CLR James (1901–1989), native of Trinidad, was perhaps the
most libertarian revolutionary socialist intellectual of both the Pan African
and international labor movements. Best known as the author of the classic
history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, he also became famous
for mentoring anti-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial statesmen such as
Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad's Eric Williams. Far less understood was
James's creative advocacy of direct democracy and workers self-management as
found in his analysis of the Age of the CIO, Classical Athens, and the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Yet undermining our understanding of the contours
and absence of popular self-management as a framework for James's visions of the
African World and Third World is the lack of a proper assessment of how he
understood V.I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This selection from a
forthcoming larger work will attempt to examine this dilemma by uncovering
silences and dilemmas for how James understood Lenin.
CLR James believed one of his major intellectual legacies
was the clarification of the wisdom of V.I. Lenin. However, James's readings
fail in making Lenin's role in history and politics transparent. James's
Leninism attempts to reconcile the validity of workers self-management and the
aspirations of a political party to seize state power. This is in conflict with
James's own genuine and original political legacy: clarifying the direct
democratic gathering forces which will create the new society.[1]
James's Lenin: Never Deceitful or Dictatorial?
James's Lenin appears to be against stifling the
revolutionary self-organization of ordinary people and against a bureaucratic
mentality. Lenin, insists James, was never deceitful nor dictatorial. James was
never Lenin's public or historical critic. For James, Lenin was an enemy of and
his policies do not anticipate Stalinism. Lenin always placed workers'
self-activity or the popular will, which James reminded Lenin always observed
very closely, above his party. James admired Lenin's ability to discard
outmoded concepts and break through rhetoric to get at problems of maintaining
what James believed was a revolutionary regime in state power.[2] These are
propositions associated with an uncritical reception of James's Leninism.
We will dispute how much clarity James brings to
understanding Lenin and the terms for Lenin's close observation of labor's
self-emancipation. For our purposes, we might divide how James viewed Lenin
into four broad frameworks: Lenin's anti-imperialism and vision of
self-determination for colonies, Lenin's purported “shift” from the centrality
of the vanguard party to embracing the Soviets, Lenin's stance during the
“trade union debate,” and Lenin's last prescriptions for a peripheral society
under state capitalism as opposed to socialism. We must be alert to how James's
Lenin first saw Russia politically as a relatively advanced capitalist country
suited for modern politics, and only later sees Russia as emblematic of an
underdeveloped peripheral peasant country. While James did not believe in the
doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which has a retreating
internationalism, James and Lenin often view the prospects of direct democracy
and popular self-management as they relate to the liberation of one nation at a
time. James's meditations on Lenin's last writings on peasants, cooperatives
and literacy campaigns were not the basis of rigorous criticism of postcolonial
states in the Third World that they first appeared. Finally, we will uncover
some silences in James's public career and contours of what he knew about the
Russian leader.
“Turn Imperialist War Into Civil War”
First, James admired Lenin's position during World War I as
a member of the Zimmerwald Left.[3] While leading this coalition of
revolutionary socialist thinkers, Lenin denounced the emergence of conservative
social democratic thinkers, who liquidated their “anti-war” stance when their
own nation states declared war. Many of Lenin's adversaries offered support to
their own ruling classes, even if under the premise of parliamentary or
electoral criticism as a loyal opposition. Lenin's viewpoint was captured best
with his slogan, “Turn imperialist war into civil war.”[4] To the extent James
was inspired by this aspect of Lenin's anti-colonialism and analysis of empire
it is a consistent radical influence for him.
Lenin, as an insurgent activist, was for replacing bourgeois
patriotism and national unity, even in times of war, with political efforts
toward the defeat of classes above society in one's own nation. He insisted on
a revolutionary socialist perspective, which is not mere aesthetic meditation
and does not assume historical defeat. Lenin's “anti-war” policy was to support
social revolution against empire, not merely abroad, but within his own
nation-state. James's Lenin had anti-imperialist perspectives that importantly
are not merely diagnostic analysis of dependency of peripheral nations in the
capitalist world system as they have been invented subsequently by many
scholars. Lenin, James insisted, did not make a fetish of the unequal exchange
of commodities under mercantilism, or in world trade between imperial and
peripheral nations, or see one imperialist or bloc of nation-states as more
democratic than the other. While Lenin's Imperialism: the Highest Stage of
Capitalism had some of these themes and could be read as anticipating others,
the anti-colonial Lenin did not agitate on the basis that revolution was the
more efficient management of capitalism. He neither, while it was certainly an
aspect of colonial oppression, centered that imperialists did not allow middle
classes from certain countries equal opportunity to enter the rules of
hierarchy.
In peripheral nation-states in the world system, under
certain conditions, the nationalist middle classes were imagined by Lenin and
James as tactical allies, if not to be trusted fully in anti-colonial revolt
against military, economic, and cultural domination by a foreign power. James's
Lenin wields an outlook of “critical support” of nationalist middle-class
politicians, rarely in Russia, but, before the defeat of imperial relations,
for the rest of the world. This alliance can partially foster democratic
struggles from below among toilers—if necessary, radicals can carry out this
tactic at the middle-classes' expense. James's Lenin does not mean for
revolutionary socialists to subordinate themselves politically to the
nationalist middle classes.[5]
A Libertarian Lenin?: James Invents A Lenin that Rejected
Vanguards
Second, James invented a Lenin who repudiated his earlier
vanguardism, by leaving behind What Is To Be Done? (1903) and writing State and
Revolution (1917). James imagined Lenin as someone who adjusted his
perspectives and strategies to the self-activity of ordinary people whom he
observed very closely. Thus, James's Lenin, before attaining state power, is
constructed, as shifting his approach from emphasizing the building of a
vanguard party toward “All Power to the Soviets.” But Lenin's flexibility in
his observations of working class self-activity could be misunderstood.
James came to view Lenin's What Is To Be Done? (1903), a
call for the building of a party of a professional cadre who will tutor the
working masses toward socialism, as obsolete in nations distinguished by modern
industrial workers. James feels his viewpoint is confirmed because he views
Lenin as breaking with this conception, as evidenced by not merely Lenin's
State and Revolution but also the April Theses, The Dual Power, and Can the
Bolsheviks Retain State Power?.[6]
In these essays, James's Lenin appeared to be a defender of
proletarian democracy which he sometimes called “primitive democracy.” Lenin
advocated a government of workers councils, where “every cook can govern” or be
an administrator in every department of society “ in rotation” so long as they
are “literate.” James's Lenin was an advocate of “instant recall” of
unaccountable delegates to constituent or representative assemblies by working
people. Inspired by Marx's writings on the Paris Commune, Lenin seemed to
advocate the abolition of the state, specifically the professional army and
police, and promoted their replacement by popular militias or the armed people.
Yet, even in these writings, Lenin desired a government which “cannot properly
be called a state” which he insists is “not a utopian vision” and is in fact a
Jacobin style regime. A close reading of Lenin, even in his writings with a
libertarian socialist tone, reveal a desire to “train” workers to be
administrators, not to allow them to place forward programs and perspectives of
their own.
