An authentic mood of revolt had been swelling up in Russia for some time before 1917, with a previous attempted revolution in 1905-06 violently repressed by the tsarist regime.
If it's any consolation, Trotsky famously met the business end of an ice-pick.
Whenever I think of the brutality of early-days Bolsheviks, recalling accounts of the Checka's activities is enough to remind me of the pure psychopathy at the heart of the beast.
The details surrounding the Bolsheviks' disposal of the Romanovs (Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and their anemic son) are also as instructive as they are harrowing.
Voline: “Their system depends on deception and violence, as in any authoritarian and state system, which necessarily dominates, exploits and oppresses. … The statist ‘communist’ regime is just another kind of fascist regime” — Which is hardly surprising, given their connection to Wall Street.
‘Liberty or death.’ Indeed. Brilliant stuff - thank you Paul. I am currently planning to live an anarchist Christian/Buddhist life in central Portugal - insh-Allah - if anyone would like to join me?
Fascinating look at the history. And it helps give some backdrop to the next assault on Ukraine, in the early 30s, directed once more at the kulaks or small independent farmers, again condemned as counter-revolutionary. Which both give resonance to the Ukraine-Russia enmity, ongoing.
"Socialism only makes sense if it is the people who govern, not the machines, the capital, or a class of aristocrats who call themselves communists". Exactly.
Actually, I believe the Bolsheviks lasted for just a few years before Stalin purged all the original revolutionaries. He was the only one "left" standing. No pun intended, as he was more totalitarian than a democratic socialist.
In fact, "around 5,000 American soldiers were part of an allied expedition to intervene in the ongoing Russian civil war against the "Red" Bolshevik forces. For a little over a year, the American Expeditionary Force in North Russia fought to give the anti-Bolshevik "White" Russians the upper hand."
The Western ruling class was so terrified by this revolution that the British monarchy would not give refuge to the Czar and his family in fear that it would trigger a prole revolt in England.
At the beginning of the 20th Century workers were uniting throughout the West and unions were becoming powerful and not yet co-opted. The newspaper reporters were muckrakers from the working-class and regularly wrote about worker exploitation.
What's interesting to note, is that many believe the 1917 Russian Revolution was funded by Wall Street banksters who wanted to get rid of the Czar, but once that was done quickly ensured Stalinism followed.
Yes, I see it's mentioned on p. 32 referencing Sutton's book.
Even then the banksters wanted to balkanize Russia for its abundant resources. Koch worked with Stalin on extracting oil. And the Post family couldn't wait to scavenge Faberge eggs.
but you don't understand that a revolution was taking place that overthrew the ancient feudal system at its foundation, and the anarchists did not have the strength to repel the forces of the counter-revolution, only the Bolsheviks could do so.
The bankers perhaps financed the revolution in the early days, given that at the beginning it had different souls, Mensheviks, bourgeois, anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, etc. One of the leaders of the revolution was Kerensky, who was certainly not a Bolshevik. But I don't think that when the Bolsheviks took power they continued to do so, in fact the Russian and international banks, still in the hands of the capitalists, suspended all accounts and it was one of the big problems that the Bolsheviks had to face.
As for the soviets, they were real bottom-up assemblies of workers, peasants and soldiers, I'm talking about the times of the revolution. Think of the heroic sailors' soviet of Kronstad, then massacred by the Bolshevik guards themselves, for fear that it was infiltrated by the Korlinovists and counter-revolutionaries.
the Mensheviks were in favor of a bourgeois parliament and thought that the revolution had lasted too long, they wanted to eliminate the Bolsheviks from the new government and open up to the bourgeoisie and also to the old tsarist ruling class. Not even the anarchists had the strength to oppose the terrible class war from above that the opponents of the revolution were unleashing.
This would lead to the massacre of the Bolsheviks.
Only Marxists could do this. That's why everyone wanted to take them out. It was a clash not only of power, but political, radical, the word ideological, when talking about Marxist revolution, makes less sense...
I would add that the entire bourgeois and aristocratic world, even the moderate socialists, hated the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were considered the devil, and to survive they sometimes became one, but less and less than their capitalist antagonists, who as far as the devil was concerned, had Mammon and enriched themselves with the genocides of entire populations, with slavery practiced as a means of economic accumulation , continuous wars and intensive exploitation of the working class. As they do even now.
Remember also that even the anarchist Kropotkin voted in favor of the First World War, a bloodbath that also caused the Russian Revolution.
In a later section of this essay, I look at the seeds of Marxist ideology as presented in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto:
Marx and Engels are not shy about setting out the authoritarian means that will be needed
to keep the wheel of industrial and financial expansion turning.
They declare (and this is in 1848, remember, 70 years before events in Russia): “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on
the rights of property”.
And they demand:
- “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State
capital and an exclusive monopoly”.
- “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State”.
- “Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State”.
This sort of society is, of course, utterly alien to the desires of most ordinary people, which is
why “despotic” measures would be required.
Their New Order/Normal would also have to involve the smashing apart of old customs and
communities in a “radical rupture with traditional ideas”.
It is clear from all of this that the seeds of the brutal authoritarianism and repression seen
in communist Russia were present in Marxist thinking right from the start.
