#title The Two Octobers
#author Peter Arshinov
#LISTtitle Two Octobers
#date October 1927
#source Written in 1927, first published in <em>Dielo Truda </em>; Alexandre Skirda, *Les Anarchistes dans la révolution russe*, 1973, op. cit., pp. 185–195.
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-02-21T03:21:49
#authors Peter Arshinov
#topics Russian Revolution, Russian revolution
#notes Written for the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, from *Dielo Truda*, No. 29, October 1927.




*** The October of Workers and Peasants

The victorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution of 1917 has been
defined as the October revolution in official parlance and in the
Bolshevik calendar. There is an element of truth in this, but not the
whole truth. In October 1917 Russia’s workers and peasants overcame a
colossal obstacle obstructing the development of their revolution. They
abolished the nominal power of the capitalist class, but even before
that, they had achieved something of no lesser revolutionary importance
and perhaps something even more fundamental: in town, they had taken
economic power away from the capitalist class – the right to free,
unfettered work, if not total control over the factories and they had
taken land from the large country landowners. Thus, it was well before
October that the revolutionary workers destroyed the foundations of
capitalism leaving only the superstructure.

If there had been no general expropriation of capitalists by workers,
destroying the bourgeois state machine, the political revolution would
not have had such success, and perhaps would have not succeeded at all,
because without it owners’ resistance would have been much greater.
Furthermore, the objective of the social revolution in October was not
limited to the overthrow of capitalism. A lengthy period of practical
experience of social self-management and socialist reconstruction lay
before workers, although this prospect shrivelled up in subsequent
years. Thus, when one considers its development as a whole, October
appears as one only of the phases, albeit a powerful and decisive phase,
of the Russian socialist revolution. So, October on its own does not
embody social revolution in its entirety. In thinking of the victorious
days of October, one should consider the specific historical
circumstances that determined the Russian social revolution.

Another peculiarity, no less important, is that October has two
meanings: the meaning understood by the working’ masses who participated
in the social revolution, and with them the Anarchist-Communists; and
the other meaning given it by the political party that captured power on
the back of the desire for social revolution, using force to betray and
stifle it, and all its further development.

An enormous gulf exists between these two interpretations of October.
For the workers and peasants, October means the suppression of the power
of the parasitic classes in the name of equality and self-management.
For the Bolsheviks, October is the conquest of power by the party of the
revolutionary intelligentsia and the installation of its state
‘socialism’ and of its ‘socialist’ methods of government of the masses.

The February revolution caught the different revolutionary parties in
complete disarray and without any doubt they were considerably surprised
when they apprehended the profound social character of the coming
revolution. No one – other than the anarchists – wanted to believe in it
at first. The Bolshevik Party, which always made out that it expressed
the most radical aspirations of the working-class, did not foresee
anything beyond the limits of a bourgeois revolution. Only at the April
conference <verbatim>[1917]</verbatim> did the question arise of what
was really happening in Russia: was it only Tsarism that was to be
overthrown? or did this revolution have a greater ambition, was it
looking forward to overthrowing capitalism? For the Bolsheviks, the
latter possibility posed questions of tactics. Lenin became conscious
before the other Bolsheviks of the social character of the revolution
and foresaw the necessity of seizing power. In the movement of workers
and peasants he saw a decisive force, a force that was progressively
undermining the foundations of the industrial and rural bourgeoisie.
Before October the party could not reach any unanimous agreement on such
questions. Throughout this period, it manoeuvred between the social
slogans of the masses and the concept of Social-Democratic revolution
from which it had been created and developed. While not opposing the
slogan of the petty and big bourgeoisie for a Constituent Assembly, the
party did its best to control the masses, striving to keep up with the
gathering pace of the rushing crowd. In this period, after the overthrow
of Tsarism, the workers marched on impetuously, with a new lease of
life. They overcame enemies to the left and the right, they marched on
in fighting mood toward victory.

Everywhere the big rural landowners began to evacuate the countryside.
They fled from the insurgent peasantry, seeking protection in the towns
for themselves and their wealth. The peasantry proceeded to a direct
re-distribution of land, they did not want to hear of cohabitation or
co-existence with landlords. And in the towns, a ‘sudden reversal of
relations’ took place between the workers and business owners. Thanks to
the effort and collective competence of the masses, workers’ committees
were formed in every workplace: factories, transport, mines...
intervening firmly in production, disregarding owners’ warnings and
putting onto the agenda their elimination from production. So, in
different parts of the country, workers began to socialise the
workplace.