Still James's Lenin argued that the idea that it is
necessary to direct the state by officials from above is basically false and
undemocratic. The introduction of an appointed officialdom should not be
tolerated. Rather, government must be based only on those popular councils,
committees, and assemblies created by the local people themselves.[7] Lenin did
not want Russia organized around parliamentary democracy. Rather, a republic
with Soviets “from top to bottom.”[8] This was a bit confusing because a
republic is explicitly a government of minority rule led by philosophers who
believe the masses do not have the wisdom to directly govern. Lenin, after the
Soviets appeared and before seizing state power, argued labor did have the
wisdom to directly govern and believed a revolutionary state cannot forbid
demonstrations or any expression of mass power on the part of toilers, or any
socialist group or radical party. However, Lenin's vision in state power is of
Soviets, if still present, as an appendage.[9]
Lenin saw clearly that the best road to state power was a
united front, not opposition to radical democratic forces he in fact disagreed
with. Lenin as agitator does not craft a coalition which prioritizes
progressive or reformist allies in state power but accentuated all ideas which
sought to tear it down and showed a desire for its replacement by direct
democracy. He desired to “stir up” adherents to direct democracy and workers'
self-management, “float along the wave” set up by their direct actions, and be
carried by its “crest” to state power through a dual power where the
self-governing institutions created by everyday people themselves would stand
side by side with the existing order's institutions and, by their example,
condemn them to illegitimacy.[10] Lenin saw direct democratic ideas as methods
of agitation but not as principles to which he was bound permanently.[11]
A Rare Admission and Never In Public: James Knew Lenin
Suppressed The Soviets
James, in his invention of his “libertarian Lenin,” affirmed
every cook “an administrator” (though elsewhere he underlined “every cook can
govern,” which though James did not say “ought or must,” perhaps has more
radical implications). He saw Lenin as a great popularizer of soviet democracy.
Yet he recognized that on one level Lenin usurped the power of the soviets with
his party in theory and practice, even as James conceived of Lenin as coming to
reject the vanguard party and thus often called into question this premise on
his own authority. In 1947–1948, when James was working out a new conception of
revolutionary political theory, a conception that was not primarily a critical
assessment of Lenin in history, he knew that Lenin's initial vision after
seizing state power did not make his state socialist. James, as he theorized,
subtly rebuked Lenin for an imprecise phrase “workers' control of production.”
For CLR James in 1947–1948, workers' self-management, in both politics and
economics, must precede the seizure and smashing of state power and was the socialist
society itself, “it cannot come after.”[12] James embellished Lenin with a
spirit of workers self-emancipation by saying what he meant was the “uncoiling”
of labor's “creativity imbedded” in the sense of humans by alienating the
technological processes of economic production itself. This pointed to a direct
democratic intention that simply does not pan out.
Lenin, not merely Trotsky whom James critiqued for such a
view, saw nationalization of property as a revolutionary weapon or “gain” of a
workers' state. It was not meant to be an economic formula for general welfare.
Rather, first it was used against owners of businesses who did not want to
recognize the workers' councils, whose self-organization independent of the
Bolsheviks strived to take over their workplaces in the Russian Revolution. It
was subsequently used to liquidate the power of the workers councils who would
not be loyal to the Bolshevik state.
Third, James rarely admitted, and never for public
discussion, Lenin's suppression of popular councils of toilers with direct
self-managing ambitions. At the same time, James occasionally and privately
affirmed Lenin's role in “the trade union debate” of 1920,[13] as pragmatic and
insightful where Lenin makes a mockery of those who advocate an extreme
democracy or a syndicalist vision of workers self-management.[14] James
explained in a private study group: “it seems the Bolsheviks suppressed workers
councils because to have supported [them] would have blown everything sky
high.”[15] In 1967, James viewed Lenin as saying a central committee cannot
compel workers who take over their workplaces to do anything without
jeopardizing their hold on state power. James compliments Lenin for using
proletarian courts to get workers to police themselves for not working
efficiently under the Bolshevik State, under which there were wage freezes,
suppression of radical literature and strike action was criminalized.[16]
Practical People Know Self-Governing Workers Are Fairytales
The Lenin of 1918–1922 was no longer the Lenin of 1917. He
no longer spoke of direct democracy or workers' self-management of the economy
by rotation of the literate worker. Lenin no longer has any use for the
syndicalist vision he himself had placed forward.[17] Lenin began to argue “does
every worker know how to rule the country? Practical people know that these are
fairy tales.” While admitting people of working class backgrounds to
administrative departments, Lenin saw a severe shortage of people from the
trade unions qualified to be managers. By this emphasis, he meant managers of a
capitalist economy. Feeling harassed by the persistent discussion of trade
union management of the national economy, Lenin now said it was “syndicalist
twaddle” and an “absurdity.” This is Lenin's reaction to the clause in his
party platform that he wrote himself.[18] Scholars of James's life and work
have yet to record either debate, confusion, or outrage by those sympathetic
with James's full archive for perhaps suggesting that direct democracy or
workers self-management were not possible at certain historical moments or in
certain sectors of the world.
James's Lenin argued to follow through on allowing the trade
unions to manage the national economy would negate the party by an overwhelming
majority of people who do not share the party's politics. Lenin now believes
the trade unions should function as part of “an inspection” of the state but
not manage the economy. Lenin argues if the trade unions alone nominated the
people to both manage the economy and govern, it may sound very democratic, but
this would destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat by which he meant the
Bolshevik hold on state power.[19]
James's Lenin believed the trade unions should be
non-political, even as he wished them to defend workers interests against
excessive bureaucracy. Still they must be guided by discipline and unity under
the state. Factories must be run by trained businessmen. Trade unions (like
workers) should never interfere in the administration of the enterprise and to do
so was recognized as injurious and outlawed.[20]
Both Lenin and Stalin's Russia Maintained Capitalist Laws of
Value Production
Lenin in 1921 reintroduces the wage scale and collective
bargaining. Trade unions were charged with regulating wages. Strikes were
legally forbidden. These policies cannot be attributed to Stalin alone as James
seemed to do at times. These policies reveal that James's analysis of how the
law of value functioned under Stalinism elides the distinction that this is how
Lenin desired to manage Russia as well.[21] Lenin insisted “disputes between
the Soviet Administrators” and the workers must not be seen from a “class”
point of view but in accordance with the general interests of the nation.
Remarkably, Lenin's policies on labor-management relations mirror or are worse
than those of the welfare state and trade union bureaucracy that CLR James and
Martin Glaberman argued against during the Age of the CIO.
When James's Lenin shifted from advocating War Communism to
the New Economic Policy for Russia, he was perceived as sensitive to workers'
and peasants' concerns, and appeared self-critical of his own mistaken
perspectives on government policies above society. Yet James asserted Lenin was
a consistent advocate of state capitalism both early and later in his career.
James's later Lenin repeatedly underscored “there can be no socialism in
Russia.” This is the context of James's veneration of Lenin's last writings
which advocate literacy campaigns, peasant co-operatives, and a workers and
peasant inspection of the state. James's Lenin is saying in fact every cook
cannot govern where he now assessed Russia as a fatally limited underdeveloped
nation, even as James viewed Lenin as having a renewed sensitivity toward the
peasantry. He never discussed in public how Lenin actually treated the
peasantry other than to say Lenin wrote of and was sympathetic to the tyranny
of landlord-sharecropper relations.[22]
Fantastic: Lenin and the Problem with Workers Associations
for the Third World
James projected this invention of Lenin as a model for
democratizing Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana in the essay “Lenin and the Problem.” It
has been overlooked how much Nkrumah's later years in state power resemble CLR
James's Leninist prescriptions. This was despite James's rupturing with him.
