Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labor and Leninist Militant Reformism
The active approach of the Russian labour movement to the organization of the Councils at the beginning of the 20th century is a promise that everyone believes in. The fact that Bolshevism in general, and Lenin in particular, never took the councils movement of the working masses seriously is also a naked fact. Lenin’s view of the councils was a non-Marxian and socialist view. His expectation of the labour movement and the spontaneous councils of the working masses was to play the role of a conveyor belt to carry the Bolshevik Party to the deck of political power. The source of many of the inversions of left reformism, including the idea that unions are for normal conditions and councils are organs of mass uprising, soviets are formed to obey the command of the party of professional revolutionaries and begin the work of overthrowing the ruling state machine, and the like, must be sought in the theorizing and theories proposed by Lenin. The Councils were created on the direct initiative of the broad masses of the Russian working class and played an effective role in the 1905 revolution, but the first time Lenin refers to the Councils and insists on the importance of their presence is in the days after the February Revolution of 1917. It is during these days that the “April Theses” are formulated and the slogan “transfer of all power to the Councils” is emphasized. The fundamental question here is whether Lenin’s intention in proposing this slogan was actually to transfer all power to the Councils and pave the way for the socialist soviet society of the working masses. History has shown that this was unfortunately not the case, and what happened later was not an affirmative answer to this question, but a negative one. Lenin proposed this slogan as an alternative to the bourgeois Constituent Assembly. A slogan that could have been very appropriate, effective and radical. The Russian big bourgeoisie and the Mensheviks, beating their chests around the Constituent Assembly, insisted on the transfer of power to a conventional capitalist state and the consolidation of the “Alexander Kerensky” state machine. In response to this reactionary, anti-worker, and counter-revolutionary approach, Lenin took a radical and decisive initiative. He put forward the slogan of transferring all power to the Councils. A strategy that, if pursued from a socialist and anti-wage worker perspective, would have shaped the history of the October Revolution, perhaps the history of the revolutions of the 20th century, and perhaps the history of human life in the era in a different way than what we are witnessing. If pursued with a workers’ and anti-capitalist narrative, the slogan of “transferring all power to the Councils” had the capacity to ground the Russian bourgeoisie, save the revolution from theft, and remove it from the clutches of the capitalist class. The disaster occurred when it became clear that the real goal was not to transfer power to the Councils, but to exploit the power of the Councils to transfer all power to a party above the Russian working class. A process that began right after the October Revolution and was completed in a short period of time.
The replacement of the “socialist, universal, revolutionary, and soviet defines” by the regular, official army, the Red Army, was the first effective blow to the body of the council movement of the working class. There was, of course, a long list of real arguments for this. The devastating civil war, the disastrous incursion of the military forces of both opposing imperialist camps deep into Russian soil, the brutal resistance of the remnants of the Tsarist army, the support of all kinds of allies for the Tsarist generals, and the terrible consequences of the war in various places were all listed as clear arguments for the need to form an official army. The appearance of the matter became more justified when Lenin declared the formation of an official army to be a kind of forced retreat from the goals of the revolution. This meant that if there were no special emergency conditions, an official army would not have been formed. But this analysis or justification left many questions unanswered. First, where were the limits of these emergency conditions? All evidence suggests that what was called under this name lost its relevance within a year or two after the revolution. The Brest Peace was signed, the war ended, and the Allied forces withdrew from Russia. But the official army was not only not disbanded, but it became more organized, better equipped, and more productive than the day before. The second question was why the workers’ councils could not take on the task of defending the revolution, what planned effort was made to achieve this goal that failed? More importantly, in which territories did the workers’ councils find an opportunity to play a role that they did not in the military defence of the goals of the revolution. It seems that the answer to all these questions is negative. The question is not whether Lenin was enamoured with the official army or even did not understand its contradiction with socialist soviet society.
