Victor Serge

I think you may be being a bit harsh on Serge. After all, he was only 20 at the time and did get sentenced to 5 years in prison. OK, he later betrayed his original anarchist ideas and became a defender, and propagandist for the Bolsheviks, but he did redeem himself in the end by turning against Bolshevism altogether, including Trotskyism which he had once espoused. The Trots like his novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev because it seems to echo their views (I prefer his Midnight in the Century) and like to give the impression that he was one of theirs (maybe that's another reason why you don't like him, which would be fair enough) but they blank out his later evolution when he turned against them too, seeing Trotsky as well as Lenin as having paved the way for Stalinist Russia. While retaining some admiration for Trotsky as a person who died for his beliefs, in an article written in Spanish after the last world war, he wrote that after 1918:

and went on:

It's true that by the end of his life (he died in 1947) he was a leftingwing social democrat rather than an anarchist, but at least he wasn't a Leninist or Trotskyist.

One of the unforgivable things is the way he re-wrote history in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary so that his role as cheerleader for the illegalists is conveniently tippexed out completely.
And he took a damn long time, fifteen years in fact, to start posing as a victim of Stalinism, after he had been appointed official escort to visiting foreign anarchists whilst reporting back to Zinoviev and co. Most others anarchists who joined the Bolsheviks , left pretty soon if they had not died in action, or distanced themselves from it after Kronstadt, the banning of factions and the NEP.
And yes there is a Serge character in the Malaquiais book. Looks like a pretty accurate depiction of Serge. I don't follow the twisted logic of someone siding with the Allied camp ( is there really any firm evidence for this on Serge's part?) ending up as a de facto supporter of Stalinism , however.

Stalinist Russia was in the allied camp - supporting 'democratic' imperialism meant de facto supporting Stalinist imperialism.
I agree it's necessary not to extrapolate directly from the character in the book to the real Serge, and I would have to look further to find out what he actually said about the war.
I didn't say it's better to be a Trotskyist than a social democrat. Certainly not today, when Trotskyism has been part of capital for over 50 years. It was a bit different in the 20s and 30s. More internationalists came out of the Trotskyist movement of that time than out of social democracy, because it was still a proletarian current and social democracy was not.
Being anti-Stalinist is no more a guarantee of defending proletarian positions than being anti-fascist, and was often similarly used as a justifcatioin for defending one imperialist camp against another, as in the case of the Burnham-Shachtman current which ended up supporting western democracy against Stalinist totalitarianism.
Having said all that, I am not in favour of judging Serge too harshly. As I said, he reflected the victories and defeats of the proletariat and his books do give an eloquent picture of the times.

Alf wrote:

I don't want to wander too far off the original point of this thread but since Serge was an orthodox Trotskyist for a while (expelled from the Bolshevik Party for it in 1928) I don't think I'm straying too far in challenging what Alf says here.
I know you are using the words "internationalist" and "proletarian current" in a special, unusual way confined to your milieu, but using the words in their more obvious sense, I don't think more people who believe in a united world and in international working class solidarity emerged from the Trotskyist movement than from the Social Democratic movement, if only because the members of the latter were many thousands of times more numerous than those of the Trotskyists sects of the 1920s and 1930s. I suspect that most critics of capitalism, even anarchists, will have come from or passed through leftwing reformist parties.
But the main point I want to challenge is the description of the Trotskyists as a "proletarian current". Logically, this should mean people committed to the interest of the working class, but the Trotskyists defended the Bolshevik regime in Russia as a "workers state" whereas even under Lenin and Trotsky the workers were exploited and oppressed and deprived of any organised means of fighting back. A harsh labour discipline was imposed ("Taylorism" imposed by one-man managers), absenteeism was severely punished, strikes were banned, trade unions incorporated into the state, the soviets were taken over by Bolshevik Party, the sort of people on this forum (anarchists, leftwing social democrats, dissident Bolsheviks) were rounded up and sent to labour camps. Some "workers" state! It was an anti-working class state ruled by a bureaucracy that was emerging from the pre-revolution vanguard party. The Trotskyists were the leftwing of this bureaucracy. the ones who lost out in the struggle to become a stable ruling class.

