about
For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social democracy had engaged in an unresolved debate over all the conditions that might bear on the overthrow of Czarism — the weakness of the bourgeoisie; the preponderance of the peasant majority; and the potentially decisive role of a proletariat which was concentrated and combative but which constituted only a small minority of the population. This debate was eventually resolved in practice by a factor that had not figured in any of the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy that placed itself at the head of the proletariat, seized state power and proceeded to impose a new form of class domination. A strictly bourgeois revolution had been impossible; talk of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” was meaningless verbiage; and the proletarian power of the soviets could not simultaneously maintain itself against the class of small landowners, against the national and international White reaction, and against its own representation which had become externalized and alienated in the form of a working-class party that maintained total control over the state, the economy, the means of expression, and soon even over people’s thoughts. Trotsky’s and Parvus’s theory of permanent revolution, which Lenin adopted in April 1917, was the only theory that proved true for countries with underdeveloped bourgeoisies; but it became true only after the unknown factor of bureaucratic class power came into the picture. In the numerous arguments within the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin was the most consistent advocate of concentrating dictatorial power in the hands of this supreme ideological representation. Lenin was right every time in the sense that he invariably supported the solution implied by earlier choices of the minority that now exercised absolute power: the democracy that was kept from peasants by means of the state would have to be kept from workers as well, which led to denying it to Communist union leaders and to party members in general, and finally to the highest ranks of the party hierarchy. At the Tenth Congress, as the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried under a barrage of slander, Lenin attacked the radical-left bureaucrats who had formed a “Workers’ Opposition” faction with the following ultimatum, the logic of which Stalin would later extend to an absolute division of the world: “You can stand here with us, or against us out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some opposition. . . . We’ve had enough opposition.”
lyrics
The blade falls to the wood, and the red rivers run
The blade falls to the wood, did you think something else could happen
We’ve been surrounded, a thousand guns, a thousand prying eyes
We’ve been surrounded, the prying eyes that stab us in the heart
We’ve been surrounded; hope like sailors dashed against the rocks
We’ve been surrounded; the path of roses leads us to the grave
And in this fortress we will die
The state lives in us
And in this water we will drown
The state lives in us
The blade falls to the wood, and my severed head calls out for my body
The blade falls to the wood, and there’s no such thing as remorse
We’ve been surrounded; we wrap our faces up with the black flag
We’ve been surrounded, and with that banner we dry our weeping eyes
We’ve been surrounded; hope like sailors dashed against the rocks
We’ve been surrounded; the path of roses leads us to the grave
We’ve been surrounded, a thousand guns, a thousand crimson flags
We’ve been surrounded; the snow is colored with the blood of wolves
We’ve been surrounded; hope like poison blackening our lungs
We’ve been surrounded; we inhale the perfume of the grave
And in this fortress we will die
The state lives in us
And in this water we will drown
The state lives in us
I refuse this Armageddon…
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