While there are no doubt followers of Marx who do not support these toxic elements, they are
embedded within the ideology and will always be available as a theoretical backdoor for pragmatic authoritarianism.
yes, but it was a class war, and only with a class war from below can you oppose it. Think of ancient Rome, of the plebeian tribunes Caius and Tiberius Gracchus and what happened to them, Marx considers it the prime example of class war.
Marx talks about commodity fetishism.
Now we can no longer even understand the concept of alienation, of commodity fetishism, but it is from there that we arrive at the current absurdity, in which a group of oligarchs, from above, claims the right to control bodies and minds as goods. But it's a long story, this is the history of capitalism, nothing has changed, it's the new metamorphosis of capitalism.
Marx wrote in Capital that English port cities became wealthy cities of empire thanks to the slave trade from Africa to America.
Here are some passages from Marx's Capital, which I have tried to summarize in some points: In the Peace of Utrecht, between March and April 1713, England extorted from Spain, with the Treaty of Asiento (the Spaniards called asiento the permits for traffic with the colonies, otherwise a monopoly of the mother country.) the privilege of carrying out from that moment the black trade, 'asiento de negros', (which until then the English had only carried out between Africa and the West Indies English), also between Africa and Spanish America.
England obtained the right to supply Spanish America with 4,800 blacks per year until 1743. In this way, English smuggling was also officially covered.
Liverpool and the major English port cities became thriving cities thanks to the slave trade that was their original method of accumulation. (the one that then allowed them to make the leap into industrialization, in short the industrial revolution).
''And to this day the "honourables" of Liverpool have remained the Pindars, the singers, of the slave trade, which - see the writing of Dr. Aikin of 1795 - «heightens the spirit of commercial initiative to the point of passion, trains magnificent sailors and makes enormous sums of money».
The cotton industry, by introducing child slavery into England, at the same time gave the impetus to the transformation of the slave economy in the United States, previously more or less patriarchal, into a system of commercial exploitation.
Typically, the veiled slavery of wage laborers in Europe needed the pedestal of sans phrase slavery in the New World.
Liverpool grew fat on the slave trade. This was his primitive accumulation method. Liverpool employed 15 ships in the slave trade in 1730; in 1751, 53 ships; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792, 132.ships.
If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a stain of blood on a cheek,” capital drips from head to toe, from every pore, blood and dirt. '' Karl Marx. Capital, chapter 1
I believe in the value of dialogue, each person has their own idea of the meaning of history and the value of struggle. I don't want you to think like me, for sure.
But regarding the question you posed, I think that the Bolsheviks were a revolutionary vanguard, and only in this way is a revolution possible.
This is also the thesis of george jackson in Blood in My Eyes.
There is an article by the Dutch economist Kees van der Pijl, "Governments turn against citizens as if they were at war against them", which explains the issue well:
''The fact is that in our part of the world governments turn against the people, acting as if they are at war with them.
The methods of struggle used for this derive from the colonial expansion of capitalism. They were always directed against foreign peoples that white settlers and imperialists found in their path, from North American Indians to Vietnamese and Afghans, but now they are being deployed against their own populations on the home front.
States, sovereign in name, have been relegated to conduits of ruling class priorities. Such priorities are again implemented in all kinds of consultative bodies such as the World Economic Forum and formal supra-state bodies such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund and so on.(...) How governments Westerners are facing resistance? A resisting population consists of a small, active minority of rebels, a small group that actively fights oppression, and a large passive majority.
The aim of fighting the insurgency is also to gain the support of that passive majority.
who are they? The more you can know about a population, the better.
In this regard, we live in a golden age of repression, because people deposit their data day after day on the Internet.
Storing them is a breeze and all major companies .
After the victory of Mao's revolutionary army in China in 1949, it was clear that it was a radical vanguard that would not be given another chance to win the support of the passive majority.
After all, the Chinese people were not communists, but Chiang Kai-shek's government was so abhorred for its arbitrary rule and corruption that Mao's revolutionaries enjoyed the tacit support of the people.
On the other hand, in Western countries that have faced similar uprisings, both the British in Malacca and Kenya, France in Southeast Asia and North Africa, and the United States in Vietnam and Latin America, the doctrine of isolating the radical minority from the passive majority worked.
It is that model that is now being used against its own population due to the aforementioned, dual economic and existential crisis that is becoming increasingly visible after the financial collapse of 2008. All cards must be played to protect the loyalty of the passive majority; the representatives of the radical minority can therefore simply be eliminated one by one.
With the virus panic, we have seen this model applied successfully. The vast majority maintained trust in the WHO and in the governments that imposed the measures it issued on the population.''
Now I think that the Bolsheviks were the revolutionary vanguard that allowed the October Revolution, without them class struggle was not possible.
Do you remember how the Paris Commune of 1871 ended? The Commune was repressed and suffocated in blood: the Communards were killed by the army or deported. Their decimation at the wall of the Federates of the Père-Lachaise cemetery lasted a week....
This is the end of revolutions in capitalism, only with a war from below can we try to oppose it.
A "class war from below" does not involve the creation a secret police force to neutralise and silence ordinary people organising to defend their freedom against a new state dictatorship pretending to represent their interests!
Why do you feel the need to defend last-century "communist" totalitarianism?
