Part III: Left Communism and the Russian Revolution

In the previous articles we examined various Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist positions on the nature of the USSR.

We now turn to the theories of the less well known but more interesting Communist Left, who were among the first revolutionary Marxists to distance themselves from the Russian model by deeming it state capitalist or simply capitalist. The Russian Left Communists' critique remained at the level of an immediate response to how capitalist measures were affecting the class, whereas in both the German/Dutch and Italian Lefts, we see real attempts to ground revolutionary theory in Marx's categories in a way distinct from Second International orthodoxy.

Introduction

Any analysis of the USSR necessarily involves an underlying conception of what the Russian Revolution was. The Trotskyist approaches that we have previously considered are all based on the conception of the Russian Revolution as being an essentially proletarian revolution that somehow degenerated. By contrast a consideration of Left Communist theories allow us to question this underlying assumption, and as a result provides vital insights into the development of a theory of what the USSR was.

The Russian revolution seemed to show for the first time that workers could actually overthrow a bourgeois capitalist state and run society themselves. After almost all of the socialist parties and trade unions of the mainstream Second International workers movement patriotically supported the slaughter of the first world war, the Bolsheviks it seemed had reasserted an internationalist revolutionary Marxism. But if the Russian revolution was initially a massive inspiration to proletarians across the world, being a first outbreak in the revolutionary wave that ended the war, its impact after that is more ambiguous. The word ‘communist’ became associated with a system of state control of the means of production, coupled with severe repression of all opposition. The workers movement across the world was dominated by this model of ‘actually existing socialism’, and the parties who oriented themselves to it. The role of these regimes and parties was to do more to kill the idea of proletarian revolution and communism than ordinary capitalist repression had ever been able to. So those in favor of proletarian revolution had to distinguish themselves from these official communist parties and to make sense of what had happened in Russia. A group that did so was the Left Communists or Communist Left.