The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today, 1955

The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today, 1955
International Communist Party
Text on Russia
The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today
1955
2018 Presentation
1955 Introduction
Part one: Struggle for Power in the Two Revolutions
I
1.
The 1914 War -
2.
Nightmarish Collapse -
3.
Seven Theses on War -
4.
No “New Theory” -
5.
Simultaneous Revolution? -
6.
Down with Disarmament! -
7.
Youthful Exuberance -
8.
Guns and Workers -
9.
Fatherland and Defence -
10.
Victory in One Country -
11.
Ditched Resolution (La carta cambiata)
II
12.
The Made Up Theory -
13.
Countries and Revolutions -
14.
Back to the Roots: The Manifesto! -
15.
Harmonic Structures -
16.
From 1848 to the Commune -
17.
Social-democratic Revisionism -
18.
Only the Opportunism is New -
19.
The Socialist Transformation -
20.
Power and Economy -
21.
Production and Politics -
22.
Infamy and Philistines
III
23.
Back to 1914 -
24.
Subversion of the Tendencies? -
25.
The early part of the War -
26.
War suits Democracy -
27.
Cracks Appear in the Empire -
28.
A Warmongering Revolution -
29.
A Loss of Direction -
30.
A homeland at last? -
31.
Vladimir gets ready to move off -
32.
The April fool -
33.
Thrills after the dressing down -
34.
Monosyllabic proof: da
IV
35.
April’s Benchmarks -
36.
Repel defencism! -
37.
Defeatism continues -
38.
Transition: between which two stages? -
39.
The provisional Government to the pillory! -
40.
Party and Soviet -
41.
Impeccable tactics -
42.
Down with Parliamentarism! -
43.
Police, Army, Bureaucracy -
44.
Frail human nature? -
45.
The clearly bourgeois social measures -
46.
Other false dispersals
V
47.
Towards the April Conference -
48.
Disagreement at the conference -
49.
The question of power again -
50.
The new form of power -
51.
The clear alternative -
52.
One foot then the other -
53.
Further steps taken by the two feet -
54.
Wrong moves by the first foot -
55.
The difficult post-April maneuver
VI
56.
The Russian national question -
57.
Two conflicting positions -
58.
Lenin’s confutation of the “lefts” -
59.
The central question: the State -
60.
The usual historical kitchen -
61.
Lenin and the question of nationalities -
62.
The conference resolution -
63.
Despotism and imperialism -
64.
Separation of States -
65.
Against ‘cultural’ autonomy -
66.
Nations and proletarian organisations -
67.
Nationality and the West -
68.
Revolution with Europe
VII
69.
After April, onwards to the great struggle -
70.
Legal Preparation or Preparation for Battle? -
71.
The post-April Phase -
72.
The Struggle in the Countryside -
73.
The Demands of the Urban Workers
VIII
74.
The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets -
75.
The Line-up at the Congress -
76.
Lenin’s Interventions -
77.
The Bolshevik Position -
78.
“Popular” Revolutions -
79.
“Revolutionary Democracy” -
80.
Political Economic Measures
IX
81.
The Congress Recoils -
82.
The June Struggles -
83.
The Situation Changes -
84.
The July Battles -
85.
Defeat in the Streets and Repression -
86.
Clandestine Congress -
87.
Still a Balance Sheet of the Revolution -
88.
Lenin’s Political Line -
89.
History of the Oscillating Power -
90.
Responding to Tactical Objections -
91.
Lenin’s Conclusions -
92.
Still on the 6th Congress -
93.
Where the Line Was Broken
X
94.
Dogma or a Guide to Action? -
95.
The So-Called “Philosophy of Praxis” -
96.
Lenin still on the Thread of Time -
97.
The Famous “Anti-Right Front”: Kornilov -
98.
Weakened Front, Advancing Bolshevism -
99.
Preparliament and Boycott -
100.
Insurrection Is an Art! -
101.
Further Disagreements in the Party -
102.
The Organs of struggle -
103.
The Crucial Hour -
104.
Power Conquered
XI
105.
The Light of October -
106.
Destruction of the State -
107.
The Constituent Assembly -
108.
Trotsky and Lenin -
109.
Decree of Dissolution -
110.
War and Peace -
111.
Tragic Chronology -
112.
A Serious Crisis Within the Party -
113.
Lenin’s Evaluation -
114.
The Terrible Civil War -
115.
October’s Three Socialist Tasks -
116.
The Results are in -
117.
Solitary Supreme Effort -
118.
In Russia and in Europe -
119.
“Ionization” of History -
120.
Dialog between Colossi
2018 Presentation
The extended study entitled
Struttura economica e sociale della Russia d’oggi
first appeared in the columns of
Il Programma Comunista,
an organ of our party at
that time, in 15 instalments from number 10, 1955 to number 4, 1956. Here we are publishing
the introduction to that work, recently translated by our English comrades, and it gives a good
idea of the vast panorama of complex material covered.
The important question of the class nature of the self‑proclaimed ‘soviet State’,
of the complex and turbulent way it came into being, and of its subsequent history was already
back then a central preoccupation of the many movements which in all countries, of both new
and long entrenched capitalisms, although wavering in their loyalty and entertaining major doubts,
declared themselves followers of the October Revolution. Equally it stimulated the misleading
propaganda of the opposing camps, the Atlantic and Eastern bloc ones, which were nevertheless
in agreement in describing the ‘soviet State’ as communist and proletarian; characteristics
these which supposedly referred not only to the political nature of the State but also the prevailing
economic relations in Russia and to all aspects of its society.
It was therefore evident that a revival of the communist movement, similar to what
came after the dispersion of the Paris Commune and the First International, the betrayal of
1914 and of the Second International, and the degeneration of the Third International, required
the party of communism to derive definitive historical lessons from these serious defeats of
ours, and make a clear reaffirmation of orthodox doctrine and of our consequent separation from
the degenerate schools and parties of anarchism, of reformism, and of that national-communism
which would be named after Stalin. Only on acquiring the
balance sheet
of the Russian
tragedy, complete, coherent and agreed upon, was it, and will it be, possible for the refoundation
of the international communist movement of the working class to take place.
1956 and “The Structure” mark for our party the culmination and the completion of
that difficult task, and in a certain sense it was definitive.
Stalin had died in 1952. Already by 1956 the XXth Congress of the CPUS had given
its official sanction to what was called “destalinization”. And forty years later, on 26 December
1991, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR would declare itself “dissolved”, giving birth to a declaredly
capitalist nation on the ruins of the “death of communism”. “Communism is dead – Long Live Communism”
we would write, meaning that we considered the inglorious, horrible death of false socialism
a good thing and the necessary precondition for the rebirth of genuine communism, which would
arise on its own distinctive bases of class and historical programme.
All of the transitions that have taken place in the sixty odd years since the drafting
of “The Structure” have been carefully monitored by the Party, and their causes and effects
analysed. They cannot be characterised, we wrote, as either revolutions or counter-revolutions.
As far as the Russian economy is concerned, there has never been
a return to
capitalism
, a historical backwards step. History never goes
backwards
. And it wasn’t
possible
to return
to capitalism because Russia never emerged from it in the first place.
The task of the revolution in isolated and semi‑feudal Russia in the early 1920s was just
to resist
in the expectation of the revolution breaking out in the West. And in order to resist
it had
to build capitalism
, even if under the communist dictatorship, in other words,
electrification, large scale industry, a modern agriculture. And subsequently the accumulation
of capital in Russia took the form of State Capitalism, but only in large‑scale industry.
As regards the political situation, the overturning by the class which through its
party held on to the dictatorial power of the State, in Russia would come to an end with the
degeneration of the glorious Russian Communist Party, in a lethal struggle which saw the fractions
which remained faithful to communism and Marxism defeated; a process which by 1956 had been
fully completed and sanctioned by the participation of the Russian State in the Second Imperialist
War.
To be sure, Stalinism, destalinization, and openly declared capitalism are different,
indeed conflicting, phases, but all are part of the tumultuous process of the formation of a
national capitalism. The different guises in which the latter appears and the ideologies behind
which it hides, whether democratic, fascist, or “communist”, correspond to the changing necessities
of the defence of the relations of production, always and without fail based on wage labour
and the accumulation of capital. Whether the owner of the capital is a private individual or
the State doesn’t change by one jot the underlying relations of production and distribution.
It is therefore gratifying to have confirmed our prediction that the centralized
“Soviet planning” of the productive forces would be unable to contain the disruptive energy
of those forces which they assume in the shape of capital, resistant as it is to any kind of
containment or rationality and with an inherent tendency towards overproduction and self‑destruction.
This phenomenon, which propels the capitalisms of both East and West into crisis; into their
common, fatal crisis of the senile phase of capitalism, will not be avoided by constantly altering
the colour of their flags.
What the global working class and the revolution needs is a party which, as in Russia,
knows how to recognise and fight for
its
revolution, and without getting distracted,
deceived or deviated by the various so‑called “revolutions” on offer from the rotten bourgeois
world, each of them as grandiloquent and pretentious as they are inconsistent.
1955 Introduction
1. Reference to Previous treatments of the Subject
The current essay may be considered a direct continuation of the study presented
at our party’s general meeting in Bologna held between 31 October and 1 November 1954 and fully
developed in a set of articles, ranging over eleven numbers, which appeared in our fortnightly
publication
Il Programma Comunista
(issue no.21, 1954 to issue no. 8, 1955).
Its title,
Russia and Revolution in the Marxist Theory,
corresponded to the
aim of giving a systematic exposition of what the Marxist communist movement has asserted as
regards the historical development of Russian society and its international relations.
By remaining faithful to the method which presents the task of Marxist revolutionaries
not as a generic more or less sceptical waiting for events to unfold, whose unexpected novelties
and changes of course indicate to the movement the new path it should take, but as a constant
comparison of historical occurrences with previous “expectations” and “forecasts”; something
the party, as a living organisation participating in historical events, is in a position to
do (although it remains a constant challenge) by drawing on the theory which shaped its platform
and its general character; we set out to present what the Marxists had established as regards
the course of social history of Russia, and to compare it with the historical data we have on
the past and present development of Europe and the world.
The exposition was divided into three periods. As would be expected an
Introduction
took up this theme and reconnected it to the many previous elaborations on this important topic
that had already been made at our meetings and in our writings from just after the Second World
War onwards, and it set out the problem: to obliterate all of the assertions made by our enemies,
both open and hidden, about the incapacity of Marxism to arrive at a general picture of what
happened in Russia, and of the so-called necessity to make revisions to our general theory in
order to encompass Russian “peculiarities”.
The first part was entitled: “European Revolution and ‘Greater Slavia’”. In it was
sketched out a developmental time-frame of the forms of production that typify the Russian zone
today, as distinguished from the Mediterranean-classical and German-feudal forms. It set out
to trace the main lines of these three processes, placing the Russian one in relation to historical
data on how the first communities settled and organized themselves on the land; their arrangement
into social classes and their forms of production; and the major and minor centralization of
political formations and of the State. Having thus arrived in modern times, an account was given
of what Marxism asserted in its early years regarding the role of Russia in the European revolutionary
movement after the French Revolution, and then as regards social questions within Russia. This
from the contributions of Marx and Engels in the last century.
Having paused to consider the dual Marxist interest in the impending revolutions
in Russia, which would fatally intertwine the bourgeois and the proletarian ones, the second
part gave an account of the particularly rich and complex views about this future-historical
question which were expressed by the mainly Marxist, but also pre-Marxist, movements inside
Russia, with particular attention paid to the debates and the solutions put forward in the various
congresses of the Bolshevik Party before the 1914 war. Here also we set out to demolish the
extremely persistent idea that in Russia one is obliged to use a
special
historical yardstick.
2. Plan of the Present Report
On the basis of the material set out and elaborated in suchlike manner we come directly
to the topic under consideration here: study of the historic way in which the great revolution
occurred, and evaluation of the events and of the situation that came after it.
We therefore come to the essential issue, one which not only gave rise to the particular
differentiation of our group from so many others, but which stands at the centre of every struggle,
of every political dispute in the contemporary world, that is: what
is
Russia today?
And indeed since far off 1917 taking a position on the Russian situation, condemning or exhalting
the extent to which Russia has its own stage, and the coups de theatre it has presented to an
astonished world, form the touchstone for the warring movements and parties, even in countries
far removed from what goes on there, in their various battles.
Today the political horizon is entirely obscured and suffocated by an interpretation
which is essentially the same in both sectors, shared despite being the bitterest of enemies,
and between which stands in today’s troubled world an almost completed physical wall; a forbidding
sight for all to behold. Russia, with its powerful leading State and a bunch of satellites and
hangers-on, is supposedly on the side of the global proletariat and represents a socialist form
of social organization – while the other countries, at whose head stands a number of other monstrous
State powers comparable in size to Russia, supposedly represent the defence, preservation and
interests of the present capitalist economic form of society, and of the bourgeois class which
controls it under the banner of democratic liberty.
Since its very first manifestation we have fought, on our own or with very few others,
against this interpretation of living history, and we alone have showed the best way of opposing
it, in rigorous coherence with the Marxist method of reading the social struggle of the last
century. From our very first meetings we rejected the notion that Russia equals socialism and
from the very first issues of our bimonthly publication (in the years up to 1951) of our review
Prometeo
. Our programmatic formulations were rolled out at our very first meetings in
Rome, Naples, Florence, Milan, Trieste etc.
We demonstrated, moreover, that they were very different from those of the trotskists,
which defend Russia on the basis it is proletarian and socialist today, and also from the banal
formulations of leftism, which lack the dialectical force to go beyond a merely verbal identification
of each historical process and of
each imperialism.
We also considered it important to
dismantle an odd construct which sees the social structure in Russia today as representing a
third way in the bloody dialogue which started a century ago between capitalism and communism;
an alleged rule of the bureaucratic classes.
And all of this we were able to elaborate by showing how it stems from the umbilical
cord of orthodox unitary Marxism, first and foremost, and then from the robust defence of it,
immediately after the Russian Revolution, by the left-wing Italian Marxist Communists and by
a few other international groups, when confronted with the first symptoms of the gigantic degenerative
wave which goes by the name of Stalinism, which would then sweep everything away.
It is a case now of providing a better exposition of all this; a survey which, after
having covered the events of the long awaited double revolution of 1917 (be it understood in
a critical way not by listing a succession of already generally well-known facts the events),
will proceed to clarify the relations of production that exist in Russia today, and the economic
laws to which they correspond, and demonstrate that such a society still remains within the
bounds of capitalism; and in the end sum up the result obtained, not to be disparaged, of a
colossal bourgeois revolution, whose epic expansion proceeds from old Europe and extends across
the whole of the planet.
3. More on “Tactics”
Also omitted from the present report, although we need to remember a connection
exists, is a topic our movement put a lot of work into over a number of years, building up a
large corpus of documents in the process, that is: the debate on
tactics
and methodology
which took place before our split from
official
communism, which bit by bit, from positions
which were increasingly unacceptable and heterodox, descended to making a systematic repudiation
of the initial positions which had bound us to what we had derived in common, put simply, from
Marx, Lenin and the Third International. This debate on tactics took place between 1920 and
1926 and the positions adopted, as we intend to prove, were – in their rectitude and far from
simplistic presentation – genuinely Marxist, and would receive, in the future, the most resounding,
but least appreciated, of confirmations.
Nevertheless it is important to specify exactly what position we take on this realigning
of the delicate matter of tactics, indispensible for any return to those periods – desirable
but not expected any time soon – in which action and struggle take precedence over the never
to be neglected and always decisive factor of party doctrine.
Without a doubt our struggle is to ensure that the movement’s “obligatory” rules
as regards action are applied by the party in a practical sense; rules which are binding not
only on individuals and peripheral groups, but on the party centre itself, to which is due total
executive
discipline, to the extent it remains strictly bound (without the right to improvise
bogus ‘new courses” when new situations are identified) to the set of precise rules adopted
by the party as its guide to action.
However, we need to avoid any misunderstanding as regards the universality of these
rules, which are not primary, immutable rules, but
derivative
ones. The permanent principles,
which are forever binding on the movement, since they arose – according to our thesis of the
revolutionary programme forming all at once – at given, rare turning points in history, are
not the rules on tactics, but the laws of historical interpretation contained within our body
of doctrine. The development of these principles leads to the recognition of the great road,
over vast areas and across historical periods calculable in centuries, which the party is on,
and from which it cannot diverge without leading to its collapse and historical disintegration.
Tactical norms, which no-one has the right to leave a blank sheet or to change in order to adapt
to immediate circumstances, are rules that derive from this theorization of the great historical
pathways and main tendencies, and they are rules which are in a practical sense firm but in
a theoretical sense flexible, because they are rules derived from the laws of the “major courses”,
and like them, since they exist on the historical level rather than that of manoeuvre and intrigue,
they are declaredly transitory.
We remind the reader of the many, often cited examples, such as the famous transition
in Western Europe from the fighting of defensive wars and wars of national independence, to
the method of defeatism in any war conducted by the bourgeois State. Comrades need to understand
that no problem will ever be resolved by resorting to a party tactical
code
.
The latter has to exist, but in itself it reveals nothing and resolves no queries;
it is within the storehouse of general doctrine that the answers should be sought, and by keeping
firmly in mind the historical cycles/zones that are derived from that doctrine.
It will therefore have to be left to a subsequent exposition, using as historical
material the polemical dialogue between the Italian left and Moscow, to throw light on the question
of tactics, and to put right the serious errors that are still doing the rounds. For example,
as regards the question of the relationship between the international proletarian movement and
the movements of the colonial peoples opposed to antiquated domestic regimes and white imperialism,
which is the most extreme example of a historical rather than a tactical problem, not a question
of providing
support
, because it is necessary first of all to give a full explanation
of why the purely classist movement of the metropolitan proletariat has totally collapsed, and
only then will we know what kind of relations this post-capitalist level revolutionary force
can establish with the pre-capitalist level revolutionary forces which are powerfully alive
in the East today.
In such cases, to respond by citing some rigid tactical formula or, worse still,
by inventing a new one, is banal. To defend the right to invent on the spur of the moment flexible
tactical rules as convenient, this is opportunism and betrayal, yes; and we will always ruthlessly
oppose it, but with much harsher, less innocuous condemnations of infamy than that.
4. Results Obtained
Since the results established in our previous treatise are merely our point of departure,
we need only record the most important points.
The doctrine of historical materialism confirms we are entirely right in opposing
the superficial notion which claims that Russian history is somehow exceptional. The various
processes by which free nomadic tribes were transformed into an organized settled people is
set in relation to the physical nature of the territory; to the climate; to the poor fertility
of the soil; to the vast expanse of land far from the coastal regions; to the different rate
of evolution with respect to the peoples of the hot Mediterranean shores; to the different manifestation
of slavery related to the latter, and to the formation of a unitary State. Different destinies
awaited those peoples from the East who reached the borders of the collapsing Roman Empire,
and whose accumulated wealth and endowment of an advanced production they exploited – allowing
them to form a civilization based on landed property, a decentralized order akin to that of
the feudal lords – and those who remained closer to the vast Asian heartland, exposed to fresh
waves of nomadic hordes in search of prey and a base camp, whose stability would remain precarious
for as long as it was entrusted to local chieftains, and which only became permanent after the
formation of a large, centralized State organization, powerful enough to organize not only wars
but also peace-time production.
From the earliest times
the State
is therefore an essential component of
Russian society, and thanks to it, and the military and administrative organizations centred
around it, it is able to withstand the continuous attacks from Asia and Europe and become increasingly
powerful. But its function is not merely political but also directly economic: to the Crown
belongs around half the land and the rural serf communities, and thus the class of nobles controls
only half of the territory and the population and is subordinate to the central dynastic power:
the king is not, as in the decentralized Germanic system, elected by the nobles, who remain
the effective holders of the real economic and legal control of society.
This typical “State Feudalism” survives into modern times and Marx sees it as the
lynchpin of the “Holy Alliances” and as the power, from the time of Napoleon onwards, which
is most committed to subjugating the bourgeois revolutions in Europe, as well as being prepared
to lend its support to both monarchies and bourgeoisies to help them combat the first proletarian
movements.
We recorded Marx’s keen interest in each of the Tsar’s military defeats, from which
might emerge the collapse of the Slavic bulwark of reaction, whoever the enemy might be.
We then aligned the data from the first analyses of the social forces inside Russia,
and the responses, for which Engels had laid the basis, to the famous question of the possible
“leap over capitalism” to which Marx had also made dialectical allusions, eventually discarding
such a possibility. Engels follows the early formulations of the Russian revolutionaries which
underestimate the importance of emerging industry and rely on the peasant movement, and he engages
them in discussion, also concluding in his final days that the Slavic agricultural community
would be unable to transform itself into full-blown socialism, before a complete capitalist
and mercantile form had emerged.
In the second part, as mentioned, we looked at the extremely important work of the
nascent Russian Marxist movement, supported by the industrial proletariat, and recorded the
following historical theses attributed to it, which may be summed up as follows:
- Progressive development of capitalism in Russia and formation of a large urban
proletariat.
- Negative conclusion as regards the revolutionary competence of the Russian bourgeoisie
to conduct the overthrow of Tsarism.
- Analogous conclusion as regards the capacity of the movements based on the peasantry,
such as the populists, the trudoviks and the socialist revolutionaries.
- Condemnation of the position taken by some
Marxists
on the right, later termed Mensheviks, which, based on the false claim that the bourgeois
revolution was of no interest to proletarians and socialists, proposed leaving it to the democratic
and popular parties to lead it, thus, to all intents and purposes, abandoning the political
struggle against the Tsarist power.
- Further unmasking of this counter-revolutionary thesis, disputing the notion that
one could support a version of the democratic revolution based on constitutions bestowed by
the Tsar, or even on the preservation of the dynasty,
id est
an insurrectional and republican formula for the bourgeois revolution.
- Participation of the urban proletariat in the front line of every struggle, as
historically occurred in 1905; revolutionary power issuing from the armed struggle to exclude
all the bourgeois constitutional parties and to be founded on the leadership of the
democratic
revolution by workers and peasants (democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants).
- The transition to further revolutionary struggle for the socialist program to
only take place after the outbreak – always predicted by Marxism – of proletarian socialist
revolution in Europe following the collapse of Tsarism.
5. Lenin’s Formula
So before the revolution, and after it for that matter, Lenin never expected the
evolving revolutionary crisis in Russia to reveal a
different
process of international
proletarian revolution that would need to be applied there. As a Marxist of the radical left
he never doubted that in the capitalist countries socialism would emerge from a revolutionary
insurrection of proletarians and the realization of the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat.
Since however he was having to work on the problem of a country in which the bourgeois revolution
was yet to be completed, he predicted not only that the proletariat and its revolutionary party
would have to invest all their efforts toward that end, but, given the delay in bringing about
the fall of the reactionary and feudal Tsarist regime State, he issued the forecast and explicit
program that the working class would have to relieve the bourgeoisie of this historic duty,
and conduct it in its stead, also relieving it of the no less characteristic task of leading
the peasant masses.
If, as an example of the bourgeois revolution, the formula was: leadership provided
by the bourgeois class (although, even back then, more by its ideologues and politicians than
its industrialists, merchants and bankers) drawing the proletarians of the cities and the peasant
serfs of the countryside along behind the democratic revolution; the Russian formula for revolution
(still
bourgeois
, i.e., democratic) was different: leadership provided by the proletariat,
struggle against the bourgeoisie which was inclined to reach an understanding with Tsarism based
on parliamentary compromises, drawing of the popular and rural masses along behind the proletariat,
who, during this historical phase, elevated the poor peasants to the rank of allies during the
insurrection and in the dictatorial government.
The tasks of such a revolution, not of socialism as yet, are nevertheless clear:
civil war to defeat the Tsarist army and police, overthrow of the dynasty and proclamation of
the republic, elected constituent assembly struggling against all opportunist and bourgeois
parties, drawing on the support of the Councils – arisen in 1905 – of workers and peasants.
The objection that the latter was not a
socialist
revolution did not stop
Lenin for one moment since the thing was clear from a theoretical point of view. It was a bourgeois
revolution, in the only form in which
the defeat of the Tsarist and medieval counter-revolution
could be assured
: and to achieve this one result (considered then and subsequently as clearly
extremely important and decisive), the power of the proletarian dictatorship was consecrated:
dictatorship
because violent and illegal means were used, just as they had been by the
great bourgeoisies in Europe at the head of the masses, but
democratic
because the task
was to destroy feudalism and not capitalism, with the peasants allied for this very reason and
because, while ultimately destined to eventually become allies of the bourgeoisie against the
proletariat, they are also the sworn enemies of feudalism.
Lenin (it seems indispensible to us to carry on synthesising what was said at Bologna,
referring doubters to the mass of documents and evidence contained in the extended report) wasn’t,
therefore, during this phase, setting his sights on the socialist revolution, such as to lead
not to a bourgeois democracy, which at most would be radical and consistent, but to the dictatorship
which would expropriate capital, because he was leaving this latter task to a struggle which
would no longer be contained within a national framework, as would be the case for the impending
Russian Revolution, but which would take place on an international scale.
He believed that, in the aftermath of a European war, which Marx and Engels had
always anticipated would be between the Slavs and the Germans, the collapse of Tsarism would
be sure to set the working masses of the West in motion, and that only after they had taken
political power and taken control of the huge means of production concentrated by a fully developed
capitalism, would the revolution in Russia also be able to acquire socialistic content.
The start of the war
had been confirmed by the disastrous one with Japan.
But the counter-revolution had easily crushed the forces of 1905. As a consequence, until the
struggle against the forces of reaction was resolved through the use of terror (also in substance
“bourgeois”, as in Robespierre’s use of it), the decisive toppling of Tsarism would always be
a
preliminary
outcome with respect to the advent of socialism. We showed along with Trotski
that the power of the international proletariat was invoked by Lenin to support the revolutionary
power in Russia against a Tsarist revival, not so much to aid collectivist social development.
And in fact a revival of Tsarism would have represented the same oppressive yoke for the Russian
peasants and proletarians if they had got into power by democratic means, and to Western workers
risen up against the capitalist bourgeoisie.
In fact back in 1917 and after a series of other events, Tsarism’s attempts to regain
power, flanked by western forces, were far from negligible, and it would take a long time to
stamp them out. Lenin’s powerful vision of a gradation of historical phases was therefore correct;
and it would be an exercise in extremist stupidity to portray him as the confident prognosticator
of socialism in Russia.
This apparently
left
explanation of Lenin’s work would be used in the treacherous
game of showing that historically one arrives at socialism through forms that include democratic
ingredients; and socially side by side with peasant-populist elements, which is the main form
that the degeneration, and the present ignominious situation, takes.
6. Letting the Facts Speak for Themselves
The present issue is to establish if Russia did or didn’t move forward insofar as
it was contained within such a perspective. If we threw a bridge between those disquisitions
from between 1903 to 1917, which seemed far removed from any practical effect, and the situation
as it is today in 1955, in which we find the capitalist form completely established, deeply-rooted
and spread throughout Russia, and we find founded on it and intermingled with it a veritable
orgy of democratic, populist and coalitionist “values”, we are entitled to conclude that Lenin’s
forecast was accurate and that history arrived at the point he said it would, thanks to a gigantic
effort on the part of the Russian proletariat, whose balance sheet today is: “the building of
capitalism”.
And it proves all the points we have been making: that with the Marxist key ancient
and modern Russian can be unlocked and read correctly; that Marx and Engels rightly prognosticated
the indescribable horrors of the capitalist inferno; that Lenin produced an impeccable Marxist
analysis of how to cast off the yoke of a formidable pre-capitalist regime, along with a very
apt theory about the bourgeoisie’s incapacity to accomplish it and the role of the proletariat
as the latter’s historical surrogate. And we are also fully entitled to say that Lenin achieved
all that without adding anything new to classical Marxist theory: the birth of proletarian communism
is dialectically a national and international fact: it can only arise and take shape where the
form of modern production has already triumphed and this has only happened within a national
framework (England, France, etc) but, in issuing forth from such national contexts, as theory
and as organization and working party, proletarian communism had from the very start to take
into account not only the binomial
capitalism-proletariat
, but also the real, living
global picture which includes every class and movement that exists within human society at all
stages of development.
In the
Manifesto
this principle is applied on a universal scale, and since
that time the communists, after all other vestal virgins have allowed themselves to be seduced,
have continued to tend the flame of every genuinely white-hot revolution.
This is the genuine Marxist viewpoint and sole way of formulating the problems of
all societies not yet arrived at the stage of the great duel between bosses and workers, and
it also applies to all the marginal and ‘mongrel’ classes in those societies which by now have
the capitalist “model” of the economy as their underlying framework.
7. The Past Half Century
If all of this is particularly true at the beginning and end of the fifty year period
which runs from when the theory was sketched out in 1905, and the actual physical structure
as it appeared in 1955, we can’t consider only the extremes. The historical bridge that extends
between these dates is best conceived of as having several arches rather than a single span;
this is because it crosses the most
concentrated
50 years in all of known history, including
two world wars and, as far as Russia is concerned, at least three great revolutions, and a half-revolutionary,
half counter-revolutionary course which, even if not unique in the history of the modes of production,
must certainly be described in much more detail.
Since we will not be providing a theory in the Marxist sense to explain each of
the “intermediary arches”, which together define the whole difficult cycle, an over-simplification
might be helpful at this point.
Yes, the Russian party of revolutionary workers and of communist socialists set
itself the historical aim of bringing about the accession of mercantile and democratic capitalism,
on condition that by delivering this (and committing to it its own class forces, protagonists
of another great historical task) it would guarantee the obliteration from Europe, by fire and
the sword, of the monstrous construction of the Tsarist State, consigning the memory of it forever
to the dim and distant past.
Yes, the momentous and far from linear struggle which then took place, it had no
other result but this, and, using the same criteria we apply to the countries of the capitalist
West, we must denounce the notion that in Russia today there are powerful forces at work whose
aim is to achieve post-capitalist forms, for the difference between the two consists only in
the distinction between a capitalism in florid growth and one in an inflationary phase which
heralds its decline.
But it would be wrong to dryly conclude from this that, given the correspondence
between what the party mapped out, and what history presented us with, that in Russia there
was only a bourgeois revolution, because bracketing together Kerensky’s and Lenin’s revolutions
and describing them both as bourgeois fails to fully explain the situation, the two of them
standing in the relation to one another (so to speak) of Mirabeau’s revolution to Robespierre’s.
As we develop this point, setting it in the context of economic and social factors,
classes, parties and political power relations, we will assert that whilst the form of production
in Russia is bourgeois, October was not bourgeois, but proletarian and socialist.
Such a treatment of the subject is only achievable by placing it within the international
framework of the last few decades, and at the end of this introduction we will recall the three
historical characteristics which are contained within October itself and which confer on it
much greater significance than having “just” destroyed Tsarism forever; which with only the
results of the February revolution to contend with would probably have regained power, as it
desperately attempted to do, and as a large part of the global bourgeoisie would encourage it
– and encouraged in a practical sense – to do, until it was soundly beaten by the Bolshevik’s
integral dictatorship.
8. The Destruction of War
The strict relationship established between defeat of the Tsarist army and political
revolution, which Marx and Lenin were keen to identify in all of the wars which European history
records – we could say a lot more about the purely indicative use we make of the named persons
who became associated with the coalitions from the early eighteen hundreds to the First World
War – was proven in the policy conducted, without shrinking from its more tragic consequences,
by the October power, namely: favouring the breaking up of the military units, dismantling the
front and overcoming any infatuation within the party, even unfortunately by some of its best
members including those definitely on the left, for a national, patriotic version of the war,
which instead, in a truly major success, was ruthlessly crushed.
This totally revolutionary policy, which left no room for hypocrisy, which pushed
through to its most extreme consequences, which was inspired by the demand for a no holds barred
defeatism, of turning the war to defend the country into a civil war, was magnificently vindicated
by the collapse of the German military power, brought low not by an offensive from the West
but by a capitulation and fraternization to the East.
For a bourgeois revolution to have such content as this is not possible, intrinsically
linked as it is to the promotion of values and institutions of a national and patriotic character.
This we have already explained at great length (in the treatise at the Trieste Meeting of 29-30
August 1953 for example, the written account of which, entitled “
Factors of Race and Nation
in the Marxist Theory”, appeared in issues
16 -20/1953 of
Il Programma Comunista
). We showed on one occasion how Robespierre, speaking
from the Parliamentary Tribune, reproached his sworn enemies the English for taking action against
Louis XIV and XVI to redress French influence on the other side of the Atlantic. The bourgeois
revolution doesn’t break the thread of national history, only a proletarian revolution can dare
as much. Today yes, now that the line the Russian power takes is patriotic, glorifying its defeated
armed forces at Port Arthur and Tsushima who Lenin had worked to hamstring, and not less the
defenders of Sebastopol who made Marx sick to the stomach, and even the conquests of Peter the
Great.
9. Liquidation of the Allies
Another distinguishing feature of Bolshevik revolutionary policy is the progressive
struggle against the transitory allies of the preceding phase, who one by one are put out of
action until finally an undiluted party government is achieved. It is not enough here to draw
an analogy with the bourgeois revolutions and the struggles of the various parties from 1789
and 1793 in France, because the analogy holds only as regards the methods of action. We would
not say, for example, that a distinguishing proletarian feature of the Russian Revolution was
political terrorism. Terror was involved in the revolutions of the bourgeoisie in England, France
and in many other countries; and in Russia, because it was a question of destroying the parties
which supported the Tsar, such a method was decisively invoked also by non-Marxists, such as
the left populists and the social revolutionaries.
But the dialectical position assumed by the Bolsheviks over the whole course of
this development, beginning with the assumption of the tasks of the bourgeoisie and then disbanding
their parties, and accomplished by temporarily marching alongside semi-bourgeois and peasant
allies until finally driving them out of the government and from any right to participate in
the State, responds to the original Marxist position, which even before 1848 clearly proposes
an initial struggle fought alongside bourgeois, liberal and democratic allies, followed by a
decisive attack against them and against the petty-bourgeois factions. Such a forecast is firmly
anchored in an unrelenting, pre-existing critique of the distinctive ideologies of these strata,
which make them implacable enemies of the proletariat.
These characteristic developments, which occur in all struggles between the classes,
have led on numerous occasions to the defeat of the proletariat and the ruthless destruction
of its forces and organizations, as in the classic events in France. For the first time the
proletarian party in Russia achieved victory in the final episode of the civil war phase, freeing
itself from its soon-to-be ex-allies, who bit by bit passed to the side of open counter-revolution,
leaving the victory achieved in the final battles in the hands of the party. Whatever happened
next, which saw no setback in the Civil War, but another process entirely, this historical experience
was truly original and it remains a permanent legacy of revolutionary potential, which would
later be dissipated in other ways, and through the shameless use of alliances and cliques which
lacked any of the original dialectical autonomy of the class party or of intransigent positions
it adhered to.
On many occasions we have rolled out the Marxist concept that counter-revolutionary
experiences are precious nourishment on the tough road ahead, as in the case of the Paris Commune
so fundamentally invoked by Lenin.
These results therefore, even if later buried or cast aside, are valuable to us
in showing that after October, before the new government had a chance to take on those tasks
of an economic, productive and social nature which we will examine later on, political power
was indeed in the hands of the proletariat, which due to the international situation
went
beyond
the bounds of the democratic dictatorship, clearly if not definitively, and
beyond
the bounds of the alliance with the populist-peasant parties, and crossed over therefore
into the historic sphere of the socialist political revolution, which then missed out on the
contribution which only the revolution of the workers of the West could have brought to it.
10. Demolition of the State
The passage from the purely democratic revolution, even though with various socialist
parties in its front ranks, to the Bolshevik October, would not have been possible unless the
whole question of the ascent to power of the workers’ party in the advanced countries had been
highlighted, and along with it the comprehensive Marxist theory of the role of violence in history
and of the nature of the political State. This great battle was not just theoretical, such as
occurred in the pages of
State and Revolution
and during the controversies that claimed
the attention of the entire world in the post-First-World-War period, and it was not just organizational,
inasmuch as a radical split was achieved between the revolutionaries of the Third International
and the revisionists and traitors of the Second. It was a real political battle with armed force
used during the worst incidents, when we saw social-democrats become capitalism’s executioners
and stab the revolution and the red dictatorship in Germany and Hungary in the back, and the
same battle developing and spreading throughout Europe.
Suppose we had only got as far as implementing the insurrectional, and terrorist,
democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, the one possible historical inheritor of power
in Russia, but no further. There would remain just one experience, one legacy to bequeath to
revolutionary history, namely: that insurrections, civil war and terror are necessary, but only
in order to emerge from the mediaeval form; not necessarily in order to successfully emerge
from the capitalist and bourgeois form.
However in the subsequent advance of the Bolshevik proletarian power in Russia the
latter was able to merge its struggle with that of the advanced forces of proletarian communists,
who in the European countries were no longer faced with a forgotten Middle Ages, but with the
modern democracy of capital, and who had learnt, in a historical phase which was much further
on with respect to the conquest of bourgeois liberty, that violence and the dictatorship of
the class oppressed by capital was a necessary requirement. This they had learnt alongside their
comrades in Russia, who had also had to “slit the throats” of the so-called socialists, who
were influenced by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas, and notions of class democratic pacifism,
which maintained that, following the collapse of the feudal regimes, the struggle should be
conducted by legal means; thereby revealing themselves to be completely counter-revolutionary,
some of them even with ill-concealed links to Tsarism which was still hatching its plots.
Although the classic bourgeois revolution necessarily involved the dismantling of
the previous State structure, because it was founded on the old Estates, on the privileges of
those Estates, and on the different juridical powers of society’s various components, only the
Russian revolutionary struggle in its October phase was able to provide the positive, historical
basis for the statement that even the modern, constitutional juridical State, proclaiming equality
and freedom for all and based on universal representation without distinctions of Estate, even
such a State, as Marx and the Manifesto established from the very beginning, was still an organ
of class rule, and that one day History would smash it to pieces.
Nobody can therefore say that the October Revolution stayed within the limits of
a bourgeois revolution. Social development within Russia had to stay within the limits of the
capitalist forms and modes of production, and it is a historical fact that the proletariat fought
for the installation of a bourgeois form – and had to do so. However its political struggle
would not be so limited.
Acting as an inseparable part of the political struggle of the international proletariat,
which in order to organize itself as
ruling class
must first organize itself as the
party
of its own exclusive and distinctive revolution, the forces and the arms which indisputably
won the October battle won for world socialism and the global proletariat; and their victory
in the historical and material sense will serve to achieve the global victory of communism,
which will arise on the ruins of all types of capitalism in every country, and that includes
present-day Russia.
