Bourgeois October

“Thesis on Bolshevism” was first published in 1934 by the Dutch GIK, a Council Communist group. Council Communism represents the more “libertarian socialist” or “anarchist” part of the Left Communist spectrum (with Bordigism being the more authoritarian and “Leninist” pole). GIK and the US-based international network International Council Correspondence regrouped well-known personages such as Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Otto Rühle and Paul Mattick. My edition of “Thesis on Bolshevism” was published in 1975 by Svarta Häften, probably a proto-ICC group in Sweden (ICC as in International Communist Current).

GIK had pretty much given up on the Russian revolution, and hence didn´t see it as a “proletarian” or “socialist” revolution in any sense. Rather, the October revolution was a bourgeois revolution, but a bourgeois revolution of a very special type. The bourgeoisie in Russia was too weak to carry out “its” revolution, and this task therefore fell to the petty bourgeois intelligentsia regrouped in the Bolshevik Party, which under this scenario was “Jacobin” and didn´t represent the true interests of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks used workers and peasants as battering rams to smash Czarism and feudalism, thereby paving the way to industrial development and modernization. In the peculiar conditions prevailing in Russia, only a centralized state dominated by a new bureaucracy could modernize society. Thus, GIK´s analysis of the Russian revolution is strikingly similar to how other leftist groups analyze the post-World War II revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere. Or, if you like these regimes, then you analyze Iraq, Libya or Syria in this way. The “deflected permanent revolution” also comes to mind, since the GIK argues that the Soviet social formation is state capitalist, indeed that it represents a particularly pure form of capitalism.

There is however a serious problem with GIK´s analysis: if the October revolution led to a particularly pure form of capitalism, and solved the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, shouldn´t the GIK logically *support* Bolshevism and even Stalinism? This is doubly true since the GIK claims that only the bourgeois revolution was possible in Russia in the first place, a workers´ revolution being utopian! However, GIK doesn´t seem to draw this conclusion, instead opposing Soviet Communism and its “state capitalism”. Perhaps they view the Soviet Union as a deadly enemy of the proletariat in the advanced Western nations? But what if state capitalism works there, too…

Somehow, it feels as if the GIK was trying to force its analysis of the Russian tragedy into the procrustean bed of Marxist dogmatics.