The essence of War Communism [1918-1921] was that we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses, and sometimes not only the surpluses, but part of the grain the peasant needed for food. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the worker.—Vladimir Lenin [1]
Every communist intellectual, no matter how humanistically educated, has an ethical Achilles’ Heel. C. L. R. James was no exception. For years, I’ve been fascinated by his story and ideas. (Feel free to search his name on this site.) Every so often, however, I splash my face with cold water to remind myself of the horrors that James shut out of view (when he didn’t rationalize them outright). If I’ve created the impression that I’m starry-eyed over an intellectual’s literary achievement at the expense of flesh-and-blood victims of the policies he owned, then I must counter that impression.
In the mid-1930s, James was an apologist for Lenin and Trotsky’s “War
Communism,”[2] i.e., bloody totalitarian dictatorship, including their suppression of the revolutionary sailors at the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921.[3] That is, the Pan Africanist James sided with a social system as evil as the one that had enslaved Robert Alexander James, his grandfather, in the New World.
After creating the Red Army, Trotsky introduced into factories and fields an army’s characteristic regimentation of labor, thereby helping to install new slave masters to replace Russian serfdom’s. Some socialists noticed. As Paul Avrich, cited in the first note above, wrote:
Menshevik leaders compared the new regimentation to Egyptian slavery, when the Pharaohs used forced labor to build the pyramids. Compulsion, they insisted, would achieve no more success in industry than in agriculture.[4]
Avrich cites Soviet scholar James Bunyan whose labors have unearthed the most damning of indictments of Trotsky regarding compulsory labor, the moral equivalent of slavery:[5]
The first stage of the Bolshevik blueprint for “laying the foundations of socialism”—the nationalization of industry—was nearing completion, and an elaborate network of administration . . . was ready to take full charge of industrial production. Labor, however, was the critical bottleneck in the realization of the Communist’s economic goals . . . .
Resort to material incentives was precluded by the severe shortages of food and other consumers’ goods. Nor was there a willingness to follow a course of slow, incremental improvement by which food and other necessities could be furnished to induce skilled workers to return to the cities and to offer incentives to higher productivity in labor. Flushed by their victories in the civil war and impatient to resolve the manpower crisis, the Bolshevik leaders apparently were emboldened to widen the sporadic measures of labor compulsion that had been enacted during 1919.
It was against this background that the strategy of labor militarization was evolved, and this strategy ushered in a new phase in Russia’s internal revolution—with accompanying pressures on the masses of the people for the speedy realization of the Communist economic and social order. The decision was made to centralize the entire economy.[6]
There was no sleepwalking into this slavery. Bunyan continues:
In industry, a vast mobilization of labor, on military lines, was undertaken. The industrial plan was formulated in an elaborate set of regulations that had been decreed toward the end of January, 1920-in the form of “theses” the Party Central Committee had adopted. . . . [T]he sporadic and piecemeal levies on labor that had been enacted during the previous period were greatly extended and consolidated under one agency . . . Successive decrees of [these agencies] . . . broadened the application of forced labor to encompass almost the entire population of Russia. The militarization campaign was accompanied by a deluge of propaganda and exhortation. Government decrees provided severe penalties against persons who were charged with failing to carry out the compulsory-labor regulations. Such persons were called “deserters on the labor front.” The leading role in formulating the policy of labor militarization was played by Leon Trotsky.
Yes, the humanistically educated People’s Commissar of War and Chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council of the Republic. His 24-point plan to liberate Russia from economic chaos was published in Pravda. Bunyan writes:
Trotsky’s basic idea consisted of applying military methods in the economic field and of turning the entire population of Russia into a vast army of labor. The workers were to be “militarized”; that is, tied down to jobs they could not leave without the permission of high authorities. Any shirking of duty or unauthorized absence from work was to be punished on the same basis as desertion from the army.[7]
That is, summary execution. There was pushback from Trotsky comrades on the pages of that Communist organ, but the author of The Russian Revolution, the book that made James a Marxist[8], prevailed over them:
When—on January 12, 1920—Trotsky’s proposals came up for informal consideration by the Communist faction of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, Lenin was the only speaker (except for Trotsky ) who defended military methods for handling the labor problem. From the sixty or seventy members who were present at the meeting of the faction, Trotsky’s program of militarization received only two favorable votes.
The first document that follows [excerpted below] is Trotsky’s exposition of his theory of compulsory labor, as it appeared in his book, Terrorism and Communism. The second document is a greatly enlarged and modified version of his original theses, which were accepted by the Party Central Committee and then promulgated as official Soviet policy on January 22, 1920.[9]
I invite the reader to peruse passages from Trotsky’s Terrorizm i Kommunizm that Bunyan excerpted, or read the unexpurgated version on a frankly Marxist site.[10] Here are a few salient sentences:
The only proper and practical solution of the economic difficulties is to view the population of the entire country as a reservoir of labor power—almost an inexhaustible source—and to introduce strict order into the registration, mobilization, and utilization of that labor power . . . .
