At their Berlin Concert in December 2016, King Crimson gave their rendition of David Bowies’ hit single “Heroes” in which two lovers find themselves stranded on either side of the Berlin wall. The Berlin Wall had been erected in Cold War Berlin by the East German authorities in 1961.
The YouTube recording of King Crimson’s concert is accompanied by film clips of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. On some of the tumbling masonry is the scrawled graffiti exclaiming “I have seen the future…”. This is a reference to a letter by the American journalist, Lincoln Stephan to Marie Howe, dated April 3, 1919, about the author’s visit to Petrograd in that year. Stephan exclaimed to Howe in his letter that “I have seen the future and it works”.
The fragment of Stephen’s quotation scrawled by a protester on a piece of the Berlin Wall was intended as a piece of irony. The Berlin Wall showed the real destination of 1919 Petrograd. The Berlin Wall symbolised Bolshevik state capitalism with its secret police, gulags and suppression, not the starry-eyed future imagined by uncritical intellectuals and fellow travellers like Lincoln Stephan. It was a future that had its boot on the neck of the working class.
Lincoln Stephan must have walked around Petrograd with his eyes shut because the economic and political reality of the city was one that would never work for the working class. One wonders what he saw in Petrograd at the time. There was no worker’s paradise but a dictatorship over the working class by a ruthless political organisation led by Lenin.
What of Petrograd in 1919? The working class were still a minority of the population and were being forcibly conscripted into Trotsky’s Red Army to fight a brutal civil war where deserters fleeing the front line were summarily shot in their hundreds. Discipline within the factories was harsh. Lenin had introduced capitalist management techniques such as Taylorism and had forbidden free trade unions and strikes. Workers were exploited as a class producing what Marx called “surplus value”. Russia was not socialist but state capitalist.
The Bolshevik dictatorship began with the coup d’état in October 1917. One of the first actions of the Bolsheviks was to dissolve the Constituent.
Assembly at the end of a gun. The constitution of the Soviet Union established a one-party state.
So-called “war communism” was also introduced to support the prosecution of the Civil War
War communism included the following capitalist policies:
- The nationalisation of all industries and a central planning authority to dictate the economy.
- State control of foreign trade
- Requisition of agricultural produce from the peasants
- Imposition of state capitalism throughout the economy
Then, there was the secret police set up during the “Red Terror”. The Red Terror started in late August 1918 after the beginning of the Russian Civil War and lasted until 1922. It is estimated that it led to the death of some 2 million people. The Cheka secret police were active under Dzerzhinsky. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up throughout the country imprisoning and killing opponents.
Ostensibly set up to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, such as the aristocracy, former capitalists and members of the clergy, the Cheka was soon used as a repressive tool against all political opponents of the Bolshevik regime. At the direction of Lenin, the Cheka performed mass arrests, imprisonments, torture, and executions without trial. The Cheka laid the basis for Stalin’s police state.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain did not need to visit Petrograd to see that there was no future for the working class in a Party dictatorship led by the Bolsheviks. The SPGB were students of Marx and understood that where you had a labour market, the buying and selling of the commodity labour power, you also had class exploitation.
Using Marx’s theory of history as a guide the SPGB said:
‘Is this huge mass of people, numbering about 160,000,000 and spread over eight and a half millions of square miles, ready for Socialism? Are the hunters of the North, the struggling peasant proprietors of the South, the agricultural wage slaves of the Central Provinces, and the industrial wage slaves of the towns convinced of the necessity, and equipped with the knowledge requisite, for the establishment of the social ownership of the means of life? Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never
seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred immensely more rapidly than history has recorded, the answer is “No!”
‘What justification is there, then, for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists.’ (Socialist Standard, August 1918 ‘the Revolution in Russia –Where it Fails’).
You will not see this text in history books or given to students studying the revolution and coup d’état of 1917 as a clear repudiation that Russia was “socialist” and the Bolsheviks were “socialists”. Historians do not want to bring to attention a socialist critique of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, particularly those “historians” of the capitalist left who support Lenin’s coup d’état and are members of the various political parties who propagate Lenin’s anti-socialist ideas and beliefs. The SPGB has been written out of history. We are despised for telling the truth.
The article “A Socialist View of Bolshevik Policy” was published in the Socialist Standard in July 1920. Two socialist criticisms by the SPGB were made against Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
First the establishment of State Capitalism in Russia. The SPGB drew attention to a pamphlet written by Lenin under the heading ‘The Chief Tasks of Our Day’ written in 1918.
The SPGB said:
“We have often stated that because of a large anti-Socialist peasantry and a vast untrained population, Russia was a long way from Socialism. Lenin has now to admit this by saying” (p20):
And the Party quoted the following from Lenin’s pamphlet:
“Reality says that State Capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State Capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us (p. 11).
On the rule of the minority in Russia the SPGB remarked:
“The denunciation of democracy by the Bolshevik leaders is quite understandable if we realise that only the minority in Russia are Communists. Lenin therefore denies control of affairs to the majority, but
he cannot escape from the compromise involved in ruling with a minority. Not only is control of Russian affairs out of the hands of the Soviets as a whole, but not even members of the Communist Party are allowed to vote” (p 23)
Lenin and the Bolsheviks could not establish socialism in Russia, their actions were imprisoned by history. There mistake was to repudiate the key Marxian principle that the establishment of socialism had to be the work of the working class itself and not imposed on them by a professional minority elite. Socialism could not be imposed in one country but had to be established globally by a world socialist majority.
The remarks made against Lenin and the Bolsheviks by the SPGB were not written on the Berlin Wall. If they had been, then workers in Germany and elsewhere in the world would have been directed to a real socialist future expressed in the form of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. They would have understood that it will be the working class alone who will be the heroes of the revolution, “storing heaven” as Marx remarked, in their own interests. They would have understood that it is only the democratic and political action of a socialist majority that can revolutionarily change the profit system into a free association of individuals where production takes place solely and directly to meet human need.
