Click here to access article by Michael Welton from CounterPunch.
Although Welton starts out his very readable essay casually by citing anecdotes from his personal life in relation to the Russia and its revolution, he soon get serious about a central issue that has proved to be a conundrum for Marxist intellectuals and many left revolutionaries. Welton focuses in on this issue by examining the Russian Revolution and the theoretical statements of many Marxist intellectuals and the practice of Russian revolutionary leaders. The issue boils down to "who will educate the educator?" He argues that this conundrum caused the Russian revolutionaries to descend into an authoritarian bureaucracy which was far from the worker's utopia that its "bourgeois intellectual leaders" envisioned.
I dealt with this issue earlier this year in my commentary in response to an article entitled "Thoughts on Rojava: an interview with Janet Biehl". My answer which I didn't make explicit in this commentary is that a bottom-up structure together with a supportive ideology must be established from the very beginning of any worthwhile revolutionary organization as a bulwark against authoritarian and centralization tendencies.
