
RIDDLING THE ENIGMA NEP: ITS CAUSE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Response to ,,Chapter 2 NEP: An Enigma’’
from ,,Lenin’s last struggle’’ by Misha Lewin
Author: Jean-Paul Marat
English version: 11.05.2012
Macedonian version: Разгатнување на енигмата НЕП
,,In the conditions prevailing at the end of the civil war the Soviet leaders were presented with a number of problems demanding solutions’’, begins Lewin its chapter (p. 21).
Anywhere in whole book ,,Lenin’s last struggle’’ he does not present the fact to its reader that the civil war is in part a guilt of the Bolsheviks (This is so obvious because Lewin only once mentioned the Constituent Assembly without any examination of the controversy about its dismissing. Is it a virtue feature to a serious historian to oversee such an important issue?). I say ,,in part’’ because the war against the white guardsmen was inevitable. Part of these problems demanding solutions, thus, were resulted by the conditions in part created by the ,,Soviet leaders’’. NEP was not the only solution. Besides by means of politics, the Bolsheviks used also a physical destruction in order to deal with the problems which were in part their result. Why ,,in part’’ we will see below.
Lewin asks: ,,How were they to avoid a confrontation with the Western powers in the period preceding new revolutions in Europe or Asia?’’ (Ibid.).
Certainly not by destruction of the socialist opposition (these socialists became – according to the Bolsheviks ,,illegal’’ – opposition after the dismissal of the Constituent assembly by means of coup d’état from the part of the Bolsheviks, left-wing Socialist revolutionaries and Anarchists), but by means of consolidation of the socialist powers, and thus, during the civil war much earlier the apologists of the old regime could have been destroyed.
Lewin states: ,,There were no ready solutions to problems that involved so many unknown factors’’ (Ibid.).
The factors, both politic and economic, were clear. We indicated the politic ones. We will discover also the economic ones. The implications of the solutions of these problems were also clear. From the politic aspect, that would have been a retreat of the Bolsheviks, giving place to the socialist opposition, and probably, a repeated election of the Constituent assembly (a real demand of the population), and from the economic aspect, that would have been an abolition of the wages system in the villages and in the cities as well (a real demand of the peasantry and the working class). Simply, that would have been a defeat of the politic economy of the Bolsheviks (one party system and state as a collective capitalist) promoted in such, by that time unprecedented, brutal way by means of physical and moral destruction of every opponent.
According to Lewin NEP was ,,original and unexpected economic system’’ (p. 22).
Well, Lenin himself said that NEP was ,,new only in its relation to the politics which we began. But, actually in NEP there is more old thing than in its previous one’’. And of course NEP was an expected economic system – because of Lenin’s ruthless implementation of his tax in kind. Detailed explication of its implications below. It seems Lewin is not a good expert of the works of Lenin since he did not read them systematically, that’s evident.
Lewin considers that ,,this policy was adopted in face of the urgent need to remedy the stagnation into which the country as a whole, but agriculture in particular, had fallen’’ (Ibid.).
But, why there was a stagnation of the agriculture in particular Lewin does not reveal to us, whether from an ignorance or from an ideological blindness (as an apologist of Lenin and the Bolshevism). It’s up to us as Marxists to detect for what reasons the agriculture before the introduction of NEP has stagnated.
,,Lenin explained that it was a measure, intended to save the country from disaster, by which the peasants were given the necessary concessions to encourage them to resume production and feed the country; and these concessions could be seen as the injection of a dose of capitalism’’ (Ibid.).
