Revolutionary priorities - human rights and combating bureaucracy?

On my translators' discussion list, PF replied to me:

You use the word red herring a little too liberally. If the protection
of human and individual rights and preventing the abuse of power by a
ruling party/bureaucracy are not to be the _first_ priorities in a
socialist revolution, you can revolute without me.

And I responded:

There's a place for people who have priorities besides state power in revolutions. Obviously. And obviously everybody chooses how to get involved - it can be purely political - you can be for the new regime or against it, or socio-economic too - for the new state or against it. And you can choose to keep your head down and your fingers crossed, as Stalin did during October when he was skulking in the editorial offices of Pravda preaching conciliation with the Provisional Government. And you can scoot off to your dacha and sit it out. 

Revolutions happen, almost regardless of our priorities and wishes. You can't prioritize or wish a revolution into being. And you can't wish away the violence involved. As a worker you'd be mad to be a pacifist while the counter-revolutionary white guards are shooting at you. 

The organization, vitality, democratic health and programmatic clarity of the forces involved are what determines the fate of issues like human rights during a period of revolutionary upheaval. In general, revolutionary armies have codes of conduct requiring humane treatment of civilians and enemy combatants -  often on pain of death for violations - while counter-revolutionary armies behave despicably. Pissing on enemy corpses, mocking enemy cultural values, raping and stealing, etc. Chiang Kai Shek and the Kuo Min Tang reactionaries are perfect examples of this.

When it comes to post-conflict social life the same goes. If there is a low level of organizational vitality, democracy and programmatic clarity in the leading political forces, you're in for trouble. Sometimes regardless of your priorities and wishes. It is ridiculous and unhistorical to foist the blame for the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party in power on Lenin and Trotsky. Neither creating an intelligence service nor putting down a serious mutiny are exceptionable matters in a situation of extreme social tension, let alone a war. When you have a series of deliberate constitutional changes aimed at reducing broad popular participation and increasing the power of a bureaucracy and executive working in cahoots, then you have an exceptional threat to popular rights and the healthy exercise of power. In the final year of Lenin's life it is very clear from his writings that he regarded the bureaucratic cancer creeping over the government and party-political and social life as a very high priority. In his "testament" he warns explicitly of Stalin's flaws.

Creating and maintaining a healthy political regime in a political party isn't easy. It doesn't get any easier if people with healthy instincts turn their backs on politics because it's hot in the kitchen and pots go flying. Parties (despite what Tomás claims) are where politics are forged. The heat and steel come from the masses and their interests, but the weapons (programme and strategic plan) and leaders come from the parties. 

Like I said, revolutions happen. We can choose to revolute along with them, or against them, or stand and watch. They are mass events. Mass mobilizations. You don't have to go around knocking on doors to get people out to make a revolution. That's the whole character of them - they are social eruptions. If I have a programme and leadership to offer for a revolution, then the masses in their assemblies will decide whether to take them or not. As happened throughout 1917 in Russia during the revolutionary upheaval between February and November, when the Soviets were massively democratic assemblies of workers, peasants and others who thrashed over a huge number of political and organizational matters. The victory of the Bolshevik programme and party was in no sense a manoeuvre or a coup. The Soviets were the great centres of mass decision-making where the weapons and leaders of the revolution were selected in open competition. The Mensheviks screwed up and were rejected (as was Stalin's conciliatory line towards them).

Plenty of Mensheviks ran away from the revolution when they lost favour. But it was no great hardship for many of their leaders, they just exchanged an editorial office in Moscow for one in New York and got lionized by the imperialists (Kerensky, for instance). 

There is ample prima facie proof of the popularity of the Bolshevik leadership of the revolution with the Russian people in the mere fact that over a hundred million Russians followed them in war and faced extreme hardship for three years to chase out and keep out Russian (Ukrainian etc) reactionaries and imperialist invaders. There were never enough Bolshevik commissars to whip the peasants into doing this by brute force - the Tsarist knout was a thing of the past. The peasants and peasant-workers in the army, for Christ sake, had thrown down their weapons and deserted from the Tsar's army only the previous year! And yet they took up arms again and followed Trotsky's strategic guidance and fought successfully!

Please, Paul, try and get some perspective into this period of Russian history. If the not-even-socialist half-measures of Allende and the popular upsurge of his day in power are inspiring, before Kissinger and Pinochet smashed them, then surely the real social and economic changes that took place between 1917 and 1920 in Russia are even more inspiring, especially since the many Kissingers and Pinochets of the time were soundly thrashed and sent home whimpering with their tails between their legs.

The state of affairs at the moment

On a mailing list, GA posted the following, linking to an article in a Swedish daily ("We are living in the biggest bluff in history"):

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/vi-lever-i-historiens-storsta-bluff_7636778.svd#xtor=AD-500
One highlight from the article (translated on the fly):
"The IMF calculated the other year that the group of Americans that turned 65 in 2012 can count on the state paying out 333 billion dollars more than they paid in taxes. This jackpot is 17 higher than what those 25 year old at the time will have to make do with.
Europe isn't any better. A report issued by the EU Commission shows that with the welfare systems intact, the average member country's state debt will amount to 477% of the gross national product in 2060."
FWIW. Sorry I don't have the time to translate the rest. I hope GT will make a halfway decent job of it.

