The failure of Marxism

And the religious similarity does not end there. How many of us have not come across the sort of Marxist who answers a difficult question with a one or two line quotation from Karl? It need not even have any particular relevance, just as the born again Christian plucks quotes randomly from the Bible. But you are being dared to disagree with the great man himself and if you do you aren't a good Marxist, and if you aren't a good Marxist your socialism is at best weak and at worst quite suspect.

To even suggest that Marxism has failed can lead to a rolling of the eyes and a dismissal of one's case as ignorant, revisionist, utopian, reformist, or what ever insult you fancy yourself. It is as if some people can not see that the organised revolutionary left today is at its weakest for many years. It is not so much a question of the triumph of capitalism, however, as the failure of most of the ideologies of socialism. The collapse of both old style Labourism and the USSR has left the vast bulk of the left confused and demoralised, either dead, dying or repeating decades old slogans as if oblivious to all the changes that have happened since.

The bulk of the Marxist left came to consist of supporters of the Bolshevik tradition, divided - like the flavours of Heinz soup - into 57 varieties. Like the Labour parties they promised that if we put them into power they would sort out the problem for us. They may have recognised that the creation of socialism would first require the overthrow of capitalism but in power they have been every bit as anti-working class as the social democrats were, perhaps even more so. Their idea of building socialism after the revolution included smashing all working class organisation outside the control of their party - from factory committees to trade unions. This side of the revolution they spent more time squabbling over who was the real vanguard than anything else.

The conflict between Marxism and anarchism occurred over the question of the state. Could socialism be introduced by a minority, either using the existing state, or using one of their own creation after a revolution as the Marxists claim, or could socialism only be introduced through the actions of the working class itself? Now after the collapse of the eastern block and of the left inside the Labour parties it is clear that the statist path to socialism is a failure. Unfortunately such was the ideological dominance achieved by Marxism in the period after World War Two that for many this signals the end of socialism itself.

With the exception of small handfuls like the Dutch council communists or American DeLeonists, there are very few Marxists today who do not also support Leninism and the Bolshevik tradition. Therefore it is not unreasonable to look at the record of the Bolsheviks as representing Marxism in action.

The Russian revolution of 1917 has been a subject of key importance for over three quarters of a century now, for two reasons. The first reason is that for the first time in history a working class revolution succeeded in ousting the old ruling class. The second reason is that after the old ruling class was ousted a new class came to power. Those of us who want to make a revolution today must understand where the successes and failures of the past came from.

The Russian revolution demonstrated that it was possible for the working class to take over the running of the economy and to bring down their old rulers, not once but twice in a single year. After the February revolution of 1917 the workers entered into a period of almost constant struggle with the state and the bosses. At the start of this period many workers supported the Kerensky government. This struggle changed their attitudes on a mass scale and gave them the confidence to try to overturn all of the old order and privilege. Committees sprung up in the factories and the armed forces. In the run up to October the workers had already taken control of most of the factories. The purpose of the October revolution was to smash the state, destroying the power of the bosses to use armed force to recover their property.

There were several organisations arguing for a workers revolution in this period. This included many anarchists. They were however much fewer in number than the Bolshevik party which came to claim the revolution as its legacy alone. During the 1905 revolution the anarchists had raised the slogan "All power to the soviets", at the time this was opposed by what became the Bolshevik party but in 1917 they used this slogan to gain mass support. Other Marxists at the time were, incorrectly to accuse the Bolsheviks as having abandoned Marxism for Anarchism but as events were to show they had done no such thing.

The revolution was made by no single organisation, but rather was the work of the working class of Russia. But as usual it was the victors who were to write history, and Bolshevik history tends to be rather selective. Two small points to illustrate this.... how many of today's Marxists know that during the October revolution 4 anarchists were members of the Revolutionary Military Committee that co-ordinated the military side of the revolution, or that it was an anarchist sailor from the Kronstadt naval base led the delegation which dissolved the constituent assembly?

After October the working class of the Russia set about the process of building the new society on the ruins of the old. If they had succeeded there would be little need for this meeting today. However within a few short years the revolution had collapsed. The old bosses never came back as a class, although many individuals returned. Instead a new class of rulers arose, one which successfully incorporated many of the revolutionaries of 1917. If we are really to learn from history, then for socialists today there is a pressing task to understand not only why the revolution failed but also why it failed in such a manner. The fact the patient died is now obvious, the question today is what it died of.

