[YCLSA Discussion] Dual Power, Blade Nzimande. Build it now!

[Dominic Tweedie]

Relevant to debate on local protests. Umsebenzi Online, Volume 6, No. 20, 7 November 2007     Dual power - The living legacy of the Great October Revolution     Blade Nzimande, General Secretary, SACP     November 2007 marks the 90th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Beginning on November 7, 1917, in ten days that famously shook the world, workers and peasants, many of them in the threadbare uniforms of soldiers and sailors, organised by their soviets (organs of local popular power) poured out from their working class neighbourhoods, from their factories, battleships and garrisons, and marched upon the seats of power.   They overthrew the bourgeois state that had been installed in February of that year. That state owed its existence to the popular revolt against the feudal autocracy and the imperialist war. Compromised by its class allegiances, the bourgeois government had been unable to even begin to deliver on the most basic demands of the popular masses. And so, on November 7th 90 years ago, under the banner of “Bread, Land, Peace!”, and shouting the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!”, workers and peasants, for the first time in world history, abolished bourgeois rule and embarked upon a socialist revolution.   It is impossible now in 2007 not to view those events, at least partly, through the lens of the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is also imperative, not least for those of us who are communists, never to forget the epochal crimes committed in the name of “communism”, particularly in the Stalin years – crimes amongst whose victims were numbered many hundreds of thousands of communists. As we commemorate the 90th Anniversary of the October Revolution, we should remember that a revolution can devour its own children. We need to draw the appropriate lessons, so that we, in our turn, are not condemned to repeat history.   But if gross distortions and eventual collapse are part of the story, they are very much only a part – and even that part owes a great deal to external factors, in particular, the unceasing hostility and destabilisation of the Soviet Union by the imperialist powers.   Contrary to the Hollywood version of the Second World War, the epicentre of that war was the Eastern Front. It was on the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow, and street by street, building by building in Stalingrad, that the tide of Nazism was halted, turned and finally routed. 20 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in that war alone. Without the Soviet Union, the second half of the 20th century might have been a half century dominated by a real (and not fictional) axis of evil.   Let us also not forget the pioneering socialist measures introduced in the Soviet Union – an eight-hour working day, free health-care, free education, free crèches for workers’ children. Without the defeat of Nazism in Europe, and without the example of Soviet social achievements that inspired working class movements in the West, it is doubtful the welfare states that flourished in parts of the developed capitalist north after 1945 would ever have existed. Without the counter-balancing global presence of the Soviet bloc, would India have been decolonised, would China and Vietnam have been liberated, would the Cuban revolution have survived its initial years? And without all of these advances, Southern Africa could still be in the grip of white minority regimes.   While acknowledging the huge impact the October Revolution has had on the past century, we need to ask: What are the key lessons we need to derive for the present?   We suggest that there are two key lessons:   One: It is possible (and imperative) to press ahead with socialist-oriented transformation right now in the present.   The pessimists, those who lost their will to struggle with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, those who lost faith or who never had faith in the popular masses to begin with, those who were socialists when it was the flavour of the decade – they all keep telling us that “the global balance of forces is now unfavourable”. Socialism is something to be deferred until capitalism has been “fully developed”.   But when the Bolsheviks in November 1917 led the workers and peasants of Russia, along with dozens of oppressed nationalities, into battle for socialism – they, too, were plied with the same negative sermons. “Russia is too backward”. “Wait for the advanced capitalist countries like Germany to make their socialist revolution”. “Russian capitalism must first modernise”. “Wait for the Russian working class to mature”.   Lenin was portrayed in some “socialist” circles as a voluntarist, an ultra-leftist. But Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood that Russia would always remain backward within the imperialist world system, that the Russian working class and the democratic revolution (not least the national democratic liberation of dozens of oppressed nationalities) would always remain stunted unless a decisive break with a dependent and semi-peripheral capitalism was made. In fact, the impediments to Russia becoming a competitive capitalist power in 1917 were far greater than the (considerable) impediments to making a socialist revolution.   