Do anarchists ignore the objective factors facing the Russian revolution?
It is often asserted by Leninists that anarchists simply ignore the “objective factors” facing the Bolsheviks when we discuss the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Thus, according to this argument, anarchists present a basically idealistic analysis of the failure of Bolshevism, one not rooted in the material conditions facing (civil war, economic chaos, etc.) facing Lenin and Trotsky. According to one Trotskyist, anarchists “do not make the slightest attempt at a serious analysis of the situation” and so “other considerations, of a different, ‘theoretical’ nature, are to be found in their works.” Thus: “Bureaucratic conceptions beget bureaucracy just as opium begets sleep by virtue of its sleep-inducing properties. Trotsky was wrong to explain the proliferation and rise of the bureaucracy on the basis of the country’s backwardness, low cultural level, and the isolation of the revolution. No, what have rise to a social phenomenon like Stalinism was a conception or idea . . . it is