Further, James saw Julius Nyerere's vision of Ujamaa Socialism for Tanzania
favorably, for what he perceived as Nyerere's similar approach to Lenin.[23]
James's account, in just that context, has some severe blemishes. James's
“Lenin and the Problem” affirmed Lenin's discarding of direct democracy,
insisting it is “fantastic” (by which Lenin and now James meant absurd) to
conceive of building socialism “by means of all types of workers'
associations,” rather than finding more “simple,” “intelligible” and “easy
ways” for the peasantry to participate under state power. James never explained
persuasively why indirect “self-reliance” was proper, instead of self-directed
liberating activity for toilers of peripheral nations, other than to fall back
on their material and cultural underdevelopment. Yet James's Lenin maintained
that those who cannot directly govern are in fact “the real masses of the
population.”[24]
James conceived that it was possible for Lenin to fight
bureaucracy from a position of state power where workers and peasants,
importantly selected for their political loyalty to the Bolsheviks, will
function as a type of ombudsman with no direct policymaking power. Rather, this
inspection will check the one-party state's vanity and corruption by elevating
its power to below the party's central committee. The peasant cooperatives are
imagined as a transitional model under the New Economic Policy, a mixed
economic plan, where people viewed as illiterate, by Lenin, were to be given
“incentives” (small farmers will be allowed to produce under capitalist
relations) so long as they show qualitatively their growing embrace of
“socialism” as monitored by the Bolshevik state. The trade unions, not
politically independent of this regime, will be consulted on economic
production alone. Workers will not have any power directly over governance. To
allow them to act independently to defend themselves in their unions would be
to allow them to challenge the state and act in a supposed privileged fashion
toward the peasantry. By this logic independent labor was suppressed in both
Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and Julius Nyerere's Tanzania.[25]
How Early Did James Know That Lenin Betrayed All His
Professed Principles?
How did toilers miraculously become so dumb in Lenin's
Russia where a social revolution against the Czar through mass popular activity
had just been made? This is also important comparatively for understanding how
James evaluated anti-colonial revolutions at the post-colonial moment. We can
begin to understand James's silences about Lenin's politics by centering the
critique of Lenin in Boris Souvarine's Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism,
that James translated from French very early in his political career.
Boris Souvarine explained how Lenin abandoned, one by one,
all of his October Theses: Soviet democracy; peasant control of land; abolition
of professional police, army, and bureaucracy; equality of wages; the right of
self-determination of oppressed nationalities. Souvarine argued that Lenin
publicly admitted many economic planning mistakes. However, he never admitted
the abandonment of soviet or direct democracy was a mistake or dictatorial
measures against his opponents whether workers or peasants, revolutionaries or
socialists were mistaken. All rival radical ideas and parties were outlawed
(Left Social-Revolutionaries, Anarchists, independent trade unionists,
Tolstoyans). While a legal opposition was eventually allowed led by Martov of
the Mensheviks, exclusive power was held by Lenin's Bolsheviks. Lenin believed
neither in liberty, equality, nor workers' democracy if he found them contrary
to “the theory of labor” or “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” by which he
meant the one-party state. Congresses of Soviets developed into meetings of
paid officials compelled to take instructions from above, yet it was said by
Lenin to be the result of apathy and lack of culture.[26] It is remarkable that
CLR James translated a book published in 1939 that underscored crucial
political and historical matters that he was muted about for the rest of his
career.
James's Contours On the Soviets: Were the Soviets
Self-Managing Workers Councils or Mere Evidence of Workers Self-Activity?
Perhaps Oskar Anweiler's The Soviets is the best introductory
survey of how the Russian workers, peasants, and soldiers councils functioned
from 1905–1921. Were Soviets suited for government administration or were they
a permanent riot? Were they a mere barometer of the masses' changing moods or
were they forms of freedom with a clear program of popular self-management?
Anweiler suggested while they could be seen as all these things, we must
understand that the Soviets were battlegrounds of various political tendencies.
They were a market place of revolutionary ideas, a meeting pot of intellectuals
and toilers, and they often in their factory council form began to govern and
carry out politics at the point of production. The Soviets were as powerful and
directly democratic as the politics which were advocated and administered by
them. But they were also undermined in various ways by Lenin's Bolshevik state
including the maintenance of multiple layers of indirect workers'
representation to compete with and undermine them.[27] Thus, we need to be
aware of the Lenin who oriented to the Soviets and critically inquire why in
order to understand the contours of James's interpretation. They were perceived
as tools of insurrection to secure state power but also means of containing
workers' autonomy as Lenin's tactics shifted.
James tended to place Lenin and the Soviets in conversation
in a peculiar fashion. James's Lenin believed if the Bolsheviks want to carry
any program out at all they have to go toward or enter the Soviets. On the one
hand, they were organs of popular self-management that no elites or vanguards
invented or taught to workers—they appeared to have self-sufficiency as
self-governing institutions. Soviets, an enhancement of the political general
strike including armed extension of struggle, “tell us things which no experts
on the powerlessness of permanently alienated populations dare even to think.”
James emphasized they do not “wait on any [political] party.” From another
angle, Soviets are the masses' self-activity which should be engaged by
revolutionists who did not create them or previously thought them
unimportant—this can reduce their stature to inconsistent protest activity.
James's Lenin could proclaim that the self-organization of the working class
carried out a higher type of social organization but this did not emerge from
moral wishes but from the crisis of material relations which his party had to
tactically adapt. Yet James knows Lenin said some “savage” things about the
Soviets.[28]
James, in a January 2, 1951, letter to William Gorman,
acknowledged Gorman uttered a great truth in their private correspondence when
he concluded the revolution and counter-revolution were tied together in the
Bolshevik leadership in Russia from 1918 to 1925. This was substantially
Lenin's regime's responsibility, not Stalin's, and it would appear Gorman's
sympathy for the Bolsheviks is overstated. Nevertheless, James continued to
believe Lenin embodied the highest stage radical political thought had reached
and it was the task of contemporary revolutionaries to clarify and extend the
historical lessons of that tragedy.[29] Yet, for James, the tragedy was not
Lenin's way of seeing but that the toilers, both proletariat and peasantry,
could not do what was required. Apparently their creativity and self-governing
potential had its limits and they could not directly re-organize society
because Russia was not modern enough and rejected working on other than
capitalist terms.[30]
Anarchism and Syndicalism: Bourgeois Movements to Be
Vanquished?
Lenin saw no self-emancipating workers because those who are
inspired by a different anti-capitalist or more libertarian socialist
perspective he suppresses. Where Mensheviks, SRs, or Left SRs gained a majority
in the Soviets, he would either disband them or expel the offending forces and
deliver the Soviets to Communist Party members or functionaries who then
steered the Soviets to conformity with government policy. This amounted to a
coup by the Bolsheviks against the system of sovereign popular committees their
party had advocated.[31] Lenin, months later after suggesting every cook could
govern and advocating abolition of the professional coercive apparatus of the
state, proclaimed anarchism and syndicalism are “bourgeois” movements to be
“vanquished.” From April 11–18, 1918, Lenin's Bolshevik State broke the
anarchist movement by a military “pogrom.” He closed its newspapers, smashed
its offices, arrested and assassinated its prominent members. Over forty
anarchists were killed or wounded. 500 were taken prisoner.[32]
In 1918, Lenin said the party of the Left
Social-Revolutionists was the only party which expresses the will of the
peasants. He acknowledged this so long as they remained in a loyal opposition
to his policies. This changed with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk where the Left
SRs attempted to assassinate the German ambassador in revolt against Lenin's
retreat on self-determination for oppressed nationalities. Lenin's state now
said the Left SRs were accomplices of the White Guards, landlords and
capitalists and attempted to suppress them. The Left-SRs responded by going
underground, as they did through much of their existence against the Czar, and
conducted armed struggle against the Bolshevik state.[33] Notably the SRs who
did not go underground retreated to the Volga, a stronghold of theirs for
years. They advocated the restoration of the Constituent Assembly that the
Bolsheviks had abolished, as “a soviet” of a united and independent Russia,
projecting a type of provisional government against the Bolsheviks. Their
political program rejected workplace committees and instead advocated municipal
assemblies, the restoration of private property and suspension of socialist
experiments declaring it was impossible to abolish capitalist forms of industry
at the present time—a stance Lenin would soon embrace.
