EXCERPT

Introduction to Bukharin's Anarchy and Scientific Communism

The following translation comes from Kommunist #2 and was written in March/April 1918. There are two existing versions on marxists.org and libcom.org but looking at the original we realised that these are incomplete. They both appear to have been translated from an Italian version which was put out as a twelve page pamphlet by the Communist Party of Italy in the early 1920s. It seems that some of the more difficult Italian passages were avoided in that translation. [1] As previously, our translation is taken from La Revue Kommuniste (Smolny Press) which was based on the Russian original.

The article is itself a polemic and thus suffers all the weaknesses of that form of argument. In fact it is possible that this rather labored piece against the anarchists is as much motivated by Bukharin’s desire to distance himself from them since they, together with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, had shared the left communist critique of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. [2]

Nevertheless, the document is interesting in itself as it reflects a turning point, not only in the Russian Revolution, but also in the thinking of Bukharin himself. This introduction puts those issues into historical context.

In the first paragraph of the article Bukharin hints at the “liquidation” of certain Muscovite groups. In the third part he expands on this.

We have CONSCIOUSLY made a point not to criticize anarchists as criminals, bandits … But … we can understand why it is mainly anarchist groups that degrade themselves by carrying out their “expropriation”, why the underworld “creeps in” among anarchists. Everywhere and always there are elements that use the revolution for their own personal benefit.

What is this all about? During 1917 many anarchists had worked alongside Bolsheviks in the struggle to establish soviet power. Indeed many anarchists regarded Lenin’s April Theses as his adoption of key anarchist ideas. [3] In June 1917, when the Provisional Government tried to shut down the anarchist communal base in the Durnovo Villa in Petrograd, Bolshevik workers from the nearby Vyborg Side were amongst those who came to their assistance. Alongside the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who actually joined the Bolsheviks in government from December 1917 to June 1918, the majority of anarchists formed the minor party in an uneasy and undeclared coalition to fight for soviet power.

Many anarchists thus supported the October Revolution even though they were deeply critical of the fact that the Provisional Government was replaced, not by the Executive Committee elected by the Second All-Russian Soviet Congress, but by a new Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom). Sovnarkom was nominally responsible to the Soviet Executive but, in practice, the latter had less and less control of affairs as time went on. Various anarchists recalled that Bakunin and Kropotkin had warned that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would really be a dictatorship of the Social Democratic Party and the Bolsheviks were only the most radical version of Social Democracy.

They might have been re-assured had they read Lenin’s State and Revolution in which he talked of a “semi-state” that would only exist until the capitalist class was overcome. However, as that would not be published until the middle of 1918, by which time soviet reality was already beginning to contrast with Lenin’s theory, they could only judge by events.

Up until March 1918 the worst fears of the anarchists were not realised. The revolution was undergoing what one Left Communist of the time called its “heroic period”. Not only did the number of Soviets increase but a whole raft of social and economic changes were implemented. The Bolsheviks, by virtue of their massive support in the working class, may have stood at the apex of the system but the revolution had plenty of life of its own with communes, cooperative and committees being formed ad hoc to deal with all the social issues confronting the working class. [4] The Bolsheviks had led the overthrow of the Provisional Government as the first step in what they hoped would be a world revolution. They had no master plan for how the working class would change society inside Russia. [5] At this point Lenin could be seen as the leader of the left inside the Bolshevik Party. He constantly encouraged worker initiative.

Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers’ control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain… Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves. [6]

Whilst addressing the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 (a few days after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly) he stated,

Anarchist ideas now assume living forms in this epoch of the radical demolition of bourgeois society. However it is still necessary, first of all, in order to overthrow bourgeois society, to establish the strong revolutionary power of the toiling classes, the power of the revolutionary State ... The new tendencies of anarchism are definitely on the side of the Soviets. [7]

So what is behind Bukharin’s polemic? As a careful study of the article shows, it was written at a time of acute tension between some in the anarchist camp and the Bolshevik Party. We have to remember that Kommunist was the brainchild of the Moscow Bolsheviks and it was there that the Cheka had just engaged in a gun battle with the Moscow anarchists on account of the “expropriations” that the latter had been carrying out since the October Revolution.

A historian of anarchism, Paul Avrich, fills in the background:

During the spring of 1918, local anarchist groups began to form armed detachments of Black Guards which sometimes carried out “expropriations”, that is, held up banks, shops and private homes. Most of their comrades – especially the ‘Soviet Anarchists’ – condemned such acts as parodies of the libertarian ideal, which wasted precious lives, demoralized the movement’s true adherents and discredited anarchism in the eyes of the general public.

