From the neo-Trotskyist journal. http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/Decept.html
Also note this footnote (cf. A.J. Polan on Lenin's State and Revolution)
(Tony) Cliff (aka Gluckstein) overlooks the fact that on the practical level State and Revolution does not go beyond generalities, and ones which were to prove extremely difficult to adhere to in the harsh realities of Russia in 1917. Paul LeBlanc similarly overlooks the abstract nature of Lenin’s book (P LeBlanc, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, New Jersey, 1990, pp393-4). Marcel Liebman, however, says that State and Revolution ‘shows glaring weaknesses where one of the most important and most difficult problems is concerned, namely, that of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (M Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, London, 1980, p193). Did the Bolsheviks Seize Power by Deception?
Did the Bolsheviks Seize Power by Deception? By Paul Flewers
The contrast between the promises and the end result of Bolshevism has often led its critics to claim that the Bolsheviks seized power by deception. By and large, these observers fall into two schools of thought. One school is largely comprised of an unlikely combination of conservative historians and libertarian left wingers, whose ideas on this subject coincide to a surprising degree, whatever their profound disagreements on other matters. They view the Bolsheviks as conscious deceivers, as power- hungry intellectual zealots posing as the friends of the oppressed, taking advantage of social problems and the discontent of the masses, in order to seize power and impose their authoritarian rule, irrespective of their lack of support amongst the population as a whole.
The other school of thought also combines different political outlooks within a common conceptual framework on this particular issue. This school sees the basis of Bolshevik practice in a combination of a problematic political theory and a highly over-optimistic estimation of the national and international situation. In short, the Bolsheviks were fooling themselves, and were victims of their own illusions, although it must be emphasised that with some adherents to this school, the charge of deception is implicit rather than stated.1
I. Bolshevism as Manipulation
The conservative and libertarian critics of Bolshevism consider that the Bolsheviks manipulated their way into positions of leadership within the Russian working class. A leading exponent of the conservative school, John Keep, says that the workers’ militias and the factory councils were established by workers in order to protect their neighbourhoods from unsocial elements, and to defend their jobs and wages, but they were infiltrated by Bolsheviks, who used them as weapons ‘of a single political party which made no secret of its intention to seize state power by insurrectionary means’:
‘Many ordinary red guardsmen, and also members of the factory committees, will scarcely have been able to comprehend the import of this transformation. Driven to near despair by the economic crisis, their nerves kept on edge by incessant propaganda, they responded uncritically to the appeals of a party that promised untold blessings once "soviet power" had been achieved.’2
Keep says that intellectuals played a predominant role within the Bolshevik party due to ‘their natural self-assertiveness, nourished by the traditions of clandestine struggle, [which] encouraged these men to take advantage of their commanding position’, and this enabled them to form a new elite after the October Revolution.3
For the Russian anarchist Peter Arshinov, the October Revolution represented the accession to power of the intellectuals, the ‘socialist democracy’, of whom the Bolsheviks were merely the most artful. Comprising ‘a well-defined socio-economic group’, the intellectuals promoted a statist system as ‘the ideology of the new ruling caste’, and the Soviet system was ‘nothing other than the construction of a new class domination over the producers, the establishment of a new socialist power over them’, the plans for which having been ‘elaborated and prepared during several decades by the leaders of the socialist democracy’.4
The Bolsheviks promised that this revolution would lead directly ‘to the free realm of socialism and communism’, which seemed plausible to the masses, who were ‘inexperienced in politics’:
‘The participation of the Communist Party [sic] in the destruction of the capitalist regime gave rise to enormous confidence in it. The stratum of intellectual workers who were the carriers of the ideals of the democracy was always so thin and sparse that the masses knew nothing of its existence as a specific economic category. Consequently, at the moment of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the masses saw no one other than themselves who might replace the bourgeoisie. And it was precisely at this moment that the bourgeoisie was in fact replaced by these accidental leaders, the deceitful Bolsheviks, experienced in political demagogy...
‘Thanks to its revolutionary energy and its demagogic confusion of the revolutionary idea of the workers with its own idea of political domination, Bolshevism drew the masses to itself, and made extensive use of their confidence.’5
The Bolsheviks keyed into the sentiments and demands of the popular masses, in order to impose upon them a new form of exploitative society, and used the political inexperience of the masses for their own ends. The Bolsheviks, therefore, hijacked the Russian Revolution in order to become a new ruling elite. <SNIP> http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/Decept.html
-- Michael Pugliese