The anarchist Nestor Makhno was a major leader of the
national liberation movement in the Ukraine. A few days before surrendering the
Ukraine to Germany, where the Bolsheviks made a treaty with the imperialists,
Lenin and Trotsky had the leadership cadre of Makhno's army shot. They also
sabotaged Makhno's army's supply line, just as Stalin's Russia did the Aragon
Front in the Spanish Civil War.[34]
Lenin on Soviet Power: A Nature of Jellyfish?
On April 23, 1918, Lenin addressed the Moscow Soviet, and
said “the Soviet Power” had a nature of “jellyfish not of iron” and that, in
many instances, was not efficient or determined against the counter-revolution.
Lenin saw the workers and peasants and every radical idea or party he didn't
control in the Soviets, which of course are popular councils which desired a
more direct democracy, as “disorganized and petty-bourgeois forces.” Lenin
began a wave of terror against the independent power of the workers' councils.
Two weeks after, Lenin argued for the most part the Civil War with
pro-imperialist counter-revolutionists had come to an end. Thus one cannot
confuse his wave of terror against forces to his Left with them having been
collaborators in the Civil War with pro-imperialist forces.[35]
By June of 1918, the withdrawal of political support by the
majority of the social groups that had supported the Bolsheviks in
October—workers, soldiers, and peasants—was plunging the regime into crisis.
The problems, including rising unemployment, inflation, famine, popular unrest
(both peaceful and insurgent); and the possibility that the opposition parties
might replace the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition in winning majorities in the
Soviets compelled Lenin to wonder whether his government would survive until
the next day.[36] On June 28th, the Council of People's Commisars passed a
nationalization decree. Implemented gradually until completion at the beginning
of the next year, under the premise of rooting out disorganization of
production and supply, the Bolshevik state outlawed the remaining Soviets they
did not control in mining, metals, textiles, steam driven mills, utilities,
railways, and other sectors.[37]
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Kaplan, a former anarchist turned
SR, tried to assassinate Lenin, firing several bullets into him at point blank
range outside a Moscow factory. His health never recovered. An official “Red
Terror” was proclaimed in response where all legal limits on the Cheka, the
state secret police, were removed and roundups of opponents followed, with
unknown thousands being executed or placed in concentration camps for real and
suspected offenses. Victor Serge, a well known “socialist humanist” and
ex-Communist, was convinced that the formation of the Cheka chapters in
different parts of Russia and the inquisition they carried out, instead of
popular tribunals, was “the gravest error” of 1918.[38]
On Sept 20th of 1918, Lenin launched a campaign against
workers and entire factories who viewed the Bolshevik State as they did the
capitalist employer and thus desired to give their bosses as little work as
possible.[39] Jonathan Aves has called this the volyna (go slow) movement.[40]
James analyzed such a stance in the United States as labor striving to directly
govern but made no critique of Lenin for campaigning against workers local
grievances and strategy of work to rule.
By 1919 there were major strikes in Petrograd and Moscow.
Workers demanded that the peasants be allowed to sell grain on the free market,
the removal of military coercion blocking food being brought to the cities, and
restoration of civil liberties to all anti-capitalist forces. Somehow, James
commended Lenin for observing workers' self-activity closely and supposedly
correcting mistakes but never highlighted toilers' actual thoughts and actions
which take the revolutionary lead in Russia after Lenin achieved state power.
Radical socialist and direct democratic workers and soldiers were being accused
by Lenin of being accomplices of imperialism. James was not even sympathetic to
the Workers Opposition, led by Alexandra Kollontai and A.G. Shliapnikov, which
was a disciplined minority faction within the Bolsheviks that called for
allowance of more direct democracy and workers control. Instead, James affirms
Lenin for offering financial bonuses to workers to build socialism on
capitalist terms.[41]
“Enemies of the People”: Lenin's Attack on Self-Governing
Farmers
Often lost in “kulak” discourse, Lenin attacked the
peasantry for not producing grain and food under conditions of scarcity of
commodities, inflation, and coercion to those who wished to sell their produce
on the market. The system of producing grain had broken down partially because
of the loss of the Ukraine and partially because trade was abolished between
town and country. Farmers were called “enemies of the people” by Lenin and
attacked by “committees of poor peasants” that included state organized
hoodlums from the cities. Lenin said: “that we brought civil war to the village
is something that we hold up as a merit.” James felt Lenin was aware and
sensitive to the tyranny of landlords against sharecroppers in Russia's rural
outposts. However, whole villages that did not produce enough grain were
subject to mass whippings (a method employed previously by the Czars but also
over one hundred years before by Toussaint L'Ouverture's post-colonial state in
the Haitian Revolution when ex-slaves rebelled against their own economic
arrangements). In the summer of 1920, prominent toilers in the co-operative
movement became the focus of the most intense persecution. They were arrested,
thrown into prisons on trumped up charges of economic sabotage and
collaboration with capitalism.[42] All of these are important historical
preludes to understanding Lenin's last writings on peasants and cooperatives
but also how he to evaluate his own state capitalist initiatives.
Lenin hoped to terrorize the peasants into full state
regimentation before shifting to the more moderate New Economic Policy (NEP).
NEP, which gave “incentives” but in fact merely allowed peasants finally to
produce under market relations, divided peasant resistance movements, like A.S.
Antonov's Green Movement in the Tambov region, and in effect saved Lenin's
regime from itself.[43] James shared with Lenin uncritical contempt for most
Mensheviks, in spite of the fact that the latter initially advised the more
moderate path of state capitalism that Lenin finally chose.[44] James also
felt, as did Lenin, that, within the peasantry, not just their landlords,
existed an inherent and dangerous capitalist impulse. James's Lenin was
critical of the romantic impulse of past Russian radicals who saw an inherent
collectivist impulse in rural life. We must be aware that human nature is prone
to both competitiveness and possessive individualism but also mutual aid and a
self-directed creativity in the quality of their autonomously managed work.
That these dueling spirits have not been resolved for all time (and likely will
never be) need not be an obstacle to a self-managing cooperative society.
Something “Tragic” To Witness But “Foolish” To Defend: James
Sides with the Bolshevik State Against the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921
For CLR James, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 represented
a breakthrough toward a type of third revolution against both the one party
state and the welfare state. But James, in his treatment of the Kronstadt
Uprising of 1921, the sailors who supported revolution against V.I. Lenin's
Bolshevik regime after a long trail of abuses of Russian workers—especially
broad layers of labor in Petrograd and those identified with anarchist and
libertarian socialist activism — does not support the self-mobilization of
working people as a historian or political theorist. The Kronstadt rebellion,
like the events in Hungary thirty five years later, lasted for a very short
time, and was a flash of light which illuminated the conflicting tendencies
within actual existing socialism. James often elevates the political statements
of statesmen, from V.I. Lenin to Julius Nyerere, all out of proportion to their
real worth given their actual political practice. Often he presents these as
remarkable—the finest—political statements overtaking and overturning anything
Rousseau, Aristotle, Plato, or Locke could ever comprehend. James's readers and
audiences tend to fall for this hyperbole even as they also accept that mass
movements for liberation often seize historical moments but very often cannot
find adequate leadership to plan and theorize and create opportunities. While
taking in strains of racial and anti-colonial vindication it is often missed
that all of these figures are advocates of various forms of a republic—a regime
led by a minority professional ruling elite—not a popular government where working
people place forward perspectives of their own and carry them out.
