On Kronstadt

[T.K.A.-Denmark]

I just read this article
http://www.marxist.com/History/Trotsky_was_right.html
Give it a read and we can discuss it.

[mir]

It's good because I always thought (at least from reading semi-bourgeois books) that Trotsky was somehow an evil dictator trying to bury the voice of democracy.  I never knew that the Kronstadt was being led by whites and reactionaries.  Good article, if any one is interested in Soviet history.

[Aky]

Yes. I have experienced the same, mir. Whenever I hear about for example Lenin now, I immediately think of a dictator or an evil person or something. That is because I have read, nearly studied, too many capitalist propaganda websites... Well, you can learn a lot from them too! :P

The article was good, there was some parts I wondered about, but I don't remember which. I will check it tomorrow.

[des-esseintes]

One thing caught me off guard.

In Hue and cry over kronstadt Trotsky writes:

"those sailors who remained in ”peaceful“ Kronstadt until the beginning of 1921, not fitting in on any of the fronts of the civil war, stood by this time on a level considerably lower, in general, than the average level of the Red Army, and included a great percentage of completely demoralized elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts."

Almost as if having a "sporty haircut" makes you a "demoralized element"... and at the time Trotsky had a fancy beard himself!

Is it possible to judge someone's character by their style?

[T.K.A.-Denmark]

Is it possible to judge someone's character by their style?

Yes of course, people with long hair are hippies and so on:)

Nahh I get yr point.

[marx_was_right]

it's a bad comment on Trotsky's part, it seems that almost every leftist writter has made one or two 'gaffes' in their time, I suppose it is inevitable at some stage that if you write so many thousand articles they will not always be crystal clear. He was only human after all.

[marx_was_right]

I wonder if anyone can help me.

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/wsfws/2_2_kronstadt.html this website attacks Trotsky, it uses a quote however that I can't find anywhere...

According to Trotsky socialism involved "authoritarian leadership...centralised distribution of the labour force... the workers' State [considering itself] entitled to send any worker wherever his labour may be needed." (2). He condemned those who "put the right of workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the right of the Party to affirm its dictatorship, even when the dictatorship comes into conflict with the passing moods of the workers democracy."(3).

STATELESS SOCIALISM FROM BELOW

Kronstadt workers and sailors opposed these ideas. They had a vision of socialism being established by ordinary people through mass action, of the abolition of coercive authority and of society being controlled through democratic worker organisations, not the State. This is why the Kronstadt revolt was suppressed. We Anarchist - Syndicalists are proud to stand in the revolutionary anti- authoritarian tradition of Kronstadt. The role of revolutionaries is not to "lead" the masses but to organise them to take power in their own name. Remember Kronstadt!

Notes

1) I. Geltzer, Kronstadt 1917- 21. p. 207.

2) L. Trotsky, Terrorisme et Communisme (Paris 1963). p.215.

3) L. Trotsky, Sochinenyia (Moscow 1925). p.89, p. 136.

Can anyone find these articles in full?

[TavareeshKamo]

Originally posted by igor
He was only human after all.

SACRILAGE! (sp)

[styrken]

Originally posted by des-esseintes
One thing caught me off guard.

In Hue and cry over kronstadt Trotsky writes:

"those sailors who remained in ”peaceful“ Kronstadt until the beginning of 1921, not fitting in on any of the fronts of the civil war, stood by this time on a level considerably lower, in general, than the average level of the Red Army, and included a great percentage of completely demoralized elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts."

Almost as if having a "sporty haircut" makes you a "demoralized element"... and at the time Trotsky had a fancy beard himself!

Is it possible to judge someone's character by their style?

Well, it was kind of hard acuusations against Trotsky that he just judged people by their style :D

Of course, on some way, you have some prejudiced against someone because of their character of their style. Seing a lady in a big expensive fur coat make you think that she is rich and if you see a guy in overalls sitting in a bus make you think that he is a worker - but of course it is not allways the case.

Trotsky did not judge anybody because of their style. Lenin and Marx wasnt stock-exchange magnates because they weared a tie.