The risk of disaster in the agriculture was not created by anyone else but the Bolsheviks. The surpluses of crop, produced by the peasants, were taken away by the government to support the forces of the Bolsheviks in the civil war waged against both the white guardsmen and the socialist opposition. With no incentive for the peasants to produce a food surplus, the Bolshevik government turned to confiscation, which further discouraged agricultural production. The peasants resisted the harsh government measures. Peasant uprisings ignited spontaneously throughout the country beginning in the spring of 1920, protesting shortages and government centralization. In 1921 in Kronstadt naval base there was arisen an armed rebellion against the dictatorship established by the Bolsheviks. The sailors at Kronstadt sympathized with the rebellious civilians and formally called for an end to Bolshevik tyranny. They put forward a list of 15 demands:
1. Immediate new elections to the Soviets. The present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda.
2. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.
3. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organizations.
4. The organization, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.
5. The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organizations.
6. The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.
7. The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In the place of the political sections various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.
8. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.
9. The equalization of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
10. The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups. The abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.
11. The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labor.
12. We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution.
13. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.
14. We demand the institution of mobile workers’ control groups.
15. We demand that handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage labor.
The Bolsheviks refused to accept these demands. Trotsky was sent with 60,000 troops to crush the Kronstadt Soviet. Some units mutinied and joined the rebellion. After a two week battle which killed thousands of civilians and as many as 10,000 Red Army soldiers the rebellion was crushed.
We can see from 11 and 15 demand that there were no such ,,concessions that could be seen as the injection of a dose of capitalism’’. Lenin’s act of allowance for the kulaks to use wages working force, despite the will of peasantry, is only his guilt. Therefore, that it was ,,a capitalism that we must and can accept’’, as Lenin states, is a lie. ,,The capitalism is necessary to the great mass of the peasantry’’, continues Lenin, that’s a lie too. ,,It must be so for the sake of the people’’, concludes Lenin hypocritically.
Lewin considers that ,,the Russian peasantry [was] with little interest in socialist experiments’’ (p. 23).
This simply is not true. The program of the party of socialists-revolutionaries (PSR) was both democratic socialist and agrarian socialist in nature; it garnered much support amongst Russia’s rural peasantry, who in particular supported their program of land-socialization as opposed to the Bolshevik programme of land-nationalisation—division of land to peasant tenants rather than collectivization in state management. In the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly held two weeks after the Bolsheviks took power PSR still proved to be by far the most popular party across the country, gaining 58% of the popular vote as opposed to the Bolsheviks’ 25%. However, in January 1918 the Bolsheviks by a coup d’état disbanded the Assembly and thereafter the SRs became of less political significance. In response, some SRs turned to violence. A former SR, Fanny Kaplan, tried to assassinate Lenin on August 30, 1918. The largest rebellion (Tambov Rebellion) against the Bolsheviks was led by an SR, Alexander Antonov with a massive support of Russian peasantry.[1]
But, it arises one more question. How Lenin has treated his ,,petite bourgeoisie’’, i.e. the peasantry? His government obliged peasantry to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price (Prodrazvyorstka). The absolute limit of a given product for personal or household needs was pre-determined by the state. Prodrazvyorstka was introduced only to feed the hungry urban population, where support for the Bolshevik government was strongest, although this is disputable if we consider the executions of ,,saboteur workers’’ by shooting from the part of Lenin’s Cheka[2]. On the contrary, Prodrazvyorstka did much damage to the agricultural sector and caused peasants’ growing discontent. It caused a famine of 1921, also known as Povolzhye famine, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through 1922. François Furet estimated there were 5 million deaths in the famine.
,,The NEP succeeded in regenerating the capitalist class, businessmen, tradesmen, industrialists, old and new. … The NEP was like a mine that had been placed under the still insecure structure of the new regime.[3] Whether he would have admitted it or refuted it in public, Lenin was no less concerned than other militants at the prospect of such a threat’’, writes Lewin (p. 24).
