A review of Maurice Brinton’s For Workers Power
By Tom Wetzel
I was attracted to radical politics in the late 1960s/early ’70s when I was in my twenties. Most of the people who were drawn to serious revolutionary politics back then ended up in Leninist organizations of some sort, if only for a time. Third World revolutions were one influence. Various Marxist-Leninist parties had come to power based on guerrilla struggles, in places like China and Cuba, and this augmented the claim of Leninism that it was “successful” in charting a way to a post-capitalist future.
But it seemed obvious to me that workers did not have power in production in the various Communist countries. They’re subordinated to a managerial hierarchy. Thus, I reasoned, workers must be a subjugated and exploited class in those countries.
A work I found particularly helpful in the ’70s was Maurice Brinton’s The Bolsheviks and Workers Control. This clear-headed and well-researched little book was an indispensable source of arguments to explode the myth of the Bolshevik party building “proletarian power” in Russia. AK Press has now re-issued this booklet as part of an anthology, For Workers Power. Brinton was the main writer for the London libertarian socialist group Solidarity. This anthology collects in one place many of Brinton’s writings, including The Irrational in Politics and Paris: May 1968. In this review I’ll mainly focus on the Russian revolution. (more…)
