FT turns to Lenin in desperation

Mark Carney isn’t due to move from being governor of the Bank of Canada to governor of the Bank of England until next July. But the intensity of the global economic crisis is so severe that policy makers can’t wait that long.

Chancellor George Osborne, who tempted him here, and the other beleaguered leaders of the capitalist world are prepared to discuss Carney’s ideas and put them into effect as soon as possible – preferably before the likely effects begin to be appreciated by those who’ll suffer the consequences.

Since the global crash in 2007/8, the top financial and economic brains in the world have tried everything they know to bring about a recovery. The shock of seeing the sudden shutdown of the credit markets bringing world trade to a virtual standstill after the decision to abandon Lehman Brothers prompted emergency action.

Governments encouraged central banks to pour trillions of every currency into the world’s financial institutions and, it must be admitted, the treatment had an effect. The patient’s heart was restarted. But capitalism has been on life-support ever since. The system has drawn its energy from the millions suffering the effects of “austerity” – soaring unemployment, falling incomes, smashed up pensions, wrecked health and social care.

Interest rates offered by central banks have been held at historic lows for years now, hovering just above zero – but below inflation, so negative in real terms. Low rates paid to savers mean the few people lucky enough to have any, have seen the income from their savings decline. The majority with debts to service find above inflation rates charged driving them further into poverty. It’s a deliberate policy called “financial repression”.

So what’s Carney’s big idea, and why is it so attractive? Does it really amount to a revolution as the Financial Times suggests?

Put simply, Carney says that its time to turn the attention from keeping inflation at bay to a more positive focus on promoting growth. The new target should be based on “nominal gross domestic product” – which brings growth and inflation together in a single figure.

It’s a way of convincing themselves that governments and their central banks can turn their attention from just rescuing the financial system to “prioritising growth”, by which they mean furthering the interests of the global corporations. It’s a refrain shared by the newly-elected centre-right government of Japan, led by prime minister Shinzo Abe.

But Carney and friends fail to understand that whatever the subjective intentions of the central bankers, or anyone else wishing for a “return to growth”, the objective conditions of the capitalist economy are what determines their actions. After several decades of growth stretched way beyond its natural limits by the deregulation of the credit system, the crash simply announced that the only way is down.

As the capitalist tide ebbs away, it continues to exposes the desperate measures taken to sustain profits, whilst millions suffer. UBS has joined Barclays in paying fines to the regulators for fixing LIBOR – the world price of financial contracts – so that it favoured them and their clients. As the regulators summed it up: “They manipulated UBS’s submissions in order to benefit their own positions and to protect UBS’s reputation, showing a total disregard for the millions of market participants around the world who were also affected.”

No surprise there.

In its article on Carney, the Financial Times actually quotes Lenin’s famous dictum that “a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation” to try to stand up their story. The situation is indeed pregnant with revolutionary possibilities – but not as the FT means. 

In December 1917, Lenin drafted a decree for attention of the revolutionary government. It called for joint-stock companies and the banks to be taken into social ownership. Something to consider over the holidays.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

In praise of Russian revolutionary art

Tate Modern’s exhibition of art from the Russian Revolution has received ecstatic critical acclaim. And rightly so. The two artists in the spotlight, Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov Popova, made paintings and art works which retain their excitement nearly 100 years later.

By limiting the scope of the display to the years 1917-1929 and to the contribution of only two artists, we can appreciate their particular contribution – their freedom and breadth of vision. Initially inspired by Picasso and Braque’s Cubist revolution (in painting), Russian artists took up the baton of abstraction and ran with it. They were lifted up and borne by the triumph of the October socialist revolution of 1917

Rodchenko and Popova and their fellow artists saw even greater possibilities in something that had been confined to artistic creation, and made it part of a social political transformation. The scale of this movement was vast, encompassing all the arts. It became part of a cultural sea change which swept through the young Soviet Union.

A major difference between Paris and what was happening in Russia was the involvement of women artists at the highest level. In this show, Popova is revealed as temporarily greater than Rodchenko in her abilities, although he outlived her by 32 years. And, how unprecedented that of the five artists in the famous 5 x 5 = 25 exhibitions held in Moscow in 1921, three were women.

“The Bolshevik Revolution aimed to transform an entire civilisation, and artists were among the first to show their support,” says the Tate’s handy guide. Contrary to the often churned out prejudice that “revolutions suppress creativity”, here we can see the imagination take off. And from abstract art, Rodchenko and Popova and their colleagues Exter, Vesnin and Stepanova moved seamlessly to designs for textiles, theatre, posters and as well as making photographs and films as they sought to use their talents to transform every day life.

This was not some fantasy world but part of state-sponsored initiatives to lift the country out of back-breaking primitivism. Rodchenko’s design for the cover of Leon Trotsky’s Questions of Everyday Life is on view in Room 9. In this book, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution argued for the emancipation of women from domestic slavery and the introduction of socialised childcare.