What about the global situation? Let us never forget that when the Russian workers and peasants of November 1917 rose up against bourgeois power, there was no external Soviet bloc to support them. This is not to say that the international balance of forces is irrelevant, but should we understand the construction of socialism as a “competition between two systems”?  Writing in a recent issue of Monthly Review, Claudio Katz (“Socialist Strategies in Latin America”) critiques this position:   “This approach is a remnant of the theory of the ‘socialist camp’ proclaimed by supporters of the old Soviet model. They gambled on defeating the enemy by means of a series of economic successes and geopolitical achievements, forgetting that one cannot defeat capitalism at its own game. Peripheral – or less industrialised – economies in particular can never triumph in a competition with imperialist powers that have controlled the world market for centuries. The success of socialism requires a continuous sequence of processes that undermine global capitalism.”   For a number of reasons, the “two camps” approach had a strong resonance for southern African liberation movements (and the SACP) in the 1960s, 70s and into the 1980s. With the collapse of the “socialist camp”, demoralisation was a likely (if mistaken) outcome. In Latin America in that period, by contrast, many major left movements (all with their own strengths and weaknesses) were less inclined to base their strategies on the existence of an alternative socialist bloc. This is surely one of several reasons why an important (but, of course, complex and uneven) wave of popular, anti-capitalist socialist renewal is now welling up across Latin America, from Mexico through Bolivia to Argentina.   The world of 2007 is not the world of 1917. But like 1917 it is not a world of one-way traffic for the imperialist powers. The world’s “hyper-power”, the United States, despite its massive military superiority, is bogged down in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. Its Middle East military adventures are rejected at home by a growing majority. Its triumphalist 1990s neo-liberal “solutions” are discredited in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and in many parts of Africa and Asia. Structural adjustment programmes have given rise to mass-based social movements, indigenous peoples’ struggles, and electoral defeats for comprador elites across the developing world. In Latin America, in particular, the power of local elites (“national” bourgeoisies) have been hollowed out by trans-nationalisation and privatisation to multi-national corporates. In the face of rising popular mobilisation, the traditional recourse of the Latin American elites to military coups or one or another anti-democratic authoritarianism has been weakened (although it can never be entirely ruled out). It has been weakened by the earlier popular defeat of military regimes whether in Argentina, Chile, Brazil or Uruguay. The new popular mobilisation is frequently democratic and constitutional (see for instance the centrality of the Bolivarian constitution as a mass reference point in Venezuela), and no longer presents itself primarily as a rural or urban guerrilla. The popular, and increasingly anti-capitalist movement in Latin America, contests the class struggle on the terrain of electoral democracy, the constitution, human rights, media and social development, frustrating counter-revolutionary endeavours to locate the struggle back on the terrain of military contest. The Cold War, anti-communist “excuses” for repression have also evaporated.  This is especially the case in Latin America (with some exceptions like Colombia), but equally (although with its own specificities) here in post-1994 South Africa.   What are the key motive forces, or (to use Latin American terminology) what are the key subjects of this contemporary anti-capitalist struggle? This brings us to the second key legacy of 1917.   Two: Dual power re-visited   When Lenin and the Bolsheviks advanced the slogan of all power to the soviets in 1917 they saw in these spontaneously formed local councils of worker power the seeds of an alternative state. The bourgeois state, with its “façade of multi-party, parliamentary democracy” and a “liberal” constitution, was to be replaced by a different state, soviet power. The soviets of 1917, like the soviets that emerged in the 1905 Russian revolution, bore many resemblances to the spontaneous popular structures of the 19th century Paris Commune that Marx and Engels had studied and celebrated as harbingers of a different kind of proletarian state. They were characterised by various forms of direct and participatory democracy. Elected representatives and officials were revocable by popular assemblies and none was paid more than the average wage of a worker.   