James often inquired about the spontaneous and instinctive
qualities of working people and repeatedly extended the implications of their
elemental drive toward self-government. But never has James placed before his
audiences direct democratic political statements by self-emancipating workers.
Kronstadt was his opportunity. The Sailors had a political statement that was
so vivid it put fear in the heart of Lenin's regime—it actually advocated “a
Third Revolution.” Let us examine some of their demands. We must remember, like
the Hungarian workers of 1956, they were not making mere calls for reform. For,
as part of the military, they were the law in practice and on their own
authority threatened to be the armed backing of the dual power of independent
labor retaking of the factory councils in Russia.
The Kronstadt Sailors called for immediate new elections to
the Soviets (the “popular” councils) which they boldly stated under a police
state no longer expressed the wishes of workers and peasants. While they were
not the first to proclaim it, they were in the best position for self-defense
while saying it. The sailors called for all sectors of the military to
associate with this and other resolutions. They called for the secret ballot
and insisted the vote should be after a period of free political propaganda of
all Left parties, all of whom, besides the Bolsheviks, were suppressed. Freedom
of the press and speech was explicitly called for anarchists—which most
accounts of the Russian Revolution favoring the Bolsheviks, whether Trotsky or
Stalin, have been written out of these historical events.
A Congress of “non-party workers and soldiers” was called
for at Kronstadt consistent with a general call for freedom of assembly. The
Sailors called for a stop to the Bolshevik monopoly of the press and finances
to spread political ideas. They rejected the idea that all military guard
detachments could receive political education from only one source and called
for a proliferation of independent cultural associations and a taking into
account of what rank and file workers were actually thinking. A Commission was
called for to look into those detained in “concentration camps” as distinct
from a demand that all political prisoners from Left Parties were to be
released immediately.
The Sailors exposed the premise of the Russian Revolution,
under Lenin's regime, as a consolidation of the revolt against value production
itself sponsored by the state—as James's State Capitalism & World
Revolution viewed it—and called for an equality of wages, save for those
workers who toiled in unsanitary or dangerous conditions. Ida Mett, a scholar
of Kronstadt, reminded us that this also placed out in the open the lie by Trotsky
that the Sailors wanted privileges while the masses went hungry—a stock false
premise that would be used against independent labor by Third World regimes who
admired the Bolshevik state time and again. The Sailors underlined that the
peasants' self-government over their own land was to be restored, with
sovereignty over their own soil and cattle, as well as small handicraft
artisans, provided they didn't employ wage labor. The Sailors rejected the idea
that the state could fight bureaucracy and the lie that they wished toilers to
inspect the ethics of the state—mobile workers' control groups would be
maintained autonomously to police the state.[45]
Oskar Anweiler reminds us that the Kronstadt Sailors did not
criticize Lenin and blamed primarily Trotsky and Zinoviev for the bloody
conflict. But they turned the concept “All Power to the People” against the
Bolshevik State and rejected a counter-revolution of both left and right.
Anweiler, while a critic of the Bolsheviks, sees both an irrational faith and a
vitality in the council concept as embodied in the Sailors' declaration.[46]
Paul Avrich, perhaps the most definitive scholar of the Kronstadt Sailors,
argued that Lenin, in contrast to the repeated claims by CLR James of Lenin's
affinity for workers' self-activity, repeatedly distrusted the spontaneous
actions of independent labor. Lenin feared that “organs of local democracy”
could end up advocating and sustaining any type of politics. While that was
true, Avrich explains fairly the Sailors did not defend a historical retreat to
more conservative politics as they were falsely accused by the state. In fact,
the Sailors were not advocates of “equal rights and liberties for all” but only
for the numerous political tendencies among the Left. Their sense of freedom
was not for landlords, capitalists and the middle classes—only for workers and
peasants. They were for direct democracy and had no use for representative
government—something James embraced in the Hungarian workers but not for the
Kronstadt Sailors.[47]
All James could see in Kronstadt was a tragic dilemma for a
revolutionary statesman. He thought Lenin was bound to crush this rebellion.
Then the Bolsheviks could admit some past mistakes, institute economic reforms
which would let the state retreat into a more free capitalist market, and
continue to suppress direct democratic expressions of labor. This became
James's model for the conflict between Toussaint and Moise in the Haitian
Revolution and his justification for the suppression of independent labor among
the ex-slaves at the post-colonial, post-abolition moment. This degrading of
the direct democratic potential is what is really behind James's Leninist
prescriptions and advice for underdeveloped formerly colonized countries.[48]
James could be subtle and concerned with ethical dilemmas in
his public career. Yet, particularly in his writing of World Revolution,
1917–1936 and The Black Jacobins, it may take several readings to understand
better what is at stake. However, if one reads the marginalia in his personal
copy of R.V. Daniels's The Conscience of the Revolution, one of the first
scholarly studies of the Russian Revolution in the second half of the twentieth
century to highlight the conflict between the Bolshevik state and workers'
self-management, it is clear that James was hostile to any notion that Lenin's
state should not be defended against accusations of dictatorship—even when it suppressed
self-managing workers.
Daniels explained that when Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried
to retreat from the extremes of War Communism, the economic plan which desired
to abolish the market by military means, “the party leadership found
doctrinaire criticism from the Ultra-Left intolerable.” James wrote in the
margins of his book “fool!” expressing impulsively that Daniels, to his mind,
did not understand the art of social revolution.[49] But we can watch further
as James reads Daniels.
Undoubtedly the Kronstadt revolt could have been forestalled
by timely reforms, but such a course would have been too embarrassing and might
well have been a serious blow to the authority of the government. Petrograd was
in the throes of a wildcat strike wave, upon which Menshevik and SR
undergrounders were allegedly trying to capitalize, and the Soviet authorities
had all they could do to keep the situation in hand there. For the Communist
leaders it was more natural at the time of crisis to tighten up. Given the
state of popular discontent, an admission by the government that the
Kronstadters had a case that could be discussed might have brought the Soviet
regime crashing down everywhere. It was essential above all for the Communist
Party to suppress the idea of Kronstadt as a movement which defended the
principles of the October Revolution against the Communists—the idea of the
'third revolution.'[50]
James writes in the margins “quite thus always.” He seems to
confirm what we find in his commentary on Kronstadt in his The Black Jacobins
many years before—there is agreement with Daniels that the Kronstadt Sailors
were “ultra left”—a pejorative term—and they would have had no basis for
projecting their proposals if Lenin had pushed reforms through sooner. Within
the Bolshevik Party, it was permissible for Lenin and the leadership to
acknowledge “mistakes” but these were mistakes of administration not of
intention. One could not permit any attacks on the authority of the Bolshevik
government—for it embodied the revolution, not the workers' actual thoughts and
action after state power was seized. The Kronstadt rebels represented not a
mutiny of Sailors alone. It embodied one of many popular committees of labor
which were in motion everywhere against the regime—especially across the water
in the wildcat strikes of Petrograd. So not only did the meaning of Kronstadt
have to be suppressed by the Bolsheviks but in a certain respect it had to be
denied by CLR James in his public political thought. James thus is annoyed with
Daniels and writes “fool” again in the margins, where he discusses in public
“from the standpoint of the party leadership, such explosive criticism had to
be disarmed permanently.”[51] James is satisfied with the strategic issues
being documented but not the implied evaluation, for Daniels appeared to
criticize the Bolsheviks too much for James though Daniels's historical
perspective was clearly that he still wanted them to succeed in retaining state
power.