Many socialists have tried to explain this degeneration of the revolution as a product of a unique set of circumstances, comprising the backward state of the USSR and the heavy toll inflicted by three years of civil war and western intervention. According to this theory the Bolsheviks were forced to take dictatorial measures in order to preserve the revolution. These were intended as emergency measures only and would have been repealed later but for Stalin's rise to power in the 20's. This interpretation of history presents the Bolsheviks as helpless victims of circumstances.

This is not a view anarchists accept. It is a view that falls beneath even a casual look at what occurred in the USSR between 1917 and 1921. It also collapses when you look at what Leninist ideology had stood for before and after the revolution. We instead lay the blame at the feet of Lenin and the Bolshevik party. The degeneration was part and parcel of the policies of the Bolsheviks.

What actually happened in this period was the replacement of all the organs of workers democracy and self-management with Bolshevik imposed state rule. One example of many is given by the factory committees. These were groups of workers elected at most factories before, during and after the October revolution. The delegates to these committees were mandatable and recallable. They were elected initially in order to prevent the individual bosses from sabotaging equipment. They quickly attempted to expanded their scope to cover the complete administration of the workplace and displaced the individual managers. As each workplace relied on many others to supply raw materials, power and to take their products on to the next stage of production the Factory Committees tried to federate in November 1917.

They were prevented from doing so by the Bolsheviks through the trade union bureaucracy. The planned 'All Russian Congress of Factory Committees" never took place. Instead the Bolshevik party decided to set up the "All Russian council of workers control", with only 25% of the delegates coming from the factory committees. In this way the creative energy of Russian workers which would have resulted in a co-ordinating centre not under Bolshevik control was blocked in favour of an organisation the party could control. This body was in itself stillborn, it only met once. In any case it was soon absorbed by the Supreme Economic Council set up in November 1917 which was attached to the Council of Peoples Commissars, itself entirely made up of Bolshevik party members.

So within a few short months of October the Bolsheviks had taken control of the economy out of the hands of the working class and into the hands of the Bolshevik party. This was before the civil war, at a time when the workers had showed themselves capable of making a revolution ....but according to the Bolsheviks incapable of running the economy. The basis of the Bolshevik attack on the factory committees was simple, the Bolsheviks wanted the factories to be owned and managed by the state, the factory committees wanted the factories to be owned and managed by the workers.

There were many anarchists involved in the factory committee movement at the time, mainly through the K.A.S., the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists. In some areas they were the dominant influence in the factories. The influence of the KAS was to grow rapidly in the unions, to the point where the Bolsheviks started to physically suppress its activists in 1918. At the first All-Russian council of trade unions the anarcho-syndicalists had delegates representing 75,000 workers. Their resolution calling for real workers control and not state control was defeated by an alliance of the Bolshevik, Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary Party delegates. By the end of 1918 workers control was replaced with individual management of the factories (by Bolshevik decree) and the KAS had been weakened by armed Cheka raids and the closing down of its national publication in April and May 1918.

All this occurred before the Civil war and the allied intervention attempted to smash the revolution. The civil war was to inflict terrible suffering on the Soviet Union as the combined forces of White generals and 17 foreign armies captured up to 60% of the land area and threatened to capture Petrograd. It also provided the excuse the Bolsheviks were to use for the suppression of workers control, but as we have seen this was a process that was already under way.

The civil war greatly weakened the ability of the working class to resist the further undermining of the gains they had made in 1917. During the civil war emphasis was placed on the need for unity to defeat the Whites. After the civil war a much weakened working class found itself faced with a complete state structure armed with all the repression apparatus of the modern state. Many of the dissident left wing activists had been jailed or executed by the Bolsheviks. In 1921 at the end of the civil war only a fresh revolution could have set the USSR back on the path towards socialism.

The important point is that the repression of workers democracy by the Bolsheviks was as a result of Marxist or Bolshevik ideology rather then due to character flaws in the Bolshevik leadership. Lenin had a very limited view of what socialism was, seeing it as little more then an extension of state capitalism. As he put it in his own words:

"State capitalism 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". The introduction of piece work and one-man management in the factories in 1918 and 1919 displays a similar fixation with managerial power.

Lenin believed that ordinary workers could not run society. A party of intellectuals was necessary to do this. He thought that workers were unable to go beyond having a "trade union consciousness" because of the fact they had no time to study socialism. Once again i his own words:

"there are many....who are not enlightened socialists and cannot be such because they have to slave in the factories and they have neither the time nor the opportunity to become socialists". Briefly in 1917 Lenin was forced to acknowledge this to be wrong when he admitted that the workers were 100 times ahead of the party from February to October. But unwilling to allow the facts to get in the way of a good theory he quickly reverted to his original position.