Not sure if social democracy is less dangerous than Leninism if we bear in mind that it was social democrats like Noske and Schiedemann who spearheaded the crushing of the German revolution

"I know you are using the words "internationalist" and "proletarian current" in a special, unusual way confined to your milieu, but using the words in their more obvious sense, I don't think more people who believe in a united world and in international working class solidarity emerged from the Trotskyist movement than from the Social Democratic movement, if only because the members of the latter were many thousands of times more numerous than those of the Trotskyists sects of the 1920s and 1930s. I suspect that most critics of capitalism, even anarchists, will have come from or passed through leftwing reformist parties. (Capricorn)

I don't think there's anything so special or unusual in defining the proletarian camp in terms of internationalism, of opposition to imperialist war. This was a fundamental basis for the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences during the first world war.

I should have been more specific and referred to internationalist organisations, and in the period I am talking about I mean organisations which explicitly opposed both camps in the second imperialist world war. The clearest of the these were groups of the Italian and Dutch left. Some anarchist groups were internationalist during the war, though quite a few were not. There is one clear case of a group with close links to the left wing of social democracy taking up internationalist positions, and that is the Sneevliet group, the 'Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg' front, although it also had connections to certain 'right wing' oppositional tendencies in the Communist International. But this was highly unusual. On the other hand, some of the best internationalist groups during this period came straight out of the Trotskyist Left Opposition: the RKD from Germany/Austria, the Communistes Revolutionnaires from France, the Stinas group in Greece, the Munis group in Spain/Mexico.

The existence of these groups once again reveals how inadequate the term 'Leninist' is as a basis for defining the revolutionary movement. Some of these groups (the Italian left, the left opposition groups) defended some but not all of Lenin's positions; on the other hand, many of the organisations that participated in the imperialist fronts (Stalinists and Trotskyists) claimed adherence to 'Leninism' but were betraying the internationalist position that Lenin defended in 1914, while some 'anti-Leninists (anarchists) also joined the ar effort via the Resistance groups.

Battlescarred
What do you mean by Leninist?
To throw in Norske with social democracy is meaningless in itself, given that Social Democracy had undergone a whole process of crisis faced with the war. The Left had broken from the Right and were waging a struggle against it. Or do you see Luxemburg and Norske as basically holding the same ideas?

Isn't Ernie's point that social democracy was once a proletarian party and that the crisis of 1914 resulted in fundamental splits within it? Also, it's not exact that the entire social democracy passed into the camp of the bourgeoisie in 1914. Even leaving aside the left wing which went on to form the communist parties, currents like the USPD were 'centrist', not bourgeois.

I think I need to clear this up a bit. I think the error is mine. A lot of the time there can be a tendency to treat Social Democracy pre/post WW1as the same thing (the 2nd International as reactionary) by some comrades who intervene on the threads. There have been several threads where there have been some pretty heated discussions about this question. I think that I may not have read battlesacreds posts throughly enough and I apologies for this and the confusion it has caused. I should have cleared this before but for work and personal reasons I have not been able to do this.
The point about Rosa assignation is that those who say that Social Democracy was always reactionary end up in all sorts of contradictions. The example is not the best, pretty poor really.
However, if in the end we are all agreed about the difference between SD before and after the war, then at least it may have helped others to understand the question

OK Ernie, that's pretty clear for me. I think we're pretty much in agreement about the 2nd Int, though it's probably not the opinion of the majority of posters to libcom...

I don't know what Battlescared's view is; but, whether it's that the 2nd Int betrayed the working class, or it was always a counter-revolutionary force, we're all agreed on its brutal counter-revolutionary nature after WWI.

Bolshevism was pretty brutal too in suppressing the working class. Agreed it didn't betray the working class but that's only because it never represented them. It was anti-working class right from the start, an ideology of bourgeois intellectuals who wanted to carry out a bourgeois revolution against Tsarism in Russia that ended up with some of them becoming the new ruling class. Both Bolshevism and Social Democracy were no good for the working class, even if, in my opinion, Bolshevism was worse because it introduced into the West tactics and organisational practices which the working class here had outgrown. In other words, it put the clock back and diverted radical-minded anti-capitalist workers into a dead-end.

