IMHO, Bolsheviki Lost-Causism Is Almost as Unattractive as Confederate Lost-Causism
Kindly General Lee, meet kindly Comrade Vladimir:
If the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly is not your Kronstadt, there is something profoundly wrong with you
"For a certain kind of leftist hipster or wannabe hipster, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet six o'clock on that October afternoon in 1917...
...the cadres are in position across the square from the Winter Palace, the guns are loaded and ready, and the furled banners are already loosened to break out and Lenin himself with his beard and his hat in one hand probably and gesturing with the other looking down the street waiting for Trotsky to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Dzerzhinsky and Stalin and Zinoviev and Antonov-Ovseyenko look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Petrograd, Russia, the world, the fortress towers of the Moscow Kremlin itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago...
And, yes, it is a he. Bolsheviki Lost-Causism is, like Confederacy Lost-Causism, overwhelmingly a gendered activity.
Today, we have:
In the New Republic, David Sessions: The Radical Hopes of the Russian Revolution: "Was the October revolution bound to lead to terror? China Miéville's October and Tariq Ali's The Dilemmas of Lenin reconsider the history.... Lenin was thoroughly committed to the European model of social democracy..."
In Jacobin, Henry Farrell: Revolutionary Possibility: "The moments that [China] Miéville is interested in are the moments at which words stop obeying their masters and people find themselves able to forge their own fate collectively...
...His Marxism is... faithful to unexplored possibilities.... The promise of revolution is inevitably a lie, right up to the moment when the revolutionary transformation occurs, because the person making the promise cannot possibly understand that to which she is committing.... It’s superficially easy... to sneer at these ideas.... Such efforts at radical transformation as we have seen in the last century have largely failed, and often failed in terrible ways. Yet it is also true that we have seen enormous transformation in the past, and have no good warrant to believe that we’ve arrived at the end of transformative history...
It is not just superficially easy to sneer. It is profoundly true to sneer. And it is necessary, if we are not to forget our history, to sneer.
As John Adams said truly, revolutions take place in hearts and minds—and they do so relatively slowly. They do not take place in the storming of the Winter Palace by a cult-like cadre that thinks it is a party of a new type playing a leading role in leading a universal class to its historical destiny.
And nobody was better at sneering at Lenin than was Red Rosa. As wrote at the time http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/index.htm: "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party -- however numerous they may be -- is no freedom at all...
...Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently... because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic....
The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin-Trotsky theory of dictatorship is this: that the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately -- not the case.... What we possess in our program is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look....
The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history... socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force -- against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.
The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress.... The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.... [Lenin] is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror.... It is rule by terror which demoralizes.
When all this is eliminated, what really remains?... Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously -- at bottom, then, a clique affair -- a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense.... Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc....