It is not about knowing or not knowing, but about the practice of changing certain material realities and developments that are to take place. Class struggle is not an archive of beliefs. It is a process of struggle to eliminate the dominant social relations and replace them with a new order of work, production and life. Let us suppose that the germ of the official army was formed with the good intention of overcoming the acute emergency conditions and let us suppose that later it was preserved and strengthened with the good intention of defending socialism against the barbaric rabid capitalism, very good! The vital question is, what is the purpose of all this work, overcoming the emergency conditions and repelling the barbaric attacks of capitalism? The answer will certainly be that it is to protect the socialist revolution!! But this is the fundamental problem. What is being done in this direction, including the formation and strengthening of the official army, is not the path to socialism, but the very terrible mining of this path and the digging of the dark tunnel of state capitalism in front of the working masses. The official army means the architecture of the most sensitive and important part of the official bourgeois state, meaning the four-horse gallop towards the reconstruction of the structure of capital power and the capitalist production, political, and police order, matters that in the very first years after the October victory, with Lenin’s decisive and penetrating strategies, took on the guise of reality one after another. The formation of an official army told the workers very clearly that the approach of people’s communism between 1900 and 1917 had not helped the working class to acquire the minimum capacity and ability necessary for a council and socialist society against wage labour. This was a fact that Bolshevism and Lenin naturally did not accept, precisely because they sought the anti-capitalist movement of the working class and the process of organizing, preparing, equipping and preparing the masses of this movement to replace capitalism with socialism in a non-Marxian and incorrect way. From within the call of the workers to a supra-class democratic anti-regime and a rush towards the horizon of the further development of European-type capitalism, a solid skeleton of the socialist anti-wage labour front of the masses of the working class is not born. Bolshevism and Lenin, faced with the consequences of such a failed practice, had no choice but to convene the Councils and plan the economy, politics, security, defence, and all aspects of wage slavery along the lines of state-cantered capitalism. The establishment of a formal army was only a step in this direction. Following the formation of the official army and the reconstruction of the structure of the conventional bourgeois state, the process of the dissolution of the soviets proceeded with great speed. If justifications were needed for the establishment of such an army, and if it took a few days for the decree based on the existence of extreme emergency conditions to become an eternal communist principle, no such justifications were felt during the other stages of the reconstruction of the capitalist order. Not even a few months after the construction of the Red Army, workers’ control in the factories was abolished, and the essence of this abolition had not yet dried up when the law on individual or unitary management in production units was passed by the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party. Lenin wrote in praise of this law:
“On the importance of the dictatorial power of a single person from the specific point of view of the present moment, it must be said that every kind of large-scale machine industry, namely the source and material basis of production of socialism, requires an unconditional and absolutely emphatic unity of will, which directs the joint work of hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands of people. This necessity is obvious both technically, economically and historically, and all those who have thought about socialism have always recognized it as a condition of socialism. But how can the most emphatic unity of will be ensured, through the obedience of a thousand to the will of one?”
The type of socialism Lenin envisioned, which is nothing other than state capitalism, will be discussed below, but for the time being, let us continue to explore Lenin’s view of the most fundamental prerequisites for the realization of socialism. In the above statement, the obedience of a thousand to the will of one is declared a necessary and inevitable prerequisite for socialism!!! It seems unlikely that a more disastrous distortion of socialism can be made than this. Socialism cannot be realized without providing all the necessary conditions for the exercise of the free, conscious, penetrating, creative, equal, and consultative will of individual citizens in all matters related to the planning of work, production, and social life. Socialist society is a society of active, involved, influential, equal, and in every respect free presence of all individuals. The working class, the mass of exploited and subordinate wage slaves of the world, in the midst of their class struggle against capitalism, look to a horizon in which no force beyond them, above them, will be the guardian and determiner of the fate of their life, work, and production. What kind of socialism is this, the condition for its realization must be sought in the pure obedience of thousands of people to a single, overpowering will!! The basis of socialism is to end the separation of man from his work, and in order for people to eradicate this separation, they must first of all have a direct, influential, equal, and free involvement in the process of what is produced, what is not produced, how much is produced, and how work and production are planned. How can socialism be achieved by locking up consciousness, thought, and will, depriving people of any kind of influence and creativity, and chaining their every movement and intervention to the will of a superior force?!!
It was said earlier that in the days after the February Revolution, Lenin, by publishing the April Theses, relied on the slogan of transferring all power to the Councils. This step in the history of the Councils revealed the secret of the matter. It became clear that what was not going to gain any power were the workers’ councils and the working masses organized in their councils. It became clear that the name of the councils was merely a pretext for handing over the reins of all affairs to the party of the workers. Let us pay attention to this statement of Lenin. “Reporting on the political work of the Central Committee is a very difficult task, if this task is understood in the strict sense of the word. During this year, the bulk of the work of the Politburo consisted in the daily solution of any questions that arose that were related to politics, and it covered the operation of state and party institutions, all working-class organizations, and all the activities of the Soviet Republic, and its goal was to direct this work. The Politburo solved all questions related to world and domestic politics.”
