Workers’ Control: An Anarcho-Communist Russian Revolution

[TheMolluskLingers]

A fascinating topic is the role anarcho-communist forces played in all three Russian Revolutions (1905 and the February/October Revolutions) - so I began asking myself: what if they won out somehow? What if the Bolsheviks didn't, but the anarchists did?

So the anarchists win and organize all of Russia along the lines of the Ukrainian Free Territory; the end goals of the Revolution have been achieved not through the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as Marx said, nor under the banner of a mass workers' party; but through spontaneous decentralized actions.

The only question is: how did we get to this point, can this decentralized stateless society be maintained, and most importantly, how does the 20th century change without the familiar Marxist-Leninst derived image the word "communism" brings to mind?

 

[Pete55]

The only question is: how did we get to this point, can this decentralized stateless society be maintained

The concept of anarchists taking power is something of an oxymoron, if you think about it too long. Regardless, there has to be some centralization to coordinate a successful war. I'm a little but of a cynic, but when completely decentralized groups seize power historically, the result tends to look a lot like warlord era Somalia.

The Red revolutions can get glorified and sanitized by time, but what the anarchist groups boil down to are mobs. Mob rule leads to terror first and authoritarian government second. In fact, I would submit revolutionary France as case in point of this.

 

[Sam R.]

@Pete55 you'll probably want to expand your reading, especially regarding Thermidor, and for that matter who staffed the CPS. Correspondingly I'd suggest reading about the actual failures of anarchist organisations during revolution. The FAI failed in Spain through its auto-bolshevisation, not through mob rule or authoritarianism. The Hungarian workers councils failed because they couldn't stop a multiple army group invasion with a strike.

how did we get to this point,

The urban anarchists are competent, platformist in their binding, and win the Putilov plant. They force an insurrection in October and become the pole around which the Soviet left redefines itself by joining. As a result their ideas are diluted and they engage in horrific substitutionalist policies, forcing the organisation to follow a pastiche of its original ideas, while trying to incorporate new membership 100 times its previous size. After a coup attempt by left-srs and bolshevists they are forced to liquidate them during a bloody civil war. Eventually the urban workers are more or less burnt out and in order to survive the organisation is forced to give in to bourgeois production techniques, especially with the balance of trade deficit between the cities and the countryside for food.

Basically Leninism without seizing the existing government departments and using them under comissar supervision.

can this decentralized stateless society be maintained,

No. They'll have to reintroduce capitalism in 1921 due to the scissors crisis. Will probably have to liquidate an all party commune of revolutionary sailors in the process.

and most importantly, how does the 20th century change without the familiar Marxist-Leninst derived image the word "communism" brings to mind?

Substitutionalism in a different skirt with a different perfume.

yours,
Sam R.

This POD is of course fanciful: there is no way Russian urban anarchists of the period could pull themselves together.

 

[mial42]

I seriously doubt the anarchists would be able to seize power; they lacked both the discipline and ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks or the popular support of the SRs or the allied support of the Provisional Government. Russia 1917 was not Spain 1936. But if they somehow did, I'd expect to see something like what happened in Spain then; neither stateless nor especially decentralized, but with an extremely strong emphasis on worker's and peasant's democracy (Soviets...) at the military unit, shop floor, and village level. The economy would probably be structured as a market between cooperatives. I don't think this would last long; as both the OTL Soviets and the CCP after them found out, managing a modern industrial economy like that is extremely inefficient, and you'd tend to see the more successful firms (cooperatives) gradually outcompeting and absorbing the less successful ones, and much slower industrialization then OTL. I feel the need to emphasize that by "cooperative" I don't mean joint ownership (whose effects on firm effectiveness are still debated), so much as joint management (which didn't work very well, as the Soviets and CCP found out). You might see some cooperatives wind up very large and successful like Mondragon, by essentially operating as typical hierarchical firms with compressed wage scales.