A quick reply to Dan and Louis's comradely replies.
Dan makes a good point:
>Might I suggest that this whole top-down/bottom-up thing is a false dichotomy?
>Any successful revolutionary movement, of which the Bolsheviks were certainly
>one, is necessarily both. It has to have a mutually-reinforcing leadership
>and a rank-and-file, direction and mass enthusiasm.
Absolutely. I should have been more specific. The structure of a large social organisation, should be one (for proven reasons, not just 'normative' ones) with inbuilt mechanisms for dynamism, breadth and variety at the 'top'. Those are the institutions that handle variation over time and space, that address the variability of humanity and, not least, meet the basic requisites of a socialist society. Without delving excessively into historical esoterica (in which sphere Louis is the man to go to, anyway) and without extensively repeating stuff Doug and Charles have already heard from me elsewhere, I reckon Lenin's April Theses had a serious flaw, ie. the centralisation of political (coercive and otherwise) and economic power into very few and untried hands. Lenin himself took care of as much dynamism and flexibility as one man could, but it was a system of organisation he was building, an autonomous aparat that would have wide impacts outside his will and beyond his time. One that was still there when he had his stroke, and, or so I reckon, one that is still having wide impacts now.
So when Louis says:
'What do you mean by top-down utopian adventurism? The Russian Revolution? This is such a distortion of historical reality that I must recommend that you read a little about the events before coming up with such a distortion. Really, Rob, you have the most perverse determination to distort what Lenin stood for. In reality, Lenin was trying nothing else except to create a Social Democratic party in Russia, where none existed. There was nothing "utopian" about this. His party was not "top-down" either. Historians agree that the Mensheviks were far more "top-down" than the Bolsheviks. When the Russian people overthrew the Czar, they had expectations that the Kerensky regime would pull Russia out of the imperialist war and distribute land to the farmers. When he refused to do this, Socialists had no other choice except to fight for the goals of the February Revolution. The November Revolution was nothing more than the expression of the Russian people to secure the benefits they deserved when the Czar was overthrown.'
I'm inclined to answer (a) I'm not really going on about what Lenin stood for - I haven't found anybody else in Russia in 1917 who stood for anything much at all - rather what he, in his trying circumstances, effectively did; (b) that April was a turning point at which the bolshie structure assumed an autonomous elite with totalitarian discretion; (c) that the road of 'uninterrupted revolution', as explicated by Lenin himself, depended on a mass consciousness that did not yet exist (as Lenin himself would shortly have to remind the left-commies); and (d) somebody did have to do something after the disappointments of 1917, and Lenin was the only game in town - the fact that there would be no costless way out of the war by then wasn't his fault - but even there, I'd love to ask him why he persisted with his 'revolutionary defeatismism' after the greater part of the German left decided to back the war.
Lenin was stuck in a bad place at a bad time - my reservations are not to do with his personal make-up - but I reckon we'd do well to learn from the story of Lenin that (a) where there's a will there's a way, and (b) planting the seeds of bureaucratic centralism is not the way to approach any future. It can never compensate for 'a mutually-reinforcing leadership and rank-and-file'.
That way will inevitably be signposted by Kronstadts, and will ultimately take you to (not necessarily socialist) revolutionary pressures anew. I apologise for my smug 20/20 hindsight here, but it's all I've got.
Cheers, Rob.