Posted on

“Going Back or Moving Forward” & “Speech to the 8th CPSU(B) Congress” by N. Osinsky

Translations by Mark Alexandrovich, introduction by Mark Alexandrovich and Renato Flores. 

Depiction of Council of People’s Commissar, or Sovnarkom.

Osinsky is the pseudonym of old Bolshevik Valerian Valerianovich Obolensky. Born in 1887, Osinsky is an often forgotten but very influential Bolshevik and theoretician. He started off on the left-wing of the Bolsheviks, being active around the journal Kommunist. After the revolution, he became chairperson of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy but lost that position due to his opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was elected in 1919 as a delegate to the founding congress of the Communist International, and in this same year became part of the oppositional tendency, or unofficial faction of the Democratic Centralists, alongside other figures such as Sapronov and Smirnov. 

The Democratic Centralists, or Deceists, were a tendency within the Bolshevik party who came together on the basis of attempting to reform the organizational structures of the nascent Soviet state. In particular, they questioned the existing relationship between the party and the state, which they saw as inefficient and undemocratic. They were concerned with the proliferation of unresponsive bureaucracy due to either excessive centralization, duplication, or triplication of roles that were supposed to deal with the same competencies. They also heavily opposed the encroaching militarism of the government which was caused by the civil war. They realized that this was demobilizing the workers and disenchanting them from the idea that the Soviet government was their own. During the brief time during which they were active, they pushed for more debate, and more collegiality at all levels, proposing new ways of running the government. They became moribund after the 10th Communist Party Congress, which alongside approving most of their demands, also approved the temporal ban on factions. 

Below, we present two texts from Osinsky which have never been available in English: an article from Pravda in January 1919, and a speech from the 8th Communist Party Congress. The former text’s original scan is unreadable in places in the digital scans, so if anyone has or knows of a complete copy we invite them to make it available to us. This text is meant for a more popular audience, even if some sentences are long and convoluted. If some passages are confusing in English, they are like that in the original Russian, too. The translator tried to make it clearer where possible. Osinsky’s language is also old fashioned, even for 1919. This could either have been the way he wrote or purposeful use of old fashioned, peasant language for his audience. The second text’s source was much clearer as the proceedings from the 8th Communist Party Congress are fully available in digital format. This text also does not have the old-fashioned language and is overall an easier read. 

Osinsky was one of the most prominent members of the Demcents. These texts we present are an important exhibit of the type of diagnosis and reforms proposed by the Deceists in order to improve Soviet democracy and make it a true government of the people. Like many of their contemporaries (such as Krupskaya), the critiques from the Deceists were constructive and presented as resolutions with actionable points in the congresses of the Communist Party. We present this text with two intentions. First, to show the vibrancy and depth of Bolshevik debates in general; unfortunately, in modern-day “common-sense” historiography the struggle is too often reduced to the two poles of Stalin and Trotsky, forgetting everyone and everything else constituting Soviet life and government. This text from 1920 is prior to Trotsky’s critiques of bureaucratization in 1923, and in many ways opposes Trotsky’s politics at the time of the text regarding the militarization of the state. Second, this text clearly shows that the Bolsheviks realized quite early that forming a workers state was not going to be as easy as expected, and that the tasks of government and the articulation between Party and State, and between centralization and decentralization, were extremely complex. In this context, the diagnostics and resolutions of Osinsky, although opposed by Lenin and heavily voted down in the 8th Congress, are crucial for understanding the development of the Soviet government. 

Osinsky, alongside many Deceists, would later sign the Declaration of 46 in 1923, a communique to the Central Committee which asked for urgent reforms to solve the increasingly aggravated problems of government malfunction. The Deceists would end up fracturing, with many (including Osinsky) joining the Left Opposition. Some Deceists like Sapronov and Smirnov would end up expelled from the party, going as far as characterizing the USSR as state capitalist and unworthy of defense. Osinsky would end up aligned with Bukharin’s views on the peasantry, and served as Professor of the Agricultural Academy of Moscow. With the downfall of Bukharin, his protection disappeared. Like many Old Bolsheviks, Osinsky would be executed during the Purges, on the first of September 1938. However, the issues and problems that Osinsky raises here are still as relevant today as ever as other problems of socialist transition.

Further readings:
Lara Douds, “Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State”, Bloomsbury Academic, 2008
David Priestland, “Bolshevik ideology and the debate over party‐state relations, 1918–21”, Revolutionary Russia Volume 10, 1997 – Issue 2 

Photo of Osinsky

Going Back or Moving Forward

Pravda, 15 January 1919

“Ah, yes, you preach no more no less a return to ‘democracy’, your reasoning smells a lot of liberalism”, we have already heard the objection from some comrades. Such comrades have not learned at all of our attitude to democracy, to populism. By renouncing the so-called “democratic republic”, we gave up bourgeois parliamentary democracy. We gave up its foundation, the capitalist mode of production, which provides in such a republic a financial dictatorship. We have renounced all the formal features of a “democratic republic” that, in words, give rights to the people and, in fact, ensure the domination of the bourgeoisie: universal (rather than class) suffrage; essentially irreplaceable elected bodies detached from the masses; separation of powers, transforming parliaments into legislative institutions: independence and irreplaceability of officials; universal and formal civil “freedoms”. 

But we gave up all this only in order to secure the dictatorship of the widest masses of the working people and to create a true people’s rule of law, a worker-peasant democracy. The Soviet republic is the only form of real democracy. And if so, some features of its working may coincide with the corresponding features of bourgeois democracy, recreating them in a new form. Moreover, some of the principles of the “proclamation” of bourgeois democracy are only truly implemented in the workers’ and peasants’ state. Also, direct participation of the masses in decisions of public affairs […] in the Soviet Republic, it is carried out in practice, thanks to the creation of a separate network of electoral cells and the unification of powers: responsibility […] ([…] only in the Soviet Republic, it is carried out due to replacement of officials and the same unification of powers); genuine public opinion controls all organs of power (bourgeois forgeries of public opinion disappear), etc.

We do not call to go back to bourgeois democracy, but forward to the expanded form of worker-peasant democracy. Only people infected with bureaucratic spirit may not understand that this is our goal, but authoritarian techniques are a temporary phenomenon, which is not the sole manifestation of a worker-peasant dictatorship. 

By the way, the attraction of new layers to public work to replace the “exhausted” part of the proletarian avant-garde, presupposes the reduction of “command” methods and increase in public initiative of the masses. A class mobilization in the proletariat under current conditions can be created by moving towards a developed form of worker-peasant democracy. 

What should be done to eliminate the main “shortcomings of the mechanism”.

The ways in which we must make this transition are as follows: 

First of all, it is necessary to connect all Soviet agencies directly to the organizations of the working masses. Commissariats of foodstuffs and finance, first of all, should be “workerized” by involving proletarian organizations in their system and involving representatives of these organizations in decision making. This is how the “personal union” of Soviet bureaucracy and the proletariat is created. 

But the position of Soviet officials should be radically changed as well. The number of emergency commissioners with extraordinary powers should be limited to a minimum. The rights, duties, and activities of the officials should be defined by precise norms. […] a Soviet republic may demand from them to fulfill their legal duties and refuse to fulfill their illegal demands. For their actions, especially for abuse of power, officials are responsible not only to their “department,” but also to elected bodies and the people’s court (it is best to arrange special tribunals for this purpose), to which every worker and peasant can summon them. 

All bodies carrying out searches and arrests (in particular, emergency commissions) must be subordinate to the judicial power. It should be explicitly stated that the emergency commissions should be turned into a properly appointed (i.e. subordinated to the control of the court), criminal and political police, which should exist in the workers’ and peasants’ state until further development makes it possible to replace it with a nationwide people’s militia. 

Both local Soviets and especially VTsIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee) should become collegial institutions that discuss general norms and following policy measures, guide their implementation and indeed control their implementation. For this purpose, VTsIK may establish standing committees. It is necessary to reduce, and partially stop the concentration of legislative and executive powers within the narrow closed ministries–starting with the Presidium of VTsIK, the Council of People’s Commissars and departmental tops to the corresponding local cells. Uniting legislative and executive powers does not create arbitrariness and detachment from the masses only if the powers are united in the hands of experienced elected bodies.

The activities of all authorities should be controlled by the public opinion of workers and peasants. The meetings of collegial institutions should be public, open, and the commissariats should give reports on their work to VTsIK. All their work and the activities of individual officials should be constantly illuminated by this body of central power. The same shall apply to local councils. It is also clear that only a free discussion of all issues of public life in the press and at meetings leads to a firm ground for public discussion in elected institutions. 

The workers’ and peasants’ public opinion and the petty-bourgeois parties.

Here again we hear the questions: So you are proposing universal freedom of the press, of assembly (and therefore of unions)? Does this not mean a return to bourgeois democracy? And further: isn’t it related to the return to the soviets of parties hostile to workers’ and peasants’ power? And isn’t it related to the change of the course of our policy, which is so heavily criticized by the Mensheviks?

And in any case, we do not call back to bourgeois democracy, but forward to the full implementation of workers’ and peasants’ democracy. First of all, the workers’ and peasants’ democracy provides the workers and peasants with a real basis for the free use of speech, press, and assembly in a union organization (the bourgeoisie is deprived of space for […] telegraphy and paper, and the possibility of any bribed campaigning is destroyed). As for the very use of these real opportunities, we take care to ensure that workers and peasants are able to freely express their opinions. For us, only their public opinion exists, but not that of the bourgeoisie and its parties. The bourgeoisie and its parties are dead; they do not exist. 

So, who can express their opinion in the Soviet Republic and what can they say? Only parties and organizations whose representatives were sent by workers and peasants to their councils. Between them should be deployed, according to the number behind us of […]–premises, telegraph machines, and paper. At meetings and in the columns of newspapers, they shall substantiate the same views as those expressed in the councils. 

Thus, we have indeed come to the question of which parties may be represented on the councils. Until recently, petty-bourgeois parties were expelled from the Soviets. Now they are in a semi-legal position there. We must say clearly and unequivocally that at this stage of development there is no need to remove from the Soviets and from free discussion, parties that do not call for a direct overthrow of Soviet power. It is also possible that we will come to grant this freedom to all parties that can have representation in the Soviets. 

Since the balance of real forces has been confirmed in favor of the proletariat and the poor, since the Soviet state has been strengthened and established, freedom of the press and assembly for the petty-bourgeois parties represented in the Soviets is possible and necessary. The control of public opinion over the work of the Soviet authorities is thus expanding. In the chorus of public opinion, are heard the voices of backward politicians who express the opinion of the most backward and hardened layers of the petty-bourgeoisie. All the better: any clash of opinions is useful in the Soviet state because it has strengthened its existence. Variety makes it easier to find the right path quickly. As for gentlemen petty-bourgeois politicians, they are offered full opportunity to push for a change in general policy by influencing public opinion in a “soft parliamentary way” that they so praise. Only here public opinion is different and voters are different. But these voters, not worse, but better than parliamentary voters, can understand who is right and who is wrong.

As far as policy changes are concerned, allowing a minority to defend their opinions does not mean a change of course on the part of the majority. It only expresses the strengthening of the position of this majority. In addition, petty-bourgeois politicians and petty-bourgeois masses are “two big differences”. The overwhelming majority of the petty-bourgeois masses (peasants) followed the proletariat and its party and approved its policies. And this policy […] the party offered the petty-bourgeois masses through the head of people who wanted to speak on their behalf, but spoke only in the name of the kulaks and the bosses […]. Therefore, if we admit the lords of petty-bourgeois politicians to the Soviets, it does not mean that we “made peace with the petty-bourgeoisie” (we did not quarrel with it), and therefore it does not mean that we commit ourselves to any concessions to these lords. 

Thus, the question of the content of Soviet politics is by no means predetermined by fallen defeats. This is a special question. But the forms of defining this policy are predetermined: it is managed by elected bodies; it is conducted by officials directly subordinate to these bodies, who give them permanent master reports; they are rightfully controlled by the public opinion of workers and peasants. 

We think that if the Soviet Republic enters this path in the near future, the petty-bourgeois lords […] will have to testify bitterly that the Soviet Republic has survived another crisis unscathed. If this does not happen, the crisis will drag on, but it will still be resolved, and namely that is necessary. And the historical necessity will sooner or later declare and realize its rights. And the historical necessity is that the great and strong Soviet Republic grows and develops further, throwing off its skin, which has become tight for it. 

8th Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) — SECOND MEETING

ORGANIZATIONAL SECTION

March 21st, morning, 1919

Original proceedings, pages 187-197:

The meeting opens at 11:10 a.m.

Chairperson: I declare the meeting open. Comrade Avanesov has a word for order.

Avanessov: To reduce the time, I would suggest connecting the last two questions and giving the speakers a little more time.

Chairman: Are there any objections? No. Is it convenient to amend the regulations in order to provide the co-rapporteur with 30 minutes and 10 minutes for the final word? Accepted.

Osinsky:

Comrades, our party program includes a clause that speaks of the struggle against the revival of bureaucracy. By stating that we have a revival of bureaucracy, I must begin my report. This revival of bureaucracy is what we have called the “minor” and sometimes the “major” shortcomings of the Soviet mechanism in newspapers and discussions all the time. How is it expressed? Critics dwelt very little on elucidating the causes of this phenomenon. It should be noted that in our Soviet activities, the work of open elected collegia1, for example, plenums of local Soviets, plenary sessions of the CEC [Central Executive Committee]2, meetings, etc. is dying down. At meetings where the prepared bills are voted upon, there is no discussion of these bills.

Then, the lively work of the masses in state-building has frozen in our country. Decision-making is concentrated in narrow collegia, which — we need to straightforwardly state — to a considerable extent are detached from the masses in a significant way. We now have all issues resolved in executive bodies, starting from the very top and ending with the very bottom. The development of personal politics should be attributed to the phenomenon just mentioned. I must say that two months ago Comrade Lenin raised the question in the Central Committee about the development of our personal policy. This is called, speaking the German language–“Zettelwirtschaft”–economy by means of notes. We have solved a lot of problems by notes of various commissars.3 On this basis, starting from the very top, from party comrades, a system is developed for resolving problems by one-on-one means and a personal conduct of business is being developed. From here a whole system of irregularities arises, which leads to the fact that we are intensely developing patronage for close people, protectionism, and, in parallel, abuse, bribery; and, in the end, especially in the provinces obvious outrages are committed by our senior, sometimes party, workers. 

At present, the old party comrades have created a whole bureaucratic apparatus, built, in fact, on the old model. We have created an official hierarchy. When we made the demand of the commune state at the beginning of the revolution, this demand included the following provision: all officials must be elected and must be accountable to elected institutions. In fact, we now have a situation where the lower official, who acts in a province or county and is responsible to his commissariat, in most cases is not responsible to anyone. This explains to a large extent the outrages caused by the “people with mandates”, and despotism develops on this basis.

There’s an extreme development of paperwork. Entire groups of people gather who do nothing. And if our program is the so-called cheap government, then at the present time we can say that our government machine is extremely expensive. There are a lot of extra posts, they are paid all the time, and people who are registered as staff but to a large extent do nothing, eat bread for nothing and only increase clerical red tape. The question is, what is the reason for this? Two explanations are outlined in the draft of our program. On the one hand, it is indicated that the layer of advanced workers in Russia is unusually thin, while our state apparatus can be based only on this stratum of advanced workers. The new class state of the republic of workers and peasants should be based on personnel from the new classes that came to power–from the workers and the rural poor. Meanwhile, the layer of conscious representatives of these revolutionary classes is unusually thin. If this layer is thin, then the second layer is little cultivated due to the backwardness of our country. Then there is another main factor: under such circumstances, it is necessary to use the old bureaucratic apparatus, composed of the old workers of the former tsarist apparatus. As a result of this, all the old habits began to carry over to our institutions.

Such an explanation of the revival of bureaucracy is given by the program. Those two reasons, closely related to each other, which are indicated here, are undoubtedly very important, but not the only ones. There are other equally important reasons. We must reckon with the general situation in which our state-building is still taking place. Firstly, it takes place in a setting of acute civil war, and secondly, the construction of a new state mechanism was to be completed extremely quickly. Both required a military-style dictatorship. Our dictatorship acquired a military command character, we had to concentrate our powers in the hands of a small collegium, which was to quickly, without friction, discuss bills, etc. We had to quickly build a new state machine. Since the proletariat took power into its own hands, it needed to be consolidated by the creation of a solid apparatus, a solid state machine. Clearly, this could only be done if quick directives were given from the center. To a large extent this explains the phenomenon that we had to concentrate in the hands of a small collegium, sometimes even individuals, executive and legislative functions. This was supposed to strengthen the bureaucracy that is now beginning to penetrate us from the other end in the person of the old officials.