The mere obedience of thousands of people to a single will, in the process of work and production, and the development and rupture of all matters related to the domestic and international politics of Russia by the multi-member bureau of the “Communist Party” and, worst of all, the consecration of these relations as important mechanisms for the exercise of the power of the proletariat and the consolidation of the socialist revolution, is the story of the worst distortions of the problem of the socialization of the working masses and the process of establishing socialism. But as far as the point we are discussing is concerned, such decrees and theorizing leave no room for any form of real role played by the councils of working people. It would be a misleading contradiction if we were to speak of the councils and the intervention of the working-class councils and at the same time speak with the utmost pride and arrogance about the unbridled power of the multi-member bureau of the party and the paramount role of this institution in the entire policymaking of society today!! The fact is that for Lenin and all the leaders of the Bolshevik Party, both the soviet movement of the years before the October Revolution and the workers’ councils that formed the victorious army of the revolution were merely instruments that were to smash the ruling state machine of the day, hand over political power to the party, and thereby declare the end of their existence and put an end to their philosophy of existence. A little reflection on Lenin’s explanation of the relationship between the workers’ councils, the party, and their interactions in the power structure resulting from the October Revolution makes this matter sufficiently clear. He writes: “The dictatorship is exercised by the proletariat organized in the soviets. The proletariat itself is led by the Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which, according to the statistics of the last Party Congress (April 1920), has 611,000 members… The Party, whose Congress is held annually, is led by a Central Committee consisting of 19 members, while the current work in Moscow is carried out by even more limited bodies, namely, by the so-called “Organizational Bureau” and the “Politburo”, each of which consists of five members of the Central Committee and is elected at a plenary session of the Central Committee. Therefore, it follows that there is a completely calculated oligarchy. None of the state institutions in our republic resolves any important political or organizational issue without the guidance of the Central Committee” (Selected Works). The points raised here do not need much elaboration and explanation. The words are very clear, and the content of the speech is naked in all respects. The workers and their councils are under the leadership of the party. This party is led by a 19-member Central Committee. None of the important current affairs of the Soviet Republic are carried out without the guidance of the Central Committee. However, the power is in the hands of the working masses!! And they exercise this power through their councils!! It can be seen that the councils, in Lenin’s view, are not only the party’s conveyor belt for seizing political power but must also play the same role in exercising the party’s power over society and over the working class. In other words, in Lenin’s view, the councils are neither a vessel for the struggle of the working class against capitalism nor a vessel for the conscious socialist socialization and abolition of wage labour. In all cases and in all periods, executive and policy-making institutions are considered to be instruments for exercising the party’s power over the labour movement or ensuring the party’s rule over the working masses. As we have repeatedly emphasized, there is an essential feature in most of Lenin’s analyses, opinions, and strategies, and that is their distance from the basis of Marx’s understanding of society and various issues related to the class struggle. This is an important problem that accompanies him everywhere, in the analysis of capitalism, in the narrative of socialism, in the understanding of the labour movement, in the anatomy of the consciousness of the working class, in looking at the organization of the masses of this class, in understanding the political power of the workers, and in various other areas. His discussion of the councils also has the same problem. Lenin himself states somewhere that the workers’ councils do not participate in the management of society’s affairs and must one day be able to achieve this participation, but at the same time he speaks with complete certainty of the complete establishment of workers’ society. “According to their program, the Soviets are organs of administration by the working people, but in reality, they are organs of administration for the working people, in which the affairs are not administered by the working masses but by the leading stratum of the proletariat” (Selected Works)
Lenin means the advanced stratum of the proletariat, the party power machine. He does not think that if the worker is to be freed from alienation from his work and separation from the process of determining the fate of his life, he must participate in this process with the greatest possible awareness and the most effective role in all matters related to work, production and social life. In the absence of such intervention, he will in any case be subjugated by a social relationship beyond himself, and this is the very disaster that capital has brought and is bringing upon him. How and in what way will the workers who are supposed to be thousands and thousands obedient to a single will and whose decisions on all important political, economic and social issues are to be made by the 19-member Central Committee of a party become one with their work and with the process of determining the fate of their life?!! The whole importance of the Council movement lies in its appropriate capacity for practicing intervention, awareness, exercising collective power against capitalism and promoting the ability of the working masses to organize an anti-wage labour Council society? When we take away this role from the councils, they will either become a tool, like all other tools, to bury the power of the workers’ struggle, or a prison of darkness to prevent this struggle, in favour of the bourgeoisie, in favour of the capitalist state, and in favour of state capitalists.