Daniels believed the “Ultra-Left had held the ideal while
the party leadership, through the progressive canonization of bureaucratic
expedients into the law of the revolution had departed from the spirit of
1917.” Daniels is correct to point out that Alexandra Kollontai's faction among
the party, known as the Workers' Opposition, whom James never identified with
anyway, actually represented “a failure to deviate along with Lenin when he
abandoned the anarcho-syndicalist aspects of the Bolshevik program.” CLR. in
his marginalia, continues to believe Daniels's assessment is “fool[ish]” and
asked “why?”[52] It should be clear that James's valorization of the Soviets as
the creative self-management of labor in 1905 and 1917 should not be mistaken
as an “anarchist” thread of his political principles. It is not a principle he
is willing to sustain when they confronted Lenin's state power or a state power
he deems progressive for an underdeveloped country.
We see CLR's perspective on “socialism from below” was
really a way of seeing the self-activity of labor as a measure of what
statesmen must do to retain state power—a project he sees as a huge
priority—over and above the self-organization and self-emancipation of labor at
“the post-colonial moment” for Russia after the Czar. CLR terms the following
assessment by Daniels as “wicked”:
The proletariat of itself was held to be incapable of rising
above the level of mere trade union-consciousness. To dispute this was an
unpardonable theoretical regression from Marxism, which no genuine proletarian
could commit. Granting his premises, Lenin had an airtight case. Any
manifestation of independent revolutionary thought among the workers which
would seem to refute Lenin's characterization of them naturally had to
challenge the authority of the party which purported to do the proletariat's
thinking for it.[53]
There was nothing evil or malicious about Daniels'
interpretation. But his view does conflict with James's claim that Lenin left
behind the perspectives of What Is To Be Done? Lenin did not see vanguard ideas
as obsolete. James would insist that Lenin never saw his party or state as
politically thinking for, or providing government for, the workers. But James
never even used one of his more modest formulations at Lenin's expense. He
never assessed Lenin as being “pushed from behind” by the Russian workers once
he had achieved state power. Their self-directed political activities suggested
corrections in state policy but their actions, and their actual political
thought, never clearly expressed the programmatic desire for popular
self-management in James's mind's eye. He wished to maintain the illusion that
toilers could not find adequate leadership side by side with their historical
tendency to rebel in ways of their own invention. Yet this for James never
implied that Lenin's statecraft was illegitimate. Thus CLR insisted Daniels was
“all wrong” when Daniels asserted the pattern of 1921 relied on the old
organizational tradition of Bolshevism to “conceal, rationalize, and explain
away the failure of the regime to live up to its original social ideals.”[54]
James falsely saw Lenin's last writings as a form of decentralization within
the context of accepting Lenin's admission that socialism in Russia was
impossible. Lenin, in fact, was defending and legitimating his own plan for industrialization
by invitation to multi-national capitalists, while he threatened all socialist
thinkers to his left, many for workers' self-management, with repression.
James believed, at his finest, that the greatest obstacle
humanity placed in its own path was the notion that social revolution through
self-emancipation was not possible. But Maurice Brinton in his introduction to
Ida Mett's The Kronstadt Uprising sets up a supposition relevant to a critical
study of James:
When Stalinists or Trotskyists speak of Kronstadt as “an
essential action against the class enemy,” when more “sophisticated”
revolutionaries refer to it as “a tragic necessity,” one is entitled to pause
for a moment. One is entitled to ask how seriously they accept Marx's dictum
that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class
itself.” Do they take this seriously or do they pay mere lip service to the
words? Do they identify socialism with the autonomy (organizational and
ideological) of the working class? Or do they see themselves, with their wisdom
as to the “historical interests” of others, and with their judgments as to what
should be “permitted,” as the leadership around which the future elite will
crystallize and develop? One is entitled not only to ask…but also to suggest
the answer!
One can't help but see James as “the sophisticated
revolutionary” who refers to Kronstadt as “a tragic necessity” after a close
reading of his World Revolution and The Black Jacobins. For James, the quarrel
over the events of Kronstadt in 1921 represented more than a historical
instance of direct democracy or workers' self-management challenging state
power. It was an event which could be used, and was by defenders of the
capitalist world system, to call into question not merely Stalinism, but “the
whole Marxist-Leninist heritage.”[55]
James's Dictatorship of the Proletariat: A Nuanced or Vulgar
Materialist Concept in James's Intellectual Legacies?
Why did James go so far in his development of direct
democracy and workers self-management as the socialist future but often
capitulated subtly to oppressive notions associated with Lenin? A better
understanding of the concept of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” suggests
a further avenue of inquiry. James appears to embrace this concept before and
after he saw state capitalism as an obstacle to the self-emancipation of modern
industrial workers as expressed in his writings during the Age of the CIO and
on Hungary.
State capitalism evolved in his political thought to have a
double value—especially where he saw it as progressive for former colonial and
plantation societies. Where state capitalism was viewed as progressive by James
it was merely an application of the theory of “the dictatorship of the
proletariat” to the Third World. But this theory had little to do with labor's
self-emancipation in any nation.
James explained that global capitalism inevitably developed
into huge monopolies, and these gradually control the economic and financial
life of the larger capitalist nations. There is an increasing tendency to
separate the ownership of finance capital from industrial initiatives, or seek
economic production in the lowest wage sectors in the world economy by the capitalists.
It follows for James's Leninist political economy that the supremacy of finance
capital suggests perhaps a tendency to hesitate to re-invest or lack of desire
to invest surplus capital to raise the standard of living of the masses, for
this would mean a decrease in profits. It should be clear that this is not an
anti-capitalist discourse but a nationalist discourse about capitalist
development for an underdeveloped nation (wherever it may be found).[56]
James, again arguing about Lenin's Soviet Union, explained
that, in 1937, capitalism and socialism were not economic entities that were
already fixed. A decaying capitalism could overthrow an aspiring socialist
state, or an aspiring socialist state might organize working people to strike
blows against capitalism.[57] These were not class struggles, as in
self-directed initiatives of workers, but economic clashes among nation-states
and aspiring rulers within the world economic structure.
When Lenin desired for a more advanced capitalist country to
come to the aid of Russia (or a socialist revolution in another country) or
Russia would surely fail—he meant the same thing. Internationalist workers
would not so much aid Russia as he was hoping for another nation-state like his
own. So when James's Lenin argued it was impossible to pass from capitalism to
socialism without breaking “national frameworks” he did not mean a rupture with
nationalism or the nation-state but the creation of blocs among nation-states
which might share capital but operated on the terms of capital and subordinate
wage labor with a progressive varnish. This was essentially what Kwame Nkrumah,
George Padmore, and CLR James mean about Caribbean and African federation.[58]
James's concern to describe the importance of “an advanced
society” was remarkably, in terms of Leninist political economy, similar to his
prescriptions for a colonial or peripheral nation. A modern industrial nation
could have both urban and agricultural workers, but have a greater number of
urban ones which live close to and intertwined with the middle classes. Having
a majority of industrialized workers, or a peripheral nation's push to get to
that quota, is not a prelude to a direct democracy in James's Leninist
formulations (whether nationalist or internationalist). Instead they anticipate
the proletariat's representatives remolding society by smashing the bourgeois
state and creating a new type of bourgeois state of their own often called
progressive or socialist. James's assertion that Lenin “saw the form of the new
state” in the Soviets, while consistent with a strict textual reading of
Lenin's State and Revolution and other writings, is either a rupture with
James's and Lenin's actual political economy or telling a neglected truth. The
Soviets were merely a battering ram to secure a nationalist-capitalist state
which would reinvest capital, where possible and if present, in subordinate
workers' development.