* * *
1 – The 1914 War
The relationship between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914 cannot be ignored. This well‑known point is one we have recalled on
an infinite number of occasions. The entire historical development which ties the Marxist parties
of Europe and of Russia together, and which links the prospects for the future that had formed
to the particularities of their internal political life and faction struggles, were all shaped
by that volcanic historical crisis, that political earthquake in August 1914 from which 41 years
now separate us.
Although our intention here is not to write history and the essential things everybody
already knows, we nevertheless still need to recall the main points.
In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, a mainly Slav province which had passed from
the Ottoman to the Austrian Empire after the Balkan Wars, on the 28th of June Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the elderly Franz Joseph, is passing through in an open‑topped
car with his wife. They are mortally wounded by shots from the revolver of a young Bosnian nationalist.
In the tragic weeks that followed, the government in Vienna announced that the assassin
and his accomplices had confessed under interrogation to being agents of the independence movement
and the Serbian government. On 23 July, supposedly secretly spurred on by Kaiser Wilhelm, the
Austrian foreign minister would issue its historic ultimatum to Serbia, imposing a series of
political and internal police measures. A 48 hours deadline was set. Serbia’s response was weak
in tone but it didn’t agree to all of the conditions. On the 23rd, Grey, the British Foreign
Secretary, attempted to mediate by calling a conference. This was rejected by Germany. On the
28th, a month after the assassination, Austria declared war on Serbia.
On the 29th Russia mobilized, on the 30th Germany did the same, on two frontiers.
On the 31st Germany ordered Russia to revoke the mobilization order within 24 hours, and after
receiving no response it declared war on the 1st of August. On the 3rd it declared war on France,
on the 4th it invaded Belgium but without a declaration of war. Only on 6 August did Austria
declare war on Russia.
As we all know, the Belgian government decided to mount an armed resistance to the
invasion and Great Britain declared war on Germany for having violated international pledges
to respect Belgian neutrality. Count Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Foreign Minister, famously
countered this by asking how Britain could go to war over ‘a scrap of paper’.
It would later emerge that the British, only a few days before, had assured Berlin
it would not intervene if Germany went to war with France and Russia, tacitly encouraging the
Kaiser’s government to launch itself into the abyss.
But before we look at the immediate effects of the war on Russia, which is the subject
of our present inquiry, we need to mull over another aspect of that tragic month: the collapse
of International socialism.
The circumstances at the time, it should be borne in mind, were very different from
when war broke in 1939. In 1914 there was a clash in every country between two clear alternatives:
the internationalist class position on the one hand, and a unanimously national, patriotic position
on the other. And this really was the case everywhere. By 1939 everything had changed, and in
given countries there was to be found a bourgeois defeatism which founded movements against
the war based on being open “partisans of the national enemy”. In the first historical cycle
nationalism would triumph, in the second it split into two nationalisms. The cycle in which
internationalism will get back on its feet is yet to happen.
2 – Nightmarish Collapse
Two days after Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, the German socialist party issued
a powerful anti‑war manifesto condemning it as «deliberately calculated to provoke war», and
declaring that «not a single drop of German soldier’s blood must be sacrificed to the Austrian
despot’s lust for power».
But by the time the International Socialist Bureau was summoned to an emergency
meeting in Brussels on the 29th and 30th July, the situation was already coming to a head. Old
Victor Adler, the leader of the Austrian socialists, would say in the opening address: «We are
already at war. Don’t expect any further action from us. We are under martial law. Our newspapers
are suppressed. I am not here to deliver a speech to the meeting but to tell you the truth that
now, as hundreds of thousands of men march towards the borders, any action is impossible».
Bebel, who had died at the end of 1913, was no longer around; for the Germans Haase
and Kautsky attended and debated directly with Jaurès and Guesde on the remote possibility that
the war between Austria and Serbia might not necessarily extend to the rest of Europe (magnificent
the stance of the few socialists in Serbia).
A general strike against mobilization was proposed only by Keir Hardie (the small
British Socialist Party taking a not unworthy stance as well) and by Balabanoff, representing
Italy along with Morgari. And who met this with a frosty response? The orthodox Marxist, Jules
Guesde: «A general strike would only be effective in countries where socialism is strong, thus
facilitating the victory of backward nations over the progressive ones. What socialist would
want the invasion of his country, its defeat at the hands of a more retrograde country?».
Lenin was not there, but in a village in the Carpathians with his wife who was sick;
Rosa was suffering from a heart complaint. Magnificent was the adroit and non‑orthodox Jaurés,
thundering out at a great mass‑meeting with the immense crowd echoing the call: Down with war!
Down with War! Long Live the International! Two days later the nationalist Vilain would kill
the great tribune with two revolver shots, in Paris.
The only thing the meeting could do was to bring forward to the 9th August the world
socialist congress which was due to take place in Vienna on the 23rd. But, as Wolfe correctly
pointed out, those ten days would shake the world a lot more than the decades that followed
[B.D.Wolfe, “Three who made a revolution”, New York, 1948].
Meanwhile between 31 July and 4 August in Berlin there were back to back meetings
of the socialist party leadership and parliamentary group, with their 110 strong contingent
of deputies in the Reichstag.
Mueller was dispatched to Paris where they considered the same question, although
most of the French comrades said: France has been attacked, we have to vote Yes to war credits,
and you Germans No. In Berlin 78 votes to 14 decided in favour of war credits with a declaration
declining responsibility for the war. On the 4th all 110 were registered as voting for the credits
(including the 14, amongst whom the president of the German Social Democratic Party Haase, and
even Karl Liebknecht, for discipline’s sake) though one, just one, Fritz Kunert from Halle,
slipped out of the Chamber before the vote.
The same day press dispatches from Paris brought the same baleful news: war credits
for national defence passed unanimously.
In the two capitals crowds demonstrated in the streets to the cry of Up the War!
Trotski was in the capital of Austria at the time, where he was astonished to hear the cries
of exalted joy from the young demonstrators. What ideas are inflaming them? he asked himself.
The national ideal? But isn’t Austria the very negation of any national ideal? But Trotski always
put his faith in the masses, and in his autobiography he found an entirely optimistic explanation
for this agitation aroused by the mobilization, a leap in the dark by the dominant classes.
3 – Seven Theses on War
Following his eventful crossing from Austria – where he was an enemy alien – into
neutral Switzerland, Lenin was without reliable news on the stance taken by the Russian socialists.
It was said that all the social democrats in the Duma, Mensheviks included, had refused to vote
for war credits. But some things still stuck in his craw: in the pre‑vote debate, Kautsky, who
he still considered his teacher, had opined for abstention, but afterwards, with a thousand
and one sophisms, he would justify and defend the vote in favour set by the majority. Lenin
then learned that in Paris Plekhanov had become a propagandist for enrolment into the French
army. For days Lenin was consumed with rage and fury until finally he adjusted to the necessity
of having to start all over again, and to defenestrate the new traitors. As soon as he could
get six or seven Bolshevik comrades together, he presented them with seven concise theses on
war. There was him, Zinoviev and their partners, three Duma deputies and perhaps the French-Russian
Inessa Armand as well.
One: the European war has the clearly defined character of a bourgeois, imperialist
and dynastic war.
Two: The conduct of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, in the Second
International (1889‑1914), who have voted for war credits and repeated the bourgeois-chauvinist
phrases of the Prussian Junkers and the bourgeoisie, is a direct betrayal of socialism.
Three: The conduct of the Belgian and French Social-Democratic leaders, who have
betrayed socialism by entering bourgeois governments, is just as reprehensible.
Four: The betrayal of socialism by most of the leaders of the Second International
signifies the ideological and political bankruptcy of the International. This collapse is mainly
caused by the present prevalence within it of petty-bourgeois opportunism.
Five: false and unacceptable are the justifications given by the various countries
for their participation in the war, namely: national defence, defence of civilization, of democracy
and so on.
Six: It is the first and foremost task of Russian Social-Democrats to wage a ruthless,
all‑out struggle against Great-Russian and tsarist-monarchist chauvinism, and against the sophisms
used by the Russian liberals and constitutional democrats, and a section of the populists, to
defend such chauvinism. From the viewpoint of the working class and the toiling masses of all
the peoples of Russia, the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its army, which oppress Poland,
the Ukraine, and many other peoples of Russia would be the lesser evil by far.
Seven: the slogans of Social-Democracy at the present time must be all‑embracing
propaganda, involving the army and the theatre of hostilities as well, for the socialist revolution
and the need to use weapons, not against their brothers, the wage slaves in other countries,
but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries... the urgent
necessity of organising illegal nuclei and groups in the armies of all nations... appeal to
the revolutionary consciousness of the masses against the traitorous leaders... agitation in
favour of republics in Germany, Poland and Russia.
The text was adopted with a few amendments, or rather additions:
1. An attack on the so‑called “centre” which had capitulated in the face of the
opportunists and which needed to be kept out of the new international. This direct attack on
Kautsky may not have been written by Lenin.
2. A recognition that not all workers had succumbed to war fever and in many cases
had been hostile to chauvinism and opportunism. This was possibly prompted by news about those
countries where part of the movement was on the right path (Serbia, Italy, England, some Greek
and Bulgarian groups, etc).
3. An additional note on Russia whose source, Wolfe believes, is undoubtedly Lenin,
in that it constitutes «a characteristic formulation of the requirements and of the slogans
of a democratic revolution in Russia». And we wanted to put it here because it takes us directly
to our main theme: «Struggle against the tsarist monarchy and Great-Russian, Pan‑Slavist chauvinism,
and advocacy of the liberation of and self‑determination for nationalities oppressed by Russia,
coupled with the immediate slogans of a democratic republic, the confiscation of the landed
estates, and an eight‑hour working day».
A few weeks after the war broke out in 1914 the view of revolutionary Marxists is
therefore clear.
In Europe: liquidation of the Second International and foundation of the Third.
In Europe: struggle to liquidate the war not through peace but by the overthrow
of capitalist class rule (socialist revolution), subject to the toppling of the dynastic regimes.
In Russia: war lost, end of Tsarism, democratic revolution effected through radical
measures. Transition to a socialist revolution only in tandem with a similar European revolution.
4 – No “New Theory”
This cycle is recounted in the official Stalinist History of the Bolshevik Party
in such a way as to conclude wiht Lenin, confronted with the opportunist collapse of the European
movement, supposedly creating the “new theory” of revolution in one country. It is therefore
in this sense, and to this end, that it lays claim to Lenin’s entire inexhausible crusade against
the social-patriots: «such as the Bolsheviks’ theoretical and tactical conception regarding
the questions of war, peace and revolution».
It is instead abundantly clear, using pretexts even more specious than Guesde’s
and Kautsky’s, that the astounding orders given to the Communist Parties during the Second World
War, who were hurled onto a joint front with the bourgeoisies, left not a single stone of Lenin’s
theory of war, peace and revolution standing, insofar as it was just the “old theory” of Marx,
which the traitors of 1914 had similarly torn to shreds, and which Lenin, to their eternal shame,
had gloriously reinstated. What else is the victory of the retrograde country which Guesde talked
about in Brussels if not the eternal lie of the victory of the fascists over France or England
which had to be avoided at all costs?
The official falsification relies on two of Lenin articles from 1915 and 1916. The
1915 one is entitled “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe”. Lenin, quite rightly, had
a number of reservations about this slogan. The way it appeared in the seven theses was as republican
United States of Europe, coordinated with the call for republics in Russia, Germany and Poland.
(Today all done, but when will we add England to the list?). Later on the Party rightly decided
to postpone this political slogan, as it could lead to misunderstandings. According to Lenin
the United States of Europe between capitalist States (not just dynastic) is an inadmissible
formula; but not bacause it is a pre‑socialist, democratic formula since such demands may still
be useful, but because in this case such a body would be reactionary. An excellent and prophetic
opinion on the various federations and European leagues propounded on all sides today, Stalinist
ones included. «A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on
the partition of colonies».
Excuse us if we persist in the digression, but today they would be in second place
behind America in any case, which now has the lion’s share of that partition. But this just
makes the likelihood of a federal Europe being either “reactionary or impossible” even more
likely.
Either against America, as Lenin viewed them in 1915, or under America, as we think
likely today (or even under Russia, or under an entente between them) the United States of Europe
would inevitably be against the colonies and against socialism.
As far as we are concerned, Lenin clearly states, war presents a more revolutionary
situation than European federalism (rather different this than adopting the theory, etc, etc,
of the various above-mentioned sacresties!)
Our slogan would be United States of the World, says Lenin. But even that doesn’t
really suit us, firstly, because it clashes with socialism, «In the second place because it
could generate the mistaken opinion that the victory of socialism in one country is impossible,
and wrong ideas about the relations such a country would have with other ones».
It is here we want them, these gentlemen. It is the period subsequent to this that
official history invokes: «Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism.
Hence, the victory of socialism is possible initially in some or even in one capitalist country
taken separately. The victorious proletariat in that country, having expropriated the capitalists
and organized socialist production, will arise against the rest of the capitalist world attracting
to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, [here finishes the citation by the great
allies of Roosevelt, and before him Hitler, by the castrators of the revolution and of Lenin’s
thinking, but we’ll go on] stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and
in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their States».
5 – Simultaneous Revolution?
The other citation which the afore-mentioned text would like to put on record is
from an article written in Autumn 1916
The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution
,
in which is openly treated the hypothesis of a capitalist country in which the proletariat has
taken power and then conducts a war against countries that are still bourgeois, importing the
revolution. This scenario, which we have covered on many occasions, is a million miles away
from the ghastly buffoonery of “peaceful co‑existence”, “peaceful emulation” and “defence against
aggression”, inasmuch as such a war would be a class war, of unadulterated aggression, and above
all an unconcealed declaration to the proletariat of the world to stand by and prepare for the
moment when it will be possible to attack the strongholds of capitalist exploitation.
The crude sleight of hand lies in slipping from one of these theses to the other:
taking political power in one country – building socialism in one capitalist country where power
has been conquered – building socialism just in Russia. And it is this last thing which we mantain
belongs in cloud cuckoo land, as will be borne out by the palpable economic facts in the second
part of this report.
This then is the load of rubbish which supposedly justifies the new theory (only
to then to be quickly bury it, new or not). «This theory differed radically from the conception
which was widespread among Marxists in the pre‑imperialist phase of capitalism, when Marxists
held that socialism couldn’t win in one country but would triumph at the same time in all the
civilized countries». And then: Lenin destroyed this wrong theory, etc, etc.
This is just a fairy tale, every word of it made up, and Lenin had nothing to do
with it. And did anyone ever really believe in this fable of simultaneous socialism in all countries
anyway? Neither the left, nor with greater reason the right of Mrxism. And the civilized countries,
which ones are they then? France, England and America, but Russia – certainly not. And Germany?
To hear the bigots of 1914, of 1941, and those of today, who in order to attack the European
Defence Community revive that much abused bogeyman of the thuggish, armed German, Germany is
more uncivilized... than the Hottentots!
However, before continuing to dispel the central ambiguity that animates the entire
narrative of proletarian history ad
usum Kraemlini
, it is necessary to make an observation.
This alleged dualism between two theories, an old and a new one, the one arising from the circumstances
of pre‑imperialist capitalism and followed, with related tactics, by the Second International,
and the other supposedly discovered and installed by Lenin, and based on the experiences of
the most recent imperialist phase (stage), is not a defining mark of the Stalinist brand of
opportunism alone.
The opportunism of the 2nd International also had an overblown (and lousy)
new
theory
of its own: one which boasted of having done justice to a forty-eightist and catastrophist
Marx, authoritarian and terrorist, and modelled itself not on the bristly, coruscating “red
terror doctor”, but an the most honourable parliamentary social-democrat in his top hat and
tails (we even saw such creatures in Moscow), who loathed the class party and courted instead
the pacifist and gradualist economic unions, ever ready to put the dampers on any mass action,
and who finally, between the white fury of Vladimir Ulyanov, and of us lattest dupes, voted
through war credits for the imperialist massacre. It was the revisionist theory of Bernstein
and Co., singing their eternal, whorish refrain: the... times... have... changed.
So then, the same old story about the old nineteenth century theory of big bearded
Karl, and the new twentieth century theory they have the nerve to attribute to Lenin, but which
is the legacy of a simian army of bare‑arsed baboons who aren’t even fit to gibber his name;
a theory typical of many small groups who don’t like to call themselves Stalinists, because
they aren’t aware they are, and who – as we have rammed home on so many occasions – devote themselves
to dry‑docking the ship of the revolution which supposedly ran aground because they weren’t
around, poor cercopithecoids, to design the new theory, fortified by what Marx didn’t know and
Lenin had only just begun to spell out; it is the legacy of the many small groups which every
now and again, in a horrible “bouillabaisse” of doctrines and onanistic interpretations announce
they are going to “reconstruct the class party”. Let us leave these gentlemen to their execitations
(which above all fail to address the capricious aim that really motivates them: of attracting
attention) and get back to the Kremlinesque machinations.
6 – Down with Disarmament!
The other contribution to the theory of the “revolution in one country” is drawn
by those Moscow
bishops’ council
from another article, from Autumn 1916, which treats
another theme: namely it smashes to smithereens, as the article from 1915 did the United States
of Europe, another slogan, in support of disarmament, which the left‑wing elements of the socialist
movement, during the war, especially in the Socialist Youth International, were going to launch
in opposition to social-chauvinism.
The article is a powerful attack on pacifism, a cansistent theme in Lenin’s work,
and thoroughout the decades of Marx’s “old theory”, and inseparable from the desperate resistance
which radical Marxists have always mounted against the philanthropic-humanitarian pietism of
the radical petty bourgeoisie and libertarians and against the gradualist visions of late nineteenth
century reformism, which in a general cesspit of trade-union-big-wig corporativism and democratic
electoralism wished to stifle power, violence, dictatorship, wars between States and wars between
classes; a contemptible view and a world away from Marxism in its original, unadulterated form,
avenged by the nimble fingers of those who patched it back together after it was ripped to shreds
by those traitors. Today it must be proposed again, against the collectors of signatures, in
the face of the bold supporters of the pen’s mighty crusade against the cannon and the atomic
bomb [Cf. “The ‘Disarmament’ Slogan”, October 1916].
In the article “The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution”, which in
our expositions (which invent or discover nothing, but only repropose the historical material,
endowment of the anonymous, eternal movement, within the framework of well‑defined develop-mental
phases) is placed in the right context, here is the passage that suits the officials: «The development
of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under
commodity production [applica et fac saponem!...]. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism
cannot achieve victory simultaneously
in all
[Lenin’s italics] countries. It will achieve
victory first in one or several countries, while the other countries will remain, for a certain
period, bourgeois and pre‑bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct
attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist State’s victorious
proletariat. In such cases, a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be
a war for socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie».
Pure gold, this passage. But so are the sentences which precede it: «The victory
of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all wars in general. On the contrary
it presupposes war».
A bit different from claiming, as the Stalinists do, that they are in a socialist
country, and therefore preparing universal peace! They are in a bourgeois country, and their
pacifism is just as hypocritical as the bourgeoisie when they were anti‑1914, then anti‑1939,
and now anti‑third world war (1970?). It will end up the same way.
And then there are the sentences that come immediately after: «Engels was perfectly
right when, in his letter of 12 September 1882 to Kautsky, he clearly stated that it was possible
for
already victorious
socialism to wage “defensive wars”. He was alluding in fact to
the defence of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries» [“The
Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution”, September 1916)]. Poor altar boys! In the
very writings they are relying on to show us Lenin giving birth to the new theory, the latter,
in one of his typically clear explanations, demonstrates that what he is saying was already
well known to the Marxists “of the second pre‑imperialist period”, that is, a good 38 years
before; and certainly Engels knew all this not because he dreamed it up that autumn evening,
but because he was drawing on the ABC of Marxism, which History gave birth to around 1840.
What interests us is the historical context and overall structure of the article.
Since we can’t reproduce it all we will give an idea of its powerful framework.
7 – Youthful Exuberance
Lenin had been struck by Grimm’s theses in the
Jugend-Internationale
. In
the minimum programmes of the old parties there was inserted the item: people’s militia, arming
the people. The war had rendered this a topical problem, and it is well‑known that the anarchistic
trade unions supported the “refusal to serve” argument. Their spokesman at the Stockholm conference
in 1907 was Hervé, who had supported the correct thesis of the general strike in a speech which
was theoretically disjointed (and was deemed as such by Lenin). So the young left Marxists resolved
to replace the slogan
arming the people with disarmament.
Lenin was against it.
We should recall that among the socialist youth of Italy at that time the anti‑militarist
problem was also being discussed at length; and not only on the theoretical level but in high‑profile
trials as well. The idealist individualist stance – I am against the spilling of blood and will
not take up arms – was condemned as typically bourgeois. When the question touched on Italy’s
entry into the war, we stated that by declaring ourselves neutralist we were misrepresenting
our revolutionary position: “neutrality” of the bourgeois State was not our goal, nor a role
for it as a mediator, or as a proponent of the absurd idea of universal disarmament, a notion
no less bourgeois than that of individual disarmament. In peace and in war we said (shameful
to admit we weren’t even aware of Lenin): «We are enemies of the bourgeois State and want to
strangle it. Following mobilization, whatever the strength of our forces may be, we won’t offer
it neutrality, and we won’t disarm the class struggle».
My young friends and comrades, says Lenin, you want to argue for disarmament because
that is the clearest, most decisive, most consistent expression of the struggle against all
militarism and all war. But you are wrong. It is a premise which is idealistic, metaphysical,
and nothing to do with us: for us being against war is the ultimate point of arrival, not the
point of departure. The abolition of war in itself is not a slogan we defend. War is one of
the historical facts which mark the stages of the capitalist cycle in its ascent and decline:
to abolish war is, fortunately, meaningless, if it weren’t it would mean stopping that cycle
before a revolutionary outcome was achieved. But that is how we express it. Lenin goes – sometimes
too much – for the concrete. He explains the cases when we are not against war.
First of all he goes into the
bourgeois
revolutionary wars supported by Marxists.
For which see our extensive treatments of the subject [Cf. among others the “Fili del Tempo”
which appeared in nos. 10‑14/1950 and 4‑6/1951 of “Battaglia Comunista”, the party’s fortnightly
publication at that time]. The thesis that in Europe such wars came to an end in 1871, which
was formulated by Marx at the time as «the national armies are as one against the proletariat!»,
is replaced by Grimm with the “
obviously wrong
” formula of
in the era of this unbridled
imperialism national wara are not possible.
Lenin would have been happy to put his signature
to thas if it had been followed by the words
in the European camp, between the European powers
,
prophetically slapping down the apologetics for French and Italian “national liberation” offered
in 1945. His counterblast here is that national wars outside of Europe, in Asia, in the East,
are still entirely possible, and indeed they still are today.
Secondly, civil wars are wars which will not end until the division of society into
classes ends: another exception to the famous “any” wars.
Finally Lenin mentions the future revolutionary war, which is no longer
bourgeois
but
socialist
. So, three kinds of just war, i.e., wars we might have to support. According
to Lenin, the correct formulation is as follows: «To accept the defence of the fatherland slogan
in the 1914‑16 imperialist war is to corrupt the labour movement with the aid of a bourgeois
lie». This response, he says, hits the opportunists much harder than any platonic slogan calling
for disarmament or against any
defence of the fatherland
. He proposed adding that henceforth
any war waged by these powers: England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Japan and the
United States is bound to be reactionary, and the proletariat must work for the defeat of its
‘own’ government in such wars, taking full advantage of it in order to unleash revolutionary
insurrections.
This is a theory which hinges on the entrenched anti‑pacifism of Marx and Engels.
So then, Stalinists, what is this new theory? Did the age of full imperialism come to an end
in 1939 perhaps? And instead one had to
defend the fatherland first
in Germany and Austria,
deriding it elsewhere – and then in France, England, Italy, in order to save them from Germany?
Evidently a third theory is called for, then a fourth and so on ad infinitum; but still the
stuck record you love so much spins round and round: the... times... have... changed; the... time... have... changed.
But it is still the same old opportunism, smelling as bad as ever.
8 – Guns and Workers
Since it concerns the youth movement, Lenin, after having said one shouldn’t include
the call for
disarmament
but substitute
people’s militia with proletarian militia
,
points out the importance of learning how to use arms if an insurrection is to be mounted, another
point we have been fighting for decades, even if unfortunately we have only seen it applied
purely in the service of bourgeois ideologies, in illegal movements, sure, but emanating from
bourgeois States and armies. Lenin even mentions the arming of proletarian women. «How will
proletarian women react? Only by cursing all war and everything military, only by demanding
disarmament? The women of an oppressed and really revolutionary class will never accept that
shameful role. They will say to their sons: “You will soon be grown up. You will be given a
gun. Take it and learn the military art properly. The proletarians need this knowledge not to
shoot your brothers, the workers of other countries, as is being done in the present war, and
as the traitors to socialism are telling you to do. They need it to fight the bourgeoisie of
their own country, to put an end to exploitation, poverty and war, and not by pious wishes,
but by defeating and disarming the bourgeoisie”».
The latter passage is not likely to get quoted by Stalinists. As a matter of fact
inviting women to come up with pious wishes is exactly what they do; wishes so pious indeed
that they actually invoke Pope Pius XII as the greatest example of a disarmer (and compared
to such a rabble, he was a respectable one at that).
In order to get young people to better understand dialectics, which even many oldies
still can’t digest, Lenin followed his thesis through, to the point of leaving intact – theoretically
– the expression
defence of the fatherland
and
defensive war.
One needs to know
how to properly interpret a text in such cases. Marxist literature, having established that
the catchphrase “against all wars”, so beloved of liberals and libertarians, had no place within
it, and that a not always straightforward historical distinction needs to be made between the
various wars and different types of war, had nevertheless ended up inheriting, in order to make
such distinctions, the common formulation: when attacked you defend yourself. Despite the fact
that this is a million miles away from transposing, as do philistines, the piddling little rules
of individual morality onto the historical plane, one ended up by calling wars of defence wars
which were supported, or at least not sabotaged. It is well known that the First Address of
the First International on the Franco-Prussian War contained the expression: On the German side,
the war is a
war of defence.
And in fact it was Napoleon III who had boldly launched
the attack. But the fact is that at the end of that historical cycle Marx was more interested
in seeing the ruination of Bonaparte than the hated Prussians, and Bonaparte (see the rich harvest
of quotations) is considered an ally of the Tsar: nothing would have changed if it was Moltke
who had made the first move, and the call had been zur Paris, zur Paris rather than à Berlin!
à Berlin!
9 – Fatherland and Defence
So what does Lenin have to say about it, at least in the officially sanctioned Italian
translation? [The translation of the citation used here is from the 1964 Progress Publishers
English language edition of “The Military Programme”, so it also was officially sanctioned!].
«To accept “defence of the fatherland” in the present war [1916] is no more nor less than to
accept it as a “just” war, conforming to the interests of the proletariat – no more or less,
we repeat, because
invasions may occur in any war
. It would be sheer folly to repudiate
‘defence of the fatherland’
on the part of
oppressed nations in their wars against the
imperialist great powers, or on the part of a victorious proletariat in its war against some
Galliffet of a bourgeois State» (General Galliffet, the “Butcher of the Commune”).
We, who would never alter our theory’s “propositions” or “theorems”, but occasionally
have the temerity to rearrange their symbols, have italicised the words
invasions may occur
in any war
, to clearly identify our annotation.
Just as the slogan “Oppose all wars” is not dialectical, so no less metaphysical
and bourgeois is it to state «We are against wars, unless they are wars of defence, and the
national territory is threatened by an enemy invasion, given that the
defence of the fatherland
is considered sacrosanct by the citizens of every country».
This is in fact the formula of opportunism which explains how on the same day the
French and the Germans, in their respective unanimities, voted for national war. The words invasions
may occur in any war recalls an article published in Avanti! in 1915, entitled on “Socialism
and National Defence” [December 21, republished in “Storia della Sinistra Comunista”, 1912‑1919].
With the stock phrase “duty to defend the nation” you don’t actually just accept
some
wars, you accept
all
wars. Once the bourgeois States have issued the order
to open fire, ‘over here, and over there’, both territories are in danger; it may happen that
one of the armies abandons its own territory for strategic reasons, becoming an “aggressor”
in the process, and there are many historical examples of this.
Therefore we draw distinctions between one kind of war and another, and even if
we sometimes use popular terms (although in fact we’d like to ban them altogether) such
as
just or defensive war
, to signal a war we support or which we believe to be useful in a
revolutionary sense, we are in fact asking ourselves the historical-dialectal question: “
is such and such a war in the interests of the proletariat
? Does it, as Lenin put it, conform
to the interests of the proletariat?” As regards the war in 1914 the answer was No. Nowhere.
And though it was clearly a case of a neutral country being attacked, the Belgian socialists
were wrong as well; and the brave comrades in no less attacked Serbia were right.
For example in 1849 Marx and Engels supported Austria, which was plainly the aggressor,
against little Denmark, and, as the Trieste report on the
Factors of Race and Nation
clearly
shows, they did the same in all of the wars up to 1870. They would have supported the Napoleonic
invasions and rejected the characterization of the German wars at the beginning of the century
as just,
defensive wars
, or even as wars of independence, as the bourgeois and petty-bourgeoisie
in general viewed it. Back then it was in the interests of the revolution that the first Napoleon
should win, and not the Holy Alliance.
However Lenin is always worried that the party, when making decisions, rather than
drawing on the overall perspective of our complete, complex, and never sharply dualistic view
of living history, might draw instead on stock phrases, which as often as not are bourgeois.
We would find it more exact to say not that in given cases we admit the legitimacy of war and
the country defended, but that in given times and places when faced with war we will sabotage
it, and in others we will defend it. The word ‘country’ is too a‑classist, and Lenin, in the
same more widely distributed 1916 theses, puts a nice slant on the sentence in the
Manifesto
about countries; and us proletarians not having one.
In any case, it is extremely dangerous to adopt slogans of the ‘Disarmament’ variety
and it signifies a total relapse into bourgeois ideology.
10 – Victory in One Country
It wasn’t a pointless digression to comment on the all‑out war which broke out in
1914, even if it involved repeating ideas we have expounded on before, mainly with the aim of
emphasising that our theory of war and peace is set and hasn’t changed for over a hundred years.
As mentioned earlier, it is strictly linked to our historical theme, the revolution in Russia.
Having explained the two texts by Lenin which condemn two fanciful and stupid ideas:
the United States of Europe, and global European disarmament, we return to the point which Stalinists
have been so keen to distort: the revolution in one country.
When reading our texts, it should be borne in mind they weren’t written just to
fill some gap on a library bookshelf, adding another abstract chapter to an abstract subject
or discipline, but arose within the life of a bitter dispute which was the historical substructure
of a real battle of opposing forces and interests. We are in a living struggle taking place
between Lenin and those who supported the war. It is necessary to follow this robust dialogue
that would soon become an armed struggle conducted on several very different fronts.
The Revolutionary Marxists say: In no country can this war be supported, no defence
of the war, but in all countries sabotage of the war and also of defence of the homeland.
The opportunists and also the more dangerous centrists hypocritically respond: we
are ready to do it. But only on condition we can be 100% certain, while we are stopping our
own State’s army from the rear, that the other side is stopped as well. If there is no such
assurance, we would merely be defending the enemy’s war.
Is is clear that such an apparently logical objection, as easy to grasp as all of
the populist theses the miserable activists are talking to the proletariat about these days,
includes bankrupting the revolution. Thus, for example, during the war with Austria, we managed
to prevent, through a superhuman effort, the socialist parliamentary deputies in Italy from
voting for war credits, but when the collapse of Caporetto occurred, it was only because the
bourgeoisie did us the honour of attributing it to our propaganda (how would a Togliatti deal
with such a historic problem? Would he say it was to allow the Veneto fall, glorifying Sicily?
However nothing ever collapsed thanks to anuthing he did), that our honourable deputies suddenly
wanted to vote through the funds for the defence of Mount Grappa, and take the same road the
Germans and French had taken in 1914. Whether it was good or bad to have prevented it one cannot
say: certainly it cast a spotlight on the opportunist plague, which later needed to be branded
with a red hot iron.
Lenin wasn’t the kind of person who would bother to argue such a point. He often
said that only an imbecile is incapable of understanding that every revolutionary party has
to sabotage the wars of its own State. In truth getting the point over for us was actually much
harder and not so straightforward, and taking it forward us a lot about the impossibility of
proceeding always by means of crystal-clear expressions; and about the authentic glory of “revolutionary
obscurity”, the master of which, in our view, was the great Karl.
However Lenin is unyielding on this point and would give his cast iron demonstrations
the unequivocal title:
Contro Corrente
[Refers to a collection of Lenin’s articles from
the years 1914‑1916. These were originally published outside Russia in the “Sozial-demokrat”
and in “Kommunist”, and later republished by the Petrograd Soviet in 1918 under the title “Contro
Corrente”].
History didn’t allow him, great as he was, to anticipate a horrible possibility:
the danger of getting sucked back, powerless and impotent, into the slimy depths of the current;
which we all thought had been reversed but unfortunately hadn’t been.
It is necessary to sabotage war on both sides of a front WITHOUT setting the condition
that the sabotage be conducted with equal force; without minding if it might even be non‑existent
on the other side. It is equally necessary in such a situation, with an enemy army crossing
the undefended frontier, to try and liquidate
one’s own
bourgeoisie, one’s own State,
to take power, to install the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Along with “fraternization”, with international agitation, and with all the means
at the disposition of the victorious power, the rebel movement within the enemy country will
also be stimulated.
The response is simple, as far as Centrism is concerned. But if despite everything
such a movement fails, the enemy State and army continues to function, and they go on to occupy
the revolutionary country and overthrow the proletarian State, what do you do then?
Lenin had two responses to this: one is from the history of the Commune, which wouldn’t
hesitate, having managed to defeat the bourgeois cops of France, to greet the Prussians with
cannonades as well, but under no circumstances would it lower the red flag of revolution. The
other response to the twisted apologists of the imperialist and counter-revolutionary, bourgeois
war, was precisely: war. Our war, revolutionary war, socialist war.
Against the same enemy then? So it’s the same war defended by us? snigger the philistine
contradictors. No, because the new war is class war, because it isn’t conducted alongside the
bourgeois State and its general staff, already swept aside; because its victory won’t be a victory
for any imperialist coalition, but for the world revolution.
11 – Ditched Resolution (La carta cambiata)
(
1
)
This historic point concerns the possibility of a revolutionary manoeuvre by the
International against the traitors of 1914, as entirely opposed to what was done in 1939 and
1941.
Opportunism is the watchword of non‑revolution, the class truce within individual
nations conceded to all of the belligerents, until war is over.
We will show that it is vulgar sleight of hand to equate this shameful and barefaced
traitor’s expedient with the movement’s alleged precautionary adherence to a theory which requires
“simultaneous revolution” in every country.
Lenin’s formula is the rejection of this
watchword
, the rejection of the
class truce in all countries, whether at war and or at peace; it presses forward to realise
the revolutionary event regardless of whether a State wins or loses, and above all if takes
revolutionary advantage of the defeat.
Wherever the reverses of war gave the proletarian party the possibility of doing
so, it had to take power: this would need to the policy in Germany, in France – and, of course,
in Russia.
France without Germany would have had a socialist government; or Germany without
France. Both such governments could have taken resolute anti‑capitalist measures and above all
throttled the war industrialists; and then the immediate requirement on the winning side would
not be to
disarm
, but to organize a
revolutionary
army to stop the capitalist
enemy, to stop their own revolution from being stangled.
The building of communism in Russia, or in a prevalently feudal and patriarchal
“one” country in general, has nothing to do with the latter thesis, and cannot be based on it:
it is something else altogether.
So what should revolutionaries in Russia be trying to achieve? By God, how many
times do we have to say it: not socialism, but a democratic republic. The hypothesis of socialism
in one country is obvious, but spell it out and it reads: Capitalist country.
So there it is: the ace up your sleeve, Mr Card sharper, has been played.
12 – The Made Up Theory
We have dwelt on the artificial antithesis between two theories, the “old” and the
“new”, on the “questions of war, peace and revolution” pleaded in the (official)
History
of the Bolshevik Party
published in Russia.
The author of the
new
theory on “revolution in one country” is supposedly
Lenin, whereas the
old
theory, typical of the old Marxists, is “simultaneous revolution
in all civilized countries”.
We have not said whether this theory is true or false, just that it is a complete
fabrication,
and that no‑one ever supported it. The old theory coincides with the new.
Marx established these points and Lenin defended them. Marxists (excluding those who refer to
themselves as such but do not believe in revolution) have
always
supported the revolutionary attack
even in one country
, as a political strategy,
as the struggle to take power.
As for the transformation of the social structure into
socialism,
which using
an expression no less theoretically false than the others is called the
construction of socialism,
whereas it should be called the
destruction of capitalism
, it has always been considered
both feasible and possible
even in one country.
But under two conditions, set out in
crystal‑clear fashion by Marx and Lenin. Firstly: that the capitalism in the country concerned
is fully developed; secondly: that the victorious proletariat in that country is cognisant of
its role: as the bringer not of peace, but of war!
There is no other theory
of war, peace and revolution
. The
new
theories,
with one cooked up for every generation, are all of them, Muscovite “History” included,
counter-revolutionary
.
To demonstrate this we will quote again the passage which invents “the old theory”,
and invents the invention of Lenin, who is systematically downgraded from died-in-the-wool Marxist
militant to idol for altars and monuments.
“This theory [of Lenin, who, as we reported, according to the text, laid the basis
for it in 1905 in his work “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, thereby
threading one more pearl onto its string of historical and theoretical gaffes: how do you found
a new theory for an “out of date” problem which refers to Germany in young Marx’s time, and
France in Babeuf’s time? According to these counterfeiters, Lenin supposedly expatiated on how
to construct
socialism
by means of the
democratic
revolution, as though he were
the worst ultra‑rightist] this theory differed radically from the idea that was widespread among
the Marxists of the
pre‑imperialist
period when Marxists maintained that socialism wouldn’t
be able to achieve victory in just one country, but would triumph contemporaneously in all civilized
countries”.
We won’t repeat here our critique of the definition
civilized
. If the adjective
civilized
had been replaced with
capitalist
(referring to the economic structure)
or
democratic
(referring to the political structure), the expression might be less devoid
of intrinsic meaning but would be equally misleading. These “Marxists” simply never existed.
