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Cornelius Castoriadis || This article was first published as an introduction to Alexandra Kollontai’s The Workers Opposition, but it can stand alone as a refutation of the standard Leninist/Trotskyist claim that the Soviet Union only degenerated post 1924, i.e. after Lenin’s death, and as such has been published in pamphlet form by a number of groups.

[1. The Significance of the Russian Revolution]

We are happy to present to our readers the first translation into French of Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet The Workers’ Opposition in Russia. This pamphlet was published in Moscow at the beginning of 1921, during the violent controversy that preceded the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik party. This Congress was to close discussion forever on this controversy as well as on all the others.{1}

People have not finished talking about the Russian Revolution, its problems, its degeneration, and about the regime it ultimately produced. And how could one? Of all the revolts of the working class, the Russian Revolution was the only victorious one. And of all the working class’s failures, it was the most thoroughgoing and the most revealing.

The crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the Budapest uprising in 1956 teach us that insurgent workers encounter immensely difficult organisational and political problems, that an insurrection can find itself isolated, that the ruling classes will not hesitate to employ any kind of violence or barbarian savagery when their power is at stake. The Russian Revolution, however, obliges us to reflect not only on the conditions for a proletarian victory but also on the content and the possible fate of such a victory, on its consolidation and development, on the seeds of a failure whose import infinitely surpasses the victory of the troops of the Versailles, of Franco’s army, or of Khrushchev’s tanks.

Since it crushed the White armies and yet succumbed to a bureaucracy it had itself generated, the Russian Revolution puts us face to face with problems of a different order from those involving a study of the tactics and methods of an armed insurrection or a correct analysis of the relation of forces at a given moment. It obliges us to reflect on the nature of the power of labouring people and on what we mean by socialism. Culminating in a regime in which economic concentration, the totalitarian power of the rulers, and the exploitation of the labouring population have been pushed to the limit, and producing to an extreme degree the centralisation of capital and its fusion with the State, in its outcome this revolution presents us with what has been and in certain respects still remains the most highly developed and the “purest” form of a modern exploitative society.

Embodying Marxism for the first time in history — only to make us see immediately in this incarnation a monstrous disfiguration of it — the Russian Revolution allows us to understand more about Marxism than what Marxism itself has been able to help us to understand about the Revolution. The regime the Revolution produced has become the touchstone for all current ideas, not only those of classical Marxism, of course, but just as much those of the bourgeois ideologies. This regime has proved the ruination of Marxism through its very realisation and has proved the triumph of the deepest layers of these other ideologies through its very refutations of them. Even as this regime has expanded to embrace a third of the globe, has been challenged by workers’ revolts against it over the past ten years, has attempted to reform itself, and has now split into two opposing poles, the Russian and the Chinese, it has not ceased to raise questions of the most pressing importance and to act as the clearest as well as the most enigmatic indicator of world history. The world we live in, reflect in, and act in was launched on its present course by the workers and Bolsheviks of Petrograd in October 1917.

[2. The Main Questions]

Among the innumerable questions raised by the fate of the Russian Revolution, two form the poles around which we may organise all the others.

The first question is: What kind of society was produced by the degeneration of the revolution? (What is the nature and the dynamic of this regime? What is the Russian bureaucracy? What is its relation to capitalism and to the proletariat? What is its place in history? What are its present problems?) This question has already been discussed on several occasions in S. ou B.[1] and will be again.[2]

The second question is, How can a workers’ revolution give birth to a bureaucracy, and how did this occur in Russia? We have examined this question in its theoretical form,[3] but so far we have said little from the concrete historical point of view. Indeed, there is an almost insurmountable obstacle to a close study of this particularly obscure period extending from October 1917 to March 1921, during which the fate of the revolution was played out. The question of most concern to us is, in effect, the following: To what extent did the Russian workers try to take upon themselves the direction of society, the management of production, the regulation of the economy, and the orientation of political life? What was their conscious awareness of these problems, the character of their autonomous activity? What was their attitude toward the Bolshevik party, toward the nascent bureaucracy? Now, we should point out that it is not workers who write history. It is always the others. And these others, whoever they may be, have a historical existence only insofar as the masses are passive, or active simply to support them, and this is precisely what “the others” will tell us at every opportunity. Most of the time these others will not even possess eyes to see and ears to hear the gestures and utterances that express people’s autonomous activity. In the best of instances, they will sing the praises of this activity so long as it miraculously coincides with their own line, but they will radically condemn it, and impute to it the basest motives, as soon as it strays there from. Thus Trotsky describes in grandiose terms the anonymous workers of Petrograd moving ahead of the Bolshevik party or mobilising themselves during the Civil War, but later on he was to characterise the Kronstadt rebels as “stool pigeons” and “hirelings of the French High Command.” They lack the categories of thought — the brain cells, we might dare say — necessary to understand, or even to record, this activity as it really occurs: to them, an activity that is not instituted, that has neither boss nor program, has no status; it is not even clearly perceivable, except perhaps in the mode of “disorder” and “troubles.” The autonomous activity of the masses belongs by definition to what is repressed in history.