This position was the justification for the dictatorship of the party. In a modern sense it is the justification for putting the party before all else. Some Leninists today will happily argue that a socialist should have no principles beyond building the party and that even scabbing is excusable if it is in their party's interests. Leninist organisations tend to look at struggles purely in terms of recruitment, remaining involved just long enough to pick up one or two new members, then moving on to the next one. For the Leninists the chance of a revolution being successful is mainly determined by the size of their party at the time.

The Bolsheviks saw their party as comprising all the advanced revolutionaries - the vanguard. They saw socialism as something best implemented by a professional leadership. So when they talked of dictatorship of the proletariat they did not mean the working class as a whole exercising control of society. They meant the party holding power on behalf of the working class, and in practise the leadership of the party being the ones making all the important policy decisions.

They believed the party, because of its unique position was always right and therefore it had the right to rule over all the class. So, while the Soviets had been useful to the Bolsheviks up to the October revolution, after the revolution they became a threat. They could and did decide policy which would contradict the party line. Most of them were not sufficiently under the control of the party, as they contained many other revolutionaries also. So the Bolsheviks proceeded to turn them into organs which did little more than rubberstamp party decisions.

By 1918 this process had been advanced to the extent that the decision to sign the treaty of Brest-Livtosk, which surrendered a huge area of the revolutionary Ukraine to Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, was made at a party Central Committee meeting. Indeed the central committee was split, the decision going through only by one vote. The Soviets had no role at all in this decision making. This was long before the civil war and the famine was to be used as an excuse for such manoeuvres.

The success and failure throws up all the questions that still separate anarchism from all other socialist theories. Where do revolutionary ideas come from? Lenin was quite clear on this in 'What Is To Be Done'. "History in all countries attests that, on it's own, the working class cannot go beyond the level of trade union consciousness, the realisation that they must combine into trade unions, fight against the employers, force the governments to pass such laws as benefit the conditions of the workers....As for the socialist doctrine, it was constructed out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated members of the ruling class by intellectuals".

Anarchists on the other hand point to the creative energy of the working class, the creation of Soviets in 1905 and of the Hungarian Workers Councils in 1956, for instance, were spontaneous events unguided by any organisation.

Leninists see their party as representing the working class. This was the justification for the suppression of all rivals in 1918 by the Bolsheviks and for the closing down of factions inside their own party from 1918 to 1921. Trotsky, even more then Stalin or Lenin, was the most prominent supporter of what was called the party's historical birthright. In the early 20's he was to repeatedly use this idea of the party's birthright against minority groups and individuals in the Bolshevik party. The most astounding part of this however was the willingness of the same groups and individuals to accept this silencing in the name of the party. By the 30's this whole process was to reach its logical conclusion with Stalin's show trials of many of the old Bolshevik leadership.

The right of the Bolsheviks to dictate to the class was clearly expressed in 1921, by Trotsky at the 10th party congress. In attacking a faction within the Bolshevik party he said of them "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 were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy!" Here we have one of the clearest statements of the ideology behind Bolshevik practise. This is the road many of todays Marxists would like to lead us on to.

There is an entirely different project of how capitalism is to be overthrown and what is to replace it. Workers democracy is not merely icing on the cake or a step towards a workers state. We have no illusions in the neutrality of the state, no matter in whose hands power may lie. We wish to take part in the building of a workers movement not only capable of tearing down existing society but also of building a new society free of exploitation.

It is on this issue that anarchism's fundamental difference with Leninism is made clear. We agree with Lenin that authority can only be defeated by authority, that the authority of the bosses will be destroyed by the authority of the workers. We agree on the need for a lead to be given within the class. But while anarchist leadership is one of persuasion and education, the Marxist-Leninist party goes way beyond this and tries to grab power through control of the state. It seeks to exercise the authority of the party over the workers. In doing this it prepares the way for the growth of a new oppressive ruling class, as Lenin's Bolshevik party did in Russia.

There is much of use within Marxism, I do not propose to throw away the impressive economic analysis for instance, but as an ideology, as a tradition and as a guide for the future it has failed; and failed on a grand scale. Socialists must be prepared to question everything. And that includes Marxism. If the right tools are not chosen for the job, the job will not get done right.

Talk by Alan MacSimóin to the Trinity College Socialist Society, November 10th 1994