If we turn to measures to treat the shortcomings of the Soviet mechanism, then, taking into account the two kinds of reasons that I spoke about, we should outline a few other measures than those that are usually exhibited. The following question may arise: do these two reasons continue to have effect, that is, that we must quickly build the state apparatus and that we are at war? Of course, these reasons continue to operate, mainly the reason that comes down to the severity of the civil war. However, their action at some point begins to weaken. The civil war is weakening around the beginning of the winter of 18-19. It should be noted that in relation to the civil war, we had some change: namely, inside the country, the old state class was basically broken by the beginning of this winter, the bourgeoisie was defeated, it transferred forces to the outskirts, from where it is trying to send regiments that want to overthrow our power. But in the center this dominion is undermined, the bourgeoisie is broken, and the layer that supports it is also broken, such as the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, from which vast detachments of the White Guards were recruited. Comrade Dzerzhinsky at the CEC factional meeting stated that at present we do not have the large kulaks of the White Guards, we have only scattered intelligentsia groups in the center of Russia, then the middle layer of clerks, various employees, etc. If they are not completely remade by us, then they are disorganized. The economic power has been taken away from the bourgeoisie, the main enterprises, banks, etc., have been taken away — in short, its keys to the economy, which are usually the keys of political power, have been taken away. This fact is important: there is no trace of the old state machine, the new state machine is basically laid down. In general, it turns out that we defeated our enemies within the country. We leveled all classes and even if they are not destroyed, we disorganized the enemy.

In such an environment, for us, the correct operation of the apparatus is a matter of great importance. If our apparatus is unable to cope with the tasks it faces, it can make it possible for these sectors of the population to oppose us not even because they will be counter-revolutionary, but simply because our apparatus will not serve them. We are mainly threatened by the fact that we are not coping with economic tasks. We defeated the bourgeoisie, but can we organize new production, feed and clothe the citizens of the Soviet Republic? That is the question. Because in this area we will not be able to cope with our task, we will be at risk of spontaneous indignation against us. Here it must be noted that the mass of peasant uprisings is explained by the outrages of the commissars of our provincial bureaucracy. Very often, the news of these revolts indicates that the peasants have nothing against the Soviet regime, but they rebel against the commissars who end up in the village. We need to seriously think about how to find ways to treat this deficiency. A transition is necessary from such forms when legislative and executive powers are concentrated in few hands to such forms when legislative and executive powers are exercised by the broadest possible masses. We cannot now proceed to the full, expanded form of the new democracy, to the workers ‘and peasants’ democracy, to that which is called the commune state. We cannot proceed because this is primarily hindered by the ongoing civil war inside the Soviet Republic, and, on the other hand, by an external onslaught. For a long time we will practice military command forms of the proletarian dictatorship. But at present, in order for us to have a stronger foundation within the country, so as not to incline the population against ourselves, we must expand the circle of those citizens who directly implement this dictatorship. We must involve at least the entire mass of the proletarian vanguard, if not the entire working class as a whole, if not the entire mass of workers and peasants in legislative, executive, and supervisory work. To do so, a number of concrete measures need to be taken to ensure that the power of government is transferred to the wider collegia chosen by the wider proletarian vanguard masses.

In addition, we need to take a number of different special measures against the revival of bureaucracy for the special reasons mentioned in the program. From these measures, I can clearly point out the following. First of all, it is necessary to start from the very top. At the top of our state apparatus there is an incredible parallelism, a repetition of institutions that do the same thing. For example, I now head the department of Soviet propaganda, which conducts international propaganda of the ideas of the Soviets and Soviet construction. In addition, at least 6-7 institutions are involved in this business, which absolutely cannot demarcate themselves from each other and interfere with each other all the time. I have given this example in order to go straight to the main one. First of all, there is parallelism in central government bodies. On the one hand, there is a Council of People’s Commissars, and on the other, there is a Presidium of the CEC, and their work largely coincides. Since the Presidium of the CEC is not only the Presidium that implements the decisions of the CEC or directs its meetings, it takes over the consideration of bills. On the other hand, the Council of People’s Commissars is considering the same bills. And neither the members of the CEC Presidium, nor the Council of People’s Commissars can say for sure where the powers of one body end and the powers of another begin. First of all, it is necessary to merge these two central government bodies into one. The question is which one to join to which: should the Presidium be attached to the Council of People’s Commissars or the Council of People’s Commissars to the Presidium? The Moscow Provincial Conference decided to add the Council of People’s Commissars to the Presidium. I am speaking on this issue not only on behalf of the provincial conference in Moscow, but also on behalf of the Ural delegation. At a joint meeting of these two delegations, it was decided that we should act differently: we must take the old name of the Council of People’s Commissars and attach the Presidium to the Council of Commissars. 

In essence, there is no difference whatsoever, and there can be no serious objections to that. On the ground, the Executive Committee is at the same time the Presidium of the Council, the legislative body and the executive body. Parallelism will be reduced by this, and the legislative and executive work will be clarified. If we do this, then our people’s commissariats will turn into what we need, into what they should be according to the Constitution, but which really is not. They are constitutional departments of the CEC, but in fact there are also departments of the CEC, whose activities coincide with those of the former, and the commissariats are actually becoming independent. If the Council of Ministers merges with the CEC Presidium, it will be the first guarantee that the commissariats will be CEC departments. Similarly, various local authorities – financial, educational, etc. – must be departments of local councils.

Next is the second proposal. I mentioned it yesterday and today I repeat it in a very serious way and now I will prove that at the moment, in fact, if we keep in mind the Council of People’s Commissars, there is no single government. I had the honor of being a member of the Council of People’s Commissars in November, December and January 17-18. Then, the Council of People’s Commissars discussed the main issues of politics. If there was a conflict with the Romanian ambassador, he was arrested or a war was declared – all this was considered at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars. This is currently not observed. Comrade Sapronov mentioned that Chicherin’s note about the Princes’ Islands fell into the regions, as if from heaven. Comrade Zinoviev says it’s not the case. In fact, this is true in some respects, because according to Chicherin’s first answer, it seemed that we were accepting an agreement, but we would not accept the Princes’ Islands, that this was a provocative proposal. But it was accepted. And this answer was completely unexpected for local organizations: they were not prepared for this form of response. This answer turned out to be unexpected even for members of the collegium of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the institution that should consider foreign policy issues. The members of the board read this note in the newspapers, but did not take part in the discussion. Did the Council of People’s Commissars take part in this discussion? No. And not one of the major notes in the Council of People’s Commissars was considered. Now individual decrees are being considered there, they are being edited there, and some of the board members state that they have turned into an editorial commission. They do not rule the country, but consider decrees and resolve interagency tensions and disputes. There is no single government that governs politics in general. This situation needs to be changed.

Of course, there are no forms or prescriptions that can help the cause. At the beginning of the revolution, the situation was such that our government was a real government. And at this point, if the majority of the Central Committee members are members of the Council of People’s Commissars, the following advantages will be obtained. First, the Council of People’s Commissars will become a government in the full sense of the word. It will have to be in charge of policy at all times, as there will be the most senior political workers there. On the other hand, the Central Committee will always be in place and will not even have to meet to decide on individual issues, as these will be dealt with by the Council of People’s Commissars. And if it is necessary to solve more general issues, it will not be difficult to convene the Central Committee. Such a structure of the Council of People’s Commissars guarantees the existence of a real government, which is alive and working. On the other hand, there will really be a Central Committee. Against this, there may be objections that by doing so we will disrupt the business work of the Council of People’s Commissars. Nowadays, the Council of People’s Commissars consists exclusively of business people, and if not exclusively, then to a large extent, of people who understand political questions very poorly, but know very well their own departments. And it is necessary to understand, comrades, that this departmentalism does harm. If the government consists of business people, if it is a business cabinet, it is quite clear that everyone here will talk about the interests of their department and will argue about the boundaries of the competence of their agencies, and there will be no general political leadership. Typically the government is structured as follows: each agency should be headed by a responsible political head, and with him there are business fellow ministers. This is the case abroad, and it was also the case with us before. And thanks to this, the business work is not disturbed at all. All business commissars can be turned into deputy commissars. We will not lose anything from this, but we will acquire a real government, which we lack.

Chairperson: Your time is running out.

Osinsky: Then I will have to just read the theses. Here they are. (He reads.)

THESES ABOUT SOVIET CONSTRUCTION

Under the conditions of the civil war the apparatus of the new class state was built at an increased pace, the workers’ and peasants’ power still had to concentrate its legislative and executive powers in narrow and closed collegia (executive committees, bureaus, presidiums, etc.) or in the hands of individuals with unlimited powers. The need for such military command forms of proletarian dictatorship will not disappear completely until the victory of the international revolution. But now that the old state machine has been destroyed, the new one has been built, the old ruling classes and the production relations have been broken down, it is an opportunity to take a number of steps towards the proletarian class democracy, which is our goal in the field of state-building. Under these conditions, these steps consist of the broad involvement of the proletarian avant-garde in the legislation, management, and supervision. These steps will prevent the bureaucratic rigidity of the Soviet mechanism, revive its work, attract new cadres of workers and help to eliminate the spontaneous discontent of the masses with the shortcomings of the Soviet mechanism.

When we issued a decree on the emergency tax, then at the meeting of the CEC faction it turned out that no preparation had been done for the population. And the very same is true. Krestinsky admitted that it would have been more expedient if this issue had been widely discussed beforehand – then the masses would have been prepared and it would have been easier to implement it. Nowadays, even non-urgent draft laws are carried out without any preliminary preparation. In addition to measures to democratize the forms of proletarian dictatorship, it is necessary to take a number of special measures against the revival of bureaucracy. To this end, the Congress considers it necessary to implement the following provisions:

1) In order to fully unite and centralize legislative and executive activities, the Presidium of the Central Electoral Commission merges with the Council of People’s Commissars, which assumes all the functions of the Presidium. Existing people’s commissariats, in accordance with the requirements of the Constitution, become departments of the Central Electoral Commission, people’s commissariats are the heads of these departments and, at the same time, the members of the Presidium.

2) In order to eliminate this situation, when the Council of People’s Commissars has become a meeting of business commissars, which discusses individual decrees and does not actually direct the government policy as a whole, which leads to the strengthening of bureaucracy, it is necessary that as many members of the Central Committee of the party as possible should be part of the government.

3) In order to involve all CEC members in active work, the CEC composition is divided into sections corresponding to the departments. The sections are responsible for the preliminary review of decrees and major events of a fundamental nature that fall within the competence of the department.

4) As some people’s commissariats nowadays find themselves inclined to issue orders without discussion in the Council of People’s Commissars that contradict decrees and interfere with the competence of other central and local institutions, it is necessary to establish and implement a rule that no department has the right to issue principal and other particularly important decisions without discussion and approval by the Council of People’s Commissars.

5) The CEC plenum, being the supreme body of the Republic in the period between congresses and sitting at least twice a month, should take part in the legislation on the most important issues and in fact discuss and monitor the activity of the Council of People’s Commissars and departments of the All-Russian CEC.

6) Department estimates are discussed in detail in the financial section of the CEC and are approved by the plenary for each department separately.

7) Elections to the CEC at the Congress of Soviets are held only after all the candidates nominated separately are discussed in the party factions, and none of the members of the Presidium of the previous CEC should chair the election sessions. The list of members of the Communist faction of the CEC is approved by the Party Central Committee. After the approval of the lists by the Congress, they are announced at the last session of the Congress and are immediately published.

8) In order to establish a close connection between the CEC and the organizations of working masses, the majority of the CEC and its sections shall consist of employees of professional, cooperative, cultural, and educational organizations, etc.

9) In order to properly prepare and implement new actions, decrees and orders of general principle, except for the most urgent ones, should be discussed in advance in the sections and plenum of the CEC, reported in the abstracts to the local executive committees for review and considered in the press, as well as at meetings of workers’ organizations.

10) In order to save revolutionary forces and centralize local power, all executive committees of the city except for the executive committees of the capital cities and industrial centers are abolished, merging with provincial and district executive committees, to which all local power is transferred in the period between congresses.

11) Local executive committees shall organize departments and sections accordingly to departments and sections*. Each department is headed by a member of the executive committee. Members of the executive committee must be employees of local territorial-production cells. Plenums of local councils should take part in the discussion of the most important cases and supervise the activity of the executive committee.

(* Apparently, a word is missing “[of the] All-Russian Central Executive Committee”. -Ed.)4

12) As the People’s Commissariats currently seek to subordinate local departments to their direct influence, separate them from the executive committees, appoint their own heads of departments and members of the boards, it is necessary to restore and confirm the provision of the Constitution that all local departments are subordinate to and controlled by the executive committees, that the heads of departments, subdivisions, members of boards and other responsible persons are elected by the councils, congresses and their executive committees. Only local and higher executive committees and the Council of People’s Commissars have the right to withdraw the elected persons. 

In order to establish proper relations between the central and local authorities, an exact separation of powers should be worked out and fixed by law. In matters of national importance, local executive committees should be agents of the CEC and its presidium. All decrees and orders of the Central Authority are mandatory for executive committees. At the same time, local executive committees should exercise the widest right of local self-government.

13) In order to establish permanent relations between the Soviet bodies and working organizations, to constantly monitor the activities of the Soviet institutions by broad layers of the working class, members of sections related to professional, cooperative, cultural and educational organizations and cells should make regular reports on the activities of plenums, departments, and sections in which they participated. Heads of departments shall submit such reports to specially convened district workers and peasant conferences.

14) Special administrative and judicial departments shall be established in all executive committees in order to establish the real responsibility of officials and provide the public with a real opportunity to pursue officials who violate decrees and commit abuses. Collegia of departments are elected by the congresses and cannot be members of other departments. These departments have the right, upon complaints from the public, to overturn improper orders of officials, to remove officials who have committed offences, and to bring them to trial.

15) In view of the current abnormal tendency of the centers to establish separate local branch offices, which escape from the control of local executive committees, it must be established that local executive committees form a single office for all their departments. Loans granted by the centers to the relevant local departments are transferred to the account of the executive committee, which in turn has no right to delay and change the nature of the loans without special permission from the center.

16) In view of the apparent desire of the Revolutionary Military Council, individual headquarters, even individual commissioners to declare martial law without the consent of the executive committees, it is necessary to leave the right to declare martial law outside the front only to the executive committees and the Council of People’s Commissars. 

The basic norms of martial law and the conditions under which it can be extended should be elaborated by the CEC in the near future.

17) Since the existing outdated division of the country into provinces and counties prevents the proper establishment of central and local government, it is urgent to develop and implement a new division based on the tendency of territories to production centers.

Posted on

Knowledge Democratization, Bourgeois Specialists and the Organization of Science in the Early Soviet Union

For the first installment of our in-depth study of Soviet Science, Djamil, Donald and Rudy sit down to discuss the scientific institutions and the practice of Science in the early Soviet Union up to the conclusion of the Stalin Revolution. They start off with a survey of the Tsarist Academy, and what kind of structures and specialists the Bolsheviks inherited. The conversation continues with the changing ways the Bolsheviks related to specialists during the Civil War and the NEP, and how they were trying to assimilate the culture of specialists when they realized it was impossible to seize cultural power, and how this relates to the present-day debate around the Professional Managerial Class. They then discuss the role of the two anti-specialist trials that kick off the Stalin revolution: the Shakhty affair and the Industrial Party Trial, and how that served to strengthen Stalin’s hand in taking over the politbureau and resulted in a culture of blaming specialists for the failure of five-year plans. They finish by analyzing the resulting academy and intelligentsia of the 1930s, fully loyal to Stalin, and how that sets the stage for the rise of someone like Lysenko.

Further reading:

  • Loren R. Graham – Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (1993)
  • Sheila Fitzpatrick – The Cultural Front (1992)
  • Kendall E. Bailes – Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin (1978)
  • Simon Ings – Stalin and the Scientists (2019)
  • James T. Andrews – Science for the Masses (2003)

Stay tuned for episodes on Lysenko, the relation of dialectical materialism to the sciences, physics, chemistry, computing, and space travel.

Posted on

Komsomol Life: Interrogating the Soviet Young Communist League with Sean Guillory

Donald sits down with Sean Guillory from the SRB Podcast to discuss the Komsomol, or Soviet Young Communist League, which was often one of the only organizations that provided a link to the early soviet state in many small towns. They discuss the way the early Soviet state was structured with attention to how soft and hard power was transmitted, communist values, gender relationships, the rebirth of social conservatism, and the meaning of comradeship.

 

Here’s a list of sources on the topic provided by Sean:

Anne Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents.

Matthias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917-1932.

Seth Bernstein, Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism.

Sean Guillory, “The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs,” Slavic Review, 71:3, Fall 2012, 546-565.

