Errors of “War Communism” here ♦ ICWP Misjudged “War Communism”here ♦
Errors of “War Communism” and Worse Errors of “Third Revolution”
Part V described how the Bolsheviks tried to cope with massive famine in Russia in 1918. They misleadingly called their policy “war communism.”
“War communism” centered on a state grain monopoly. Farm surpluses were requisitioned from peasants and rationed for urbanites. The “communist” aspect was replacing markets with state-managed distribution. Money became almost worthless, except in illegal “black markets.”
But the Bolshevik party was committed to Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program (published 1891). First, Marx said that in communism’s “lower phase,” people would receive goods according to their work. Only the “higher phase” would function “from each according to ability, to each according to needs.”
Lenin saw war communism as the “lower phase.” But how would state distribution allocate food according to work? It didn’t.
Second, in Gotha Program Marx emphasizes the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This was to be the transition between capitalism and communism. Lenin, too, emphasized this in his May 1918 letter to Petrograd workers. He called on the party’s strongest base to form “iron detachments” for this “communist task.”
By 1921, capitalists had violently suppressed proletarian revolutions in Germany and elsewhere. Soviet leaders could no longer expect support from western Europe. Their situation was critical. They had to face it alone.
Many desperate ex-soldiers had turned to banditry. Former industrial workers were largely de-proletarianized. Factories closed. Cities shrank as hungry workers left for the villages. Crops failed in 1920. Industrial production was only a fifth of pre-war levels.
The Civil War ended with the defeat of Wrangel’s counterrevolutionary army in November 1920. But resolving that contradiction sharpened new ones.
Many peasants had sided with Reds against Wrangel’s Whites. Now they lost their main reason for supporting the Bolsheviks. Over 118 peasant rebellions broke out across the Soviet Union.
Lenin admitted in 1921 that the Bolsheviks had made “mistakes in every field of work.” Their single-minded focus was “everything for victory on the Civil War front, and nothing else.”
This, Lenin said, “determined a whole series of mistakes and intensified the crisis.” These included a mistaken analysis of class forces. And time wasted on inner-party debates over “syndicalist and semi-anarchist deviations.”
Lenin saw the main task as strengthening the Bolshevik Party to “operate the dictatorship of the proletariat.” It had become a mass party with half a million members. But a “struggle against the evils of bureaucracy” had become “indispensable.”
Other Bolsheviks, however, feared a party dictatorship over the masses. Anarchists saw an opening for the “third revolution” they’d advocated since 1917.
1921: Anarchists Attempt “Third Revolution”
Anarchists launched that “third revolution” in late 1920. The key leader was the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno (1888-1934). An anarcho-communist since 1905, Makhno was a political prisoner from 1909-1917. Freed by the revolution, he organized peasants and workers in his hometown into anarchist unions.
These took control of local government. They froze out political parties. They organized armed peasant detachments against the landlords, bourgeoisie, and kulaks.
They seized land from landlords and redistributed it among peasants. They transformed large estates into agrarian communes. With other anarchists, they conducted political work among the peasants.
Between 1918 and 1920, Makhnovists repeatedly formed tactical alliances with the Red Army. And then broke them.
They were key to defeating Austro-German and White troops in Ukraine. But with Wrangel’s defeat, the contradiction between anarchists and communists sharpened.
In February 1921, a former Bolshevik military commander, Maslakov, joined Makhnovists to fight the Bolshevik government. Some other former Red Army commanders did too. They may have thought they were fighting for “communism without commissars.” But that’s not what happened.
Instead, desperate to take down the Bolsheviks, anarchist leaders aligned themselves with capitalist forces. These included White emigrees, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and others. They openly hoped to turn the clock back to the bourgeois revolution of February 1917.
The next article in this series will explore this.
ICWP Misjudged Soviet “War Communism”
In the past, our party did not correctly analyze the Soviet “war communism” period. Our manifesto “Mobilize the Masses for Communism,” published fifteen years ago, said this:
During the civil war, the Bolsheviks organized society under what they called “war communism,” on an emergency basis. They requisitioned food, jump-started production, and bypassed currency that inflation had made useless. As an emergency measure, they eliminated money, but they didn’t think that the masses were ready to do this long term.
This is true. However, we mistakenly suggested that this “war communism” showed how we “expect and plan to build our new communist world on the rubble and ashes of the old.” We identified the Bolsheviks’ mistake as thinking of it only as an emergency measure. (Red Flag, 2022)
We said that “we are learning the lessons of War Communism during the Russian Revolution.” (Red Flag, 2017) However, we did not draw the correct lessons. This series attempts to do better. But more study and discussion is needed. Especially of what “war communism” meant in the factories.
Self-critically, we have not fought hard enough to deepen and broaden our individual and collective understanding. We need more dialectical-materialist study of communism and its history.
We must fight to end the division of labor within our party. To develop more curiosity, critical thinking, and writing skills among all members and friends.
Read previous articles in this series here