Counter-Revolution
There were really two October revolutions – the worker & peasant revolution, which expropriated land and industry, and the Bolshevik "revolution" which established a "dictatorship of the proletariat (and peasantry)." In the months and years after October the Bolshevik revolution would smash the worker & peasant revolution. Many anarchists in the 19th century predicted that if Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" were ever implemented it would result in the creation of a new ruling class that would exploit the workers just as the old one did. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" inevitably becomes a "dictatorship over the proletariat." Mikhail Bakunin (and others) provided a materialist explanation for this. Few predictions in the social sciences have come true so dramatically. Not only in the USSR but also in every single instance where "workers' states" have been implemented (at one point they ruled a third of the world) this prediction has come true.
The state is a hierarchical organization with a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the legitimate use of violence. It is a centralized rule making body that bosses around everyone who lives in its territory. It uses various armed bodies of people (police, militaries) with a top-down hierarchical chain of command and coercive institutions (courts, prisons) to force its subjects to obey it. It has a pyramidal structure, with a chain of command and a few people on the top giving orders to those below them. Because of this pyramidal structure and monopoly of force the state is always the instrument by which a minority dominates the majority. It was precisely this kind of organization that the Bolsheviks set up immediately following October. This led to the formation of a new, bureaucratic, elite ruling over the masses. The libertarian elements of Lenin's thought conflicted with the interests of this new elite (which he was a part of) and so were dropped one by one.
At the top of the state pyramid was the Council of People's Commissars or Sovnarkom; below it were several other bodies. It made laws and set up various hierarchical organizations to implement its' decrees. These were bureaucracies because that was the most efficient way for its orders to be implemented and to run the country. In order to enforce the state's laws armed bodies of people with a top-down bureaucratic hierarchical chain of command were set up. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage or Cheka (secret police) was created not long after October to enforce the rule of the state. Although at first they employed a relatively light amount of repression, the Cheka soon went out of control and used excessive force against anyone who did not agree with the state. The Soviets gained a near-monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and hierarchical authority over the population. This caused them to become isolated and detached from the masses, transforming into representative instead of directly democratic institutions.
During the course of the revolution the workers had taken over the workplaces and ran them themselves through their factory committees and factory assemblies. For a brief period a kind of "free market syndicalism" prevailed, with self-managed workplaces selling their products on the market. There were initial moves within the factory committees towards setting up non-hierarchical forms of coordination between workplaces without relying on the market, but the Bolsheviks defeated these proposals. On November 15th a decree on Worker's Control was passed that rubber-stamped the factory committee movement but undermined workers' self-management. The factory committees were legalized but required to obey the state planners rather then the workers in their factory. A system of central planning was set up, with a set of top-down authoritarian councils giving the committees orders. Workers lost control over the factories they had expropriated to the state. This effectively killed worker self-management in favor of centralized power. In December this process continued with the creation of the Supreme Economic Council to centrally manage the economy. The regime started nationalizing industries, centralizing the economy under the control of the Supreme Economic Council.1
Starting in March 1918 the regime began abolishing the factory committees (which had already been subordinated to the state) in favor of outright one-man management.2 The dictatorship of the bosses was restored; capitalist relations in the workplace returned in the form of state planning. Over the next several years the factory committees would be eliminated in industry after industry until, by the early 20s, all workplaces were under one-man management.3 In 1920 Trotsky claimed that, "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."4
In April Lenin was arguing that
"We must raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice; we must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond to the total amount of goods turned out, or to the amount of work done … The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. … We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system."5
As Marx said, piece-wages are the "most fruitful source of reductions of wages, and of frauds committed by capitalists,"6 a way for capitalists to increase the exploitation of workers. Its usage by the state is increased exploitation by the state. Lenin continued this counter-revolutionary theme, arguing, "that large-scale machine industry … calls for absolute and strict unity of will … But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one." He now claimed that "unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organized on the pattern of large-scale machine industry" and that the "revolution demands—precisely in the interests of its development and consolidation, precisely in the interests of socialism—that the people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labour." In the same document he said:
"That in the history of revolutionary movements the dictatorship of individuals was very often the expression, the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes has been shown by the irrefutable experience of history. … There is, therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals."7
The new regime exploited the peasants through grain requisitions, begun a few weeks before the start of the civil war. In early May a state monopoly on all grain was decreed. Any grain they produced in excess of what they needed for themselves was to be given to the state; peasants got little of value in return. The actual implementation of this was fraught with difficulty. Determining exactly how much a peasant needed for himself was not easy and telling whether a peasant was violating the grain monopoly by hording more grain than he needed for himself was, as a result, extremely difficult. "The calculations of the [grain requisitions] made no allowance for the long-term production needs of the peasant farms. The consumption norms left the peasant farms without any grain reserves for collateral, or insurance against harvest failure."8 Lenin himself admitted that under the grain monopoly, "we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses and sometimes not only the surpluses but part of the grain the peasant needed for food."9 This policy eventually led to famine. The state exploited the peasants by appropriating anything they produced in excess of what they personally needed to survive and sometimes more than that.
All this resulted in the creation of a new bureaucratic ruling class. Decisions in this immediate post-October period were not made by the working class but by the small group of commissars and bureaucrats who ran the state (a tiny minority of the population). Neither the workers nor the peasants were running the state at any point in time. The state did not later degenerate but was an instrument of minority rule from the moment it established its authority, as are all states. This is clearly shown by where decision making power lay: in the hands of the Sovnarkom and hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations subordinated to it. When the Sovnarkom makes the decisions the working class does not. If the majority of the population is unquestioningly subordinated to the "leaders of the labor process" then it is those leaders who rule, not the workers or peasants, and form a new ruling class over the workers and peasants. These authoritarian policies, combined with the disruption from war and revolution, caused Russia to sink deeper into economic crisis in the first months of Bolshevik rule.