Between February and October 1917 in Russia a dual power situation increasingly developed – with the bourgeois “liberal” (in practice, not so liberal) parties controlling the Parliament/Duma and the key organs of state, with an alternative centre of power developing in the soviets/councils of workers and soldiers – in working class neighbourhoods, in factories, and barracks. It was these alternative self-organised centres of power, influenced largely (but not entirely) by the Bolsheviks that were a critical locus of power in the October Revolution.    But although the state that emerged from the October revolution came to be described as “soviet”, it increasingly bore less and less resemblance to the spontaneous organs of localised working class power on which it supposedly rested. This was the result of many realities, including the drastic depletion of the seasoned working class cadres in a bitter Civil War and the challenges of a massive industrialisation drive and the administration of a huge country. The “soviet” state became increasingly bureaucratic, hierarchical, centralising, authoritarian, and staffed by a self-reproducing elite of apparatchiks.   Marxists were not wrong to recognise in the organs of popular power that emerged spontaneously in the Paris Commune and in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 a critical revolutionary reality and a key component of any future socialist state. But we tended to see these organs as the totality of socialist state power and as “alternatives” to, and abolishers of, the bourgeois state and “its” associated institutions – a separate standing army, courts, parliament, etc. In practice, in subsequent decades in the Soviet Union, bureaucratic state power displaced participatory and direct democracy.   What is beginning to emerge in, for instance, the Venezuelan revolution, what has always been at least an important residual reality in the Cuban revolution, and what is latently present in our own South African reality is a new conception of dual power. This is “dual power” not as a transitional reality, but as a permanent feature of an anti-capitalist revolution. Here organs of popular power co-exist with, buttress, check and balance other apparatuses of progressive democratic power (an army and police force, the administrative apparatus, a parliament). Organs of popular power need to act as a constant counterweight against the dangers of bureaucratisation, elitism, corruption and corporate capture that constantly beset the state apparatus, including a socialist state apparatus. These tendencies need to be constantly abolished. But localised organs of popular power, practising more direct and participatory forms of democracy, also have limited capacities to run a modern socialist economy, or, in isolation, defend the country against imperialist destabilisation.   The point is not that the one locus of progressive power should abolish the other, but that they should act to complement each other - as was seen, for instance, in the combination of armed forces, popular militias and mass mobilisation in the very rapid defeat of the 2005 imperialist-inspired attempted military coup against the democratically-elected Chavez government.   Here in South Africa, we developed strong “soviet” traditions, organs of popular power, a legacy of self-governance, in the midst of our struggle – particularly in the 1980s. These traditions have not evaporated, but post-1994 we have not really mastered the art of combining democratic state power with organs of popular power.   To take one of countless current examples - faced with the imminent extinction of our abalone (perlemoen) shell-fish stocks, as a result of poaching activities by criminal syndicates with international links, the ANC Minister of Environment and Tourism last week announced a total ban on perlemoen fishing. In the face of popular concern, with the livelihoods of coastal communities threatened, the Minister has backed down for three months. The Minister, of course, has science on his side. Perlemoen, a food source for communities along our coastline, stretching back to the beginnings of modern human civilisation, is about to disappear forever unless poaching is stopped. “And we cannot put a policeman every twenty metres along the shore-line”, the Minister has explained.   That is true enough. But with or without a ban on perlemoen catches, an overstretched police force and a very weak and under-resourced Sea Fisheries Inspectorate is not going stop the elimination of our stocks. Why have we not organised the local fishing communities themselves to form democratic vigilance units, to safe-guard (along with the organs of the state) their own local legacy passed down through many generations?   As we mark this 90th anniversary of the first socialist revolution in world history, let’s honour it - not as a museum exhibit – but as a living legacy that has every relevance for our challenges in the present.     Asikhulume! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to yclsa-eom-forum@googlegroups.com or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. 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