Sean Guillory, “Profiles in Exhaustion and Pomposity: the Everyday Life of Komsomol cadres in the 1920s,” Carl Beck Papers, no. 2303, 2014.

Sean Guillory, “We Shall Refashion Life on Earth! The Political Culture of the Young Communist League, 1918-1928,” PhD Dissertation, 2009.

For early access to episodes and other perks, you can support Cosmonaut on Patreon. We also recommend listeners support the SRB Podcast so they can continue the excellent work they do.

Posted on

Against Socialist Reactionaries: a response to Jacob Richter

Rosa Janis responds to Jacob Richter’s April 9th, 2020 letter to Cosmonaut on social conservatism and the left. 

Normally we do not respond to letters that are sent to us. However, Jacob Richter’s recent letter, which is more of a short article, merits a response for a number of reasons. The sentiments expressed are, to put it bluntly, a deadly spew. This poison of “anti-idpol” social conservatism is spreading quite quickly among certain parts of the socialist movement in the wake of the defeat of both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It’s always easier to scapegoat others than applying Marxist analysis to political failures. We are forced to respond to this sentiment both on the level of our political commitments as Communists towards general social progress as well as on the personal level of two people on the Cosmonaut editorial board being trans women (myself included) who would be affected negatively by a tolerance toward social conservatism in our movement. Also, while we welcome disagreement among comrades, it is particularly disappointing that Richter would express such reactionary sentiments, as he was an early proponent of the “neo-kautskyism” that influenced us. Despite taking a polemical tone here, we genuinely hope that he and those who hold similar views can be reasoned with. 

Does Reaction have a class character? 

Richter claims that social conservatism can be divided into two distinct categories of class character: proletarian and petit-bourgeois. The difference between these two categories of social conservatism can be traced out through empirical data that has been gathered by mainstream social scientists like Thomas Piketty. While it’s impossible to deny that there are reactionary sentiments common among the working class, to argue that there is social conservatism with particular class characteristics is an abuse of class analysis. At first glance it may be obvious that certain social conservative sentiments have a working-class basis, with anti-immigrant sentiment tied to working-class fears about being replaced by illegal immigrants who are willing to work at starvation wages. However, this is one of the few examples where It can appear to be as clear-cut as this. The vast majority of reactionary sentiments cut across class. For example, racism was practically universal among American whites before and during the Civil Rights Movement. In a Gallup poll from 1963, 78% of the white participants said they would move out if a black family moved into their neighborhood, while 60% said that they disapproved of the marches of MLK while a plurality of Americans thought the Civil Rights Movement was made up of Communists. Although it could be argued that the white population the United States at the time were unevenly proletarianized and consisted of a large labor aristocracy (a claim one can dismiss as cheap Maoism), this reality leaves one in a particularly sticky situation, as whites were the majority of workers in the United States and expressed racist attitudes. Therefore, according to this logic it makes sense to say that racism at the time had a working-class character, making it possible to rationalize racism in workerist terms. The introduction of more blacks and women into the workforce drastically reduced the wages of white men since such minority workers were willing to work for less, meaning the worker’s movement in the United States accommodated racist and sexist views on numerous occasions. However, racist attitudes were nearly universal among the white population of all classes. The same can be said for a number of different forms of prejudice ranging from sexism to homophobia. 

If these sentiments are not born out of a particular class character, then where do they come from? For this, I will give you the standard Marxist answer which was best articulated by the great theorist Louis Althusser: these reactionary sentiments only come to be thought of as common sense throughout society because they are spread through the social practices of ideological state apparatuses such as the church, the school, media, etc. Ideology, spread through the social practices of such institutions, unconsciously reinforces the status quo of capitalism. One might point out that such civil institutions have been weakened by the advancement of neoliberal capitalism, yet this does not mean that said institutions do not exist in their entirety, but rather only in weaker forms. Thus, we see weaker and less universal forms of these reactionary sentiments. 

It could even be argued that social conservative sentiments are more common among the petty-bourgeois than they are among working-class People. Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital and ideology argues that social progressivism correlates the views of “professional-managerial class” but Thomas is not using a Marxist understanding of class to analyze class politics. The professional-managerial class is not a class unto itself but rather a subsection of a larger petty-bourgeoisie. When this fact is taken into account we get a much different picture of the social politics of class. The petty-bourgeois in the United States consistently votes for the Republican party on average, with your average Trump voter having a significantly higher income than even the majority of Hillary supporters. This preference towards social conservatism among the petty-bourgeois can be explained by the fact that the ideological state apparatuses of civil society are more well-funded and operational among the petty-bourgeois then they are among the proletariat. The proletariat is more likely to be politically apathetic rather than socially conservative. They might express reactionary or progressive sentiments but these do not amount to a meaningful ideological commitment to social conservatism. So, in a certain sense, it could be said that social reaction, in general, does have a particular class character. However, when it was in its prime it was a universal ideology across classes and in the current moment, it more strongly correlates to the petty-bourgeois than the proletariat. 

Historical responses to Social Reaction 

Since Richter brought up the history of the SPD and Stalin in relation to social conservatism it would be relevant to talk about the particularities of their responses to social conservatism among the working-class. While the SPD in many respects was “conservative” on social issues such as prostitution and gambling, to label them socially conservative would be somewhat mistaken. The “socially conservative” positions that the SPDtook when they were still an authentically socialist mass party were rooted in Marxist rather than conservative reasoning. Prostitution and gambling were opposed not because of the cheap moralism of the petit-bourgeois concerned about the impurity of such acts but because they took advantage of working-class and surplus population poverty by selling people into sexual slavery and debt. The SPD was also willing to push against the prevalent social reactionary sentiments of the time. On 13 January 1898, the great Marxist August Bebel stood before the German Parliament to advocate for the decriminalization of sodomy, arguing clearly and concretely against Victorian social conservatism in favor of a scientific understanding of human sexuality. He would also sign a petition put out by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, an early LGBT advocate group. 

Compare the SPD response to homophobia to that of the USSR. Initially, with the abolition of the laws of tsarist Russia, there was a small opening for social progress on the issues of sexuality in the Soviet Union since anti-sodomy laws were effectively gone in certain parts of the Federation. This, along with a number of members of the party like Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, commissar of Health, actively pushed for a scientific understanding of homosexuality to be the official policy of the USSR. Leading a team of Soviet scientists to meet members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany, Nikolai Aleksandrovich and a small number of Bolsheviks within the party opened up the possibility of genuine progress during this brief moment. However, with the rise of Stalin, things changed rapidly and in an attempt to appeal to the peasantry Stalin put forward a series of socially conservative policies that would not only set back the small bits of progress made by gay rights activists but also the advances of women and ethnic minorities within the USSR. Stalin was particularly vicious towards homosexuals, imprisoning homosexuals en masse in a witch hunt to take down a supposed fascist pederast conspiracy. After everything was said and done the Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko rationalized Stalin’s anti-gay pogrom as being class warfare against the remnants of the effeminate aristocracy. The same sort of story would repeat in other supposedly socialist nations with the notable exceptions of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. 

The worst elements of reaction within the worker’s movement have always been justified as a means of appealing to a socially conservative working-class, leaving oppressed minorities within the working class defenseless against pseudo-democratic demagogues. Social conservatism in the workers’ movement has always been rationalized by appealing to a proletarian class character. As a result, if we were to accept Richter’s arguments, we would have to accept the darkest aspects of our own history as authentic class positions. 

Minorities and the Minimum Program

Coming back around to Richter’s initial argument, he seems to be making less of a claim about what issues working-class people happen to be socially conservative than arbitrarily labeling certain positions petit-bourgeois social conservatism as opposed to proletarian. This arbitrary division leaves open a non-scientific approach to this issue and opens the door for simply rationalizing personal bigotry by throwing on the label of class character. This is exemplified by the offhand mentioning of Paul Cockshott’s reactionary views on gender as an example of social-conservatism with a proletarian class character. Cockshott’s views on gender, whatever the merits of the rest of his work, are especially abhorrent in their hatred of transgender identity and belief in homosexuality as bourgeois deviance. To suggest such views are an example of proletarian class positions is personally insulting to the transwomen on the editorial board of Cosmonaut and also seems bluntly absurd when one looks at the specific details of the trans issue. The bulk of anti-trans sentiment is AstroTurf by conservative think-tanks in both the United States and the UK while among the working class general acceptance of LGBT people is popular. The majority of people who identify as LGBT are working class and young according to recent Gallup polling. Expecting a party of the working class to accommodate the bigotry of petty-bourgeois boomers with reactionary views on gender like Paul Cockshott is asinine, to put it bluntly.

 

Even if trans acceptance was not popular among the working class it would not matter because we are not vulgar workerists. We understand the role of the mass party as leading the working class towards proletarian politics which means we will often have to cut against the grain of what is popular among working-class people. The Party must uphold the Democratic rights of minority groups such as women, oppressed races/nationalities, and LGBT people as a part of the minimum program. Through this commitment to social progress, the party molds the consciousness of the working class towards genuinely proletarian politics. 

 

Posted on

Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: A Discussion

Christian and Donald sit down for a discussion on Moshe Lewin’s 1974 tome Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. They discuss Bukharin, the Left Opposition, Stalin, Soviet reformers, cybernetic planning, and more. Our conclusion: this book has greatly humbled us, letting us know how hard actually creating a new society outside of capitalism is. Unfortunately, Lewin’s book is out of print but we recommend getting your hands on a used copy if possible. If you can’t, his book The Soviet Century is still in print from Verso Books. We hope to continue this as a reading series on the problems of building socialism. Edited by P.H. Higgins.

Posted on

“Taylor’s System and Organization” by Nadezhda Krupskaya

Translation by Mark Alexandrovich, introduction by Renato Flores. 

Time motion study being performed in the central institute of labor, 1923

Nadezhda Krupskaya is unfairly remembered by the identity of her husband. A glance at her page in Marxists.org predominantly shows texts related to Lenin’s persona. One of her most detailed biographies is titled “Bride of the Revolution”. But as many women of the time who have been written out of history, she was a revolutionary in her own right, standing alongside Alexandra Kollontai or Inessa Armand. She was the chief Bolshevik cryptographer and served as secretary of Iskra for many years. She was hailed by Trotsky as being “in the center of all the organization work”. After the revolution, she contributed decisively to the revamping and democratization of the Soviet library system, always pushing for more campaigns that would increase literacy and general education.

Her persistent interest in education and organization was a result of her life story. Krupskaya was the daughter of a downwardly mobile noble family: her father was a radical army officer, who combated prosecution of Polish Jews and ended up ejected from the government service, and her mother Elizaveta came from a landless noble family. Nadezhda was provided a decent, albeit unsteady education. She was committed to radical politics early on in her life, starting off as a Tolstoyan. Tolstoyism emphasized “going to the people”, so Krupskaya became a teacher to educate Russian peasants and seasonally spend time working in the fields. However, she found it hard to penetrate the peasant mistrust for outsiders and realized this was a political dead end. 

Krupskaya became a Marxist when enmeshed in the radical circles of St. Petersburg. Marxism appealed to her because it provided a methodology for revolution, with its science substituting the failures of Tolstoyan mystique. After her “conversion”, Krupskaya worked as an instructor in the industrial suburbs of St. Petersburg between 1891 and 1896. The “Evening-Sunday school” was financed by a factory owner, and provided evening classes for his workers. Although she nominally taught just reading, writing and basic arithmetic, she would also teach additional illegal classes on leftist topics and helped grow the revolutionary movement. Her first-hand experience in the factories of St. Petersburg would inform her life-long interests, heavily influencing her views on the organization of production.

In this piece, Krupskaya looks at Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management and shows how they could be applied to the Soviet government. The early “collegiality”-based Soviet State was leading to inefficiencies all around, which produced a stagnant and unresponsive bureaucracy. Krupskaya believed that scientifically-driven organization would alleviate these organizational problems, and at the same time raise everyone’s consciousness of the work they were doing. She provided several prescriptions for the organization of production to achieve these goals, as well as a rationale for them.

Taylorism is a dirty word in leftism today. But as Krupskaya did, we have to understand that we should not hate technology itself. Technology is deployed by certain class interests. Krupskaya mentions that workers rightly hated Taylor because the scientific organization of production had been deployed to the advantage of the capitalists. But Krupskaya also believed that Taylorism could be a weapon wielded by the Soviet State so that it could be more responsive to workers’ needs. Taylorism could even be used by the workers themselves to increase productivity and work shorter hours.

Krupskaya was not alone in her support of a Soviet Taylorism. Gastev’s Central Institute of Labor wanted the full application of Taylor’s principles to production as the best way to organize the scarce resources available. Others opposed Taylorism, understanding that it came with insurmountable ideological baggage and would alienate workers from production. This old debate sees new spins played out today in the context of automation. And while there is no longer a Soviet state to organize scientifically, we can still use the principles of Taylorism in our political organizing as Amelia Davenport recently discussed in “Organizing for Power”.

Krupskaya, date unknown

Taylor’s system and organization – Krupskaya N.

The strange thing is that every communist knows that bureaucracy is an extremely negative thing, that it is ruining every living endeavor, that it is distorting all the measures, all the decrees, all the orders, but when the communist starts working in some commissariat or other Soviet institution, he will not have time to look back, as he will see himself half mired in such a hated bureaucratic swamp.

What’s the matter? Who is to blame here – evil saboteurs, old officials who broke into our commissariats, Soviet ladies?

No, the root of bureaucracy lies not in the evil will of one or another person, but in the absence of the ability to systematically and rationally organize the work.

Management is not an easy thing to do. It is a whole science. In order to properly organize the work of an institution, you need to know in detail the work itself, you need to know people, you need to have more perseverance, etc., etc.

We, Russians, have so far been little tempted in this science of management, but without studying it, without learning to manage, we will not move not only to communism, but even to socialism.

We can learn a lot from Taylor, and although he speaks mainly about the way the work is done at the plant, many of the organizational principles he preaches can, and should, be applied to Soviet work.

Here’s what Taylor himself writes about the application of the well-known organizational principles:

“There is no work that cannot be researched to the benefit of the study, to find out the units of time, to divide it into elements… It is also possible to study well, for example, the time of clerical work and to assign a daily lesson to it, despite the fact that at first it seems to be very diverse in nature” (F. Taylor, “Industrial Administration and Technology Organization”, pp. 148).

Already from this quote it is clear that one of the basic principles of F. Taylor considers the decomposition of the work into its elements and the division of labour based on this.

Let’s take the work of people’s commissariats. Undoubtedly, there is a well-known division of labor in them. There is a people’s commissariat, there is a board of commissariats, there are departments, departments are divided into subdivisions, there are secretaries, clerks, typists, reporters, etc. But this, after all, is the coarsest division. Very often there is no borderline between the cases under the jurisdiction of the commissioner, board, department. This is usually determined by somehow eyeballing. The functions of different subdivisions are not always precisely defined and delineated. There are also states. But in most cases, these “states” are very approximate. There is no precise definition of the functions of individual employees at all. Hence, the multiplicity of institutions follows. There are, say, 10 people in an institution, and their functions are not exactly distributed. Eight of them are misinterpreted, the other two are overwhelmed with work over and above measure. The work is moving badly. It seems to the head of the institution that there are not enough people, he takes another ten, but the work is going badly. Why? Because the work is not distributed properly, the employees do not know what to do and how to do it. The swelling of commissariats is a constantly observed fact. But does it work better?

The question of “collegiality and identity”, a question that has grown precisely because of the lack of division of labour, the lack of separation between the functions of the commissioner and the functions of the collegium, the lack of separation between the responsibilities of the collegium and those of the commissioner. A misunderstanding of this seemingly simple thing often leads to administrative fiction. Thus, during the period of discussion in the Council of People’s Commissars of the question of collegiality and identity, one absolutely monstrous project was presented in the Council of People’s Commissars. It proposed to destroy not only the board, but also the heads of departments and subdivisions, it was proposed to leave only the commissioner and technical officers, to whom the people’s commissar had to give direct tasks. This project revealed a complete lack of understanding of the need for a detailed and strict division of labour. The authors wanted to simplify the office, but overlooked one small detail: if there was only a commissioner and technical staff, the commissioner would have to give several thousand tasks to the staff every day. No commissioner can do that.

The division of labour in the factory is very thorough and far-reaching. There, no one will ever doubt the usefulness of such a division.

The division of labour in Soviet institutions is the most crude, and there is no detailed division of functions. It must be created. The responsibilities of each employee should be defined in the most precise way – from the commissioner to the last messenger.

The terms of reference of each employee must be formulated in writing. These responsibilities can be very complex and extensive, but the more important it is to formulate them as precisely as possible. Of course, this applies even more to all sorts of boards, presidiums, etc.

