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

The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of necessary labour-power–an almost inexhaustible reservoir–and to introduce strict order into its registration, mobilisation and utilisation.

Trotsky dismissed the “fiction of the freedom of labour” and concluded, “The crown of all this work is Taylorism, in which the elements of the scientific organisation of the process of production are combined with the most concentrated methods of the system of sweating”. 13

Trotsky thus advocated a militarised industrial regime combined with the most concentrated methods of sweated labour that science could devise. Of this grand scheme, unencumbered by democratic checks or trade union counter-power, Maurice Brinton concluded, “Trotsky’s philosophy of labour came to underline Stalin’s practical labour policy in the Thirties”. 14After Stalin’s death a well-thumbed copy of Terrorism and Communism , annotated with scribblings of approval, was found among his private papers. The philosophy of labour that Trotsky laid out here was not just a suggested route to rapid industrialisation. It was the preferred route to and the foundation of the Soviet Union’s future model of industrialisation.

Significantly, the “Workers’ Opposition” movement was born from the trade unions. Its prime mover and organiser was the Bolshevik union leader and ex-People’s Commissar of Labour Alexander Shliapnikov. He began his political career as an apprentice mechanic in St Petersburg where he was sacked and blacklisted in 1901 for union activities. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks and was one of their most important activists, writing articles for Bolshevik journals on trade union and industrial policy. During the war he was one of the main links between the Bolshevik cc abroad and its cadres within Russia. In 1917 he was one of the Bolsheviks’ delegates on the Petrograd Soviet Executive. He supported Kamenev and Zinoviev’s attempts to prevent the October Insurrection because, like them, he felt it would lead to political isolation and economic disaster. After October he ran the Commissariat of Labour for a year until he resigned the post to fight in the Civil War.

Shliapnikov had an intuitive understanding of the Russian working class that Lenin and Trotsky sorely lacked. He knew full well that the Bolshevik Revolution had disappointed many on the factory floor. After Trotsky’s proposals to militarise labour, disappointment turned to anger. The Workers’ Opposition reflected that anger. As well as Shliapnikov, it was led by leaders of the Metalworkers’ Union Mikhail Vladimirov and Sergei Medvedev, Chairman of the Miners’ Union Aleksei Kiselyov, Artillery Industry union leader Alexander Tolokonstev, Chairman of the Textile Workers Union Ivan Kutuzov, and Kirill Orlov, a senior member of the Council of Military Industry and a veteran of the battleship Potemkin . The Workers’ Opposition argued for more influence and control by trade unions in the direction of industry. This meant a reassertion of workplace and industrial democracy, with the senior levels of the factories, Soviets and party cells all directly elected by the workers and replaceable by them.

The Workers’ Opposition was an expression of authentic socialist democracy, but they were still dissenters within Bolshevism. They were thus constrained from developing their critique to its logical conclusion, namely that it was the entire basis of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that led to abuse of power and the death of the Soviets. Martov, though, was not. In October 1920 he was invited to address the Congress of the German USPD in Halle, Germany. This was no ordinary Congress. After the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919 the German left realigned itself to adapt to the new reality of a German republic presided over by a right-wing SPD. Kautsky and Hilferding’s Socialisation Commission had gone nowhere and its leaders resigned in protest. The only left parties who might have carried out its recommendations–the USPD and the KPD–were not in power.

Following the creation of the Comintern in 1919, the KPD affiliated to it and accepted its “21 Conditions”. Some of the Conditions, such as support for anti-colonialist movements and opposition to social patriotism, were positive and progressive. Much less so were those which established that the party press must “consistently spread the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”; that all “reformists and centrists” be removed from party organs; that both legal and illegal work be conducted; that party cells in the army be created; that the party must support the Soviet Union at all times; and that it must conduct “periodic membership purges” to clean out “petit-bourgeois elements”. Even in Tsarist Russia, many of the 21 Conditions were irrelevant or inoperative between 1905 and 1917. In 1917 the reason for the eventual triumph of the Bolshevik Party was its freedom to organise and campaign openly and legally. The 21 Conditions thus did not even apply to the country that had seen the triumph of Bolshevism, let alone a bourgeois democracy like Germany.

For the Comintern, and the Bolsheviks who controlled it, the prize was the USPD. Unlike the relatively small KPD it was a mass party of the German working class. It condemned Noske and the SPD but it also stood ready to participate in National Assembly elections and secure as much as it could for German workers from the newly established Weimar Republic. Between November 1918 and March 1919 the German working class gave its verdict on the two socialist alternatives to the left of the SPD. While the KPD stood aloof in sectarian purity, the USPD attracted 200,000 new members.

In July 1920 it was proposed that the USPD affiliate to the Comintern. Should that happen a mass-based German socialist party with 800,000 members would be working for the overthrow of the German state and its replacement with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Despite the election of pro-Comintern radicals Walter Stocker and Curt Meyer to the USPD leadership, the party as a whole was split down the middle on the proposal. Meyer, Stocker and the left wanted to affiliate. Kautsky, Hilferding and others wished to reform the Second International–in their terms, return it to the internationalism it had repudiated in 1914. Still others wished for an alternative between a Third International run by Bolsheviks and a Second International terminally discredited by its collapse into social patriotism. The Halle Congress would debate the proposal to affiliate to the Comintern. There would be two guest speakers from Russia on either side of the question–Martov and Zinoviev.

Martov would speak against the proposal with all the rhetorical and intellectual ability for which he was famous. The Politburo had wanted to deny him permission to attend Halle but Lenin insisted he be allowed to go. 15Zinoviev, who by 1920 had an international reputation almost on a par with Lenin and Trotsky, would speak for the motion. Second only to Trotsky as the Bolsheviks’ supreme orator, Zinoviev was a man of severe personality defects. Unlike Kamenev, Rykov and Shliapnikov, he had not opposed Lenin over the launching of the October Insurrection from political principle. Once it became clear that the Bolsheviks had secured power, Zinoviev instantly morphed into a hardline party boss, notorious for ruthless persecution of socialists with whom shortly before he had wished to form a coalition. Of Zinoviev, Trotsky once quipped, “Luther said, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other’. Zinoviev says ‘Here I stand. But I can do otherwise’”.

By the time of the Halle Congress, Martov was reaching the end of the line with Bolshevism. At the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1919, the Mensheviks had been allowed to send delegates and speak. Theodore Dan welcomed a “single revolutionary front, in all that concerns the defence of the revolution”. 16Martov, whilst recognising the need to defend the revolution from the Whites and pledging the Mensheviks to do so, read a declaration to the Congress that called for “freedom of the press, of association and of assembly […] inviolability of the person […] abolition of executions without trial, of administrative arrests and of official terror”. Lenin replied personally, criticising Martov’s declaration as “back to bourgeois democracy, and nothing else”, and concluding, “When we hear such declarations from people who announce their sympathy with us, we say to ourselves, ‘No, both terror and the Cheka are absolutely indispensable’”. 17