thoughts on bolshevism

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HR: Your father1 belonged to the relatively little known tradition of council communism that was born after the First World War. What was, briefly, their analysis of the nature of Bolshevism?
PM: I would say that the basic analysis was that Bolshevism re- presented, as Lenin originally described it in his first writings, a revolutionary variant of social democracy, that is to say, social democracy in what are now called third world conditions, conditions of a very early stage of capitalism or nearly a pre- capitalist situation, in which the left-wing party, the social democratic party, could not even think of practically working to produce a socialist revolution, but had first to fulfill the function which the bourgeoisie was unable to fulfill in a backward country, and produce a capitalist system. So I would say that their fundamental analysis of Bolshevism was that it is the ideology of the development of a form of capitalism in parts of the world in which the slow development such as took place in England between, say, the 15th and the 19th century was no longer possible, making use of an ideology derived from social democracy as a kind of cover for the actual creation of a form of wage labor and a form of capitalist relationships. There were many disagreements within what we could call the council communist or ultra-left position. For instance, some people believed very literally that a country like the Soviet Union should be analyzed as a form directly of capitalism, and that the state planning form was really a fairly superficial difference, that what was essential was the relation between wage labor and capital, and that the capital should be concentrated in the hands of the state rather than dispersed among private entrepreneurs was a relatively unimportant difference. My father disagreed with that and believed that this represented a novel form of capitalism, that the absence of the dispersion of capital among private entrepreneurs and its concentration in the hands of the state represented a novelty, a new form.2 I'm actually very sorry that he's not alive at the moment, because I think that this question has to be discussed at the present time, whether it wasn't a mistake of all the people, members of this ultra-left current, among whom I would include myself, to think of the Bolshevik form, the centralized, state controlled economy, as a new form, which we should think of as coming after capitalism, as representing, say, a logical end point of the tendency to monopolization and centralization of capital, which is a feature of all private property capitalist systems, Instead, it seems to really have been a kind of preparation for capitalist, development, a pre-capitalist form, if you want. But nonetheless, the essential point of the critique was that Bolshevism, which claimed to be acting in the name of the working class, could not have been any such thing since the majority of the Russian population at the time of the Bolshevik revolution wasn't a proletarian population, but a peasant population, and that in practice the historical project of the Bolshevik Party was to organize the expropriation of the peasantry and the production of a wage earning proletariat in the Soviet Union, but one which was set against not, as I said, a group of private entrepreneurs, but the state functioning as the repository of the total social capital.