

“….the Bolshevik position had not changed since Lenin articulated it the 1905 polemic Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution…..despite inevitable confusions amidst the revolutionary ferment, with pulls and tugs and sometimes partial misunderstandings among personalities – the Bolsheviks were well-guided by the perspectives they had embraced since 1905. There was no need for Lenin to “re-arm” the party, and it simply didn’t happen. Or so my friends [Lars Lih and Eric Blanc] assert.”

What is the difference between the two passages regarding the “preparedness” of the Bolsheviks in 1905 to meet the challenges of 1917?

In “Letters From Afar” written in early 1917 Lenin refers to the need for, “history [to] make particularly abrupt turns…” It is abundantly clear that Lenin saw the obvious need for the Bolshevik party to also make what some might have considered “an abrupt turn,” in order to keep up with events.

Looking back as he was writing in November 1918, he confirms this again. “Beginning with April 1917…long before the October Revolution,” the objective conditions had accelerated so rapidly that the consequences, “(whether one likes it or not) will demand steps forward to socialism.”

Lenin was not one to cling to old positions that had been disproven by events. Had he seen in retrospect, errors in “Two Tactics,” there was no reason in 1918 not to acknowledge them. To the contrary Lenin wrote, “Things have turned out just as we said they would…”

How much clearer could he have been?

I am as aware as anyone that any number of quotations can be singled out — and taken out of context — to buttress this or that point. Nor do I have any intention of submitting as lengthy a review of these issues as others have done. But I did spend some time today rereading a few of the documents written by Lenin himself that seem to me to clarify the issue fairly simply. They are:

“Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” written in 1905.
“Letters from Afar,” written in early 1917 and
“The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” written in 1918

In “Two Tactics” Lenin says clearly:

“Only the most ignorant people can ignore the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place; only the most naive optimists can forget how little as yet the masses of the workers are informed about the aims of Socialism and about the methods of achieving it. And we are all convinced that the emancipation of the workers can be effected only by the workers themselves; a socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class conscious and organised, trained and educated in open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie.”

What had changed by 1917 was NOT Lenin’s views, but the objective situation. As he explained in “Letters from Afar”:

“Without the tremendous class battles and the revolutionary energy displayed by the Russian proletariat during the three years 1905–07, the second revolution could not possibly have been so rapid in the sense that its initial stage was completed in a few days. The first revolution (1905) deeply ploughed the soil, uprooted age-old prejudices, awakened millions of workers and tens of millions of peasants to political life and political struggle and revealed to each other—and to the world—all classes (and all the principal parties) of Russian society in their true character and in the true alignment of their interests, their forces, their modes of action, and their immediate and ultimate aims…

“Without the Revolution of 1905–07 and the counter-revolution of 1907–14, there could not have been that clear ‘self determination’ of all classes of the Russian people and of the nations inhabiting Russia, that determination of the relation of these classes to each other and to the tsarist monarchy, which manifested itself during the eight days of the February-March Revolution of 1917. This eight-day revolution was ‘performed,’ if we may use a metaphorical expression, as though after a dozen major and minor rehearsals; the ‘actors’ knew each other, their parts, their places and their setting in every detail, through and through, down to every more or less important shade of political trend and mode of action.”

Lenin then explains — in equally clear, unmistakable language — the additional factor of enormous importance that had changed the situation since 1905:

“For the first great Revolution of 1905…to the ‘brilliant.’ the “glorious” Revolution of 1917—the Guchkovs and Milyukovs have proclaimed it “glorious” because it has put them in power (for the time being). But this required a great, mighty and all-powerful ‘stage manager,’ capable, on the one hand, of vastly accelerating the course of world history, and, on the other, of engendering world-wide crises of unparalleled intensity—economic, political, national and international. Apart from an extraordinary acceleration of world history, it was also necessary that history make particularly abrupt turns, in order that at one such turn the filthy and blood-stained cart of the Romanov monarchy should be overturned at one stroke.

“This all-powerful ‘stage manager,’ this mighty accelerator was the imperialist world war.”

Finally in 1918, Lenin reminded us again that there was no contradiction between the Bolshevik approach in 1905 and the policy followed in 1917:

“The Russian revolution is a bourgeois revolution, said all the Marxists of Russia before 1905. The Mensheviks, substituting liberalism for Marxism, drew the following conclusion from this: the proletariat therefore must not go beyond what is acceptable to the bourgeoisie and must pursue a policy of compromise with them. The Bolsheviks said this was a bourgeois-liberal theory. The bourgeoisie were trying to bring about the reform of the state on bourgeois, reformist, not revolutionary lines, while preserving the monarchy, the landlord system, etc., as far as possible. The proletariat must carry through the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the end, not allowing itself to be ‘bound’ by the reformism of the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks formulated the alignment of class forces in the bourgeois revolution as follows: the proletariat, winning over the peasants, will neutralise the liberal bourgeoisie and utterly destroy the monarchy, medievalism and the landlord system.

“It is the alliance between the proletariat and the peasants in general that reveals the bourgeois character of the revolution, for the peasants in general are small producers who exist on the basis of commodity production. Further, the Bolsheviks then added, the proletariat will win over the entire semi-proletariat (all the working and exploited people), will neutralise the middle peasants and overthrow the bourgeoisie; this will be a socialist revolution, as distinct from a bourgeois-democratic revolution. (See my pamphlet Two Tactics, published in 1905 and reprinted…”

“The question which Kautsky has so tangled up was fully explained by the Bolsheviks as far back as 1905. Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we march with the peasants as a whole. This has been as clear as clear can be to us; we have said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905, and we have never attempted to skip this necessary stage of the historical process or abolish it by decrees. Kautsky’s efforts to ‘expose’ us on this point merely expose his own confusion of mind and his fear to recall what he wrote in 1905, when he was not yet a renegade.

“Beginning with April 1917, however, long before the October Revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we publicly declared and explained to the people: the revolution cannot now stop at this stage, for the country has marched forward, capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached fantastic dimensions, which (whether one likes it or not) will demand steps forward, to socialism. For there is no other way of advancing, of saving the war-weary country and of alleviating the sufferings of the working and exploited people.”

If this is not clear enough Lenin then explains again:

“Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the ‘whole’ of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means to distort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie in comparison with medievalism.”

If there is some mystery to the history of the Russian Revolution or the Bolshevik party’s views about it, that Lenin did not clarify with these three essential writings, could someone please tell me — preferably in a few short sentences — what it is?