The Bolsheviks in power: Lenin’s revolutionary realism against ultra-left despair

The spring of 1918 was a time of unprecedented difficulty for the young soviet republic in Russia. The civil war and the recently-signed treaty with Germany had led to a drop in grain production. Combined with the collapse of the rail network, whole towns were left starving. Factories had to close down due to the lack of coal and unemployment was rising.

[Read Lenin’s ‘Left-wing’ Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality here]

What Russia was experiencing clashed with the naive revolutionary hopes that some in the Bolshevik party cherished, the so-called ‘left communists’, led at that time by Bukharin, who failed to understand the objective situation in Russia. In opposition to an unpalatable but unavoidable reality, they raised empty slogans that failed to correspond to the challenges they were facing.

In their publication Kommunist, the ‘left communists’ expressed their disagreements with the pamphlet The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, which we looked at in the last instalment of Lenin in a Year, where Lenin outlined the policies that were imposed on the soviet state to manage the peculiarities of this tough situation.

In ‘Left-wing’ Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality, Lenin relied to their criticisms, explaining that the arguments of the ‘Left Communists’ actually undermine their own conclusions and lead inescapably to the conclusion that the Bolshevik’s position was the correct one. But turning away from this reality, being “incapable of giving thought to the balance of forces”, these ‘left communists’ fell into the trap of petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering.

This was not the first time that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had faced an ultra-left opposition from their own ranks. Such an opposition had been posed by vacillating, petty-bourgeois elements within the party at various times whilst the party was an underground organisation fighting Tsarism.

In the wake of the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, such an opposition had arisen. Its main feature, one of despair, was to turn away from reality and to take refuge in comforting, revolutionary-sounding phrases in preference to a harsh reality.

‘Defencism’

Above all, the ‘Left Communists’ denounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They disapproved of what was a tactical retreat that conceded swathes of territory to German imperialism that the soviet republic had no means to hold, viewing it as an abandonment of the fight for world socialist revolution.

They denigrated efforts, led by Trotsky, to create a new Red Army / Image public domain

But at the same time, they denigrated efforts, led by Trotsky, to create a new Red Army, and implied that the Bolshevik leadership had become ‘defencist’. The new proletarian state, they claimed, should wage a ‘revolutionary’ struggle, not a ‘military’ struggle, as if one precluded the other.

The defining characteristic of ultra-leftism, of which Bukharin and others were guilty, is the opposition of abstract slogans, learned by rote, to the real situation. For years, the Bolsheviks had denounced those who argued for ‘defence of the fatherland’ as in times of imperialist war, this meant the slaughter of Russian workers in the name of the Russian bourgeois and the Tsar. However, Lenin explained that the class content of this slogan had changed, therefore the defence of the socialist fatherland is the duty of any serious revolutionary.

To oppose preparation for a revolutionary war (and the tactical retreat at Brest Litovsk constituted part of that preparation) with abstract calls for revolution in the West – a revolutionary wave that was maturing but the date of which could not be precisely foretold – was to merely hide despairing passivity behind old, radical-sounding slogans.

State capitalism

The backwardness of Russia meant that the masses needed to master the technique and management of production and distribution in order to begin the task of socialist construction. But this would take time, and it meant learning from the old bourgeois experts. As such, the soviet state had to entice the old experienced management and experts to work with it, something they could only do by incentives – which meant higher salaries.

Lenin stressed that this could only be done with the minimum of danger under the strict control of the workers and their committees, but doing so would increase productivity and pave the way towards a fully nationalised planned economy.

This process, of the workers learning the techniques of capitalist industry, through regulation and incentive, while holding onto the levers of power, Lenin called ‘state capitalism’.

In response to such an approach, the ‘Left Communists’ accused the Bolshevik leadership of derailing the revolution away from socialism. They deemed this stepping stone to socialism to be a “Bolshevik deviation to the right”, and demanded an immediate transition towards socialism. How this was to be achieved, they could not say.

A plan towards state capitalism alarmed the ‘left communists’, who were unable to look at the concrete situation Russia found itself in, seeing in it only a backsliding towards capitalism, rather than protective measures for the Soviet state. This is another general feature of ultra-leftism: seeing any ‘compromise’ – even one as imposed by circumstances – as a betrayal.

Lenin explained that Russia was composed of varied socio-economic strata; the internal struggle in Russia in 1918 was more complex than simply one of capitalism versus socialist planning. The soviet republic contained within it, at one and the same time, peasant farming, small scale production, private capitalism, state capitalism, and elements of socialism.

State capitalism, given the backwardness of Russia, represented a material step forward in the organisation of production relative to backward peasant conditions. In reality, it was a step forward towards socialism, not a detour for the revolution.

“Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).”

The composition of the state that guided the process was also a concrete question that the ‘left communists’ failed to understand. The soviet state fundamentally differed from capitalist states, and as such, ‘state capitalism’ under its guidance would have the character of a temporary measure to defend the gains of the revolution, given that the decisive control of the economy remained in the hands of the Soviet. As Lenin says:

“At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC.”

The principal enemy

In a small peasant country, such as Russia, the petty bourgeois predominated. This was a problem that state capitalism aimed to solve. The mass of small profiteers were like small holes draining the Soviet state. They constantly revived capitalist tendencies, and disrupted the state monopoly over trade and key sectors of the economy, and were thus the “principal ‘internal’ enemies” of the economic policies of the soviet power.

In a small peasant country, such as Russia, the petty bourgeois predominated / Image: public domain

The ‘left communists’, by denouncing state capitalism in words, hoped to spur on the revolution. In deeds, however, they were blindly echoing the petty bourgeoisie’s opposition to state capitalism, which represents a progressive step forward from the small-scale, dispersed production of that class.

“Either we subordinate the petty bourgeoisie to our control and accounting (we can do this if we organise the poor, that is, the majority of the population or semi-proletarians, around the politically conscious proletarian vanguard), or they will overthrow our workers’ power as surely and as inevitably as the revolution was overthrown by the Napoleons and Cavaignacs who sprang from this very soil of petty proprietorship. This is how the question stands. Only the Left Socialist Revolutionaries fail to see this plain and evident truth through their mist of empty phrases about the “toiling” peasants. But who takes these phrase-mongering Left Socialist-Revolutionaries seriously?”

The petty profiteering layer constantly breached and avoided the economic measures passed by the soviets. Their undermining of the soviet regime was a direct threat to the workers’ state. The petty bourgeois were hoarding wealth and employed people for their own benefit. They had no intention of building socialism nor communism. They believed that the soviet state was an experiment that soon would come to a close.

Lenin warned the ‘left communists’ that their opposition to state capitalism and their undermining of the Bolshevik leadership was leading them down the path of petty-bourgeois prejudice. It was the ‘left communists’ that were abandoning the road to socialism, through their inability to face up to the concrete situation in Russia at the time. To give the final word to Lenin:

“From whatever side we approach the question, only one conclusion can be drawn: the argument of the “Left Communists” about the “state capitalism” which is alleged to be threatening us is an utter mistake in economics and is evident proof that they are complete slaves of petty-bourgeois ideology.”