The extreme degree of repression eventually employed by the "soviet" state arose out of this process of class formation and the class struggle between this new ruling class and the previously existing classes. Both the Russian working class and peasantry were highly combative and had just overthrown the previous ruling class. Subjugating them to a new ruling class was not easy and required massive amounts of repression, which is why all opposition was eventually suppressed. If this hadn't been done the new ruling class would have been overthrown. In doing this the Bolsheviks were not defending the working class (much of their repression was directed at the working class), they were defending their own dictatorship. The suppression of opposition groups (both left and right) could not have been caused by the civil war as many Leninists claim because it started prior to the start of the civil war.
At first government repression was relatively light and directed mainly at the right-wing socialists and supporters of the old ruling class. Although the actual dispersal of the constituent assembly was bloodless, a protest in support of it held after it's dissolution wasn't. Bolshevik troops opened fire on the demonstration. In December 1917 the Kadet party (constitutional democrats who advocated a liberal capitalist republic) was outlawed and some of its leaders arrested. On January 6th 1918 Kokoshkin and Shingarev, leaders of the Kadets, were murdered by the regime. Many bourgeois papers were shut down, as were some anti-October socialist papers. A few right-wing socialist leaders were arrested and harassed. Compared to what would come later, this was a very light degree of repression. Most of the groups attacked were actively opposed the October revolution and/or were attempting to overthrow the new government. The Kadets, for example, were attempting to form counter-revolutionary armies to overthrow the government. This repression wasn't all that worse than the repression most governments, including western "democracies," employ against groups attempting to overthrow the government.10
Late winter and spring of 1918 saw rising working class opposition to the Bolshevik regime. Life for most workers had not significantly changed for the better and many began to organize against the new regime. In March there were a number of peaceful protests by workers against the Bolshevik regime and organizing against the Bolsheviks by workers stepped up.11 They did this in a manner similar to how they had struggled against the old bosses - they formed worker assemblies and conferences of worker delegates, which functioned similarly to the way the Soviets originally had - as organizations (similar to spokescouncils) designed to coordinate worker actions against the regime. The Soviets by this time had degenerated into weak parliaments controlled by the Bolshevik party and were denounced by the workers, who claimed they "have ceased to be the political representatives of the proletariat and are little more than judicial or police institutions."12 They criticized the subordination of the factory committees and demanded that they "out immediately to refuse to do the things that are not properly their real tasks, sever their links with the government, and become organs of the free will of the working class, organs of its struggle."13 In the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks lost elections in Soviet after Soviet. The Mensheviks and SRs, the only other parties on the ballot, won by a large margin. Just a few months after coming to power, most workers were opposed to the continued rule of the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks reacted to this resistance with repression. Where they lost soviet elections they resorted to various forms of electoral fraud; usually they simply disbanded soviets after losing. In order to maintain their rule they destroyed the Soviets.14 The right of recall, of even free elections, was destroyed and party dictatorship fully implemented. This resulted in a wave of worker and peasant protests and revolts, which the Bolsheviks put down with force. On May 9th armed guards shot at a group of workers in Kolpino protesting shortages of food and jobs. This touched off a wave of strikes and labor unrest that resulted in more arrests and attacks from the state.15
This early workers' movement against the Bolsheviks was largely reformist, with a high degree of Menshevik influence. Some workers' just wanted "good Bolsheviks." Most workers' and groups involved in the movement lacked "a compelling explanation for the new disasters besetting Russian workers or a clear and convincing vision of a viable alternative social order."16 An exception to this was the anarchists, who had both an explanation of the problems in Bakunin's (and others') warnings about authoritarian socialism and their own ideas about how to organize society. So the anarchist movement had to be smashed. In early April Anarchist organizations were raided; many anarchists were killed and many more were arrested. This was the start of a major attack on the Russian anarchist movement that eventually wiped it out.17 Continuing the crackdown on anarchism, in early May Burevestnik, Anarkhia, Golos Truda and other major anarchist papers were shut down by the state.18 The "Communist" press put out all sorts of slanders against the anarchists – calling them bandits and other nonsense. Other opposition groups suffered similar fates - the Mensheviks, SRs, Left SRs and Maximalists all saw many of their activists arrested or killed and publications censored. All of this occurred prior to the start of the civil war.
Notes:
1 Brinton, 1917; Lenin, Draft Decree on Workers' Control
2 Brinton, 1918
3 Farber, p. 66-69
4 Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism ch. 8
5 Lenin, Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government
6 Marx, Capital p. 694
7 Lenin, Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government
8 Figes, Peasant Russia p. 251
9 quoted on Avrich, Krondstadt p. 9
10 Maximoff, Guillotine p. 48-58; Farber, p. 114-115
11 Rosenburg, Russian Labor
12 quoted in Rosenburg, p. 230
13 quoted in Rosenburg, p. 231
14 Brovkin, Menshevik Comeback; Farber, p. 22-27
15 Rosenburg, p. 232
16 Rosenburg, p. 237
17 Maximoff, Guillotine p. 57; Guerin, Anarchism p. 96; Farber, p. 126-127; Voline, Unkown p. 307-309; Serge, Year One p. 212-216
18 Brinton, 1918
