Notices by schalken (schalken@kolektiva.social)

Kropotkin has popped up in my timeline a couple times as of late.

I get it. He looks like Santa. And, personally, Conquest of Bread is one of the three books that most influenced my politics. Cool guy.

But.

We should remember that Kropotkin completely betrayed internationalism and the working class when he sided with Russia and the Allied Powers in the First World War.

We remember this not so that we can tear down Kropotkin, but as a lesson that _class_ has to be the fundamental focus of anyone who calls themselves a revolutionary.

As Alexander Berkman wrote at the time:

"""
It is a most painful shock to us to realize that even Kropotkin, clear thinker that he is, has in this instance fallen a victim to the war psychology now dominating Europe. His arguments are weak and superficial. In his letter to Gustav Steffen he has become so involved in the artificialities of "high politics" that he lost sight of the most elemental fact of the situation, namely that the war in Europe is not a war of nations, but a war of capitalist governments for power and markets. Kropotkin argues as if the German people are at war with the French, the Russian, or English people, when as a matter of fact it is only the ruling and capitalist cliques of those countries that are responsible for the war and alone stand to gain by its result.

...

In the letter to Professor Steffen, Kropotkin strangely fails to mention the _working classes_ of the contending powers. He speaks a great deal of the military ambitions of Prussia, of the menace of German invasion and similar governmental games. But where do the workers come in in all this? Are the economic interests of the working classes of Europe involved in this war, do they stand to profit in any way by whatever result there might be, and is international solidarity furthered by sending Russian and French workers to slaughter their brother workers in German uniform? Has not Kropotkin always taught us that the solidarity of labor throughout the world is the cornerstone of all true progress and that labor has no interest whatever in the quarrels of their governmental or industrial masters?

...

We regret deeply, most deeply, Kropotkin's changed attitude. But not even the great European catastrophe can alter our position on the international brotherhood of man. We unconditionally condemn _all_ capitalist wars, with whatever sophisms it may be sought to defend the one or the other set of pirates and exploiters as more "libertarian." We unalterably hold that war is the game of the masters, always at the expense of the duped workers. The workers have nothing to gain by the victory of the one or the other of the contending sides. Prussian militarism is no greater menace to life and liberty than Tsarist autocracy. Neither can be destroyed by the other. Both must and will be destroyed only by the social revolutionary power of the united international proletariat.
"""

#Anarchism #Kropotkin #Communism #Socialism #Berkman

@abolisyonista @communism

I'll take a stab at it! Fraternally and comradely, I hope. Sorry if this is a bit rough around the edges. :)

From the perspective of the communist left, there's no sense in talking about "socialist countries." These were state capitalist in the sense that the state owned the means of production to a large extent and continued to exploit wage labor.

The goals of these states -- which were entirely outside of the control of the proletariat -- was only to further industrialize and modernize the economy. It was basically state-led primitive accumulation like what we saw in Western Europe, except telescoped into decades instead of centuries. (What else was the Great Leap Forward or the Stalinist program of the 1930s?)

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and maybe even begging the question. After all, I'm using slightly different language and concepts to say the same thing you are: the working class lost power (in Russia -- it's hard to argue it ever _held_ power in places where a "revolutionaries" either willingly followed the Stalinist model, or where it was imposed by the "Red" Army).

So what in the first place led to the working class losing power over the state, to the degeneration of the revolution?

First, grant that the Russian economy had no "socialist" basis, not in the time of Lenin, and not later. At most you had state enterprises, and these have always been rejected by the workers' movement as capitalism with a different juridical foundation.

Anyway, there are a lot of explanations of what went wrong in Russia.

* Working class "depoliticized" by hardship and famine.

* Class conscious workers were absorbed into the Red Army, with many new factory workers coming from the village, with no political traditions.

* Many of the most revolutionary workers were killed in the Civil War.

* Party absorbed all sorts of new and alien elements, in part to replace the members who were worn out or killed (in 1922 only 1 in 40 party members had been members in 1917).

* In a period of civil war and extreme unrest, with the working class so battered and demoralized, the "party-state apparatus" was a source of stability (this is in Faulkner's book Marxist History of the World).

* Trotsky himself argued that it was an unfortunate reality that the Civil War period and militarization had led many party members to become "accustomed to command and demanded unconditional submission to their orders."

* Invasion by the capitalist states led to a need to subordinate production to military ends, with a return to "iron discipline" and Taylorism in the factories.

* etc.

Bottom line, it's down to objective factors. The working class was numerically decimated and morally exhausted. It was utterly isolated. It lost control over the state, whose raison d'etre had become self-preservation (with the idea that the revolution survived as long as the state did).

To paraphrase Bordiga (I think), there was no guarantee that, once it conquered power, the working class would hold on to it. Lenin was correct to say, very early on, that without a revolution in Germany, the revolution in Russia was doomed. Or Rosa Luxemburg: "The question of socialism has been posed in Russia. It cannot be solved in Russia."

I don't think there was a happier outcome to be had by rejecting marxism. Instead, we can draw some lessons: a revolution cannot occur in one country alone without being defeated by internal and external forces. It cannot (and will not anymore) happen in a country where the working class is such a small minority. The working class needs to constantly watch for any sign that the proletarian state is rising above society. Etc.

@abolisyonista @communism The other thing to take away from the Russian experience is that winning some kind of military victory against the counter-revolution _must not_ come at the expense of restoring all the worst features of the old order: "iron discipline" in the factories, command and submission in the military, etc.

Radek kind of hints at this in an incredibly prophetic passage in 1918:

"If the Russian revolution is crushed by the bourgeois counter-revolution, it will be reborn from its ashes like the Phoenix; but if it loses its socialist character, and by this disappoints the working masses, this blow will have ten times more terrible consequences for the future of the Russian and international revolution."

@sofia

I would kindly ask you not to paint us all with the same brush!

Marxists can defend the necessity the dictatorship of the proletariat, but this is only a use of force for holding down the old oppressing classes as we destroy property and wage labor.

Any marxist worth the name can find no justification for recreating what Marx called the "the whole sham of state-mysteries and state pretensions." As Bordiga said, "we don't want to free the State, we want to put it in chains, and then strangle it"!

Infinitely less is there any justification for the Stalinist states that just defended a new kind of capital accumulation.