Then F. Taylor insists on an exact instruction, also in writing, indicating in detail how to perform a particular job.

Taylor means the factory enterprise, but this requirement applies to all commissariat work.

“Instructional cards can be used very widely and variedly. They play the same role in the art of management as in the technique of drawing and, like the latter, must change in size and shape to reflect the amount and variety of information it should provide. In some cases, the instruction may include a note written in pencil on a piece of paper that is sent directly to the worker in need of instructions; in other cases, it will contain many pages of typewriter text that have been properly corrected and stitched together and will be issued on the basis of control marks or other established procedures so that it can be used” (Ibid., p. 152).

Just think how much better the introduction of written instructions would be to set up a case in commissariats, how much would it reduce unnecessary conversations, how much accuracy would it bring to it, what would it be a reduction in unproductive waste of time.

Taylor insists on written instructions, reports, etc.

The written report is much more precise and, most importantly, it is recorded. The written form also facilitates control.

Separation of functions, introduction of a written instruction allow assigning less qualified people to one or another job. Taylor says that you can’t “take advantage of the work of a qualified worker where you can put a cheaper and less specialized person. No one would ever think about carrying a load on a trotter and put a draft horse where a small pony is enough. All the more so, a good craftsman should not be allowed to do the work that a laborer is good enough for” (Ibid., p. 30).

“To put the right man on the right place”, as the English say, is the task of the administrator. Most commissariats have so-called accounting and distribution departments. These departments should have highly qualified employees who know in detail the work of their commissariat, its needs, who are able to correctly evaluate people, find out their experience, knowledge and so on. This is one of the most important jobs, on which the success of the entire institution depends. Is this understood enough by the commissariats? No. This is occupied by random people.

“No people”, you have to hear it all the time. That’s what bad administrators say. A skilled administrator can also use people with secondary qualifications if he or she is able to instruct them properly and distribute the work among them. There is no doubt,” Taylor writes, “that the average person works best when he or she or someone else is assigning him or her a certain lesson, and that the job must be done by him or her at a certain time. The lower the person’s mental and physical abilities, the shorter the lesson to be assigned” (Ibid., p. 60).

And Taylor gives instructions on how the work should be distributed:

“Every worker, good and mediocre, must learn a certain lesson every day. In no case should it be inaccurate or uncertain. The lesson should be carefully and clearly described and should not be easy…

“Each worker should have a full day’s lesson…

“In order to be able to schedule a lesson for the next day and determine how far the entire plant has moved in one day, workers must submit written information to the accounting department every day, with an exact indication of the work performed” (Ibid., p. 57).

A system of bonus pay is only possible with detailed work distribution and accounting.

In commissariats, the premium system is usually used completely incorrectly. Bonuses are not given for extra hours of work or for more work given out, but are given in the form of an additional salary. One thing that indicates this is that there is no proper distribution of business work in Soviet institutions.

Of course, only those who know the job very well, to the smallest detail, can distribute it correctly.

“The art of management is defined by us as the thorough knowledge of the work you want to give to workers and the ability to do it in the best and most economical way” (Ibid.)

It would seem that this is a matter of course, yet it is almost constantly ignored. Comrades are good administrators and, in general, good workers are constantly moving from one area of work to another: today he works in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, tomorrow in the theater department, the day after tomorrow in supply, then in Supreme Soviet of the National Economy or elsewhere. Before he has time to study a new field of work, he is transferred to a new field of work. It is clear that he cannot do what he could have done if he had worked in the same field for longer.

It is not enough to know people, to have general organizational skills – you need to know this area of work perfectly, only then you can distribute it correctly, instruct correctly, do accounting and supervise it.

Taylor’s control is particularly important. He suggests daily and even twice a day to quality control the work of workers, he insists on the most detailed written reporting, suggests not to be afraid of increasing the number of administrative personnel able to control the work. According to Taylor, the best thing would be if it were possible to organize a purely mechanical quality control (not for nothing, the control clocks are linked to the name of Taylor).

It’s vain to write laws if you don’t obey them. And Taylor understands that all the orders hang in the air, if they are not accompanied by a strictly carried out control.

Meanwhile, in terms of control in commissariats the situation is often very unfavorable.

The purpose of Taylor’s system is to increase the intensity of the worker’s work, to make his work more productive. Its goal is to change the slow pace of work to a faster pace and teach the worker to work without unnecessary breaks, cautiously and cherish every minute.

Of course, Taylor is the enemy of all the time-consuming conversations. He tries to replace oral reports with written ones. Where they are unavoidable, he tries to make them as concise as possible.

“The management system increasingly includes a principle that can be called the “principle of exceptions”. However, like many other elements of the art of governance, it is applied on an ad hoc basis and, for the most part, is not recognized as a principle to be disseminated everywhere. The usual, albeit sad, look is represented by the administrator of a large business, sitting at his desk in good faith in the midst of a sea of letters and reports, on each of which he considers it his duty to sign and initial. He thinks that, having passed through his hands this mass of details, he is quite aware of the whole case. The principle of exceptions represents the exact opposite of this. With him, the manager receives only brief, concise and necessarily comparative information, however, covering all the issues related to management. Even this summary, before it reaches the director, must be carefully reviewed by one of his assistants and must contain the latest data, both good and bad, in comparison with past average figures or with established norms; thus, this information in a few minutes gives him a complete picture of the course of affairs and leaves him free time to reflect on the more general issues of the management system and to study the qualities and suitability of the more responsible, subordinate and employees”. (Ibid., p. 105).

What business-like character would the work of commissariats take if the comrades working there would keep to the “principle of exceptions”?

Let’s sum it up. F. Taylor believes that it is necessary:

1) Decomposition of the work into its simplest elements;

2) the most detailed division of labour based on the study of the work and its decomposition into elements;

3) precise definition of the functions that fall on each employee;

4) definition of these functions in exact written form;

5) Appropriate selection of employees;

6) such distribution of work, so that each employee has as many jobs as he can perform during the day, working at the fastest pace;

7) Continuous instruction by more knowledgeable persons, if possible in writing;

8) systematic, properly organized control;

9) to facilitate its written reporting (as soon as possible);

10) Where possible, mechanization of controls.

“This is what everyone knows,” the reader will say.

But the point is not only to know, but to be able to apply. That’s the whole point.

“No system should be conducted ineptly,” notes Taylor.

Where do you learn to manage? “Unfortunately, there are no management schools, not even a single enterprise to inspect most of the management details that represent the best of their kind” (Ibid., p. 164).

That’s what Taylor says about industry in advanced countries.

Clearly, in Russia, we will not find any samples of the industry, not just of the industry, but of the administrative apparatuses. We need to lay new groundwork here. Through thoughtful attitude to business, taking into account all working conditions, it is necessary to systematically improve the health of Soviet institutions, to expel the shadow of bureaucracy from them. Bureaucracy is not in reporting, not in writing papers, not in distributing functions, in the office – bureaucracy is a negligent attitude to business, confusion and stupidity, inability to work, inability to check the work. You have to learn how to manage, you have to learn how to work. Of course, everything is not done in one go. “It takes time, a lot of time for a fundamental change of control… The change of management is connected with the change of notions, views and customs of many people, ingrained beliefs and prejudices. The latter can only be changed slowly and mainly through a series of subject lessons, each of which takes time, and through constant criticism and discussion. In deciding to apply this type of governance, the necessary steps for this introduction should be taken one by one as soon as possible. You need to be prepared to lose some of your valuable people who will not be able to adapt to the changes, as well as the angry protests of many old, reliable employees who will see nothing but nonsense and ruin in the innovations ahead. It is very important that, apart from the directors of the company, all those involved in management are given a broad and understandable explanation of the main goals that are being achieved and the means that will be applied.

Taylor, as an experienced administrator, understands that the success of the case depends not so much on the individual, but on the sincerity of the entire team.

Only this Taylor’s team limits itself to administrative employees. This is quite understandable. In general, Taylor’s system has not only positive aspects – increasing labor productivity through its scientific formulation, but also negative aspects: increasing labor intensity, and the wage system is built by Taylor so that this increase in intensity benefits not the worker, but the entrepreneur.

The workers understood that Taylor’s system was an excellent sweat squeezing system and fought against it. Since all the production was in the hands of capitalists, the workers were not interested in increasing labor productivity, not interested in the rise of industry. Now, under Soviet rule, when the exploitation of the labor force has been destroyed and when workers are interested to the extreme in the rise of the industry – a team that should consciously relate to the introduction of improving working methods – there should be a team of all the workers of the plant or factory. The capitalist could not rely on the collective of the workers he was exploiting, he relied on the collective of administrative employees who helped him to carry out this exploitation. Now the working collective itself has to apply the most appropriate methods of work. He only needs to be familiarized in theory and practice with these methods. This is production propaganda.

As far as the employees of Soviet institutions and people’s commissariats are concerned, it is necessary to familiarize them with the methods of labor productivity. This falls on the production cell of the collective of employees. But only by raising the level of consciousness of all employees, only by involving them in the work of increasing the productivity of commissariats – it is possible to actually improve the state of affairs and destroy not in words, but in practice, the dead bureaucracy.

 

Posted on

Which Side Are You On?: The Challenge of the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution

The Ethiopian Revolution teaches modern leftists an important lesson about international solidarity, argues Ian Scott Horst. 

Way back in 1848, the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admonished in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” This basic prescription for political solidarity flows obviously and organically from the understanding of global political economy that they (and their ideological heirs) spent decades investigating, defining, and fighting for on street barricades. Marx and Engels diagnosed that the vast majority of the world’s population shared a mutual interest by virtue of its exploitation and oppression at the hands of a global class system, here in corrupt decay, there in bloody infancy. They suggested a liberatory class struggle as a path of resistance that was conveniently locked inside that global political and economic system and enabled by its own contradictions. To reject, indeed to overturn, that global system of exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of humanity by a tiny controlling minority of kings, political elites, and captains of industry, Marx and Engels prescribed not only moral outrage, but an understanding they called “scientific” of how those oppressed and exploited people could employ their vast majority in numbers and their strategic social relationship to the means of production to win the class struggle, and with it a better future for humankind based on cooperation and the communal good.

The phrase “Solidarity Forever” may have originated in radical trade unionism, but it was a damned effective compass for orienting one’s place in a combative world divided into potential comrades and bloodthirsty enemies. As leftist watchwords, the phrase reinforces an intuitive impulse growing out of the human experience of living and working together in a class-divided world, and neatly reinforces the deeper ideological explorations of theoreticians in the Marxist tradition. As a concept it rightfully suggests a deep connection between the daily struggles to survive, as experienced by the unpropertied classes and the political prescriptions of communist ideology. So why does it seem that so many of today’s heirs to Marxist tradition have discarded this time-proven compass when it comes to orienting themselves in today’s world of struggle? How did it happen that the first impulse of wide swathes of the Marxist left is to oppose the masses turning out into the world’s streets and avenues?

Leftists in the belly of the beast are morally (not to mention strategically) obligated to oppose the actions of our “own” imperialism. The dividing line this commitment creates is pretty easy to see in the separation of a “hard” left from a social-democratic one, even though the numbers of people identifying with either is much reduced in this post-Soviet century. But dialectical thinking should enable us to see that rejecting “our” government is actually not an automatic reason to express political support to every regime in conflict with the one we live under, and this is where much of today’s left seems to have stumbled away from the basic starting place located by Marx and Engels back in 1848.

It would be naive to suggest there are no differences in the mass popular mobilizations that have rocked the world’s streets in the last decade: The so-called Arab Spring and its stepchildren in Syria and Libya. Occupy Wall Street. Iran. Thailand. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Nicaragua. The yellow vests of France. Hong Kong. But what unites these popular struggles is that, by degrees, much of the left reflexively rejected them out of hand, in some cases siding with the brutal police or military repression that would follow. Solidarity was discarded. In truth, some of these movements have had intensely reactionary elements, and in several cases that reactionary element is certainly at their core; but much of the left’s response was predictable, sudden, and utterly lacking in nuance, or importantly, any willingness to investigate the contradictory natures of these mass revolts or suffer any mild interest in the causes of mass grievance. The left has repeatedly rushed to identify the American CIA as the unquestionable locus of all global discontent. In several of these instances, the pretensions of the targets of mass resistance to some mantle of social progress were given greater credibility than the cries coming from the street. In many cases, the relationship of each country to the imperialist hegemon is factored larger than the class relationships within them. Let us not be naive: certainly, the CIA is engaged in subversion as a matter of routine. But what does it say about the possibilities for human liberation (and perhaps more importantly, about our abilities as professed revolutionaries to evangelize a universal message of revolt) that every spark of rebellion is reflexively dismissed? Put in another way, do “Black Lives Matter” only in the United States?

This phenomenon didn’t begin in the last decade. It really goes back to the halcyon days of left-talking military revolutionaries who dominated large swaths of the global South in the period between post-war decolonization and the fall of the Soviet bloc. With socialist revolution seemingly more distant than ever in the so-called liberal democracies of the global North, the left came to embrace many of these military figures with minimal critique or challenge, seemingly forgetting that printing up posters of Lenin isn’t quite the same thing as following his prescriptions for waging proletarian revolution or building socialism.

One of the clearer cases of this phenomenon — indeed one of the most tragic cases — was the embrace by much of the left of Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam and the military regime which ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.

Mass demonstrations in 1974 began the revolution

In February of 1974, a wave of labor strikes and mass protests swept the empire of Ethiopia. Tightly ruled by an aging Emperor Haile Selassie since the early decades of the century, now confronted with an increasingly harsh and vivid contrast between the haves and have-nots, the Ethiopian population stayed in the streets for weeks. They were soon joined by elements of the military which threatened a full-on mutiny. Taxi drivers, teachers, Ethiopia’s small industrial workforce led by what had been presumed to be a docile and captive trade union confederation in the pocket of the AFL-CIA, and most importantly, many thousands of dissatisfied high school and college students made economic and political demands, including that of popular democracy in the form of a people’s provisional government. There were mass demonstrations of priests and prostitutes, of minority Muslims; and the country’s vast peasantry began eyeing the land they worked in a variety of exploitative feudal land tenancy schemes. A country without political parties or press freedoms soon engendered a vibrant political culture in which underground publications written by communists soon dominated the national discourse.

In what has been described as a slow-motion coup, a committee of junior military officers known as the Derg began edging its way into the seat of power, forcing the autocrat to readjust his government repeatedly. They claimed that the spontaneous popular revolt needed direction and that the military was the only organized force in the country that could offer it. In September of 1974, the Derg pushed the emperor from power and shortly afterward proclaimed Ethiopia a state guided by “Ethiopian Socialism,” defined very loosely and not yet implying an imitation of, or connection to, the avowedly socialist countries of the Soviet bloc.

The new regime was ruled by a provisional military government, a triumvirate junta in which Mengistu was a junior partner. Mengistu had been trained in Fort Benning, Georgia, and displayed no apparent ideological sympathies. But ominously, in a year marked by remarkably little bloodshed, the Derg promptly executed sixty people, mostly prominent officials of the former regime and members of the nobility, but including a small number of leftists. In what was to set a pattern for government personnel changes in the Derg era, also killed was the head of the Derg himself, a liberal general named Aman Andom. While Mengistu remained a junior partner in the Derg, he was widely recognized as the agent of these executions. The military junta was now to be headed by another non-ideological figure, a brigadier general named Teferi Bente.

Over the next two years, the Derg government engaged in a number of revolutionary reforms, greeted with degrees of enthusiasm and skepticism by the revolutionary population. Some businesses were nationalized, but foreign and private investment was guaranteed. Feudal land tenancy was ended, but the land was turned over to the state, not the tiller. Students were sent to the countryside to evangelize Ethiopian socialism, but they, and the peasants they instructed, were punished for taking things too literally. The government tried to disband the independent labor movement and replace it with a captive state-run union that would focus on production and class peace. And all the while the regime continued the imperial wars against restive national minority populations, most notably the rebellious Eritreans in the country’s northern Red Sea region. The regime posed as anti-imperialist, but relied on U.S. aid, including all that military hardware being used against Eritrean peasants.

By the end of 1976, elements within the Derg lost patience with the quickly growing Ethiopian left which had continued its agitation for popular democracy and began to wage a brutal campaign of repression. This repression was met with violent resistance from the civilian left, which began its own urban guerrilla campaign against government officials guilty of acts of repression.

