What Went Wrong with the Russian Revolution?

There are six principal reasons for the failure of the Russian so-called ‘socialist’ state and government:

1. Soviets – workers’ councils – were dissolved and dismantled by Lenin;
2. The Soviet Government lacked a separation of powers at the federal government level: no independence of the three branches of government – the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary;
3. Totalitarian one-party closed system – no possibility of competition between parties in elections;
4. The abolition of private property; and
5. Large and inflated state: too much state power, bureaucracy and central planning, and the lack of a smooth and comprehensive progressive political transitionary plan for implementation.

1. The truest and most foundational building block of libertarian socialism is rank-and-file workers’ councils. These were called The Soviets in Russia before Lenin abolished them in favour of more political centralization of powers to the government. Chomsky gives an incredibly important speech on what socialism really is – workers’ self-organization, and how the biggest two propaganda ‘institutions’ of the globe – the U.S. and the U.S.S.R wanted to claim that the USSR was socialist when its number one precondition thereof – the self-organization of workers – was missing! The YouTube video is linked below of Chomsky’s incisive speech:

2. “In the Soviet era the communists saw the principle of separation of powers as a ‘bourgeois fiction’. It didn’t fit in the Soviet ideological system, as the Soviet state proclaimed to do everything in the exact and appropriate way for the wellbeing of the working people and because of that there was no need for separation of powers. In addition to that the Soviet Union was a one party state and even the theoretical anchorage of separation of powers in the Soviet Union would have harmed the totality pretension of the party. Because of that separation of powers was nonexistent in the Soviet Union” (Henderson in Hertle 2020, p. 2).

This meant centralized Executive control under the General Secretary, who controlled police (Cheka) and could institute martial law (Red Army). This is in contrast to the United States of America’s political design by its founding fathers which has proper checks and balances on the use of Executive power and prohibits policing by military.

3. In Soviet Russia, there was “the forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (the multiparty national parliament) as early as January 1918” (Ecyclopedia.com 2018).

There should be little / minimal barriers to inaugurate and create a political party capable of contesting elections. There should not be the placing of limits on the legality of official inaugurations of other parties. This is to prevent a forced monopoly (like Russian ‘communism’) and a two-party cartel system (like Western capitalist ‘representative democracies’) (see Miragliotta, Errington and Barry 2010, pp. 189, 196-9, 202-11, and 281). Do we need a multiparty system for political diversity? Well, at the least there should be no suppression nor automatic exclusion of other parties. If one party wins all the votes or most of the votes, then that is fair competition – the point is that the system should never be closed off to potentially rival political parties.

4. We need a political system which reflects the people’s right to own and claim ownership of things – not state capitalist dispossession as in what occurred in Leninism and Stalinism in Russia. The police – as an important part of the Executive branch of government – derives one of its key functions in protecting private property of citizens. Private property – when fairly acquired – is a progressive political-‘technology’ and gives humane social mores in protecting / upholding the ownership of possessions and assets. Private property is the humane inherent right of each individual / citizen to exclude others from use of and/or interference with their possessions and assets.

5. After freehold land distribution and allocation for all adult individuals, we need socialism with a small state and to eventually abolish money for authentic participatory political action, exorcising social and political and economic corruption. We should have a resource based economy (Fresco 2018) but one with a system of nation states that have sovereignty but cooperate with each other for fair resource distribution and equalizing wealth levels for citizens across nation-states. (See my blog post ‘Against abolishing nation states’ https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2020/10/17/against-abolishing-nation-states-as-the-authentic-sites-of-proletariat-power/).

Against Abolishing Nation States as the Authentic Sites of Proletariat Power

There needs to be instituted decentralized decision-making to offset state power. So, anarcho-syndicalist institutions could be implemented. Furthermore, in addition to workers’ councils and consumers’ councils, we may want to utilize a system of direct democracy in the vein of Bookchin’s (2015) conceptualizations, and voting on ideas and equally negotiating input into workplace work delegations and in the production of goods and renderings of services, could be enacted. For a careful and comprehensive stepping-stone plan for transitioning from capitalism to libertarian socialism see my blog entry: https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2018/05/02/prison-abolition-examining-gender-competition/

Prison Abolition? Examining ‘Gender Competition’

Most fundamentally, for these institutions to operate authentically the precondition is a well enlightened populace. Probably at least a third of the population need to be trained polymaths who would oversee the humane functioning of political institutions and social practices.

Bibliography

Bookchin, M 2015, The next revolution: Popular assemblies and the promise of direct democracy, Verso Books, London.

Chomsky, N 5 July 2015, ‘Noam Chomsky on Leninism’, Chomsky’s Philosophy, last accessed 22 March 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxhT9EVj9Kk&gt;

Encyclopedia.com 27 June 2018, ‘Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics’, last accessed 22 March 2023, <https://www.encyclopedia.com/places/commonwealth-independent-states-and-baltic-nations/cis-and-baltic-political-geography/union-soviet-socialist-republics&gt;

Fresco, J 2018, The Best That Money Can’t Buy. Beyond Politics, Poverty and War, The Venus Project, Florida.

Henderson, J 2011, The Constitution of the Russian Federation: A contextual analysis, Constitutional Systems of the World, Bloomsbury, Britain.

Hertle, F 2020, ‘The Russian Model of Separation of Powers. Constitutional grounds and practical realization’, GRIN Verlag, Munich.

Miragliotta, N, Errington, W, and Barry, N 2010, The Australian Political System in Action, Oxford University Press – Australia and New Zealand, South Melbourne.