Actually he just use these reactionary sailors style,  as a kind of metaphor on what side they were on. If somebody weared bellbottoms and even had a haircut an that time, they wasnt ordinary workers i think. Its the same if you today write something like "These bourgeois parasites, wearing showy suits and wanking to the NASDAQ-index" :D

I think the problem is that you quoted Trotsky out of the context. If you read whole of the passage, you will see that he explain the material reason why these sailors wasnt on the side of the revolution. Try to read these two passages:

Yes, Kronstadt wrote a heroic page in the history of the revolution. But the civil war began a systematic depopulation of Kronstadt and of the whole Baltic fleet. As early as the days of the October uprising, detachments of Kronstadt sailors were being sent to help Moscow. Other detachments were then sent to the Don, to the Ukraine, to requisition bread and organize the local power. It seemed at first as if Kronstadt were inexhaustible. From different fronts I sent dozens of telegrams about the mobilization of new ”reliable“ detachments from among the Petersburg workers and the Baltic sailors. But beginning as early as 1918, and in any case not later than 1919, the fronts began to complain that the new contingents of ”Kronstadters“ were unsatisfactory, exacting, undisciplined, unreliable in battle, and doing more harm than good. After the liquidation of Yudenich (in the winter of 1919), the Baltic fleet and the Kronstadt garrison were denuded of all revolutionary forces. All the elements among them that were of any use at all were thrown against Denikin in the south. If in 1917-18 the Kronstadt sailor stood considerably higher than the average level of the Red Army and formed the framework of its first detachments as well as the framework of the Soviet regime in many districts, those sailors who remained in ”peaceful“ Kronstadt until the beginning of 1921, not fitting in on any of the fronts of the civil war, stood by this time on a level considerably lower, in general, than the average level of the Red Army, and included a great percentage of completely demoralized elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts.

Demoralization based on hunger and speculation had in general greatly increased by the end of the civil war. The socalled ”sack-carriers“ (petty speculators) had become a social blight, threatening to stifle the revolution. Precisely in Kronstadt where the garrison did nothing and had everything it needed, the demoralization assumed particularly great dimensions. When conditions became very critical in hungry Petrograd the Political Bureau more than once discussed the possibility of securing an ”internal loan“ from Kronstadt, where a quantity of old provisions still remained. But delegates of the Petrograd workers answered: ”You will get nothing from them by kindness. They speculate in cloth, coal, and bread. At present in Kronstadt every kind of riffraff has raised its head.“ That was the real situation. It was not like the sugar-sweet idealizations after the event.

Comradely, Michael

[turnoviseous]

Originally posted by igor
I wonder if anyone can help me.

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/wsfws/2_2_kronstadt.html this website attacks Trotsky, it uses a quote however that I can't find anywhere...

According to Trotsky socialism involved "authoritarian leadership...centralised distribution of the labour force... the workers' State [considering itself] entitled to send any worker wherever his labour may be needed." (2). He condemned those who "put the right of workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the right of the Party to affirm its dictatorship, even when the dictatorship comes into conflict with the passing moods of the workers democracy."(3).

STATELESS SOCIALISM FROM BELOW

Kronstadt workers and sailors opposed these ideas. They had a vision of socialism being established by ordinary people through mass action, of the abolition of coercive authority and of society being controlled through democratic worker organisations, not the State. This is why the Kronstadt revolt was suppressed. We Anarchist - Syndicalists are proud to stand in the revolutionary anti- authoritarian tradition of Kronstadt. The role of revolutionaries is not to "lead" the masses but to organise them to take power in their own name. Remember Kronstadt!

Notes

1) I. Geltzer, Kronstadt 1917- 21. p. 207.

2) L. Trotsky, Terrorisme et Communisme (Paris 1963). p.215.

3) L. Trotsky, Sochinenyia (Moscow 1925). p.89, p. 136.

Can anyone find these articles in full?

Ive found more such quotes on flag.blackened.net.


March 30, 1918 on the introduction of top down appointment of Red Army officers

"The elective basis", Trotsky wrote, "is politically pointless and technically in expedient and has already been set aside by decree". (L. Trotsky. 'Work, discipline, Order', Sochinenlya, XVII, pp. 171 - 172)



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April 6th 1920 at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions.

"the militarisation of labour . . . is the indispensable basic method for the organisation of our labour forces" . . . "Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? . . . This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive". . . "Compulsory slave labour . . . was in its, time a progressive phenomenon". "Labour . . . obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism". "Wages . . . must not be viewed from the angle of securing the personal existence of the individual worker" but should "measure the conscientiousness, and efficiency of the work of every labourer".

A few quotes by Trotsky from his work _Terrorism and Communism_. Ann Arbor edition, 1961):

"The organisation of labour is in its essence the organisation of the new society: every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organisation of labour" (p. 133.)

