What happened during the Russian Revolution?
). Even more ironically, Harman argues that the Stalinist bureaucracy became a ruling class in 1928 when it implemented the first five year plan. This industrialisation was provoked by military competition with the west, which forced the “drive to accumulate” which caused the bureaucracy to attack “the living standards of peasants and workers.” He quotes Stalin: “to slacken the pace (of industrialisation) would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten . . . We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do so or they crush us.” Moreover, the “environment in which we are placed . . . at home and abroad . . . compels us to adopt a rapid rate of industrialisation.” [Harman, Op. Cit., pp. 15-6] Given that this was exactly the same argument as Trotsky in 1927, it seems far from clear that the “Left Opposition” presented any sort of alternative to Stalinism. After all, the “Left Opposition took the stand that large-scale new investment was imperative, especially in heavy i
, the Bolsheviks had disbanded soviets elected with non-Bolshevik majorities all across Russia and suppressed the resulting working class protest. In Moscow, workers also organised a “Conference” movement and “[r]esentment against the Bolsheviks was expressed through strikes and disturbances, which the authorities treated as arising from supply difficulties, from ‘lack of consciousness,’ and because of the ‘criminal demagogy’ of certain elements. Lack of support for current Bolshevik practices was treated as the absence of worker consciousness altogether, but the causes of the unrest was more complicated. In 1917 political issues gradually came to be perceived through the lens of party affiliation, but by mid-1918 party consciousness was reversed and a general consciousness of workers’ needs restored. By July 1918 the protest movement had lost its momentum in the face of severe repression and was engulfed by the civil war.” In the light of the fate of workers’ protest, the May 16th res