In February of 1977, Mengistu resolved some serious internal contradictions inside the regime with a preemptive coup d’etat, killing Teferi Bente and a handful of other officers of questionable loyalty. He immediately moved to make an alliance with the Soviet Union. He also unleashed what he would eventually christen as the “Red Terror,” a series of death squad campaigns against any and all civil opposition. While totals remain the subject of debate, the body count has been compared to that of the 1994 genocide in nearby Rwanda. By the time of the terror, the U.S.-trained Mengistu had become proficient at employing Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, and he claimed, invoking early Soviet history, that his purges were directed against counter-revolutionary “white terrorists,” which he defined variously as anarchists and Maoists as well as agents of imperialism and the former nobility.

Captured EPRP members and flags during the “red terror”

When the quixotic and also avowedly Marxist-Leninist military leader of neighboring Somalia, Jaale Maxamed Siyaad Barre, invaded eastern Ethiopia and renounced his own Soviet sponsorship in favor of U.S. aid, Mengistu pleaded to Cuban leader Fidel Castro for assistance, and soon massive numbers of Cuban troops and Soviet bloc weapons flooded the country. Mengistu, with Soviet and Cuban aid, attempted to rally progressive global opinion against the Somali invasion, now marked as a proxy for imperialist meddling. Soon, Somali troops were driven out, and with massive donations of police surveillance technology from East Germany, the “Red Terror” found success by the end of 1978, wiping out all traces of opposition in the country’s urban areas.

A generation of political exiles fled the country, leaving behind a variety of guerrilla struggles polka-dotting the country’s rural expanses, one of which eventually snowballed into the rebellion that swept the regime from power in 1991. That rebellion also allowed the Eritrean rebels to consolidate their own victory and secede from Ethiopia. But in 1978 the future looked bright for Mengistu. He eventually built a captive state communist party (which he headed, of course), called the Workers Party of Ethiopia. Posters of himself, and Marx and Lenin were soon ubiquitous. Despite famine, economic disaster, and the occasional coup attempt, the regime lasted until about the same time as the Soviet bloc faltered. That global dust-plume of Soviet collapse undercut the stability of Soviet clients across the globe from Afghanistan to Benin, from Madagascar to South Yemen, from Kampuchea and Vietnam to Cuba; only the strongest survived and that did not include the Mengistu regime.

The great majority of the global left lauded Mengistu’s Ethiopia, accepting official government narrative as gospel. Socialist groups like the U.S. Workers World Party accepted state press junkets, interviewing regime members by day while nighttime neighborhood roundups left piles of bloody children’s bodies on street corners for the morning trash. Most Maoists and Trotskyists expressed degrees of critique, especially as regards the controlling influence of the USSR, and the global national liberation support movement anguished over the idea of the Cuban revolution suddenly in contradiction with the Eritrean national liberation struggle; but lasting orthodoxy seeping into 21st century leftist discourse holds that the Mengistu regime may have had its flaws, but it was another experience of Marxism-Leninism squelched by imperialism.

Mengistu: not a hero of the proletariat

Most of the barebones narrative I have repeated above is not unlike the way much of the left recalls the Ethiopian Revolution in its totality, though perhaps I’ve been a bit more critical. They focus on the claims of the Mengistu and the Derg. They write off the dissent from the left. They are embarrassed by the violence, but since it was probably unreasonable infantile ultraleftists consciously or unconsciously acting in the interests of imperialism, it’s all well and good. As a model for socialism, well, it was a revolution from above, but it works that way sometimes.

As a verdict of history, let us be clear: an interpretation of Derg-era Ethiopia as actually socialist is completely shameful, and reflects miserably on the compass of solidarity used by the left. Nostalgia for Mengistu (still alive in a villa in Zimbabwe, by the way) is deeply and intensely misplaced. The global left embraced yet another left-talking military strongman, accepted his rhetorical claims at face value, and turned its back on what was one of the largest mass, civilian communist movements in African history. It’s worth remembering here one of the most useful axioms of Maoist praxis, “no investigation, no right to speak.” So let’s take a second look.

To really understand the Ethiopian revolution, one has to go back to at least 1960. While on one of his many foreign excursions, the emperor was briefly overthrown by military officers led by the Neway brothers. The rebellion was crushed and the Neways were executed, but it was a critical crack in the absolute rule of the emperor in a volatile period of continental decolonization. By 1965, a radical student movement formed the first of many clandestine organizations, the Crocodile Society, which organized demonstrations calling for “Land to the Tiller” and other democratic reforms. Against the backdrop of a growing world radicalization, resistance to the American aggression in Vietnam, the selfless albeit tragic guerrilla exploits of Che Guevara, the labor and student explosions of 1968, and the rise of a younger, more vibrant, New Left detached from Soviet orthodoxy, the Ethiopian student movement became the arena for revolutionary debate and discussion that was otherwise banned. Student publications were filled with nothing but theoretical articles debating the application of Marxism-Leninism to Ethiopia. This revolutionary student movement dominated academic culture in Ethiopia as well as among the many diaspora Ethiopians who were seeking higher education abroad.

The first Ethiopian left organization was formed secretly in France in 1968. Called Meison, the Amharic abbreviation for the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, it was the brainchild of an Ethiopian linguist named Haile Fida, who would become a notorious figure in the revolutionary era. The group had distinct views it argued for in the student diaspora, but as an organization, it remained completely clandestine until after the events of 1974. In 1969, a group of radical students led by Crocodile Society veteran Berhane Meskel Redda hijacked an airplane from Ethiopia to Sudan. They soon found themselves in revolutionary Algiers, were given a vacated pied noir villa by the Algerian government, and set up a base from which to coordinate revolutionary activities while they hobnobbed with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers and representatives of dozens of other global national liberation movements.

Things at home took a dark turn with the assassination at the end of the year of a popular student leader, Tilahun Gizaw, in what was presumed to be a government hit. A wave of repression killed many students, imprisoned more, and sent thousands of others abroad. Ethiopian student discourse took a serious turn: they knew a crisis was coming and with it the promise of a popular explosion, and they began to make plans to transform themselves from radical students to professional revolutionaries; they knew they needed a revolutionary party and started to plan how to build one. In 1972, they founded a second radical organization at a congress held in West Berlin, again in total secrecy. Calling itself the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Organization, its supporters were based everywhere there were Ethiopian students, from New York to Moscow, from Rome to Addis Ababa. It approached the most radical Palestinian organizations for military training, which it received. It competed for covert leadership of the movement with Meison, whose politics were not dissimilar but which had quite a different perspective. EPLO felt revolution was imminent, Meison prepared itself for a long march lasting many years.

It is true that the embryonic Ethiopian left did not lead the February 1974 uprising, though the ranks of people rising up included many young people who had spent their school years learning about revolution in the campus crucibles. Both Meison and EPLO immediately understood the importance of the moment, and most of their cadre who were based abroad returned home, where they began to publish and distribute regular underground newspapers and flyers. The most important of these was Democracia, published by EPLO, although that was, for the moment, left unsaid. They understood students couldn’t do it alone and they began to expand their social base. The revolutionary movement started to take off. It greeted the military coup with concern and suspicion; the welcome exit of the emperor tempered by the expectations about the predictable trajectory of a military regime. This was when the call for a people’s provisional government was formulated, at first supported by all factions on the left.

The left did not ignore the military. In Bolshevik fashion, they reached out to the military rank and file. EPLO even formed caucuses of revolutionary soldiers. Some oriented to various officers within the ruling military committee. Meison’s Haile Fida and one Senay Likke, a veteran of the diaspora student movement who had repeatedly clashed politically with partisans of EPLO, wound up becoming confidants of key Derg figures, including most importantly Mengistu, who was a veritable political tabula rasa packed with personal ambition. Shortly after some of the dramatic reforms announced by the regime, Meison dropped its calls for democracy in favor of cooperation with the military. Haile Fida and Senay Likke were soon referred to as the Derg’s politburo, and they and many of their followers were given portfolios in government ministries and charged with applying a socialist varnish to military rule.

In 1975, EPLO transformed itself into Ethiopia’s first political party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party or EPRP. It had an elaborate nationwide network of clandestine cells and semi-open mass organizations. They established the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Youth League which attracted tens of thousands of eager revolutionary youth. They had a mass organization for women and their cadre kicked the CIA out of the Ethiopian labor movement. After that was suppressed, they formed their own red labor movement. They attempted, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to build an alliance with Eritrean rebels. At one point they were even accused of seizing control of national distribution of red chili pepper. At their height in 1976, they had thousands of members and tens of thousands more supporters and sympathizers. A rural base area in the north of the country was home to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Army, which hoped to replicate the Chinese successes of waging people’s war and building peasant support in the countryside. EPRP has been called one of the largest communist parties ever seen on the African continent. It showed up to mass demonstrations with huge contingents carrying red flags, warning of the dangers of fascism from the regime and calling for the people to take power.

EPRA fighters in a base area

The politics of both EPRP and Meison started where one might expect for groups originating in the late 1960s: heavily influenced by Maoism, holding Che Guevara and the US Black Panthers in high regard. Meison tended more toward a kind of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, but EPRP was ideologically quite iconoclastic. Its surviving propaganda materials reveal a commitment to revolutionary democracy and popular empowerment unparalleled in other left movements of the day. Surviving veterans of the movement talk of study groups where the reading lists may have started with Lenin and Mao, but ended with Frantz Fanon, new leftist economists like Huberman and Sweezy, and even Isaac Deutscher. Its ground-breaking 1975 program includes planks for workplace daycare to enable women to work and participate fully in society; it called for the recognition of the right to strike and laid forth a vision of a democratic society on a path to socialism. The EPRP’s formation threw off course the Derg’s own plans to form a political party; that didn’t fully materialize until 1984.

A comparison of how the EPRP organized for socialism with the way the Derg tried to impose it is stark. Again and again, Derg initiatives were clearly exercises in population control painted in red Marxist-Leninist language, devoid of popular empowerment but stressing obedience to “the revolution” and production. EPRP appeals called for the people to take what is theirs.

As Meison integrated into the state apparatus, simmering sectarian differences between the two groups became exacerbated. The EPRP accused Meison of compiling lists of its members to turn over to government agencies of repression, which were stocked with Meison supporters. The first person EPRP assassinated in reprisal for the government’s repression in late 1976 was a Meison cadre, a popular college professor, but one who was accused of having overseen a roundup of EPRP sympathizers.

1977 was a complicated year. Senay Likke lost his life collaterally during Mengistu’s coup. Meison eagerly participated in the first waves of “Red Terror” directed at the EPRP, but pulled back from supporting the government when Mengistu invited the Soviets in. Shortly before May Day, EPRYL youth preparing for celebrations were set upon by death squads and thousands were killed. During this period in general, the EPRP leadership was decimated. Its most important leaders were gunned down in the street; internal factionalism split the party, forcing Berhane Meskel off to the countryside to regroup and turning other factionalists into snitching enemies. Horrifying torture by the Derg including rape and genital mutilation was widespread. Parents were made to pay for the bullets used to execute their children.

When Meison broke from the regime, Haile Fida and its other leaders went underground. Meison lost its seat at the edge of power and joined the other victims of the terror. Thousands of its members and supporters were then killed or imprisoned, including Haile Fida himself. Ironically, both Berhane Meskel and Haile Fida were executed in the same prison in 1978, strangled by a graduating class of military cadets. Soviet advisors urged Mengistu to purge any traces of Maoism or Chinese influence, and so the last remnants of the civilian left were exterminated. By the end of the year EPRP was reduced to a struggling guerrilla force in the countryside; it survived through the end of the Derg era, but was banned by the new government. That, as they say, is another story; EPRP today calls itself social-democratic but it jettisoned the most radical Marxist parts of its program in the 1980s.

Party program of EPRP

EPRP, Meison and the Derg all waved hammers and sickles. But an investigation of what they meant by those hammers and sickles reveals conflicting visions of socialism and a fundamental dishonesty on the part of the Derg. The Derg was always the creature of the military officer corps: it propounded a theory of the “men in uniform” meant to rationalize the role of the military as agents of social change. The Derg was not made up of the soldiers of the 1917-era Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, it was the creature of Kornilov’s officer corps. Like the emperor before them, it repeatedly and openly said that the Ethiopian people were not ready for democracy. It acted out of expediency, not principle. The EPRP’s base included a layer of the urban petty bourgeoisie, but the Derg’s base included the massive layer of lumpenproletariat displaced from the countryside and crowding Ethiopia’s cities who could be counted on, sometimes mildly coerced, to turn out to pro-government rallies. But even with the transformation of the regime from a provisional one to a formalized single-party state over the course of the 1980s, military figures kept a tight grip, making up the majority of “Workers” Party membership.

The EPRP certainly deserves scrutiny. It can be said in some ways that they were too little too late, and all their study and preparation failed to prepare them for the heavyweight of repression that was to fall on them. Although they made ingenious plans for clandestine organizing and had a clear vision of their final destination, they ultimately failed at people’s war and their detour into urban guerrilla war and terrorism lost them support among those concerned generically about “violence.” They wavered when confronted with strategic choices for a united front to keep the revolution on track.

The revolutionary left achieved hegemony over the Ethiopian student movement at a time when that movement was hugely influential, and this was remarkable. None of its factions believed that students would themselves be the vanguard of a revolution per se; they studied Lenin’s writings on the party and understood the limitations of student organizing. The whirlwind of events confronted the left with an array of choices for breaking out of their demographic limitations, but also a shrinking horizon of possibility. Some turned toward organizing the proletariat and the peasantry directly from their midst and simply ran out of time. Others turned toward the revolutionary state for leverage in organizing society from above; they would find themselves outmaneuvered and paying with their lives at the hands of institutions they helped create.

Those interested in reading more about the EPRP and Meison may have to wait for my own book-length documentary history to see the light of day; for now, the Ethiopian section of the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online hosted by the Marxist Internet Archive is definitely worth a perusal. The bottom line, however, is that an understanding of revolutionary Ethiopia — perhaps more accurately labeled counterrevolutionary Ethiopia — is not possible from taking the words and visuals provided by Mengistu and his allies at face value. There are complicated ideological issues here that a short article like this one can’t address. But there are also facts. And the worshipful appetite of segments of the left for a military ruler who held on to power by suppressing the left, by suppressing ethnic dissent, really makes a travesty of the foundations of our commitments as communists.

What happened in 1974 was a real revolution at the conjuncture of contradictions in Ethiopian society. That revolution continued with critical mass support for a few years, but the process was hijacked by a brutal military that sought to control and channel it for their own power. In 1991, the masses of Addis Ababa enthusiastically welcomed the toppling of the massive Lenin statue that had been supplied by North Korea in 1984. This is the cost of getting it wrong: socialism is remembered in Ethiopia as the dark time when untold thousands of people, including children beyond counting, lost their lives at the hands of people who claimed to be acting in the shadow of Marx and Lenin.

People have been in the streets around the world in the past decade in sometimes surprising places. Are some reactionary while others revolutionary? Sure. Without a dominating ideological resurgence of clear class-based revolutionary praxis, that’s likely to continue. But if you’re gonna pick a side that is a government against its people, you’ll need to have a deep and factual understanding of why and be prepared to fit that answer into an ideological matrix of human liberation. Or maybe you’ll have some explaining to do if you keep calling yourself a Marxist.

A Short Suggested Reading List on the Ethiopian Revolution:

    • John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, Red Sea Press, 1978. Still in print I think. Markakis is a respected Ethiopianist academic; Nega was a former student activist and a key member of the EPRP who perished in the terror. While dated, contains lots of factual analysis and a healthy suspicion of the Derg.
    • Babile Tole, To Kill a Generation; Free Ethiopia Press, 1989/1997. Out of print but PDF widely available online (see EROL link above); Babile Tole is the pseudonym for a collective of EPRP insiders. 
    • Hiwot Teffera, Tower in the Sky; Addis Ababa University Press, 2012/2015. A little hard to find in the US, but an easy, moving read. One of the many memoirs by veterans of the period. Somewhat controversial in a world where the arguments and tragedies of the 1970s remain in living memory among survivors. The bibliography of my own work references something like a dozen of these memoirs, all worthwhile reading.
    • Kiflu Tadesse, The Generation, Volumes I and II. Out of print and expensive, these two volumes by one of the highest-ranking EPRP leaders to survive the period contain extraordinarily rich detail about the party’s history, politics, and organization. Also somewhat controversial.
    • Hama Tuma, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor And Other Stories, Heinemann paperback, 1993. Out of print, but not hard to find. Bitter, moving, satiric fiction about the revolutionary era from the pseudonymous Hama Tuma, actually also a founder of the EPRP. 
    • Left-wing books on the subject written during the Derg era by Fred Halliday, the Ottoways, and René Lefort are rich in detail but marred by also being rich in excuses for the Derg. More modern post-Derg works on the revolutionary period have their merits but are generally marred by anti-communism. Solomon Ejigu Gebreselassie’s The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 1975-2008 from Red Sea Press is still in print and covers a lot of this ground but is a sort of diaspora polemic with the modern remnant of the EPRP.