Marx was undoubtedly a Marxist of the pre‑imperialist period. And so? Either Marx is stupid
and Marxism is stupid, or within Marxism, a theory born in 1840, the laws of the imperialist
stage of capitalism (n.b.
stage
not
separate period
) are already set out. Lenin
in fact didn’t produce them as a
secretion
of his brain, but by applying the doctrines
found in
Capital
. Just read it and you’ll see. Referring to the events of the imperialist
stage he gave a further demonstration of our theory of capital, and showed again that it excludes
peace between States and classes, and that, just as at its first dawning, the closing of the
capitalist cycle will be dominated by the flames of social catastrophe and a general explosion
of violence.
Tell us their names! That kind of Marxist never existed. We will go further: nor
that kind of generic socialist either!
13 – Countries and Revolutions
Ever since it appeared in its utopian-idealistic form socialism wasn’t thought of
as international; or even national! It was thought of as socialism in one
city
, in Plato’s
Republic
, in Campanella’s
City of the Sun
, in Thomas Moore’s
Utopia
(literally
“no place”), in Cabet’s
Icaria,
in the country of the absolute sovereign of the great
French utopians, enlightened among his subjects, in Owen’s cooperative factory, in Fourier’s
Phalanstery, or if you like, in Benedict’s mediaeval monastery. So was it really Lenin, you
bunch of idiots, who put out this stuff as a “new theory”?
This first naïve but noble socialism is considered by its builders – and they actually
did build it – firstly as an act of opinion, then of will, transmitted to the people by the
wise leader, or even by the great king. Clearly no‑one would subordinate it to a coincidence
of these waves of enlightenment in the minds of people in various countries at the same time;
even when socialism was utopian it was envisaged within set frontiers, and in the most evocative
of these social “projects” the existence of the military strata, the standing army and the defence
of the chosen country against the envious enemy, is considered permanent; a concept due more
to inertia than being actively maintained, although some ingenious minds, such as the mighty
Saint‑Simon, managed to get beyond it.
The transition from Utopianism to Marxism occurred not because the notion of socialism
was refined and subjected to a “rethink”, but due to the appearance of capitalist production.
Marxism founded its doctrine and programme mainly on the work it did on England. This
one
country, and it really was just
one country
, provided a framework for proving that a
socialist economy, at a certain stage of commercial-industrial development is not only possible
and feasible, but an implacable necessity; the condition for it no longer technical-productive
and economic, but just historical, that is, that the ancient bonds, relations of production,
and property are shattered and swept away and overcome by uncontainable productive
forces
,
not by brilliant advances in the realm of
opinion
.
When therefore the theses on the capitalist economy and the more general ones on
historical materialism arose, they arose thanks to the dynamics of English society in the 17
th
and 18
th
century.
The socialist programme arises not as a millennial prophecy but as a possibility
based on already acquired conditions, but only in ONE country: in the strict sense England,
without Ireland, where the bourgeois agrarian revolution was still expected, and minus most
of Scotland.
At the dawn of the 19
th
Century France is fully bourgeois but not completely
capitalist: France is not an island, but the engine of Europe; its historical task is to extend
the flame of the Great Revolution to the west. Only between 1831 and 1848 does the proletariat
begin its epic struggle, which is still not constructing socialism, but spreading the revolution
eastwards: let us consider the audacious hypothesis that the Paris workers had won in 1848;
far more pressing than the task of destroying capitalism at home would have been a revolutionary
war against reaction in Europe: still in a broad sense we have the historical problem of the
Two Tactics
, and not yet the question of whether a socialist France was possible. But
for historical reasons, which has nothing in common with the same necessity of waiting for there
to be the economic conditions for socialism across the Rhine, across the Danube or across the
Alps.
14 – Back to the Roots: The Manifesto!
By 1848 however, in the year communism comes of age, we have what they derisively
call “the communist Bible”: the
Manifesto
of Marx and Engels. The question of the proletarian
revolution is already fully and insuperably posed: not only is there is no trace of simultaneous
revolution in all countries, the idea attributed to the old‑time Marxists, but the socialist
revolution in one country is clearly proposed. And not only is it proposed and allowed, it features
throughout the whole of the powerful unitary construction, and nor could it be otherwise.
In 1893, in his final years, Frederick Engels dictated the preface to the Italian
edition of the
Manifesto
. Well then, in this short preface there are some historical
passages, like the one stating: The
Manifesto
does full justice to the revolutionary
part played by capitalism in the past.
The first capitalist nation was Italy
. And Engels
dates the transition from the feudal Middle Ages to the modern era to 1300, to Dante’s time.
However, he returns to the situation in 1848, and in recording how from Milan to
Berlin and to Paris it was the workers who were first on to the barricades, and in highlighting
this trait of European “simultaneity” in the revolution as a war involving all classes, he adds
the significant words: “only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very
definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they were of the
fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic
progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the French workers had as yet reached
the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore,
the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class”.
From this we can draw various corollaries – apart from usual one we touched on earlier,
of the colossal foolishness of engaging in an anti‑mediaeval struggle in Italy in 1945, or indeed
… in the 1955 Sicilian elections. Six and a half centuries of horrendous errors. The first bourgeois
metropolis, more than anywhere else was in Sicily: the Palermo of Frederick ll.
In 1848 Engels thinks the socialist transformation of the economy is not possible
in ultra‑bourgeois France! He, who had traced out the sure prospect of it from his youthful
studies of the English economy!
Therefore the damn
construction
of socialism was viewed by the oldest Marxists
as something that occurred in one country, and no need for Lenin to discover it in 1905 or 1914.
In addition: was the struggle of the Paris workers pointless then? Never! Engels
says that the capitalist exploitation of the revolution led to the national formation of Italy
and Germany, and he mentions that Marx used to say that the men who suppressed the Revolution
of 1848 were its testamentary executors.
Therefore the notion of the proletariat fighting for the capitalist revolution, which
has to
fight for it, and which should do so if in a position to choose, is also not something
Lenin invented in 1905.
What history reserved for the French workers in 1848, it reserved for the Russian
workers in 1917: Lenin saw it and theorized it decidedly in advance; the facts of history highlight
it today with dazzling clarity: fighting with a developed class organization, and socialist
party consciousness, in a proletarian revolution, whereas the outcome of the revolution is the
installation of capitalism.
However we will call once again on the content of the
Manifesto
in this regard,
well known though it is.
15 - Harmonic Structures
Need we recall the “systematics” of our historical codex? The first figure to appear
on the scene is the bourgeoisie, about whom their worst enemy writes an incomparable “chanson
de geste”. The bourgeoisie scours and conquers the world, shakes secular institutions to their
very foundations, unleashes huge forces in the realm of human activity, and in diabolical fashion
summons up its gravediggers, the proletariat.
The classic enunciations on the “organization of the proletariat into a class, and
consequently into a political party” apply to the national framework of “one country”. There
is in fact the famous observation: the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at
first a national struggle, though in form rather than substance. The proletariat of each country
must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
This famous thesis is then further emphasised in the no less well‑known sentences
which follow the passage about workers having no country: “Since the proletariat must first
of all acquire political supremacy [interpreted by social traitors as universal suffrage!],
must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is,
so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”.
These words, frequently discussed and greatly distorted at the outbreak of the first
world conflagration, succinctly sum up the Marxist theory of power and the State. The bourgeoisie
had the goal of constructing the national State – the proletariat has as its aim neither the
permanent construction of the State nor of the nation, but, since it has to grasp the weapon
of power, and of the State, precisely when it has only gained the collapse (“at first”) of its
own bourgeoisie and its own bourgeois State, it builds its own State, its own dictatorship,
and constitutes itself as the nation, i.e., it defends its territory against external bourgeoisies,
while waiting for them, in their turn, to be overthrown by the proletariat as well.
All this, therefore, is already contained in those first tabulations of how the revolution
would come about, working out the hypothesis of the victory in one country as the
rule
not
the
exception
, and the theory of it existed from the dawn of Marxism.
How otherwise to read what for a century philistines have been reading back to front,
that is the final programmatic part: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest,
by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase
the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible”?
This though is just the beginning of “entirely revolutionizing the means of production”
which requires “despotic inroads” and “economic measures that are insufficient and untenable”.
Old stuff, for sure. But that is precisely what we need to demonstrate: that the theory of the
taking of political power and the transformation of society is not a new theory but an old one.
How else could the text have continued than: “These measures will of course be different in
different countries”?
And would not the Manifesto add a list of them for the most advanced countries, relevant
to the 1848 period?
And how else could the final chapter trace out the prospects, nation by nation, of
the revolutionary conquest of power if not by basing them on the concept, which drives everything,
that the revolution could begin in any country where the development of production had formed
a modern proletariat, and even in Germany before England and France because Germany was on the
eve of a bourgeois revolution “with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England
in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century”?
16 – From 1848 to the Commune
After the disastrous defeat in 1848, the proletarian conquest of power in the European
countries became a more distant prospect. In the long period that follows bourgeois nations
and States are established in a series of wars; the proletarian parties become less important,
and Marxist policy focuses on the wars that lead to the defeat of the reservoirs of reaction,
namely Austria, Germany, France and above all and in every phase Russia, something on which
we have elaborated at great length.
The new arrangement arises out of the magnificent episode of the Paris Commune. This
time the proletariat not only undertakes to overthrow the national bourgeoisie, it actually
does so, though faced with two enemies, the victorious Prussian army, and the armed forces of
the recently republicanised bourgeois State.
Here the memorable Marxist analysis in the classic works stands out: You wanted to
understand the proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the socialist State?
Here’s the first historic example: the Commune!
In taking the side of the Commune, did Marx, or any one of the Marxists at the time,
ever dream of condemning it because the proletariat in the other capitals of Europe, and especially
in Berlin, didn’t take action, as happened in 1848, since clearly the German army would intervene
against the socialist State in Paris if the bourgeois forces of France were not enough?
Was there not already a theory of the revolution in one country; a theory, moreover,
which was unique, and which had arisen at the height of the
pre‑imperialist
phase of
capitalism? And did not this theory describe the first steps of the social transformation, raised
in its classical form by Marx, and by Lenin, following in his exact footsteps, in his well‑known
decrees and edicts?
What Marxist, even from less ardent tendencies, ever disavowed the Commune, or suggested
it lay down its arms, on the grounds that to have a revolution in France you needed to have
one in the whole of Europe?
There were two different positions in the First International at the time, the Marxist
and the Bakuninist ones; two “versions” of the Commune, and both unreservedly praised the revolt,
its brief life‑cycle, and its glorious fall, and the disgrace and shame of the “civilized” regimes.
Neither of these currents can be linked to the
made up
theory of the contemporaneous
revolution in Europe.
The libertarian view is that the Paris Commune wasn’t a political
State,
but
was responding to the myth of the local commune which, within its narrow compass, liberates
itself by rebelling against State tyranny and social oppression by establishing a self‑sufficient
collective of free and equal individuals. It is on record why we Marxists consider this, at
best, a dream; but we mention it here in order to rule out the idea that this wing of the socialists
(socialist anarchists they used to be called) ever believed in the notion of simultaneous revolution:
far from it in fact; for them revolution need not even take place on a national scale, but could
be on a city, municipal or communal level.
A few years later they would fight to establish anarchy in Spain and in some of its
provinces, tortuously asserting that they had neither armies nor States, before succumbing to
the inexorable critical demolition of Marx and Engels.
But whatever mistakes they made, not even there can we find supporters of the idea:
no to revolution, unless in ten countries at once.
We have then the orthodox, Marxist, version of the Commune, the version which pours
scorn on the manipulators of fables and half‑truths, and deserving to be called
Leninist
.
The Commune isn’t just the twice‑sieged municipality of Paris; it is France, the
French proletariat finally formed into a class, which on the banks of the Seine raised the banner
of its constitution as the ruling class; which erected the revolutionary State of the French
nation. Not a nation in the bourgeois sense and against the German nation, but in the sense
that with its cannons it tried to cut off the traitor Thiers from his seat of control over the
whole of France; and shedding, in pursuit of this objective, the freely given blood of red Paris,
even knowing – as the indigenous executioner advanced – that the workers in Berlin, Vienna and
Milan hadn’t picked up their rifles.
It is the theory which in its blazing splendour becomes white hot history; and after
the final volleys against the wall of the Père Lachaise had fallen silent, it would become the
patrimony and content of the world revolution, its victorious conquest, and it will continue
to exist in the general consciousness of Marxists that, one day, from a first victorious national
Commune, there will arise the progressive, unstoppable incineration of the world of capital.
17 – Social-democratic Revisionism
It was in 1900 that Lenin’s hated enemies came up with a “new theory” that claimed
to be Marxist, a modern version of Marxism; and with this they prepared for the catastrophe
in 1914, which according to the fraudsters in Moscow induced Lenin to overhaul all of Marxism’s
previous statements on War, Peace and Revolution.
While in the workers’ camp Bernstein and all the others are elaborating a gradualist
reformism – itself not new, but rather a horrible concoction of the heresies which Marx fought
against his entire life, of the Prussian State socialists, of Lassalleanism, of French social
radicalism, of English trade unionism, and so on – the bourgeoisie is meanwhile elaborating
its theory of war and peace, relying on the myth of disarmament, arbitration and universal peace.
This old stuff too had already been battered by Marx’s hammer blows, when following 1848 he
took on the bourgeois radical left, Mazzini, Blanc, Garibaldi, Kossuth and such like, and well
we know with what furious indignation he saw them off.
Legalitarian revisionism dismantles the Marxist vision one bit at a time. First of
all it throws out insurrection, violence, arms, and the dictatorship. For a brief period a denicotinized
“class struggle” is allowed, although it is forced to take place within the bounds of State
legality, through winning elections and seats in the political assemblies. The model for this
is German social democracy, a monstrous electioneering machine, not above making reprehensible
use of one of Frederick Engels’ final utterances: that its distance from power could be calculated
from the statistics on the increasing number of votes it obtained. But Engels also correctly
observed that once a certain line was crossed, capitalism would resort to terror!
We don’t need to repeat here our critique of this tendency and the prospect it held
out: majority in parliament, legal socialist government, a set of progressive laws that attenuate
the exploitation of the proletariat and bourgeois profits until a gradual transition from capitalism
to socialism is set in motion: nor need we recall how bit by bit, in France, Belgium and elsewhere,
the class struggle itself, on paper, was bartered away by accepting the entry of the workers’
parties into bourgeois cabinets as minorities; thereby founding what would be known as ministerialism,
possibilism or Millerandism. The Second International condemned it – in peace time – but shamefully
threw open its doors to it when war broke out it, unleashing the anathema of Lenin. He couldn’t
know that the Third International would also eventually allow and extol such participation not
only in war but in peace, the only justification being that it might suit some Nenni or other.
But whatever we may think of this august gathering, can we find amongst them any
of these mysterious pre‑imperialist Marxists, who supposedly wanted to conquer power in all
of the civilized countries on the same day?
Evidently if the taking of power no longer derives from armed action, action in the
streets and the collapse of the very foundations of capitalism, but happens as a result of an
increase in the number of “socialist” votes cast instead, it matters not at all whether the
glorious day of a socialist
premier
being elected to power happens everywhere on the
same day or not. In fact you can be sure that it will happen in an extremely unsynchronised
way and nothing will prevent dozens of regimes, whether they be 100% capitalist, 10% socialist,
or 20% so, etc, from living alongside one another, smiling at one another, arbitrating with
one another, disarming one other, awarding Nobel prizes to one another, giving Picassos to one
another, across the borders.
Not even in this camp then do we find anyone who is against the
building
of
socialism in one country. For if it is to be built bit by bit, by means of laws passed by the
bourgeois State, and merely by changing the party that heads it, the requirement of European
simultaneity is no longer something anyone need aspire to; and nor did anyone for that matter,
ever.
18 – Only the Opportunism is New
It was not Lenin, but the renegades castigated by him who used the turning point
of 1914 to devise a
new
theory of war, peace and revolution. And they would leave barely
a single word of the
old
theory, of Marx’s unique theory.
Marx said the proletarian revolution is accompanied by civil war between classes
and the overthrow of the State – they denied it.
Marx said that war between States would only come to an end with the fall of capitalism
and never by means of a general accord between the bourgeois States. They denied it.
Marx said that wars between capitalist and pre‑capitalist States could contain matters
of interest to the proletariat and it should participate in them, but that after 1871, within
the sector of western capitalism, every army is ranged against the proletariat and this is opposed
to all European and inter‑capitalist wars. They denied both the first and second idea and said
that in any war between two States the proletariat must support its “own side”, however unlikely
it is it will be defeated. They were pacifists as long as there was no war, pro‑war as soon
as it broke out.
Lenin restored the processes of peace, war and revolution to the important position
they had always held within Marxism. And, as had always been stipulated by Marxism, he called
for defeatism and proletarian rebellion everywhere, unilaterally and in one country too, on
the battlefield and on the historical course opened by the civil war of 1871.
He didn’t generate a new theory, but wanted to throttle the new theory of social-patriotism.
When from this historic and powerful work of restoration of the not old, but unique,
doctrine, they wanted to make arise, as something original, the obvious strategy of attacking
the bourgeoisie also unilaterally on the national terrain, as enunciated in the
Manifesto
and in all Marxist texts, amongst which those on the Commune, for Lenin sacrosanct and fundamental,
as indeed are hundreds of his own writings; and when this not new thesis was translated into
the notion that without a revolution in Europe you could have a social transformation in a communist
sense in Russia, the all‑seeing midwives of the Kremlin attempted an outright substitution of
the infant, attributing to the person they considered the Little Father of the revolution in
Russia an obnoxious bastard; they didn’t turn him into the destroyer of an outdated theory of
non‑existent old Marxists, but the destroyer of a theory which he himself, on the backbone of
the general system, had promoted in a truly ingenious way, the essence of which was: in a revolution
that doesn’t spread beyond Russia, the proletariat will have to take power, but in order to
accomplish the democratic revolution and favour thereby the advent and development of the capitalist
system of production, which can only be overthrown when there has been a victorious proletarian
revolution in other European countries.
A theory which Lenin constructed with truly astounding thoroughness, whose truth
he would see confirmed; which he would never repudiate or retract.
And it is pointless to insult him by insinuating, with outright falsifications, that
he did so, given that history has shown he was right about the subsequent phases, which occured
in the order he said they would.
19 – The Socialist Transformation
The question of the transition of Russia from the republic controlled not by the
bourgeoisie but by the victorious proletariat, with a social programme of nationalization of
the land and State control of industry, to a socialist economy, is not in its right place if
posed at the moment the much earlier problem of liquidating the war arose. When the Second International
collapsed the prospect for Russia (even before Lenin learned of the betrayal of various socialists
there) appeared no more favourable than it had been before the war. Up until 1914 Lenin was
relying on the Marxist workers’ movement in the more developed countries to shorten the course
of capitalism in Russia, which by now, it was believed, could not be avoided. But when the mighty
German social democracy succumbed to opportunism, along with the other big parties in the industrial
countries, it became increasingly unlikely that an anti‑Tsarist democratic revolution in Russia
would be followed by a proletarian revolution in the European countries, which would have rendered
the socialist transformation of Russia a less distant prospect.
At this key turning point in 1914 we saw how Lenin recapitulated the programme in
the
Seven Theses.
In Russia, work intently for the country’s defeat, the collapse of its army and its
dynasty. The programme that follows remains the same: do not govern with the bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois
parties, but run the republic with the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants.
Socially such a republic will nationalize the land, bring in the eight hour working day, set
up a State bank and put into effect other measures achievable within the confines of capitalism.
In Europe: struggle to eliminate the opportunists, organization of a new proletarian
International, new groups and parties to lead the defeatist struggle against the war. Wherever
possible, the attempt should be made to take power under the rallying‑cry of the proletarian
dictatorship of the communist party.
Only after the war had brought about at least a partial collapse of bourgeois power
in Europe would it be possible to address the problem of the socialist transformation of Europe
and its support for economic and technical evolution in Russia.
Thus the question of how to make Russia alone socialist wasn’t posed at the moment
official history assumes it was by Lenin and posed for the first time and for the first time
resolved in a positive outcome: how to build socialism in a Russia emerging from feudalism and
surrounded by capitalist countries.
Similar shifts in Lenin’s thinking will require an explanation later on, and
explain them we will
, namely: at the moment Tsarism fell; on his arrival back in Russia; in the
struggle for all power to the one Bolshevik Party; in the period after the conquest of power,
to that of the first economic measures and the fundamental shift represented by the New Economic
Policy (NEP), this as well nothing “new”, to the extent it was never referred to as such by
Lenin.
The very fact of having invented this conversion of Lenin outside of historical time
and its appropriate context, of having sneakily brought it forward, demonstrates the false position
which underpins the entire policy of the Russian State, after the death of Lenin and the well
known events enucleated from the situation.
20 – Power and Economy
As this question of the socialist transformation in relation to a conquest of power
in a non‑capitalist country has to be posed in general terms, we need to explain it better in
order to avoid any serious misunderstandings, and, as always, we need to pay attention to the
distinction between the economic and political aspects of the transition from one mode of production
to another.
Our resolute defence of the thesis that we never expected to see in Russia a
working
socialist economy, production and distribution, given its social structure and its feeble
economy after the war, may shock some readers who might see in it echos of the opportunist position
which for years on end hurled slanderous accusations against the Bolsheviks.
According to Marxism the transformation of the economy of a country into a socialist
one cannot get properly underway unless its predominant features are large‑scale industrialisation,
big business capitalism, a generalized market economy, and the commercialization of all of its
land and products. When these conditions are met, the transformation is not gradual and spontaneous,
but, as stated by Marx, Lenin and the revolutionary left, it will not happen without the political
revolution, in other words, the violent overthrow of the capitalist State and the founding of
the new State of the proletariat, with the Marxist Party clearly at the head of it.
To guarantee the socialist transformation, triggering this political struggle and
conquering power is therefore not enough.
However, just as it would be wrong to say that by means of a simple political coup,
a putsch of the Blanqui type, we can introduce full socialism in New Guinea, it would likewise
be wrong to exclude those situations where we should take power even in the full knowledge on
that basis alone the socialist transformation will not take place.
Therefore, those who said: “Bolsheviks! Without the revolution in Europe you will
not build socialism” were not wrong. But that wasn’t what the philistines said. They said that
as the communists were unable to guarantee the socialist transformation, they should
not
take power, even if – as history would bear out – they had the capacity to do so; they should
instead delegate power to other classes and parties, or at any rate they should support, and
put themselves at the disposal of, a Lvov or Kerensky provisional government.
But the Russian communists did not reply that they wanted – and had to – take power
because it was the means to make Russia, even on its own, socialist. At that time they weren’t
even dreaming of that. They had, and proclaimed to the world, a different set of historical
reasons, far more wide‑ranging than the problems of the future Russian economy. It wasn’t a
race to administer Russia as if it were a
big farm
or
manufacturing trust
. It
was a race to expel from power and overthrow political and class forces which would undoubtedly
have postponed indefinitely the future Russian and global socialist transformation, further
destabilised the country’s contingent economy, and exposed Russia to the serious threat of counter-revolution,
not in the sense of keeping a Kerensky or a Miliukov in power, but in the sense of abandoning
power to the reactionary governments emanating from the imperialist countries in the German
or the Anglo‑French bloc; or even to the resurgent forces of tsarism, which would have reared
its head again in its classic role as policeman of the democratic revolution in Russia, and
of the proletarian revolution in the rest of Europe.
The only party which had a clear vision of these developments, which was able to
face up to these dangers, and which made the impotence and progressive betrayal of all the other
parties abundantly clear was Lenin’s. The communists in all countries applauded it when it took
all power into its own hands, invited it to keep a firm hold on it, and did all they could to
parry the blows of its thousand and one enemies. They didn’t ask it to build socialism, but
they did expect – less so the petty bourgeois exiles – to
be shown
how socialists should
live
.
And the Russians would have been bound to ask the same of the Europeans. It came,
preceded by another clear request: overthrow capital where it is fully mature, take power, proclaim
the dictatorship as an intrinsic historical task of the proletariat, of it alone; of the Communist
Party.
21 – Production and Politics
But if no immediate prospect of socialist production is in sight, and you have to
grit your teeth and witness, as though it were new, the capitalist form spreading, is not economic
determinism contradicted by the fact is that a socialist political power rests on an economy
that is not yet socialist? The argument is a specious one. For a start a genuine socialist economy,
once it has emerged from capitalist and mercantile forms, has no need to generate powers, socialist
or otherwise: on the contrary, it does without them.
Anyone who gets bogged down in this difficulty has entirely failed to understand
the great historical polemic on the dictatorship. We would not be telling the anarchists that
the State and dictatorial violence will be needed after the overthrow of the bourgeois State,
if we were unable to demonstrate that in a far from brief period in the super‑industrialised
countries themselves, the proletariat will be the governing, politically dominant class, while
yet remaining economically in large part an exploited class.
The super‑structure of the capitalist mode of production equates with the inertia
that exists in the ideology and behaviour of both the capitalists and of those they oppress.
It will disappear very slowly, and the revolutionary government has a duty to suppress it.
The precise formula is not that the superstructure of State power differs according
to the form of production (absolute monarchy for feudalism, liberal republic for capitalism
and so on) but is that established in the pages of the
Manifesto
: the State is an organ
for the domination of one class by another.
The following two situations are therefore plausible: capitalist State which guarantees
the domination of the bourgeoisie over the workers; and socialist State which having only just
started to eliminate the capitalist mode of production, ensures its destruction by being the
organ of the domination of the force of the proletariat over the remaining exploiters. These
situations are followed by a third: no more exploiting or exploited class, socialist mode of
production, no more State.
If a mode of production, like the Russian one, is for the most part feudal with capitalism
established in a few spots, history has realized a case in which the control and rule of a State
held by proletarians alone is dedicated to the complete eradication of the feudal mode and does
not yet attack the capitalist one; and it is not possible to say when such a conjunctural period
will end, it being determined and influenced by all the diverse productive structures in the
various countries of a highly complex zone.
But clearly such a period cannot go on indefinitely, and as a matter of fact a time
limit was set on it by both Marx and Lenin: it was the time the
impure
Russian revolution
would take to spread to a
pure
European one, which both thought would be shorter.
The component parties in the same international may historically be handling an impure
revolution on one side, and a pure (developed socialist) revolution on the other, or just revolutionary
action against the bourgeois powers that haven’t yet fallen. This relation of forces must reach
a point where the equilibrium is broken: and reached it was, tipping in the direction of counter-revolution.
22 – Infamy and Philistines
But it is really too much to have to put up with those infinitely hypocritical objections
to Russian communism disguised as accusations of violation of Marxism. They shout that the terrorist
dictatorship of the Bolsheviks was ferocious and unjust using the theoretical pretext that the
latter was unable to uproot all bourgeois relations. But if it had done so, how much louder
they would have screamed!
In fact those who were scandalized by the communist dictatorship in Russia were
those who were scandalized, with the renegade Kautsky at their head, that we wanted to apply
it in Europe, ready for rapid socialist transformation though it was.
In reality the arguments were not about the negative aspects and backwardness of
the Russian economy, but about a loathsome subjection to bourgeois ideologies, to limitations
of bourgeois origin which the proletariat was supposed to impose on itself. We were told we
should wait until capitalism was in full bloom, because then the number of workers would be
such that the path of persuasion and of the class idyll would lead to a non‑violent victory.
It was therefore in the name not of hastening to reach socialist society, but of the “absolute
value” of the democratic principle and bourgeois idealism that it was claimed the Bolsheviks
had stopped trampling on the parties which, for example, had more votes than them in the “freely
elected” constituent assembly.
Now, the condition on which the Bolsheviks could have kept their Marxist credentials
intact, and hung on to power in Russia for much longer – although certainly not for ever – was
by continuing to declare, as Lenin had always done without pretending otherwise, that they were
still
unable
to build socialism.
And their credentials certainly remained intact on the hundred and one occasions
when, in successive waves of genuine revolutionary action, they throttled the openly counter-revolutionary
forces and stifled the ignoble caterwauling of the defeatists. Because not only did they prevent
an even more unfavourable and counter-revolutionary situation existing today, but they confirmed
the teaching that the sermons and mind‑bending conjurations of bourgeois prejudice won’t necessarily
be powerful enough to stop the hand of the proletariat once it is up on its feet; and that material
power need not be subjected, before its inexorable deployment, to the censorship of its treacherous
adversary, which with power in his own hands would not consider giving it up for a single second
or give a damn about human life, unless it is his own.
23 – Back to 1914
We repeat that it was not a digression, but an introduction to our main theme, when
[between chapters 4 to 22 in this Part One] we examined the central falsification of that History
of the Bolshevik Party which, as Trotski recalls, appeared first anonymously, then as the work
of a group of authors, and then finally in Joseph Stalin’s
Collected Works
.
In order to demonstrate, as we propose to do, that the only framework that exists
in Russia is capitalist, not socialist, it was important to show from when it was the attempt
was made to switch the thesis (certainly not new theory) of Lenin on the
transformation of
the imperialist war into a civil war
, for the false one, for which Stalin alone was responsible,
of
building of socialism only in Russia
.
In that exposition we recalled that Lenin had heard that the Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks, and even the socialist revolutionaries, had protested in the Russian Duma against
the war and voted against credits. Lenin believed this is in September, and maybe even in August
when he wrote the
Seven Theses
; but it was not so.
The Mensheviks, including Chkheidze and former maestro of the Bolsheviks, Plekhanov,
are the leaders, in the Duma and in the emigration, of the “defensists”, whose ranks however
also include some non “liquidators”. The Bolshevik workers’ deputies’ group is opposed to the
war, and soon its adherents are arrested and deported; but various Mensheviks, including Martov,
are also against the war. In the Bolshevik’s own organizations and in the groups abroad there
were serious oscillations, and consequently among the deportees in Siberia: Stalin’s stance
is much discussed, let’s say it was quite demure, until news reached them much later of Lenin’s
stance. Spandarian was the energetic head of the defeatists, before any links were established
abroad.
The social revolutionaries split in their turn: against the war, Chernov at the
head of a small group, in favour of it, Avksentyev, Bunakov and many others who formed a group
“Beyond the border”. All of the latter, namely Plekhanov, Peter Kropotkin, Chkheidze and so
on, declared that the war on the Germans was just, defensive and holy, and they called for all
actions against the government and the Tsarist dynasty to be suspended. Not even Chkheidze and
Kerensky had the effrontery to vote in favour of war credits, however.
24 – Subversion of the “Tendencies”?
Even the objective Wolfe, not that orthodox as far as his theoretical line goes,
is pleased to insist on the fact – for us not that significant – that the division between defeatists
and defensists in 1914 did not coincide with that between revisionist-reformists and radical
orthodox Marxists. To the famous example of Kautsky he counters Karl Liebknecht, who was a “left
Bernsteinian”, while later Bernstein himself was among the first to deplore the abandonment
of the “old Marxist tactic” (here well said) of the vote against war credits. But a series of
other well-known orthodox Germans were chauvinist: Parvus, Lensch, Cunow, Haenisch. In England
the extremely right-wing labourites Snowden and MacDonald voted against credits; in favour was
Hyndman, leader (according to Wolfe) of the orthodox Social Democratic Federation. The British
Socialist Party, which had none of its members in parliament, was decidedly against the imperialist
war.
We will close the inexhaustible subject of the pre-war socialists with Wolfe’s cutting
remark: “
the soft-minded humanitarians inclined to pacifism while many a tough-minded ‘historical
materialist’
[the quotes are Wolfe’s, a clearly idealist historian]
flung himself heart
and soul into the war
” (B. Wolfe, op cit., p.698,
Three Men who Made a Revolution
,
1966).
Quite right! Wolfe didn’t put Mussolini on the list. We could have told him that
Mussolini was an idealist who was conned, or who conned himself, into following revolutionary
materialism. An idealist is neither a radical Marxist nor a reformist Marxist. He is just somebody
not following the same path as us. Historically Gramsci helped us by providing a thousand good
reasons to expel Turati. Theoretically however, and it is always a bad thing to keep quiet about
this, Gramsci was less orthodox than Turati.
It is the general tendencies that interest us: persons and names are only helpful
as a didactic mnemonic; maybe we’ll be partly to blame if it all becomes a bit indigestible.
We have wanted to give an account of the struggle between defensism and defeatism. That was
indispensible before we could pass on to the other antithesis between “uni-constructionism”
and… communism. Social chauvinism and cominformism are not interpretations of communist theory;
they are just some of the many ways of abandoning it. A very bad journey, gentlemen!
Anyway, what is neither right nor left is the Kremlin’s historical method: self-promoting
historicism. The whole of the Bolshevik Party was solidly against the war. Whereas in fact the
trial of the Duma deputies, arrested with Kamenev went badly, and equivocal statements were
made, arousing the ire of valiant comrades Spandarian and Sverdlov (dead both of them without
a stain on their names) the
History
brands Kamenev alone. Kamenev did indeed lead the
Duma group, and didn’t prevent it on 25 July from issuing a very equivocal joint declaration
with the Mensheviks, which talked of defending the people against every oppression, whether
domestic or foreign. Lenin didn’t know about it: but what was clear was the gravity, immensely
greater, of any act of solidarity, however vague, with the defensive war in autocratic Russia
with respect to the western countries.
The historic fact, nevertheless, that all of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties
gave respite to the Tsar as soon as he set off to war is just one more proof of Lenin’s historic
construction: it is only the proletariat that can overthrow tsarism and feudalism, to make that
revolution that is not its own. In February 1915 the Duma greeted the ukase [decree] of its
long-term dissolution with a loud cheer for the victory of the imperial armies!
25 – The early part of the War
The capitalist leaders of the
democratic
nations were certain that the Muscovite
steamroller, so often drawn up under the walls of the western cities to crush revolutions, would
be set inexorably in motion to loosen the grip of the German armies descending on Paris. But
the last time the Russian military machine had been tested on western battlefields was many
decades before. Since then war, and the means to fight them, had been transformed by modern
technology; their huge reserves of manpower, their mass of mounted soldiers no longer counted
for much, and the loans from the French bankers and of other nations were happily gobbled up
without much to show for them in terms of modern armaments.
The Germans detached a few corps from the western front, taking advantage as usual
of their internal lines, and pulled them back to eastern Prussia, but before they reached the
Russian front Samsonov’s army had already been crushed with colossal losses by Hindenburg’s
brilliant manoeuvre at the Masurian Lakes, and by the superior martial organization of the Germans.
The Bourgeois in France and Russia nevertheless exchanged compliments for this
lightening
of the pressure on Paris, analogous incidentally to that obtained by the Russians in Stalingrad
after the huge massacres in the Second World War.
Old comrades may recall a cartoon by Scalarini in
Avanti!
: Nicholas’s claws
tighten around Berlin, Wilhelm’s around Paris. The Masurian lakes and the Marne transformed
everything.
Meanwhile in the Russian cities there was a waning of that wave of enthusiasm which
had seen students, and some plebeian elements from the revolutionary strata of 1905, singing
the war’s praises and kneeling to sing tsarist hymns. The generals attempted to redeem themselves
in the Caucasus, by driving back the Turks, and in Galicia by smashing through the Austro-Hungarian
front in August as far as Leopolis [Lviv], and in Spring they arrived at the fortress of Przemysl,
the key to the Carpathians. But in the Summer of 1915, an overwhelming counteroffensive along
the whole of the Austro-German front reached as far as Riga and Warsaw.
The military, civil, administrative and economic disorganization that spread throughout
Russia was frightening: highly priced provisions in the countryside, an industrial crisis, a
transport system threatening to seize up, and extreme dislocation of the State’s finances. Soon
their western allies began to get worried about it as well.
Over the course of 1916 what remains of Russia’s potential is, at the request of
the allies who assist with money and supplies, employed in a series of offensives which are
either useless or of short duration, and whose aim is to reduce the pressure being exerted by
the Austro-Germans on the Western Front. Moscow no longer dictates its will by throwing its
massive military might into the balance but serves as a buffer whenever it pleases the modern
despotism of big capital.
26 – War suits Democracy
The lessons of the first great universal war start to make an impact, and yet an
entire cycle will go by and another great war will arrive and overwhelm the continents, without
the swindles engendered by opportunist superstitions being avoided. The binomial so dear to
bourgeois rhetoric, which associates despotism with military strength, autocracy with invincibility,
and which portrays capitalism’s modern liberal States as pacific and defenceless and ill-adapted
to all-out war, is resoundingly refuted as the first global conflict unfolds. France, England,
Italy itself, and then America involved, countries all laying a claim to freedom and parliamentary
government, emerge from the war virtually intact, and with advantages and conquests to boot.
First to surrender is Russia, followed by “feudal” Germany, Austria, and Turkey, even though
they had adopted modern industrial technology for military purposes to a far greater extent
than Russia. Napoleon was invincible not because he was a despot, but because he acted under
the impetus of the democratic revolution which first created the citizen soldier; because he
was in control of the army of the Convention of 1793, which first instituted military conscription,
fully relevant at the time, to defend the revolution and the country.
A lie was therefore crushed, which unfortunately later regained an immense amount
of lost ground later on, namely that in order to put a stop to militarism you have to worship
democracy. The two things actually go hand in hand as Athens and Rome had already shown (they
were slave societies, but the slave was forbidden to bear arms).
Even if drawn from a propaganda publication, it is interesting to see how the effects
of the 1914-18 war were mirrored in the “national wealth” of the countries involved. Russia
down to 40% compared to the 1913 figure, Austria down to 55%, Germany 67%, France 69%, England
85%: the national wealth of Japan and America increased! Exchange rates against the dollar in
1918 were: Japan up 1%, England down 2%, France down 12%, Italy down 20%, Germany down 23%,
Austria down 33%, Russia down 40%!
We shouldn’t therefore be saying that democracy is not militarist, but rather the
opposite: the more democracy there is, the more militarism there is and the greater the potential
for war.
So the inevitable conclusion presented itself of its own accord: Russia is no longer
the decisive military factor in Europe. What is to be done to make it more effective in war?
Democratise it!
Did we maybe diminish Lenin when we commented that he worked for an entire historical
period to plant “democracy” in Russia? Those quick to condemn him pose this dilemma: if the
capitalists in the West and in Russia are fighting for democracy in order to strengthen Russia’s
military capacity in the war, and to win it – and Lenin and the communists are fighting for
this historical transition [to democracy] to be completed, but their goal is defeat. Which side
did history prove to be correct?