The introduction of compulsory labor is inconceivable without the use, in one form or another, of the methods of militarization of labor. The foundations for the militarization of labor are the forms of state compulsion without which the replacement of the capitalist economy by a socialist system will forever remain an empty sound.[11]
An almost inexhaustible source of labor power. Is that not how the European powers viewed Africa?
The takeaway is that the horrors of War Communism predate Stalin’s genocidal command and control of society and economy. He introduced new personnel, but nothing new in principle. It’s what the humanistically erudite Trotsky helped create with Lenin and the fantasy that seduced no less erudite James, the scholar of New World slave revolts.
In the early Cold War anthology The God That Failed—to which Richard Wright, another subject of this series, contributed—as Louis Fischer (1896-1970) pressed the Kronstadt rebellion into service as a metaphor for events
that proved to be too much to swallow for faithful Stalinists like himself. Until a certain straw broke the back of their ideological camel, however, there was no Communist aggression that these true believers wouldn’t defend, e.g., the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the book’s introduction, Crossman wrote:
The Kronstadt rebels called for Soviet power free from Bolshevik dominance. After describing the actual Kronstadt rebellion, Fischer spent many pages applying the concept to some subsequent former communists—including himself: “What counts decisively is the ‘Kronstadt.’ Until its advent, one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether in one’s mind, and yet refuse to attack it. I had no ‘Kronstadt’ for many years.”
Kronstadt itself never became James’s “Kronstadt,” that is, it never moved him to question his commitment to communism. He regarded the rebels as libertarian, ultra-leftist fools. You can’t have Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” without a revolution, and the rebels threatened the viability of the October edition, so James rationalized the betrayal of its ideals.
I cannot recommend too highly an essay by Marxist scholar Matthew Quest, whom I knew in 2013 when I was working on my James-Aptheker article for the C. L. R. James Journal[12] (and who helped prepare it for publication).[13] Quest writes:
One can’t help but see James as “the sophisticated revolutionary” who refers to Kronstadt as “a tragic necessity” after a close reading of his World Revolution and The Black Jacobins. For James, the quarrel over the events of Kronstadt in 1921 represented more than a historical instance of direct democracy or workers’ self-management challenging state power. It was an event which could be used, and was by defenders of the capitalist world system, to call into question not merely Stalinism, but “the whole Marxist-Leninist heritage.”
Which questioning we cordially encourage. But let us hear at length this Marxist revolutionary who, at least on one level, is arguably writing against interest:
James often inquired about the spontaneous and instinctive qualities of working people and repeatedly extended the implications of their elemental drive toward self-government. But never has James placed before his audiences direct democratic political statements by self-emancipating workers. Kronstadt was his opportunity. The Sailors had a political statement that was so vivid it put fear in the heart of Lenin’s regime—it actually advocated “a Third Revolution.” . . .
The Kronstadt Sailors called for immediate new elections to the Soviets (the “popular” councils), which they boldly stated under a police state no longer expressed the wishes of workers and peasants. . . . The sailors called for all sectors of the military to associate with this and other resolutions. They called for the secret ballot and insisted the vote should be after a period of free political propaganda of all Left parties, all of whom, besides the Bolsheviks, were suppressed. . . .
The Sailors called for a stop to the Bolshevik monopoly of the press and finances to spread political ideas. . . . A Commission was called for to look into those detained in “concentration camps” as distinct from a demand that all political prisoners from Left Parties were to be released immediately.
The Sailors exposed the premise of the Russian Revolution, under Lenin’s regime, as a consolidation of the revolt against value production itself sponsored by the state . . . and called for an equality of wages, save for those workers who toiled in unsanitary or dangerous conditions. Ida Mett, a scholar of Kronstadt, reminded us that this also placed out in the open the lie by Trotsky that the Sailors wanted privileges while the masses went hungry . . . . The Sailors underlined that the peasants’ self-government over their own land was to be restored, with sovereignty over their own soil and cattle, as well as small handicraft artisans, provided they didn’t employ wage labor. . . .
Paul Avrich, perhaps the most definitive scholar of the Kronstadt Sailors, argued that Lenin, in contrast to the repeated claims by CLR James of Lenin’s affinity for workers’ self-activity, repeatedly distrusted the spontaneous actions of independent labor. Lenin feared that “organs of local democracy” could end up advocating and sustaining any type of politics. While that was true, Avrich explains fairly the Sailors did not defend a historical retreat to more conservative politics as they were falsely accused by the state. . . . They were for direct democracy and had no use for representative government—something James embraced in the Hungarian workers but not for the Kronstadt Sailors.
All James could see in Kronstadt was a tragic dilemma for a revolutionary statesman. He thought Lenin was bound to crush this rebellion. Then the Bolsheviks could admit some past mistakes, institute economic reforms which would let the state retreat into a more free capitalist market and continue to suppress direct democratic expressions of labor. This became James’s model for the conflict between Toussaint and Moise in the Haitian Revolution and his justification for the suppression of independent labor among the ex-slaves at the post-colonial, post-abolition moment.
