The Decadent Worker

STATE CAPITALISM VS. TRUE COMMUNISM

“Today, along with a host of western companies, General Motors and Ford both have factories in Russia and supply the Red Army with much of its transportation. One bit of knowledge that the public is carefully protected from, on both sides, is the fact that the trucks that carried over 50,000 Russian troops into Afghanistan were built by American companies. And the computers that organized the invasion were built by IBM, who supply both the KGM and the CIA with their intelligence technology. American ambassador to Russia at the time of Afghanistan was Thomas Watson Junior, son of the head of IBM. Vague Magazine #18/19: Programming Phenomena and Conspiracy Theory (BCM Tanelorn, London WCIN 3XX 2 pounds)

The Kronstadt soldiers and sailers soviet, a strong fortress with 15,000 men, called for immediate reforms in War Communism — and to grain requisitions, free peasant markets, and to the Cheka’s terror and terror within the military, democratic elections of a new Soviet government, revitalizing the power of the soviets over state and the economy — that amount to an insurrection against the Bolshevik state from March 5 to 18, 1921, in solidarity with the stiking Petrograd workers. The Kronstadt revolt was under the influence of anarchist/Left SR elements and allied with the revolutinoary Petrograd soviet, both demanding ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and “Soviets Without Bolsheviks.’

Trotsky, under Lenin’s command, removed Red Army units sympathetic to the revolt from the Baltic area and assembled a large, select force of Red Army troops, first moving on Petrograd, suppressing the workers’ insurrection and killing its leaders. The Bolshevik command decided to act before the ice melted around Kronstadt, permitting the Kronstadt sailors to move their battleships to the aid of the Petrograd proletariat. Red Army troops led by General Tukhachevsky transported cannons across the ice and attacked Kronstadt relentlessly, killing thousands, until its downfall March 18, 1921. Even survivors and prisoners were executed in the move to stifle all remnants of the insurrection. The Cheka went to work in Petrograd to stamp out all remaining sympathies.

The Petrograd workers and Kronstadt sailors, who had prepared the ground for the 1917 Revolution with 1905, who had supported the Bolshevik October Group with strikes and an armed uprising, found themselves starving, exhausted, war-weary and unable to dislodge the Bolshevik regime they had aided to power. Revolutionary soldiers, sailors, workers and peasants had little choice but to accept the one-party Bolshevik rule after 1921. Radical peasant socialists and anarchists considered 1921 the final betrayal of the Russian Revolution, though in point of fact the Bolsheviks had centralized all economic, political and military power in the country and suppressed democractic freedoms well before 1921. The Bolshevik regime tried to mask this phase of the Civil War by calling Makhno a kulak, the peasant revolts, workers’ strikes and soldiers’ mutinies a product of ‘White’ agitation, and Kronstadt a ‘White’ General conspiracy. Anarchism celebrated these events as the high point for the anarchist movement in modern socialism. New Indicator Collective, Socialism: A Brief History, USCD

“For the multinationals, a cheap strike free workforce held tightly in control by a firmly entrenched authoritarian regime.” — Vague Magazine, Ibid.

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