27 – Cracks Appear in the Empire
Following the series of setbacks suffered by the Russian army there arose an entire
movement dedicated to plotting within the ruling spheres on the domestic front and within the
diplomatic corps: discontent about the serious errors and general administrative chaos won over
ever new strata; these circles predict above all that the extreme corruption of the tsarist
regime and the deep economic depression will inevitably arouse the masses who had started to
manifest their intolerance, not only about the way the war was being conducted, but against
the war itself, and for it to end.
The industrial bourgeoisie, who had become more important because of the war, called
for a new government which wasn’t dominated by the court cliques and landed nobility. The liberal
parliamentary parties and the Kadets [popular name for the Constitutional Democrats, or K.Ds]
who had flaunted their solidarity with the government begin to get restless. Their leader Miliukov
delivers a pompous address on the subject: stupidity or betrayal?
Whereas corruption in the imperial court was demonstrated by the famous episodes
of fanatical enthusiasm for the monk Rasputin and the well-known influence of the Tsarina over
the faint-hearted Tsar, Russian capitalists and foreign diplomats had caught wind of a tendency
among the reactionary forces which wished to make a separate peace with the Germans. On each
side it was decided to act without delay, while for their part the masses and even the soldiers
at the front were rebelling ever more frequently.
Even those opposed on most matters now agreed that previous initiatives and international
meetings had proved ineffective, and that the ambassadors of France and England were secretly
pulling strings to bring about a bourgeois democratic government and the deposition, if not
of the dynasty, of Tsar Nicholas.
The replacement of Sazonov, minister of foreign affairs with strong connections
to the west, with extreme right-wing elements would ratchet up the tension even further.
On 15 December 1916 Rasputin is assassinated by aristocrats in a palace plot which
aims to ward off the regime’s collapse.
At the beginning of 1917 there increasingly take shape preparations for a coup d’etat
by the nobility and big bourgeoisie, the aim being to depose Nicholas and to nominate his ailing
son Alexis as Tsar; and as concerns power they consider appointing prince Lvov. It seems the
English ambassador Buchanan was behind these moves. But popular action took the plunge and the
various parties of the parliamentary left were forced to speed things up; which they did, in
truth, with complete success, constituting a power entirely controlled by the bourgeoisie, while
the petty-bourgeois parties and social-defensists did a magnificent job of keeping the proletarian
forces at bay.
28 – A Warmongering Revolution
If it is true that the Bolsheviks were the only ones to engage in intense work among
the masses to bring down the government, by stirring up workers, soldiers, sailors and even
the women in the food queues, by leading the general strikes and by placing themselves at the
front of the crowd in several bloody clashes with the police, just as true, as regards Lenin’s
revolutionary ‘scheme’, is that they were tricked and didn’t know how to apply it consistently.
The instructions were supposed to be, as we recall from the lengthy analysis of
Lenin’s writings in 1905 (at our Bologna meeting): mass action on the streets, not agreements
between parliamentary parties – overthrow of the dynasty, not constitutional government; republic
– democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants, i.e., not agreements with parties
on the left which would also make agreements with the bourgeoisie.
In Lenin’s view this historical phase was still a
bourgeois
revolution in
the hands of the proletariat and the peasants.
February 1917 was not that; it was instead an earlier, extremely volatile phase,
rendered possible only by the war and the foreign powers. Suffice to recall that the proletarians
(Bolsheviks) and the poor peasants (Left S.R.s) remained in opposition, and at a certain point
were outlawed.
October 1917, which we will examine later, was, in an immediate sense (and more
than that as well as we will see) the Leninite phase, that is, the democratic revolution
in the hands of the proletariat
.
February can be defined straightaway: democratic and bourgeois revolution
in
the hands of the bourgeoisie
.
The dateline of events is well known (with dates given in the calendar we use which
is 13 days ahead, so not in February).
10 March. General strike in Petrograd; street battles.
11 March. The Tsar dissolves the Duma. The deputies remain in the capital to
reject the order and to form the provisional government.
12 March. Formation of the Provisional Committee of the Duma and the Soviet
of Petrograd Workers’ Deputies (which, in the classic Marxist scheme, should take total
national power).
13 March. Arrest of the tsar’s ministers.
14 March. Soviet in Moscow. Soldiers’ delegates in the Petrograd Soviet. The
army sent in against the workers opens fire on the police.
15 March. One up to the bourgeoisie: the Provisional Government is formed by
the Provisional Committee of the Duma. Lvov, constitutional [Kadet], prime minister – Miliukov,
head of the Kadets, foreign affairs – Kerensky, populist social-revolutionary, Justice,
etcetera.
Nicholas II abdicates in favour of his brother Mikhail.
16 March. Mikhail abdicates and defers to the future constituent assembly.
18 March. The Petrograd Soviet, like the one in Moscow, is mostly in the hands
of the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. It effectively consigns power to the
provisional government formed by the bourgeois parties, in which the verbose and traitorous
Kerensky plays the part of representative of the left and the socialist workers. The Bolsheviks
react with a manifesto (and this time we can agree neither with the Stalinists, nor even
with Trotski) which does not disown the bourgeois provisional government, but sets out demands
for the latter to enact: albeit by opposing a peaceful conclusion to the war rather than
stoking it up.
Mensheviks and social revolutionaries would subsequently enter the government: the
Bolsheviks took an unclear position, and
Pravda
published articles by Kamenev that would
later arouse Lenin’s indignation: in essence they not only failed to define the Lvov government
as counter-revolutionary but offered it support, albeit conditional.
The bourgeoisie, having got the proletariat to overthrow the tsarist forces, were
now one hundred per cent successful in clinching the contest for power.
This was due solely to the action and the historical role of the opportunist and
petty-bourgeois parties, as “Lenin’s plan”, sketched out over a long period, had perfectly summed
up.
29 – A Loss of Direction
It was very clear that the whole of the right wing or, more precisely, almost the
whole of the provisional government, was composed of supporters of the war and friends of the
western allies. They had been persuaded to overthrow the tsar’s government, to which in 1914
they had offered full national solidarity, for the sole reason it was suspected of pro-German
defeatism which would sabotage the country’s full potential, and now it was logical for them
to direct every effort towards the resumption of hostilities at the front.
No less logical was it that that part of the proletarian parties, who in 1915 had
proved to be shamelessly “defensist”, should support the same policy and approve of the war,
which by now had acquired a democratic virginity.
The members of those parties which, even when not defeatist, had at least opposed
the war, but who now embraced the policy of the continuation of the war and defence of liberated
Russia, showed that they had nothing in common with the condemnation of the imperialist war
“on all sides”, and that it was bourgeois reasons, not Marxist ones, which had kept them from
marching off to war, for as long as the tsar was directing it.
But was perhaps the position the Bolsheviks took as regards this historical alternative
perfectly clear? What had changed? Should defeatism continue, or should they move to another
phase because one had a “democratic fatherland” now? Unfortunately they were far from making
a sound choice.
And yet even before the war question arose, the period of euphoria, in which for
example there the veterans of the Siberian deportation, such as the taciturn Stalin, and the
highly eloquent Sverdlov and many others met up, and there was rhetorical
fraternisation
between populists, trudoviks, social revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, shows that
the theoretical evolution of the movement fell far short of the powerful roadmaps which were
sketched out in Lenin’s work and in the battles fought at the congresses.
At the time of the “Two Tactics”, and of many other sharp polemics, Lenin had rightly
branded not only every type of populist, but also the Mensheviks, with the inevitability of
their counter-revolutionary fate.
The Mensheviks had posed as
intransigents
, maintaining that the proletariat
couldn’t insist on taking power in Russia as it was the bourgeoisie who must do that; we will
not govern, at most we can ‘monitor’ (a word which infuriated Lenin) the democratic power.
They made out that Lenin was an opportunist for bluntly stating: it is we who must
take power as a provisional government
in the democratic bourgeois revolution
on condition
we concede not an iota of power to the bourgeois parties. And what is more, let there be no
more talk of monarchy.
The dispute, despite the lies spread via Stalinist channels, was never about us
taking power
in order to build a socialist Russia
. Heavy hitting adversaries like Plekhanov
would of course immediately responded: but if we are talking about
that
historical objective,
then we are for taking power as well.
Lenin – and it is as well to constantly emphasise this – said that it was necessary
to take power because history offered no other way of avoiding a counter-revolutionary victory.
Evidently in a potential sense taking power derives from the necessity to advance historically
towards
socialism, towards the Russian and the world revolution, but it is always suggested
in a potential sense and not as the
immediate
and
present
content of the historical
struggle.
At this point even Trotski had not yet found his bearings. When Lenin pointed out
the rightism of the Mensheviks, he agreed. However, when the Mensheviks, with staggering hypocrisy,
attacked a Lenin who was making the proletariat fight for too little, Trotski, who as an ardent
militant dreamed only of struggle, was perplexed; although later on he would understand the
powerful dialectics of Lenin’s construction, and understand it in earnest. In any case we will
use him as an impeccable witness to the fact that what Lenin
wanted
was this: the bourgeois
democratic revolution, as long as it was not an
abortion
and
parody
of a bourgeois
democratic revolution. As a steely determinist, the accusation of having
wished for
too
little made him laugh. In reality he had given a
terrible
example, as the anglo-saxons
would put it, of how to write the history that is yet to come.
So, the minute the Mensheviks reveal their true colours, and though declaring that
they were only negotiating about liberty, democracy, and democratic war, never about immediate
socialism, ENTER the bourgeois government, every red-blooded Bolshevik should have grabbed them
by the throat and declared war without quarter on them. But neither Kamenev, Sverdlov, Stalin
or anyone else did so. Apart from the war question – which they knew had been resolved by Lenin
and by uncorrupted Marxism over two years earlier – they also failed in their duty towards a
party that had taken such trouble to define what its tasks should be during those hours which
had struck so gloriously on the clockface of history.
This group, despite the great merit they had accrued in the insurrectional struggles,
fell short as regards the problem of the relations between the social classes and the political
parties in Russia. That the party which had explained the historical doctrine so brilliantly
should fall down when it came to action was indeed a serious matter.
30 – A homeland at last?
This was also due to the war situation. Indisputably so. But to the error regarding
Russia’s internal dynamics there corresponded a similar error regarding the dynamics of the
international forces, of the global imperialist conflict.
For the late-lamented Karl Marx, if he follows things from the next world (for us
materialists, he surely is following them, but from the place-time
when he was alive
,
and there is Vladimir – oh go ahead, laugh – to shout what he would have shouted) the most horrible
moments must surely be, having explained so often that dialectics is the key to history, when
he sees “Marxists” who are apparently totally oblivious of it, and their adversaries seemingly
knowing it inside out.
The group of bourgeois parties in the pre-war period (whose movements were closely
tracked by Lenin) were very definite that they would never launch an attack on the feudal government
and that they would avoid the awkward stage of the “illegal” transitional government, and they
only set aside this judicious assessment because losing the war would have spelled ruin for
powerful Russian and international capitalistic interests, and would certainly have provoked
violent movements at the expense of the propertied classes, resulting in an intense civil war.
They therefore followed the road that could avoid complications of this kind, the road to German
defeat in the world war.
Apart from everything else, this was consistent with the purely bourgeois requirement
of exalting national values at home, as in all the other bourgeois revolutions in the nineteenth
century. If, therefore, they followed the path of Germandefeat, that is, of the victory of western
imperialists bound together by important business interests, it is clear that from the anti-tsarist
revolution was bound to emerge not an end to the war, but its revival in an extra-virulent form
fuelled by “national enthusiasm”, and a surmounting of the
defeatism
being plotted by
hysterical Tsarinas and dishevelled Rasputins.
The provisional government didn’t hesitate to take this road. Who could have stopped
them? The Soviet, with its
dualist power
. But what dualism of powers! Power is not to
be shared, just as the bourgeoisies in the west hadn’t shared it with the deputies from the
workers’ parties who voted for war credits or who joined the ministries: to these reprobates
was given status and honours, but no more than that. And so it was with the Cheidzes and Tseretellis,
the Martovs and the Chernovs.
To get back on the right road was reading Lenin’s text really too much to ask, or
to hear echoing in one’s head the tough, unvarnished speeches he made over the course of ten
congresses and conferences; or even without reading the theses, to have read the articles and
the pamphlets dictated after the 2nd International’s shameful 1914?
And if the Belgian and French socialists had been pilloried, what doubt was there
that by the same token the Russians who had given national solidarity to a post-tsarist republic
should be as well?
To hesitate on this meant to be subject to purely bourgeois and nationalist ideology,
to draw a parallel between the defence of the country by the Convention and the epic of France’s
Thermopylae, to not have understood a damn thing about anything Marx wrote, or Lenin’s
Imperialism
,
or about the Marxist-Leninist distinction between wars of revolutionary defence and the contemporary,
abhorrent and shameful war of the imperialist powers, that certainly stunk no less after the
Romanovs had gone, nor by acquiring the cachectic face of Woodrow Wilson.
These in fact are precisely the arguments which the Italian reformists wanted to
utilise after the collapse at Caporetto to give their support to the war effort; and often we
have recalled the blood, sweat and tears involved in holding on to them.
Were these then rock-hard Bolsheviks, firmly loyal to the party, with bloody red
revolution running through their veins? Not a bit of it!
31 – Vladimir Gets Ready to Move Off
Need we recount again the story of Lenin’s journey from Switzerland to Russia and
his triumphant arrival? Perhaps not, and yet we will, because the events are very instructive,
and so great is the danger that easy sentimentalism, or its condescending ally, a sly and despicable
scepticism, will conclude: there is nothing to be said; it all depends on one man, on one man’s
brain, and History’s great movements only break out when the dice have been thrown, and from
the many idiots discharged from the uteruses of the world, one guy is selected “
who is always
right
”.
The news Lenin has received when he sets out is only partial, but during the journey,
and especially after crossing the border, or rather the front, he gets to know more. In his
hands are copies of
Pravda
edited by Stalin and Kamenev, which he angrily shows to his
travel companions, perhaps terrified he’d tear them up.
Trotski recounts that Kamenev, one of Lenin’s most devoted disciples, to the point
he even mimicked his gestures and handwriting – not a man to mimic for sure – went to meet him,
and felt he was badly treated. Raskolnikov, another sound head, recounts that Lenin came in
and sat down on the couch: “What have you people been writing in
Pravda
? [he must surely
have used the term equivalent to “what the f…?”]. We are very angry with you!” From then on
whoever came into range got a similar greeting, up to the famous speech to the crowd, from the
armoured car.
We will emphasize the gulf that had opened up between the mentality of the comrades
who had remained in Russia and Lenin’s interpretation of things. In the first place, in order
to dismantle one aspect of the theory of his
Hypnotization
of the masses, we will point
out what a great advantage it is to be able to look at these important matters from a distance
(both spatially and timewise). Lenin gets off the train in Petrograd. He doesn’t even look round,
no-one is stupid enough or has the nerve to say: get yourself
settled
in first. The representatives
of the government, false and obsequious, come to greet him in the great station’s imperial lounge.
He can’t stand Cheidze, who delivers a welcoming address, offering him unity with the Mensheviks
in the “revolutionary democracy”. In the party meeting, a few days before, Stalin had showed
that he was prepared – as we will see – to welcome a similar initiative from Tseretelli.
Lenin didn’t even respond with a no, but resolutely turned his back on the official
delegation (merely shrugging his shoulders would have been too respectful), walked to the station
entrance, entered the square to much applause, and hoisted himself up onto an armoured car.
Maybe no text of the speech exists. Everyone refers to excerpts from it: … I greet you as the
advance guard of the proletarian army… this war of imperialist plunder is the start of the civil
war throughout Europe… The world socialist revolution has already dawned… any day, maybe tomorrow,
capitalist imperialism may collapse once and for all… The revolution achieved by you was a start,
it opened a new epoch: Long Live the Worldwide Socialist Revolution!
That speech, and Lenin’s later appearances at the party headquarters and at the
conference of the following day, as amply documented in the April Theses, not only left the
so-called “leaders of the revolution” lost for words, but, if all the testimonies are correct,
“turned the heads” of the best workers and leading Bolshevik intellectuals. Following his overwhelming
critique, nothing was left of the tactics followed up until that point. The new proposals descended
like a crash of lightning on his astounded and disorientated audience. Those who heard Lenin
speak, without oratorical emphasis, and many of those who didn’t hesitate to contradict him,
can say how whatever he said appeared obvious and relevant to everyone, including those who
had never heard him before. Those who were least skilled in Marxist dialectics were always the
most astonished of all. What he says is impossible! But it is so clear and evident that not
a syllable can be refuted…
32 – The April Fool
The newspaper reports of the speech on the 3rd April were greeted with general astonishment;
not only by his opponents, but by the cadres of the Bolshevik party; and this continued during
the meeting on the following day when Lenin gave a more in-depth presentation, showing no interest
in the topics and resolutions on the agenda, but dashing off there and then the famous theses,
on which Stalinism would try to base his gigantic falsification, and which trotskists would
misunderstand, claiming that Lenin had revolutionized the “old” Bolshevik tactic of 1905. But
in fact, what Lenin brings to Moscow is the underlying argument of the
Two Tactics
without
changing a thing, and it’s just that Trotski only finally grasps its revolutionary significance
(having arrived on the scene a little later). The falsification is this, that it is not at all
to do with passing from the bourgeois revolution to the “socialist transformation” but rather
more exactly of passing from the “Menshevik tactic of the democratic revolution” to the communist
and “revolutionary tactic”
during the democratic revolution
.
This is demonstrated in crystal clear fashion in the text of the Theses of April
Fourth and by Lenin’s reports to the conference on the 24th and over the following days, during
which Lenin constantly repeats: “it isn’t yet about installing socialism”, but rather of not
acting like opportunists in the bourgeois revolution.
For now, however, we will linger over the testimonies to this general astonishment,
which, if there had been a real Marxist party functioning as it should, would have been replaced
by the simple statement: he is saying what he has been saying for twenty years, and we were
idiots to have taken a different path, on the ground of the usual prejudice that new and unexpected
situations required it.
Their opponents can hardly have been surprised: their statements merely expressed
fierce disappointment that their clever snare, laid at the heart of the soviets to entrap the
Bolshevik fraction, had been severed with one blow.
Plekhanov, who as a theoretician must have recognized the Lenin as he was when he
himself was with him, makes out, good renegade that he was, that he heard those things first
time round. He is like the Italian supporters of Togliatti who to some indignant old comrade
reply: can you still be coming out with that old stuff from 1921! His expressions are very similar:
This speech is a
farcical dream
, it is the
ravings of a madman
. The Mensheviks,
having made the sign of the cross, discover that Lenin “is inciting a civil war”! Cheidze is
a more formidable opponent: Lenin will stay out of the revolution, while we will follow in its
path. Great prophets! Tseretelli states that if they had taken power they would have ruined
everything and destroyed – wait for it – the proletarian International!
These people had already drooled over the way out provided by the Germans, before
dashing off to see if Lenin, after so many years, would offer them his hand on which to throw
themselves weeping with emotion; spurned, they came back spitting venom. All this is
classic
,
we well know, and there is no need to go into it further. But what is important is the disorientation
of even the comrades in the front line, totally ignored in the official
History
, which
as usual only slings mud at Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin and others from the gallows platform of
twenty years later. Let us listen to the testimonies gathered by Trotski. “There was no discussion
– he said – All were too stunned for that. No one wanted to expose himself to the blows of this
desperate leader” (here he veers on the side of fiction a bit: a leader not desperate, but angry,
to not use a slightly stronger term, and yet on a resolute doctrinal march from the past to
a clear-cut future, at that particularly fecund turning point; one of the very few in which
the
catalysing
action of
that mere corpuscle that is the leader
acts on an entire
collectivity). Trotski continues: “they whispered among themselves that Ilyich had been too
long abroad, that he had lost touch with Russia, that he did not understand the situation, and
worse than that, that he had gone over to the position of ‘trotskism’”. Here the great Leon
is guilty not of vanity, which one wouldn’t expect from him, but of bounteous naivety: it was
Trotski who finally discovered Lenin, not the other way round. Trotski with his eagle eyes did
not witness that scene, but he knew that the blue, ultra-penetrating, eyes of Lenin, at that
moment, blazing, seemed to be quietly saying: not only is it such and such, but you should recognize
that every faithful sucker knows it already. Nobody’s head is set spinning just by being told
things they didn’t know before, but only when they have the sensation of ‘how come this wasn’t
said right at the start: how could we ever have thought otherwise? We used to know this off
by heart!’
33 – Thrills After the Dressing Down
There are other references to this sensational brain-washing operation; an operation
entrusted not to ruthless cops or Freudian sorcerers, but to material forces during certain
historical crises as they come to a head, which myth, the maker neither of dreams nor farces,
but laborious interpreter of palpable facts, used to express with the sacred words: He is the
Word: he has spoken, and the light has entered into us! (oh, materialist Plekhanov, how deep
have you fallen!). And the references are as follows.
When Lenin said: I propose to change the name of the party to the Communist Party,
not even Zinoviev, who had just arrived with him, supported the proposal! The Bolshevik Angarsky
wrote: ‘It must be openly acknowledged that a great many of the Old Bolsheviks maintained the
Old Bolshevik opinions on the question of the character of the revolution of 1917 and that the
repudiation of these views was not easily accomplished’. And Trotski writes: ‘As a matter of
fact it was not a question of ‘a great many of the Old Bolsheviks’ but of all of them without
exception’. Well, no Angarsky, no, Trotski. Maybe it was all of them (but despite a lack of
alternative sources from which to make a reconstruction, it is difficult to believe that Krupskaya,
let’s say, and who knows who else, did not accept it without flinching) but actually it was
the matter of laying claim to the “old theses of 1905” as they stood, point by point. It is
these coincidences, not the power of one human brain, however much light emanates from it, which
when linked to the forces of the historical subsoil have the power to shake an entire epoch.
But it was Markov, a worker from the Urals, “whom the revolution had found at his
lathe”, who spontaneously gave the assessment that was theoretically correct: “our leaders were
groping until the arrival of Vladimir Ilyich. Our party’s position began to clarify with the
appearance of his famous Theses”.
Bukharin, too prone to flaring up, recalled after Lenin’s death that a part of the
party considered the theses as a betrayal of Marxist ideology! Ludmilla Stahl wrote: ‘Our comrades
were content with mere preparations for the Constituent Assembly using parliamentary methods
and did not even consider the possibility of going further. By accepting Lenin’s word we shall
be doing that which life itself is urging us to do’. Very well. But we will show that that word,
which condemned the universal suffrage Constituent Assembly in the bourgeois Russian revolution,
was printed back in 1905.
34 – Monosyllabic Droof: Da
Since a certain elephantine global co-ordinating body did such a great job of creating
the myth that only Stalin accepted the April line straightaway, (whereas
Pravda,
when
edited by him and Kamenev, stated that the ‘pravdas’ [truths] of Lenin (poor little fellow!)
were merely personal opinions) let us quote a last
non-trotskist
witness.
This is not the first time we have referred to it, but it is useful and pertinent
to the subject under discussion. At the enlarged executive of the Comintern in February-March
1926, during a meeting on the Russian question (the Trotski-Zinoviev-Kamenev opposition was
forming), the debate on which was prevented from being brought to the plenary session on the
grounds that the opposition itself had requested as much for fear of being even more severely
chastised,
a delegate from the left of the Italian party asked Stalin whether it were true that
at the 1917 meeting, when discussing the stance to be taken on the war, Lenin had included him,
Stalin, among those against whom he directed epithets of the type “Russian chauvinist”, “Cossack
nationalist” and such like. As the embarrassed young interpreter remained silent, Stalin ordered
him to translate the question for him, raised his head, and clearly said:
da
– yes, it
is true.
On one occasion (in fact at that same executive meeting) during an attack on the
lefts, Stalin made a triple distinction: when it is comrade X speaking, it is always a lie –
when it is comrade Y, it is sometimes true, sometimes a lie – when it is comrade Z (the Italian
delegate) it is always true, even if the conclusions he draws are wrong.
The witness we have quoted is Stalin himself, via he who according to him (see the
report printed in Moscow) never bore false witness. And to him be given due credit for not wishing,
even if monosyllabically, to lie either.
That would not be enough to condemn anybody, if even Jesus Christ had to tell his
first lieutenant, Peter, that before the cock crowed, he would deny him thrice.
To us materialists it cannot be said: you will be with me in Paradise! History, and
its theory, towers above us all, big and small, famous and unknown. It is its path alone that
we follow.
35 – April’s Benchmarks
There is no doubt that the arrival of Lenin in Russia, and the April Theses, which
would follow within 24 hours, mark a historical turning point, a fundamental stage. But this
must not be understood in the sense that they send out a new message to the world, give a new
version of revolutionary dynamics, or that from that moment, as we wrote so long ago in these
texts, the revolutionary socialist vision had been changed. The simplistic version, as though
from a professorial chair, is that for the entire world proletariat the syllabus had changed.
No more struggle, victory and attainment of power by the
wage-earning proletariat
as
the springboard for the destruction of capitalism, and for the freeing of the productive forces
in order to steer them towards the communist order: but struggle, victory and the attainment
of the State by
the people
, by proletarians and semi-proletarians, workers and peasant
proprietors: this then the banal and pedestrian interpretation whose lesson supposedly needs
to be learnt by the proletarians in the west; in countries, that is, where capitalism has matured
and is in an advanced state of decay before being violently put to death!
The turning point does not concern a capitalist country yielding to the process of
socialist revolution, but a country with a decaying feudalism, in the throes of a bourgeois
and popular revolution.
The April turning point is a powerful grabbing of the helm of the Bolshevik ship
which was succumbing to the waves of petty-bourgeois opportunism, and which had strayed off
the course that needs to be followed
in a bourgeois revolution;
it was a grabbing of
the helm that required the eagle eyes and Herculean efforts of its steersman, but didn’t require
him to plot a new unknown course, but rather to simply follow, and get others to follow, the
course that was already indelibly marked on the navigation chart of History.
Everything that Lenin proclaims and sets down on paper in those historic theses is
terribly against what they were doing in Russia; not only against what the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
parties were doing, but what the workers’ parties and
his own
one were doing as well.
But at the same time, he is fiercely conformist to everything that
had already been writte
n,
to the course mapped out by Marx and Engels in 1848 and a hundred times confirmed; and to the
course traced out by Lenin himself from 1900 onwards for Russia. Impatient People who go weak
at the knees at the mention of new, modern directives need only understand this: we defend the
immutability
of the course, but not its
rectilinearity.
It is full of difficult
twists and turns. But these are not whims that arise in the head the
capo
, of the Leader,
as Trotski himself puts it. Leader in fact means driver. Just because the leader of the party
has the steering wheel in his hands doesn’t mean he has the arbitrary power to go in whatever
direction he chooses; he is the driver of a train or of a tramcar. His power lies in knowing
that the track is fixed, although certainly not straight all the way; he knows the stations
through which it passes and the destination towards which he is driving, the curves and the
slopes.
And he is certainly not the only one who knows it. The historically plotted course
does not belong to just one thinking head, but belongs to an organization which transcends individuals,
above all in time, forged by living history and by a doctrine, which is (for you a tough word)
codified
.
If this is denied then we are all of us done for, and no new Lenin will ever save
us. We will take our manifestoes, books and theses to the pulping mill, in a common bankruptcy.
The April Theses therefore deal with a given, grandiose historical situation, encompassing
a crucial year and the thunderous movement of a hundred and fifty million people. They don’t
treat the situation as unexpected or new, as one which requires a makeshift solution, but graft
it on to the deterministic lines which the doctrine – unitary and cast
en bloc
– of history
and revolution, or rather revolutions, discovered. And discoveries do not evolve or improve.
They are either discoveries, or they aren’t.
It seems therefore that Lenin makes his entrance like those who want to dismantle
and smash everything up. To destroy is the only Marxist way of constructing and managing things.
In the bourgeois and petty bourgeois swamp, and indeed for all dying classes, knowledge is folly,
revolutionary truth is treated with hemlock. But on at least one occasion the scandalised conformists
have been forced to swallow it. Stepping down from the train, the engineer lays into the opportunist
obstacle with a few deft blows. And the train of history continues along its inexorable track;
and along the only path which it could and had to take.
36 – Repel Defencism!
1. (Paragraph one).
In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government
of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to
the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism”
is permissible.
After what we have mentioned repeatedly, no theoretical gloss is required. Clearly
if the war was considered imperialist by Marxists when fought by England, France, Belgium, etc,
one could hardly think that, since it was imperialist under the Tsar, it ceased to be so under
a Russian bourgeois democratic government. In fact it became even more so, because that type
of revolution, which Lenin had come to break up, involved a major linking up with the interests
of big capital in the West.
It is worth highlighting this: the Bolsheviks had failed in revolutionary dialectics.
They hadn’t understood that in Russia democracy was accepted, invoked and preached as an inevitable
transitional bridge, but not as a situation in which the opposition between State and proletariat
should be slackened just because the State passed to the bourgeoisie had assumed parliamentary
forms: they hesitated to issue the defeatist slogan in the combatant army, merely because it
was Lvov in Moscow and not Nicholas. Lenin wipes the whole thing away.
1. (Paragraph two).
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to
a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition:
(a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned
with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that
a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.
Firstly, we must draw attention to a formula which is by no means new, but is stated
here very clearly, which develops the classic concept of the dictatorship of the workers and
peasants, involving the “the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat”,
and to be illustrated later on. But the important point to highlight is that due to doctrinal
rigor, no less than to avoid blocking oneself in in future public situations (as will be seen)
Lenin, although under enormous pressure to react to the “sympathy for the war”, which after
February threatened to wreck everything, did not use the raw formula of “we are against all
wars”. It is a fact that here simplistic extremism is ready to commit both errors: the pacifist
and the militarist one.
Another important point that clearly needs to be made: the Russian war in 1939-45
was not revolutionary defencism because none of Lenin’s conditions were met: power was not in
the hands of the proletariat and the poor peasants – there was no renunciation of annexations
after the war, because in the first phase Poland was subjugated, in the second phase half of
Europe – and not only was there no break with the interests of capital, but a brazen alliance
with it: with German capital to get hold of Poland, and with Anglo-American capitalism to get
hold of the rest.
37 – Defeatism Continues
1. (Paragraph three).
In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections
of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and
not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie,
it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error
to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist
war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is IMPOSSIBLE to end the war by a truly
democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.
Lenin, who had seen defencism infiltrating his own party, fully evaluates the real
extent of this danger of “cossack” national patriotism and ingeniously links it to the “pacifism”
of the masses. The latter believes that it is Nicholas, William and Franz Joseph pushing for
the war to continue, and that the “democratic” governments will quickly put a stop to it. It
is necessary to explain that the opposite is the case, and that in our words “War suits democracy”
more than it does despotism. The last excerpt is the one we need
to know how to read
.
Lenin underlines the word IMPOSSIBLE, and if we had the original text we would see that the
exact construction is: you shouldn’t invoke a democratic peace without violence, because therein
lies only error and illusion, but call for the overthrow of capitalism. A shortlist of democratic
capitalist States is not a guarantee of general peace, but a condition for imperialism. A thesis
that is the opposite of the one, held in common by all those currently present at the Geneva
Convention, which seeks to ward off war with “political honesty”; which maintains that peaceful
coexistence is possible, and so on and so forth... whereas they are all plundering wolves.
1. (Paragraph four).
The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised
in the army at the front. Fraternisation
.
The urgency of the moment meant that this international point is indicated with
a few strokes of the chisel. The illegal organization of military defeatism, the downing of
weapons to embrace the enemy soldier, was not because Nicholas and his supporters (the provisional
government however wanted to come to terms with Grand Duke Michael!) were in command of the
army, but it was something that had to be carried out no less vigorously under the committee
and the government of the Duma! The Cossacks
ad honorem
are flabbergasted, and try in
vain to hide under the table.
38 – Transition: Between Which Two Stages?
2. (Paragraph one).
The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is
the TRANSITION from the first stage of the revolution
–
which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness
and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie
–
to its second
stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the
peasants.
Here the noun revolution is written without the adjectives which we have no hesitation
in adding. In both the
first
and the
second
stages, we are dealing with a bourgeois
and democratic revolution, an anti-feudal, non-socialist revolution.
A text is interpreted, normally, in such a way that the various passages and sections
are susceptible to being ordered in a logical way. And the following excerpts, as well as the
hundred and one formulations for over twenty years of the same thesis, clearly evidence this.
There is more: the first stage, that gave power to a bourgeoisie that neither
could
nor
wanted
to carry out the anti-feudal revolution on its own, was only possible, as a simple
prologue to the anti-tsarist revolution which everybody was expecting, due to the international
fact of the imperialist war, which lent power to, and imposed obligations on, the local bourgeoisie,
and which – due to the failures of the European parties when war broke out – caused disorientation
among the nascent Russian proletariat, with the
semi-proletarians
leaning on the bourgeoisie
and not on the workers.
It is now a matter of
recuperating.
Not in order
to do more
of what
we were determined to do back in 1905, but of making up for the failure of having done
much
less
than set out by the theoretical programme, namely: capitalist revolution with democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
2.
(Paragraph two).
This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally
recognised rights (Russia is AT THE MOMENT the freest of all the belligerent countries in the
world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their
unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.
This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the SPECIAL conditions of Party
work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political
life.
The words we have put in capitals were in italics in the original. In this passage
the italicised words
at this moment,
and
special,
are the most eloquent. Dialectics
teaches that often the response to the hypothesis that negates the existing state of affairs
(democratic freedom), matters more than the response to that state of affairs itself (proletarian
revolution).
Lenin was bombarded with objections about us being in the minority, that the workers
do not understand (or, perhaps it is the professors of Marxism who don’t understand a damn thing?),
that power is in the hands of the provisional government and the Soviet is in the majority for
him and not for us, who have the advantage of being able to meet, talk, publish newspapers,
etc… So then, says Lenin, how could it be better? Is this a reason for writing and talking rubbish?
Should we maybe thank the liberal government for what they have bestowed by licking their boots,
or at least (that gigantic blockhead Nenni having already shown how) by becoming its
gallant
and loyal
opposition?
We must certainly take advantage of such largesse though: as Marx always said, the
proletariat is, in spite of the victorious bourgeoisie,
educated
by it; not in school,
but by being called to struggle, by being drawn into politics. In this
lapsus
of liberty
we must sail against the current, open the eyes of the masses, get the upper hand.
But take heed: this much is possible in
this special moment
. Here the political
leader keeps a firm grip on his followers, but the far greater theoretical leader already sees
clearly what lies ahead. Freedom, no violence against the masses: for now. But would you tell
them that the situation is a definitive one, a guaranteed victory of the
revolution
?
Soon we will have to fight on non-legal terrain! The revolution must still be carried out (and
not because the socialist one is still to be accomplished) and within months; for if it is not
us attacking the bourgeois-opportunist government, it will be them putting us outside the law!
In July Lenin already had to go into hiding. But by now the masses had understood. Maybe by
reading the “theses”? Never. It was the theses that had understood history. And those blind
until then, or dazzled by the splendour of democracy, hesitatingly opened their blurry eyes.
39 – The Provisional Government to the Pillory!
Thesis 3:
No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all
its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations.
Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that THIS government, a government
of capitalists, should CEASE to be an imperialist government
.
This is a direct response to the Party’s manifesto in March and to the articles
in
Pravda
, which considered the government which succeeded Tsarism, although it hadn’t
been a part of it, a revolutionary conquest, and restricted itself to inviting it to carry a
series of “impossible” political measures such as a “democratic” peace initiative, without declaring
that it was a government mandated by international capital to keep the war going, and that the
war had to be stopped in spite of it, by overthrowing it, which was the only way peace could
be achieved. The Lvov government, no less that those than came after it, expressed the requirements
of the national bourgeoisie, which was nurturing hopes of taking its seat at the banquet of
victory over Germany and the division of the imperialist plunder, which would give to a bourgeois
and militarist Russia a hitherto undreamt-of boost. It reciprocated the aid from the Entente
by committing itself to stay in the war through the course of Russian Revolution and see it
through to the end, which was possible only if the force of the working class was behind it.
It counted on winning over the workers’ leaders just as the governments of France, Belgium,
and Germany had done, and it achieved its first successes on this path with the complicity of
the mensheviks and the populists in the Soviets: this no-one had been able to say before the
April Theses. No-one had yet moved on from their joy over the fall of the Tsar. Today in Italy
the proletariat is immersed in
unconsciousness
because no-one (apart from us) has moved
on from a far more imbecilic victory: over Mussolini, which wasn’t even a turning point in the
historic struggle between classes, but just a military episode during the war.
40 – Party and Soviet
Thesis 4. (Paragraph one).
Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets
of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so for a small minority, as against a bloc
of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries
down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have
yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat
.
The well-known situation – the majority in the Soviets in the hands of the right-wing
socialists, delegation of power by these to the Provisional Government elected within the Committee
of Oppositions of the old tsarist Duma – is engraved by Lenin in the general formula of opportunism:
the bourgeoisie influences and controls the right-wing socialists, the latter influence and
control the working masses in favour of the former.
The revolutionaries disapprove of the submission of the Soviets to the Provisional
Government, and they are obliged to fight against it. How should they act towards the present
leaders of the Soviets, who
en bloc
, are at the service of a capitalist and military
policy? To maybe denounce Soviets, as such? Or to say instead that, given that the “democratic
majority” within the Soviets
votes
to support the bourgeois government, this should be
ratified in homage to the usual “proletarian united front”?
To a such an alternative Lenin shrugs his shoulders. Neither of the two.
Thesis 4. (Paragraph two).
The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of
Workers’ Deputies are the only POSSIBLE FORM of revolutionary government, and that therefore
our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present
a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation
especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.
As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing
errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire State power to
the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.
As usual we focus on what is underlined: only
possible form
. The theses are
as follows: any government or power based
outside
the Soviets is
not
revolutionary.
The only government that
can
be revolutionary is one based on the majority in the Soviet.
But he does not say: the Soviets democratically express the will, the free opinion of the workers,
and therefore, any government based on it is revolutionary, conforms to proletarian interests,
and should be supported. This would be patently false. Today the Soviets express the opinion
of a proletariat that has been deceived and misled: they make decisions neither from a revolutionary
perspective, nor from the standpoint of the “practical needs” of the masses.
In these circumstances the Soviet, this historic form expressed by the bourgeois
Russian Revolution, and a direct introduction to the tasks of the proletariat, is neither cast
aside like rubbish, nor forcefully attacked; rather, its errors are systematically denounced.
What directive is offered for this difficult campaign? The famous slogan:
All
State power to the Soviets.
