Ruhle's formulation of state-capitalism is more bad than good. While we should without reservation agree that te Soviet Union never transcended capitalist relations, Otto Ruhle and others like Mattick say that the Soviet Union couldn't have been anything other than capitalism. This is of course a retreat back to Menshevism and 2nd International stage-ism, Marxism for amateurs. It completely ignores the class content of the Russian Revolution and most importantly, its international aspect. To say Russia "could only" have been capitalist is to restrict one's sights on a single nation, abstracted from the rest of the world.

First thing we need to do is get a machine up and running to spread the ideas.

Actually that's probably almost all we need to do.

People like you are exactly what we need.

People looking for solutions, willing to commit to a certain extent at least.

You don't have to be alone, trying to work it all out from scratch, we have a lot of answers already and together we'll have a lot more.

Your questions as to the precise means by which we can penetrate the working class, influence those willing to listen, how we 'intervene' (I like the word, some don't) are exactly what we are looking at.

Anyway, back to the beginning, getting the fire started, getting the ball rolling....it all comes down to people like yourself getting involved in our revolutionary organisation, that's the stage we are at, molecular growth, individual by individual. Don't underestimate how important the individual revolutionary is. 1000x more important than revolutionaries when the revolution is up and running. Without today's few, there will not be tomorrow's many.

But be patient, don't get frustrated, what we are looking at is a huge historical task, a dividing line for all time. I think we have a lot of grounds to believe that those alive today will see the revolution, but it could be further off. There are no guarantees, the answer is in each one of us, we can all contribute to accelerating the process. No matter how grim the capitalist reality may be, it still will not collapse into socialism on its own.

And a last comment, the working class of the moment may appear to be conservative, backward, but that is not the point, the point is that reality is a process of change, capitalism constantly forces radical change and today's obese video gamers will be tomorrow's class conscious revolutionary fighters.

Marx himself said the proletariat was revolutionary or nothing. Only at certain moments of history can the capitalist floodgates be breached and the revolution explode from obscurity to everything. Yet that revolutionary explosion is dependent on the patient work of the few who resist the tide and persist with revolutionary work, getting the revolutionary organisation together, defending, spreading, clarifying, developing revolutionary theory.

Point of my post is to eventually get you into our organisation and pooling our efforts into something bigger and more powerful and effective that any of us can create on our own.

I have no simple solutions but I think that you need to find your political 'home'.

The working class is strong through unity.

Otherwise it is nothing but a resource to be used by the capitalist class.

I hope that is with us in the ICT but that will be your decision.

Have you contacted our North American comrades?

I.N. - P.O. Box 746, Lafayette - IN 47902-0746

Maybe you could get to talk to someone in person, reduce the isolation.

Sandman

I don't understand where your last two comments come from. We have not made fun of you on this site (you have replied to us that some of your posts were not to be taken seriously when we did do so and criticised them). No-one has said you are a member of the ICT here although Stevein did express the hope you would consider it (but his post also realises that you are exploring issues for yourself).

The reference to "young American sympathiser" is not on here either but we did refer to your original post reminding us that we had predicted the end of the specualtive bubble in 2006 as such (because we deduced that from your positive (even when critical comments). Since then we would not have said it (since on this thread you say you identify with Gramsci because he was "a councilist". I don't think you realise just how bad Gramsci's position was in 1919-20 (read our introduction to the History of the Communist Party of Italy which is on this site for more details) but that is something for you to think about.

Forthe most part you have posted positively and hope you wil continue to do so.

Do you mean as a member? To join the ICT you join through the local territorial section. In your case that is the IWG who can be reached on us@leftcom.org.

Internationalist Notes is a collective product not a one man band. I don't see how you can say you agree with the ICT enough to ask to join and then disagree with one of its sections (we all disagree about one thing or another but we are talking about a general agreement around the Platform).

I think this must be a case of mistaken identity. No "Gary" in the US exists and we would not have anyone defaming the Kronstadters but that's another complex event of 91 years ago!

Good idea. Good luck.

I think Sandman's comments on Lenin are a bit extreme.

I agree that he/the bolsheviks/1917 had flaws and our attitude isn't just happy celebration and I said as much at the Sheffield meeting, maintaining that acceptance of 1917 as proletarian, without necessarily being an incorrect position, needs not be a condition for adherence to the ICT.

However, I think that Lenin, Trotsky et al are complex subjects and cannot be easily condemned or praised.