Why not ditch that historical millstone round your neck and work with others to build a new popular resistance to the slavery of global Capital which is rooted in the love of freedom, decentralisation and organic cultural autonomies?
because it is one of the few historical examples (I underline the historical term) of class struggle from below that we have, even if I agree with you that anarchists have fought the hardest battles in the streets of the world, and in the Russian countryside, think of Nestor Makhno . There is no point in dividing ourselves in the fight from below, against the Masters. But I think about how the Paris Commune ended, or about the socialist states that were besieged and destroyed by the armies of the Empire all over the world, I think about how the peasants' war of 1525 ended, and about Thomas Muntzer and his words: ''Omnia sunt communia ''. Massacres and massacres. I have read Marx, perhaps not everything but I have read something, he is the most coherent, profound and honest thinker and it occurs to me that the England of the aristocratic Fabians has banned the study of Marxism in schools for some years. How the USSR was besieged, Cuba and Ho Chi Minh and George Jackson.
There is something dystopian in the enormous power of technology is a form of alienation, perhaps the most powerful form of alienation. It scares me and repels me, both here in the West and in China. Perhaps more in China, where the revolution socialist had come to subvert normal power relations and class dynamics. In other words, as Communists always do, he had committed the only real crime that a people can commit: Getting rid of its oppressors and subverting economic power relations, in a way. You wonder what goes wrong every time, because socialism only makes sense if it is the people who govern, not the machines, the capital, or a class of aristocrats who call themselves communists. Commodity fetishism and alienated labor for the production of capitalist goods are the exact opposite of Marxism, perhaps not even the exact opposite, which still sounds like a dialectical concept, capable of triggering a historical process of liberation; they are the annihilation at the basis of every true Marxist thought, they suffocate it, they suffocate the whole of human society, they are bad, captivi, in the Latin sense of the term: they imprison.
But apart from that, China still has an at least partly socialist economic structure, a strong welfare state, and many goods are public. And in a Marxian way, it means that still something of the old revolution has remained alive. And here it stands out from the West, which is slaughtering that part of the world where a socialist economy still exists. It destroys and subverts states, territories, and peoples. And to the extent that China still has a socialist economy, then the West wants to destroy it. Like a heresy that must be eradicated from the face of the earth. It does not matter that China is in business with Washington, because even socialist Libya, (in the sense that it used its oil reserves for the welfare state and for the well-being of its people: its health, etc.) was razed to the ground
by its own business partners. It is called neoliberalism ... and it is based on wars. Then I am reminded of Brecht's poem, 'Not this interpretation', in which he protested against the consensus that came to him on the other side of the border (he had chosen to live in Soviet Germany, the GDR): `` Even the narrowest foreheads, where peace dwells, they are more welcome to the arts, than that friend of art, who is also a friend of the art of war. ''
at a certain point the Bolsheviks had against them the very powerful internal reaction, the Mensheviks, the Cossacks, and all the European and not only European nations. This is reality. Lenin knew from Marx, in his writing on the Paris Commune, that if the Communards occupied the Central Bank, they would have a real chance of succeeding. But in the early days no Russian bank was willing to collaborate with the Bolsheviks. It's a fact. The Russian revolution was a complex and controversial affair, just think of Kronstadt, in which the Bolsheviks acted like butchers against other Marxist comrades (by the way, Kronstadt was a sailors' soviet, of worker and peasant origin), and the treatment they reserved for Nestor Makhno and his troops, without whom, in the endless Russian campaigns, the revolution would have been lost;
and to the massacres of anarchists and early communists themselves. But the Bolsheviks were also massacred en masse by the Kornilovists, the Black Guards, the Cadets and the Imperial Army, and by the imperialist armies outside Russia. Their ranks were full of spies and agents provocateurs. They were subjected to a continuous siege both inside the country and outside. It's not every day to overthrow a thousand-year-old empire and an entire ruling class and proclaim Soviet communism. The Bolsheviks were certainly not saints, far from it, but Lenin knew from Saint-Juste that ''Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n' ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.''
[Those who make revolutions halfway are only digging a grave for themselves.]
At that point they could only move forward and continue fighting, it was a civil war, as well as an external war.
We know who took power in 1917 in Russia. They were the Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, i.e. bottom-up assemblies that decided the actions of the new government. Hence the name of the Soviet Union. Factories for workers and lands for farmers, and the end of the world imperialist war which was causing millions of deaths and suffering. In fact, the backbone of the Revolution of '17 was the army, it was the soldiers, who mutinied en masse so as not to die like flies in the name of the arbitrariness of the czars, capitalists and master classes, including the Church, which sent its military chaplains blessing the dead. The millions who died in the First World War were mainly farmers and workers, sent into disarray by their very religious sovereigns in a crazy fratricidal world war.
One of the first initiatives implemented by the new Soviet government was the abolition of large landholdings (read large estates).
Lenin read the decree on land: ''All large agrarian estates, all lands belonging to the crown, monasteries, church, ... are placed at the disposal of the Agrarian Land Committees and the District Peasants' Soviets... ''.
A great Reset yes, but the opposite of what they are preparing for us in Davos, a Reset from below.
