Farewell to the working class

"Workers against Lenin" is the provocative title of Jonathan Aves' study of Soviet Russian labour relations (or lack of them) during the period 1920-21.

Lenin's Bolshevik regime ruled in the name of the working class, and claimed that the Soviet state was a workers' state or workers' republic. In reality, the Bolshevik Party had lost most of its working class support by 1920-21, the period covered by the author. Strikes, protest marches and mass meetings directed against the regime seems to have been legion, especially during the first half of 1921, a year which also saw the Kronstadt mutiny and large peasant revolts in the Tambov, Western Siberia and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the working-class membership of the Bolshevik Party sharply dropped, as party members took up positions in the bureaucratic apparatus or the Red Army. Yet, there was an opposition even inside the party itself against the perceived Bolshevik retreat from the original ideals of October. The Workers' Opposition was the most well-known dissident group. More radical groups actually quit the party, including the Workers' Group around the famous Miasnikov.

All of this happened when Lenin was still in power and Trotsky was one of his main collaborators. This has caused constant headache for Trotskyists and other revolutionary socialists who regard the early Soviet state as better than the later Stalinist regime. While Stalin was (of course) worse than average even among dictators, the one-party state was pretty much consolidated already by 1921-22, in large part by suppressing the discontent of workers, soldiers and peasants.

Lenin's and Trotsky's latter-day admirers have tried to explain away the facts in various ways. One popular argument, which originated with Lenin himself, was that the working class had ceased to exist by the end of the Civil War. The working class had been "declassed", and all purported working class protests against the Bolshevik regime must therefore be the work of recent migrants from the countryside, lumpens and (surprise) counter-revolutionary agitators. Jonathan Aves gives a very different picture: not only was the working class very much around at the end of the war, the most sustained resistance to the Bolsheviks came from the most urbanized, traditional sectors of the working class, with strong labour unions and distinctive shop floor subcultures. These workers usually supported the Mensheviks. Of course, hard boiled Bolsheviks could always explain this away by accusing them of being privileged "labour aristocrats". But, as Aves is at pains to point out, working class dissatisfaction was a near-universal phenomenon: bakers, railway workers, textile workers, women workers, mineworkers in the Donbass, tram drivers...everyone - regardless of his or her "petty-bourgeois" connections to the countryside - was a potential source of trouble.

Another argument often heard against the strikes is that they were of a purely economic character, presumably proving that the workers were fundamentally loyal to "their" government (in contrast to the pesky Kronstadt rebels of petty-bourgeois peasant stock, who were super-political and should therefore be shot like partridges). Aves believes that while both economic and political demands were raised by the strikers and other dissatisfied workers, the economic demands were nevertheless central. I see this as an unnecessary concession: in a state like Soviet Russia, where the economy is controlled by government organs, there can be no Chinese wall between economic and political demands. Economic demands *are* political demands.

On one point, however, the Bolsheviks were telling the truth: their political opponents were indeed active in the protest movements. But that, surely, goes with the territory! Aves claims that the official opposition parties, such as the Mensheviks, attempted to mediate between the protesting workers and the Bolshevik authorities for fear of otherwise loosing their precarious legality. This didn't stop the Cheka from clamping down on Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries anyway. Menshevik leaders Martov and Dan forthrightly assessed their party's hopeless position, squeezed between workers rendered passive by Bolshevik repression and a militant minority which wanted to overthrow the Soviet government, rather than meekly working within its "constitutional" limits. Interestingly, the slogans of the Plekhanovite Mensheviks (a "right-wing" split from the mainstream Mensheviks) seem to have been among the most popular. The Plekhanovites demanded a Constituent Assembly, a demand taken up by groups of striking workers in Petrograd. In the end, however, the Plekhanovites were too weak to really make a difference, except on the level of sloganeering.

Eventually, the Bolsheviks put an end to working class resistance, usually by a combination of concessions and repression. Food distribution was improved, and with the advent of the NEP, it became possible for workers to legally trade or barter with the countryside. Simultaneously, the Party tightened its grip on political power, by mopping up independent labour unions, sacking striking workers, imprisoning ringleaders and arresting Mensheviks, SRs and other oppositionists. The main leaders of the "constitutional" opposition to the Bolsheviks went into exile: Chernov, Martov, Dan, Steinberg... In the Ukraine, repression was used almost exclusively, since the resistance was much stiffer there. The Bolsheviks were seen as foreign occupants by the local population, including the workers. The Mensheviks were particularly strong in the mining region of Donbass.

"Workers against Lenin" is a scholarly book, but it's easier to read than Simon Pirani's "The Russian Revolution in Retreat", which covers strikes and other protests in Moscow during the period 1920-24. For general readers interested in working class reactions against Lenin's and Trotsky's regime, Ames would be the most logical place to start.

According to Marxism, the proletariat is *the* revolutionary class, and therefore presumably the class with most to win by supporting a party like the Bolsheviks. The real events in Soviet Russia suggests something else entirely. Ironically, however, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were right on the money on another point: without a firm leadership, the working class cannot take power. This too is born out by the events of 1920-21. Lacking a firm leadership, the workers didn't succeed in toppling Lenin and the Bolsheviks...

Left to itself, the working class could only reach "trade unionist consciousness". Revolutionary consciousness, apparently, can only come from without... :P