John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Parecon’s great virtue is in offering a model, even if it is too prescriptive, and identifying the pernicious effect of what Albert calls the “coordinator class”–i.e. workers (senior managers, highly educated specialists, etc.) who enjoy empowering roles and conditions and enforce their will on workers with disempowered roles. In Albert’s view, this coordinator class has the potential, in particular circumstances, to become a new ruling elite, much like the elite that emerged after the October 1917 Revolution under the direction of the Bolshevik Party. For Albert, “Marxism’s economic goals amounted to advocating a coordinator mode of production that elevated administrators, intellectual workers and planners to ruling status”. 21For this reason he insisted on the need for Balanced Job Complexes in any democratically controlled economy.

The values of Parecon have been better expressed by others, notably Murray Bookchin’s advocacy of confederated municipal democracy as a means to achieve his vision of Social Ecology. Bookchin’s work, criminally overlooked in his day, has had a direct influence in the Western Kurdistan region of liberated Syria known as Rojava. Here the Kurds fight an unregarded battle to establish what Derek Wall called “a practical example of an anti-capitalist, ecological and feminist alternative”. 22

After reading Bookchin’s works in prison, the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan moved away from Marxism-Leninism, and persuaded his forces to do likewise. The Rojava autonomous region was built from the bottom up by the Kurds themselves, and aims at community self-management, gender equality and ecological sustainability. The governing Supreme Council is made up of representatives of the Democratic Union Party and the Kurdish National Council, whose political ideology is a mixture of communalism and social ecology. The Council oversees external and military affairs while the Community Defence Force (YPG) defends the region from both the Syrian Army and ISIS. The YPG is a non-sexist armed militia force made up of male and female volunteers, and includes a special unit made up of women only who deal with issues of rape and domestic violence.

The governance programme for Rojava rests on elected Neighborhood Assemblies that include Christians, Muslims and Yazidis. Although private property is protected by law, the ultimate aim is to replace capitalism with a form of democratic confederalism. Its economic model is a smaller version of the Chavez/Maduro Venezuelan government’s plans for a “Solidaristic Economy”, operating to values of solidarity and sustainability, and delivered by social enterprises, cooperatives, communes and collectives. In Rojava about three quarters of all property is held in community ownership and a third of the region’s economic production is carried out by the direct management of workers’ councils. The price of basic goods such as food and medical supplies are set by sub-committees of the Neighborhood Assemblies.

Like Parecon, but less all-encompassing, the committees plan public production of staples such as wheat that underpin the broader economy. The society being established in Rojava has far more in common with the ideas of the post-October 1917 “Council Communists” than with the top-down, centralised system introduced by the Bolsheviks. Western capitalist powers that are happy to oppose ISIS with bombs ignore an already existing democratic, secular, libertarian socialist state in the north of Syria that is a genuine alternative to both Islamic fundamentalism and Baath Party fascism.

The European radical left–although its policies have not yet been realised in practice in the same manner as in Rojava, the Zaptatista liberated zones or Venezuela’s Solidaristic Economy–is beginning to explore bridgeheads to a post-capitalist society. As well as analysing the abject failure of the neoliberal economic model in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s Director of Policy Andrew Fisher, in The Failed Experiment (2014), offered concrete proposals for a different kind of economy. These ranged from public ownership of a new type (focused more on housing, renewable energy and transport infrastructure than outdated industries with a high carbon footprint); a Land Value Tax; publicly owned banks leading a systematic attack on tax evasion and tax havens; effective capital controls including a Financial Transaction Tax; a legal right for workers to buy out firms and, with government assistance and generous terms, to establish workers’ cooperatives; a basic Citizens Income to alter the relation of workers to work; and the use of new technology to reduce the working week without loss of pay or benefits. 23

None of this kind of thinking occurred within the Bolshevik Party in the pre-revolution years. Not one leading Bolshevik, not even Bukharin who was more open to heterodox ideas, wrote about workers’ control or self-management of the economy in a post-revolution society. Nor did they have feasible plans to nationalise and run banks and utilities. Despite the complete absence of a practical programme for democratic government, alternative institutions and participatory planning–i.e. for the actual implementation of a socialist economic model–Lenin pushed on. At difficult and uncertain moments he was fond of quoting Napoleon’s maxim, “ On s’engage et puis, on voit ” (“First engage in battle, then see”). The Bolsheviks were about to engage in battle. Then they would see.

In July 1917, Kerensky replaced the honest soldier Brusilov as head of the Russian army with the vainglorious and insubordinate General Kornilov. Kornilov, in close touch with Octobrists and Monarchists who wished to overthrow the Provisional Government, saw himself as the “man on a white horse” who would, like Napoleon, rescue his homeland from the chaos of revolution. Behind the General stood the “Society for the Economic Recovery of Russia” run by the great industrialist A.I. Putilov and composed of representatives of large banks and insurance companies. It included Guchkov, Minister of War in Lvov’s first coalition; N.N. Kutler, President of the Urals Mining Company; and representatives of the Russian-Asiatic and Azov-Don Banks.

At first, helped by a secret subscription of four million rubles, the Society tried to influence and direct political events covertly but, in the summary of Marc Ferro, it soon became clear that “There would have to be a military dictatorship. Kornilov was the obvious choice”. Kornilov himself was tutored in his duties by his political advisor V.S Zavoysko, a member of both the Cabinet and the Society, and a Director of the Russian-Asiatic Bank. The Society worked in close alliance with ultra-right groups such as the sinister Republican Centre with its motto “Order, Discipline, Victory”. 1

In August, Kerensky invited Kornilov to address a “State Conference” in Petrograd of delegates from all political parties, employers’ federations and trade unions (the Bolsheviks boycotted it and there was general strike in the city that day in protest). This raised his political prestige and encouraged those on the right who wished to see a military dictatorship with Kornilov as its puppet ruler. Kerensky walked straight into this conspiracy when he issued orders to Kornilov that capital punishment in the army, abolished in February, be reinstated, and that troops loyal to the government be dispatched to Petrograd. Kornilov misunderstood what was being requested (messages between Kerensky and Kornilov relayed by a third party appear to have been garbled) and the General responded by “accepting” what he thought was an offer to become the temporary dictator of Russia, with Kerensky standing down to serve in an Octobrist-Kadet cabinet. When Kerensky heard this he panicked and ordered Kornilov to resign and return immediately to the capital.