The October Revolution was an experiment that upset the natural order of things which has always established the right of the strongest to decide and legislate, and absolute power by divine right, at least in Russia, over endless masses, deprived of rights , voiceless, reduced to subhumans, oppressed by ecclesiastical dogmas, kept in total ignorance. It is known that Siberia already functioned very well under the Holy Imperial Crown, the idea had in fact been that of the tsars....
The Bolsheviks took that power which in Russia had always been denied by divine right to the masses, thanks to the participation of a part of the Russian people, of the army, of representatives of the working class and, in part, but only in part , of the peasants, the question is controversial, (that the anarchist Nestor Makhno who knew them well took them). They obtained it with an act of force, with the soldiers who mutinied from their superiors to join the revolution, overthrowing the previous feudal power that had lasted for centuries, and was based, yes, on force, arbitrariness and assassination.
This is how it goes in revolutions...
Or at least they tried to do it, it's another thing to decide if they really succeeded...
The so-called Soviet "dictatorship" in fact it crumbled under the shock wave of a much more powerful and pervasive totalitarianism: neoliberalism, the tremendous force of global financial power and multinationals. We are all in this together, even ex-communist China.
As in Plato's Cave we are inside and we talk about 'Soviet dictatorship', without realizing that we have fallen into the era of the infinite multiplication of goods, the ruthless dictatorship of profit as an end in itself, of perhaps 50 multinationals, even less, which it is driving the earth as we know it to its extinction. Where war, even nuclear, has now become the fastest method to govern and rob entire continents. They are wars of robbery, those are happening now, not revolutions, unfortunately.
Not sure how you can read the article and still insist that the Bolshevik power-grab came "from below"! Unless you are claiming that Voline's account is fictitious? Later parts of this essay will explain that the USSR and its authoritarian and centralised industrialist system was very much part of what you rightly describe as "the ruthless dictatorship of profit".
I think it makes sense to see the Covid scam as global (ongoing) war against the working class (as well as the much of the middle class too). As a political philosophy, anarchism failed as pathetically (as any other "-ism" out there) not only to fight against this ruling class attack, failed to recognize it as an attack but has joined the war on the side of the ruling class as storm troopers against those few fighting against it. So, I gather from your article that we should see anarchism as a way forward? When it has failed and continues to fail so miserably? This is not to say that anarchism doesn't have positive things to say, but then so does socialism, communism and Marxism (as well as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism who have all failed too (as demonstrated post Oct 7th 2023)).
What I am saying is that authentic resistance to the centralised industrialist system needs to be pushing decentralisation and anti-industrialism. Otherwise it will be compatible with - and could be easily used by - the criminocratic system. Although many of us have been inspired by anarchists of the past, today's anarchist movement has lost track of the original sense of the idea, as I have repeatedly stressed. Rather than seeking to revive old divisions, my wish would be that genuine opponents to the system could converge under a new banner. In my view, as set out in this essay, socialism/communism does not fit the bill, and in fact neither does corrupted contemporary anarchism, nor or course elements of the "freedom movement" that fail to address the fundamental problems in our society, particularly "development", economic growth and industrialism. The apparently politically-neutral issue of "development" is key, in my view. I wrote about that here: https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/08/02/a-developing-evil-the-malignant-historical-force-behind-the-great-reset/
I think your comment here is solid. However, I didn't get that from reading the piece you posted today. I respect what you are doing in general, but I am going to ask the unanswered question in my initial post again: Why resurrect these tired old arguments? They will not be resolved. You have more in common with those few old socialists and Marxists who saw thru the Covid scam than the new evangelists of capital on the right who also see thru (as least part) of the Great Reset agenda. It seems counter-productive.
Rather than seeking to revive old divisions, my wish would be that genuine opponents to the system could converge under a new banner. In my view, as set out in this essay, socialism/communism does not fit the bill, and in fact neither does corrupted contemporary anarchism, nor or course elements of the "freedom movement" that fail to address the fundamental problems in our society, particularly "development", economic growth and industrialism. The apparently politically-neutral issue of "development" is key, in my view. I wrote about that here: https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/08/02/a-developing-evil-the-malignant-historical-force-behind-the-great-reset/
Nicholas II and the Romanov had direct connection to Wallstreet. This is where the whole alternative explanation of what happened breaks down. We are given an unbelievable official history that some workers' leaders from the goodness of their hearts with support of the masses destroyed the monarchy when everybody was against them. And the alternative explanation spread by the whites and Churchil, and conspiracy literature is that it was "the jews", Wallstreet and jewish bankers. And the problem with this is that the Romanovs were part of the club. Directly connected to the Round table and the American Eastern Establishment. Kiril Vladimirovich financed them through the SOSJ while spreading rumors of the jewish conspiracy. Why the head of the Romanovs finances the financers of the Bolsheviks?
Good one!
Random thoughts:
If it's any consolation, Trotsky famously met the business end of an ice-pick.
Whenever I think of the brutality of early-days Bolsheviks, recalling accounts of the Checka's activities is enough to remind me of the pure psychopathy at the heart of the beast.
The details surrounding the Bolsheviks' disposal of the Romanovs (Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and their anemic son) are also as instructive as they are harrowing.