James's explanation of “the real task of the dictatorship of
the proletariat,” as expressed in World Revolution, and in historical defense
of Lenin's Bolshevik state, “was to increase production and create such
abundance” that the middle classes “would be drawn on the basis of their own
experience,” which we assume generally is not concerned with social revolution,
“to support the proletariat.” “A series of economic transformations extending
over many years” would ultimately reveal that the new order was obviously
better than private ownership of the means of production. But James
inadvertently reveals that no new order would be instituted for it was rooted
in the assumption that “the whole system would stand or fall by the increased
productivity of labor.” A welfare state, nationalized property, or a one-party
state with monopoly of foreign trade (all in shifting gradations) would make
the increased development of state capitalism possible. When James then says
“capitalism retards this development” he meant merely the unfettered global
free market kind.[59]
James reminded us in World Revolution, and for our concern
with national liberation struggles we might pay close attention, that both Marx
and Lenin agreed that the seizure of state power and the property of the rich
was not “socialism.” But if what James argued in that text is true, that the
quality of a political system “cannot rise higher than the technical level of
[economic] production,” then Marx teaches that socialism was impossible in both
imperial and peripheral nations.
Yet James complicated matters when he says properly what
about “the part the workers” play in a social revolution? Workers under
capitalism, whether in imperial or peripheral nations, in their self-organized
leap over the constraints of the means of production throughout history,
suggest the preoccupation with capitalist development of modes of production by
socialists is a grave distortion. James underscored however that “ultimately,
the standard of education, of fitness for the complicated duties of
citizenship, rested on the level of production.” When James argued that Lenin,
like no other statesman, believed in the creativity of the masses, he makes
clear that besides Lenin's self-discarded chants about soviet power replacing
state power, he only intended for labor to participate as subordinates in the
higher productivity of capitalist development.[60]
James in World Revolution embraced at times a vulgar Marxist
materialism which underscored that it was “inescapable” that labor's
self-emancipation was tied to capitalist development. Not merely the
contradictions of capitalist development which compel upheavals, he argued that
unfettered free market capitalism was an obstacle to rational or progressive
capitalist development.
James's later turn to an explicit direct democracy and
workers self-management had to be birthed through the medium of a critique of
not merely Stalinism but rationalism, progress, “production for production's
sake,” and the insults of the welfare state and one-party state whose only
conception of “socialism” was that “workers would work” and not directly govern.
But direct democracy was in constant tension not just with James's Leninism but
with his nationalism (both of which rejected imperialism but not capitalism
upon a close reading).
James interprets the dictatorship of the proletariat as an
economic dictatorship, not a personal dictatorship, under capitalism. To be
clear, this is not synonymous with working people directly governing. The
statesmen can be imagined as validly patriotic or nationalist and this can be
its only “socialist” content in a hostile world. James argued it can only be
evaluated in the context of a given time and circumstances—this only appears to
be a nuanced stance. Those circumstances are the rate of the economic
transition to socialism, the economic resources the country holds, and a
country's relationship with other nation-states. Thus, the determining factor
on the progressive nature of state capitalism is not the self-management of
labor which would be its negation but the quality of socialist statesmanship
who explained the “retreat,” and maintained some semblance of freedom of
discussion under what is essentially a real dictatorship over workers.[61]
James's literary framework which often presented Lenin, Toussaint L'Ouverture,
and Kwame Nkrumah in terms of tragedy, papered over what was in fact a vulgar
historical materialist framework that erased or justified the smashing of
independent labor.
In Conclusion
James, like Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours, saw the
heritage of Marx and Lenin as not merely synonymous with the art and science of
world revolution, but with his own claim to be a great historical actor. He was
wrong on both counts. “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was a concept
developed by Marx and Lenin. There were many others placed forward by these two
men, which were authoritarian capitalist concepts that, in the name of workers,
betrayed a fear of their self-emancipation. James's greatest contribution to
emancipation was as an enchanter of direct democracy and workers'
self-management. James shares that legacy with many libertarian socialists,
most of whom are commonly rejected by adherents of Marxism and Leninism, no
matter how they imagine their own political identity. James was correct to
reject the notion that past historical atrocities demonstrated that the desire
for social revolution “was wrong from the start.” But preventing expressions of
popular self-management from tarnishing the legacies of those, like Lenin, who
(in aspiring to be progressive guardians above society in state power) smashed
these forms of freedom, was an error so grave that it was fundamental.[62]
This error has been a great obstacle to clarifying the
revolutionary content of James's political thought. Further, the error has
obstructed a proper assessment of the presence, contours, function, and absence
of direct democracy and workers' self-management in James's view of national
liberation in colonized and peripheral nations. Yet we must always be alert
that these contours, which often seem absurd or idiosyncratic from the perspective
of a consistent advocacy of popular self-management can be explained more
consistently through the pathways of James's Leninism.
James's view of Lenin as more sensitive to peasants than
Stalin, and his sympathy for Lenin's advocacy of a workers' and peasant's
inspection soon after the Bolshevik state's attacks on independent toilers in
factories and fields reveal something crucial. James's insistence on
underscoring the vanguard party and the one-party state were not central or
special doctrine of Lenin's was a grave mistake. His repeated assertion that
Lenin as a dictator is “a lie stuck in people's minds” by bourgeois media is
false and complicated a reality of world politics he understands elsewhere. One
does not make an assessment of social revolution based on what imperialists say
about a regime alone. Rather, the criteria should be whether toilers directly
govern in that society.[63]
Lenin, an ascetic never motivated by desiring a privileged
life, nevertheless behaved very autocratically in state power. Most crucially
for our study, James's Lenin, while he at times popularized libertarian
socialist ideas, made clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that direct democracy
and workers' self-management could be discarded. For James's Lenin state power
was not in fact reconcilable with self-governing labor. Further James's Lenin,
in state power, discredited and repressed the self-emancipation of workers and
peasants, and the libertarian socialists who consistently defended them.
James's Leninism existed in tension with his politics of
direct democracy and workers self-management for modern industrial
nations—aspects of which appear in his historical narratives of peripheral
nations as well. We are partially indebted to his more libertarian socialist
writings as a basis for making this criticism. Nevertheless, James's Leninism
and labor's self-emancipation are not intellectual legacies which can be reconciled
uncritically, save for scholars and activists who wish to elevate the banner of
labor's self-emancipation only to discipline and discard working people when
they have their opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy.
[1] CLR James did not see these two intellectual legacies in
conflict. See CLR James, with Paul Buhle, James Early, Noel Ignatin, and
Ethelbert Miller, “Interview,” CLR James: His Life and Work, Paul Buhle ed.,
London: Allison & Busby (1986), p. 164. ↩
[2] Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: CLR James and
the Struggle for A New Society, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press
(2008), pp. 54–60. ↩
[3] An excellent study of this aspect of Lenin's career is
the following: R. Craig Nation, War On War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and The
Origins of Communist Internationalism, Durham, NC: Duke UP (1989). ↩
[4] See CLR James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, (1937),
Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1993), pp. 74–75; CLR James, “State
and Counter-Revolution,” New International, vol. 6, no. 7, August 1940, pp.