Simultaneously Russian revolutionary labour developed a vast network of
workers’ and peasants’ soviets, which began to function as organs of
self-management. They developed, defended, and extended the revolution.
Nominally, capitalist rule and order still existed in the country, but
alongside it a vast system of social and economic workers’
self-management was born and developed. This regime of soviets and
factory committees threatened to kill off the state system just by being
there. Clearly the birth and development of the soviets and factory
committees had nothing to do with the authoritarian principle. On the
contrary – they were in the full sense of the word the masses’ organs of
social and economic self-management – and in no way organs of statist
power. They set themselves up against a state machine which had the
pretension to imagine that it could direct the masses, and they prepared
for a decisive conflict against it. ‘Factories to the workers! Land to
the peasants!’ – starting with these slogans the revolutionary masses of
town and country worked to defeat the state machine of the wealthy
classes. In the name of a new social system they founded the basic cells
of factory committees and of economic and social soviets. These slogans
travelled end to end through workers’ Russia, thoroughly permeating
workers’ direct action [and setting it] against the bourgeois-socialist
coalition government.

As has been explained above, workers and peasants had been working
towards a complete reconstruction of the industrial and agrarian system
in Russia before October 1917. The agrarian question was virtually
settled by the poor peasants from June to September 1917. For their
part, urban workers put in place organs of social and economic
self-management depriving both the state and the owners of their role
organising production. During the October revolution the workers
overthrew the last and the greatest obstacle to their revolution: the
state power of the wealthy classes, which they had already battered and
disorganised. The latter development opened vast opportunities for
completing the social revolution – it put it on a creative path of
socialist social reconstruction – a path workers had already chosen
months earlier.

This was the October of the workers and peasants. For the
super-exploited manual workers, it signified their huge accomplishment –
their wholesale destruction of the foundations of capitalist society. A
[new] society of workers was to be set up, one based on the principles
of equality, independence, and self-management by the proletariat of the
towns and the countryside. This October did not reach its natural
conclusion. It was violently interrupted by Bolsheviks’ October, which
progressively spread its dictatorship over the whole country.

*** The Bolshevik October

The statist parties – including the Bolsheviks – all restricted the goal
of the Russian Revolution to installing a Social-Democratic regime. It
was only when workers and peasants from all over Russia began to
seriously shake the agro-bourgeois order, only when the social
revolution was evidently an irreversible historical fact, that the
Bolsheviks began to discuss the social character of the revolution and
the consequent necessity of modifying their tactics. There was no
unanimity in the party on questions of the character and orientation of
the events that had taken place, even up to October. Furthermore, the
party’s central committee was divided into two opposing tendencies both
during the October revolution and throughout subsequent events. While
part of the central committee, led by Lenin, foresaw the inevitable
social revolution and proposed preparations to seize power, another
tendency, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, denounced working for a social
revolution as adventurism. They went no further than calling for a
Constituent Assembly in which the Bolsheviks would take up the seats on
the far left (see Trotsky, *Lessons of October*). Lenin’s point of view
prevailed, and the party began to mobilise its forces for a decisive
mass struggle against the provisional government. The party threw itself
into swamping factory committees and soviets of workers’ deputies, doing
its best to obtain the greatest possible number of positions in these,
as yet immature organs of self-management – so that they could manage
their activities. Moreover, the Bolshevik Party concept of, and approach
to, the soviets and factory committees was fundamentally different to
that of the masses. While the mass of workers viewed the soviets and
factory committees that they had created as organs of social and
economic self-management, the Bolshevik party looked on them only as a
means by which it was possible to snatch power from the damned
bourgeoisie, thereafter power was to be wielded in line with party
doctrine.

The enormous difference of conception and perspective concerning the
October of the revolutionary masses and that of the Bolshevik party was
revealed in this way. For the former, it was the question of
overthrowing power to reinforce and enlarge organs of workers’ and
peasants’ self-management that were already in being. For the latter, it
was the question of using the leverage of these organs to seize power
and subordinating all revolutionary forces to the party. There was, as
we have seen, an enormous divergence, one that was to grow in time in,
with dire consequences for all the future development in the Russian
revolution. The Bolsheviks’ success in the October revolution, that is
to say, the fact that they found themselves in power and then
subordinated the revolution as a whole to their party, is to be
explained by the sleight of hand that substituted the idea of soviet
power for the idea of social revolution and mass social emancipation. At
first sight these two ideas might appear non-contradictory. One could
understand soviet power as the power of the soviets, and this
facilitated the substitution of the idea of soviet power for the idea of
revolution. Nevertheless, in real life and in subsequent experience
these ideas were in violent conflict with each other. The concept of
soviet power incarnated by the Bolshevik state, was transformed into an
entirely traditional bourgeois power concentrated in a handful of
individuals, wanting to subordinate to their authority all that was
fundamental and most powerful in the lives of the people – the social
revolution in this particular instance.