Voline: “Their system depends on deception and violence, as in any authoritarian and state system, which necessarily dominates, exploits and oppresses. … The statist ‘communist’ regime is just another kind of fascist regime” — Which is hardly surprising, given their connection to Wall Street.
It's always a power grab, under the pretense of fighting it. I'm reminded of these lines (from https://redpillpoems.substack.com/p/wokeworld-take-2):
“…pretending
— in the spirit of their virulent hoax —
that their goals were entirely noble
and their methods beyond reproach
as they feigned a burning concern
for their fellow sisters and brothers
when the aim of their long-plotted plague
of weaponized infantile outrage
had always been nothing
but the wielding of power over others.”
‘Liberty or death.’ Indeed. Brilliant stuff - thank you Paul. I am currently planning to live an anarchist Christian/Buddhist life in central Portugal - insh-Allah - if anyone would like to join me?
Fascinating look at the history. And it helps give some backdrop to the next assault on Ukraine, in the early 30s, directed once more at the kulaks or small independent farmers, again condemned as counter-revolutionary. Which both give resonance to the Ukraine-Russia enmity, ongoing.
I don't know anything. It feels like this is happening right now.
"Socialism only makes sense if it is the people who govern, not the machines, the capital, or a class of aristocrats who call themselves communists". Exactly.
Actually, I believe the Bolsheviks lasted for just a few years before Stalin purged all the original revolutionaries. He was the only one "left" standing. No pun intended, as he was more totalitarian than a democratic socialist.
In fact, "around 5,000 American soldiers were part of an allied expedition to intervene in the ongoing Russian civil war against the "Red" Bolshevik forces. For a little over a year, the American Expeditionary Force in North Russia fought to give the anti-Bolshevik "White" Russians the upper hand."
The Western ruling class was so terrified by this revolution that the British monarchy would not give refuge to the Czar and his family in fear that it would trigger a prole revolt in England.
At the beginning of the 20th Century workers were uniting throughout the West and unions were becoming powerful and not yet co-opted. The newspaper reporters were muckrakers from the working-class and regularly wrote about worker exploitation.
What's interesting to note, is that many believe the 1917 Russian Revolution was funded by Wall Street banksters who wanted to get rid of the Czar, but once that was done quickly ensured Stalinism followed.
That last point about "Wall Street" is addressed later in the essay... https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/the-false-red-flag-.pdf
Yes, I see it's mentioned on p. 32 referencing Sutton's book.
Even then the banksters wanted to balkanize Russia for its abundant resources. Koch worked with Stalin on extracting oil. And the Post family couldn't wait to scavenge Faberge eggs.
but you don't understand that a revolution was taking place that overthrew the ancient feudal system at its foundation, and the anarchists did not have the strength to repel the forces of the counter-revolution, only the Bolsheviks could do so.
The bankers perhaps financed the revolution in the early days, given that at the beginning it had different souls, Mensheviks, bourgeois, anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, etc. One of the leaders of the revolution was Kerensky, who was certainly not a Bolshevik. But I don't think that when the Bolsheviks took power they continued to do so, in fact the Russian and international banks, still in the hands of the capitalists, suspended all accounts and it was one of the big problems that the Bolsheviks had to face.
As for the soviets, they were real bottom-up assemblies of workers, peasants and soldiers, I'm talking about the times of the revolution. Think of the heroic sailors' soviet of Kronstad, then massacred by the Bolshevik guards themselves, for fear that it was infiltrated by the Korlinovists and counter-revolutionaries.
the Mensheviks were in favor of a bourgeois parliament and thought that the revolution had lasted too long, they wanted to eliminate the Bolsheviks from the new government and open up to the bourgeoisie and also to the old tsarist ruling class. Not even the anarchists had the strength to oppose the terrible class war from above that the opponents of the revolution were unleashing.
This would lead to the massacre of the Bolsheviks.
Only Marxists could do this. That's why everyone wanted to take them out. It was a clash not only of power, but political, radical, the word ideological, when talking about Marxist revolution, makes less sense...
I would add that the entire bourgeois and aristocratic world, even the moderate socialists, hated the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were considered the devil, and to survive they sometimes became one, but less and less than their capitalist antagonists, who as far as the devil was concerned, had Mammon and enriched themselves with the genocides of entire populations, with slavery practiced as a means of economic accumulation , continuous wars and intensive exploitation of the working class. As they do even now.
Remember also that even the anarchist Kropotkin voted in favor of the First World War, a bloodbath that also caused the Russian Revolution.
In a later section of this essay, I look at the seeds of Marxist ideology as presented in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto:
Marx and Engels are not shy about setting out the authoritarian means that will be needed
to keep the wheel of industrial and financial expansion turning.
They declare (and this is in 1848, remember, 70 years before events in Russia): “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on
the rights of property”.
And they demand:
- “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State
capital and an exclusive monopoly”.
- “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State”.
- “Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State”.
This sort of society is, of course, utterly alien to the desires of most ordinary people, which is
why “despotic” measures would be required.
Their New Order/Normal would also have to involve the smashing apart of old customs and
communities in a “radical rupture with traditional ideas”.
It is clear from all of this that the seeds of the brutal authoritarianism and repression seen
in communist Russia were present in Marxist thinking right from the start.