Ian Scott Horst is an independent communist living in Brooklyn, New York. He has been a supporter of a variety of defunct groups including the post-Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League, Lavender Left, Queer Pagans, and the post-Maoist Kasama Project. He recently completed a book-length documentary history of the Ethiopian revolutionary left and is currently shopping for a publisher. Updates on his research and the progress of his book can be found at his Abyot—The Lost Revolution blog. 

 

Posted on

Carrying the Burden of Communist Man

Donald Parkinson weighs in how communists should relate to our difficult history. We can neither be in denial of our failures or refuse to own up to them. 

As communists living in the aftermath of the 20th century, we inherit a legacy that is tainted by violence and corruption. This legacy is haunted by misfortunes that we rightfully wish to distance ourselves from. Yet we are inevitably attached to it, regardless of how much we denounce it. It is not only the name of ‘communism’ that is associated with the crimes of Stalin, the images of Soviet ‘totalitarianism’, and the arbitrary violence of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Any grand attempt to change the world in the name of universal humanity and do away with the regime of private property carries these associations. The legacy of communism as a mass social project, not merely an idea, is tainted by a difficult past. To simply find a new name or symbolism as a way to distance ourselves from the legacy of brutality associated with communism will not work; we carry this legacy regardless of our appearance. 

Lucio Magri calls this legacy “the burden of communist man” when discussing the Italian Communist Party.1 Magri used this term to discuss the contradiction of the party seeking legitimacy as a mass movement that stood for all that was progressive and democratic, while at the same time existing in continuity with the Stalinist purges and famines. When the Italian Communist Party reasserted itself after WWII, the Soviet Union was still standing, holding a well-earned reputation as a symbol of mass resistance to fascism. The Cold War had only recently begun, and anti-fascism was a more potent force than anti-communism. Today we live in a world of hegemonic anti-communism, where the notion of ‘totalitarianism’ tells us that communism and fascism were just two different expressions of what terror awaits us if we diverge from the liberal-democratic norm. 

In spite of the hegemony of anti-communism, many of us are seemingly immune to it. We cannot help but be captivated by the idea that the world we live in must be changed at a fundamental level. The world must be remade, not reformed; history must be something that we consciously make, not passively observe as its victims. We are believers in a god that failed, defending what much of the Western world sees as a lost cause. Perhaps some of us may be attracted to such a vision for reasons of pure revenge fantasy, yet for the majority of us, it is a moral search for justice that makes communism compelling. Regardless of our intentions, there is an element of faith in our convictions. Rather than acting as an economically rational unit that seeks the most advantageous utility out of their current circumstances, the dedicated communist acts against what is convenient. Yet this faith is different from superstition; it is rationalized with an analysis that aims to be scientific, drawing from all human knowledge to create an all-sided worldview based in reason. This is well and good, but no matter how much we try to weigh our views with evidence it ultimately requires a leap of faith, a wager of sorts, to immerse oneself in the conviction of a communist future. Lucien Goldmann described this faith as follows: 

Marxist faith is a faith in the future which men make for themselves in and through history. Or, more accurately, in the future that we must make for ourselves by what we do, so that this faith becomes a ‘wager’ which we make that our actions will, in fact, be successful. The transcendental element present in this faith is not supernatural and does not take us outside or beyond history; it merely takes us beyond the individual.2

We can tell ourselves all we want that we are merely inspired by an objective analysis of the impossibility of capitalist development after a certain historical breaking, only cold observers of the need for the forces of production to develop beyond the limitations set upon them by the irrationalities of the market. We would, of course, be right, yet to actually dedicate oneself to act upon this analysis requires a willingness to act beyond the confines of the self, beyond the immediate comfort of our lives. We must make a prediction, or wager on a future that we can never be one-hundred-percent sure of regardless of how refined our analysis is. Lars Lih argues that Lenin’s choice to seize power in 1917 was based on these kinds of wagers, the most important one being that the international working-class would follow his revolution in solidarity and spread it across the world.3 There was no way to make such a prediction with absolute certainty, yet Lenin’s faith in the communist future allowed him to act on such a wager and carry through the task of revolution. Faith in the communist cause is essential to give us the conviction and militancy needed to make sacrifices for a greater goal, especially when faced with times like the ones we live in. 

So how does one carry faith in Communism to this day, regardless of the burden of the past that we carry, the burden of communist man? How do we convince ourselves and others to make the wager that communism is possible, despite the tumultuous history behind us? Regardless of our moments of triumph and victory, there are still moments of genuine failure and atrocity. We are reminded of them constantly by the media and our social circles outside communist militancy, who see them as obvious reasons to write off communism and move on. My aim here is not to discuss these particular tragedies and crimes, but to discuss what kind of attitude we should have when looking upon the past and discussing it. First, we shall look at the common paths that people take in response to these issues and why they are inadequate. 

One path commonly taken is denial. Denial means blinding oneself to any of the negatives in our past. If there are tragedies, it is the collapse of the USSR (caused entirely by external rather than internal forces) or the cases of outright violent capitalist counter-revolution. For more complex events, where communists faced repression from other communists, those who take the path of denial develop bizarre conspiracy theories or simply dismiss any kind of concern as capitulating to propaganda. The Moscow Show Trials, in which the Bolshevik elite were purged on absurd charges of aiming to unite with global fascism to overthrow a state they had helped to forge, are entirely justified in this view. The confessions extracted from the likes of Bukharin and Radek are seen as completely genuine. The best-known proponent of this view is Grover Furr, a Medievalist professor who claims that Stalin committed no crimes, in works such as Khrushchev Lied. 

The path of denial is not an option, and those who take this path, regardless of their intentions to challenge the dominant hegemony of propaganda, only barricade their faith in the communist cause with the delusion that their own team was incapable of doing wrong. It rests on superstition rather than a reasoned faith in the final goal of communism. This is not to say that we shouldn’t defend even the most flawed figures of our history from bourgeois lies, even at the risk of sounding like apologists. There is no doubt that death tolls have been inflated and responsibilities placed in unreasonable ways when the bourgeoisie discusses the history of communism, and the authentic historical record must be defended. The danger is that in this defense, we lose sight of the actual crimes committed under our flag, and simply become contrarians to the mainstream history. 

A more reasonable variant of the path of denial is to point out the hypocrisy of bourgeois hype over the crimes of communism, exposing their double standards of condemning the crimes of communism while apologizing for their own. This perspective, best articulated by the now-deceased Domenico Losurdo, is often described as “whataboutism” for its attempt to deflect the crimes of communism onto the crimes others. This perspective in its more nuanced forms does reveal profound hypocrisy at the heart of the bourgeois project.4 After all, if we apply the standards that liberals use to judge communism, we must also reject capitalism. Yet if we are consistent, shouldn’t we also condemn communism? At that point, we are left only with a vague desire for a “third way” with no basis in history, a rejection of any possibility for a better future. The only possible conclusion is to accept the flawed nature of humanity and engage in some kind of individualist rebellion against society itself. 

The approach of ‘whataboutism’ also falls under denial because it refuses to recognize that Communists must have a greater moral standard than the bourgeoisie. Many Marxists would argue that morality is a meaningless concept that serves no purpose for a communist, a mere ideological fetishism used to justify bourgeois property relations. It is true that morality does not exist independent of the class divisions in society. Yet it was for a reason that Engels spoke of Communism as moving beyond “class morality” towards a “really human morality which stands above class antagonism …at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.”5 We must not be moral nihilists, but rather prefigure this “really human morality” in the socialist movement itself, while also understanding that it cannot exist in a pure and untainted form. So while it is of value to point out the moral hypocrisy of anti-communists, it is not enough. We must also have our own moral standards. This does not mean moralizing, to simply apply abstract moral ideals absent any material analysis of the concrete situation in its historical circumstances. As Leon Trotsky said, “In politics and in private life there is nothing cheaper than moralizing.”6

On the other end, there is the path of distancing. This is summed up in a phrase that has become a joke amongst liberals and right-wingers: “that wasn’t real communism.” Those who take this approach would deny that the various crimes committed under the red flag can even be called our own, that they were deviations completely foreign to authentic communism. All that is undesirable in historic communism is placed under the label of “authoritarian socialism”, counterposed to an ideal “socialism from below” that has never been achieved. The impulse to distance oneself from the checkered history of communism, to insist that it has nothing to do with the true meaning of communism and what we want to achieve, comes from a genuine moral instinct towards universal human emancipation from all oppression regardless of its form. Yet condemnation of communist crimes by communists still doesn’t change the reality that we inherit this history. No matter how much we deny this, the majority of the public sees the crimes of Stalin as part and parcel of the communist experience, as part of projects that authentically aimed to build an alternative to capitalism.  

Distancing typically takes a completely moral route, starting from an abstract opposition to authoritarianism and rejecting any kind of hierarchy in an a priori value judgment. This naturally entails condemning ‘actually existing socialism’ for the existence of any kind of impurity. An example of this kind of thinking can be found in an essay by Nathan J. Robinson, How to be Socialist Without Being an Apologist for the Atrocities of Communist Regimes. Robinson argues that countries like Cuba and the USSR tell us nothing about egalitarian societies and their problems, only authoritarian societies. Because communism is a society without classes or the state, and the USSR fails to meet this ideal type, no real conclusions about communism can be drawn from the USSR. In fact, Castro, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin didn’t even try to implement these ideas because their own ideology wasn’t pure enough, an “authoritarian” form of socialism rather than a “libertarian” one. Communism is an ideal that has no real-world reference point, except books where the ideas are held. All we have here is a moral opposition to hierarchy and authority that makes any serious historical investigation and reckoning superfluous. 

Some communists attempt to frame their act of distancing in more theoretical, not merely moral, terms. Some argue that socialism has never been attempted in ideal circumstances, only in developing countries without a fully consolidated capitalist base. As a result, all that could develop is a form of “oriental despotism” or “bureaucratic collectivism”.  While it is true that socialism will be easier to develop where capitalism has more fully taken hold, what we must keep in mind is that politics never occurs in “ideal circumstances”. Socialism will never exist in a vacuum, away from all the muck of the past and imperfections of human experimentation in the present. 

Others would deny that socialism was even attempted. These are the theorists of ‘state-capitalism’ like Tony Cliff, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Onorato Damen, who held that the USSR and its offshoots were just a different form of capitalism, one where the state was a single firm and the entire population waged laborers. There are many problems with state-capitalism as a theory. It takes the surface appearance of the USSR as having commonalities with capitalism without looking deeper into the actual laws of motion in these societies and how they correlate. For Marx, capitalism is a system based on the accumulation of value, where firms compete to exploit wage labor as efficiently as possible and sell their goods on the market. Prices of goods manufactured in mass factory production are supposed to gravitate toward the socially average necessary labor time to produce the goods. This process is known as the law of value. In the USSR, prices were determined by state planning boards, used as a rationing mechanism of sorts. Other tendencies that defined capitalism, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, were also missing. This is only scratching the surface of state-capitalist theories, but it should be clear enough that there are strong objections to these understandings of the USSR and ‘actually existing socialism’. 

Attempts to distance oneself from the experience of ‘actually existing socialism’ by writing it off as just a form of capitalism to oppose like any other is also a form of denial, as well as distancing. It is a form of denial because it aims to avoid reckoning with the fact that these were attempts at building socialism, genuine attempts to create a society outside capitalism. Denying this lets us dodge having to genuinely come to terms with their failures. The USSR, Maoist China, East Germany, and others were all societies that attempted to replace the ‘anarchy of the market’ with state planning, replacing the production of exchange values with the production of use-values. It is arguable whether they are worthy of the title of socialism (I wouldn’t use it without qualifiers), yet to deny that they were related to a project of building socialism is untenable. The act of distancing is an attempt to wash one’s hands of the burden of communist man, which gives moral solace to the individual but fails to actually assess the difficult reality of the past. In this sense, it is a communist faith that is rooted in superstition as much as any other denialism. 

Given the inadequacy of either denialism or distancing, the question of how we appropriately address our past remains. For one, we must own our past. Any kind of cowardly attempt to proclaim that we have no relation to the actual history of communism should be rejected. That there is a past of bloodshed (as well as triumph) that we inherit is something we must come to terms with. By taking responsibility for our past we disallow ourselves from making any simplistic assumptions that “true communism” was never tried, and that with our own purity of ideology we will do right. Instead, we must make an honest assessment of the actual history, understand the actual failures and recognize the kernels of the communist futures that manifested in the processes of the historical socialist project. This approach, neither denial nor distancing, is what I call the balancing act. 

This approach was attempted by Leon Trotsky, a thinker, and leader who undoubtedly stands in the pantheon of great revolutionaries, despite many imperfections. The organizational legacy of Trotsky’s Fourth International is one marred by sectarianism and delusions of grandeur, as seen in countless Trotskyist organizations today, all fighting over who carries the true legacy of the man. Trotsky’s own thinking could be distorted by economism and his own career was not without opportunism and excess. But this is not the place for an in-depth critique of Trotsky, as much as it is warranted. What interests us in Trotsky is what his own approach to the problems of the USSR (a society he helped create yet found himself exiled from) can tell us about how to relate to our past in a critical way. 

The most important aspect of Trotsky’s work, besides the concept of uneven and combined development, was his critique of the USSR. Trotsky’s own theory of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ is of course not without flaws. The notion that the origin of bureaucratization in the USSR was the kulak when the Stalinist bureaucracy would go on to engage in a vicious assault on the kulak can hardly hold up under too much scrutiny. What makes Trotsky’s analysis valuable is its capacity to vigorously critique the USSR while maintaining that it was a conquest of the working class that needed to be defended at all costs. It is within Trotsky’s way of understanding the USSR that we can find a correct way to understand our past. Perry Anderson described this as a sort of “equilibrium” between defense of the ‘workers state’ and critique of its bureaucratic degeneration: 

Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism was remarkable for its political balance – its refusal of either adulation or condemnation, for a sober estimate of the contradictory nature and dynamic of the bureaucratic regime in the USSR…There is little doubt it was Trotsky’s firm insistence – so unfashionable in later years, even among many of his own followers – that the USSR was in the final resort a workers state that was the key to this equilibrium.7

As Anderson points out, this equilibrium between “adulation or condemnation” was a treacherous one. To move too much in the direction of condemnation would be to take that risk of playing into the hands of the capitalist who condemned the USSR and used its shortcomings to bury the project of communism, and rally military intervention against it. This road was exemplified by the path of Max Shachtman, who would argue that the USSR under Stalin had become a form of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ that was actually regressive relative to capitalism, due to its lack of civil liberties. This led him on the path of eventually lending a helping hand to Western imperialism in the Cold War, believing the US and NATO were genuinely more progressive for the working class. The logic of this approach led to saying that the USSR’s collapse would be a progressive win for the international proletariat because it would sweep away the totalitarian system repressing the liberty and freedom that represented genuine gains of bourgeois society. Today Shachtman’s followers in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty celebrate the collapse of the Soviet Bloc as a victory of socialism despite the massive human cost. Hillel Ticktin, whose analysis of the USSR contains many useful observations, falls into a similar trap. While Ticktin never supported imperialism, he did state that “given the lack of understanding of what the Soviet Union was and the influence of the Soviet Union in preventing the coming into existence of a genuine socialist party, the end of the Soviet Union was a step forward.”8 One would think that this “step forward” would be accompanied by a renaissance of Marxism and worker organization, not neo-liberal shock therapy and reactionary nationalism. 

It is not necessary to fully agree with Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR as a workers’ state, albeit degenerated, to accept that the USSR had certain advantages for the working class that were lost with its collapse. Coming to understand this is essential if we want to adequately comprehend the past communist experience. Michael Lebowitz argues that in the USSR there was a “tacit social contract” that “provided direct benefits for workers.”9 This was not a social contract based on the direct rule of the workers over the conditions of their own existence. It was a system where workers were still atomized, unable to exercise collective control over production. They were organized in official trade unions and civil society organizations without being able to form their own independent organizations. However, in exchange for yielding these freedoms, citizens of the USSR were able to receive protection from unemployment and guaranteed access to subsistence in an informal pact with the party-state.10 The nationalization of practically all private property allowed the USSR to “shield” itself from the forces of global capitalism and carve out space to form its own economic dynamics, protecting its citizens from the chaos of the market. This meant workers genuinely had something to lose in the form of a package of economic rights, given in exchange for curtailment of political liberties. Despite the Stalinist terror and bureaucratic malfunction, ‘actually existing socialism’ was able to provide something for the working-class that capitalism couldn’t. Nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc isn’t simply nationalism but also regret over a loss of tangible material benefits. 