Hence, using the idea of ‘Soviet Power’, in which the Bolsheviks would
pick up most of the jobs, they arrived effectively at total power and
could proclaim their dictatorship throughout the revolutionary
territory. This furnished them with the opportunity to strangle all
workers’ revolutionary currents who disagreed with their doctrine,
mangling the entire course of the Russian revolution making the
revolution adopt a multitude of measures contrary to its real meaning.
In the years of war communism one of these measures was the
militarisation of labour[1] – while millions of swindlers and parasites
could live in peace, luxury and idleness. Another measure was the war
between town and country, provoked by the party policy that considered
the countryside as an unreliable element foreign to the revolution. So,
this ended up with libertarian thinking being strangled, and along with
it the anarchist movement, whose social ideas and slogans had inspired
the vitality of the Russian revolution had turned it towards social
revolution. Other measures – aimed at workers – included the banning of
the independent workers’ movement and the strangulation of freedom, both
workers’ freedom of expression and the freedom of the workers’ press.
Everything depended on the [one] centre, all instructions about workers’
activities, thinking and way of life came from there.

This was the Bolshevik October. The revolutionary socialist
intelligentsia incarnated its ideals, and decades of its subsequent
development. Now such things are finally accomplished, through the
monopoly dictatorship of the Pan-Russian Communist Party. These ideals
satisfy the ruling intelligentsia, notwithstanding the catastrophic
consequences that they have on workers. This is what they now celebrate
with such pomp, after ten years of power.

*** The Anarchists

Revolutionary anarchism was the only politico-social current promoting
ideas of social revolution among workers and peasants, both in the 1905
revolution and in the first days of the 1917 revolution. Indeed, as with
the methods of struggle employed by the masses themselves, it could have
taken on an enormous role. Likewise, no other politico-social theory
could have blended so harmoniously with the spirit and course of the
revolution. In 1917 workers listened to anarchist orators’ speeches with
rare trust and attention. It may have appeared that the revolutionary
potential of the united workers and peasants, and the power of
anarchism’s ideology and tactics would together become an irresistible
force. Unhappily no such fusion took place. Occasionally some isolated
anarchists led intense revolutionary activity among workers, but –
except for the *Nabat* Confederation and the Makhnovists in Ukraine –
there was no anarchist organisation of any great size to lead more
continuous and co-ordinated actions. Only such an organisation could
have united anarchists and millions of workers. Yet despite such an
important and propitious revolutionary period, anarchists for the most
part remained inside the shell of their small groups rather than
directing themselves towards mass political demands and action. They
preferred to drown themselves in the sea of their internal quarrels, not
attempting even once to tackle and resolve the problem of a common
anarchist politics and tactics. By this deficiency, they condemned
themselves to inaction and sterility throughout most important
revolutionary events.

The causes of this catastrophic state of affairs lie indubitably in the
anarchist movement’s dispersion; disorganisation and absence of
collective tactics, matters which have nearly always have been raised
into principles among anarchists, preventing them taking a single
organisational step towards setting out a strategy for social
revolution. There is no advantage now in denouncing those who, by their
demagogy, thoughtlessness, and irresponsibility, helped to create this
real situation. But the tragic experience that led the working masses to
defeat and anarchism to the edge of the abyss needs now to be
recognised. One must confront with disdain, and pitilessly ridicule,
whoever, one way or another, helps to perpetuate chaos and confusion in
anarchism, whoever obstructs organisation or development, that is to
say, the struggle of the movement for the emancipation of labour and the
creation of an anarchist-communist society. The working masses
understand and are instinctively attracted to anarchism, but they will
not work with the anarchist movement until they are convinced of its
theoretical and organisational coherence. All of us must try our best to
achieve this coherence.

*** Conclusions and Perspectives

Bolshevik practice over the last ten years clearly shows the path taken
by those in power. Every year it reduces workers’ social and political
rights a little further and removes all that they conquered in the
revolution. There is no doubt that the ‘historic mission’ of the
Bolshevik Party has become meaningless and that it will try to lead the
Russian revolution to their final objective: a state capitalism of wage
slavery, or in other words, the reinforcing of the power of exploiters
and the increasing the misery of the exploited.

In speaking of the Bolshevik party as a party of the socialist
intelligentsia, exercising its power over the working masses of town and
country, we focus on its central directing core. Its origins, education,
and life-style have nothing in common with the working class, and
despite that, it rules over life in every detail, both in the party and
for the masses. This nucleus will try its best to stay *above the
proletariat*. Workers *can expect nothing from it*.

There may be other possibilities for rank-and-file party militants,
including the Communist youth. This mass has participated passively in
the negative and counter-revolutionary policies of the Party, but having
come from the heart of working-class, it may end up recognising and
meeting the real October of workers and peasants. We do not doubt that
many will emerge from this mass to fight for the workers’ October. Let
us hope that they assimilate very quickly the anarchist character of
October, and that they come to its aid. On our side, let us do our best
to demonstrate its true nature, thereby helping the masses to re-conquer
and retain the significant achievements conquered in the revolution.

[1] Such measures included transforming units of the Red Army into
    labour armies and placing enterprises under military administration.