While there are no doubt followers of Marx who do not support these toxic elements, they are
embedded within the ideology and will always be available as a theoretical backdoor for pragmatic authoritarianism.
yes, but it was a class war, and only with a class war from below can you oppose it. Think of ancient Rome, of the plebeian tribunes Caius and Tiberius Gracchus and what happened to them, Marx considers it the prime example of class war.
Marx talks about commodity fetishism.
Now we can no longer even understand the concept of alienation, of commodity fetishism, but it is from there that we arrive at the current absurdity, in which a group of oligarchs, from above, claims the right to control bodies and minds as goods. But it's a long story, this is the history of capitalism, nothing has changed, it's the new metamorphosis of capitalism.
Marx wrote in Capital that English port cities became wealthy cities of empire thanks to the slave trade from Africa to America.
Here are some passages from Marx's Capital, which I have tried to summarize in some points: In the Peace of Utrecht, between March and April 1713, England extorted from Spain, with the Treaty of Asiento (the Spaniards called asiento the permits for traffic with the colonies, otherwise a monopoly of the mother country.) the privilege of carrying out from that moment the black trade, 'asiento de negros', (which until then the English had only carried out between Africa and the West Indies English), also between Africa and Spanish America.
England obtained the right to supply Spanish America with 4,800 blacks per year until 1743. In this way, English smuggling was also officially covered.
Liverpool and the major English port cities became thriving cities thanks to the slave trade that was their original method of accumulation. (the one that then allowed them to make the leap into industrialization, in short the industrial revolution).
''And to this day the "honourables" of Liverpool have remained the Pindars, the singers, of the slave trade, which - see the writing of Dr. Aikin of 1795 - «heightens the spirit of commercial initiative to the point of passion, trains magnificent sailors and makes enormous sums of money».
The cotton industry, by introducing child slavery into England, at the same time gave the impetus to the transformation of the slave economy in the United States, previously more or less patriarchal, into a system of commercial exploitation.
Typically, the veiled slavery of wage laborers in Europe needed the pedestal of sans phrase slavery in the New World.
Liverpool grew fat on the slave trade. This was his primitive accumulation method. Liverpool employed 15 ships in the slave trade in 1730; in 1751, 53 ships; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792, 132.ships.
If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a stain of blood on a cheek,” capital drips from head to toe, from every pore, blood and dirt. '' Karl Marx. Capital, chapter 1
I believe in the value of dialogue, each person has their own idea of the meaning of history and the value of struggle. I don't want you to think like me, for sure.
But regarding the question you posed, I think that the Bolsheviks were a revolutionary vanguard, and only in this way is a revolution possible.
This is also the thesis of george jackson in Blood in My Eyes.
https://ia803400.us.archive.org/31/items/george-jackson-blood-in-my-eye/george%20jackson%20-%20blood%20in%20my%20eye.pdf
There is an article by the Dutch economist Kees van der Pijl, "Governments turn against citizens as if they were at war against them", which explains the issue well:
''The fact is that in our part of the world governments turn against the people, acting as if they are at war with them.
The methods of struggle used for this derive from the colonial expansion of capitalism. They were always directed against foreign peoples that white settlers and imperialists found in their path, from North American Indians to Vietnamese and Afghans, but now they are being deployed against their own populations on the home front.
States, sovereign in name, have been relegated to conduits of ruling class priorities. Such priorities are again implemented in all kinds of consultative bodies such as the World Economic Forum and formal supra-state bodies such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund and so on.(...) How governments Westerners are facing resistance? A resisting population consists of a small, active minority of rebels, a small group that actively fights oppression, and a large passive majority.
The aim of fighting the insurgency is also to gain the support of that passive majority.
who are they? The more you can know about a population, the better.
In this regard, we live in a golden age of repression, because people deposit their data day after day on the Internet.
Storing them is a breeze and all major companies .
After the victory of Mao's revolutionary army in China in 1949, it was clear that it was a radical vanguard that would not be given another chance to win the support of the passive majority.
After all, the Chinese people were not communists, but Chiang Kai-shek's government was so abhorred for its arbitrary rule and corruption that Mao's revolutionaries enjoyed the tacit support of the people.
On the other hand, in Western countries that have faced similar uprisings, both the British in Malacca and Kenya, France in Southeast Asia and North Africa, and the United States in Vietnam and Latin America, the doctrine of isolating the radical minority from the passive majority worked.
It is that model that is now being used against its own population due to the aforementioned, dual economic and existential crisis that is becoming increasingly visible after the financial collapse of 2008. All cards must be played to protect the loyalty of the passive majority; the representatives of the radical minority can therefore simply be eliminated one by one.
With the virus panic, we have seen this model applied successfully. The vast majority maintained trust in the WHO and in the governments that imposed the measures it issued on the population.''
https://www.cafeweltschmerz.nl/kees-van-der-pijl-overheden-keren-zich-tegen-eigen-bevolking-alsof-zij-daarmee-in-oorlog-zijn/
Now I think that the Bolsheviks were the revolutionary vanguard that allowed the October Revolution, without them class struggle was not possible.
Do you remember how the Paris Commune of 1871 ended? The Commune was repressed and suffocated in blood: the Communards were killed by the army or deported. Their decimation at the wall of the Federates of the Père-Lachaise cemetery lasted a week....