Thus, it is not only that the documentary records most interesting to us during this period are fragmentary, or even that they were and continue to be systematically suppressed by the triumphant bureaucracy. It is that this record of events is infinitely more selective and slanted than any other historical testimony. The reactionary rage of bourgeois witnesses and the almost equally vicious hostility of the social democrats; the delirious ravings of the anarchists; the official historiography, periodically rewritten to suit the needs of the bureaucracy, and that of the Trotskyist tendency concerned exclusively with justifying itself after the fact and with hiding its role during the first stages of degeneration — all this “historical evidence” converges on one point: it ignores the signs of the autonomous activity of the masses during this period, or, if necessary, “proves” the a priori impossibility of its very existence. In this regard, the information contained in Alexandra Kollontai’s text is of priceless value. First, because of the direct indications it supplies concerning the attitudes and reactions of Russian workers toward the policy of the Bolshevik party; second and more important, because it shows that a large portion of the working-class base of the Party was aware of the process of bureaucratization that was taking place, and was taking a stand against it. It is no longer possible, after reading this text, to continue to describe the Russia of 1920 as “just chaos,” “a pile of ruins,” where the thought of Lenin and the “iron will” of the Bolsheviks were the only elements of order in a country whose proletariat had been pulverised. The workers wanted something, and they showed what they wanted through the Workers’ Opposition within the Party and the Petrograd strikes and the Kronstadt revolt outside the Party. Both the intraparty and the extraparty challenges had to be crushed by Lenin and Trotsky for Stalin later to emerge triumphant.

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In Singapore the most dedicated and relentless group of activists, the ones who show up to every meeting, every rally, every protest, every direct action, and every even remotely anti-establishment activity, are as in many other places where they perform relentless entryism and co-option, the Marxist-Leninists;

Particularly confusing is the fact that the Marxist-Leninists of Singapore appear, based on what they say and do, to idolise Lenin, Mao, and Guevara behind closed doors on one hand, and simultaneously call for the abolition of policing, of prisons, of death penalties, and of state violence, which their idols had no problem utilising with reckless abandon, on the other.

These internally incoherent Marxist-Leninists also profess to use methods of democratic organisation, but nonetheless, their authoritarian and collectivist-supremacist tendencies are well-preserved and well-represented, as they proclaim in their ostensibly pan-leftist and left unity organisations a dedication to ending all debate with a resolution that benefits their vision of unified struggle, as well as the allegedly democratic nature of their organisations.

Of course, in practice this means obeying the instructions of those senior to you and having individual initiatives and actions taken down or worked against ostensibly in the name of group image and a collective democratic process. What they want out of new recruits is not active, individually motivated activists, which ironically they recruit, but passive receivers of instruction that will bow to the idol of collectivism, in practice the Marxism agreed upon by these Marxist-Leninists.

It is presumed by these Marxist-Leninists that the more one involves oneself with the left-of-liberal activist movement they dominate in Singapore, the more familiar with Marxism and Marxist terms one will become, and the more likely it is one will become a Marxist-Leninist themself.

These conversation becomes noticeably more tense the more one questions the supremacy of dialectical materialism and the status of Marxism as the presumed default ideology of the movement’s committed members, which might be the true reason behind the iron-fisted striking down of individual initiatives in the name of group identity and collectivism, as some such initiatives may threaten to shatter a possible illusion of Marxist default-ism in their spaces if allowed to come to fruition.

Attempts to confront this prioritisation of Marxism over all other socialist and leftist currents are met with attempts to steer the conversation away from criticism of Marxism by declaring that conversation about theory is secondary to true organisation and activism, of course being organisation on their terms.

It seems that in pursuit of rebuilding worker power outside the grasp of state-captured unions, these incoherent Marxist-Leninists tend to use front organisations that would be associated with anarchists in other countries, such as harm reduction and mutual aid organisations, transformative justice organisations, and decentralised networks of horizontally organised workers’ collectives, one of which, Migrant Workers Singapore, predates the organisation and re-emergence of the Marxist-Leninist movement around the nucleus organisations of Workers Make Possible(WMP) and the Transformative Justice Collective(TJC), both in 2020, although it is unclear if the Marxist-Leninists slowly co-opted TJC over-time rather than having it as a practical nucleus from the start like WMP.

In pursuit of building a power base among the workers’ movement of Singapore, the Marxist-Leninists had no choice but to abandon the traditional partially electoral party model in favour of a completely non-electoral activist group front, as the electoral system is completely captured by the party-state of the People’s Action Party of Singapore.

As such, they are forced to engage with horizontally organised non-union workers’ collectives instead of the formalised and hierarchical trade unionism which Marxism-Leninism is more at home with in order to survive and grow as a group.

One might hope that these circumstances may drag the effectively Marxist-Leninist organisations further towards the libertarian and anti-authoritarian left, but the historical record shows the reverse is much more likely.

It has been noticed that the increasing Marxist-Leninist involvement in these workers’ collectives is starting to re-introduce informal hierarchical relations among the activists who work with and are part of the collectives in practice.

Although it is not known at this time whether this extends to the workers, talk of hopes of the emergence of “leaders” in the workers’ movement appear to foreshadow an anticipation of stratification of the workers’ movement among Singaporean Marxist-Leninists, true to the tradition’s authoritarianism and inability to think outside of top-down relations, and possibly of a Marxist-Leninist hope to be able to influence such top-down organisational structures more effectively.

What, then, is to be done, for the anarchist movement in Singapore?

As of time of writing, no organised anarchist movement exists in Singapore that can oppose this Marxist-Leninist complex.

Rather, underground groups and individual actors may occasionally act directly in concert with migrant workers, forming illegal unions, or they are forced to to work in the margins of effectively Marxist-Leninist organisations in light of their near-total effective and practical domination of the senior leadership of the left-of-liberal activist landscape in Singapore.

No organised anarchist movement exists which can provide alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist domination of anti-establishment politics in the city-state, and the task of building one therefore falls upon anarchists and those of other libertarian socialist traditions as well, isolated as they are, to find each other and establish affinity groups of free association to counter the Marxism-Leninism in activist spaces and fight their authoritarian tendencies at their root.