But actually Lenin states that it isn’t dangerous to develop capitalism, because the power remains into hands of the workers and the peasants. ,,The power in workers’ and peasants’ hands” doesn’t have any connection with the production. And when some power restitute as a profession, it doesn’t take an interest in production of any kind, only its professional interests. Lenin had to know it on the basis of Marx-Engels works. By the restablishment of commodity economy he returned the workers over again at the wages state, because now the worker must express his ,,value” in money. And because the power became a matter of the professionals, a matter of the ,,politic party”, then the worker had no more ,,power in his hands”. Lenin had to see it. His statement on ,,remaining the power into the workers’ and peasants’ hands” at the same time of commodity production’s restablishment is a down pure voluntarism, which hasn’t connection of any kind to scientific treatment of the economic categories, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s only a rhetoric. Further on, Lenin states that by the capitalistic production’s restablishment, when the power remains into the workers’ and peasants’ hands ,,the property of the landowners and the capitalists doesn’t restore”. And this part of his conclusion is entirely arbitrary statement. When the workers take over the power in some country, if they don’t abolish the market economy, from their lines it will shoot up ,,landowners and capitalists”. Because ,,as soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale’’, says Marx in his ,,Das Kapital” (chapter 26, p. 501). It means that Lenin, by the capitalistic production’s restablishment, although everyone was assured that the socialism overcame, in fact he devided over again the workers from the means of production and enabled ,,this separation to reproduce itself at more and more larger measure”. There hasn’t been anymore a socialism after Lenin’s NEP.
From so far discovered facts it’s clear that the Revolution was not ,,bourgeois-democratic between November 1917 and January 5, 1918 (Constituent Assembly)’’ (Lenin, see p. 25) and that ,,the socialist stage then’’ did not begin ,,with the establishment of proletarian democracy’’ (Lenin, Ibid). A proper epitaph on the condition in Russia at the close of the civil war was written by the revolutionary committee of Kronstadt rebels: ,,The peasant is turned into a servant who works as a jackal in the Soviet production, and the worker into a common wages worker in the state factories. Those who tried to protest Cheka tortured them. Those who continued resisting, Cheka eliminated effectively – shoot them. We can’t breathe anymore. Whole Russia is turned into one single enormous penal camp“.[4]
,,The theory of “state capitalism,” already used after the February Revolution and again at the beginning of 1918, was inspired by the experience of the extensively and strictly state-controlled German war economy. In the context of the Soviet economy, however, there was a substantial difference: the state was not a capitalist but a proletarian one and directly occupied important economic positions’’ (The italic is mine, p. 26).
Here I’m going only to cite Engels in order to unmask the true feature of the Soviet state in its very beginning: ,,The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers – proletarians.’’ But, the real question is who created the bureaucracy overnight? With Lenin’s decree of 26 March the worker’s management of the railway was abolished and was established a state system of bureaucratic control over the working force. The decree of 22 April introduced a universal army draft. In the same month there was an initiative for creating a centralized police, with full working time, that meant a creation of professional police. Thus it is clear that it was precisely Lenin who founded the police state which technically enabled Stalin’s monstrous undertakings.
Lewin explains: ,,Lenin used the term “state capitalism” because he was counting on the cooperation of Russian capitalism and, even more so, of large foreign capitalist interests; he thought that Russia needed a long period of capitalist development in order to assimilate organizational methods and technical expertise, and to acquire the capital and the intellectual abilities that the Workers’ State did not yet possess’’ (Ibid).
But Stalin destroying the myth of ,,stagism’’, of course by his own methods, has succeeded without the cooperation of the big capital (in private hands; consider that Stalin did not yet abolished the capital-relation) to assimilate organizational methods and technical expertise, and to acquire intellectual abilities. The statisticians inform us that in 1930’s thousands engineers and skilled workers from Europe and USA have come away to USSR to help the new industrial plants and to train a new generation of Soviet technicians. According to one account, in 1932, 42 230 foreign workers were employed in USSR, most of them skilled workers. Even the historical facts[5] stay against Lenin’s thesis of needful state capitalism. During the period from 1930 to 1970, and excluding the war years, the USSR experienced very rapid economic growth. There is considerable dispute about just how fast the economy grew, but it is generally agreed to have grown significantly faster than the USA between 1928 and 1975, with the growth rate slowing down to the US level after that. This growth took it from a peasant country whose level of development had been comparable to India in 1922, to become the worlds second industrial and technological and military power by the mid 1960s.