All
means that the Soviets do not recognise other organs of political power not emanating from
themselves; that they do not accept divisions of powers, as such divisions are tantamount to
a renunciation of any power at all.
Therefore (dialectics!) we recognize the Soviet because it is the only
possible
form
of revolutionary government. We recognize it in principle when its majority is against
us too, and do not declare it our enemy. We do not say to it: you either pass into our hands,
or we attack you. We say to it: since we can govern
only
with the Soviet we will recognize
this government even though we are in a minority, and even if the Mensheviks and populists are
in the majority. But it must demand all power, and therefore disavow the Duma committee and
the Lvov cabinet, cutting its links with it and not negotiating power with parties that are
not based exclusively on workers. The Mensheviks and the SRs have a choice: either with the
bourgeoisie in the provisional government, or with us in the Soviet that has
all power
,
and which heads the State. This the masses led by the right-wing socialists would understand
very well.
41 – Impeccable Tactics
When Lenin explains this to his party comrades, he doesn’t omit to mention that
it is well known what the opportunists would choose: the provisional government and not a government
of the Soviet with the Bolsheviks; a compromise by which the Soviet would not be the sole organ
of power, but the bourgeois ministers would remain, and power being mandated to politicians
appointed outside the Soviet would not be denied. Once this choice had become clear, the majority
of the Soviet would abandon the opportunists as traitors, and the latter, along with the bourgeoisie,
would have been defeated, as they wouldn’t be in the way when the inevitable violent clash between
the organs of bourgeois power and the Soviet broke out.
The actual development of the revolution in Russia confirmed the accuracy of this
forecast in such a luminous and powerful manner that unfortunately the fact that it was
not a new way of conducting the socialist revolution
got lost from view. This way was not
new at all, because it corresponded to the by now rancid politics of the legalitarians, reformists,
revisionists, and supporters of collaboration between the petty bourgeoisie and the workers,
who had denied all along Marx’s conception of the revolution by which one passes from the capitalist
mode of production to the socialist one.
Lenin’s tactic, within that historical setting, was, we repeat, impeccable. The setting
is the Russia of the tsars which is emerging from feudal forms of production, the heyday of
this great struggle runs from 1880 to 1917.
The tactic is right, and it is irreproachable because it is precisely the one which
should be followed in an anti-feudal revolution, in a
bourgeois
revolution.
And here we make a connection with a topic that would arise in the future; the struggle
that the Italian left conducted between 1918 and 1926 and beyond, and also with Lenin, against
the view that the same tactic should be used in
the proletarian revolution in capitalist
Europe
.
42 – Down with Parliamentarism!
Thesis 5. (Paragraph one).
Not a parliamentary republic
–
to return to a parliamentary
republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step
–
but a republic of
Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country,
from top to bottom.
We believe that it was here the atom bomb exploded. And yet – and no-one proved it
better than Lenin – they are the classic Marxist words from 1848, even if these, seventy years
earlier, rigorously described the forms that needed to be destroyed and not yet those that would
replace them. He who from these brief comments fails to understand that Marxism culminates in
the destruction of democratic parliamentarism is no Marxist, but a complete toerag.
We come now to the contingent historical situation. We have shown how most of the
Bolsheviks reasoned. The provisional government is not our government, but what can we impute
to it if it is
provisional
? It has the mandate to call
free elections
(utter rubbish),
thirst for which has tormented Russians for over a century: and after handing over to whoever
has the parliamentary majority, the constituent assembly will be gone: therefore, until then
let us prepare for the elections, and that’s that.
At this point, idiots would later say, Lenin
went really mad
. For now, the
bourgeoisie governs. The Soviet remains to monitor things and delegates substantive power to
the provisional government. Then if in the elections to the constituent assembly, the bourgeoisie
and their lackeys, all supporters of the war, form the majority, as it certainly will, and
definitive
power passes to the parliamentary government, what does the Soviet do then? It realizes
that what was
provisional
was itself and disbands, because one can sleep easy knowing
there are parliamentary guarantees! It advises proletarians to fight heroically at the front
against the Germans, and to make sure it doesn’t get involved in that scandalous activity of
organizing soldiers’ deputies alongside the worker and peasant deputies…
Interpreted in such a way the Soviet is an organ of struggle for revolutionary times,
and its life restricted to times of struggle. Its historical task is supposedly to lead the
masses during the insurrection, and having generously shed its blood, to rejoin the ranks, and
let the
legal
power govern undisturbed.
Here we can discern Lenin’s greatness. The Soviets are not organs of revolutionary
struggle but much more: they are the form which revolutionary State power takes. They are what
is contained in the words: democratic dictatorship. The proletariat takes power during the antifeudal
revolution and implements the social transformation which in substance is the creation of capitalism,
but during this period it not only takes power from the bourgeoisie and the big landowners,
but this power is organized in such a form that they are entirely excluded from it, including
any right of representation.
The only political delegation there will be lies at the heart of the network of Soviets
running from the periphery to the centre; the State will be supported on this foundation; the
bourgeoisie not only has no power but it won’t figure as a party of opposition either.
Herein lies the great blasphemy. The form that is appropriate for the anti-feudal
revolution in Russia will not be a parliamentary assembly as in the French Revolution, but will
be a
different kind of organ, based on the class of workers of the city and countryside alone
.
Not only the pretext of waiting for the election of the Constituent Assembly collapses,
but the very necessity for it as well: the cycle will close with its forced dissolution. We
are talking about an entirely different road: conquering a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets,
working legally (1848: to organize the proletariat into a political party), then the conquest
of all power to the Soviets (organizing the proletariat into a ruling class) which clearly involves
the forceful overthrow of the power of the provisional government.
In the socialist revolution the proletariat will overthrow the power of the stable
parliamentary, but bourgeois, government and will organize its dictatorship of wage-earners
alone, led by the communist party.
Here – never forget it – history is still searching for the forms of proletarian
power during a
belated democratic
revolution.
43 – Police, Army, Bureaucracy
Thesis 5. (Paragraph two).
Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy
(that is: the replacement of the standing army with the armed people).
Practically speaking the February government had changed the ministers, but not the
network, the machinery of national administration. The Black Hundreds had gone, but rather than
being an official police force they were a reactionary party/sect. The generals, the senior
central and local functionaries, had changed little from the time of the tsar. The revolution,
even insofar as it was bourgeois, was incomplete. If one had to assume political power in order
to carry out social tasks corresponding to the liquidation of feudalism and not yet of capitalism
(which was only possible if the revolution broke out in Europe) it was necessary, nonetheless,
to break up the traditional State apparatus.
The proletarian power of the Soviets could only be based on the armed working class.
It would not be a
citizens’
army insofar as bourgeois and landlords would be excluded
from it, as from the representative organs, the aim being to repress any counter-revolutionary
attempt to foment civil war.
Only in a revolution that remains socially only capitalist, but in which the proletariat
loses control, does the classic permanent national army of the Napoleonic type go back to being
the mainstay of State power.
Thesis 5. (Paragraph three).
The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective
and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.
This principle persistently defended by Lenin was, as is well-known, upheld by the
Paris Commune. It is a principle for a transitional economy in which the wage system remains
fully intact. But it marks a great step towards the elimination of the social division of labour,
of the sub-division of society between those who live with uncertainty and those who have “a
career”. To abolish
careers
is to deliver an economy in which basic consumption is guaranteed
to all, although within limits determined by plans. Today, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie
tends to do the opposite: not suppressing those with assured careers, but turning everyone into
careerists
, especially the industrial workers.
In fact Lenin’s policy – by which the administrator (coincident with the political
representative) was a simple producer who was temporarily
moved,
following a decision
by his Soviet, to perform that role, from which he could be recalled at any time – would be
abandoned when the Republic, which still calls itself Soviet, became a capitalist State ruled
by the social forces of capital and not by the workers, before fatally proceeding, on an international
scale, in exactly the opposite direction to the one which passes from a workers’ dictatorship
administering the transition to capitalism to one administering the transition to socialism.
The task of liquidating feudalism from its deep roots, even more so in fact, that
arose in 1917 also needed that guarantee. The worker delegated to govern and administer a society
in which the bourgeois and bourgeois interests still exploit the labour of his peers must not
be exposed to the risk of becoming a privileged person and potential instrument of capitalist
power: which was what, after inevitably getting drowned in the massive inundation of newly recruited
bureaucrats, and on a general scale would eventually occur.
44 – Frail Human Nature?
On this was Lenin, who so confidently predicted huge events which are still misunderstood
today, nurturing vain hopes? The usual sceptics who resolve these kind of questions with the
formula of power unable to resist a craving for wealth, rather than indulging vanity, and which,
understood in the vulgar sense, inevitably becomes economic exploitation and despotism, were they perhaps right? Given that such a process is avowedly inherent in all historical climes, and concerns insuperable givens of the hackneyed “human nature”?
It is certainly not the first time we have shown the vile inconsistency of this
kind of rubbish; or fought against this very inferior critique of what caused the death of a
great revolution. A revolution which, we may add, is not dead, but one which has been channelled
into a path that is less rapid historically speaking than was envisaged by Lenin, which lacked
precisely the conditions which he posited as necessary.
The Russian Revolution spanned a vast arc of history: from the ruins of a feudal
system, which was far more rotten than Louis XVI’s, to the installation of a mercantile capitalism
which placed it, in its economic forms, on a par with the elephantine capitalism of the west,
incarnated in its State machinery insofar as it was better at extracting profit, and with a
bureaucracy in its train even more corrupt than the feudal courts, its privileges and perquisites
existing on a scale far more scandalous than those.
And yet the phase of heroic service to the revolutionary power – and perhaps the
acceptance of austere misery is more astonishing than giving one’s life, which is far more common
– isn’t actually characteristic only of the proletarian revolution, it has been a characteristic
of all revolutions, in fact of all social forms of production, and it is easy to read about
it in the historical accounts, and even in myths; about which it is precisely idiots who smile,
in the belief that the legends which circulate were suddenly cooked one day up by an unbeliever
of their calibre.
We need not go back as far as Lycurgus drinking Spartan soup with his peasants and
soldiers, to King Agide who divided up all his goods, we need not recall the fasting and renunciations
of the Jews, Christians and Muslims in their times of revolution, nor the episodes from Roman
history about Cincinnatus, invincible general but insensible to the seductions of power and
wealth, bound to the spade with which he dug his land.
The bourgeois revolution itself had its austere champions who forsook titles and
privilege to embrace the new cause. The most illustrious of them, Robespierre, known as
the Incorruptible
, stood out from all the rest. During the rise of modern capitalism, every nation
has its Savonarola of politics, following inflexible self-imposed rules. For example, the Italian
liberal bourgeoisie of the old intransigent right from Sella onwards boasts a string of real
fasters
in power, inflexible with themselves before anyone else.
The great Bolshevik generation had such men, who were ready to take it upon themselves,
for little more than the bread and cheese of the long emigration, to administer a revolution,
and furthermore a revolution carried out by the poor, to found a social form that would elevate
the rich. Anyone who laughs at Lenin’s insistence on taking a workers’ wage is a poor soul who
envisaged him in the splendid garb of a satrap and never in his threadbare suit: who never saw
Zinoviev, Bukharin, and numerous other comrades; who never knew Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s
wife, who couldn’t be said to have dressed worse than her maid because she never had a maid,
and who never drew attention to herself in any way, even though quite capable, as a Marxist
theoretician, of contradicting its greatest exponents.
Lenin’s formula even now was the right one. History took another path, confirming
his doctrine in full, but raising to the first rank the modern satraps of the politics of the
super-salaried and those mollified by luxury and crassly bourgeois comforts. An efflorescence
of mould, not a force and cause of history, an episode alongside other periods of fetid decomposition,
of
forms
of production that must perish.
45 – The Clearly Bourgeois Social Measures
We will close our analysis, forming a fitting conclusion to what we set out to demonstrate,
with the three short theses on the social-economic measures.
We need not comment on thesis 9, on the duties, programme and name of the party,
nor on thesis 10, on “Renewing the International” since they lie at the centre of all of our
extensive and detailed treatments of the subject.
Thesis 6:
The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to
the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.
Confiscation of all landed estates.
Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural
Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor
Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (…) under the control
of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account
.
This is clear enough, especially to those who have followed our expositions on the
disputed agrarian questions. Lenin sees the waged agricultural worker, who was a pure proletarian
and
not a peasant farmer
, as the first priority. Then the
poor
peasant farmer.
Poor means that he has his family as his labour force, not much land, and no working capital:
he cannot live from the product of his small strip of land and has to occasionally sell his
labour to the country bourgeoisie. The formula is not one of a
dividing up
or
municipalisation
of the land, but of
nationalisation
, that is of confiscation of land rent by the State:
a measure so bourgeois that it was proposed by Ricardo. Possession to be entrusted to the Soviet,
not to the individual producer. The struggle against small-scale agriculture to be conducted
with large model farms. These are not yet referred to as
State
farms but are controlled
by the Soviet: thus agrarian capitalism is allowed.
Theses 7.
The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national
bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
This measure is also classically of the bourgeois period and already many States
have effectively achieved it under various forms. There are banks where there is corporate and
merchant capital. Here as well capital is not confiscated but controlled. The State is banker
and its clients are private individuals.
Theses 8:
It is not our IMMEDIATE task to “introduce” socialism, but only to
bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets
of Workers’ Deputies.
This thesis is clearly about the urban, industrial economy. It is not, consistent
with the above, a demand which the provisional government was expected to insert in its programme,
but a task entrusted to the proletarian power, and evidently subsequent to these: a) winning
over the Soviet to the formula:
all power
, id est to the communist party; b) overthrowing
the provisional government and getting rid of the constituent assembly; c) driving forward defeatism
in the imperialist war.
And yet this programme of social transformation, presented by Lenin in April 1917
as the programme for the
second stage
of the revolution, includes not a single clause
about socialist transformation. Lenin says that we are not
establishing
socialism, a
word he uses with extreme care since no government “establishes” socialism: an out and out proletarian
dictatorship would disperse bourgeois relations and forms of production: a task of destruction,
not of
establishing
something. In the ensuing conference at the end of April, Lenin would
explain everything better, and in more categorical terms.
46 – Other False Dispersals
We therefore placed the April Theses in the context within which they arose, proving
that the pronounced shift of policy by Lenin, within the complicated and difficult process of
liquidating feudal and Tsarist Russia, was solely about making the most emphatic of returns
to a revolutionary strategy. The revolution was, as we mentioned earlier, divided into two stages
with respect to the classic expectation of the Bolsheviks, not because yet another stage had
been added but because the first stage foresaw, due to the inherent difficulties of the situation,
and partly because of revolutionary weakness, that it would be split in two. The February stage
was a
false
revolution, not just a purely bourgeois revolution. It – if history had not
taken an entirely different path – would have led straight to counter-revolution, that is, not
just to being controlled by the global bourgeoisie, but even, and in parallel throughout with
the intricate vicissitudes of the war, towards an attempted tsarist counter-revolution.
The April Theses obviated this danger. It is therefore another enormous falsehood
of Stalinism (after having attempted to attribute to Lenin paternity of the doctrine ‘building
of socialism in Russia alone’ at the time of the 1914 theses against the imperialist war and
the opportunist betrayal, theses which were about destroying the war with defeatism in every
country, including in one alone and also in Russia, but which said nothing about any
constructing
)
to attribute this to him as if he had announced such a bombshell at the time of his return to
Russia in that famous April.
Here is an example of how a publication of Stalinist origin expresses it, along
with its quotations from texts that are unmistakably Lenin’s: “What marked the situation was
therefore the
passage
from the bourgeois democratic revolution to the socialist revolution,
or as Lenin put it the
transformation
of the bourgeois revolution into the socialist
revolution”. But Lenin’s words are the ones above: “
The specific feature of the present situation
in Russia is the transition from the first stage of the revolution
–
which, owing to the insufficient
class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie
–
to
its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections
of the peasants
”.
This second text will also be used instead of it. But the case is
prepared
.
The main defect, as even Lenin will say at the subsequent party conference (see chapter 49),
is that the socialists pose the question of what to do today in a way that is too general: as
the passage to socialism
. We cannot claim to be
establishing
socialism, which
would be a
monumental absurdity
. The majority of the population are small cultivators,
peasants who cannot even conceive of socialism. We can only ‘preconize’ socialism.
The historical dialectic lies in this: the man who declared he didn’t want to pass
to socialism was the greatest of revolutionaries. Those who say they were instructed by him
to build it, and who state they have done it, are nothing but damnable bourgeois.
47 – Towards the April Conference
The arrival of Lenin, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, Krupskaya and other comrades was on
16 April 1917 New Style (European Gregorian calendar) that is, 3 April in the Old Style (Russian
Julian Calendar). The famous theses were read by Lenin at the enlarged conference, which was
previously arranged in Petrograd by the local organizations, on the 4/17 April. (The first date
will always indicate date in the Russian Julian calendar, the second in the Gregorian). The
latter conference was to prepare for the national one (the party’s seventh) which ran from the
24 -29 April (7 – 12 May). It is best to stick to the old chronology, so we don’t end up calling
what has become known as the April conference the May conference, or the classic
October
Revolution
the November Revolution. The gap between the two dating systems is 13 days.
We have mentioned already that the conference was already underway and the resolution
on a settlement with the Mensheviks was being presented there, and there was even the proposal
that the two fractions of the old Russian social democratic party should unite. In Trotski’s
words: “The contrast was too cruel. To soften it, Lenin, contrary to his custom, did not subject
the resolution that had already been passed (in his absence) to analysis but merely turned his
back on it”.
We have described the astonishment which his unexpected speech, and the theses it
recapitulated, provoked in everybody. Trotski’s demonstration that Stalin was entirely, along
with almost everyone else, disowned, is as irrefutable as the story of the incredible makeover
thanks to which the official historiography later on, bit by bit, would distort the entire period
along with the contrast: before April and after April; leaving in the lurch, let it be understood,
Kamenev and other future “trotskists”. In 1924 Stalin admitted to having shared the erroneous
position of compromise with the provisional government which would “power the mill of defencism”,
confessing that: “I repudiated it only in the middle of April, after I had subscribed to Lenin’s
theses”. But in 1926 he would say “that is gossip” and it was just a matter of “momentary waverings:
who has not had them?”. In 1930 the historiographer Jaroslavsky would be persecuted for having
alluded to these waverings. Leon’s expression is most apt:
the idol of prestige is a voracious
monster
!
Finally, in the official
History
it is Kamenev, Rykov, Bubnov and Nogin who
are branded for holding this semi-menshevik position, and Stalin’s reaction to it, on returning
from exile, is attributed to Molotov and others. We don’t attach much importance to this argument.
That Stalin = Kamenev in the pre-April period is very clear. But as far as revolutionary history
is concerned, all things considered, it is Kamenev, not Stalin, who has been rehabilitated.
And even if the opposite were true, the analysis of the historical forces would remain the same.
We cannot go along with Trotski though when he wants to defend here an assessment
he made in 1909, of the disagreement between the “two tactics”, according to which there were
anti-revolutionary aspects in both the Menshevik and the Bolshevik arguments; the first of these
having already emerged, while the second would only emerge in the event of revolutionary victory.
This supposedly happened in April, and it was supposedly due to Lenin that the party
was “rearmed”; an expression used by Leon in 1922 which would later unleash the ire of the Stalinists.
Trotski grafts on to it his theory of the inspirational leader who expresses the masses who
are more revolutionary than the party, and the party which is more revolutionary than its organizational
“machine”.
In these ideas lies the proof that Trotski drew close to Lenin late in the day and
that the Stalinian counter-critique was in part correct, even if both camps were wrong in having
people believe that Lenin, by dropping the April bombshell, was putting into effect a revision
of the old theses.
We confirm the revolutionary importance of the party’s function with the proof that
its theory had predicted everything, in a way that was as orthodox as it was reliable. If Lenin
“rearmed” the party, the term implies there were those who were “disarming” it, proving in fact,
as per our presentation, that Lenin
put it back
on the positions of the old contrast
between “the two tactics” which Trotski wasn’t too keen on. It wasn’t that Lenin gave secret,
brand new weapons to the party, rather he got it to pick up the weapons it was letting go of.
48 – Disagreement at the Conference
There was resistance to Lenin. It was not from Stalin though, who kept a low profile,
but from the more ingenuous Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, Dzerzhinsky and Angarsky among others. “The
democratic revolution has not ended”. “The impetus for a social revolution should have come
from the West”.
Before continuing with Lenin’s responses, which were decisive, it is necessary to
give the very apt formulation which appears in Trotski’s account, when commenting on the reference
to the West: “That was true. However, the mission of the provisional Government was not to complete
the revolution but to reverse its course. Hence it followed that the democratic revolution could
be completed only under the rule of the working class”. Here he was following the line.
Attending the All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik organizations from 24-29 April,
representing 79,000 party members, were 131 delegates with decisional voting power, and a further
18 attending in a consultative capacity. Of the 79 thousand members a good 15 thousand were
in the capital, Petrograd. Here we see the true
dimensions
of a revolutionary class party.
Quite different from the vulgar
festivals
with head counts and contributions to party
funds solicited by means of Luna Park type “attractions”!
In confirmation of Trotski’s statements, it seems that even the Kremlin doesn’t consider
April very interesting either. In the Italian translation of Lenin’s
Selected Works
(they
are now printing the complete works) of the contribution Lenin made to the April Conference,
only the brief theses on the Agrarian and national questions are reported, expressive and important
though they nevertheless are. Lenin’s main report on the
Current Situation,
which in
an organic way develops the themes of the April Theses
,
is therefore missing. We must
therefore rely on texts which summarize the speeches, and have drawn one from a popular Italian
publication, and the other from a rather patchy German summary.
The topics of the conference (after the opening speech given by Lenin, which underlined
the historical reach of that conference “on the conditions of the Russian revolution, but of
a developing world revolution as well”) were as follows: 1) The current situation; 2) The peace
conference; 3) Our attitude in the Soviets; 4) The revising of the party program; 5) The situation
within the International; 6) Uniting the internationalist social democratic organizations (posthumous
remnant from the organization of the conference after the one in March); 7) The agrarian question;
8) The national question; 9) The constituent assembly; 10) Organizational questions; 11) Regional
reports; 12) Elections of the Central Committee. The conference had the same value as a party
congress. Following Lenin’s arrival, he was charged with developing points 1, 7 and 8 on the
agenda, but he only spoke on points 4 and 6, covering the attitude towards the workers’ and
peasants’ soviets, supporting the resolution on the war, and on the situation in the International
and the tasks of the RSDLP. He also delivered the concluding speech.
We will not follow Lenin’s entire elaboration insofar as his overall construction,
developed over the course of his many interventions, is the same as in the April Theses, on
which we reported and fully commented on previously. There are nevertheless some clarifications
here and some very important formulations to be found.
49 – The Question of Power Again
Lenin clarifies again that in February power fell out of the hands of feudal despotism
and into those of the capitalist bourgeoisie and the large landowners, represented by the Provisional
Government and its men in Parliament, the Cadets and Liberals, and supported by the populists
and socialist leaning opportunists. But history poses to the ruling bourgeoisie three tasks
it cannot resolve: ending the war, giving land to the peasants, and dealing with the country’s
economic crisis. The bourgeoisie backs the foreign imperialists in their war of plunder, as
did the Tsar, in fact even more than him.
The most it can achieve is an
imperialist peace
, as a prelude to new wars.
The capitalist bourgeoisie has no interest in nationalization of the land, not because such
a measure is incompatible with capitalism, but because of the links between landowners and capitalists,
via the mortgages on land obtained from the bourgeois banks. Finally, the bourgeoisie cannot
conceive of and realize any measure of economic recovery which would not be at the expense of
the workers in the factories and on the land.
Therefore, power must be taken from the bourgeoisie and assumed by the revolutionary
proletariat, supported by the peasants.
Here we have a very evocative formulation. Faced with the usual objection that the
conditions for a transition from a bourgeois social revolution to a socialist one are absent,
Lenin responds: “The Soviets of workers’ peasants and soldiers deputies must take power
not for the purpose of building an ordinary bourgeois republic, nor for the purpose of making a direct
transition to socialism
”.
In Lenin’s exposition, economic and political questions are once again brought fully into focus:
“We cannot be for “introducing” socialism – this would be the height of absurdity.
We must preach [elsewhere this was translated as
predict
] socialism. The majority of the population in Russia are peasants, small farmers who can have no idea of socialism. We must therefore put over practical measures”.
We have said a lot about these practical socio-economic measures in various fields,
and Lenin’s words firmly establish that their character is not such as to render them incompatible
with capitalism. We will not repeat here what was said about the control of production and the
State bank but will provide a quote which gives a definition of what the postulate ‘nationalization
of the land’ means: “Nationalization of the land, though being a bourgeois measure, implies
freedom for the class struggle and freedom of land
tenure
from all
non-bourgeois adjuncts
to the greatest possible degree conceivable in a capitalist society. Moreover, nationalization,
representing as it does the abolition of private ownership of land, would, in effect, deal such
a powerful blow to private ownership of all the means of production in general that the party
of the proletariat must facilitate such a reform in every possible way”.
Here Marxist economic science is applied with maximum rigor. Bringing land under
State control (in another text the term
Staatseigentum
, or State property, is used) means
that of the three protagonists the first, the landowner, is suppressed, leaving in play the
other two, the capitalist tenant and the agricultural wage laborer, to fight the class struggle.
This is better than passing
tenures
, by definition
bourgeois
, directly to the
small peasant farmer. But in his thesis Lenin is prepared to tolerate the latter on condition
that the soviets of wage laborers on the land are organized separately (today gone, but justified
how, in a social sense?), and with another advantage in view: that abolishing property in land
is a major step forwards by making it possible
to predict
the abolition of
all
private property, even of capital.
50 – The New Form of Power
All of these concrete measures, necessary to get the peasant majority to move in
our direction, and to get them to support the transfer of power from the provisional government
(parliament, constituent assembly) to the Soviets, have nothing to do with “setting an economic
foot in socialism”. However, as far as the transfer of power, as a whole, to the soviets goes,
this
does
mean setting “one foot in socialism”, the political one. In relation to these
considerations, we have sidestepped the definition of October as a bourgeois revolution conducted
by the proletariat.
October must be described as a socialist revolution, not only because the proletariat
is its pilot and ruling class, but because of the originality of its political and State form,
which goes beyond any bourgeois republic and is the form that is appropriate in an
international
socialist revolution; and yet, this new form and power will not be able to initiate the socialist
transformation of the economic structure in Russia, but rather in Europe.
Let’s see how this development occurs in Lenin’s words, or rather in the accounts we have of them.
“What, then, are the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat? The main flaw, the main
error, in all the socialists’ arguments is that this question is put in too general a form,
as the question of the transition to socialism. What we should talk about, however, are concrete
steps and measures. Some of them are ripe, and some are not. We are now at a transition stage.
Clearly, we have brought to the fore new forms, unlike those in bourgeois States. The Soviets
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies are a form of State which does not exist and never did exist
in any country. This form represents the first steps towards socialism and is inevitable at
the beginning of a socialist society. This is a fact of decisive importance. The Russian revolution
has created the Soviets. No bourgeois country in the world has or can have such State institutions.
No
socialist
revolution can be operative with
any other State power than this
”.
“This is a bourgeois revolution, it is therefore useless to speak of socialism,”
say our opponents. But we say just the opposite: “Since the bourgeoisie cannot find a way out
of the present situation, the
revolution is bound to continue
”. We must not confine ourselves
to democratic phrases; we must make the situation clear to the masses, and indicate a number
of practical measures to them, namely, they must take over the syndicates [for which read: production
syndicates; a well-known example being the sugar producers syndicate] – control them through the
Soviets of workers and peasants, etc. When all such measures are carried out, Russia will be
standing with
one foot in socialism”
.
And in a passage from the resolution: “Operating as it does in one of the most backward
countries of Europe amidst a vast population of small peasants, the proletariat of Russia cannot
aim at immediately putting into effect socialist changes [
Umgestaltung
]. But it would
be a grave error, and in effect even a complete desertion to the bourgeoisie, to infer from
this that the working class must support the bourgeoisie, or that it must keep its activities
within limits acceptable to the petty bourgeoisie, or that the proletariat must renounce its
leading role in the matter of explaining to the people the urgency of taking a number of practical
steps towards socialism [which go in the direction that leads to socialism] for which the time
is now ripe”.
51 – The Clear Alternative
Thus taking power, overthrowing the provisional government, abolishing dualism,
making the Councils the exclusive foundation of the revolutionary political State is the implacable
thesis, not contradicted by the fact that the
measures
in themselves are not socialist,
since, by constituting a decisive step forward from dying feudalism to capitalism, they are
heading
towards
socialism
Every passage is an incitement. We have already referred to:
the revolution is
bound to continue
. Other expressions: “If the Soviets intend to assume power, it is only
for such ends [after the other measures, bringing the sugar syndicate under State control].
There is no other reason why they should do so. The alternative is
: either the Soviets develop
further, or they die an ignominious death as in the case of the Paris Commune
. If it is
a bourgeois republic that is needed, this can very well be left to the Cadets […]. The complete
success of these steps is only possible
by world revolution
,
if the revolution kills
the war
, if the workers of the whole world support the revolution. Taking power is, therefore,
the only practical measure and the only way out”.
“But what are the Soviets to do when they assume power? Should they go over to the
bourgeoisie? Our answer is – the working class will continue its class struggle”.
“It is impossible to make a direct transition to socialism. What then is the purpose
of the Soviets taking power? They must take power in order to make the first concrete steps
towards this transition, steps that can and should be made. In this respect fear is the worst
enemy. The masses must be urged to take these steps immediately, otherwise the power of the
Soviets of workers and soldiers will have no meaning and will give the people nothing”.
Let us translate this speech, repeated ad infinitum, into simple terms. In a backward,
feudal setting, fully
capitalistic
measures have the value of steps
towards
socialism.
In the specific setting of Russia and of the imperialist world war, the bourgeoisie will never
take decisive steps towards total capitalism, of a radical subversion of feudalism. Do we have
to allow a semi-bourgeois republic, ever exposed to a feudal counter-revolution, to live? Never.
The proletariat and the communist party must take power and cut the bourgeoisie out if it is
to fully enact those totally capitalist measures. And it is through taking such drastic steps
that Russia will set one foot – the political not economic one, say we – in socialism.
52 – One Foot then the Other
As regards propaganda even a Lenin can use imagery that is somewhat pedestrian.
We will be slavishly modest in our adherence to it, and with these two feet we will occupy ourselves
for a while.
First of all, repeating again that what we have available are reports and fragments
that are not necessarily in the correct order and on which we have imposed our own ordering
of the questions, we will point out that the ‘lecture notes’ of Stalinist stamp which we sometimes
draw on bring the passage we have quoted to a close by removing the image of the foot, and replacing
it with these shameless words:
And these measures, once put into effect, will transport Russia
immediately onto the terrain of socialism!
Of course, no matter how hard we try we will never get hold of those minutes from
1917. But they aren’t necessary to enable us once again to brand as a lie such popularizing
by a Stalinist source.
Let us look at another passage from Lenin based on
feet
: “This measure [the
second one: the first as we know is nationalization of agricultural land; now comes the Soviet’s
control of large-scale production, over the Sugar Syndicate, the Coal Syndicate, the Metal Syndicate,
etc., over the banks, and a fairer, progressive tax on incomes and properties],
since big
capital remains
[…]
is not socialism
– it is a transitional measure, but the carrying
out of such measures together with the existence of the Soviets will bring about a situation
in which Russia will have
one foot in socialism
– we say
one foot
because
the
peasant majority controls the other part of the country’s economy
”.
The first of the two feet therefore refers to the proletariat in industry, the second
refers directly to the small peasant farmers. The first is in socialism the second is not. The
first stands there in a political sense because it got there thanks to two conditions: the taking
of power by the Soviets, and the proletarian State’s control over big industry, over heavy industry.
Now this, as we will fully come to see later in the present treatise, is also a
political
condition: be it of control over what remains of the
big capital
in private hands, for
taking the big factories under State control, or for their
Staatseigentum
. It is a socialist
political condition because heavy industry assures, to whoever in power who has it, the weapons
of class war and of civil war when faced with internal and external counterrevolution. It is
not, on the other hand, a socialist economic condition, since economically it is still a case
of private company subjected to State control, or later on of company as State property. An
economic condition of “State capitalism” is one in which the company, wage-paying, commercial,
monetary system remains on its feet; a condition which beyond being
political
would also
be a socialist
economic
one, would exist from the moment that mercantilism and the profit-making
of the individual company had become redundant, and with them the wage system.
So the foot in Lenin’s expression, even allowing it is not among his most elevated,
placed in socialism by Russia is due to a step made in the urban-industrial-proletarian sector
alone: this step consists of the power used by the workers against the bourgeoisie and in their
governing role with respect to the ‘common people’ and peasantry, which in its turn consists
of having adopted the measure of removing the control of banks, insurance, industrial trusts
and so on from the bourgeoisie.
The foot that remains in capitalism is the rural-agrarian one, where it wasn’t possible
to put in place in 1917 (and nor was it in place in 1955) a consignment of fully
State capitalist
measures. The nationalization or the bringing under State control of
the land
is not
State capitalism either, because private capitalism, big and small, can be associated with it.
According to Marx,
the land
is not capital either in the historical or economic fields.
More about this fundamental assumption can be found in our series on the agrarian question,
on which Lenin is orthodoxy personified. Capital here consists of the productive instruments
of the agricultural business, the stock, living and dead, fixed and circulating. A full capitalism
on the land would have transformed all the peasant farmers into wage earners of the big companies,
and from being
private
it would have become
State
after the latter had expropriated
and confiscated all the agrarian enterprises, the agrarian business capital, and all of the
stock.
So, nationalizing the land assures us of “the support of the peasant majority”, but
it does not create any basis for socialism in agriculture. One merely accomplishes one side
of the bourgeois agrarian revolution, that of freeing the small peasant farmer from feudal servitude
and from a part of the unearned income due to the landed proprietor; one part, because the State,
be it bourgeois or proletarian, will necessarily have to impose taxes that are on a par with
those the titular owner of the land paid, if not with all the revenue that he enjoyed.
53 – Further Steps Taken by the Two Feet
Lenin’s constant aspiration was for the rural proletariat to prevail over the small
farmer: and the latter remains as such whether he owns property, enjoys the use of it, or becomes
in the end a State tenant. Anticipating what we will be saying later, clearly it is not easy,
even in the most developed countries, to achieve an agriculture that is based entirely on wage
labor, which is what you have when rural families do not directly consume the product of their
own labor in kind. Only from this
rung
could one contemplate stepping up to an agrarian
State capitalism, and say: sure, we are not in socialism, but we have placed one foot on the
step
that leads to it. Lenin will take up this idea in his 1921 pamphlet on the tax in
kind about which we are going to speak at length.
Let us suppose, with the boyards and large landed proprietors of the bourgeois variety
gone (‘
Landlords
’, latifundists), that agrarian entrepreneurs (Kulaks in Russia) had
despoiled all the small peasant farmers and were conducting agriculture entirely with wage laborers.
A step up the ladder to private capitalism in the countryside would then have been made, and
it could be said: if we bring all the capital of the Kulaks, at least of the major ones, under
State control, we will enter the phase of State capitalism and place the other foot (on the
understanding that the
wage earners
in industry and on the land are still in possession
of all power) in socialism.
What actually happened in Russia then? The Kulaks were more than expropriated, they
were liquidated. Their capital didn’t pass to the State but was divided into two parts: the
big cooperative companies, which are not State entities, have one part, and the other part,
split up into many small portions, is divided among the peasant farmers of said companies, who
therefore become half-wage earners, half direct producers, with part of the direct product consumed
and the rest sold. This solution replaced the quantitative diffusion of genuine State companies,
which cultivate a relatively small amount of land. This didn’t mark a transition from private
to State capitalism, but rather the lingering on of a form that is half small-scale local production,
that is, below the level of capitalism, whereas it does not rise above it insofar as it is a
rural “labor co-operative” because, with its income and expenditure, it has the potential to
become a large company that is no longer small and localized, but one that is still private
and not a State one.
Let us put it another way. The small peasant farmer under a bourgeois regime differs
from the feudal serf because he is free from personal servitude as regards his labor and product.
He synthesizes in himself (Marx, Lenin) three figures: he is a landed proprietor, because all
of the small parcel of land that he works is his; he is a capitalist because the working capital
is his; he is a worker because all of the labor in the field is provided by himself and his
family.
Let us nationalize the land without passing from small to big companies: the figure
of the proprietor vanishes, and there remains in the small producer the two figures of the small
capitalist and the worker (analogy: the artisan, the small worker tenant, or sharecropper).
Let us move on to the big capitalist company: the small peasant farmers have their
land and capital expropriated: there remains the third figure of wage laborers in enterprises
which have been concentrated into large units.
And so on to the Russian Kolkhoz. The small peasant has become, for around half of
his labor (power) time, a wage earner and collective capitalist (to him is paid a quota of wages
and a quota of profits in a system that is very complicated, as we will see) and for the other
half he has become a small-holder again: he has a house, reserve capital, and spends the other
part of his labor (power) time on his small plot.
Leaving aside the two minority parts, that are the big State companies and the small
peasant families who are not yet Kolkhosian, it remains the fact that most workers on the land
in Russia are still tied to forms of small production, with all the social and economic consequences
that follow. The second
foot
has remained on terrain that is not only not socialist,
but is actually pre-capitalist.
54 – Wrong Moves by the First Foot
Undoubtedly after the violent crises which we are going to discuss – the struggles
to conquer power, to stifle the war, to annihilate the counterrevolution – industry started
to become on the one hand entirely, or almost entirely, State controlled, and on the other,
to assume a quantitatively much greater weight in the social economy of Russia. In those cases
where this remained associated with the political power in the hands of the Russian proletariat,
and with the general movement of the world revolutionary proletariat, the
foot
Lenin
referred to would be even more firmly planted in socialism even if the body was still outside
it, remaining in a mercantile and State capitalist setting.
Unfortunately, the grip on the other political base would become loosened. The Russian
State fully participated in a war between imperialist States as the ally of one (either…) of
the two imperialist groups. The Russian proletariat no longer has a governing role with respect
to the class of peasant farmers, even Kolkhozian ones, to whom equal legal status was given
under the political constitution of 1936. Its political movement is no longer linked to the
international program of armed revolution and dictatorship, and the Communist International
has been dismantled. The second condition has been demolished bit by bit, and the physical expression
of this fact has been the persecutions of the left opposition and the “purges” which have decimated
its ranks.
