On 2012-09-25, at 12:18 PM, turbulo at aol.com wrote:
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> Chuck Grimes is reminded by Trotsky's "History", as I was when I read it many years ago, that, contemprary prejudices aside, the October Revolution was history's most radical experiment in direct mass democracy (if a short-lived one). But whatever similarities there may be between then and now, I think we should also be mindful of the differences, especially regarding contemporary Western countries. Here are three differences that seem to me important (though they certainly don't exhaust the list).
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> 1) Russians in 1917 had never lived under an elected government. Its regimes (including the Provisional Government) therefore lacked the popular legitimacy, however bogus, that regular elections confer. The Soviets were the only means of popular political expression.
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> 2) There are in the US today far fewer permanent mass concentrations of the "popular orders". Petrograd had some of the world's biggest factories, and workers and peasants were mobilized in the army and navy during WW One. Such standing bodies tend to demystify the workings of society in the eyes of the masses, and especially reveal the extent to which society depends upon their collective efforts. The fact that people are already organized in large numbers to serve the powerful makes it much easier for them to organize in their own name. Occupy participants, on the other hand, came from a lot of different places, to which many of them had to return in order to make a living or complete their studies. Unemployed or semi-employed people were the only ones who could contemplate camping out in public squares for months at a time. They--not workers or peasants or soldiers--formed the core of Occupy
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> 3) Lenin and Trotsky were, as Chuck says, journalists (among other things). But they did not pursue normal journalistic careers, or normal bourgeois careers of any kind. (As far as I know, Trotsky only worked once for the bourgeois press, when he covered the Balkan Wars). Their activity took place almost exclusively within the socialist movement. It's true that Occupy and related movements have produced some seat-of-the-pants journalists and activists. But the elite of this intelligentsia are journalists and professors who make a sometimes comfortable living in established media and universities. Very few of them will be found trying to win support among workers.
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In addition to the structural factors very incisively identified above, there was also the historical context: the war produced runaway inflation and food shortages which led to mass famine and food riots in the cities and countryside, and mass desertions, mutinies, and the formation of military soviets on the battlefield. Neither the monarchy nor the bourgeoisie could prevent a social collapse, and the refusal to end the war sealed the fate of the Provisional Government. All Power to the Soviets became, you might say, a matter of historical necessity, quite readily understood by the masses in the prevailing misery and chaos. Though grim, the contemporary crisis in the West is not a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary one, where the broad mass of the population has lost all confidence in the ruling class and its parties and are are prepared to take a desperate, hopeful leap into a new society. In this context, Lenin and Trotsky, their exemplary leadership skills notwithstanding, wouldn't be politically much beyond where Occupy and its allied movements on the continent are now.