The Perestroika that could be but was aborted

Fascinating first-person narration by Prof. Buzgalin, back then a young Marxist enthusiast who tried, with some success, to push for a real democratic collectivism in the late USSR.

Part of a series of 12 episodes on the collapse of the USSR that you can watch at The Real News.

A communist criticism of Lenin

Rosa Luxemburg

The Commune publishes today a quite interesting article by Barry Bidulph which criticizes Lenin's alleged authoritarianism without mercy. I'm not too knowledgeable of the historical details, so I cannot subscribe nor reject the Bidulph's educated opinion, but I can't but agree that it makes for a very interesting read, very especially in this time and age in which the need to reinvent Communism is more so important for the very future of our species:

In “Left Wing” Communism an Infantile Disorder, Lenin could not have made his core organisational values more explicit: centralism and iron discipline. From putting the lid on the opposition in 1921, with a ban on factions, all the way back to bureaucratic centralism in One Step Forward Two Steps Back, and Letter to a Comrade, in 1904, there was a consistent approach in which democratic methods were not considered to be essential, but regarded as dispensable in circumstances the leader considered to be appropriate for top down authority to be loyally followed.


Simon quite rightly disagrees with a factional approach, which aims for splits, and regards disunity as normal, based on a conviction of an absolutely correct programme and policies. But this was the Iskra culture from which Bolshevism arose. It was factional through and through: the faction acting as the Party. Polemics were meant to destroy the persons credibility, not seek the truth. This included false accusations. As Vladimir Akimov remembers, in Dilemma’s of  Russian Marxism,  Lenin dishonestly claimed  Rebochee Delo and himself were  economists.(1) Leaders of other tendencies of the Russian Social Democratic Labour  Party, were seen in factional terms, as rivals.  In contrast, in the introduction to Simon’s piece, it is asserted that ‘Bolshevism emerged out of an attempt to build broad parties which allowed a diverse number of tendencies to coexist within a common political project’.  It’s not clear how this understanding emerged.

Bolshevism, as a tendency, came to light following the 1903 congress and in effect as a party in 1912. In neither instance could the ‘project’ be remotely described as a broad church. On the contrary it could not have been more narrow and factional. Lenin was virtually alone with a few followers following 1903. The congress was an émigré  squabble; cats fighting in a sack. Lenin admitted he spent the entire congress in a frenzy. There were no programmatic differences. Trotsky the future leader of the revolution in 1905 and 1917 was against Lenin. Plekhanov, who was against both revolutions, was on Lenin’s side. The faction fighting and name calling created an atmosphere in which there was no respect for personalities or decisions. Lenin’s majority on the editorial board election which triggered the split in the RSDLP was due to anti Iskra comrades leaving the congress and had an accidental character. The formal majority quickly became the minority after the Congress. In Prague in 1912, Lenin in effect captured the RSDLP for the Bolsheviks, excluding many future leaders of the October Revolution.

Simon Hardy regards Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin’s organisational methods misplaced; but the misunderstanding seems to be Simon’s. Simon warns against the dangers of inflexible forms of organisation, deduced in an unproblematic way from theory. But this is precisely the point made by Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky in their critique of Lenin in 1904, in Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy [Leninism or Marxism] and Our Political Tasks. Lenin not only advocated bureaucracy against democracy, and centralism against local autonomy, but identified revolutionary principle with this top down approach which extended the rights and powers of the centre over the parts ignoring organisational democracy. He regarded a grass-roots approach from the rank and file up, as a form of opportunism.(2)

This organisational dogma is often justified and glossed over by use of the phrase, ‘bending the stick’. Lenin used an organisational trick of exaggeration to overemphasize the key task. But a bent stick is distorted and distortion leads to a dissociation from reality and a false tradition. Another defence of Lenin is to argue that a powerful party centre was essential for effectiveness in an autocratic regime. But the problem with this is, if it is penetrated by a state agent, (Malinovsky) all the information about the organisation is shared by the state . No organisational form is spy proof. In any case, even if bureaucratic centralism was somehow necessary, due to specific circumstances, why make a virtue of necessity? Why not stand for as much democracy and local autonomy as possible? Police repression in Russia existed in 1896, but it did not stop the decentralised mass work of the so-called economists.

