Upping the Anti

The Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the view that Lenin was an opponent of the self-emancipation of the working class. We challenge the image of a “libertarian” Lenin who could say every cook can govern, yet for someone known for his careful selection of words, he did not say “ought” or “must”. Instead, Lenin began to argue “does every worker know how to rule the country? It was Lenin who usurped the power of the soviets. His phrase “workers' control of production” is imprecise and ambiguous in the context of events. It was Lenin who replaced the factory committees attempts of workers' self-management with one-man management. Nationalisation was used to liquidate the self-organisation power of the workers councils who would not be loyal to the Bolshevik state. In “the trade union debate” of 1920 Lenin makes a mockery of those who advocate industrial democracy in the form of syndicalist vision of workers self-government. Trade union management of the national economy, Lenin said was “syndicalist twaddle” and an “absurdity.” If working people could both manage the economy and govern, this would destroy the Bolshevik hold on state power. To allow the working class to act independently and to defend themselves in their unions would be to allow them to challenge the State. Lenin publicly admitted many economic planning mistakes. However, he never admitted the abandonment of direct democracy was a mistake or dictatorial measures against his opponents whether workers or peasants, revolutionaries or socialists were mistaken. All rival radical ideas and parties were outlawed. Lenin believed neither in liberty nor workers' democracy. Lenin saw no self-emancipating workers because those who are inspired by a different anti-capitalist or more libertarian socialist perspective he suppresses. Where Mensheviks, SRs, or Left SRs gained a majority in the Soviets, he would either disband them or expel the offending forces and deliver the Soviets to Communist Party members or functionaries who then steered the Soviets to conformity with government policy.

On April 23, 1918, Lenin addressed the Moscow Soviet, and said “the Soviet Power” had a nature of “jellyfish not of iron” and that, in many instances, was not efficient or determined against the counter-revolution. Lenin began a wave of terror against the independent power of the workers' councils. On June 28th, the Council of People's Commisars passed a nationalization decree. Implemented gradually until completion at the beginning of the next year, under the premise of rooting out disorganization of production and supply, the Bolshevik state outlawed the remaining Soviets they did not control in mining, metals, textiles, steam driven mills, utilities, railways, and other sectors. Workers in the factories viewed the Bolshevik State as they did the capitalist employer and thus desired to give their bosses as little work as possible. Jonathan Aves has called this the volyna (go slow) movement. It was essential above all for Lenin to suppress the idea of the Kronstadt Commune as a movement which defended the principles of the 1917 Revolution against the Bolsheviks - the idea of the third revolution. The Kronstadt rebels represented not a mutiny but embodied one of many popular committees of labour which were in motion everywhere against the regime—especially in the wildcat strikes of Petrograd. Lenin, used state power to discredit and repress the self-emancipation of the workers along with the libertarian socialists who consistently defended them. Today Leninists and Trotskyists raise the banner of labour's self-emancipation yet advocate principles that only discipline and disarm working people.  

The aim of socialists is to organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his or her capacities and powers in complete freedom. The only way to do so is through people doing so of their own volition because human development is not a gift from high. "Only in a revolution," wrote Marx and Engels, can the working class "succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew." The theme of working class self-emancipation runs through their writings. Engels that the conception was: "our notion, from the very beginning, was that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself", he wrote in a preface to the Communist Manifesto, not a late addition to their thought. If self-emancipation is the goal, it must be the means as well. To paraphrase the great American Eugene Debs, if a savior can lead you into the promised land, he can lead you back out again too. Socialism before Marx had quite a few self-appointed saviours and messiahs. A myriad of groups and individuals preached their schemes to transform the world. The conspiratorial followers of Babeuf, with his secret society, were ready and waiting to seize power on behalf of the masses and build a dictatorship that would wait until the people were ‘ready’ (or sufficiently educated by this benevolent elite) to hand over their realm of justice and equality. There were also well-meaning attempts at building perfect utopian communities. There were the philosophical socialists who believed that their worked out philosophical solutions to the world’s problems would be delivered ready-made to the masses. They believed socialism to be ‘above’ the struggle of classes. Socialism from ‘above’ always has an appeal as long as we live under a system of domination, hierarchy and exploitation. When struggles are defeated or when workers are beaten back, the loss of confidence that ensues allows for ‘substitutionism’ - when organisations or individuals step in claiming to liberate the masses ‘from above’.

What differentiates Marx was the focus on self-activity and its criticism of elitism and all substitutes for the self-activity of the working people. Karl Marx said the liberation of the working class is different in several respects from that of previous exploited classes. This is self-liberation. It is, necessarily, self-conscious emanicipation. The workers and their families are active participants in what goes on. Workers can’t be tricked by clever leaders. It is important that we restore to its rightful place the principle of self- emancipation. Revolutionaries have to be willing to enter into a constant dialogue with the working class. The educators must themselves first be educated.

Ideas that tell people that they are unworthy to decide upon their fate and require some other authority to determine the right and best way, as the only way can keep them from trying to change things. On the other hand, if oppressed people believe that they are capable of taking decisions for themselves, and reaching an awareness that their lot in life is wrong and  unjust, and if they get a glimpse of what a better world would be like — these ideas can be powerful motivators for the action necessary for radical social change. At its core, capitalism rests on the domination of the overwhelming majority by a small minority. And one of the worst things about this domination is that it is experienced as such, without being understood as such. Part of our job as socialists is to help people see through the illusions of capitalism, to understand that we are faced with this stark choice of socialism or barbarism, and to encourage a vision of self-emancipation as both means and end of revolutionary socialist practice.

Marx made clear that he did not think of socialism as simply any society that replaced capitalism with a collective form of ownership, as so many so-called socialists have defined it. Consider Marx’s scathing comments in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts on what he called crude communism, which he describes as a “regression” of the worker to the “unnatural simplicity of the poor and undemanding man who has not only failed to transcend private property, but hasn’t even reached it,” where envy levels everyone down, and where the individual capitalist is replaced by “the community as universal capitalist.” The key point is that the evils of capitalism, most basically exploitation, while inherent in capitalism, are not unique to it, nor to slavery or feudalism. These evils are endemic, Marx says in Capital, to any society in which workers do not control the means of production; it is simply the mode of exploitation that changes. Therefore it is crucial not just to be against capitalism, but to be clear about why capitalism needs replaced.

We live today in an era in which socialism has largely lost its meaning and relevance, at least in the mainstream. Socialism’s meaning is distorted by an endless variety of parties, movements and states all claiming to be socialist. The profusion of social democratic, Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist governments over the past century which have failed to carry out their promised “socialist” objectives has dealt a serious blow to the integrity of the very concept of socialism and is largely responsible for its marginalization today. Supposed “socialist” parties  out for power have proved no better, as cultism, bureaucratization, and reformism has crippled virtually every such grouping until they are able to amass only a handful of members. We also are obliged to admit that despite our own unique insightful critique of party structures with their perils of leadership and reformism and despite stressing the importance of working class self-activity we too have had little success in implanting ourselves or our ideas within the struggles of working class. We offer no easy answers, nor present a pure version of any one revolutionary theory that can be mechanically applied only provide a ruthless criticism of everything that exists and a willingness to learn from our mistakes as we move forward.

Raise the red flag and always remember that “the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves”!