Under these conditions State capitalism persists, the domination of largescale industry
remains, but the socialist character of the achievement of these “measures” has been lost, and
we are on the same level as the State capitalism of Germany and other countries (which Lenin
illustrates in the 1921 pamphlet we cited).
The revolution Lenin wanted, and that October gave us, was therefore socialist because
it firmly planted the proletarian-political foot in socialism.
And there the second socio-economic foot would have alighted if the international
proletarian revolution had come to the rescue. Maybe only after that even advanced countries
like Germany and the United States will see largescale agrarian State capitalism as a transitional
form. And it would have entered it with its whole body by initiating the uprooting of autonomous
individual enterprises of the wage-earner and of mercantile monetary distribution, in city and
country in parallel.
But although the feudal counter-revolution in Russia, backed by the bourgeoisie of
the time, had been defeated, capitalist counter-revolution would triumph in the world.
Not only was the second foot not planted in the terrain of socialism therefore, but
the first one was withdrawn from it. Today, or since about thirty years ago in fact, both are
outside it.
Not only is Russia not a socialist society, but it isn’t even a socialist republic.
What does remain socialist however, in the light of revolutionary history, is the October Revolution,
and Lenin’s monolithic, farsighted construction of Russia’s road ahead.
55 – The Difficult post-April Maneuver
Lenin had only just won the hard battle to rid the Bolshevik party of any residual
tolerance for the bourgeois government and defencism when he found himself faced with a self-styled
leftwing
objection: you have said it is necessary to take power; very well then; let
us then go back to illegality and preparing for an imminent insurrection.
Lenin’s report on tactical developments, according to the scheme of the April the
Fourth Theses, was as subtle as it was exhaustive.
We, he said, are only a minority: we mustn’t let our guard down. Due to revolutionary
euphoria, many workers in good faith have relapsed into defencism, even in the cities. Until
concrete economic measures are put in place, the peasants will not be with us. If in the international
revolution we want to preserve the new Council form, we cannot attack the Soviet just because
the greater part of it follows not us but the opportunist friends of the bourgeois provisional
government.
Said Lenin: Some may ask: Have we not retreated? We were advocating the conversion
of the imperialist war into a civil war, and here we are talking about peaceful not armed action
during the transition to Soviet power. Well, he explained, we are currently in a transitional
period in which Milyukov and Guchkov have not
yet
resorted to violence: and we need,
therefore, to make prolonged and patient class propaganda. If we were to speak of civil war
now, we would not be Marxists but Blanquists. Our policy is bound, in the immediate future,
to lead to the unmasking of the bourgeois government, and especially its Menshevik accomplices
(evidently at that time Lenin did not insist on this in public statements). But in Lenin’s construction
the future phase of civil war is a precisely defined certainty. The Bolsheviks would discuss
it at length in the months that followed, putting a brake on action again in July, and being
subjected to persecutions and provocation as a result. Finally in October they would accept
the challenge.
Trotski put it well when he said the party needed time to rearm, so that militants
and the advanced part of the masses could get their bearings; only after that, when history
had signaled the right moment, would it give battle, and win.
This powerful ensemble of decisions emerged from Lenin’s contributions to the work
program, which had been prepared against the background of the previous not very good one. Having
got on to the point about unification with the
social-democratic internationalists
(by
which Kamenev and Stalin meant, in March, bringing back almost all the Mensheviks), the conference,
following Lenin’s line, condemned any agreement with the Russian and foreign social democrats
or with any opportunism whatsoever and formulated the watchword of the Communist International.
We have thus expanded at length on the tasks that Lenin stated had to be carried
out as regards the political situation at this crucial turning point, and also as regards the
agrarian question. Meriting further attention is the question of the nationalities; a very serious
one under the empire of the tsar, which was defined as a mosaic of a hundred peoples.
The next (fifth) congress at the end of July would signal the passage from the phase
of peaceful struggle to the new armed insurrection: but the historical and theoretical line
will be the clear elaborations of the April conference; and among the 32 people who formed the
October Committee
, the same names would appear as on April 14. Stalin was called for
the first time to the central committee: Trotski was still absent and not part of the Bolshevik
organization. According to Trotski, Lenin and Stalin apart, out of all those elected to this
Central Committee only Sverdlov died of natural causes, and all the others were subsequently
executed or unofficially suppressed.
It is maybe at the April conference that the cardinal points of the Russian Revolution
shone through with their greatest intensity: the break with the semi anti-tsarist bourgeoisie,
the break with the social opportunists, the break with the war, the linking up with the revolutionary
movement and the struggle for the State of the proletarian dictatorship, in all countries.
Points formidably advanced, right from the opening statement in which Lenin states
that we are not at the historical turning point of socialist transformation in Russia alone.
56 – The Russian National Question
Concerning Lenin’s contribution to the April Conference (April 24-29, 1917; 7-12
May European calendar), there is still the national question to be considered. We have the text
of the resolution that Lenin proposed, and a partial view of the ideas within it in a pamphlet
dated 10 April (immediately after the April 4 theses which we discussed earlier). Using another
incomplete publication as our source we can reconstruct an outline of the discussion.
According to that source the principal merit for setting out the national question
goes to Stalin, who made the official speech.
It is therefore possible that Stalin had understood enough to retract the policy
he had pursued earlier towards the bourgeois provisional government and the opportunist parties
in the Soviets. Be that as it may, the decisive intervention that shaped the conference’s conclusions
was made by Lenin.
It is undoubtedly correct to say that the nationalities oppressed by tsarism (as
the old saying went, a hundred races and a hundred languages under one State and one tsar) played
a massive part in the struggle taken up in 1917 to lay the basis of a new power, its passing
to a new class. The outcome of the revolution depended, in large part, on knowing whether the
proletariat would manage to draw the oppressed nationalities behind the laboring masses. That
is a fact: one need only think of Poland, where vicious Tsarist
pogroms
had massacred
Polish and Jewish nationals; and hatred there was directed not only against the Tsar but against
Petrograd, against the Russian race, which was historically dominant within the empire. Another
matter of decisive historical importance is that the bourgeois provisional government was prepared
to continue the old policy of throttling and oppressing the different nationalities: it was
repressing national movements, and dissolving organizations of the Diet of Finland type. For
the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties, confronted with a war situation in which vast zones
of the ex-empire were in the hands of the German
foreigner
, the fact of the matter is
that the main slogan was still “Russia one and indivisible”, just as under the tsar when the
country was even deemed Holy.
No less historic is the fact that it was the Bolsheviks alone who took a stand against
this feudal slogan, openly declaring that the peoples of the oppressed nations had the right
to decide their destiny. The popular text, which here and there we have paraphrased, displays
little rigor when it attributes this right to the “workers”, when actually the formula refers
specifically to the peoples.
It is said, then, that it was Stalin who elaborated with Lenin the principles of
the Bolshevik national policy, and that in
his
report he unmasked the government’s policy
of
thievery
and pitilessly denounced the petty-bourgeois
conciliators
clinging
on to the bourgeoisie’s coat tails. Well, as is well known, the question of whether or not a
directive’s paternity is ascribed to the names of illustrious men is not something we find particularly
pressing; and as to the point he made, we will talk about Stalin’s contributions to the national
question in general (see our
Race and Nation in the Marxist Theory
). What is certain
is that the sudden shift in April, to opposing the provisional Government and the opportunists
in the Soviets, affected the national question just as it did the issues of war and peace; the
attitude to the provisional government and the dualism of powers; and the economic and agrarian
measures and so on. Anyone who had seen it as correct about the bourgeoisie’s and petty-bourgeoisie’s
reactionary policy towards the nationalities as correct would necessarily have viewed all of
it as correct, and not steered the conference we are discussing towards an attitude of “benevolent
expectation” towards the government until the constituent assembly had taken place, and towards
a merger with the Mensheviks!
57 – Two Conflicting Positions
They can be assumed to be the points attributed to Stalin, but we find them in the
resolution written up by Lenin as follows: a)
recognition of the right of the peoples to
secede
(what does it mean to apply this to workers? nothing); b)
for the peoples gathered
under a given State, regional autonomy
; c)
for the national minorities, special laws
that guarantee their free development;
d)
for the proletarians of all of the nationalities
under a given State, one indivisible proletarian organization, and one party
.
Now at this point, without dialectics to assist, one doesn’t get very far, just as
the Bolshevik
left
back then didn’t get very far. Is this the solution of the national
question for a communist society? Certainly not. It is the dialectical solution that follows
from a bourgeois democratic revolution. But back in 1917, during a phase of conquering, plundering,
imperialist capitalism, overseas and in Europe, the bourgeoisie of every country and especially
in Russia was totally incapable of remaining faithful to all the literary incense (rather than
historically concrete actions) burnt in ’89 and ’48 to the autonomy of small nations and for
their liberation (which, when it did happen, was due to insurrections and wars of independence,
not
rubber stamping
from on high).
Such a program, like many of those of an agrarian and urban social nature which are
sub-socialist and still democratic-bourgeois, can be adopted and put into effect only by a proletarian
power which takes control of the anti-feudal revolutionary process: the key to the entire problem
always lies there, in the previous theorizations of the party, in the lessons of history duly
interpreted from 1900 to the present day, and linked to what was established as regards theory
and policy by Marx back in 1848, for example in relation to the classic question of Poland,
which we have covered in great depth.
But Piatakov (a Marxist not to be written off), supported by others who attended
the conference, gave another report on the national question. They eventually did away with
Piatakov, and we are making use of the reference we have. He would state that in an era in which
the world economy had established indissoluble links between many countries, the national State
constitutes a historical stage which has ended: “The call for independence belongs to a historical
epoch that has already passed”, he said, “it is reactionary because it wishes to make history
go backwards. Setting out from an analysis of the new age, the age of imperialism, we say right
now that we cannot conceive of a struggle for socialism that diverges from that conducted under
the slogan “Down with frontiers”, a struggle that aims to suppress all frontiers between nations
and States”.
58 – Lenin’s Confutation of the “Lefts”
We will report what was attributed to Lenin because it contains a high value concept,
not because we want to put Piatakov down, as those who write in a “marketing” vein might want
to do. We know plenty of comrades who reason as we have Piatakov talking here, good ones as
well, both now and in the past. We also sang the lines which made old Turati blush:
“I confini
scellerati cancelliam dagli emisferi”
– let us wipe unholy frontiers from the hemispheres – nor do we regret having sung them or… having hit a wrong note. But singing is one thing, deducing
in a Marxist way is another. We certainly
predict
that the erasure will come to pass,
along with an international culture and language, and the global fusion of the human races,
but in following the historical course we carefully avoid serving it up as poetic and lyrical
confections.
Lenin as polemicist didn’t use quack cures, and he would have probably spoken as
it appears here: “The method of socialist revolution under the slogan “Down with frontiers”
is all muddled up. (…) What does the “method” of socialist revolution under the slogan “Down
with frontiers” mean? We MAINTAIN THAT THE STATE IS NECESSARY, AND A STATE PRESUPPOSES FRONTIERS
(…) One must be mad to continue Tsar Nicholas’s policy [which was, we suppose Vladimir would
have added, down with any frontier which dares to cut across the territory of my Holy Crown]
… The slogan “Down with frontiers” will be the suitable only when the socialist revolution has
become a reality, instead of a
method
…”
Let us pause over the words we put in capital letters. They are great. Why did the
giant Lenin say them at this felicitous moment? Perhaps it was the giant Engels, who theorized
in a crystalline phrase: two elements define the State: a definite territory, and armed class
power. Or perhaps the giant Marx said them when he was on theoretical terrain and taking on
the mantle of authoritarian and accepting the term, he used them to pour scorn on the libertarian
anarchists of 1870, who were enlightening the cosmos and history with their:
down with
God, Bosses and the State. Or maybe it was some normal person like one of us lot, from the moment
when, through no merit of our own, at a certain juncture in our lives, the idea enters our head
(“gli entro’ nelle chiocche”), never to abandon it.
Le chiocche
[in Neapolitan dialect]
are the cerebral hemispheres, the brains, the cortex; or whatever you like of the natural nut.
59 – The Central Question: the State
Bourgeois culture still poses the question as follows: Capitalism means private
economy, socialism means State. For a while nine out of ten socialists following this trend
sought to exalt the State, and if in pursuit of the usual didactic purpose we just take Italy
for a moment, it was well-known there that the anarchists “were against the State”, and that
the Marxist socialists (ouch!) were for conquering the State, under the unfortunate formulation
of the “public powers”.
Did we, who were children at the time of the Genoa Congress in 1892, need to read
State and Revolution
in 1919 in order to tackle the question? It was actually quite sufficient
to read a couple of Marx and Engels’ well-known and oft quoted paragraphs, acquirable even fourth
hand, and with no need to clothe ourselves in erudition.
Marxism is against the State
in general
and against the
bourgeois State
in particular
. The society that is in its historical program, since it is without classes,
is without a State. But Marxism foresees that the State will serve as a transitory revolutionary
instrument precisely in order to destroy the present ruling class, after the revolution has
destroyed the present State.
Marxism conducts the struggle against the bourgeois State, which can only be overthrown
by violent means. But in previous historical stages Marxism foresees the utilization of this
same State to destroy the feudal State, and in given sectors to hit the private owners of capital
with its detoxicated nationalizations. In given periods it foresees entering the organs of the
bourgeois State firstly to ‘stimulate’ it, then to ‘sabotage’ it, and at a certain point it
has to prepare to abandon this terrain for that of insurrection and the taking of power.
Anecdotal evidence can sometimes make explaining things easier. In 1908 the Marxists
in Italy began to break the monopoly on revolutionary action held by the anarchists and syndicalists
of the then
a la mode
Sorelian type, who were extremist in words but in substance petty
bourgeois; meanwhile it stigmatized the reformist wing of socialism. Attaining a certain notoriety
there was the “teachers’ left”, with solid party militants, namely comrades Dini, Capodivacca
and others, who pioneered trade union agitation among the teachers. For the deputy and lawyer
Turati:
the Dini, the Ciarlatini and other similar “omini” [little men]
. For the deputy
and lawyer Turati (certainly no idiot even as regards Marxism, and along with him Treves and
others) a Marxist without a degree was inconceivable.
In fact the school master Ciarlantini, at the 1912 Reggio Emilia congress dominated
by Mussolini as standard bearer of the left, would make a speech – maybe not understood by all
but commendable none the less – on the subject of socialism against the State for Marxist reasons
rather than anarcho-Sorelian ones.
The entire question back then revolved around running for election as
intransigents,
rather than as part of the dreadful popular blocs, which was a way of getting proletarians and
bourgeois to collaborate. Still very young when we fought for this at the time, we were nevertheless
very clear that the proletarian class needed to remain separate not in order to penetrate the
parliamentary State, but to destroy it by revolutionary means.
In any case, returning to Lenin, he along with Marx and Engels, and us in the stalls,
established that we need the State, and in certain cases the post-feudal State of whatever type,
including for over a century the bourgeois ones as well. Every time that this historical machine
that is the State is
of service to us
, of service to us is its political and military
weapons, even police ones, along with a precisely circumscribed territory as well: we will also
need the frontiers.
When feudalism is no more, when the bourgeoisie is no more and when classes are no
more or rather no more class forms of economy and production, that is, when there are no more
proletarians, then, as Engels said, we will get rid of the State and send it to the scrapyard
and after the last States are got rid of, only then will the last frontiers fall.
Certainly not as soon as we have taken power in a big, modern capitalist country;
much less after taking power in feudal Russia in 1917. And so, said Lenin to Piatakov, you tell
me nothing with the phrase ‘no more frontiers!’ You must tell me: are they the frontiers of
the Romanov territory, or somewhere else? And which ones are they?
The question of April 1917 is still a burning one. At the moment the French bourgeoisie
is screaming that black African Algeria is within the frontiers of its “République une et indivisible”.
Something to throw in the face of the even more centralist Soviet republic is that it is subjugating
peoples behind a
curtain
that is even longer than Nicholas’s Holy one.
For Marxism the resolution of such burning issues cannot be based on Piatakov’s passionate
but naïve appeal. Much more is required, when one considers the torrents of historical energy
needed to shift frontiers, and how little the workers’ International seems to possess, which
is supposed to wipe them, like chalk from a blackboard, from the spherical surface of the planet.
60 – The Usual Historical Kitchen
The balance sheet of this dispute on the national question is made by the cominformists
in the usual way. “What united L. Kamenev and I. Piatakov [with not a hint that Kamenev and
Stalin, a bit before and a bit after April, supported the same line!] was their lack of understanding
of the tasks of the revolution and it drew the party into the Menshevik swamp [and Stalin who
had drawn up, and then withdrawn, the motion on unification with them, what was he doing?];
Piatakov, without openly declaring himself [all those who are not in the inner sanctum today
have always been, by the same yardstick, Mephistophelian imitators!] against Lenin’s theses,
was, in practice, condemning the revolution to isolation and defeat. The party was fighting
on two fronts: against the opportunist opposition on the right and against the left opposition”.
And it goes on to repeat that the main questions of the conference were covered in the reports
given by Stalin and Lenin, in order to suppress, not frontiers like the unfortunate Piatakov,
but the memory, any memory of the fact that back then the right opposition was Stalin; as the
incontrovertible data and evidence we have brought forward bears out.
Anyhow, the left opposition would have said this: If we take total revolutionary
power in Moscow and Petrograd, we would be mad to let go of Warsaw, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Baku,
Batum and so on: it would be a gift to the counter-revolution made in the name of our school’s
respect for the theory of the “right to separate”. Which race or nationality did Stalin ever
give up, orthodox then against left errors, to conform with the policy on the national question?
It was the ups and downs of war that caused free bourgeois Finland to rise, still respected
to this day, and free Poland also, which, with Hitler’s help, was resolutely gobbled up in 1940.
It is therefore necessary return to Lenin’s original text, resolute on this point
more than ever.
First though we should highlight that not all the cooks in that kitchen were always
in unison. The famous Official History of the Party says that the speaker on the national question,
Stalin, had together with Lenin elaborated, etc, etc; then it reports the resolution, leading
one to believe that it was written by the speaker Stalin, as you would. But in Lenin’s
Selected
Works
edited in Moscow, there appears the same resolution, published in
Soldatskaia Pravda
of 3 May 1917, as indicated, and included in the volume:
Writings of 1917
by Lenin, Vol.1,
pp.352-353, ed.1937. Which of the two is the truth?
61 – Lenin and the Question of Nationalities
A first brief formulation, and a very good one, appears in the pamphlet which was
written immediately after the 4 April Theses. The chapter on the agrarian and national questions
is excellent also on the first question as well: it insists on the division between the rural
Soviet of wage-earning agricultural laborers and semi-proletarians (those who, let it be said
for the hundredth time, have a parcel of land, but who cannot earn their living from it and
have to work for a daily wage here and there for other larger enterprises) and the generic Soviet
of peasant farmers, as opposed to “the honeyed petty-bourgeois talk of the populists regarding
the peasants in general, which will serve as a shield for the deception of the propertyless
mass by the wealthy peasants, who are merely
a variety of capitalists
”. In what respect,
therefore, does populism, slapped down back then, differ from today’s agrarian policy of the
cominformists, where, in Italy for instance, they even flirt with the big tenant farmers?!
Lenin asked, then, that every estate confiscated from the landowners (a confiscation
the opportunists wanted postponed until … the constituent assembly had been held) be transformed
into a large model farm controlled by the Soviets. And he added: “In order to counteract the
petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and the policy prevailing among the Socialist-Revolutionaries,
particularly the idle talk about “subsistence” standards or “labor” standards, “socialization
of the land”, etc., the party of the proletariat must make it clear that small-scale farming
under commodity production
cannot
[Lenin’s italics] save mankind from poverty and oppression”.
Repeating yet again that neither Christian Democrats nor “communists” in Italy appear
to be in the least interested in pursuing such an objective, preferring instead to hatch clutches
of sterile, poverty-stricken family farms, spelling the death knell as much for squalid Basilicata
as for magnificent Sicily, we’ll now get back to the national question: in fact we’ll quote
Lenin on the subject in full (Point 14 in the pamphlet):
“As regards the national question, the proletarian party first of all must advocate
the proclamation and immediate realization of complete freedom of secession from Russia for
all of the nations and peoples who were oppressed by tsarism, or who were forcibly joined to,
or forcibly kept within the boundaries of, the State, i.e., annexed.
“All statements, declarations and manifestos concerning the renunciation of annexations
that are not accompanied by the realization of the right of secession in practice, are nothing
but bourgeois deceptions of the people, or else pious, petty bourgeois wishes.
“The proletarian party strives to create a State [you hear!] which is as large as
possible, because this is to the advantage of the workers; it strives to
draw nations closer
together and bring about their further fusion
, but it desires to achieve this aim not by
violence, but exclusively through a free fraternal union of the workers and the working people
of all nations.
“The more democratic the Russian republic, and the more successfully it organizes
itself into a Republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the more powerful will
be the force of voluntary attraction to such a republic on the part of the working people of
all nations.
“Complete freedom of secession, the broadest local (and national) autonomy, and elaborate guarantees of the rights of national minorities – this is the program of the revolutionary proletariat”.
62 – The Conference Resolution
The great historical questions that are presented here, the perspective of which
causes discomfort to no few comrades, can be followed better on the basis of the developed resolution.
Naturally how the problem is framed changes.
We are (a) under a regime in the feudal period or worse under one that is still Asiatic-depotic?
We give a completely free hand to the movements for national liberty, which in the famous theses
of 1920 at the 2
nd
Congress of the Communist International (accepted by the Italian
left, which fiercely disagreed with the application of those tactics in the countries of advanced
capitalism) there is discussion about as to whether they should be defined as
democratic-bourgeois
or
national revolutionary
. Communist and Marxist gullets were invited to swallow both
terms, dished up with the following thankless presentation: in given places, times and social
modes, if you can get your hands on guns, it is okay to unite not only with the non-proletarian
masses, but with the bourgeoisie themselves. That’s it.
Or are we instead (b) on the morrow of the fall of feudalism and in a republic led
by the bourgeoisie which has decided not to deal with the war and land questions? It is necessary
to force it to free the nations trapped within the ex-feudal State, and which want to separate.
In practical terms this means that the question will not be posed in a “pan-Russian” consultation,
but rather in peripheral national consultations.
We are (c) for moving forward, not to a socialist society, but to a socialist republic
which bases its power on the Councils of Workers and Peasants? Well, we would be consistent,
in the expectation of higher social forms and above all the international revolution, if we
proclaimed that the Soviets of the nationalities were free to decide whether or not to separate
from the one State.
We mention in advance that the question is not the same as republics united in a
federation, and hence not the same as the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, in its day, either,
insofar as almost all of the nations and races in play are represented as a minority, and the
fact that the various federated and autonomous republics do not correspond, and nor could they,
to uniform languages and races.
After the conquest of power, we will maintain the principle of separation, but civil
and military wars will have a bearing on its implementation, or rather the wars with States
who have sent in counter-revolutionary forces, variously operating in all of the regions of
the immense territory.
At a certain point the great battle of 1920 at the gates of Warsaw would determine
a major turning point, more than a Polish workers’ uprising would do, and the decision that
a Polish National Soviet on the “frontiers” would be proclaimed.
63 – Despotism and Imperialism
The passing of the resolution is a historic moment. “The policy of national oppression,
inherited from the autocracy and monarchy, is maintained by the landowners, capitalists, and
petty bourgeoisie in order to protect their class privileges and to cause disunity among the
workers of the various nationalities. Modern imperialism, which increases the tendency to subjugate
weaker nations, is a new factor intensifying national oppression”.
The resolution refers back to the historic Marxist thesis which states that in order
for the capitalist form of economy to fully develop, and for European society as a whole to
be released from the bonds of feudalism, a necessary requirement, to be brought about by means
of internal insurrections and national wars, was for States to organize on the basis of a nationality;
it was necessary (and couldn’t be otherwise) to liquidate all the old transcontinental empires,
and if Vienna’s, Berlin‘s and Constantinople’s were reluctant to die, Petrograd’s was even more
so.
If therefore the rise of the capitalist mode of production within the European zone
is linked to the free organization of the nationalities, something in which proletarians have
a direct interest, in a later phase, according to Lenin, it becomes increasingly oppressive.
The struggle for overseas and extra continental markets leads to powerful deployments of the
military forces of the State and to continuous wars driven by competition, with the aim of exerting
political domination over the countries of other continents. When in the great wars the imperialist
powers fight to rob each other of their colonies and possessions, also those with a fully developed
and democratic capitalism are keen to make conquests that are detrimental to the interests of
other European countries and, depending on the outcomes of the wars, the small countries and
peoples pass from one hand to the other.
The ideology of European national liberation and liberation in general comes to be
replaced by the idea of spreading modern civilization: this, in an early stage, is employed
to justify the subjection, enslavement and even the destruction of peoples and races of color,
and then takes the form of demands, in the metropolis, for contested frontier provinces that
lie in crucial nerve centers, i.e., Alsace Lorraine, Venezia Giulia, the Danzig region, the
Sudetenland, the Balkans. From these struggles there arises the solidarity of socialist opportunism
with imperialist capitalism, and the epidemic of defencism is triggered, with each side concealing
their thirst for conquest under phrases about saving their own developed civilization from the
threat of aggression.
That same socialism which professed to be against all annexations became the supporter
of all wars. If one allows for a moment the sophism that peoples with advanced modes of production
have “the right” to govern the less advanced ones, a sophism every European country has been
guilty of invoking, the bourgeois idea of freedom of peoples and equality of nations, historically
devoid of meaning, becomes one of oppression and conquest.
Having broken at the same time with Tsarism allied in Europe with national and class
oppression of all kinds, and with the opportunism of 1914 which consecrated the proletariat
paying homage to all bourgeois wars, the Russian revolution could not but adopt the policy of
ending wars of expansion and conquest and offering freedom to those countries which had been
included in the Russian State as a result of violent conquests.
64 – Separation of States
In his preliminary remarks Lenin points out that a bourgeois republic, with a fully
developed democracy, can consent to different peoples and languages coexisting, without one
predominating over the other; clearly he is referring to Switzerland, where there is not one
but three official languages. And he adds: “The right of all the nations forming part of Russia
freely to secede and form independent States must be recognised”. He says that any other policy
would foment national hatred and sabotage internationalist proletarian solidarity. He cites
the case of Finland and its conflict with the bourgeois Government in Petrograd, and asserts
that Finland, having thrown off the yoke of Tsarism, must be allowed to secede.
If separation from the State is not achieved, the party must support broad regional
autonomy and the abolition of a compulsory official language, calling for the new constitution
to bring an end to national privileges or any violation of the rights of national minorities.,
Readers will recall in the report at Trieste on the
Factors of Race and Nation
the part dedicated to Stalin’s writings on linguistics: the theories according to which a class
revolution does not interrupt the historical function of the national language referred to the
Russian language, which had become de facto language of the Soviet republic and of the entire
union. Our critique of this notion was useful in proving that this historical requirement of
one national language was further proof of the bourgeois character the revolution had assumed,
and that it was pointless to get tied up in theoretical knots to justify this requirement on
a Marxist level. So, what happened to the opposing claim that the State, first of all, should
propose to the national minorities that they secede, and if not, that they be granted a polylingual
administration along Swiss lines? Later on we will return to this issue and consider if the
massive State structure in present day Russia does have one national language, legally and actually,
as this is one of the obscure features that define an imperialist structure.
65 – Against “Cultural” Autonomy
It is here that we come on to the famous point on which Stalin, back in 1913, had
had to collaborate with Lenin on the national question, at cross purposes with the position
taken by Austrian social democracy in the pre-war period; a point which Lenin reaffirms in 1917.
It was the proposal of the socialists of the “mosaic State” of the Habsburgs. They conceded
that the administration of the State, politically and bureaucratically, should be unitary as
regards finance, the army and so on, (apart from the relation of parity between Austria and
Hungary, united under the crown) and proposed that to all of the subordinate peoples: Slavs,
Ottomans, Latins, there should be conceded “the removal of affairs concerning public instruction
and similar matters from the competence of the central State, in order for to be placed in the
hands of sui generis national Diets” without other powers. This creates artificial division,
Lenin now adds, between the workers living in the same locality, or even in the same industrial
enterprise, by reinforcing their link with the bourgeois cultures of individual nations, whereas
the aim of the Socialists is to “reinforce the international culture of the world proletariat”.
In the study undertaken by the young Stalin, which impressed Lenin and his wife,
was precisely developed the idea that the thesis of autonomy in schools, university and in cultural
matters was right-wing and opportunist, whereas the revolutionary thesis was the separation
of the Austro-Hungarian State from the Italian, Slovenian, Croatian, Ottoman, Serbian, Rumanian,
Czech and Slovakian provinces, the fracturing of that State, even if that was not necessarily
the task of a socialist revolution – which on the contrary would have been able to bring those
people together on a very different plane – but of a bourgeois revolution and of a war settlement,
as the first European war was for Austria, as the earlier Balkan one had been for the Ottoman
empire.
This thesis is consistent with the Marxist view on the national questions, which
with ample elaborations we showed cannot be reduced to the negation of nationalities as a present-day
historical fact, and at the time it was strongly defended. But whereas back in 1917 Lenin committed
the Russian Revolution to it, which wasn’t a national rebellion, but the historical overthrowing
of a State which held many nationalities trapped in its web, we might well ask how that thesis
developed in subsequent years, and what type of State, as regards freedom of movement of nations
and regions, the one in the U.S.S.R., constructed in Stalin’s name and appearing as a formidable
monolithic block, actually is, whereas meanwhile Stalin claims responsibility for the tradition
and the merit of being a national super-autonomist. To remain consistent with Lenin’s thinking
the next step for Russia, to be able to overcome serfdom and national fragmentation, could only
be taken in association with the European proletarian revolution. Given that this didn’t happen,
Russia arranged itself into a super-State, concentrated and unitary in its armed forces, both
at home and abroad; the classic form of modern capitalism.
66 – Nations and Proletarian Organisations
Radical Marxists had always fought the formation of national parties within the
same State, which professed to be socialist (Poland, Bohemia, etc.). In Russia the question,
as to movements within the workers unions and Party organisation, which was already social democratic,
was a burning one. Lenin had always supported one sole party throughout the Russian State. The
question was particularly relevant to the Jewish
Bund,
a party which was Marxist in doctrine
and known for its energetic revolutionary action. Accepted in Russian and international congresses,
the Bund was however unwilling to merge with the socialist, then communist, party, which comprised
indifferently militants of all nationalities in its ranks. Lenin clinched this point with the
words: “The interests of the working class demand that the workers of all nationalities in Russia
should have common proletarian organisations: political, trade union, co-operative educational
institutions, and so forth. Only the merging of the workers of the various nationalities into
such common organisations will make it possible for the proletariat to wage a successful struggle
against international Capital and bourgeois nationalism”.
These final formulae place in their correct relationship the constant pursuit of
internationalism, both in the proletarian movement and in the socialist organization of society
in the future, and the struggle against the “immanent” nationalism of the bourgeoisie, with
the historical solutions which in the great stages and great areas we are obliged to find and
give to the questions of race and nation. What we have said at great length as regards the fundamental
conference of April 1917, which maps out the entire trajectory of Russia’s revolution by strictly
linking together the movement’s past and future, which for ease of exposition, too, is personified
in Lenin, integrates historically what we developed regarding doctrine in the oft cited Trieste
report, which comrades will recall unravelled the question of race and nation, in its historical
application, up to the first great world war and within the confines of the central-western
European zone, and it was left to the present work to apply the question to Russia, and to another
one, presented orally in Florence in December 1953, to apply it to the East and to Asia.
Any justifiable elasticity, on the historical scale or related to global geography,
is possible, that much is quite clear as far as Marxist doctrine is concerned, on condition
that Lenin’s condition of one pluri-national organisation within each State is respected, and
their union at an international level: in that Communist International which in the wake of
the – monolingual – Stalinian
declination
, was liquidated in a way as rowdy as it was
servile, and which will one day shall rise again, as One Communist Party, with sections in each
State territory.
67 – Nationality and the West
Proof of the meagre internationalism of Graziadei, Serrati, Cachin and co. lay precisely
in their lack of understanding the national question in the world that lay beyond the Urals
and the Mediterranean, because that data was not that of the politics of the country they came
from.
With the sole aim of rendering Lenin’s construct for Russia and the extra-European
world more intelligible, a construct which was truly prophetic, and above all strictly orthodox
in its Marxism, we will, yet again, fall back on the example of Italy, and ask ourselves if,
and from when, it was right to say: where we are the racial and national question
doesn’t
exist;
and therefore our party (but this would be correct if it was
national!
) is
only concerned with class issues. Fine, but petty.
The Italian national bourgeois State was formed late, in 1861, on the back of the
wars and insurrections of a young bourgeoisie, in which the proletariat fully participated.
Although there arose a State of mixed races in the ethnographic sense, everything came together
(and, along with the democratic tradition
alla francese
, that of Catholicism, of ecclesiastical
internationalism) to settle the racial questions: Russians and even Germans were amazed when
they heard us say we didn’t know if a citizen was Jewish or of a non-Catholic religion: the
equality of the conditions of life was total not only legally but in fact and in custom.
Against a
lay
background such as this, for despite its lateness the capitalist
economy appeared among us in its recent forms (it had very different traditions in the North
and South, in Palermo and Milan) the class struggle of the proletariat rapidly took shape.
In 1911 the proletarian party rid itself of its last national prejudices: it loudly
denounced the celebrations of the 50
th
anniversary of unity, and at the same time
broke off its alliance with the petty bourgeoisie against alleged reactionary strata, there
being no more reactionary stratum than the petty bourgeoisie itself.
But stuck in the gullet of the bourgeoisie there still remained a negative, irredentist,
national question. An honest radical bourgeois at the end of the century felt there would be
a fourth war and he called it “
la prova del fuoco
”, the crucial test; and bourgeois Italy
came out of the imperialist war well, but without the support of the proletariat, which was
able to remain indifferent.
The socialist proletariat had provided good evidence (facilitated by history, rather
than due to any inherent merit) for its anti-imperialist and anti-annexionist positions during
the harsh African ventures at the end of the nineteenth century and in 1911-12; it had learnt
to tarnish the thesis that corrupts many Marxists: that a war is just if it brings to a barbarous
people modernizing and civilizing systems.
In a certain sense the Italian proletariat in 1918 found itself unencumbered by the
national questions whether
negative
(irredentism) or
positive
(empire), as the
bourgeoisie alone had been involved, and it felt ready, as regards its internal organisation,
to proceed and give battle on the class front.
68 – Revolution with Europe
If that battle, which doesn’t require every glorious and inglorious episode to be
gone into, was lost, it is due also to the struggles not having been correctly placed within
an international framework, to an underestimation of the much better equipped imperialisms of
England, France and Germany, which had pulled the carpet from under the feet of the European
Revolution.
If a Russian revolution is unable to attain the peak of its cycle without a revolution
in Europe, mainly because of its inadequate economic forms, an Italian revolution cannot, not
because of all the usual rubbish about regions being depressed or backward, but because geographically
events occurring in Italy become international matters; indeed, the bourgeois revolution itself
only got underway because of the wars of systemization in Europe, in the West and East, which
cleared the road of conservative obstacles. Whichever of the two imperial blocks into which
Europe can be divided wins it can take charge in Italy, and in the past, and in the future,
this country with its too many frontiers will share borders with both of the adversaries. The
Italian militants, therefore, shouldn’t be too proud in being the first to overcome the evils
of chauvinist opportunism. They should not say that due to their experience of politics on the
domestic front they can declare the national question overcome, or that they can go on to delete
those too many frontiers of theirs.
That won’t happen before the question of the ones in Europe has been settled, including
the huge problem of the two Germanies: revolution alone can unite them, but the European revolution
needs German unity, and a German workers’ dictatorship, whereas the prospect of that happening
in England and France is more fragile, for various reasons.
It would be a really, stupid kind of national pride to refuse to acknowledge this
point, and fail to see that we have to learn from the past revolution in Russia, and also from
ones yet to happen in Asia, in order to break the cycle of the hundred and one conditions which,
in endless succession, lie between us and socialism.
It wouldn’t be bad thing, having got back onto the subject, to mention a couple of
other things about the national question in Russia in 1917.
The historical thesis that the provisional government composed of members of the
bourgeoisie and social-opportunists, as well as keeping the war going, continued the tsarist
directive of ruling over the whole of indivisible “Panrussia” and – typically – fought against
the movements in the peripheral areas of a national-bourgeois type with repressive measures
(whereas the Bolsheviks on the contrary adopted the position of
disannexation
with a
view to achieving internationalist revolutionary understanding among the working classes), is
a thesis that has been confirmed in a series of facts.
Ukraine
(a third of the population of European Russia, a ninth of its territory). Petlyura and
other bourgeois nationalists followed by the social-opportunists formed the
Rada
, which,
when it called for self-determination, but not separation, came into conflict with the Petrograd
government. Lenin considered such requests modest and affirmed that one shouldn’t “
deny the Ukraine’s right to freely secede from Russia. Only unqualified recognition of this right makes it possible to advocate a free union of the Ukrainians and the Great Russians, a voluntary association of the two peoples in one State
”. In July an agreement was made between Petrograd and Kiev;
but on August 4 it was revoked drastically and unilaterally by Petrograd.
Finland
(population 3 per cent, territory 4 per cent). Having consented to the Diet on the basis
of a previous tsarist constitution, after a conflict with it the provisional government dissolved
it in July 1917. Lenin had written: “
The tsars pursued a crude policy of annexation, bartering
one nation for another by agreement with other monarchs (the partition of Poland, the deal with
Napoleon over Finland, and so on), just like the landowners, who used to exchange peasant serfs.
The bourgeoisie, on turning republican, is carrying on the same policy of annexation, only more
subtly, less openly […] Workers, do not be influenced by the annexationist policy of the Provisional
Government towards Finland, Kurland, and the Ukraine
”.
Turkestan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan
(territories partly in
central Asia, population a seventh of European Russia). The Provisional Government governed
them from the centre with the Tsar’s old bureaucratic apparatus, granted amnesties to the executioners
of the national insurrections, and imposed the Russian language and schooling on these Muslim
and Mongol peoples.
Poland
. Here the provisional government made the grand gesture in February 1917 of publicizing
the declaration of independence by Russian Poland. But the fact is the Germans had occupied
it, and a year before it had proclaimed the same independence! Where Russian troops were in
occupation of the territory, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists prevented any “disannexation”.
