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1921 – 2021.
It is exactly 100 years ago. On March 18th, 1921, the social power of the capitalist State painted in red in Russia crushed the proletarian revolt in Kronstadt. The way was thus clear for the Bolshevik Party/State to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune with great pomp. The inherent cynicism of these somewhat “radical” social democrats (who were “radical” only in form, but never in substance) was matched only by their alleged rupture with the society of Capital.
Already in October 1917, this same Bolshevik Party had succeeded in channeling the hate of the proletariat against private property and its State (and its misery, and its wars, and the world that goes with it!). It thus succeeded in appropriating the insurrectional energy developed by our class, in order to finally pass off as a revolution what is merely the replacement of a provisional government by a new caste of ministers called “commissaries”. The whole thing was sprinkled with some economic, social and political measures that had the taste and the colour of revolution (that “smells terribly of revolution” if we take the expression used by Lenin, according to Trotsky when forming the Soviet of People’s Commissaries) but that turned to be only a facade restoration of the vile social dictatorship of Capital in the name of socialism and communism.
The “October insurrection”, or more prosaically the events of October 24th/25th, 1917, which culminated in the “capture of the Winter Palace”, seat of the provisional government, was a “coup” organized by a faction of the Bolshevik Party, the so-called “Lenin/Trotsky faction”. Not a “coup d’état”, as all the chapels of the historical social democracy like to denounce it for a hundred years: from the socialists of the Second International to the partisans of ideological anarchism and to the supporters of workers’ democracy and its councilist form. But it was indeed a (temporary!) curb to the real insurrectional process of the proletariat that lasted for several months during 1917 and that didn’t stop spreading like wildfire all over the country, through cities and countryside.
As the “anarchist” militant Piotr Arshinov said quite rightly in October 1927 in an article that was to draw lessons from these events for their tenth anniversary, there were two opposing Octobers: on the one hand, “the October of the workers and peasants” which attacked private property and expropriated the capitalist class; and on the other hand, the “Bolshevik October” which overthrew the provisional government incapable of controlling the proletarian outburst, and which imposed a mere political revolution, therefore a bourgeois one.
But let’s be quite clear: we do not oppose democracy, gradual and peaceful process, soviet assemblyism to the Bolshevik insurrection of October, as our detractors could accuse us to do, but on the contrary we want to emphasize the genuine insurrectional process of the proletariat. The problem is that some sectors of our class, and among them the most radical ones, those that history will remember under the name of “Kronstadt sailors”, oscillated between “proletarian October” and “Bolshevik October” to be finally co-opted by the latter and to put themselves at the service of the Bolshevik Party, bolstered by its organizational prestige, in its quest for political power. The whole hiatus is that on October 25th, 1917, and the following months, the “Kronstadt sailors” turned from “spearhead of the revolution” into the armed wing of the Bolshevik counter-revolution to come…
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