,,According to Lenin, the principal enemy of the state was no longer big capital but the unruly, fragmented petit bourgeois sector that eluded all state planning and control’’, explains Lewin (p. 27).
A serious defect in the thesis of Lenin is that he has not given to us a counter-argument that the central planned economy is more backward than the market disorder so it could show that the building-up of socialism in one country is impossible mission. Marx himself in his letter to Vera Zasulich (1881) argues that a socialism in Russia was possible through an alternative pathway. A version of socialism in Russia based on the “archaic” commune can take advantage of the developments in technology and social organization created by advanced capitalism. It is not necessary for Russian society to go throughout the several-centuries long process of agricultural and technological modernization that England underwent; rather, Russia can simply adopt the modern technologies now available.
,,It is important to realize, of course, that the petite bourgeoisie referred to is none other than the peasantry. What had become, then, of the strategic necessity, which was also regarded as fundamental and constantly reiterated in the slogans, of an alliance with the peasantry?’’, continues Lewin (Ibid).
But the peasants supported the platform of Kronstadt rebels, which promised the peasants full rights to do as they liked with their land, and the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour. But Bolsheviks, as I proved that already, refused to accept these demands.
According to Lewin, ,,Lenin began to reorganize the Cheka and to reduce its powers’’ (p. 29).
The facts are these: In the beginning of 1921 with prohibition of fractions within the Bolshevik party and with more and more monumental concentration of power in the Politburo (to which Cheka was directly subordinated), Lenin’s party reign was to a great extent degenerated towards autocracy which was predicted by Trotsky in 1903 when Lenin disjoined the Social democratic party: ,,the Party substituted itself for the proletariat, the Central Committee for the Party, and then the supreme leader for the Central Committee’’. This process, already well established under Lenin, was carried to its conclusion with Stalin. In 1906 joined Russian social democratic working party (RSDWP) had 70 000 members, but in January 1917, then already independent Bolshevik party, officially stated that its membership has reduced to 23 600. One realistic rating indicated that the number of its members has reduced to around 10 000 and even less[6]. The principle of democratic centralism as such was set by Lenin[7] and was carried out by the Bolshevik party quitely led towards a dictatorship of autocratic kind. We have a case when Lenin quitely autocratically was ready to oppose to majority taken decisions in the Central committee, so during the crisis of Vikzel in the beginning of November 1917 Lenin threatened that ,,I will resort to an armed assistance of the mariners of Kronstadt’’.[8] Not without foundation Cockshott and Cottrell (1993) consider that ,,Lenin and Stalin were dictators in this Roman sense. ‘Dictator’ is a word deriving from the Roman republic rather than Greece. It refers to one individual who was given temporary power to rule by decree in an emergency. There was a natural tendency for temporary dictatorship to degenerate into lifelong rule’’. Even Lenin himself many times in public was identifying the Soviet democracy with a personal dictatorship: ,,That in the history of revolutionary movements the dictatorship of individuals was very often the expression, the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes has been shown by the irrefutable experience of history. … therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals’’ (28 April 1918). Lenin is wrong when he says that the dictatorship of an individual was an expression of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes. Simply the history of revolutions refutes him. Let us take for an example the Great French bourgeois revolution, more accurately the period of Reign of terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794) under the administration of Jacobin omnipotent Committee of public safety, whose leaders were carried to power on 2 June 1793 by mass support of the poorest stratum in Paris, the so-called sans-culottes. Instead the dictatorship of this Committee to be an expression of the revolutionary class, i.e. the sans-culottes, under its administration was executed a real genocide towards this class. According to the account of 50 000 killed directly by the state[9], i.e. the Committee, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and even 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, striking[10]. Two years later, on 31 March 1920, Lenin resumed his pleading for a personal dictatorship: ,,Now we are repeating what was approved by the Central EC two years ago . . . Namely, that the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at best realised by a Dictator who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed’’. Is this what Marx meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Certainly not. What he meant was a mass democracy unconstrained by entrenched constitutional rights defending private property, conclude Cockshott and Cottrell (1993). By creating an oligarchic political system supported by the political police and the other state authorities of safety responsible only to the Politburo, Lenin only destroyed the guarantees against the degeneration of the Bolshevik elite which possessed an absolute power and he created for this elite the needful obedient instruments for carrying out a compulsion.