. . . James could be subtle and concerned with ethical dilemmas in his public career. Yet, particularly in his writing of World Revolution, 1917–1936 and The Black Jacobins, it may take several readings to understand better what is at stake. However, if one reads the marginalia in his personal copy of R.V. Daniels’s The Conscience of the Revolution, one of the first scholarly studies of the Russian Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century to highlight the conflict between the Bolshevik state and workers’ self-management, it is clear that James was hostile to any notion that Lenin’s state should not be defended against accusations of dictatorship—even when it suppressed self-managing workers.
Daniels explained that when Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to retreat from the extremes of War Communism, the economic plan which desired to abolish the market by military means, “the party leadership found doctrinaire criticism from the Ultra-Left intolerable.” James wrote in the margins of his book “fool!” expressing impulsively that Daniels, to his mind, did not understand the art of social revolution. . . .
Given the state of popular discontent, an admission by the government that the Kronstadters had a case that could be discussed might have brought the Soviet regime crashing down everywhere. It was essential above all for the Communist Party to suppress the idea of Kronstadt as a movement which defended the principles of the October Revolution against the Communists—the idea of the ‘third revolution.’
James writes in the margins “quite thus always.” He seems to confirm what we find in his commentary on Kronstadt in his The Black Jacobins many years before—there is agreement with Daniels that the Kronstadt Sailors were “ultra left”—a pejorative term—and they would have had no basis for projecting their proposals if Lenin had pushed reforms through sooner.[14] Within the Bolshevik Party, it was permissible for Lenin and the leadership to acknowledge “mistakes” but these were mistakes of administration not of intention. One could not permit any attacks on the authority of the Bolshevik government—for it embodied the revolution, not the workers’ actual thoughts and action after state power was seized. . .
So not only did the meaning of Kronstadt have to be suppressed by the Bolsheviks but in a certain respect it had to be denied by CLR James in his public political thought. James thus is annoyed with Daniels and writes “fool” again in the margins, where he discusses in public, “from the standpoint of the party leadership, such explosive criticism had to be disarmed permanently.” James is satisfied with the strategic issues being documented, but not the implied evaluation, for Daniels appeared to criticize the Bolsheviks too much for James, though Daniels’s historical perspective was clearly that he still wanted them to succeed in retaining state power.
As the events of Kronstadt transpired, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), the father of modern Austrian economics, was putting finishing touches on his magisterial Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. He showed that would-be socialist planners cannot rationally calculate how much to produce of anything—or even whether to produce it at all. Why? Because the motive to produce stems not from the demand for privately owned goods and services competing for customers on markets, but rather from a dogmatically held ethical imperative.
Socialism is as foolish in theory as it is hellish in practice, but that truth was beneath the notice of C. L. R. James, the great anti-Stalinist theoretician of Marxism-Leninism. We should not forget, when evaluating historical figures, that anti-Stalinism is a rather low ethical bar to clear.
Our once-great universities are now lousy with fools who believe the same things James believed but without the charm.
Notes
[1] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [complete works], 5th edition, 55 volumes, Moscow, 1958-1965, Volume XLIII, 219, as cited in (and translated by) Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, Princeton University Press, 1970, 9. Lenin could have written this no later than May 1922, when he suffered his first debilitating stroke.
[2] See, C. L. R. James’s 1937, World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, Chapter 5, “Lenin and Socialism,” text available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/world/ch05.htm The 2021 reprint is available here.
[3] See Amos Chapple’s profusely illustrated “Shot Like Partridges: The Crushing of the Kronstadt Uprising,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 28, 2021.
[4] Avrich, 26-27.
[5] James Bunyan, The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union, 1917-1921, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967, 89ff., 135-136. Chapter III, “The Militarization of Labor,” is available as a PDF; clicking on that link will download it. There is an updated edition of this indispensable study, published in co-operation with Stanford’s Hoover Institution, suffused with documentary material translated for the first time.
[6] Bunyan, 89-90.
[7] Bunyan, 91.
[8] See earlier in this series “The seeds of C. L. R. James’s critical awakening: from Chesterton’s A Short History of England to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution,” May 22, 2025.
[9] Bunyan, 92.
[10] Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, Chapter 8, “Problems of the Organization of Labor. The Soviet Government and Industry,” subsection “Compulsory Labor Service.”
[11] Bunyan, 93.
[12] Anthony Flood, “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man,” C. L. R. James Journal. Clicking the link will download a PDF. A corrected revised version forms the third chapter of my 2019 self-published Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.
[13] Matthew Quest, “Silences on the suppression of workers self-emancipation: historical problems with CLR James’s interpretation of V.I. Lenin,” libcom.org. This penetrating reflection was written for (the apparently defunct site) Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice and submitted to libcom.org by Mike Harman on November 6, 2017.
[14] See James’s 1938 The Black Jacobins, Vintage edition, 1989, 282-288.