This is the end of revolutions in capitalism, only with a war from below can we try to oppose it.
A "class war from below" does not involve the creation a secret police force to neutralise and silence ordinary people organising to defend their freedom against a new state dictatorship pretending to represent their interests!
Why do you feel the need to defend last-century "communist" totalitarianism?
Why not ditch that historical millstone round your neck and work with others to build a new popular resistance to the slavery of global Capital which is rooted in the love of freedom, decentralisation and organic cultural autonomies?
because it is one of the few historical examples (I underline the historical term) of class struggle from below that we have, even if I agree with you that anarchists have fought the hardest battles in the streets of the world, and in the Russian countryside, think of Nestor Makhno . There is no point in dividing ourselves in the fight from below, against the Masters. But I think about how the Paris Commune ended, or about the socialist states that were besieged and destroyed by the armies of the Empire all over the world, I think about how the peasants' war of 1525 ended, and about Thomas Muntzer and his words: ''Omnia sunt communia ''. Massacres and massacres. I have read Marx, perhaps not everything but I have read something, he is the most coherent, profound and honest thinker and it occurs to me that the England of the aristocratic Fabians has banned the study of Marxism in schools for some years. How the USSR was besieged, Cuba and Ho Chi Minh and George Jackson.
There is something dystopian in the enormous power of technology is a form of alienation, perhaps the most powerful form of alienation. It scares me and repels me, both here in the West and in China. Perhaps more in China, where the revolution socialist had come to subvert normal power relations and class dynamics. In other words, as Communists always do, he had committed the only real crime that a people can commit: Getting rid of its oppressors and subverting economic power relations, in a way. You wonder what goes wrong every time, because socialism only makes sense if it is the people who govern, not the machines, the capital, or a class of aristocrats who call themselves communists. Commodity fetishism and alienated labor for the production of capitalist goods are the exact opposite of Marxism, perhaps not even the exact opposite, which still sounds like a dialectical concept, capable of triggering a historical process of liberation; they are the annihilation at the basis of every true Marxist thought, they suffocate it, they suffocate the whole of human society, they are bad, captivi, in the Latin sense of the term: they imprison.
But apart from that, China still has an at least partly socialist economic structure, a strong welfare state, and many goods are public. And in a Marxian way, it means that still something of the old revolution has remained alive. And here it stands out from the West, which is slaughtering that part of the world where a socialist economy still exists. It destroys and subverts states, territories, and peoples. And to the extent that China still has a socialist economy, then the West wants to destroy it. Like a heresy that must be eradicated from the face of the earth. It does not matter that China is in business with Washington, because even socialist Libya, (in the sense that it used its oil reserves for the welfare state and for the well-being of its people: its health, etc.) was razed to the ground
by its own business partners. It is called neoliberalism ... and it is based on wars. Then I am reminded of Brecht's poem, 'Not this interpretation', in which he protested against the consensus that came to him on the other side of the border (he had chosen to live in Soviet Germany, the GDR): `` Even the narrowest foreheads, where peace dwells, they are more welcome to the arts, than that friend of art, who is also a friend of the art of war. ''
at a certain point the Bolsheviks had against them the very powerful internal reaction, the Mensheviks, the Cossacks, and all the European and not only European nations. This is reality. Lenin knew from Marx, in his writing on the Paris Commune, that if the Communards occupied the Central Bank, they would have a real chance of succeeding. But in the early days no Russian bank was willing to collaborate with the Bolsheviks. It's a fact. The Russian revolution was a complex and controversial affair, just think of Kronstadt, in which the Bolsheviks acted like butchers against other Marxist comrades (by the way, Kronstadt was a sailors' soviet, of worker and peasant origin), and the treatment they reserved for Nestor Makhno and his troops, without whom, in the endless Russian campaigns, the revolution would have been lost;
and to the massacres of anarchists and early communists themselves. But the Bolsheviks were also massacred en masse by the Kornilovists, the Black Guards, the Cadets and the Imperial Army, and by the imperialist armies outside Russia. Their ranks were full of spies and agents provocateurs. They were subjected to a continuous siege both inside the country and outside. It's not every day to overthrow a thousand-year-old empire and an entire ruling class and proclaim Soviet communism. The Bolsheviks were certainly not saints, far from it, but Lenin knew from Saint-Juste that ''Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n' ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.''
[Those who make revolutions halfway are only digging a grave for themselves.]
At that point they could only move forward and continue fighting, it was a civil war, as well as an external war.
We know who took power in 1917 in Russia. They were the Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers, i.e. bottom-up assemblies that decided the actions of the new government. Hence the name of the Soviet Union. Factories for workers and lands for farmers, and the end of the world imperialist war which was causing millions of deaths and suffering. In fact, the backbone of the Revolution of '17 was the army, it was the soldiers, who mutinied en masse so as not to die like flies in the name of the arbitrariness of the czars, capitalists and master classes, including the Church, which sent its military chaplains blessing the dead. The millions who died in the First World War were mainly farmers and workers, sent into disarray by their very religious sovereigns in a crazy fratricidal world war.
One of the first initiatives implemented by the new Soviet government was the abolition of large landholdings (read large estates).
