The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.
The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.
Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
I think it’s reductive to claim soviet administrators formed a cohesive and distinct class, without justifying this. They gained their incomes from wages, and alongside the rest of the working classes were interested in continued collectivization of production and distribution. The problem wasn’t “Stalinism,” but instead the reforms under Khrushchev that facilitated the growth of a private economy that was not acknowledged by the state the way it is in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, which led to the growth of bourgeois classes after Stalin.
The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.
The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.
Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
I think it’s reductive to claim soviet administrators formed a cohesive and distinct class, without justifying this. They gained their incomes from wages, and alongside the rest of the working classes were interested in continued collectivization of production and distribution. The problem wasn’t “Stalinism,” but instead the reforms under Khrushchev that facilitated the growth of a private economy that was not acknowledged by the state the way it is in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, which led to the growth of bourgeois classes after Stalin.