"The creation of a socialist society means the organisation of the workers on new foundations, their adaptation to those foundations and their labour re-education, with the one unchanging end of the increase in the productivity of labour". (p. 146)

"Wages, in the form of both money and goods, must be brought into the closest possible touch with the productivity of individual labour. Under capitalism the system of piecework and of grading, the application of the Taylor system, etc., have as their object to increase the exploitation of the workers by the squeezing out of surplus value. Under socialist production, piecework, bonuses, etc., have as their problem to increase the volume of the social product . . . those workers who do more for the general interest than others receive the right to a greater quantity of the social product than the lazy, the careless and the disorganisers". (p. 149)

"The very principle of compulsory labour is for the Communist quite unquestionable .. . the only solution to economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labour power - an almost inexhaustible reservoir - and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilisation and utilisation". (p. 135)

"The introduction of compulsory labour service is unthinkable without the application, to a greater or lesser degree, of the methods of militarisation of labour". (p. 137)

"The unions should discipline the workers and teach them to place the interests of production above their own needs and demands". "The young Workers' State requires trade unions not for a struggle for better conditions of labour - that is the task of the social and state organisations as a whole - but to organise the working class for the ends of production". (p. 143) "

It would be a most crying error to confuse the question as to the supremacy of the proletariat with the question of boards of workers at the head of factories. The dictatorship of the proletariat is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production, in the supremacy over the whole soviet mechanism of the collective will of the workers and not at all in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered". (p.162)

"I consider that if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent. most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner and much less painfully". (p. 162)

"We have been more than once accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of our own Party. . . In this substitution of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class..." (p. 107)



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"They [the workers' opposition] have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy! . . The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship . . . regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class . . . The dictatorship does not base itself at every moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy."
Trotsky, 10th Party Congress, 1921.



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Trotsky's speech 30. March 1920 at the 9th party congress

"If we seriously speak of planned economy, which is to acquire its unity of purpose from the center, when labor forces are assigned in accordance with the economic plan at the given stage of developement, the working masses cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers". In the same speech, he says "Deserters from labour ought to to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps".
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I must say that I am not familiar with this. Maybe someone who is could give us more info about the matter.

comradely,

[Daymare17]

We shouldn't paint Trotsky as some kind of bubbly-sparkly, happy-land "democrat" as I think some comrades here do, even though I understand that many comrades want to "bend the stick the other way" from the Stalinists.

Trotsky was definitely a man of force, of open class dictatorship, and he would not hesitate to use this dictatorship in the long-term interest of the working class "even if that dictatorship clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy". However the one little detail which every moralist conveniently forgets is that Trotsky was guided at every step by concern for the general well being of the proletariat in the shape of international socialism. These people never understand that the class war is continually raging everywhere, and that real happiness can only come by as a product of the most terrible sufferings: Revolution and civil war on a world scale. All morality that fails to take this into consideration, is bunk.

There, I said it.

Check out this article by Emma Goldman, it is a reply to Trotsky's "Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt". It's also a classic example of anarchist-idealist thick-headedness :D

Trotsky Protests Too Much

If a minority out of ignorance or malevolence - it doesn't matter - pursues a course that threatens the entire Revolution with the spectre of capitalist resurgence, and cannot be convinced by force of argument, then a revolutionary government worthy of its name will have to neutralise this minority, even if it consists of workers and peasants. Anything less would be betrayal of the revolution.

Ignorant and miserable anarchists and pacifists have never had to make such terrible decisions: they are drawing-room "revolutionaries", operating on the basis of abstract principles, without the least conception of what revolution really demands. Whenever they by chance find themselves at the head of the working masses, they inevitably wreck the whole movement with their silly "principles" (example: Spain!) I'm not saying that I'm a veteran revolutionist but at least I have some idea of what should be done ;)

The difference between Trotsky and Stalin is that one was completely ruthless in the defence of the proletarian revolution and without hesitation destroyed all obstacles in its path, while the other was just as ruthless in the defence of the privileges of a parasitic bureaucracy. That is the fundamental difference.

[marx_was_right]

A good post!

[T.K.A.-Denmark]

Yeh I agree with the points made. Exellent post

[turnoviseous]

Good post Daymare!

Ignorant and miserable anarchists and pacifists have never had to make such terrible decisions: they are drawing-room "revolutionaries", operating on the basis of abstract principles, without the least conception of what revolution really demands. Whenever they by chance find themselves at the head of the working masses, they inevitably wreck the whole movement with their silly "principles" (example: Spain!) I'm not saying that I'm a veteran revolutionist but at least I have some idea of what should be done.

Well, actually anarchists would have to apply same principles, as those of marxists, if not worse in practice, because of material conditions. Makhno, which is viewed by anarchists as an example Russian anarchist from the bolshevik era, used very authoritarian measures. I am discussing this matter with Rob Lyon at the moment, so I can´t tell you a lot about it at the moment.

The main flaw of anarchism is its idealist interpretation of history, its all flaws come from this and end at it.

[Daymare17]

Look here turno for what the classic Anarchists did in the Spanish revolution.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1938/1938-spain01.htm

Section 7: Role Of The Anarchists.