What is to be undone: A modern revolutionary discussion of classical left ideologies (An Extending horizons book)

by Michael Albert

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875580769
• ISBN13: 9780875580760
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: P. Sargent
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Early (1974) discussion of Left theory by seminal Libertarian socialist thinker

Without mass participation in the political and economic life of a country, there can be no real socialism. As the author shows this was the point made by many anti-Leninist Marxists such as Rosa Luxemborg, anarchists and other libertarian Socialists against the Bolshevik revolution. Albert shows from quoting Lenin that that great man always believed in the same philosophy more or less throughout his years: the government should control the economy and the government should be made up of a small group of really smart people like himself (the Vanguard) who would have absolute control. The problem was that the Russian masses in 1917 seized control of their workplaces and set up worker self-management (Soviets). Trotsky later explained that the Russian masses were "100 times" to the left of the Bolsheviks at this point. Lenin did not like worker self-management at all and seized the opportunity of the civil war with the Whites and the invasions by the Allied powers to strips the Soviets of all real power and violently repressed all opposition. In early 1921, sailors on the island of Kronstadt, in solidarity with mass strikes in Russia's major cities, demanded the restoration of worker's control, restoration of freedom of speech for all radical left groups, the elimination of party goon squads and so on. Commissar of War Trotsky and other leaders started screaming that the Kronstadt revolt was financed by Western capitalists and Czarist exiles. Of course, no evidence existed for those claims. The White armies had been crushed, in spite of the severe problems fighting the war caused by Bolshevik extreme centralized control over everything, and the Western imperialists had withdrawn their armies from Russian soil. Lenin was always against worker self-management and other such institutions long before 1917. The so-called communist leaders had a similar reaction to the take-over by the Makhnovite movement of the Ukraine. That movement set up a society featuring participatory democracy in all economic institutions including their armyif their propaganda was to be believed but the Red Army invaded the Ukraine and wiped them out. The Russian masses and the Kronstadt sailors strongly believed in socialism. The Bolshevik, the new so-called Communist leaders of Russia had a vested psychological interested in convincing themselves that the only alternative to their dictatorship was the restoration of Czarism and Russia's subordination to Western imperialism. The government structure started by Lenin would be very easily used by Stalin to perpetrate his monstrosities. Albert quotes Lenin that government control of the economy is virtually the only major requirement for socialism. However, Albert notes, since authoritarian state socialism essentially reproduces the hierarchal nature of capitalism, giving economic and political power to a few and apolitical passivity for the majority, it has the habit of reproducing the worst effects of bourgeois rule. Th