Soziale Befreiung - Writings on the Russian Revolution (1917-1921)

Content

Introduction

Class Struggles in Soviet Russia (1917-1921)

1. Class struggles in Tsarist Russia
2. The February Revolution
3. From the February to October Revolution
4. The State capitalist reaction against the proletarian self-organization
5. Kronstadt and the decadence of party Marxism

The Civil and Imperialist War of Intervention (1918-1921)

1. The then and today’s social-revolutionary view
2. State capitalist reaction against private capitalist reaction
3. Bolshevik party dictatorship and civil war
4. “War Communism”
5. Soviet Russian imperialism in Ukraine
6. Soviet Russian imperialism in Georgia

The “Communist” International against the World Proletariat

1. The “Communist” International as part of the global social reaction
2. Moscow against the “left radicals”
3. The “K”PD in 1923

Introduction

The approach of social-revolutionaries to the proletarian class struggles of the past should, in our opinion, be guided by the maxim that subsequently man is always cleverer, but that afterwards man should also be smarter. This basic attitude avoids both arrogance of know-it-all over the past class struggles and a conservative parroting of social-revolutionary positions that used to be the most progressive, but still need to be critically reviewed in the light of the experiences of subsequent generations of proletarian activists. We are guided by this attitude in the analysis of the Russian Revolution (1917-1921).

In many ways, our view today does not correspond to that the social-revolutionary workers and intellectuals in and outside Soviet Russia adopted for the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Civil and Imperialist War of Intervention, the Makhno Movement and the Kronstadt Uprising. Nor does it correspond to the ideology productions of Mensheviks, “Socialists-Revolutionaries”, Bolsheviks and anarchists of the Makhno movement. Our views on the Russian Revolution are also contrary to the positions of today’s anti-communism, left-wing Social Democracy, and Marxist-Leninist political and ideological sects.

The closest to our analysis of the Russian Revolution is the position of the Kronstadt sailors who assumed it in their rebellion in March 1921 against Bolshevik State capitalism. But also the foresight of those Russian anarchists who defended proletarian self-organization in the class struggle against private and State capitalist social reaction and also the consistency of the German and Dutch revolutionaries, who broke early with the “Communist” International as the tail of Soviet imperialism, which we express of course all our respect to.

Our current social revolutionary approach is consistently anti-political and hostile to commodity production – also the petty-bourgeois production, including the cooperatives. It represents the synthesis of the progressive tendencies of anarchism and Marxism. As post-Marxist and post-anarchist communists, we fight the petty-bourgeois and ossified mainstream of both currents.

Such an attitude could not be fully adopted by the then social-revolutionary workers and intellectuals inside and outside Soviet Russia for objective and subjective reasons. Any arrogance towards the then social-revolutionary militants is totally inappropriate. Because they went goddamn far back then and learned thoroughly from the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary postwar crisis in other European countries, including Germany. They learned that the nationalization of industrial means of production cannot abolish capitalist exploitation or alienation of the proletariat, that the “communist” parties are in fact bourgeois… We also learned and need to learn more!

Nelke, August 2012

Source in German: http://sbefreiung.blogsport.de/2012/08/08/annonce-schriften-zur-russischen-revolution-1917-1921/