Lenin read the decree on land: ''All large agrarian estates, all lands belonging to the crown, monasteries, church, ... are placed at the disposal of the Agrarian Land Committees and the District Peasants' Soviets... ''.
A great Reset yes, but the opposite of what they are preparing for us in Davos, a Reset from below.
The October Revolution was an experiment that upset the natural order of things which has always established the right of the strongest to decide and legislate, and absolute power by divine right, at least in Russia, over endless masses, deprived of rights , voiceless, reduced to subhumans, oppressed by ecclesiastical dogmas, kept in total ignorance. It is known that Siberia already functioned very well under the Holy Imperial Crown, the idea had in fact been that of the tsars....
The Bolsheviks took that power which in Russia had always been denied by divine right to the masses, thanks to the participation of a part of the Russian people, of the army, of representatives of the working class and, in part, but only in part , of the peasants, the question is controversial, (that the anarchist Nestor Makhno who knew them well took them). They obtained it with an act of force, with the soldiers who mutinied from their superiors to join the revolution, overthrowing the previous feudal power that had lasted for centuries, and was based, yes, on force, arbitrariness and assassination.
This is how it goes in revolutions...
Or at least they tried to do it, it's another thing to decide if they really succeeded...
The so-called Soviet "dictatorship" in fact it crumbled under the shock wave of a much more powerful and pervasive totalitarianism: neoliberalism, the tremendous force of global financial power and multinationals. We are all in this together, even ex-communist China.
As in Plato's Cave we are inside and we talk about 'Soviet dictatorship', without realizing that we have fallen into the era of the infinite multiplication of goods, the ruthless dictatorship of profit as an end in itself, of perhaps 50 multinationals, even less, which it is driving the earth as we know it to its extinction. Where war, even nuclear, has now become the fastest method to govern and rob entire continents. They are wars of robbery, those are happening now, not revolutions, unfortunately.
https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/reed/ten-days-that-shook-the-world-reed.pdf
Not sure how you can read the article and still insist that the Bolshevik power-grab came "from below"! Unless you are claiming that Voline's account is fictitious? Later parts of this essay will explain that the USSR and its authoritarian and centralised industrialist system was very much part of what you rightly describe as "the ruthless dictatorship of profit".
Perhaps one day we shall refuse any who desire to win on such terms.
I think it makes sense to see the Covid scam as global (ongoing) war against the working class (as well as the much of the middle class too). As a political philosophy, anarchism failed as pathetically (as any other "-ism" out there) not only to fight against this ruling class attack, failed to recognize it as an attack but has joined the war on the side of the ruling class as storm troopers against those few fighting against it. So, I gather from your article that we should see anarchism as a way forward? When it has failed and continues to fail so miserably? This is not to say that anarchism doesn't have positive things to say, but then so does socialism, communism and Marxism (as well as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism who have all failed too (as demonstrated post Oct 7th 2023)).
Why resurrect these tired old arguments?
What I am saying is that authentic resistance to the centralised industrialist system needs to be pushing decentralisation and anti-industrialism. Otherwise it will be compatible with - and could be easily used by - the criminocratic system. Although many of us have been inspired by anarchists of the past, today's anarchist movement has lost track of the original sense of the idea, as I have repeatedly stressed. Rather than seeking to revive old divisions, my wish would be that genuine opponents to the system could converge under a new banner. In my view, as set out in this essay, socialism/communism does not fit the bill, and in fact neither does corrupted contemporary anarchism, nor or course elements of the "freedom movement" that fail to address the fundamental problems in our society, particularly "development", economic growth and industrialism. The apparently politically-neutral issue of "development" is key, in my view. I wrote about that here: https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/08/02/a-developing-evil-the-malignant-historical-force-behind-the-great-reset/
I think your comment here is solid. However, I didn't get that from reading the piece you posted today. I respect what you are doing in general, but I am going to ask the unanswered question in my initial post again: Why resurrect these tired old arguments? They will not be resolved. You have more in common with those few old socialists and Marxists who saw thru the Covid scam than the new evangelists of capital on the right who also see thru (as least part) of the Great Reset agenda. It seems counter-productive.
But I did answer it:
Rather than seeking to revive old divisions, my wish would be that genuine opponents to the system could converge under a new banner. In my view, as set out in this essay, socialism/communism does not fit the bill, and in fact neither does corrupted contemporary anarchism, nor or course elements of the "freedom movement" that fail to address the fundamental problems in our society, particularly "development", economic growth and industrialism. The apparently politically-neutral issue of "development" is key, in my view. I wrote about that here: https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/08/02/a-developing-evil-the-malignant-historical-force-behind-the-great-reset/
Nicholas II and the Romanov had direct connection to Wallstreet. This is where the whole alternative explanation of what happened breaks down. We are given an unbelievable official history that some workers' leaders from the goodness of their hearts with support of the masses destroyed the monarchy when everybody was against them. And the alternative explanation spread by the whites and Churchil, and conspiracy literature is that it was "the jews", Wallstreet and jewish bankers. And the problem with this is that the Romanovs were part of the club. Directly connected to the Round table and the American Eastern Establishment. Kiril Vladimirovich financed them through the SOSJ while spreading rumors of the jewish conspiracy. Why the head of the Romanovs finances the financers of the Bolsheviks?