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> What happened very quickly in 1917 was the development of committee power, so the development of local, direct democracy in terms of local committees, soldiers� committees and, of course, the Soviets. And I think that those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war, which is what the Bolsheviks used them for, or encouraged them to do. You could have had, as some in the Bolshevik Party, in the Left-Menshevik wings, were thinking, a combination of local soviet-style structures with a national parliament. There are a lot of silly ideas contained in the last two sentences. First off committees like those mentioned have sprung up in every revolution since the French Revolution. Back then they were Les Enrages, the sans-culottes, and they have emerged in revolutions since then up into the 20th century, be they called councils or soviets or whatever. The notion that "those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war" is preposterous, because workers taking control over their own lives and halting the exproporiation of their surplus labor time is the centrality of class warfare. If workers had control over their own labor time, instead of punching a clock at some corporation owned by heirs, which directed their work and expropriated surplus labor time from them, then there would be no classes. The only way to prevent workers managing their own affairs in local committees from not being engaged in class warfare would either be to dissolve the committees, or alternatively neuter them to where they were completely powerless. In terms of the idea of a national parliament and local soviets being the basis of a government, that is exactly the situation Russia was in in February 2017 - what was called dual power. It's an untenable situation. Up until April 1917 the idea was generally that socialists might be able to take power, but should instead subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie, in a society where the capitalists would rule through a modern bourgeois parliament. Lenin spells out why this was not done at the beginning and end of his April Theses: one of the main things that made him realize the time for socialists to stop subordinating themselves to capitalists and bourgeois parliaments was it was leading to the degradation of the socialist parties, the center-piece of which was German social-democrats supporting entry into World War I. The option Lenin saw being handed to him was - support World War I, pitting Russian workers against German workers (including left-wing pacifistic German socialists), or turn completely against the government. Lenin chose the latter course. Figes neglects to mention this - Lenin's only real alternative to taking the path he took would be to support Russia's continuation of World War I. |