The Bolshevik government under Lenin and Trotsky appointed Anatoly Lunacharsky as the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Narkompros. The aim was to encourage artistic diversity and to avoid endorsing any single artistic current or style however “left” it might be. Talented artists such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Tatlin and El Lissitsky were appointed directors of art training in colleges around the country.

In the closing section of the show, the curators note Constructivism was “marginalised” as the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism became the sole approved artistic style of the Soviet Union. One poignant vintage photograph shows Rodchenko together with the young composer Dmitri Shostakovich seated at his piano alongside theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

All four were to have grievous relations with Stalinism in times to come. Their subsequent fate and that of the revolution as a whole does not come within the scope of the exhibition’s timeframe. But those events, terrible as they were, do not detract from the brilliance and glory of that moment after the revolution that was to change the world artistically speaking, as well as socially. The need for contemporary creative and political revolutionary vision, in the spirit of Rodchenko and Popova, goes without saying.


Corinna Lotz
Secretary, A World to Win

Ten days that shook the world

Ninety years ago today, a remarkable series of events began in Russia that would change the course of the 20th century. The first anti-capitalist, workers’ revolution in history was set in motion. Immediately, the new government offered an armistice, carrying out its pledge to withdraw from the slaughter of the First World War.

At 10am on November 7, 1917, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Petrograd Soviet announced the disbanding of the Provisional Government which had taken power after the overthrow of the Tsar earlier in the year but which had continued the war. The MRC’s proclamation, drawn up by Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, read:

“The Provisional Government has been deposed. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies - the Revolutionary Military Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and the garrison. The cause for which the people have fought, namely, the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers' control over production, and the establishment of Soviet power - this cause has been secured.
Long live the revolution of workers, soldiers and peasants!”

The MRC, under the direction of the Bolshevik leader Trotsky, had carried out an insurrection in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), storming the Winter Palace and arresting the government. The next day, Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Congress of Soviets which gathered in Petrograd. Soviet power then spread across Russia. Liberal and monarchist forces, “the Whites” immediately went to war against the Bolshevik’s Red Army, backed by capitalist powers around the world, including Britain.

For a period, the revolution flourished despite the deprivations of the civil war. Revolutionaries from around the world flocked to Russia to join an international movement aimed at overthrowing capitalism in each country. But the failure of the 1918-1919 German Revolution and Lenin’s untimely death in January 1924 became key factors in the rise of a reactionary bureaucracy headed by Stalin. Trotsky and the Left Opposition struggled hard for an alternative, democratic socialist course, but were defeated by the end of the 1920s. The subsequent destruction of the Bolshevik Party, the murder of its leaders in show trials and the perversion of its policies and aims were among the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

A superficial reading of the subsequent history of the 1917 revolution – promoted and perpetuated by the capitalist media and right-wing historians like Orlando Figes – frequently lumps together Bolshevism with Stalin’s reign of terror. In this way, they bury the unique achievements of the revolution and the masses and leaders who made it possible. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is often labelled the “end of communism”.

But the truth is that Stalinism was counter-revolutionary and essentially anti-communist. Lenin and Trotsky always insisted that socialism could never be built in an isolated way in a single country and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which usurped political power from the masses and created a totalitarian state, is proof of this. Gorbachev’s attempt to restore Soviet democracy and restructure the economy, heroic effort though it was, could not undo decades of backwardness or overcome the resistance of die-hard Stalinists. Their failed coup of August 1991 precipitated the collapse of the USSR later that year.

First under Yeltsin and now under Putin, Russia has reverted to a capitalism where oligarchs, who effectively stole the state assets built up during the 90 years of the USSR, hold sway. Yet while the socialist property relations established by the October Revolution have been legally abolished, the legacy of revolution lives on in other forms.

The courage and audacity of the revolutionary masses, and the ability of the Bolshevik Party to seize the time, have gone down forever as a landmark in history, proving that such a change could be made and that decisive leadership was the key. The decision to withdraw Russia from the conflict, helped to bring World War I to an end and inspired millions around the world. The Red Army’s ability to defeat the Nazi war machine in World War II – which was more significant than the fighting on the Western front - was due to the economic achievements of the revolution. The glasnost period of the 1980s opened up a new understanding of the phenomenal opposition to Stalinism.

Let American Communist John Reed, who set down the first major account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, have the last word: “It is fashionable,” he wrote in 1919 “… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an ‘adventure’. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history as the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires… No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism.”

As the global economy lurches into its worst crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929, against a background of climate chaos and military tensions, new political conditions are emerging. The need for humanity to open a new, non-capitalist chapter in history is as urgent a challenge now as it was for the Bolsheviks in 1917.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary