Daily Times

Two-and-a-half decades ago, humanity suffered a cataclysmic shock when a society, having the potential of becoming an alternative to the dehumanised yet established world’s ‘reality’, vanished into thin air without a whimper. The largest state of the globe melted without a single shot fired at any living being. This tragedy reminded the oft-repeated lesson that the wheels of history are destined to move forward. The maturity of the productive forces remains the precondition of its movement towards revolutionary change, or else it tends to derail, trampling the workers it continues to move over them. Its liberating force becomes a fetter for its own liberation.

A human being, a product of history, cannot escape from the laws of dialectics. If the realm of freedom cannot be achieved, the journey in the realm of necessity becomes longer, seemingly eternal. The choice confronted by humanity was between socialism and barbarism. Had the USSR attained the first, the latter would never have had the last laugh; a cold, sardonic laugh of ‘free market’, “a sickness which infects the happiness and draws it into its worthless totality” (Horkheimer).

What led to the demise of the USSR? There is not much to discuss this since an ample amount of analyses both from the forces of right and left is already available. By now, they have given up on this affair abandoning it to the dustbin of history, yet time and again it tends to crop up. Is it because some nostalgic followers of this anachronistic system still have some kind of a fantasy about it, or is it that travelling back in time is easy when the ‘lazy poor’(despite a life of toil) were not left to the market forces to die ‘freely’ with hunger and sickness? At least they were not suspects, hence were neither hunted as terrorists nor coerced to become one to face terroristic annihilation.

Russian revolution, an over-jubilant Gramsci says, “is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital”. “In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of bourgeoisie than of the proletariat… the Bolsheviks reject Karl Marx and their explicit actions and conquests bear witness that the canons of historical materialism are not so rigid as might have been and has been thought.” That precisely was the tragedy of Russian revolution. By bypassing the hegemonic rule of the bourgeoisie, it refuted the laws of historical progression. Marx never thought of any socialist revolution devoid of an intermediate stage. For him, the necessity of a revolution was the requirement of the proletariat alone, and without the mechanisation of society, its birth had to remain a mirage.

Nonetheless, the Bolshevik revolution cannot be dismissed simply because Russia was too primitive, albeit this was the primary reason that sealed its fate. The attempt was noble, but the execution was impossible. Russia, an agrarian society, had to undergo what for Marx is the process of ‘primitive accumulation’, a plunder necessary to put industrialisation in place. To achieve this goal, the hideous but historically necessary step was left to Stalin, who used every means at his disposal to annexe the land and squeeze the gulags dry.

Were the acts of Stalin wrong? History does not judge people like this. There are no such parameters, which can lay the basis for defining the human nature as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Human nature is nothing beyond an ensemble of social relations, and “these relations of every society form a whole” (Marx). Individuals especially those who are recognized as leaders are “the manifestations of specific relations of immediate political, organizational, and military forces that they do not create themselves and they fail to convert — if at all they attempt to do so or there is any room in the system — despite their desperate efforts” (Gramsci).

Under the leadership of Lenin, electrification became the buzzword, which only shows that the backwards, agrarian, and war-torn Russia was yet to enter the era of capitalism. Electrification highlighted the preference of Soviet state over Soviet workers. The New Economic Policy was the vivid proof of dependency of revolution on petty bourgeoisie. The farmers did not fight for socialism but for the ownership of their lands, which they ultimately lost under Stalin’s leadership. Any capitalistic move carried out with the tag of socialism neither becomes socialism nor leads to its realisation. Primitive accumulation was such an act. The massacre of the Kronstadt led by Dzerzhinsky and Trotsky was the other. Unlike his successors, Lenin forthrightly told the truth of not having even the bricks to build socialism. Gramsci had to confess that “in Russia, the proletariat revolution had to be imposed rather than proposed.”

The very idea of flaunting the flag of the leadership of an individual too violates the tenets of Marxism. For both Marx and Engels, the socialist society is nothing beyond “the society of free producers” where production is organised by the “free, equal association of producers”. For them, the transition from capitalism to socialism can take any form, but its class basis is non-negotiable. The revolution has to be the direct action of the vanguard, which is none other than the proletariat itself, and Marx had no second thought about it. “[The] greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself.” The “conquest of the political power” can only be the result of political movement of the working class, which as a class opposes the ruling classes … The class organises itself into a party, but this party develops straight out of the “soil of the modern society itself… It is the self- organisation of proletariat” (Marx).

Terms such as Stalinism and Trotskyism are ambiguous which falsely reflect the miraculous powers of the individual over the objective conditions and the proletariat itself. The idea of class consciousness “from without” is equally hazy. It merely shows the lack of capacity of the proletariat to organise and lead itself. While rejecting this idea out-rightly, Rosa Luxemburg states: “No coarser insult, no baser defamation, can be thrown against the workers than the remark that ‘theoretical controversies are only for intellectuals’… Nothing will more surely enslave a young labour movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilise the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee”. However, in the case of the immaturity of the working class in attaining class consciousness, its leadership can strive to endow it with the required maturity, but such a maturity remains theoretical and would never be translated into action. The possibility of the revolution remains a mirage.

Without the initiative and control by the productive forces, nationalisation of means of production is not socialisation but only an instrument of control for those who control these means in the name of a ‘class’. Any society suffering from the maladies of objectified labour and wage slavery (where labour time is the measure of its wealth) is antagonistic to the Marxist truth. In the Soviet Union, these comprehended contradictions existed with the possibility of being resolved by the proletariat, but it was not to be.

Today, the proletariat stands where Marx stood in 1848, but with an advantage of seventy years of experience of attempted liberations behind it. Is it conscious enough to lead the revolution from here onward?

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com