However, if sandman wants to be in the ICT, I welcome him, he's thinking about the subjects profoundly and I wish him luck.

No, I don't think sandman is an anti-party anarchist, but I think his assessment of Lenin and others does tend towards a glorification of the spontaneous consciousness of the working class.

We could all call ourselves anarchists, even councilists, the words are sufficently elastic and broad to accommodate us, but I think we of the CWO/ICT have a relatively homogenous and clear view of the need for a revolutionary party, the limits of spontaneous consciousness, the nature of the proletarian dictatorship which does not translate into a separate party power.

No you don't get it. You have to look at the whole thing is a process not as a series of still black and white pictures (As Bordiga famously said history is a movie which is a brilliant way of explaining how the dialectic in history works). We don't leave out anything but examine both the success and the failures, the things that contributed to the revolution and the things that were without doubt part of the counter-revolution. But you don't start with one individual (although Lenin is as intellectually dominant a force as you get in history (the only rival I can think of is Bismarck - and they share the same fate that they both ultimately failed). But Lenin's real force in 1917 is that the working class went along with him and did so willingly. It was the rank and file Bolsheviks (the vast majority of them workers) who accepted the April Theses whilst the old Bolshevik leadership, still mired in social democratic schemas, could not see what was happening on the ground. It was Lenin who was the most internationalist in seeing that the October Revolution was not a solution in itself but depended on an international revolution. And of course this was consistent with his internationalism in being the most vociferous supporter of revolutionary defeatism at the outbreak the First World War (to the derision of the leaders of the Second International who revelled in showing his isolation as the workers of Europe willingly went off to butcher one another). In these things Lenin demonstrated real revolutionary leadership.

But not everything Lenin thought was a break from Social Democracy. Even the State and Revolution which is sometimes seen as his most visionary work (where he does not once mention the Party) has a mechanical view of what communism might be like and at times appears as state capitalist. In fact when the Bolshevik Left Communists in March 1918 pointed out that the revolution was heading towards state capitalism Lenin was not worried because he saw state capitalism as a step towards communism (the position of the orthodox Leninists of Troskyism today). We NOW know (since we have the experience of the Russian Revolution before us) that the opposite is the case and that state capitalism is the decadent form of capitalism helping to preserve it in the face of its own contradictions. This is one reason why we study past revolutiooanry experiences even though we know we live in an entriely different era and the course of revolution will be different.

But this error, plus the other one in November 1917 where the Bolsheviks set up a GOVERNMENT called the Sovnarkom instead of allowing the EC of the Congress of Soviets to rule, were not the CAUSES of the counter-revolution. That was due to the isolation of the revolution to the territory of the Russian Empire. And as the isolation grew worse Lenin took on the role of the leader of a Party which increasingly carried out the tasks which the working class could not in Russia alone. And in due course the Party convinced itself it was the class and that everything else was counter-revolutionary. In the brutal civil war you get Lenin becoming increasingly counter-revolutionary (advocating shooting workers at one point). Ultimately it all ended with Kronstadt, the adoption of NEP, the banning of factions in the once very lively and democratic Bolshevik Party and the adoption of the first steps towards a united front (fully adopted 1922). The failure of the international revolution and the stabilisation of capitalism in the 1920s are the real causes even if specific polices of the Bolsheviks defined the nature of the defeat.

At the end of his life a very ill Lenin realised the failure when he recognised that they had created state machine which was not controlled by either the proletariat or the communists and had acquired a life of its own. But that was about the last thing he wrote.

This is of course all very schematic (I have left out lots of things on both sides of the equation) but I hope you can get the idea of a sense of process that was all going (with a few problems) in the right direction until 1918, then became ambiguous in the civil war (although there was still some life in the soviets into 1920) but then hit the buffers in 1921 and a process of counterrevolutioon was full on until the adoption of "socialism in one country" after the death of Lenin.

RC

As the discussion is only about what to read it has not yet got to the "interesting" stage. If you put "1917" into the search at the top of this site you will get a series of articles which deal with the events of 1917. Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution is at times brilliant but he also has a penchant for metaphysics (the February Revolution was a product of the party schooled by Bolshevism is the one that I recall. It was a bit more dialectical process than that). You should read Rabinowitch's "The Bolsheviks Come to Power" as an antidote. Rabinowitch's sequel on the counter-revolution thirty plus years later is an apologia for Social Democracy and a big disappointment but he is not alone in his conversion after the fall of the USSR (the list is very long and we have written about this elsewhere).