After the bitter opposition of the anarchists to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, their formation of armed guards and occasional underworld excursions led the Bolsheviks to act against them. On the night of 11-12 April 1918, the Cheka raided twenty-six anarchist centres in Moscow, killing or wounding some forty anarchists and taking more than five hundred prisoners. [8]

The presence of a criminal element, who were simply engaging in self-aggrandisement under the cover of anarchism, obviously played into the hands of the Cheka. The raids on anarchist premises could clearly be justified as mere police actions although, since the anarchists were also well armed (their arms included machine guns), over 50 died in the fighting (about 40 of them anarchists). Despite the bloodshed, many of the 500 arrested who could demonstrate they really were “political” anarchists, were released, and only the criminal elements detained. After this episode anarchist publications were still allowed to appear but were increasingly harassed and even “soviet anarchists” (those who accepted soviet power and worked within the soviets to turn them to anarchist ideas) like Iuda Roshchin, were sometimes arrested. The response to the April events came first as denunciations in the anarchist press that:

We have reached the limit! The Bolsheviks have lost their senses. They have betrayed the proletariat and attacked the anarchists. They have joined the Black Hundred generals and the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. They have declared war on revolutionary anarchism. [9]

This was followed by more violence on the anarchist side. Avrich again tells us

The campaign of terrorism continued for many months, reaching a climax in September 1919 when a group of “underground anarchists”, in league with the Left SRs, bombed the Moscow headquarters of the Communist Party, killing or wounding sixty-seven people. This only led to greater repression… [10]

Despite all this, despite the actions of the Cheka in April 1918, many anarchists carried on fighting for the soviet system (as Bukharin recognises but only in a back-handed way as evidence of their “inconsistency”!) and fought bravely for it in the civil war. Others did not. Many later gathered around Nestor Makhno’s army in the Ukraine. The latter often fought alongside the Reds but when victory over the Whites was secured in 1920 the Bolsheviks (as Makhno had anticipated) turned on their erstwhile ally and drove him into exile. This was not simply an error. It demonstrated just how far the revolution and the Bolshevik Party had degenerated during the civil war.

Bukharin’s powerful polemic on the class basis of the individualist anarchists and their criminal cohorts is well made. However, his marking of all anarchists with the same label was reminiscent of his own complaint at the beginning of the article that anarchists accuse all Marxists of being statists on the basis of what various Social Democrats have done to “radically disfigure” Marx’s ideas. As Avrich tells us, there were many different kinds of anarchist in Russia in 1917-21. He identifies three broad groups, the anarcho-syndicalists, the anarcho-communists and the individualistic anarchists who looked to the theories of Max Stirner (we’ll leave aside the Christian-pacifist followers of Tolstoy). It was the individualist anarchists who were most susceptible to infiltration by criminal and lumpen elements and it is really these who Bukharin is largely inveighing against at the beginning of the article and in section 3.

Bukharin’s indignation against those Social Democrats who deformed Marx is also understandable. It was people like himself (such as Anton Pannekoek in a polemic against Kautsky) [11] who had first raised the issue of what the Marxist theory of the state was, both before and during the First World War. Indeed in his Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State he had already written (but in much more scientific and vastly superior form) the main outline of the polemic we have translated here.

Thus, the society of the future is a society without a state organization. Despite what many people say, the difference between Marxists and anarchists is not that the Marxists are statists whereas the anarchists are anti-statists. The real difference in views of the future structure is that the socialists see a social economy resulting from the tendencies of concentration and centralization, the inevitable companions of development of the productive forces, whereas the economic utopia of the decentralist-anarchists carries us back to pre-capitalist forms. The socialists expect the economy to become centralized and technologically perfected; the anarchists would make any economic progress whatever impossible. The form of state power is retained only in the transitional moment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a form of class domination in which the ruling class is the proletariat. With the disappearance of the proletarian dictatorship, the final form of the state’s existence disappears as well. [12]

He wrote this in 1916 but Lenin (who was then still in the process of escaping from the Kautsky version of Marxism) refused to publish it as he regarded the treatment of the state as “decidedly incorrect”. [13] However he was soon doing his own research into the question of the state and making notes for what would become The State and Revolution. When Bukharin arrived back in Russia in May 1917 Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, greeted him with the words “V.I. asked me to tell you that he no longer disagrees with you on the question of the state”. [14] In fact Lenin went further in The State and Revolution to talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a “semi-state” or “not a state in the true sense of the word”.

However, taking back on board Marx’s recognition of the need for the state to “wither away” still leaves us with the issue of how to organise production in the new society. This Bukharin identifies as the real distinction between “anarchy” and “scientific communism”. His intentions here are good. He wants to reduce “necessary working time” and thus in the conditions of 1918 he argues that “large scale organized and planned production” is necessary. He sees the alternative to “centralization” as a reactionary desire to return to a pre-capitalist, petty bourgeois form of production which could not satisfy the needs of the whole of society. However, he does not spell out what “centralization” of production means. Looked at from the standpoint of today it has a Fordist ring to it – which stands in sharp contrast to the writings of other Left Communists in Kommunist, like Ossinsky who defended workers’ initiative against one-man management and the reintroduction of specialists. [15]

When you add to this Bukharin’s stress on the need for “a workers’ state” (in this article he never once equates the dictatorship of the proletariat specifically with the soviets) we can see that we have arrived at a critical point in both Bukharin’s political thinking and in the revolution itself. The motivation behind this change of thinking is divulged in the document.

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ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2020