Simon seems to share Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s rejection of making a fetish of  discipline. Lenin invoked factory discipline for the Bolsheviks, conflating capitalist technology and authority with socialist collectivism and even dragging in military discipline and the soldiers mentality, as a model for the party member, literally the rank and file, in One Step Forward Two Steps back. (3) Luxemburg and Trotsky stressed arousing the spirit of rebellion against mind numbing capitalist industrial work and discipline, rather than the sterile spirit of the overseer. (4) Any discipline had meaning only in the sense of self-discipline of the individual and the class for a just cause, not in unthinking loyalty to a leadership. After the October Revolution, Lenin returned to  value factory discipline, one man management and respect for capitalist technology and the division of labour that flowed from it. Most of the factions banned by Lenin in 1921 made the same points, any organisation should be rooted in working class initiative, energy and creativity.  Instead of anchoring  the organisation in the self-activity of working class, Lenin located the party in a stable leadership team who could somehow be the custodians for the socialist future.

... continue reading at The Commune.

Fire breaks out at nuclear facility at Moscow

A so-called 'non-operational' nuclear reactor is hosted in the research facility where the fire broke out, in the outskirts of Russia's capital city. While authorities deny any risk or radiation leak, fire crews were not allowed in. 

The reactor, the first one ever built in the former USSR, had been shut down, it's claimed, on December 25th. No casualties are reported.

Source: Bellona (via EneNews).

I find kind of odd that since I have my attention focused on nuclear matters, that is: since Fukushima catastrophe on March 2011, I have been reading (and in most cases reporting) on way too many accidents and risk situations in nuclear facilities, very specially in the USA (but also some in Europe). If this is the normal situation, specially as power stations age, then it is absolutely miraculous that only three major accidents have happened (allegedly) in what is going on of nuclear age. With so many minor accidents happening each day, there should be a major one every few years at the most. 

And, of course, a Chernobyl/TML/Fukushima every few years (or even every few centuries) is not a price that Humankind can pay for anything. 

It's just mad power mongering by your usual recurrent villains, who are not distinct as your rulers or corporate masters. After all it's mad-level power for mad elites.

Do you even remember M.A.D.?

Japanese officials run away from peaceful Fukushima citizens demanding tests, evacuation (video)

The Soviet Union evacuated 24,000 children in few days, why can't Japan evacuate Fukushima?

Are the lives of the bureaucrats in Tokyo more important than those of the people of Fukushima?

Video in Japanese with English subtitles. Found at Energy News.

Fukushima city would have been evacuated by Chernoby standards

Very disturbing RT video report from Greenpeace volunteers on the actual levels of radiation at Fukushima city and how the Japanese government is forcing people to keep with their lives as if nothing happened:

This is exactly the same as saying that the Japanese authorities are sacrificing much of its people to the Moloch of the Nuclear Industry. Oddly enough it demonstrates the superiority of the Soviet system, with all its cons, over the purely Capitalist way of organization. Ultimately it is the same as comparing how Cuba and the USA react before hurricanes: in Cuba orderly evacuations take place and it is extremely rare that anybody dies, in the USA it is everyone by himself... and people die often.

Found via Energy News. 

See also Greenpeace - International - Nuclear.

Excellent documentary on Chernobyl

Must watch. This prime quality documentary contains lots of information that you and I and everyone on Earth should know about the terrible reality of a nuclear catastrophe:

Importantly (c. min 34) we are informed of an extreme danger that existed when the molten cores penetrated under the reactor (China syndrome). Tons of lead (itself poisonous but not radioactive) had to be used to cool the fire and seal the breaches in the concrete floor, otherwise the radioactive lava would have reached the water table and caused a gigantic explosion of 3 to 5 megatons that would have destroyed everything in 300 km around and rendered Europe uninhabitable. 

This same danger looms at Fukushima today, because all three cores have melted down and have broken the reactor's container, creating three China syndromes of unknown consequences. 

Among many other interesting, sometimes epic but often tragic, facts, by the end of the film we are also informed of how, while Glasnost USSR was eventually reporting transparently to the IAE, the resistance to publicly acknowledge the truth came from the West, notably France, which resorted to all kind of lies to pretend that it had magically evaded the effects of Chernobyl (actually there were people in Corsica and other places which were affected as much as people in Belarus and Ukraine). 

The forecast (estimate) of 400,000 mortal victims was reduced to 40,000 at the IAE meeting and eventually this figure became the official figure of Chernobyl-related casualties. It is an arbitrary (and surely very low) hunch because no serious official follow-up research has been undertaken since the USSR collapsed in 1991. So good for democracy.