Conclusion
The peasant in Russia was very important factor of population, production and political force. As I proved, the Bolsheviks have overseen that and it has returned to them as a very unpleasant boomerang. Furthermore, I proved that the votes of Russian peasants, which have given to the socialist revolutionaries a mandate to govern in the Constituent assembly, were not reactionary for the development of the working class revolution over against the pronounced lies of Lenin about their bourgeois-democratic character; hence the socialist revolutionaries have justified the relevance of Engels advice that in order to ,,conquest the political power the socialist party must first go from the towns to the country, must become a power in the countryside’’ (The peasant question in France and Germany), by its program for land-socialization (full rights to do as they liked with their land and the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour) have won over the sympathies of the peasantry, that’s again in accordance with Engels advices, that ,,it is not our mission to hasten the inevitable doom of the small peasant by any interference on our part’’, that ,,when we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation)’’, that ,,his private enterprise and private possession we should transit to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose’’, that ,,we can only promise then that we shall not interfere in their property relations by force, against their will’’, that ,,we can deal very liberally with the peasants’’, that ,,we can recommend here too the pooling of farms to form co-operative enterprises, in which the exploitation of wage labor will be eliminated more and more’’ (Ibid.).
References
1. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, 2008.
2. W. Paul Cockshott, Ideas of Leadership and Democracy, 2008.
Online version here: http://reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/leadershipconcepts.pdf
3. M. Hildermeier, Die Sozilrevolutionäre Partei Russlands. Cologne 1978.
4. François Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 1999.
5. Karl Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, 1874.
6. George Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin’s Political Police, 1988 (Serb-Croatian edition).
7. Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999.
8. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (Collected works of Marx and Engels, Serb-Croatian edition).
9. Barbara Keys, An African-American worker in Stalin’s Soviet Union, 2009.
Online version here: http://history.unimelb.edu.au/assets/pdf/keys/keys-historian-african-american09.pdf
10. W. Paul Cockshott, Venezuela and New Socialism, 2007.
Online version: http://21stcenturysocialism.blogspot.com/2007/09/venezuela-and-new-socialism.html
11. W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism, 1993.
Online version here:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf
12. Friedrich Engels, The Peasant Question in France and Germany, 1894 (Serb-Croatian edition).
13. Lenin, Collected works in 40 volumes in Macedonian language, volume 34.
14. Karl Marx, Capital A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I.
15. Lenin, The Immediate tasks of the Soviet government, 1918.
16. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 17, First Russian Edition.
[1] Against such an averse behavior from the part of the peasants towards the new Bolshevik government warned even Marx in 1874/5 saying: ,,Either the peasantry hinders each workers’ revolution, makes a wreck of it, as he has formerly done in France, or the proletariat (for the peasant proprietor does not belong to the proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes himself not to) must as government take measures through which the peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as to win him for the revolution; measures which will at least provide the possibility of easing the transition from private ownership of land to collective ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this of his own accord, from economic reasons. It must not hit the peasant over the head, as it would e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or the abolition of his property. The latter is only possible where the capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the true cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as is the town worker, and so has immediately, not just indirectly, the very same interests as him’’.
