Noa, do you believe that the Bolsheviks would have closed down the Constituent Assembly on the grounds you cite if they had achieved a majority?
Lenin offers reasons here
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htm
He preferred the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to exercise political power...and we know that phrase for him meant "the dictatorship of the party".
There is no doubt that bourgeoise democracy has limits but it is suffice according to the the SPGB when used in a revolutionary manner by the electorate.
I'm not sure we can describe the MRC as a lily-white reflection of a coalition of parties.
"The MRC was set up on the basis of defending Petrograd because it was rumoured of another potential Kornilov plot or an imminent invading German army. It was not set up on the basis that it would overthrow the provisional government."
"We [the Bolsheviks] took it on ourselves to revise the order sending the troops to the front, and so we disguised the actual fact of the insurrection of the Petrograd garrison under the tradition and precedents and technique of the constitutional duplication of authority” - Trotsky - Lessons of October
Were non-Bolshevik proletarians in District soviets aware this was coming? No. Were the Left-SR participants in the MRC? No. Were even the moderate wing of leading Bolsheviks supportive? No.This is not to say that Petrograd workers and soldiers didn't support the idea of a soviet government. They did. But that doesn't mean that they were consciously involved in the decision to go through with the October events in order to arrive at such a government.
(Since Noa insists upon proper crediting I stole this from comments on another Libcom thread
https://libcom.org/forums/theory/marxist-lenin-11122009?page=1#comment-3...)
Martov put forward a resolution demanding that the Bolsheviks form a coalition government with other left-wing parties. The resolution was about to receive near complete endorsement from the soviet representatives thus showing that the representatives in the soviet did NOT believe in all power to the Bolsheviks but then the majority of SR and Menshevik delegates inadvisedly left the congress in protest over the Bolshevik coup giving the Bolsheviks a majority of those who remained.
ajjohnstone.
This is reply to your nicely thought out post # 20, thanks for responding.
I think there are a couple of things in your post that remain ‘problematical’ in the context of the topic of this thread, as I am sure you would be the first to acknowledge, and that are worth exploring. My queries below are not meant to hound you to give me an answer, they are just things that I am raising that might be useful for anyone to reflect upon.
Ajjohnstone writes:
The SPGB idea, as you describe it, that socialism was not on the agenda in Russia at this time is based on two factors, I think. As you have already noted. The first being that capitalism was not developed enough in Russia to have formed a proletariat that would have been able to take over the means of production and put them to social(ist) use; and the second being, completely intertwined of course, that capitalism had not developed enough in Russia for the proletariat to have achieved a level of (proletarian) consciousness that would enable them to institute socialism. I am aware that I have probably put this badly, but is this basically on track?
Of course, there is a spanner in the works here (?) from a Marxist perspective on the issue of whether socialism/communism could be reached by bypassing the proletarianization of the peasantry by using the communal structure of the mir, as Marx intimated. But for our purposes here that does not need to be discussed.
The question is, then, at what point will the forces of production have reached the required level to create global abundance, and at what point will the working class have achieved enough socialist consciousness to effect a revolution (of whatever kind, violent, peaceful, etc)?
Have these criteria already been met? Or are they still to arrive? Or have the forces of production reached the required level globally and now we are waiting for the global proletariat to recognise their situation and do something radical and collectively about it?
But the problem I see with this is that this approach works against the idea that the mode of production of a society is the crucial influence on how people think (in capitalism, at least, the dead labor that confronts us each morning blocks out our sky and makes us who we are). Therefore, it will only be after a socialist mode of production has been introduced that people en masse will have their consciousness altered.
This then means that we need to have a transitional state in order, as Noa Rodman and Pennoid insist (rightly I think, though historical evidence across the world demonstrates it just leads to tragedy, bloodshed, and a more advanced capitalism), for the material circumstances to be changed and therefore for the consciousness of the people to be changed. So the problem here is how we relate to the notion of consciousness and the raising of consciousness, however that might be effected.
ajjohnstone writes:
What I like about what you have written here is that you are arguing that the proletarians should have been listened to and respected by the revolutionary leaders and Marxists, anarchists, etc, rather than treated as if they didn’t know what was good for them. How things would have turned out is anyone’s guess of course, but it probably would not have been Stalinism. And I am presuming that your position is that the hypothetical SPGBers there would have gone (basically speaking) along with what the proletariat ‘wanted’ without supporting the re-institution of the ruling class, or the emergence of a new ruling class.
ajjohnstone then writes:
But did Lenin and his party really have no choice? They could have taken the SPGB route, as you suggest was possible. Were they (and the SPGB) not tied to the materialist conception of history, that required the full development of capitalism before communism could be instituted? As you say, the Bolsheviks stuffed it up, fantastically murderously, by leaping too far into a void, but when will that void no longer be a void?
Perhaps capitalism has developed enough today (?), but the second problem still remains: how to get the proletarians to recognise their best interests, and make that leap which no other society in history has ever done? Or should we abandon a materialist view of society, and rely solely on evangelism?
I realise I have repeated myself here and not been very articulate. But do these concerns have any resonance?
I think that examination of these issues is the key to beginning rejecting what might be termed the Leninist Loop: the recurrent return to Leninism that may be inherent in all our perspectives, and one reason why Leninists expose us as as theoretically lacking (see discussions here and elsewhere on Libcom) before, historically, lining 'us', and plenty of others, up against a wall. But all I have is the notion of a beginning rejection, from there I have no road map.