Found at Energy News.


Related: TEPCO to build sarcophagus around Fukushima reactors, though unsure how much it will contain radiation (Telegraph).  It will take years and will be built with robot machines. Robots were a failure in Chernobyl because their circuits were destroyed by radiation (humans had to be used instead, many died or have been crippled since). It is unclear why Japan would need years for a job that the Soviets did in just months - but it is also unclear why TEPCO has not yet been intervened by the state and is taking autonomous decisions at all.

Japan wasting time on Fukushima

Japan has been and still is wasting time in Fukushima, instead of confronting the most serious catastrophe in Japanese and maybe all Human history it is avoiding to deal with it, pretending that the problem is much smaller than it really is and trying to stop an elephant with a net for mosquitoes. 

In truth it cannot be blamed only on Japan or the Japanese Government (I don't care about TEPCO: the Government can intervene it whenever they want - they should have done it a month ago in fact) but in all the pro-nuclear governments of the World which are all wishful thinking  and have been wishful thinking for the last 50 or more years. 

Arnie Gunderssen said that in his latest broadcast: that the Nuclear Industry and associated politicians have been in denial for decades, that their worst case scenarios were a joke in comparison with the worst cases we have got in this half century of nuclear power. Talking specifically to the USA (but could apply anywhere else), he said that there must be a freeze of all license renewals. 

The USA actually only gets a slim 8% of its energy needs from nuclear power, so it's pretty much easy to take off and replace... just that the Pentagon needs all those nuclear plants for military reasons: to be able to build and renew that nuclear arsenal able to destroy all relevant life on Earth many times.

But what really evidences how bad is it and how infective is the Japanese government being are the strong criticisms that General Nikolai Antoshkin, who was in charge of the air operation which quelled the Chernobyl monster by means of dropping tons and tons of sand on the deadly reactor (at the cost of the lives of the pilots, who volunteered for the operation in a heroic manner that seems out of fashion, specially among the rats who populate the Nuclear Industry and Nuclear Lobby). 

Antoshkin, quoted in The Telegraph, says that the Japanese authorities reacted in slow motion (indeed they are still doing the same: we all can see that). He seems annoyed that in advanced Japan, people, refugees from a natural and nuclear disaster, are cramped in sport facilities. One would expect something better from he third largest economy on Earth, an economic, technological and cultural powerhouse. And one would have expected also a much more effective reaction. 

But no. I have lost all the respect I could ever have regarding Japan with this matter. Of course, Fukushima is an unprecedented monster but the reaction from Tokyo has been pathetic, insultingly bad, criminally slow and specially a continuous denial of reality. 

Reality is stubborn, we know. And the leaders of Japan should have known as well. One of the problems is that instead of the government ruling on TEPCO (even manu militari if need be) it seems it is TEPCO who is ruling on the government. That could be ok if TEPCO knew what it is doing but they are obviously not any more capable than the government of the Japanese state.

So who is really in charge? I do not know but this guy, Masataka Shimizu, seems the main boss of TEPCO:

He looks a bit scary admittedly. Unlike his supposed political boss, Naoto Kan, who instead looks pitifully powerless in spite of holding the, nominally, most powerful office in the whole Empire of Japan.

However Shimizu seems to have been ill since March 13 (what a coincidence!), so the headlessness of the whole authority network is even more aggravating.

On an apart, something I find odd (now looking at Kan's file) is that all these people in power are born in the 1940s and so... they are true dinosaurs! I would expect people born in the 60s or at most in the 50s... these people are just too old. Over 60 y.o. should not be allowed to hold charge, either political nor private: it's unwise. And more people in their 30s and 40s should be leading, really.

But anyhow. This is just a hurried review of the most important industrial catastrophe ever. It does not just dwarf Chernobyl, but the Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal... 

I cannot meditate on every single detail or facet of this overwhelming brutality, For that, I recommend you to follow Energy News. 

But I do hope that, somehow, the pro-Nuclear activists from around the World sacrifice their lives (if need be) to quell this nuclear disaster. I reckon that it is even more complex than Chernobyl but Japan is not less powerful in principle than the USSR was, so it should be able to at least contain it somehow. 

What I reject is that a single innocent life (children typically) is lost instead of that of a greedy Pro-Nuclear businessman, journalist, technician or politician... These should shield with their bodies the new generations if need be because theirs is the only fault.