With the above taken into consideration, it should be clear that even if the USSR did not represent an authentic workers’ state, it was nonetheless something worth defending: its collapse was a massive setback for the global working class. Those who followed Shachtman were wrong, and Trotsky was right. It was necessary to defend the USSR and the Socialist States from capitalist restoration and imperialist attack while critiquing their bureaucracies and supporting fights for internal changes. 

If this sounds like an example of contradictory “doublethink”, let us compare the USSR to a mobbed-up trade union. We always defend unions from busting by the capitalists, regardless of how corrupt their own regime is. Yet we do not support actions by unions that attack the rest of the working class, such as hate strikes, regardless of the fact they are performed by defensive organizations of the workers that they are better off for having. An equivalent in the case of the USSR would be the repression of Prague Spring, the deportation of ethnic minorities, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. We must condemn such acts, just as we would condemn hate strikes without joining the chorus of anti-union propaganda. Furthermore, we should support attempts by workers to reform their union, even to replace it with a wholly different union that fits their needs; not only kicking out the most corrupt bureaucrats but structurally changing it. 

Of course, the USSR is now gone, so this is no longer a live issue. Leftist groups today do not have to determine the correct way to relate to the USSR as an existing entity. However, we do have to comprehend our past, not only for ourselves but for the public. My suggestion is that Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR gives us a model of how we should comprehend our past, in particular, the legacy of ‘actually existing socialism’. We must recognize that when we carry the burden of our past, we also carry a legacy of struggle for a better world, a struggle that in many cases actually has helped create a better world. If this wasn’t the case, then our faith in communism truly would be an irrational superstition, something we follow against all living evidence. Yes, in the end, the USSR failed, collapsing under its own contradictions. But this need not entail we give up. As Badiou said when challenged on the shortcomings of historical communism,

After millennia of administration centred on private property, we had an experience of collectivisation that lasted for seventy years! How can anyone be surprised that this very brief experience, which was conducted for the first time in history in Russia and China, did not immediately find its stable form, and temporarily failed? This was an assault against a millennia-long taboo; everything had to be invented from scratch without any pre-existing model to go on.11

The challenge faced by communists in forging a new society is unique in history: humanity must take history into its own hands, rather than leave it to the blind chance of necessity. To expect full success with every attempt would be foolish. Also foolish would be to join the chorus of the bourgeoisie in condemning every attempt at such a project. To even mimic the tone of these critics is not acceptable. Regardless of how much we are dedicated to the communist ideal in our hearts, joining this chorus only fuels our own doubt and prepares our eventual surrender. Following Trotsky’s example, we must be critical of and see the need for radical changes within our projects, but always while defending the validity of these projects against those who would stomp them out. 

 

Posted on

Cosmic Imagination in Revolutionary Russia

Before the rise of the Soviet Space Program, utopian visions of space travel existed alongside serious scientific work to make it a reality. Donald Parkinson explores the culture of space exploration that existed both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution and how it laid the groundwork for Sputnik. 

Painting by Andrei Sokolov

Common sense tells us that the Soviet Space Program was primarily a state project, an outgrowth of the military sector aiming to create ballistic missiles that culminated in Sputnik and launched what is commonly known as the “space race”. In this interpretation, the space race was merely a geopolitical competition between two governments to overpower the other in terms of technological achievements that would also give the respective states a military edge. Some, such as Deborah Cadbury in her book Space Race, reduce the competition to traverse the cosmos to a battle between two great scientists, Wernher Von Braun, and Sergei Korolev. Yet to reduce the Soviet aspiration to leave the Earth’s atmosphere to a mere military operation, or two men’s personal ambition, would ignore the  cultural roots of the Soviet Space Program that date back to the pre-revolutionary period of the late 19th century, where a group known as the “Cosmists” combined techno-utopianism with occult spirituality to develop a vision of colonizing the cosmos. After the Bolshevik Revolution the idea of space travel was popularized by the creation of various Cosmonautics Societies, with or without state approval. The Bolshevik Revolution, and its promethean drive to conquer nature in the name of human progress, allowed a flourishing of ideas that existed on a spectrum that ranged from crankery to brilliance. While such cultural experimentation ultimately was repressed if not shut down by Stalin’s “cultural revolution” and purges, the utopian cosmonauts of the 1920s represented a truly revolutionary culture. Within this unique culture, the  Cosmists stood out. Their uncompromising prometheanism went beyond Bolshevik hopes and preceded the mid-century Soviet fascination with space. By examining the ideas of the Cosmists we can see in action the utopian imagination unleashed by revolution, one that is in continuity with past trends of thought yet accelerated to cross new boundaries.

The first state-subsidized rocket program in the USSR started in 1933 through cooperation between the Red Army and amateur space enthusiasts. This collaboration represented a general contradiction within the Soviet space program between Cosmic dreamers and military men. The military was interested in using technology to expand the military capacities of an isolated Soviet republic, which had chosen a course of “socialism in one country” in which international isolation necessitated an industry dedicated to arms build-up.1 The other side of this collaboration involved a wide range of enthusiasts of the Cosmos, who continued and amplified a Russian tradition of fascination with space flight, with ideas ranging from scientifically groundbreaking to occult mysticism. This colliding of military interests and promethean utopianism was described by the historian of the Soviet space program Asif A. Siddiqi as the “bridging of imagination and engineering”. Much has already been said about the role of engineering in the Soviet Space Program, but hardly anything has been said about the role of imagination.

The focus here will be on imagination: those who dreamed of an escape from Earth’s gravitational pull to pierce the atmosphere and enter unknown frontiers. Before the Bolsheviks ever took power, space travel existed as part of the popular consciousness in Russia, although in a relatively subdued sense. Jules Verne’s popular novels serve as the first major example of the presence of space travel in the Russian consciousness. Verne’s first novel translated into Russian appeared in 1864, going on to be one of the most popular foreign novelists in Imperial Russia. French novelist Camille Flammarion’s astronomicheskii roman (astronomical novels) also added to the allure of space, contributing to a popular fascination with Mars through their musings regarding life on the planet. Alexander Bogdanov, a Bolshevik himself, wrote the great Russian novel Red Star about an advanced socialist society on Mars in 1908. Bogdanov’s version of the astronomicheskii roman serves as a sort of prophetic vision of how the imaginative desire for space travel would merge with the actual construction of an (attempted) socialist society that would itself travel the stars.

Painting of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

The topic of space travel in Imperial Russia was not limited to the flights of fancy of science fiction writers, however. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote science fiction novels but also did serious scientific work on questions of space travel, writing: “If a man is a participant not only on Earth, but also in the Heavens, then the influence  of free space should be of special interest.”2 Tsiolkovsky’s first major achievement came in 1903 when he mathematically proved that a rocket could reach escape velocity using liquid fuel, using a model that related the three variables of changing rocket speed: rocket mass, propellant mass, and the exiting velocity of the gas. While his work was under-recognized at the time, this paper would go down in history as the first rigorous proof that space travel was within the realm of possibility.

One of Tsiolkovsky’s designs for a manned spacecraft

Tsiolkovsky went beyond scientific tracts and developed his own philosophy of the cosmos. For Tsiolkovsky, the mystical and the scientific would be combined without contradiction, taking from German occultists like Carl du Prel as well as Darwinian natural selection and, of course, the Christianity of the Russian Orthodox Church. At the core of his thought was an attempt to reconcile the scientific worldview with the Christian worldview and prove the consistency between Biblical worldviews and science. Through these attempts to develop a whole philosophy of cosmic belonging, Tsiolkovsky took part in the creation of the philosophy of Cosmism, a form of promethean mysticism that strove to take the transcendent qualities of religion in a scientific direction.

Another who took a leading role in the development of Cosmism was Nikolai Fedorov who would die in 1903, leaving behind the epic Philosophy of the Common Task. Fedorov’s philosophy was religious in scope and claimed that the unifying goal of humanity was to become immortal and to resurrect the dead. Christianity had a strong influence on this philosophy —  if man was to emulate Christ, then man must rise from the dead. One can see a rough parallel with Marxism in this philosophy: humanity must develop society and the productive forces in order to flourish as human beings and overcome the limits of both class society and nature itself. Another parallel ideology is transhumanism, which is more associated with Silicon Valley libertarianism. Like the transhumanists, Fedorov aimed to utilize technology in an unprecedented way to achieve the abolition of death itself. Technology was de-secularized in Fedorov’s philosophy and framed as a means to achieve mystical ends. Fedorov also saw astronomy as a sort of master science of which all others, especially biology, were subsets. The mastery of astronomy would also mean the mastery of biology, which in turn meant that those once dead could live again and transform the universe in a human image.3 Here we see a strong link between immortality and space travel: before conquering the cosmos, mankind must conquer death itself. To traverse the stars for such distances death cannot become a barrier to the cosmonaut’s journey. Fedorov would greatly influence Tsiolkovsky and both were key in developing the philosophies of Cosmism. Combining Fedorov’s drive to end mortality and his own visions of traversing the cosmos, Tsiolkovsky wrote in 1912:

“In all likelihood, the better part of humanity will never perish but will move from sun to sun as each one dies out in a succession. Many hundreds of millions of years hence we may be living near a sun which today has not yet even flared up but exists only in the embryo.”

When Fedorov died in 1903, the Cosmists were only beginning to develop their thought. The collapse of Czarism and the Bolshevik Revolution would give new life to the Cosmist vision. While one could see the mystical tendencies of the Cosmists, often dealing in Christian themes and agrarian folklore for inspiration, as at odds with the militant rationalism of the Bolsheviks, the Cosmists shared aspects of the Bolshevik worldview as well. Like the Bolsheviks, the Cosmists saw technology as a tool for human liberation, a means to move past old barriers and achieve greater states of social being. For both the Bolsheviks and Cosmists, technology offered a way to conquer the barriers of nature rather than blindly follow them. However, one could say the Cosmists had a more ambitious goal: rather than merely the classless society of the Bolshevik future, the Cosmists wanted to conquer death itself and master the entire universe.

As Richard Stites has pointed out in his book Revolutionary Dreams, the post-Revolutionary period in the USSR was one of great social experimentation and utopian imagination. Stites noted that despite Fedorov’s Tsarist and Orthodox Christian roots, his influence extended to various actors taking part in the revolution.4 The Cosmist followers of Fedorov found themselves in contact with the infamous Proletkult, a mass organization based on the ideas of Bogdanov that aimedto construct a new proletarian culture that would transcend the culture of bourgeois society. Proletkult was where the pre-revolutionary followers of Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky in particular, directly connected with Bolsheviks in their quest to build a new society. Yet Proletkult would be derided by both Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky critiqued it for trying to build a new proletarian culture without first bringing the best of bourgeois culture to the illiterate masses, arguing that the new culture of socialism would be an expression of universal humanity rather than a specific class. In 1920 Proletkult was integrated into the Narkompros or Ministry of Education, no longer continuing an independent role but bringing many of its ideas into the Narkompros itself.

After the end of the Russian Civil War and the beginning of the New Economic Policy (which ended the state of economic war on the peasantry by tolerating a level of agrarian commodity exchange), a period of stability emerged. This period of stability was one of great artistic and scientific experimentation, where the “cosmic imagination” of the Russian Revolution was at its most visible. The scientific and artistic pluralism of the NEP meant the works of the Russian Cosmists flourished, with Tsiolkovsky doing some of his most creative work.

Poster for film Aelita: Sunset of Mars

The ideas of space travel gripped much of the Soviet masses, with Cosmonautics societies popping up around the country simply to discuss its possibilities. One such society was the Obshchestva Izucheniia Mezhplanetnykh Soobshchenii (Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communication), which organized a lecture in 1924 by the engineer Mikhail Lapirov-Skoblo which was so highly anticipated it sold out two days early. This same year the film Aelita: Queen of Mars, where a young man travels to Mars to unite with Queen Aelita to overthrow the “Martian Bourgeoisie”, was released.  In the period from 1921 to 1932, Russian media published nearly 250 articles and more than 30 nonfiction books about spaceflight, dwarfing the mere two nonfiction works published in the United States. A discourse of utopian imagination and belief in the power of science were opened up to all. This was not through top-down state commands, but the experience of a society itself living through the actual process of trying to build a new world. In fact, the Soviet State, preoccupied with political challenges, did very little to promote such thinking. And yet this lack of interest from the Soviet state did not prevent a massive cultural interest in space exploration; the general ethos of the revolution was a catalyst all on its own. Anything seemed possible, and space travel was not an unreasonable goal. Many believed that the forces unleashed by the revolution could make the dreams of Fedorov and Tsiolkovsky into a reality.

The ideas of the Cosmists show the level of both crankery and ingenuity produced by the NEP culture at the time. While the Cosmists were not the only space enthusiasts during this era, they are most easily available to study in their own words. The works of Cosmists aimed to be both scientific and prophetic, combining mysticism and science in a way one only finds in science fiction. The Cosmists aimed to go beyond storytelling and instead provide a vision for the future, one that was to be created in the Workers-Peasants Republic of Soviets. To best grasp the general vision of the Cosmists, we shall look at the work of Tsiolkovsky in the 1920s, when his ideas were at their height of influence among various cliques of space enthusiasts.

After the revolution, Tsiolkovsky continued his work outside the Bolsheviks party but remained respected by figures such as Lenin. While not a Bolshevik, Tsiolkovsky found that the October Revolution had ushered in a culture in which his ideas could flourish and become influential.  Despite this, state funding did not come easily, possibly because his ideas ultimately seemed too absurd to warrant serious state funding in a time of economic difficulty. It wouldn’t be until the 1930s when Tsiolkovsky was granted state recognition for his work and was awarded the Honor of the Red Labor Banner, being invoked as a homegrown scientific hero who didn’t follow the sensibilities of bourgeois specialists who were under attack at the time.

Drawing of floating people looking at stars through a window, from Tsiolkovsky’s 1933 paper “Album of Space Travel”.

In his work The Earth and Future of Mankind, Tsiolkovsky begins by speculating that at least 500,000 Earth-style inhabitable planets exist in the universe and that it would be possible to pierce through the atmosphere and “blaze a path into the Ether, the interplanetary environment, and beyond.” Even beyond this, “man would build homes in the Ether….encircle the sun, and people’s wealth would increase billions at a time.” One can see in this description a vision of what some have called “space communism”, which certainly inspired later visions of many Soviet artists in the period of the “Space Race”. Despite his calls for expanding society beyond Earth, Tsiolkovsky still sees Earth as humanity’s primary base and notes that leaving its domain is no reason to forget the need to “clean it up of its torments”. Echoing his religious tendencies, Tsiolkovsky claims that the destiny of the Earth is the destiny of the universe. Earth is a sort of perfect ideal, one of all other planets to live up to.

Tsiolkovsky’s prometheanism leads him to see an earth that is unused, full of soil that awaits transformation. His solution is for all of humanity to unite, end private ownership of property, and wage a “struggle on nature” to cultivate unused land and eradicate hostile elements. These schemes may sound rather bizarre today but are related to the struggle to modernize agriculture, which at this time was limited to small plots owned by peasants. Further, Tsiolkovsky speculates how all corners of the Earth could be made habitable for humans using scientific methods, combining a sort of messianic desire to expand the dominion of man with faith in science to placate the miseries of nature. “Man shall slowly overcome everything,” Tsiolkovsky would write.5  

The prometheanism of Tsiolkovsky goes as far to suggest what looks like geo-engineering, saying that deserts must “become a paradise on Earth” and be “covered with special inhabitable greenhouses.” The aim is to make the deserts immensely agriculturally productive, further allowing human flourishing on Earth. Tsiolkovsky also calls for the use of what today can only be called solar panels. This grand transformation of nature, of “filling Earth’s entire surface to the extreme” is merely a part of a grander process of mankind conquering the Cosmos, as he adds that artificial moons containing industry will already exist before this task is completed. This conquering of nature on Earth is merely a prelude to the conquering of the solar system, which he adds would hold a population of no fewer than a thousand trillion.6 In fact, the aim of Tsiolkovsky’s agenda in The Future of Earth and Mankind seems to be to allow the maximum expansion of a human population, which to him inevitably leads to greater perfection of the individual and a “more advanced solar system.”7 His end result is essentially to make Earth the equivalent of a capital city in a broad solar system. Tsiolkovsky’s vision of massively terraforming of the Earth may sound absolutely horrendous in an age of life-threatening climate change. Yet one cannot one help but appreciate his ambitions, a sort of techno-utopian drive that goes beyond what the Bolsheviks themselves dreamed of at the time.