Wonderful text, full of "Lenin said this, therefore he was okay" kinds of assertions. For example, "And one could cite dozens of other texts from 1917, 1918, 1919, expressing the same ideas." In practice, of course, these "ideas" were ignored in practice, with the Bolshevik party exercising its dictatorship over the working class.

And, it should be noted, that Lenin was pretty clear that he thought that "Marxism" was the product of bourgeois intellectuals, who educated the working class to socialism as they were not able to do that by themselves. He wrote a whole book on the subject, "What is to be Done?" -- people may have heard of it...

As for Serge, he swapped the elitism of French individualist anarchism for the elitism of Bolshevism. Thus we find him arguing in 1919 that "For it appears that by force of circumstances one group is obliged to impose itself on the others and to go ahead of them, breaking them if necessary, in order then to exercise exclusive dictatorship." The militants "leading the masses . . . cannot rely on the consciousness, the goodwill or the determination of those they have to deal with; for the masses who will follow them or surround them will be warped by the old regime, relatively uncultivated, often aware, torn by feelings and instincts inherited from the past." And so "revolutionaries will have to take on the dictatorship without delay." The experience of Russia "reveals an energetic and innovative minority which is compelled to make up for the deficiencies in the education of the backward masses by the use of compulsion."

And so the party, "is in a sense the nervous system of the class. Simultaneously the consciousness and the active, physical organisation of the dispersed forces of the proletariat, which are often ignorant of themselves and often remain latent or express themselves contradictorily." And what of the masses? What was their role? Serge is equally blunt. While the party is "supported by the entire working population," strangely enough, "it maintains its unique situation in dictatorial fashion." He admits "the energies which have just triumphed . . . exist outside" the party and that "they constitute its strength only because it represents them knowingly." Thus the workers are "[b]ehind" the communists, "sympathising instinctively with the party and carrying out the menial tasks required by the revolution."

Pretty standard Bolshevik arguments of the time. His memiors downplay this aspect of his conversion to Leninism.

And this one develops it: http://libcom.org/library/lenin-as-philosopher-pannekoek

Another dubious ICC "contribution" -- like their recent nonsense on the CNT, it would only convince anyone who knows little or nothing about the subject. Which, in my experience, covers most people influenced by Lenin...

I would, in return, suggest section H.5 of "An Anarchist FAQ" on what is wrong with vanguardism. I'm in the process of revising section H just now, I plan to add some relevant quotes from Plekhanov -- Lenin was simply repeating his ideas, linking them with Kautsky to show they were orthodox social democratic ideology.

Oh, and on a different subject, I have proved that the SPGB's analysis of Marx and Engels is right -- they did advocate utilising bourgeois elections to achieve power. Lenin distorted their argument in order to justify his own actions, as Martov pointed out at the time.

Hal Draper was a joke. As was his article, which the FAQ section I pointed to analysed and found lacking. Really, try and read the critique before trying to refute it!

There is no contradiction. Marx talked of smashing the state machine, not the state. If you read the Civil war in France, you will discover that Marx explicitly states that the Commune was elected by universal suffrage based on the bourgeois electional system. As such, the workers used "political action" to seize the state and then had to transform that state by getting rid of those parts of the machinery which are considered repressive.

This is discussed in section H.3.10 in some detail. And, of course, there is Engels useful explaination of what was meant by that bit of Marx's "Civil War in France":

So Lenin simply distorted Marx and Engels position. Martov was right.

The notion that Marx urged the smashing of the state is false. Marx argued for a democratic republic, within which the working class could use "political action" to take power (i.e., to form a government) and then reform it (smash the state machine). This is a policy which the social democrats did follow -- with obvious bad results.

Now, Lenin would have been right to argue that developments had made this position wrong. He did not. He argued that Marx was against this position, that the democratic republic had to be smashed. This was not Marx's position, as Martov pointed out. In summary, Lenin distorted Marx's position in order to justify his own actions. As Martov, Kautsky and the SPGB argued.