Turn of the wheel

 That State management of industry (if not of the whole economy) established by the Bolsheviks did not lead to socialism, but to modern Russian national capitalism, seemed to a bunch of people historical proof of the “prophetic correctness” of Bakunin’s views, a bunch of people who, in politics, did not however use anarchism by name. 

This is how, in matters of socialism, our era has simply fallen back into Proudhonism (Proudhon being the recognized master of Bakunin, and unrecognized master by many other people). Its great formula is “socialism, yes, but in freedom”, accompanied – in the best cases – by the other formula: the dictatorship of the proletariat, yes, but not over the proletariat. 

The great “lesson” that this liberal, associative socialism, which we shall call “self-managed socialism” learned from the Stalinist counter-revolution is that Marxist “statism” cannot lead to the liquidation of capitalism, but only to the fierce reign of an omnipotent bureaucracy; that the class party has no role to play in the economic transformation, which must be left to the “working class itself” and to producers in general. 

Undoubtedly, no “lesson” is as difficult to destroy, given the force of suggestion of the counter-revolution and the voluntarist caricature that Stalinism made of the Marxist doctrine of the role of the Party by lending it the power to create socialism at will, on the condition that it is obeyed;