Poland is the classic ‘test’ of the national
vexata quaestio
: and its function in that
respect doesn’t start nor end here.
A note on
language
. On 29 March 1917 the Russian provisional government “
authorizes the use of all languages and all dialects in the documents of private societies, for teaching
in private schools and in commercial literature
”.
The 1918 constitution (which consecrates the independence of Finland, the Persian
provinces, Armenia, and the right of national secession) includes education among the central
people’s commissariats, sanctions the general right to free instruction, but doesn’t say anything
about the use of the various languages.
The 1936 constitution (on which we will need to dwell later) states in article 121
that the right of the citizen to instruction is “
in the mother tongue
”.
The matter is left to the ministers of education of the federated republics (which
are nonetheless not
monolingual
).
Therefore, there is no explicit reference either to one State language or to languages
being considered equal under the law.
In practice that same Stalinian pamphlet on linguistics, which places the language
factor (see the Trieste report on “
Race and Nation
”) outside of socio-economic determination
and “
politics
”, erects a monumental pedestal to the classic literary historical Russian
language, which is no longer considered the language of a nationality, but as a language of
the State,
because
it is pluri-national.
A concept that is indissolubly linked to the historical phase in which the capitalist-bourgeois
from of production dominates, if Marx is Marx.
Regarding this cycle, and in relation to our quotations from Marx on the Crimean War and the siege of Sebastopol, which appeared in that report: Voroshilov, over recent days in that very city, has glorified the heroic and patriotic resistance on the centenary of its defence. Holy Russia!
69 – After April, onwards to the great struggle
The reader who has understood the significance of our treatise knows that our intention is not to compile a
generic
historiography or give a complete account of the facts, which would require greater uniformity in the ‘density
of the
writing’. The facts, even in the news columns, are well known, yet are quite controversial at a detailed level,
and
rendered obscure: which is where we pause to consider the documentation and make a more in-depth analysis.
What we aim to do, however, is to make a continual comparison between the doctrinal elaboration carried out in
advance
by the party – or even by other parties – those which engage with the historical process, and what actually then
happens.
It is for that reason that we gave a lot of space to the April phase; during which the party drew up its
theoretical
balance-sheet of two battles, of differing content, about which it has sufficed for us, and will continue to
suffice, to
sketch out the key stages and important struggles.
The Bolshevik party had developed on a grand scale an impressive edifice of historical perspectives in the period
leading up to 1905, grafting its conclusions and forecasts relative to Russia onto the great perspective of
Marxist
communism regarding proletarian battles in the countries of the white race.
A second balance sheet had to be made during the new pause determined by the reaction which followed 1905 and
utilizing
the lessons learnt in that great struggle, until one arrived at the next major crisis to hit international
socialism
with the outbreak of war in 1914. A new doctrinal battle was conducted, not so much at first within Russian
socialism,
which appeared to Lenin, too, to be entirely against a war proclaimed by the hated Tsar (we saw that here Lenin
was for
the most part mistaken, unable to believe that after so much theoretical preparation there would be any
hesitation on
that point), as within the parties in the West, most of which had shamefully caved in and gone along with the
chauvinist
betrayal.
When in February 1917 the crisis engulfed the Russian Tsarist State, all doctrinal forecasts are once again put
to the
test of facts, but the devastating effects of the European and world war would overlap with those of the class
struggle
in Russia, and of the anti-feudal revolution in which the working class must take up a fighting position that is
difficult to define, but certainly in the front ranks.
The party within which there had been such abundant preparation following February, would acquit itself well in
terms of
action, but find itself on shaky ground in the latter phase as regards three problems which we have adequately
outlined.
First: response to the war. Second: the task of the proletarian party in the anti-feudal revolution. Third: the
struggle
against international social-democratic and social-patriotic opportunism.
In April the historical balance sheet is completed in an extremely thorough way, profiting from the transitory
legality
then in force in Russia. The program of action is constructed with great resolution. It is just a matter of
applying it.
70 – Legal Preparation or Preparation for Battle?
The question can be seen under two aspects: of method and principle, and tactics. Two extreme ‘wings’, to use a
rather
inexact term, see it in very clear cut terms. Lenin’s dialectical viewpoint identifies the two types of activity
and
strives to apply them at the most appropriate times, when they are most likely to meet with success.
A position that is clearly Menshevik and opportunist is to say: tsarism has collapsed, and power is held by a
coalition,
sometimes open, sometimes hidden, of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opportunists. It is established that we
cannot
support any part of the domestic or foreign program of such a government: we need to call for power to be passed
to the
workers’ and peasants’ councils. But now that we are free to agitate and distribute our propaganda, following
the
victory of the democratic revolution, it is just a matter of winning, openly and by legal means, the majority in
the
workers’ organizations and the soviets. Even worse it would be to say: such peaceful agitation must be extended,
even if
we did win a majority in the Soviets, until the constituent assembly is convoked, in order to successfully place
in a
minority the solution of a coalition government with the bourgeoisie.
For a start, such a solution should be rejected as it is non-revolutionary, insofar as it is not proposed in
reference
to a transient phase, but in the sense of an acknowledgement that, after the democratic liberation, the party
programmatically and on principle excludes armed struggle, the civil war, though having on the other hand
excluded a
parliamentary and government bloc with the bourgeois parties. Lenin’s response is instead completely
dialectical: now,
at the end of April, it doesn’t suit us to provoke, in the short term, a civil war to take power. Nevertheless,
the
civil war will happen, and there are two hypotheses: a tsarist counter-revolution which aims to overthrow the
provisional government, in which case we will provide armed support (which happened), and in a second
hypothesis: that,
with the proletarian struggle having developed to the point that it both has the capacity and the need to take
all power
with the Soviets, the provisional government is resistant to ceding it (which also happened).
Lenin therefore responds ‘no’ to this right-wing which wants to renounce armed struggle once and for all, but at
the
same time he agrees with them that it is not yet the moment to spark off a rebellion and that it is necessary to
undertake legal work.
Another opposition wing, also oblivious of the dialectical link between theory and strategic method, wants
immediate,
spontaneous struggle to be provoked without delay, to be instigated on every occasion with preliminary actions.
Now that
the liberal revolution has happened, these comrades say, any support for bourgeois governments, even if ratified
by a
parliament, is ruled out, and the way to overthrow them is not by means of the peaceful conquest of the majority
but by
insurrection alone. Even this position is flawed if it becomes dogmatic, restrictive for the party, if it is not
just
content to say that armed struggle is plausible and is bound to happen in the future, but goes on to assert that
armed
struggle alone should be considered at all times, and not peaceful preparation.
Against these comrades Lenin expended a great deal of effort to stop a premature attack being launched, while at
the
same time fully admitting that in all spontaneous movements of the working masses the party should be present
not only
with political agitation but with material force as well.
Given the extreme difficulties involved in identifying the propitious moment in such difficult conversions for
the
activity of the party, at such moments, caught between war at the borders and economic and social crisis, almost
all
comrades would later bitterly reproach themselves, both those who hadn’t wanted the struggle, and those who had
opted to
compromise it by launching it prematurely.
What is indisputable is that without the robust preparation of the April debate, the party, either due either to
exhaustion or exasperation, would have gone down the road to ruin and certain defeat.
71 – The post-April Phase
We know that even before the conference opened, on the 17th April, 14 days after Lenin arrived, the masses
reacted to a
provocation by the government. The date coincided not only with the 1st of May new style, the first post-tsarist
one,
but also with a declaration by Milyukov, the Kadet Foreign Minister, in which he promised, at the request of the
Allies,
to continue the war. Notwithstanding the related level of infatuation with defencism noticed by Lenin among the
Russian
people and soldiers, in contrast with the tendencies supporting the war’s immediate liquidation, there began in
Petrograd and Moscow a series of days in which the workers called for Milyukov’s head with armed demonstrations,
calling
for peace, and for him to resign, which he did a few days later. But the masses didn’t go beyond demonstrations,
and the
party was still intent on settling its doubts.
It was on 17th May, or 4th of May old style, after the conference had closed on 12 May (29 April), that Trotski
arrived
in Petrograd (greeted with enthusiasm not least as its old president in 1905) and made a speech to the Soviet in
which
he declared (he didn’t yet belong to the Bolshevik Party) that he fully concurred with Lenin’s political
directive.
During the April Days some Bolsheviks had proposed to launch the watchword of overthrowing the government, but
the party
rebuked them by opposing it. Trotski mentions here that Stalin and two conciliators signed the telegram that
asked the
Kronstadt sailors to suspend the anti-Milyukov action. In early May, meanwhile, with Milyukov and Guchkov having
resigned their ministries, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) entered the coalition.
From the ending of the conference on 12 May, up to the convocation of the 1st Congress of Soviets from 3/16 June
1917,
the Bolsheviks carried out the work of propaganda, organization and penetration which had been set out at the
conference.
Meanwhile the opportunists were moving in the direction Lenin had predicted. Before April, the Soviet’s executive
committee, which they controlled, was split about fifty-fifty between those for entering the government, and
those
against it. After the initial crisis involving the street protests, the delegates voted 34 to 19 in favor of
reaching a
settlement with the bourgeoisie. In Lenin’s opinion, it was the petty bourgeoisie, faced with the threat of a
new
revolutionary phase, which was caving in, conceding to the capitalists on all positions. On 6/19 May, the
members of the
new government were announced, a government presided over by the bourgeois Lvov with Kerensky and the others
mentioned
above: the bourgeoisie and the opportunists had clinched their pact of steel.
As predicted, the government would be powerless even in a reformist sense and the timid steps taken by the
“socialists”
were soon blocked, thus among the masses of the city and countryside disappointment in the government and the
leaders of
the Soviet would increase at this time.
72 – The Struggle in the Countryside
The struggle of the peasants to seize in one way or another the land of the big landowners was boiling over, and
one of
the aims of the coalition was to divert this simmering threat into achievements attained by peaceful means. The
Minister
of Agriculture Chernov made attempts to implement the convoluted theoretical program of the Social
Revolutionaries,
involveing repartition of the land. He welcomed the call from the rural zones which denounced the attempts of
the
landowners to save themselves from spoliation by means of partial sales to nominees, or to rich or well-to-do
peasants:
and he adopted the measure of suspending, with a legal order to the notaries, all contracts involving the sale
of land.
This strange measure, which contrasted on the theoretical level with the program of a great bourgeois revolution,
which
in France in 1789 would make “of the land an article of commerce”, aroused the indignation of the big
landowners, who
claimed that Chernov should withdraw this provision. Despicably this man first rendered it ineffective in
practice by
specifying that the transmission of mortgage rights was not prohibited, and then, more cowardly still, he
authorized the
resumption of all contracts which conformed “to the law”, under the pretext that only the future Constituent
Assembly
would be able to legislate otherwise. A miserable end for the man who had been dubbed the “minister of the
mujiks”.
This gave further confirmation of the correctness of the Bolshevik view, who proposed that without waiting for
the
Constituent assembly the land should, without further delay, be declared the property of the State, by handing
it over
into the immediate material possession of the local peasant councils to be collectively managed by them or to
make
transitory distributions of land allotments to farming families.
73 – The Demands of the Urban Workers
At the same time in the cities the scarcity of resources and staple goods was agitating the workers who were
clamoring
for pay increases. For months on end the government avoided this thorny issue, they had no minister of labor,
whereas
the progressive Konovalov was minister of trade and industry. Finally the Menshevik Skobelev would take it on,
but with
the sole means of getting the so-called unofficial Duma Conference to appoint a commission, divided into
sub-commissions
and sections, which were deprived of any authority, and which hid behind the assertions made by the employers
that any
major expenditure would cause the productive machinery to grind to halt, or cause an enormous rise in prices.
Around a
million industrial workers would take action in the factories, not satisfied with the vague works committees
which the
new regime had grudgingly recognized.
Until early June it would only be in commissions and theoretical declarations that the government would tackle
the
question of the State’s political economy, its control of the factories and the prospect of direct State control
of the
largest ones, which the government viewed very unfavorably because… due to the severe lack of resources it
wasn’t
possible to pass to socialism! Conditions as regards obtaining supplies were worsening, workers’ wives found
themselves
queueing for days on end, and in the large and medium sized centers the wave of discontent was steadily rising.
As for the army, whereas the government was plotting a revival of the military struggle with support from the
powers of
the Entente, though fearing the consequences – which then came – of the mad launching of the offensives at the
front,
there was meanwhile a growing aversion among the soldiers to proceeding with the war. In the regiments agitation
was
rising and they were organizing Councils, always oriented more and more towards the Bolshevik tendency.
Against this hazy social backdrop there was the opening, for another great political struggle, still a bloodless
one, of
the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
With the reinvigorated Bolshevik fraction Lenin, just as he had brought the force of revolutionary requirements
into the
party meeting, got ready to bring it to the assizes of the entire working class. It was a memorable clash.
74 – The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets
The congress opened on 3/16 June 1917 and continued until 24 June/7 July, with long debates which for the time
being
left the situation as they had found it. However, this congress would mark the end of the Bolshevik Party’s
phase of
legal preparation, of agitation on the platform established by the April Theses, and a new one would open, not
of the
party’s transition to the insurrectional attack however, but rather the phase of it being attacked by the
counter-revolution, the end of the utilization of the public liberties, of it being forced back “underground”,
that is
back to the illegal activity which the party was so good at.
In power, as we know, was the coalition government established on 6/19 May between the bourgeoisie and the
social-opportunists, consisting of: Lvov, president, ten other ministers, who were either Kadets or Octobrists
(the “ten
capitalist ministers”), the Mensheviks, Tsereteli and Skobolev, and the Social Revolutionaries and allies
Kerensky,
Pereverzev, Černov and Peshekonov. Kerensky, who’d sold his soul to the western allies, was at war; the
Socialist
Revolutionary Party was at that time numerically the most influential party in Russia.
Three months separate Lenin’s arrival from the July insurrection: his
rearmament
of the party was
effective: on the
theoretical side through having precisely defined its objectives, on the tactical side with the policy of
carrying out,
for the present, organizational activity, propaganda and agitation among the masses.
It is from this phase that the tradition would emerge, later excessively trumpeted, of a special ‘recipe’ that
‘Bolshevization’ would confer, as an alarm call to wake up the masses if they dozed off, by tenacious,
unrelenting work
and so on, like in a hackneyed, demagogic campaign. Such a recipe was employed for the entire duration of
Stalinian rule
in a hypocritical, philistine and intimidating way, to silence anyone who saw, instead, the true tradition being
basely
and blatantly betrayed. It was, instead, a matter of a particular approach to evaluating the historic
transition,
anticipated and expected in the after long theoretical preparation, and not an expedient of charlatans for the
resolving
of stagnant situations wherever and whenever they occurred. Today we have been stagnating for thirty years, but
back
then the situation evolved from one week to the next. Not at all times is it appropriate to go to the “great
masses”,
but only when they are moving in a revolutionary direction: a time that one seeks to understood, not to provoke
into
being.
Those three months, at that specific time and place, were certainly not wasted. The Central Committee in April
had
summed up its tasks as follows:
“(1) To explain the proletarian line and the proletarian way of ending the war;
(2) To criticize the petty-bourgeois policy of placing trust in the government of the capitalists and
compromising with
it;
3) To carry on propaganda and agitation from group to group in every regiment, in every factory, and,
particularly,
among the most backward masses, such as domestic servants, unskilled laborers, etc., [not from Lenin’s pen,
this, or
just badly translated, if the domestic servants of city and countryside, deteriorated version of the of the
Russian
serf, appear alongside purely agricultural workers] since it was above all them that the bourgeoisie sought to
use as
leverage in days of the crisis;
(4) To organize, organize and once more organize the proletariat, in every factory, in every district and in
every city
quarter”.
This is an excellent historical lesson in the study of revolutionary processes; it is not a philosophy, as
eternal as it
is worthless, of organization, a historical form whose effectiveness lies in its content, and which is not
revolutionary
automatically
, and can indeed be the opposite. Indeed it is the explosive play of the social forces that
we follow.
On the eve of the congress the Bolsheviks measured the degree of their assiduous preparation: at the Conference
of the
Factory and Shop committees held between May 30 and 3 June (12 -16 June new style), in which three quarters of
the
delegates accepted Lenin’s Bolshevik line – well illustrated in the ‘Resolution on Measures to Cope with
Economic
Disorganisation’ -, at the conference of the Bolshevik military organizations held during the All-Russian
Congress of
soldiers, and on other occasions and demonstrations. The worker’s trade unions had increased during that period
to 130
newly constituted ones in the capital and 2000 throughout Russia.
75 – The Line-up at the Congress
The All-Russian Congress, which opened on 3/16 June under the direction of the opportunist leaders in the
government and
of the capital’s Soviet, consisted of more than a thousand delegates, but only 822 had a deliberative vote. Of
these,
285 were Socialist-Revolutionaries, 248 Mensheviks, and these, together with a variety of smaller fractions,
were in the
overwhelming majority. The Bolsheviks numbered a mere 105. Represented at the Congress were 305 unified local
soviets of
peasant and soldier deputies from throughout Russia; 53 regional and provincial soviets; 21 organizations from
the
active army; 8 from the reserve army; and 5 from the navy. This was the disposition of a gigantic, organized,
armed
force: it showed itself to be totally impotent.
At this congress the solid Bolshevik fraction had neither the aim of achieving a Bolshevik majority, nor that of
attacking the congress from without if it rejected its proposals. The step being taken then was just promoting
as widely
as possible the revolutionary program which the party had adopted in April.
Sitting in the presidency for the Bolsheviks were Kamenev, Zinoviev, Nogin and Krylenko. The main speakers were
Lenin,
Zinoviev and Kamenev. But the work of the fraction was quietly being led by two strong-arm organizers – Stalin
and
Sverdlov, who never went to the tribune. Trotski was not yet in the Bolshevik Party. He rightly remarks that if
Sverdlov
hadn’t died, soon he would have assumed the role, close as he was to Lenin, of the party’s organizing secretary.
However, the Bolsheviks, who as the facts would show were already in control of the masses in the capital
Petrograd and
could have exerted pressure on the congress from without, for the last time waged a great battle of words and
ideas, on
a neutral terrain, a declaration of war alongside the bourgeoisie as much as the opportunists, who were still
vested in
dividing up the legacy of Tsarism between them.
The primary question was the attitude to take towards the provisional government. The Social-Revolutionaries and
Mensheviks would uphold the position, in the All-Russian Congress, which had hitherto prevailed in the Petrograd
Soviet,
that is, to leave governmental power to the coalition ministry, formed outside the Soviets, inside the equivocal
committee which claimed to trace itself back to the old Duma “elected” under the Tsar. And meanwhile everything
should
be deferred until the Constituent Assembly, to be democratically elected “as in the liberal, civilized
countries”.
Tsereteli, one of the most talkative speakers, repeated for the umpteenth time:
“At the present moment, there’s no political party in Russia that says: give us power, leave, we will occupy your
place.
Such a party in Russia doesn’t exist”.
The old rhetorician was confident of his effect on the audience, but a voice – Lenin’s – answered him from one of the delegates’ benches:
“Such a party exists
!”
Amidst much commotion and astonished comments Lenin took the platform:
“He [Tsereteli] said that there is no political party in Russia that would express willingness to take all State
power
into its hands. I say: ‘Such a party exists! No party has a right to refuse power, and our party does not refuse
it. Our
party is ready at any moment to take all power into its hands!”.
76 – Lenin’s Interventions
This narrative is perhaps a bit fictionalized, but we have in Lenin’s “Works” two texts: the first is the speech
that he
gave on June 4th on the question of the attitude to take towards the government, and the other concerns the
proposed
resolution on the burning agrarian question.
In the speech (official minutes of the non-Bolshevik Soviet?) we can read the response to Tsereteli’s quoted
sentence:
evidently Lenin followed up on his earlier interruption and the statement that he was ready to take power. There
follows
in parentheses: (
Applause, laughter
). Indeed, the congress partly applauded the open declaration; the
congress leaders,
poor saps, snickered ostentatiously: they were the ones who had claimed back in April: Lenin will remain alone,
while we
will stand at the head of the revolution!
The first task of the Marxist movement, declared to be an organization for making historical forecasts, is to
tirelessly
compare the facts with the predictions of those good men who treat us as visionaries. And this is what we have
to offer.
Before quoting the passages that made Tsereteli’s laughter fall flat, let us emphasize for a moment this
historical
fact: the party NEVER conceals that it is constructed to hold power, on its own.
Mind you: at the very moment that Lenin, as regards the tactics he defends, is deemed to be an unpredictable and
unscrupulous tightrope walker, an acrobat of unprincipled double-standards – by those who have never understood
anything
– he deals his cutting blow very calmly. The situation is this, he says, it is not a matter of
constructing
a socialist
society, of implementing the socialist program; nor is it even about threatening to take action in the streets
tomorrow,
about insurrectionary violence, or of using the platform to advocate that to the masses; he declares that the
aim is
still to use the available legal channels for propaganda purposes; it is not said – though it will be said, and,
as we
shall see, in the doctrine it is theorized from now on – that by remaining in the minority one would see to it
that the
majority were edged out; the Soviet isn’t asked to immediately assume power, under threat of a boycott. None of
all
this, but, by the infernal Gods, while neither announcing nor threatening that revolution was at the door, it is
loudly
proclaimed that the party of the working class exists to achieve
this sole aim
: to seize power from the
government, and
certainly not, particularly in the phase most unfavorable to it, to participate in it only to end up being
dragged along
in the train of some other administration.
And the latter applies to Lenin’s “pupils”, who say they have learned from him that
flexibility
which
call-girls learn
from their pimp, and (today 1955) that their party has no other aim than the
good of the nation
, and to
that end anyone
who wants to can govern it. Swine!
77 – The Bolshevik Position
It is in a hostile environment that Lenin speaks, and the other incident is accurately recorded in the minutes.
(
Chairman
: Your time is up).
Lenin
: I’ll be through in half a minute… (
Noise, requests that the speech be continued, protests,
applause
).
(
Chairman
: The presidium proposes to the Congress that the time of the speaker be extended. Any
objections? The majority
is for extending the time).
The speech will end amid
“applause from a part of the audience
”.
Lenin begins by asking: what type of institution is
this
assembly? Can you say it exists in any other
country in the
world? No. And so the question is this: either a bourgeois government as exists in all other countries today, or
this
institution to which we are appealing today to decide on the question of power. Now this new institution is a
government
, of which examples can be found in the history of the greatest revolutionary upheavals, as,
for example, in
France in 1792 and 1871, and in Russia in 1905.
Lenin’s conclusion is familiar to us: it is a conclusion opposed to
coexistence
. The bourgeois government
of the
parliamentary type, and the Soviet, cannot co-exist: therefore, either the former is suppressed, or the latter
will be
crushed by the counter-revolution or at best make a laughing-stock of itself.
In accordance with this doctrine (
Vain is the thought
, Lenin cries out,
that this is only a theoretical
question
), from
then up to now, we have always called ‘blabbermouths’ those who, in the absence of any real movement, and with a
bourgeois parliamentary government still firmly in place, want to “found Soviets in Italy”.
Everyone is fond of building, constructing and founding. The bourgeois animus of the building firm! We are
revolutionaries insofar as we aspire only to tear down, demolish and destroy!
But we would like to dwell a moment on the very remarkable claim that an institution of government which arose
from the
exploited masses occurred not only in 1905 Russia and with the Paris Commune, but also
“in 1792 France”
.
This is a thesis of Marx and Lenin’s that rests on very solid foundations. The French Revolution of 1789-1793 was
a
bourgeois revolution, i.e., it was determined by the pressure of the capitalist mode of production which needed
to
replace feudalism; nor could there have been any other social perspective than the passing of economic privilege
and
political power from the feudal nobility to the big bourgeoisie. But the clash manifested itself as a collision
of the
mass of urban and rural poor against the
ancien régime
and its defenders: and it is precisely a
revolution that
historically straddles feudalism and capitalism that can best be described as a
truly popular revolution
.
It was a class
revolution fought for the bourgeoisie, but not by the bourgeoisie, who sent the poor, and the middle class
intelligentia
, to fight for them. Our revolution will be a true class revolution rather than a
popular
one, because the
proletariat will engage in a revolution for itself, and what is more it will abolish all classes; the working
class will
make this happen, and it alone
In 1917 Russia, between February and October, we don’t have the historic problem of the revolution in-between
capitalism
and socialism, but rather that of the revolution from feudalism to capitalism. In distant 1792 there was a
second
bourgeois revolution, and the poor people were able to fight but not govern, whereas in the more recent one in
1917, we
are talking about the… penultimate bourgeois revolution, and the proletariat, already with a significant
presence, had
to fight with the whole of the people and govern with them – exerting hegemony over them.
78 – “Popular” Revolutions
We won’t at this point examine what Marx and Lenin had to say about a
dualism of power
in the anti-feudal
revolution
which had already revealed itself in the French Revolution of the 18th century (and we could say also in the
English
ones of the 17th Century, in the time of Cromwell and then of William of Orange’s) and ended up in both those
cases with
the defeat of the embryonic “people’s power” and the triumph of the minority propertied class of manufacturers,
bankers
and bourgeois landowners. In this conception we see counterposed to the first Parliament, to the Estates
General, of
1789, the extremist Convention of 1793, which expressed the revolutionary ardor of the urban
sans-culottes
and the
incendiary serfs from the countryside, succumbing in the Thermidor to the power of the big bourgeoisie, as quite
a while
after the Commune would succumb to Thiers’ thugs.
Although skipping such an analysis we will quote a passage from Lenin which confirms that the Russian Revolution
was a
wholly bourgeois revolution, and of all of those it played out as a “truly popular” one – which does not
contradict the
thesis that it triumphed in October as a revolution that was politically
socialist
, but which
aimed to
achieve
an
anti-capitalist social development, even though, at the end of the cycle, with the defeat of the revolutionary
and
internationalist party after the defeat of the European communists, it withdrew – no less than the French
revolution of
1793 did – into the great feudalism-to-capitalism transition. The passage is this, from
“State and
Revolution”
.
“If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the
Portuguese and
the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a “people’s” revolution,
since in
neither case does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own
economic
and political demands. […] The Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 [Lenin is writing between February and
October,
at the time of the June congress in fact, and here denounces Tsereteli, just a few days after the speech we are
examining, for having put forward his candidature for the job of executioner of the Bolsheviks] was undoubtedly
a "real
people’s" revolution [a phrase taken from Marx and Engels, who relentlessly denounced the lack of this
historical
breakthrough in bourgeois Germany] since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest groups in
society,
crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution
the
imprint of
their own
demands,
their
attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of
the old society that was
being destroyed”.
Here it is made clear that of all the bourgeois revolutions the Russian one was an exquisitely popular one, and
that
Lenin conducted a popular revolution in 1917, and was perfectly aware of the fact. And throughout all of this he
remained on the path of the European anti-capitalist revolution, in a Europe in which the conditions of 1871 no
longer
existed:
“In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in
any country
on the
Continent,” as
he says immediately after the previous passage.
But vile and traitorous are those who say that it was Lenin himself who charted a new course for Europe’s class
revolution, by
demoting
it to a “truly popular” one: whereas in fact the latter constituted a real
promotion
for a
capitalist-bourgeois revolution, arising as it did, in Russia, from historical feudalism.
Had such a revolution occurred, which he did not see, the Russian revolution would not have
descended
from
a
popular
to
a capitalist one, but suddenly truly
ascended
from a popular one to a proletarian, classist and communist
one.
But let us return to the First Congress of Soviets.
79 – “Revolutionary Democracy”
Lenin derides the obsession the opportunists have with this phrase. He does not depart from the line he’d been
following
for twenty years (as Stalinism would have it) and does not deny at all that he is proposing in the democratic
revolution
is a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants. It is you, he says, who shouldn’t be talking about
revolutionary democracy, but rather of “reformist democracy with a capitalist ministry”. And it’s here that the
speaker
turns to someone he certainly doesn’t call comrade, but “citizen-Minister of Posts and Telegraphs” and gives him
the
answer that aroused the aforementioned laughter in the opportunists.
“You can laugh as much as you please, but if the citizen-Minister confronts us with this question [about power]
side by
side with a party of the Right, [an old expedient of the renegades!] he will receive a suitable reply. No party
can
refuse this. And at a time when liberty still prevails, when threats of arrest and exile to Siberia—threats from
the
counter-revolutionaries with whom our near socialist Ministers are sharing government—are still no more than
threats,
every party says: give us your confidence and we shall give you our programme. This programme was given by our
conference on April 29. [...]. I shall try to give to the citizen-Minister of Posts and Telegraphs a popular
explanation
of our resolution, and our programme”.
Lenin follows up with an exposition of the ideas and proposals set out in April. The government wants the war to
continue, because it is in the interests of the Russian and foreign capitalists, and it’s a government of
that very
class
.
But Lenin’s confutation of Tsereteli on the right of parties under a liberty endorsing regime had a great
dialectical
and polemical flavor. Lenin was unfortunately never able to review the volumes of his
Works…
Lenin
foresaw it would be a
matter of days before the Bolsheviks were outlawed, as the only enemies of the coalition with the bourgeoisie,
i.e., of
serfdom under the bourgeoisie.
He contrasts the two alternatives: If, in order to prevent the proletariat, and our party, from getting in to
power, you
take repressive measures against us, against our being able to agitate in the Soviet elections, in the press,
etc, this
would demonstrate the correctness of our thesis very well. But as long as you assert that democratic freedom has
triumphed with you, then why, after the consultation of the laboring classes within a revolutionary democracy,
do you
demand that the assembly of Soviets on principle respect the power of a pre-established center that is outside
it? You
invite workers to elect Menshevik and SR delegates, you invite them to follow these parties that call themselves
socialist; but by what logic, if these parties claim on principle that they don’t want to come to power?
This argument, which is as clear as it is incisive, aims to achieve the following set of results: only the
Soviets are
to have power and form the basis of the government. But for this to be possible it is necessary that within the
Soviets
there cannot prevail parties that declare themselves to be workers’ parties, but which renounce at the outset
any
possibility of taking power.
80 – Political Economic Measures
Lenin’s speech also throws light on the question of practical anti-capitalist measures which the coalition
government is
powerless to implement. The opportunists here defend themselves with the usual ruse: the economic situation is
serious;
Russia is poor and has been further impoverished by the war. Calling for measures against big industry means
claiming to
“install” socialism: they call themselves socialists, but they object, entirely out of context, that socialism
follows
only on the basis of developed capitalism. Lenin explains that this isn’t what it is about, but only about going
forward
in the sense of pursuing the workers’ interests and opposing bourgeois interests. In April we merely asked, he
said, for
an investigation into the 500-800 per cent profits obtained by the war magnates from war contracts, by chucking
a few of
them into prison for a while so they can reveal all, and by means of workers’ control in the factories.
This
is not
socialism
.
We’re still at the same point in the polemic. They are a series of steps which can be taken in our class
struggle,
possible even when socialism isn’t, which as a point of arrival is not to be found within the revolution in
Russia,
although it must remain the
final aim
of the class and the party. So, we are talking about workers’
control, about
compulsory
cartelization
, that is, the establishment of State-controlled industrial trade unions.
Bourgeois governments
also do this (in Italy the various “Institutes for Industrial Reconstruction”) but for the purpose of increasing
capitalist profits with State money: the revolution must do this in order to forfeit a part of the profits. And
finally,
but only later, will the Bolsheviks propose the nationalization of factories.
From 1918, and in 1921, Lenin will explain that this is not, even with expropriation without compensation, a
question of
socialism, but of climbing the rung of State capitalism, which is on the march towards socialism.
But you must pose the question as a concrete relationship of political forces. The revolutionary party gives the
order
for the nationalization of the factories of the heavy arms industry, to strengthen the armed power of the State
itself
and the political power of the working class. The opportunists oppose this, because they don’t want to take
either
profits or power from the capitalists, and they assume that socialism not being mature, it is not the time to
nationalize the great means of production! The correct response is twofold: nationalization of industry is State
capitalism, and not yet socialism (not even in the sense of the lower stage of communism). But in denying this
measure
and in supporting it one has an act of fighting
against socialism
and
for
socialism, with the
proletariat leading the
latter fight even in the knowledge that it comes to administer the political power, still under a democratic
form, of a bourgeois society.
81 – The Congress Recoils
Lenin will conclude by saying that the revolution cannot rest: it must
take all those real steps forward, or must surrender to the
counterrevolution if it retreats. But the time is not yet ripe, and this
First Congress draws back, voting for Tsereteli, and for Chernov. But not
before the Bolsheviks had given a full demonstration that what the
government wanted, and was conducting, was a war of imperial conquest;
that it was preparing disastrous military offensives; that it was not
upholding the rights of the urban workers against the greed of the bosses;
and that it was deceiving the peasants by stopping any land reform until
after the Constituent Assembly had deliberated on it.
In this connection, for the umpteenth time, powerful indeed is Lenin’s
draft of the – rejected – resolution on the agrarian
question, in the plan drawn up by him for the First All-Russian Congress
of Peasants’ Deputies on May 17th-June 10th (i.e., May 4th-May 28th old
calendar).
The socio-economic formulas are the well-known and strictly Marxist ones: “It is necessary to encourage the conversion of all large, landed estates
into model farms, cultivating the land collectively with the aid of the
best implements under the direction of agricultural experts and in
accordance with the decision of the local Soviets of
Agricultural
Laborers’ Deputies
”.
More than ever the populist partition and peasant ownership of small
parcels of land is fiercely condemned.
But it’s the second point that’s politically interesting. “The peasantry
must, in an organized manner, through their Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies,
immediately
take over all the land [...] without however in any way
prejudicing thereby the final establishment of land regulations by the
Constituent Assembly
or by the All-Russia Council of Soviets, should
the people decide to vest the central power of the state in such a
Council of Soviets
”.
Here the text is influenced equally strongly by positions of principle
and doctrine and a historical perspective that is confidently sketched
out.
The Soviets, if they are not to disappear, and having failed on top of
all the other tasks in that of collectively receiving the land of the big
landowners, and preventing its fragmentation, will certainly reach the
point of having to take over the central State power themselves and
liquidate the Provisional Government. With the latter eliminated, there
will be no more need for the Constituent Assembly since the
“constituents”, in agrarian matters and in every other matter, will be the
Soviets and the Supreme Central Council.
We can already envisage the condemnation, which seemed – to
idiots – an impromptu stopgap due to not having won a majority,
of the future Constituent Assembly to a not very flattering liquidation so
soon after its birth!
No constitutional or organizational form can, on its own, work miracles
on the basis of its own inherent virtues.
This congress, opportunist and fearful of capitalist power, proved it.
Soon we would hear Lenin deliver a very different condemnation; the slogan
Power to the Soviets
applies only so long as the Soviets act as a
class-based force, otherwise the formula must be changed, as would indeed
happen: the class and its party can, if necessary, take power without the
Soviets and against the majority within them.
Neither the external wrapper of parliamentary democracy, nor the
particularly unstable and fleeting one of “revolutionary democracy” have
any right to arrogate to themselves an exclusive claim on the revolution;
which may proceed without, or even in opposition to, such forms, even
when, as in fact was the case, the revolution is socially anti-feudal, and
conducted as an anti-capitalist revolution only in the “potential” sense,
and not yet in an “actual” sense.
During and after the Congress events would follow thick and fast.
82 – The June Struggles
During the Congress, which Menshevik and SR parties were sure they would
control to the bitter end, the latter parties had prepared a rally in
honor of those who died fighting for the revolution, setting the date for
June 12th. But as concerns about the mood of the Petrograd proletariat
began to set in, they hesitated, then reset the date to June 18th (July
1st). But on that same day, by a fateful coincidence, the new offensive on
the German front would be unleashed, which the semi-demented Kerensky had
fomented, and the plans for which, ready for some while, were the same as
those of the Tsarist General Staff back in February, with the complicity
of a number of counter-revolutionary generals, later to become notorious,
such as Kornilov and Denikin.
The June demonstration achieved the exact opposite of what the Congress
hucksters expected. The Petrograd workers took to the city squares with
flags, placards, and a bold proclamation that thoroughly echoed the words
of the Bolshevik party, “All Power to the Soviets!” – “Down
with the ten capitalist ministers!” – “Peace, Bread and
Freedom” – “Workers’ Control of Production” and the like.
Although even before day 12 of the Congress there had been ranting by Dan
and Tsereteli against the Bolsheviks, who were accused of
counterrevolutionary plotting and sabotaging the revolution, the June 18th
demonstration saw the peaceful mobilization of half a million citizens
from Petrograd and the neighboring centers. The extremely few groups with
slogans which expressed confidence in the Provisional Government were
mocked and dispersed by the demonstrators themselves, and the opportunists
became seriously afraid. The Menshevik newspapers would write stuff like
this: “
The June 18th demonstration turned into a demonstration of lack of
faith in the Provisional Government. Outwardly it produced a deplorable
impression. It seemed that revolutionary Petrograd had broken away from
the All-Russian Congress of Soviets… A few days earlier the latter had
given its vote of confidence in the government. On the 18th, the whole of
revolutionary Petrograd seemed to express its clear lack of faith in i
t”.
For the Bolsheviks an armed confrontation on this occasion was not their
intention at all, and they would contain the movement within the limits of
a massive but peaceful demonstration. But in the meantime events were
coming to a head: the opportunists were planning repressive measures,
which they had bragged about in a public meeting, the soldiers were
shuddering at the news of the successive mobilizations of units to the
front, and the Petrograd workers, including not a few impatient Bolshevik
comrades, were starting to ask themselves whether it wouldn’t be better to
concentrate all forces on attacking the government and attempting to
overthrow it.
83 – The Situation Changes
In fact we are at a historical turning point, at one of those tipping
points that are generally invoked as a pretext not only for a total
revision and a complete overturning of the tactical rules of action, but
also – and this is a serious and harmful mistake –
to call for the elaboration of an entirely new historical perspective and
doctrinal evaluation, diffeing from that hitherto followed by the party.
And it is at these turning points that the crises of opportunist infection
break out.
The strength of the Bolshevik party, in the light of the facts we are
demonstrating here, giving the lie to the rotten, false and treacherous
usage of these celebrated and immensely important experiences, was instead
to shift with magnificent certainty the focus of its deployment and its
practical means of combat, but without ever departing from the solidly
unbroken line of its theorization of and forecast on the course of the
revolution in Russia. To be sure, through all these twists and turns now
this guy, now that, now this tendency now another, did not avoid the
crisis, and it could hardly have been otherwise, but almost always the
party, as a unit over and above individuals, took, and held to, the right
course.