[2] In March 1919 there were serious riots in Petrograd, including the strikes of workers in Putilov factories and other industrial firms. At the massive meeting on 10 March the Putilovs’ workers promulgated a resolution which begins with the following words: ,,We, the workers from the factorys’ plants of Putilov, declare in advance of the working class of Russia and world working class that the Bolshevik government betrayed the ideals of the Revolution and thus betrayed and duped the workers and peasants in Russia; that the Bolshevik government which governs in our name, is not a government of the proletariat and peasantry, but a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party established by help of Cheka and the police. We demand the release of the workers and their wives, who are prisoners; anew releasing of press, speech, vote and inviolableness of the individual; transferring of the administration for alimentation to cooperator’s unification and transferring of the power to the free elected councils of workers and peasants“. On 16 March 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. More than 900 workers who went to a strike were arrested, of whom more than 200 were executed without trial during the next few days. Numerous strikes took place in the spring of 1919 in cities of Tula, Orel, Tver, Ivanovo and Astrakhan. All strikes were mercilessly suppressed by Cheka using arrests and executions. In the city of Astrakhan, the strikers and Red Army soldiers who joined them were loaded onto barges and then thrown by the hundreds into the Volga with stones around their necks. Between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from 12 to 14 of March 1919. However, strikes continued. Lenin was concerned about the tense situation regarding workers in the Ural region. On 29 January 1920, he sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov stating “I am surprised that you are taking the matter so lightly, and are not immediately executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage”.
[3] Cf. Chapter 1, note 20.
[4] Известия ВРК Кронштадта, 12. март 1921.
[5] Howard J. Sherman. The Soviet Economy. Little, Brown and Compay, Boston, 1969: The first plan 1928-32 successfully completed in December 1932, 4 1/4 years after it began. Investment in heavy industry 50% higher, in all industry 33% higher than plan targets for the whole five years. Iron and steel industry capacity increased by nearly 2/3, machine tools stock in engineering industry and electric power generating capacity doubled. Important long-run gain was improvement in quality of labor. Number of specialists increased 250%. Summary: despite many unforeseen calamities, the first 5-year plan largely successful in its goals. The second 5-year plan 1933-37: Supply of goods from farms increased. By 38, procurement of agricultural produce to cities was 250% higher than 1928. Second five-year plan very successful. During this time population in cities doubled, workers from 10% to 33%, cooperative producers to 55% of all workers. Vast changes. Third Five-Year Plan 1938-41: Response to war threat. By 1940, investment plus defense took at least half of Soviet national income. Standard of living declined. Most of industrial construction was in Eastern areas.
[6] Schapiro, 1970, p. 73, note 4.
[7] Cockshott & Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism, p. 163, 1993: ,,Lenin’s notion of ‘democratic centralism’, whereby the outstanding class-conscious members of the working class, organised in a Communist Party, are elected through a system of workers’ councils to form a workers’ government, is fundamentally flawed. It seeks to build a democracy on an instrument of lass rule: elections. The fact that the vote is restricted to workers does not stop elections being an aristocratic system in the classical sense. Politics becomes a matter for the politicos. Like all aristocracies, it degenerates into a self-serving oligarchy, and is eventually replaced by an ‘honest’ bourgeois plutocracy.
The idea that a right of recall would be an effective constraint on this process is laughable. The right of recall is written into the state constitution of Arizona, and was in Stalin’s Soviet Constitution without noticeable effect. It takes the collection of tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures to secure the recall of an official. It is bound to be a rare event compared to regular elections, but if elections do not keep officials in line why should recall? As for average workmens’ wages, who is to enforce this? What is to stop elected officials voting themselves other benefits?’’
[8] Schapiro, 1955, p. 74 and footnote 14.
[9] ,,Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution’’. BBC. BBC Two. Emitted 24 October 2009.
[10] “French Revolution”. History.com. The History Channel. Retrieved 24 October 2007.