Tsiolkovsky was also fascinated by the prospects of intelligent life, some he hints at in The Earth and the Future of Mankind with his mention that 500,000 Earth-like planets exist. His own personal philosophy of panpsychism and monism were based on the idea that all matter is composed of living things, down to the last atom. This meant that the needs for life were the same on all planets, from there arguing that it is possible for planets to have intelligent life. Using what can only be described as an early form of the Drake Equation, Tsiolkovsky then argued that if intelligent life were to develop life on other planets than the development of space travel for these beings would be inevitable just as it was for humans. Objections to this argument that Extraterrestrials would already have visited us or would have made their presence known are also addressed in Tsiolkvosky’s work, claiming that it may take years for such an encounter or that other species are too engaged with visiting more advanced species.8

Another Drawing from Tsiolkovsky’s 1933 paper “Album of Space Travel”

Panpsychism as a general theory of the universe would guide all of Tsiolkovsky’s work. In his 1925 exegesis on the topic, Panpsychism, or Everything Feels, Tsiolkovsky aims to give a simple rundown of his philosophy. He promises “conclusions more comforting than the promises made by the most life-affirming religion” while also adding that “compared to me, Spinoza is a mystic.” Written after the Bolshevik revolution while possibly trying to win favor with the new revolutionary regime, it is quite possible Tsiolkovsky is aiming to hide his religious sensibilities if not leaving them behind entirely. Instead, the universe is teeming with life, all organisms feeling pain or pleasure thus having the property of sensitivity. Sensitivity, or responsive, is not equal for all organisms however; plants have less sensitivity as do dead bodies. Therefore all of the universe is one substance, but with differing degrees of sensitivity. This is the essence of panpsychism, further arguing that all matter in the universe essentially follows the same laws. From this, Tsiolkovsky argues that the tendencies that led to life on Earth will lead to life on other planets.9 This is the basis for his aforementioned argument that extraterrestrial intelligence must exist. His panpsychism is also a basis for a unified human community around a rational society, which like his vision of terraforming the Earth is a launching ground for colonizing not merely the solar system but the entire Milky Way. What is interesting here is how a logical line is drawn from the conclusions of pansychist philosophy to the domination of the universe by mankind, a sort of need to realize the inherent connection of all matter and the dissemination and achieve perfection in the Cosmos.

Another Cosmist who made explicit the link between immortality and space travel was Alexander Svyatogor, an anarchist futurist poet who like many anarchists collaborated with the Bolsheviks. During the Russian Revolution, Svyatogor expropriated bourgeois apartments alongside the anarchist Black Guards, then going to Ukraine to fight the German and Austrian occupiers. Back in Moscow, Svyatogor would break from his previous organization the Anarchist Universalists and form a group of Biocosmists-Immortalists who operated under a slogan of “immortalism and interplanetarism”. His work Biocosmist Poetics from 1921 begins with a claim that natural laws are merely expressions of a particular balance of power, a balance that can be interrupted with the introduction of a new force or removal of an existing one. Thus it is possible to set the forces of immortality into motion. A similar attitude is taken to space travel by Svyatogor:

“Our agenda includes “victory over space.” Let us not refer to it as aeronautics – it is not enough – but rather space travel. Our Earth must become a spaceship steered by the wise will of the Biocosmist. It is a horrifying fact that from time immemorial the Earth has orbited the sun, like a goat tethered to its shepherd. It’s time for us to instruct the Earth to take another course. In fact, it is also time to intervene in the course taken by other planets too. We should not remain mere spectators, but must play an active role in the life of the cosmos!”10

One cannot help but be reminded of Trotsky’s dictum in Their Morals and Ours that “the means are justified only if the ends are” and that the ends are justified if they lead to “increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.”11 Arguably the Cosmists took this to the extreme, believing that man’s power over nature would extend to the point where death was no longer a necessity. This was a vision of socialism that aimed to challenge everything that seemed fixed, even natural laws of science, believing that humanity taking control over its own conditions could change the very mechanics of the universe. Svyatogor sees the revolution not merely ushering a new mode of production, but exiting “all previous history, from the emergence of organic life on Earth to the massive upheavals of the past few years, constitutes one age: the age of death and petty deeds.” The new era for the Biocosmist is the age of “immortality and infinity”.12

Other Cosmist thinkers would also straddle the line between occultism and science. Leonid Vasil’ev was a parapsychologist who experimented with telepathy, claiming to have found proof of such phenomena in his experiments. One can see the influence of the aforementioned panpsychism of Tsiolkovsky, where all life is interconnected with living energy. If immortality is possible, why not telepathy? Chizhevskii, a friend of Vasil’ev, would develop a theory that comes off as a mix of pseudo-scientific astronomy and Spengler, where there are four cycles of world history based on the activity of the sun: the epoch of minimal excitability, the epoch of mounting excitability, the epoch of maximal excitability, and the the epoch of diminishing excitability. Each phase has a corresponding level of mass political activity, where increasing excitability from transition to phases leads to social upheaval and then stability.13 While Tsiolkovsky was able to combine his flights of fancy with actual scientific work, Cosmists like Svyatogor, Chizhevsky, and Vasil’ev were closer to occultists than proper scientists.

The role of the utopian and mystical visions of the Cosmists was not so much to serve the Soviet state as it was a part of a broader artistic and scientific culture (with the Cosmists a strange synthesis of both art and science) that carried much pluralism. For Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky who set the tone of cultural affairs in the early Soviet Republic, such musings had value in developing a new socialist consciousness regardless of their instrumental utility to developing industry. Lunacharsky promoted artistic experimentation and only excluded outright reactionary provocations, while the sciences were not straight-jacketed by the state-imposed orthodoxy. Rather, early Bolshevism sought to win the most talented bourgeois scientists to the revolutionary project while promoting their work regardless of political affiliation.14 This pluralism combined with a general attitude that society was taking a leap into an unknown frontier where humanity would take control of its own destiny led to an explosion of new thought, much that is completely forgotten to this day. As one can see much of this thought was on the verge of pure crankery and quite laughable today. Yet perhaps crankery is a necessary product of a broad and innovative scientific and artistic culture and cranks perhaps have something useful to tell us despite their tendency to make entries into irrationalism. Reading Tsiolkovsky’s visions of terraforming the planet may seem absurd in an age facing global warming, but perhaps they demonstrate the kind of scale of action and transformative drive that conquering the threat of species extinction may require.

With the rise of Stalin, the “cultural revolution” that accompanied his industrialization and collectivization drives would see an introduction of rigidity into the arts and sciences. This meant that the Cosmists would eventually be marginalized, with the exception of Tsiolkovsky who nonetheless was controversial due to his belief in eugenics. Crankery still existed, such as the likes of Lysenko, yet only was tolerated because it fit the bounds of state ideology and the needs of an industrializing state. The utopian experiments of the 1920s were shut down for not conforming to the needs of mass industrialization, and socialist realism became official doctrine in the arts. Science became purely instrumental for the needs of industrial development and had to conform to the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. This process didn’t happen overnight and came to a height with the purges of the mid to late thirties. Yet it was clear that the atmosphere of experimentation that produced the Cosmists was long gone.

The Group for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight (GIRD) in 1933 feeding liquid oxygen to the “09”, the first Soviet liquid- propellant rocket. From left to right are Sergey Korolev, Nikolay Yefremov, and Yuriy Pobedonostsev.

Yet ironically fascination with Space was picked up officially by the state, as rocket technology became an interest of the military. This was not without its links to the space enthusiast Cosmists of the 1920s. A key link was the figure of Fridrikh Tsander, member of the aforementioned Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications who would quit his job in 1927 to live off donations of his comrades and design a space plane.15 Tsander was very much like Tsiolkovsky in that he was prone to utopian flights of fancy while having a practical mastery over science and engineering. In 1930, independent from the state, Tsander was testing what was essentially a primitive jet propulsion engine, built from a modified blowtorch, a spark plug for ignition, gauge to adjust fuel level and conic nozzle for exhaust. After a long series of rejections, Tsander eventually joined the Osoaviakhim, or Union of Societies of Assistance to Defence and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR. Within the Osoaviakhim Tsander formed the GIRD or Group for the Study of Reactive Motion. It was here where Tasander met Korolev, an aeronautics enthusiast who would go on to become a hero of rocket science and the Soviet front in the Space Race. The GIRD was funded entirely by volunteer donations at one point, but in 1933 this would change. Marshal Tukhachevskii took interest in the research and development of rockets, and military research and development would now include rocketry.16 While the utopian goal of space travel was put to the side, the technical aspirations of rocketry would expand and set the stage for the world-historic voyages of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.

There is a certain irony in how things played out; the rise of Stalinism saw the explosion of cosmic imagination repressed in favor of monolithic party ideology, yet the industrialization of the country and massive expansion of the military also allowed the development of rocket technology they once only dreamed of. Illustrative of this contradiction was that Korolev would design the basis for the rocket that would take Sputnik into orbit while in the gulag. Yet Korolev was required the keep his desires for space travel a secret during his research on military technology once released from the gulag, and it wasn’t until 1956 that he would convince Khrushchev to take up the production of satellite technology, particularly as a propaganda win against the USA. With this, the proponents of space travel were able to meet the needs of the Soviet state and a new era of space travel began. While the Cosmists’ dreams of immortality and telepathy remain unrealized, their goals of using rocket propulsion to leave the Earth became a reality.

Posted on

Brick by Brick: An Appeal to Strength

CLR Gainz argues that the left needs physical as well as mental strength if we are going to be victorious in making revolution and defeating reaction. 

Soviet Cosmonauts in training

Our world is one governed not only by social but physical forces; this is a lesson reinforced by the experience of class struggle. Because enough ink continues to be spilled on the topic of social forces, the purpose of this article is to address the more overlooked aspect of physical force, or strength, that is, our primary means of mediating with nature. In the early chapters of volume one of Marx’s Capital, we learn that what makes humanity essentially different from the animal kingdom is that we are not only able to formulate complex ideas and models in their minds, but also apply these designs physically. Labor in this way could be described as that kinetic chain of applied strength involving the full cooperation of our central nervous system which recruits our joints, ligaments, and muscles to literally materialize the world around us. It is no wonder that throughout the latter half of the 19th century in Czarist Russia, both the early socialists and liberals paid significant attention not only to humanity’s mental development but its physical faculties as well. Sadly, it remains less of a wonder—perhaps more of a frustration—as to why we modern-day socialists are apt to neglect the development of our bodies. Three brief themes will be touched upon as an appeal to get readers to consider strength training as a political activity, its historic importance, and its lost legacy in the Soviet Union.

Strength training is not only a significant means of becoming healthier but, by reorganizing the composition of bodies to make them less fat to more muscle, also represents the physical manifestation of a disciplined person. One of the important principles I’ve taken from my involvement as an organizer and party socialist into strength training and bodybuilding has been a willingness to accept the shortcomings of my analyses and actions. In bodybuilding in particular, in order to tack on lean mass, you have to come to grips with your muscular deficiencies and train hard until you reach the correct size and proportions. The sport also requires you to be patient with yourself and have the humility to ask others what they think you’re lacking. Building muscle is achieved by the correct execution of form in every exercise for the purposes of causing micro-tears in the fibers of the targeted muscle group; you train through your own exhaustion—especially when it begins to hurt the most. The same approach goes for the struggle over correct political lines as we commit ourselves to understand dense German texts.  Any socialist who has made the journey through the volumes of Marx’s Capital can recall how much our heads hurt and the number of times we had to occasionally put down Volume II to rub our eyes, but we nevertheless got through them by sheer force of will grounded in the desire to comprehend the world around us. We mastered it until we were able to communicate all of its nuances in a direct manner for the purpose of becoming better organizers and better comrades. Had we let our frustrations overwhelm us, we would never have been able to grow intellectually. The same goes for training, as the failure to be consistent will simply leave our muscles to atrophy. A disciplined mind will work best with a disciplined body. We should begin to balance our desire to read Marx and Engels with a similar aggressiveness when we train.

Little is written by Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the importance of physical strength. There are several passages written by Marx which decry the ways in which the labor process depletes the physical health of the worker, but that’s about it. As previously mentioned, an existing Russian fascination with physical development did exist, which lent itself to the presence of “indigenous” forms of Russian strength training. Interestingly, these Russian exercises were molded in some ways as a response against the more synchronic movements on display in Western European gymnasiums (think CrossFit). Yet ultimately some of these Western methods and styles of training did penetrate Czarist lands. Russian bourgeois society, however, generally frowned upon strength training and gymnastics as “unproductive” activities, and thus discouraged Russian youth from participating in them. Kinesiology and strength theory quickly fell into the domain of subversive activity in the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution. One of the chief founders of theoretical anatomy, Piotr Franzevich Lesgaft, whose Society for the Encouragement of the Physical Development of Student Youth (est. 1892) engaged in outreach and recruitment of the children of the poor to strength training and gymnastics. The Society’s working-class orientation allowed it to make strong inroads in the industrial centers of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa where it also began to cross-fertilize with socialist ideas. Eventually, Czarist authorities targeted the Society and banned it after unrest began to emanate from its floors. Lesgaftian theories and practices, however, were rehabilitated and found acceptance among Bolsheviks, especially when it came to the importance of the defense of the early Soviet state under siege from external and internal enemies.

When Leon Trotsky organized the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army through the Narkom of the Ministry of War in 1918, he did so with the understanding that the defectors from the Czarist military apparatus would not be sufficient to actually win the Civil War. He thus drew upon the tens of thousands of industrial workers and peasants to comprise the Red Army’s main fighting force, allowing much of the thin layer of previous WWI draftees to take command, in addition to former White officers. A working-class base that was ritually brutalized in the streets, as well as in factories and at home, degraded by excessive alcohol consumption, disease, and so on, were able to muster the moral and physical strength to defeat the invading imperialist forces and the Whites. In the years following the decisive Red Army victory, Lenin would stress the importance of the physical health of the working class at times as a passing metaphor. But make no mistake: sabotaged infrastructure, maligned cities, and so on, required the total physical investment of all inhabitants of Soviet territory, not simply its working class.

While much of Soviet society from the 1930s onward were rife with the assorted horrors of Stalinism, there were also some impressive periods of research in the field of kinesiology and exercise science. Beginning in the 1960s but especially in the 1970s, Soviet kinesiologists developed groundbreaking theories and protocols on the biomechanics of the human body. Particularly focusing on the body in its kinetic state in the sport of Olympic-style weightlifting, AS Medvedyev, Pavel Tsatsouline, YV Verkhoshansky, AN Vorbeyev, among others, extensively researched the most efficient ways in which the human body could create explosive dynamic movement in transporting weight from a resting state and over the head. What is arguably more interesting, however, was the dialectical-like system of adaptation to strength gains and recovery. What the Soviets did that was so innovative was to view lifting in the long-term, seeing the body as an organism which requires adequate rest and recovery. In an almost spiral-like pattern, the heaviest lift was quickly proceeded by weeks of building up ground strength by lifting small weights and more of them, until one worked up to what is known as a one-rep max, or one repetition of a lifter’s maximum load. Today, virtually all protocols in the sports of Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting use some variant of these Soviet methods. In contrast, Western-based strength protocols were reflective of a linear progression model which most of us who frequent the gym are familiar with, where a lifter gradually stacks heavier and heavier weights with every workout. Needless to say, there was never much of a science behind it. The Soviets began to quickly surpass their American counterparts in all strength sports due to their scientific approach towards lifting.

Without physical strength, we are powerless against reaction.

It was not until American lifters like Andrew Charniga and later Louie Simmons began to adopt these methods for Anglophone audiences beginning in the 1980s, and with great success. Today, Louie Simmons’ Westside Barbell, based in Columbus, Ohio, is billed as the world’s strongest gym—all due to Simmons’s study of and improvement on the Soviet breakthroughs in human biomechanics. Yet unsurprisingly, Simmons and others were not necessarily apt to take in much of the politics of their Soviet predecessors and colleagues at the time, merely borrowing their methods for the sake of making American athletes more competitive. The irony couldn’t be clearer: groundbreaking strength theories that developed in a state with historic roots in a socialist revolution have been popularized and taken far more seriously by the American far-right than the radical left.

Where does this “strength gap” leave us in the here and now? It is more than just that we have completely ignored the achievements of Soviet science in the realm of strength training, an eminently practical field; we have also deprioritized the enormous potential of untapped strength which lies in our genes. One of the biggest wake-up calls I can remember happened several years again in Queens, NY, when several activists coming out of an event at night were savagely attacked and beaten by one fascist. I wondered then as I do now: how was it possible that three or four people were defeated by one fascist? I was angry, not just for what happened, but at our movement, for not emphasizing training and defense. In times where large numbers of us take the streets to protest, we can’t guarantee the safety of ourselves or our comrades if we refuse to train and adapt our bodies to become stronger than they presently are. Building a strong socialist force ought not to simply be a passing metaphor for successful organizing; it must be interpreted quite literally. For if we’re ever going to hold the red flag over parliaments and congresses worldwide, then we better possess the actual strength to do so.