137–140. ↩
[5] See C.L. Rudder (CLR James), “Popular Fronts in Past
Times,” Fight, vol. 1, no. 2, December 2, 1936, p. 16; C.L. Rudder (CLR James),
“The Leninist Attitude To War,” Fight, vol. 1, no. 3, January 1937, p. 16.
These issues of Fight have been bound with others as Staffan Lindhe, ed.,
Fight: Fascimile Edition of British Trotskyist Journals of the 1930s, Goteborg,
Sweden: SL. Publications (1999). ↩
[6] These texts can be found in Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin
Anthology, New York: W.W. Norton (1975). ↩
[7] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), p. 23. ↩
[8] Ibid., p. 22. ↩
[9] Ibid., p. 24. ↩
[10] Ibid., p. 25. ↩
[11] Ibid., p. 27. ↩
[12] CLR James, with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, “On
Marx's Essays from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts” (1947), in At the
Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings, London: Allison & Busby (1984),
p. 67. ↩
[13] The Trade Union debate within the Bolshevik Party
included Trotsky, Martov, Bukharin, and Alexandra Kollontai's Workers
Opposition. James mistakenly viewed this debate of 1920 as proof of the
democratic character of the Bolshevik one-party state, and the freedom of
discussion allowed. Despite this claim, what was conceived as a debate about
the role of labor in workers control of production, was something else entirely
when an important matter was considered. Almost all the trade unions had been
co-opted by the state or were outlawed. They earlier were used to overtake some
Soviets and suppress others. James's analysis may have benefited from his
normative critique of trade union bureaucracy as militantly hostile to
independent labor action during the Age of the CIO. We can fruitfully apply
James's insights from elsewhere here. ↩
[14] CLR James, “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in
Russia,” part 1 (1967), in You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal
Lectures of CLR James, David Austin ed., Oakland: AK Press (2009), pp. 161–162.
↩
[15] Ibid., p. 166. ↩
[16] Ibid., p. 173. ↩
[17] Manya Gordon, Workers Before and After Lenin, New York:
E.P. Dutton (1941), p. 84. ↩
[18] Ibid., p. 85. ↩
[19] Ibid., pp. 86–87. ↩
[20] Ibid., pp. 88–93. ↩
[21] CLR James, with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, State
Capitalism & World Revolution (1950), Chicago: Charles H. Kerr (1986), p.
47. ↩
[22] See CLR James, “Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro
Question” (1947) in CLR James on “The Negro Question,” Scott McLemee ed.,
Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi (1996), pp. 130–32. ↩
[23] CLR James, A History of Pan African Revolt (1939,
1969), Chicago: Charles H Kerr (1995), pp. 148–150. ↩
[24] CLR James, “Lenin and the Problem” (1964), in Nkrumah
and the Ghana Revolution, Westport, CT: Lawrence & Hill (1977), pp.
202–203. ↩
[25] See forthcoming Matthew Quest, In the Shadow of State
Power: CLR James, Direct Democracy and National Liberation Struggles, Atlanta:
On Our Own Authority! ↩
[26] Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of
Bolshevism, translated by CLR James, New York: Alliance (1939), pp. 255–257,
261. ↩
[27] Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers,
Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, New York: Pantheon (1974), pp.
111–112. ↩
[28] CLR James, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Vanguard Party,
Detroit: Facing Reality (1964), pp. 3–4; CLR James, Modern Politics, Detroit:
Bewick (1973), pp. 46–47; CLR James, Marxism and the Intellectuals, Detroit:
Facing Reality (1962), p. 24; CLR James, with George Rawick, Martin Glaberman,
and William Gorman, The Gathering Forces, Unpublished Manuscript. George P.
Rawick Papers. Western Manuscript Archives, University of Missouri at St. Louis
(1967), p. 4. ↩
[29] CLR James, Letter to William Gorman, January 2, 1951,
Martin Glaberman Collection, Walter Reuther Labor Archives, Wayne State
University, Detroit, Michigan. ↩
[30] CLR James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, Westport,
CT: Lawrence & Hill (1977), p. 211; CLR James, World Revolution, 1917–1936,
(1937), Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1993), pp. 125–126. ↩
[31] Murray Bookchin, Third Revolution, vol. 3, New York:
Continuum (2004), pp. 267 and 271; Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines
of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP (1994), p. 16. ↩
[32] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), pp. 37–38;
Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and
Counter-Revolution, foreword by Andrew Zonneveld, Atlanta: On Our Own
Authority! (2012), p. 96. ↩
[33] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), p. 39. ↩
[34] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), pp. 108–109; See
also Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921, London:
Freedom Press (1987); Voline, The Unknown Revolution, Montreal: Black Rose
Books (1990), pp. 541–711. ↩
[35] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, vol. 1, Chicago: Cienfuegos Press (1940), pp. 52–53. ↩
[36] Vladimir Brovokin, The Mensheviks After October:
Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP (1987), p. 199. ↩
[37] Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control,
1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution, pp. 106–107. ↩
[38] Murray Bookchin, Third Revolution, pp. 272–273; Victor
Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1901–1941, New York: Oxford UP (1963), pp.
80–81. ↩
[39] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, pp. 80–81. ↩
[40] Jonathan Aves, Workers Against Lenin: Labour Protest
and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, London: Tauris (1996). See especially chapter
4. ↩
[41] CLR James, “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in
Russia,” part 1 and 2 (1967), in You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal
Lectures of CLR James, pp. 179, 192–193. ↩
[42] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, pp. 132–133; Murray Bookchin, Third Revolution, pp. 286. ↩
[43] See Oliver H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet
Russia, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press (1976). ↩
[44] G.P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist
Counter-Revolution, pp. 71. ↩
[45] See Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Uprising, London:
Solidarity (1967), pp. 37–41; Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921, New York: W.W.
Norton, (1970), especially chapter 5. ↩
[46] Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers,
Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, pp. 250–251. ↩
[47] Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921, pp. 161–162. ↩
[48] CLR James, The Black Jacobins, (1938) New York: Vintage
(1963), pp. 282–286; CLR James, World Revolution, 1917–1936, p. 135. ↩
[49] R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution:
Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, London: Oxford UP (1970), p. 138. This,
and all of the following citations, come from CLR James's personal copy found
in the CLR James Collection in the West Indiana Collection of the Alma Jordan
Library, University of West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. ↩
[50] R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 144.
↩
[51] R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 146.
↩
[52] R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 147.
↩
[53] R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p. 147.
↩
[54] R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, pp.
152–153. ↩
[55] CLR James, “Discussion II,” London (1964), vol. 2,
Unpublished Oral History Transcript. Martin Glaberman Collection. Walter
Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. ↩
[56] CLR James, World Revolution, pp. 118–119. ↩
[57] Ibid., p. 120. ↩
[58] James, in contrast to Nkrumah and Padmore, would often
raise the idea of a constituent assembly, an aspect of direct democracy that he
forced on middle class politicians, in the hope they would have to account for
criticism of the form federation would take. But with statesmen in the lead
such an assembly could be discarded like Lenin discarded the Soviets. ↩
[59] Ibid, p. 122. ↩
[60] Ibid., p. 123. ↩
[61] Ibid., p. 133–135. ↩
[62] CLR James, “Discussion II,” London (1964), vol. 3,
Unpublished Oral History Transcript. Martin Glaberman Collection. Walter
Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. ↩
[63] CLR James, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Vanguard Party, p.
3; CLR James, “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in Russia,” part 1 (1967), in
You Don't Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James, pp.
174–175. ↩