BR

GA 

I commented:

In other words -  either capitalism survives, or we do...

And capitalism is no bluff. It's very real. Its alleged benefits are all a bluff, but that's another matter altogether. 

What it really does is condemn most of humanity to a daily life of misery and pain and anxiety and insecurity. And that's those of us with work and an income. Shit, it can't even keep translators feeling bubbly, let alone people working in a factory or a sweatshop or a mine. Or scratching at debt-ridden soil. 

Meaningful daily activities, food, shelter and health - forget it. Food and shelter if you're lucky, maybe. If you're displaced or unemployed, tough luck.

What capitalism does do is waste an awful lot of the wealth produced by those working for it (let's call them "workers" :-) on things that are directly intended to repress, enslave and kill these workers. Armies and weapons. Not only intended, either, but doing it all day every day throughout the world. It also wastes an awful lot of our wealth on things intended to deceive us and brutalize us - advertising, media garbage (films, radio, tv, press).

It directly engenders its mirror image in mass organized crime - the arms, drugs and sex industries. No capitalism in America, no drug wars horrors in Mexico or Colombia. The freer a country is from US/imperialist influence, the freer it is from the arms drugs and sex industries..Just compare Guatemala and Cuba.

Capitalism is now so over-ripe and rotten it's liquefying. It still stands because it and its treacherous (for the workers) henchmen Social-Democracy and Stalinism have deliberately and brutally smashed anti-capitalist working class political and economic alternative leaderships. Capitalist China in 1948, for  instance, was as flimsy (as Peng Shuzi wrote) as a wooden house full of dry rot - one good kick and it would fall. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao was still capable (despite the counter-revolutionary orders/advice it received from Moscow) of delivering such a kick, and it did. Castro's army did the same in 1959 in Cuba. But since then mass mobilizations have kicked out regimes (Nicaragua and Iran in 1979, Spain and Portugal in the mid-80s, Egypt and Libya today) but they have been leaderless with regard to the economic system which is at the root of all the trouble. So fascist and comprador regimes have been replaced by still bourgeois, still capitalist regimes with little hope to offer the workers for a qualitatively better life, including political, cultural and economic power. The same process but in an even more perverted fashion took place in the Soviet bloc in 1990, when the rage of the masses flung out the oppressive Stalinist regimes - and simultaneously destroyed the non-capitalist foundations of the state. Bringing in equally or more oppressive regimes, along with new and horrific economic and cultural inequalities and destitution.

So that's the state of affairs at the moment. And the multiplying newspaper reports like this one just rub it in a little bit more painfully with every new day it's allowed to continue.

As Marx said, we don't make history in conditions of our own choosing, but we do make our own history - and it's time we started doing it again and with a sense of purpose. 

And that purpose should be: 

Out with capitalism 
In with socialism.

On the economic crisis which isn't really an economic crisis...

In response to Mike Roberts's blog about a Greek pensioner killing himself in despair outside the Greek parliament, and a couple of comments there, 

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/tsolakoglou/

I wrote the following:

Well, from this and your previous blogs it's obvious that humanity's crisis at the moment is less and less narrowly economic and more and more overtly political. The Political in Political Economy is coming to the fore. As I showed a couple of blogs ago with lots of quotes from ch 27 of Book III of Capital (on the role of credit in capitalism), by 1867 Marx already considered that capitalism had outgrown itself and was taking on more and more socialized forms of production and circulation, although remaining trapped and crippled within bourgeois relations of production. So the problems to be solved aren't economic as such - the preconditions for a non-capitalist society run by democratically associated producers (socialism) are there and have been there for one and a half centuries.

The problem, the deepest crisis of humanity, is political. As Trotsky formulated it in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938: "

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

You can't put it much clearer than that.

The leaderships of the working class on a mass scale are class traitors, from the Labour Party in Britain to the Socialist Parties in France, Spain and elsewhere, to various "revolutionary" left government parties in Latin America, to the Social Democrats of Sweden. Not to mention the counter-revolutionary regime running the non-capitalist Chinese state. The unions are as bad in their way, backing these governments, worldwide, and in the US even backing an openly bourgeois pro-plutocrat party.

In an economic perspective the most glaring symptom of this betrayal is the total capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the economic theory front. Nowhere among the working class leaderships is Marxist economics taken seriously - and hardly even among the more truly revolutionary (and small) parties.

So the working class is not just politically blind, in that it is force-fed bourgeois policies and whipped into the polling booths to vote for its own flaying, but it is economically blind as to the part it plays in creating society's wealth (flaunted by super-rich individuals and corporations) and running the whole system of production and distribution (against its own interests).

So basically if we are to resolve the deepest crisis of humanity we need to fuse the two aspects of social life, and bring more economics into politics and more politics into economics.

Someone once characterized Soviet citizens as "ferociously egalitarian", and what we need is to be "ferociously revolutionary" if we are to remove the capitalist system and create an egalitarian and democratically run society.