Bolsheviks

The latest deception - Gabriel Miasnikov

In this essay first published in 1930 in France, the founder of the Workers Group denounces the bureaucracy that he claims seized power in a “coup d’état” in 1920 at the Ninth Congress of the CPSU(b)—its “latest deception” being its fraudulent appeals for “freedom of criticism” and “self-criticism” after a series of revolts by workers and peasants in the early to mid-1920s—and calls for a restoration of proletarian democracy (as exemplified by the Paris Commune) by democratizing the functions exercised by bureaucratic State institutions (production, distribution, oversight) and replacing them with Soviets (“Councils”), cooperatives and trade unions.

Democratic centralism, the Workers Opposition, clandestine opposition movements, the crisis in the party, Kronstadt and the end of the revolutionary period in Russia - Michel Olivier

Submitted by Alias Recluse on Sep 15 2014 22:50

A short essay on the left opposition in the Bolshevik Party in Russia from 1919 to 1927, focusing mostly on the Democratic Centralists and the Workers Opposition.

On the construction of socialism - Nikolai Osinsky (Valerian V. Obolensky)

In this text first published in the journal of the Bolshevik left communists, The Communist, in April 1918, Osinsky attacks Lenin’s economic policies (which he attributes to Lenin’s erroneous support for the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty) from a “left” perspective that champions working class supremacy in the “organization of production” (in the economic councils, etc.), advocates a policy of rigorous nationalization and promotion of “heavy industry” (coal, steel, railroads), and concludes that economic reconstruction cannot be directed towards Russian “self-sufficiency”, but must be oriented towards the goal of the victory of the international proletarian revolution.

The same, only in a different way - Gabriel Miasnikov

In this essay written in 1920, the Bolshevik left communist Gabriel Miasnikov examines the limitations of the Russian trade unions in the context of what he perceived to be the economic and political supremacy of the soviet institutions, but concludes that the trade unions must be preserved for purposes of domestic public relations (due to the habits of the Russian workers) and international propaganda (due to the predominant concepts concerning revolution outside of Russia where soviet-type institutions do not exist or are quickly destroyed and revolution is conceived as a trade union affair) and therefore they must be given something to do to keep them busy.