Nor is it correct to attribute this exceptionally favorable outcome of
the historical struggle, the most memorable one the labor movement has
registered so far, to the presence of the Man of Genius who “only comes
along once every five hundred years”, as Zinoviev once let slip. Lenin
himself proved and showed that the beneficial outcome was due to the
steady maintenance of the principles of the party over many years, to the
coherent use made of the march of the proletarian movement over a long
course and crossing all nations, and to the rigorous relating of current
events to the laws of historical development in all its past stages, as
elaborated in our revolutionary theory. Willpower, tenacity, courage and
self-control in the face of terrible situations was shown by hundreds and
thousands of comrades and proletarians.
The Congress of Soviets, after interminable and sometimes vacuous
discussions, closed on June 24th/July 7th, 1917: in the twenty days of its
sterile labors everything has changed.
After the demonstration on June 18th, the activities of Bolshevism’s
enemies take on an increasing sense of urgency: capitalist ministers and
Tsarist generals, under pressure from the Western imperialisms connected
to them, must unleash war, if only to alleviate the German pressure on the
“democratic” countries. The opportunists of “socialism”, even those who
had taken a vaguely internationalist and Zimmerwaldist attitude when the
autocratic monarchy was at the head of the army, are irresistibly dragged
down the path of the social-national betrayal of the European parties:
they who insulted Lenin by calling him a German agent when he pointed out
to them to the path indicated by Liebknecht, who was in prison at the time
for telling German soldiers to shoot their Kaiser. They don’t understand
that their coalition with the bourgeoisie facilitates the latter’s link
with the counterrevolution, and an autocratic and Tsarist one at that, as
shortly afterwards they would come to realise, yet without being able to
recover from it – Lenin will predict, and take note during
successive phases, that such a coming to ones’ senses is not possible.
The date of the famous July days is between the 4th and the 6th, that is,
between the 17th and 19th in the new style calendar. On the 7th/20th a
warrant was issued for Lenin’s arrest, and he will go into hiding.
Meanwhile the Bolshevik’s Congress, which will allow Trotski and his
tendency to take part, is convened for July 26th/August 8th and will take
place entirely underground. On the 22nd Trotski himself will be arrested,
and along with him Kamenev and many other comrades. Stalin, still free,
will be in overall charge of organizing Lenin’s flight to safety in
Finland as well as of the illegal congress, whose discussions are
inevitably, yet again, greatly affected by that tumultuous turn of events.
84 – The July Battles
As we said, it was precisely on June 18th /July 1st, while the masses
were demonstrating in Petrograd, that the war offensive began, with around
300,000 men spread along a 70-kilometer front and the employment of
considerable artillery: 800 light pieces, and more than 500 medium and
heavy pieces. There was military success to begin with. Up to June 25th,
the Russians registered successes and advanced, though only by sacrificing
60 thousand men. But the Germans counterattacked, and by July 6th, they
had already made a definitive breach in the front, causing the famous
Kerensky and Brusilov offensives to fail and resulting in the collapse of
the Russian combatant army.
All of these events: the betrayal of the social-opportunists, of the
“supporters of compromise”, with the passage to police reaction, the
collusion between their leaders and ministers and the Tsarist generals,
the catastrophe of the offensive imposed by the imperialist allies, the
return of the parties to illegality and the situation of civil war, were
wholly anticipated in the perspective followed by Lenin.
All this confirmed the tactics followed by the Soviets which had to get
to the point of unmasking the opportunist bourgeois policy before the
peasant masses at the front, and the party was thus fully prepared for it.
However, the strategy previously put in place by Lenin and by the
majority was still not one which accepted fighting in the streets and
overthrowing the government: that as well was a historical turning point
predicted in theory and prepared for tactically, but the party hadn’t and
wouldn’t have chosen July. It was too early. However after the rearmament
in April, July was not at all surprising, and it went to show that the
view that had been taken was the correct one, and that we were proceeding
nicely along the historical path that the party was prepared to follow
right to the end.
The statement that at the 6th Congress (in the same old official
History
)
the party
moved towards armed insurrection
is therefore false. It
had been oriented towards tha for some time, and had never supposed it
could successfully take power and achieve victory by any other means.
Lenin had nothing new to discover on the subject, much less did he need
Stalin to discover it, as per the glaringly insinuated falsification!
Spontaneous demonstrations erupted in the Vyborg district on July 3rd
/16th, and merged into one large demonstration of workers, this time
armed, and marching under the banner of the transfer of power from the
Provisional Government to the Soviets. The party was there to prevent an
armed assault taking place, but the government unleashed
junkers
(officer trainees) on the demonstrators and blood began to flow. Bourgeois
and white guards deluded themselves into thinking they had won.
85 – Defeat in the Streets and Repression
It is not our intention here to give a blow-by-blow account of the July
Days of 1917. In our already very extensive elaboration we have been
concerned, above all, to revisit events so we can highlight the
alternating phases, and the evaluations which the party now and then gave
of them (or which sections or currents of the party gave of them) in line
with its general theoretical principles, and its organic and decennial
vision of the Russian revolution.
As we have already noted, the two days of mass action in the streets,
mainly in Petrograd, were on July 3rd and 4th (16th - 17th). The workers
spontaneously and violently reacted to various factors as we have shown,
namely: the ever-closer coalition of the Mensheviks and the SRs with the
bourgeois Kadets and the other center parties, and the unleashing of
Kerensky’s insane offensive at the front.
The version of events that opportunists and those in cahoots with the
bourgeoisie gave was that the Bolsheviks, having witnessed the defeat of
their theses (that the Soviets should take power themselves, and break off
their coalition with the bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government) in the
Soviet executive (which sat from the 3/16 June) and losing mainly because
of the major influence the SRs and Mensheviks still had in the provinces
and countryside, they then responded to losing the vote with the
deliberate use of force; with all of this spiced up with slanderous
attacks on them as German agents, or even Tsarist ones! But all historical
accounts, on this point, are agreed that this was simply not true, and
that not only had the party definitely not prepared this immediate change
of tactics in advance, but it did everything in its power, at the time, to
avoid a head-on clash.
In reality, masses of Petrograd workers and soldiers and sailors of the
fleet, armed and masters of the city for two days, gathered around the
Tauride Palace where the Executive Committee of the Soviets was in
session, and sent a series of menacing delegations calling for an end to
the ruling coalition, for peace, for an end to the offensives at the
front, and for all the other measures which tallied with Bolshevik
positions. Among the agitators, along with some of the more impatient and
extremist Bolshevik workers, there was also no shortage of anarchist
workers, and agents provocateurs as well, acting both on behalf of the
whites, and of the social- traitors themselves, who were planning their
counterattack on the Bolsheviks.
Key events were the machine-gun regiment’s request to attack and arrest
the government, the siege of the St. Peter and Paul fortress, and the
physical takeover of the red quarter in Vyborg and of the naval base in
Kronstadt. But both Trotski and Stalin concur in saying that the Bolshevik
leadership and the Central Committee did their utmost to stop such armed
actions and of out and out civil war.
Key incidents during the repression triggered immediately afterwards
were: the interventions by the armed forces called in by Kerensky: the
junkers, the Volinia regiment (the one that would tip the scales over to
the revolutionary side in October) on whose arrival the various
Tseretelis, casting aside all fear along with their masks, proclaimed a
new government coalition, identical to the first; the trashing of the
Bolshevik newspaper editorial offices and printing presses, during which
the worker Vojnov was murdered. The proletarian Red Guards were disarmed,
and the reddest of the military units sent off to the front. A wave of
arrests began, which Lenin managed to evade. A great trial for “high
treason” was announced. The party was outlawed, the workers had to fall
back.
What did the party make of this new phase, and what strategy did it
settle on for the future? We here are intent on proving that the leading
thread was the same as it had been since 1900. But there were many
alternating phases. From February to April, there was concealed tolerance
of the bourgeois-worker coalition and of the war, along with talk of
rapprochement with the Mensheviks (stuff given the historical name
“Kamenev-Stalin” without the fact of the two names eventually lining up in
opposing camps, one as victim the other as executioner, having been able
to erase it). From April to June, following the return of Lenin, revival
and back onto the “classic” revolutionary line along with clarification of
all theses and positions along with the strategy of engaging in legal and
peaceful action to conquer the Soviet, and by means of the latter to
effect the conquest, to take upon itself, the new power of the state. In
July, defeat inside the Soviet, fury of the working masses, offensive by
the renegade traitors inside the working class, momentary defeat of the
working class, attempt of the bourgeois government to annihilate the
party.
86 – Clandestine Congress
It will not be until October, having grabbed the dissenters by the
scruffs of their necks, that Lenin roars that there’s not a moment to
lose, that it is no time for consultations, that the Soviet congress, the
Party congress and the Committee vote can all go and screw themselves,
along with the crap opinion of the majorities; that we
must
this
very night (of October 24th - 25th/November 6th-7th O.S.) either
finish
off
the enemy government, or disappear from history.
But during this phase of retreat, it is of the utmost interest to follow
the reaction of how the aforementioned 6th party congress (coming ten
years after the 5th congress in London, and which was held between July
13th/26th and August 3rd/16th).
This was in fact preceded by a conference of the Bolshevik organizations
in Petrograd, which had been interrupted by the demonstrations, and which
closed between the 4th and 7th (17th and 20th) of July. Spirits had been
aroused: the conference in the first phase had done everything to put a
brake on the impatient masses, now they were fiercely debating whether the
setback had been decisive and the phase of victorious counterrevolution
had begun. The majority followed one of the most valiant Bolsheviks,
Volodarsky, who doggedly refused to admit that the counterrevolution had
beaten us. His resolution to that effect was accepted by 28 votes to 3,
but with about 28 abstaining. The kind of man Volodarsky was, so much more
than a specialist presenter of agendas, is stated in these terrible terms
by Trotski, showing how the revolutionary party might in given cases
oppose the unleashing of civil war, but after the defeat it is the first
to fight back: “
The defeatist mood among the masses only lasted a few weeks. Open
agitation was resumed in the middle of July, when at small meetings in
various parts of the city three courageous revolutionists appeared:
Slutsky, who was later killed by the White Guards in Crimea; Volodarsky,
killed by the SRs in Petrograd; and Yevdokimov, killed by Stalin in 1936
”.
We exalt the memory of Comrade Volodarsky, not just because he met his
end at the hands of a proletarian traitor, but for the powerful statement
he gave at the July conference, when being hunted down by the dogs (
camelotti
)
of capital. And we don’t share the judgements that Trotski would later go
on to make.
The documents we now have, amongst which articles written in July and
published in September at Kronstadt (where they had not dared to suppress
the press, the cop Kerensky seemingly not daring to provoke Vyborg by
having the congress dissolved immediately after the conference) establish
how Lenin had made an impromptu assessment, lacking any uncertainty, of
the situation as it stood at the time.
The official
History
at this point puts Stalin in a very
prominent position at the 6 th Congress and attributes to him paternity of
the diagnosis of transition from the legal to the civil war phase, and yet
again of the statement that the revolution must address the construction
of socialism. But Trotski documents how Stalin – who was the
only one, or near enough, who had links with the Lenin in hiding
– had in his possession the original July Theses written by
Lenin, which no one else had seen, nor had they ever been published.
Obviously, the text of these can be deduced from the articles we
previously mentioned, and it is obvious that Stalin did not formally
articulate these discoveries, but, mindful of past events, merely made
himself a slavish spokesman for Lenin.
In addition, if it turns out that at the Petrograd Conference Stalin,
though speaker on the politics of the current moment, opposed Volodarsky’s
resolution which denied the victory of the counter-revolution, it is
difficult to see how he could appear as the one who mapped out the future
phase of revolutionary civil war.
87 – Still a Balance Sheet of the Revolution
We are in the presence of three historical presentations which we can say
are by Lenin, Trotski and Stalin. The latter two say that theirs are
Lenin’s, indeed they claim in a certain sense that Lenin pointed to a road
they were already on, that of the non-peaceful, insurrectional development
of the revolution which began in February.
In truth Trotski and Stalin shared a common position: namely, that during
1917 Lenin modified and renounced his 1905 thesis on the democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. In this regard
Trotski claims responsibility for an old thesis of his, which indeed he
had been advocating since 1905: permanent revolution, that is, an
uninterrupted series of class wars ranging, as Marx enunciated for Germany
in 1848-50, from a clearly bourgeois revolution, supported by the
proletariat, to a clearly proletarian revolution. Stalin then stakes claim
to a thesis that he developed much later, at least seven to eight years
later, namely, that since the first revolution had exhausted the bourgeois
tasks, the second would have as its content the establishment of a fully
socialist society in Russia alone.
It should be noted straightaway that Trotski’s construct does not differ
on the political plane from Lenin’s, insofar as along with him he
maintains that the closing of the permanent revolution will only occur in
parallel with a European socialist revolution.
But Trotski, along with Stalin, got it wrong when he argued that Lenin
broke with the line he had taken in 1905. The revolutions in Lenin’s
writings – and in history – are neither two
historically and socially autonomous ones, nor one revolution which was
developed over a longer period: there are three of them. Anti-feudal
revolution led by the bourgeoisie with the help of petty-bourgeois
opportunists – democratic revolution but led, against the
former, by the revolutionary proletariat – anti-capitalist
revolution coinciding with a “pure” proletarian revolution in the West.
Lenin’s second point, politically and regarding power, already contains
one aspect of the socialist revolution and constitutes the only path
towards socialism. The third point alone leads to the socialist
transformation of the European and Russian economies.
Trotski reports that Volodarsky, after taking the correct position on the
question of the July battle “
continued to defend in substance the
Bolshevik schema for the Revolution of 1905: first, the democratic
dictatorship; then the inevitable break with the peasantry; and, in the
event of the victory of the proletariat in the West, the struggle for the
socialist dictatorship
”. Then he says that “Stalin
, supported by Molotov
and several others, defended Lenin’s
new conception
: the
dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the poorest peasants, can
alone assure that the tasks of the democratic revolution will be solved at
the same time as opening the era of socialist transformations
”.
Strange that, in a book written to demolish Stalin, he should agree with
him when he is fundamentally wrong, that is, in making him the herald of a
new conception
about which a massive fuss would be made for many
decades! We’re not deploring the formula of “opening the era” that
appeared in Lenin’s as well as in Marx’s writings (see in “Russia and
Marxist Theory” about the "signal to the workers’ revolution in the West")
but we do contest that 1917 produced a different and new conception of the
historical path in Russia, let alone that it was Lenin’s, whose original
formulations we shall shortly see.
Nor can Trotski say: “
Stalin was right as against Volodarsky, but he did
not know how to prove it
”. It would have mattered little. Nor is it fair
to add: “
On the other hand, in refusing to recognize that the bourgeois
counter-revolution had won a decisive victory, Volodarsky was proved right
against both Lenin and Stalin
”. Volodarsky was right and had the right to
appeal to Lenin: it is Stalin who had no right to do so back then (and
kept quiet at the time of the vote) and much less did he have it after
having recounted that it was he who first dictated the course to be
followed: and now we march for the civil war!
88 – Lenin’s Political Line
We derive what is stated above from the same text by Trotski: when
Volodarsky saw that Stalin was the speaker he declared: either Lenin, or
Zinoviev should do the report. When the 28 then abstained, they declared
that they did so because they had not been able to read Lenin’s theses,
and were perplexed by Stalin’s hesitation. If only they had known that
Lenin shared Volodarsky’s line, the vote would have been unanimous.
The work of Lenin when in hiding was yet again admirable. Here Trotski
describes it, as befits him: “
Although the fact that he was at a distance led him not infrequently
into tactical errors, it enabled him all the more surely to define the
Party’s strategy
”.
A profound truth that shows how directing a revolution bears no
resemblance to staging a dramatic display. A truth that is still not
understood a century afterwards.
Of Lenin’s texts we have these: “On Slogans” written in July and then
appearing as a pamphlet, in Kronstadt we believe; and “Lessons of the
Revolution”, written in late July and published in September in the
newspaper
Rabochiye
(
Workers
) and as a pamphlet. The study
of these texts is enough to clarify, many years later, the issues which
the party was facing in that situation at the 6th Congress, even if the
written theses have been lost.
The first article states formally what is flaunted in the official
History as a brilliant, innovative new order from Stalin: that the
watchword: “
all power to the Soviets
”, which we had fought over
from April to June, should be liquidated. Lenin had realized by then what
would happen. In such cases as these one has the bad habit of saying: we
were wrong in April to launch that slogan, which had a bad effect (defeat
in July). And by the same token popular opinion will be wrong when in
September the same watchword of power to the Soviets is issued
again
,
implying that it was a mistake to have dropped it in July… It is reasoning
akin to that of modern hack
opinions
of the American type:
politics is the art of making up and launching appropriate
slogans
,
like those which sell soft drinks or new cars. Whoever gets the right
slogan wins the big political game and is successful, as the masses,
befuddled, take to dancing the can-can of history to those rhythms…
A very different dialectic is found in the positions Lenin takes, as for
example in his critique of Blanquism which, as we recalled, he uses in
April against the so-called leftists; and in his defense of Blanquism,
that is, of the Marxist conception of the
art of insurrection
,
which he uses in October, against the defeatist-pacifists.
The apparent contradictions, in the minds of idiots, are allowed instead
to be magnificently placed on the path of the same doctrinal vision,
confirming its powerful unity and continuity, and inviting the peddlers of
new conceptions
, past or posthumous, generous or tendentious, to
spare themselves the trouble.
Lenin’s exposition makes it clear that while in the first stage it was
possible
to forecast
the handover of power to the Soviets
peacefully, in the subsequent stage the bourgeois government would not
abandon power without a struggle. The watchword of this violent struggle
now
cannot be the transfer of power from the defeated government to the
Soviet
,
because the
present Soviets
(July) are “lambs led to the
slaughter” inasmuch as they are in the hands of the Mensheviks and SRs,
whose actions have only allowed power to be transferred to the
counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.
Already in this conception is contained the future objective that, when
the Soviets pass from the hands of the opportunists into those of the
revolutionaries (the Bolsheviks), the demand will be made that State power
be handed to them. It’s a case of a
negation of the negation
. But
not in the sense of a new repentance, overriding the previous repentance,
but in the dialectical sense of a shift to a higher plane: in October
it’ll no longer be a question of a peaceful handover of power to the
Soviets, but of a violent, insurrectional shift, conditioned by the
overthrow, weapons in hand, of bourgeois power.
Lenin insists on the fact that the formulation of watchwords for
immediate action should be made not according to general criteria, but in
relation to the concrete situation, not based on the nature of the Soviet
in the abstract, but on the nature of the Soviets that are actually
present. It could even happen, if things evolved down a certain
degenerative course, that in the future the Soviets as a form of
working-class power would be meaningless. It is not the form but the
content of the Revolution that matters. The content of any demand is
judged by its
class
character: a Soviet in the hands of the
bourgeoisie or servants of the bourgeoisie is a Soviet cadaver: “so it
means they are nothing, puppets, and that real power is not in their
hands”;
so
, that is, in response to the objection that it is not
the Soviet, but peradventure Chernov and Tsereteli as individuals, who had
the protesting workers shot at.
It is a grave error of the
parties
of “Leninism” and
“Bolshevization” that they interpret this adherence of the
watchwords
to the immediate characteristics of situations that involve force, as a
rash inclination to change and reconstruct every now and again
new
ideologies and theories for the party!
89 – History of the Oscillating Power
And in fact Lenin explains the vicissitudes of the power play between the
Soviets and the bourgeoisie by referring back to the purest strand of
theory. The State, he says, according to Engels, consists, first of all
“of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command”.
Immediately after the February Revolution such an apparatus was in the
hands of the Tsarist monarchy and the feudal classes. This apparatus was
destroyed by the working-class and peasant masses who rapidly organized
themselves into spontaneous armed groups and took power everywhere at a
local level, opening up a phase of complete freedom, which in concrete
terms meant that every anti-feudal political current could organize itself
without being inconvenienced by cops and prisons.
The Soviets, well-known since 1905, soon appeared everywhere and began to
equip themselves with a network covering the whole of Russia. If they had
held central power in their hands, no coercion by means of police and
imprisonment could have stopped them. But on the one hand the capitalists
and landowners began to form a power of their own, sticking to forms
similar to those that had been suppressed: a ministry formed by the
non-right wing groups from the former Duma, and pseudo-parliamentary
committees; and on the other, the dominant parties among the working class
allowed
dualism of power
to be established, and administered it
outside the Soviet in a coalition with the bourgeoisie. In the period up
to June 18th, the Soviet could have decided to break with dualism by
forming within itself a government of workers’ parties, albeit a
non-revolutionary one: in those months the bourgeoisie could not have
prevented it by using repressive force. What is more, says Lenin, the
struggle between these petty-bourgeois parties and the revolutionary
proletarian party could also have proceeded in a non-violent way, if the
Soviets, instead of having divested themselves of it, had had State power
in their hands and consequent control of all its armed units.
The policy of the opportunists threw away these historical possibilities:
the civil and especially the military government placed their command
structures outside of the Soviet, and had control of the army, the
bureaucracy and the police: in every class effort to oppose it, the
Mensheviks and SRs saw to it that the Soviet ratified these acts.
The point had now been reached where such a government could use the
armed
detachments and
prisons
in its own way: the phase of freedom of
agitation ends, the masses are shot at, newspapers are suppressed, arrests
made, etc.
In such a situation there are only two ways out: either the
bourgeois
counterrevolution (not yet
white
, Tsarist) holds on to armed power
and removes all freedom of action from the proletariat, or the proletariat
forcefully overthrows the counterrevolutionary government and its
opportunist allies.
Socially speaking, Lenin explains it by the fact that the petty
bourgeoisie, who according to Marx are always cowardly and wavering, has
allied itself with the bourgeoisie.
With power in the hands of the Soviets, detaching the petty bourgeoisie
from the bourgeoisie by peaceful means could have happened, and an
understanding been reached between it and the proletariat. But the
petty-bourgeois parties and leaders, by becoming servants of the
bourgeoisie itself, closed the way to any non-violent resolution of these
relations.
Therefore, the watchword today will not be, says Lenin, all power to the
Soviets, but rather “decisive [i.e., destructive and armed] struggle
against the counter-revolution, that seized power”.
90 – Responding to Tactical Objections
Lenin himself predicts what they will say to him: We think the time is
still not right to take up arms in a civil war; if we switch into that
mode now, we would be encouraging imprudent actions and provocations.
Lenin responds that the Russian workers are already class-conscious enough
not to yield to provocation: however, it is certainly not the time to keep
quiet about the essential resumption of armed struggle that is required,
insofar as only the revolutionary proletariat has the strength to defeat
the counterrevolution.
With this he also counters a second objection: When we declared we
wouldn’t launch an armed attack on a Soviet-based government of Mensheviks
and SRs, if it detached itself from the parliamentary bourgeoisie, we
showed the masses that we believed that these petty-bourgeois movements
could be accepted as allies. How then can we now denounce them as enemies,
and the Soviet itself as an enemy that they control? If bourgeois
reaction, or worse still, Tsarist reaction also attacked them, and wanted
to dissolve the Soviets, could we remain indifferent? And Lenin’s answer
here, too, betrays no sense of uncertainty.
We know, says Lenin, that the leaders of these parties will go the way
they inevitably must: but that doesn’t prevent us from defending the
masses of the peasantry and the poor against the attacks of both
capitalist and feudal reaction. And here the Kornilov phase, that would
follow shortly afterwards, is clearly sketched out.
“
It would be a profound error to think that the revolutionary proletariat
can ‘refuse’ to support the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks
against the counter-revolution, by way of ‘revenge’, so to speak, for the
support that they gave in smashing the Bolsheviks, in shooting down
soldiers at the front and in disarming the workers. First, this would be
applying petty-bourgeois conceptions of morality to the proletariat
(since,
for the good of the cause,
the proletariat will always
support not only the vacillating petty bourgeoisie but even the big
bourgeoisie)
” but above all, it would be a mistake to conceal the fact
that the counterrevolutionaries, “
the Cavaignacs (...), these new holders
of state power can be defeated only by the revolutionary masses, who, to
be set into motion, must not only be led by the proletariat, but must also
turn their backs on the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties,
which have betrayed the cause of the revolution
”.
Lenin’s response makes an appeal to the classical directives of Marxism.
As long as the feudal menace still remains (thus it would be with
Kornilov, and for a long time after him) the proletariat will support the
petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie (in Marx, even the big bourgeoisie
against the petty-bourgeoisie, often allied with the feudatories). But it
will remember the lesson of the Cavaignacs, the generals and ministers of
the 1848 Republic, who after they won in February, using proletarian
forces, viciously massacred the workers of Paris in June; and it will only
see its own victory after these temporary allies are destroyed.
Reading through these documents, which were not written dispassionately,
as though a historical analysis was being conducted from a distance, but
rather in the heat of the battle, one must know how to place them in a
dialectical sequence. The Party knows from the outset what the trajectory
will be: it will have to ally itself with the bourgeoisie and sometimes
save them (as it did from Kornilov), however it knows it must end up
dispersing them; it knows that the petty-bourgeois parties will have to be
dragged along as allies, although their leaders will betray the party and
will have to be beaten back, and even the classes
below
them will
eventually set themselves
against
the proletariat.
But in external proclamations, these stages of action are signaled when
the series of givens contained in the doctrine have become part of the
experience of the masses cast into the revolutionary furnace: from
February to June, a government that is a democratic dictatorship of
proletarians and peasants is declared possible
even
on the basis
of a front of left-wing parties; once the right-wing front is made, the
social
formula is certainly not thrown out – diverging from Trotski
and from Stalin – but the break with the populist and Menshevik
parties is deemed irrevocable: any peaceful competition with them even at
the Soviet level is ruled out.
And so, once the inanity of these political forces has brought down on
their heads the Tsarist generals who, champing at the bit, want to destroy
the Soviets and the parliamentary ministries, it will be the revolutionary
workers and the Bolshevik Party who, having taken up arms, will make those
armies of reaction bite the dust, and who will save, but only in order to
well and truly crush it in due time, the Kerensky regime.
All of this is flawless revolutionary strategy. None of it needs to be
justified by theories that have been improvised in the face of alleged
sudden unforeseen changes, even if all the forecasts theoretically reached
are not placed at the same time at the centre of the agitation.
91 – Lenin’s Conclusions
The second article develops these same concepts more fully, and
especially the Marxist one on the instability of the petty-bourgeoisie and
the unsurmountable petty-bourgeois character of the peasantry.
What emerges from it all, in full light, is that moving from the
watchword of the peaceful period to that of the civil war period wasn’t
Stalin’s doing, and that among other things the sudden change consisted
essentially of a different view (and anticipated stage) of the
Weg zur
Macht
, of the road to power, and was certainly not a new version of
the immediate social program of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik
Party, much less a declaration that, merely by having unmasked the
petty-bourgeois parties, one had moved, all of a sudden, to maintaining
– almost, as Lenin said, as though doing it out of spite
– that there would be implemented in Russia, without European
support, full (one-countryist) socialism; a vulgar lie fabricated long
afterwards.
Indeed, here is how Lenin brings the article to a close: “
The lesson of the Russian revolution is that there can be no
escape for the working people from the iron grip of war, famine, and
enslavement by the landowners and capitalists unless they completely break
with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and clearly
understand the latter’s treacherous role, unless they renounce all
compromises with the bourgeoisie and resolutely side with the
revolutionary workers. Only the revolutionary workers, if supported by the
peasant poor, are capable of smashing the resistance of the capitalists
and leading the people in gaining land without compensation, complete
liberty, victory over famine and the war, and a just and lasting peace
”.
There can be no longer any doubt that, while in July the condemnation of
the opportunists is resounding, public, and openly irrevocable, and the
resort to violence is likewise declared inevitable, the demands are
politically STILL on the democratic plane, and are socially STILL NOT on
the socialist plane: all of them, at each step, are nevertheless
self-evident inasmuch as they are placed on the road that leads
politically to power being fully in the hands of the proletarian party,
and socially to an international socialist society.
It is completely false then when the
Official History
has us see
Stalin, after having cleverly – which is undeniable
– put Lenin somewhere safe, taking his place and dictating the
rules of the new road!
For that matter, the
History
itself says that the Congress
posited as essential points of the party’s economic platform the
following: the confiscation of land from all landowners, the
nationalization of banks and big industry, and workers’ control over
production and redistribution, i.e., the usual pre-socialist measures.
Other writings and documents would show that, still in October,
nationalization is demanded in limited and entirely bourgeois forms.
92 – Still on the 6th Congress
Despite it being a difficult moment, 157 delegates convened: membership
of the party had gone up to 240 thousand. It had 41 newspapers, and it is
curious that the main one (
Pravda
) only printed 320 thousand copies
for the whole of Russia.
Absent, either because in prison or on the run, were Lenin, Trotski,
Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Kollontai and a great many others. Among the
better-known of those present were Sverdlov, Bukharin, Stalin, Molotov
(what a pity we can’t pluck him from the conferential armchairs and ask
him a bit about how it really went!), Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Yurenev
and Manuilsky.
Sverdlov gave the Central Committee’s organizational report. Stalin
repeated the reports given at the Petrograd Conference on political
activity and the state of the country. He declared that now was the time
to fight hard against the social-compromisers. Bukharin dealt with
international issues and the war, arguing that only by the overthrow of
the Provisional Government could there arise action for peace.
In the debate, one could see that the two speakers did not agree with one
another. It is also strange that Trotski, in formulating the two theses,
admits here that Stalin is right. Bukharin was supposedly defending the
“old Bolshevik plan”: first revolution shoulder to shoulder with the
peasants, second revolution shoulder to shoulder with the European
proletariat, the first one in the name of democracy, the second one in the
name of socialism. Stalin said Bukharin’s plan was futile, since if the
proletariat does fight it can only do so in its own interests. Trotski
finds the rebuttal correct, having argued since 1905 that the proletariat,
if it takes power, can only
begin
a socialist revolution. However,
a few years later, he would accuse both Bukharin and Stalin of having
revived the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship” in pursuit of the
International’s aims as well, and with a catastrophic effect as far as
Trotski was concerned on the revolution in China, and in other countries.
Trotski, a genuine revolutionary, finds it even more difficult than Lenin
to tolerate a proletarian class and Marxist party committing considerable
energy to facilitating democratic and bourgeois anti-feudal revolutions,
and says that in such a case, and given Lenin was right in saying that it
was being done “solely for the objectives of our socialist cause”, one
should wash ones hands of such a
dirty business
as soon as possible, and
move on to the socialist revolution.
There is no doubt that taking power even in Russia alone, along with
having no few tasks of a democratic and capitalist nature to attend to as
well, was nevertheless a
step towards
socialism, and indeed an act of
socialist revolution. Much more sagaciously in 1926 Trotski would make the
magnificent statement that without letting go of your power and without
ceasing to declare your own politics and also your own economic policy as
socialist, you had to know how to wait, even for decades. When it is
recognized that socialist society is not yet ready to burst into life, it
is still possible to take measures with socialist content that are not
only symbolic and propagandistic, but practical as well: you are growing
grapes also when you prune the vine, and you are aiming for wine when you
water the vine.
Let us go even further: there is nothing wrong with announcing that
socialist society is closer than it actually is as long as its socialist
substance is not betrayed. At the time we can see that not only Bukharin
and Trotski, but Stalin as well, were convinced that socialist society
would not develop in Russia before a political victory was achieved by the
European proletariat.
Stalin in fact concluded with the words: As the forces of the revolution
develop, some explosions will occur and the moment will come when the
workers will rise up and gather around themselves the strata of the poor
peasantry, they will raise the banner of the workers’ revolution, and
begin the era of socialist revolution in the West
. This, notes Trotski
here, remained the party’s formula in the years to come. We showed in this
study’s summary exposition that in 1926 Trotski and Zinoviev charged
Stalin with the fact that he, as well, had thought and spoken thus until
1924.
We attribute the greatest importance – we hope with the
readers understanding – to showing how in the various stages
and transition phases the party theorizes and perceives these great
questions, still of pressing importance today.
When in its turn the Stalinist
History
quotes Stalin’s confutation, to
certain right-wing elements, with the words, “It is not ruled out that
Russia will be the country to pave the way to socialism”, it is searching
for an alibi that doesn’t hold up. That prediction was first made in 1882,
when it appeared in the preface to the Russian translation of the
Manifesto
; and it has nothing to do with the prediction of a socialist
society in Russia within a capitalist world, which back then would have
made even Stalin laugh. His confutation was directed at some comrades
– certainly not Bukharin – who wanted to postpone
until the Western Socialist Revolution
the seizure of political power
by
the Communist Party in Russia, remaining until then a simple opposition to
governments of a Kerenskian type.
To this Trotski was fiercely opposed, as he shows in word and deed.
Nevertheless, he is so attached to the tradition of the 1905 polemic that,
while unwilling to leave such a hybrid task to the Kerenskians, of whom he
was the destroyer, he thinks – and it was certainly a useful
thought to have in the final days before the October insurrection
– that in any case one should not have any qualms, after power
has been taken by force of arms, about rejecting non-socialist tasks. And
it is also a revolutionary fact that in 1917 neither Lenin, Trotski, nor
the party, pose the formidable question: What will become of us if the
proletariat of Europe doesn’t make its move?
In that phase is socialist work for an entire political generation which
we always sum it up as three main tasks: liquidating the war –
entirely liquidating opportunism in the various Russian parties, and
annihilating them – reorganizing the Proletarian International
and taking it back to its revolutionary program.
The conquest of power, preparations for which started to be made by the
party from that key moment in July, and with its forces alone –
except for the left fraction of the SRs, in which a cycle of crises would
soon follow – is seen from that position (as from ours in 1955)
as the greatest, and only victorious one, of the socialist revolutions.
But Lenin’s greatest and boldest perspective, cold and passionate at the
same time, needing to encompass immense tasks of a capitalist social
nature and
satisfy
the people’s democratic-bourgeois demands, looms ever
larger today; after the proletarian revolution didn’t happen in the West,
and with capitalism now ruling the world. And yet despite that result, we
will never concede that Lenin and Bolshevism were mistaken, and didn’t
understand revolutionary history, or did not work in its grandiose furrow.
93 – Where the Line Was Broken
Trotski’s thesis that the proletariat could not, in a revolution coming
after the first bourgeois-popular revolution, take all power without
moving towards socialism, is, in a certain sense, undeniable (and also
inevitably pondered within the Russian proletariat in the pre-October
situation, since although it is true that the proletariat must carry heavy
historical burdens that are not its own, in the end it must feel that it
is fighting for its own demands), but said thesis only remains solidly in
place for as long as questions of “internal” economic policy remain
dormant: in essence, during the period when the war was being wound down,
which took almost a year; during the period when hundreds of
counter-revolutionary forces were being destroyed, which takes another
three or so years; and in the simultaneous period of the gigantic effort
to support the European revolution, which we may consider extended it for
a further three years.
All these tasks are carried out under a socialist government, and as only
a proletarian and communist government can.
Little by little as the possibility of an intervention in the social
transformation of any of the major advanced countries in the West
weakened, the problem for the new Bolshevik power became increasingly
daunting.
The crude formula that proletarian power can only have a socialist
program would become its reciprocal opposite, that is, if that power is
not exerted within a socialist society, one that is no longer capitalist,
it is bound to collapse, or worse still, hand in its resignation to
History.
In fact, the solution that the victorious enemies and the murderers of
Trotski found was to govern and not to hand in their resignation,
declaring not only that socialist society could be generated in Russia
even before it had arisen within the environment of European capitalist
production, but that it had already been generated: as what was, in that
hideous slogan, called “the building of socialism in one country”,
cultivated in a hothouse, the surrogation of the revolutionary
giving
birth
with an administrative poultice.
Not out of any necessity to choose between the two opposed directions
that Trotski’s formula took – which in those days Stalin would
have the merit (!) of pitting against Volodarsky and Bukharin –
but because of the less rigid consequence which Lenin’s richer and loftier
vision contained… He will win or lose as a principled revolutionary in
theory and practice he who, like Volodarsky, says: I will tear power away
from the bourgeois counterrevolution and use it against it, even if I have
to call it democratic and popular for a while, and put up with having in
Russia alone
triggered
, after overcoming every obstacle, the bursting
forth of the most vigorous of capitalisms from a stagnant, medieval
society.
He would consign power by other means to the global enemy he who backed
up this arrangement with the statement that this palingenesis of modern
capitalist – only partially so in the countryside –
forms, is instead the finally achieved advent of that socialist society,
which all of us for centuries have demonstrably been heading towards;
worse, that this form, for us historically
necessary
, arose from a will, a
will to
build
, an expression that is in itself disgustingly bourgeois!
If Volodarsky, on the position which, as principled militant, he always
held, hadn’t been killed by
SR
counter-revolutionaries, as they would turn
out to be, he would certainly have been killed, like his July friends, by
the latter
species of counter-revolutionary.
Was it just an error of historico-economic definition then? A small
error, but one written on tags tied to the backs of chairs, placed in
front of firing squads.
Not bullets in the behinds, but in the backs of former comrades. And yet
it is not on sentimentalism that we rely, but on the organic demonstration
of how the doctrine came to be betrayed. An error far more monstruous than
just pulling a trigger. Revolutions have always passed over a multitude of
errors of the second kind.
The former one assassinates the revolution itself.
94 – Dogma or a Guide to Action?
Although realizing we are still on the threshold of our true subject, namely, the social economy in Russia from the October Revolution onwards which was treated in the final stages of the Naples and Genoa meetings, it is yet again necessary to insert some additional comments into the chronological flow of this exposition.
We need to show that Lenin’s and the party’s position between July and September 1917, during which there was an abandonment of the
slogan
“all power to the Soviets” only for it to be taken up again during the October insurrection, was not a
lapsus
; was not subjected to the lamentable ordeal of
error recognition
, in which the fire and the glory of the revolution would be slowly extinguished in the ensuing years.
This formula of recognizing mistakes is valid for individuals, who matter little with their repentances, submissions or bloody liquidations. But for the party it is transformed into the making of successive amendments to the strategy of the working-class, resulting from the appearance of “unexpected” situations. As these successive
maneuvers
gradually led the global and Russian proletariat into the most fetid miasmas of the bourgeois quagmire, increasingly powerful resources would be used to inject the bewildered masses with the ignoble belief that this dictate was included in the line of Marx, of Engels, of Lenin, reduced to the pitiful figure of unprincipled followers of the latest fashion.
We expound at length not on history’s glorious or shameful episodes, but on the successive evaluations of the historical course that have been made by the Marxist movement, in order to show they are linked to a unitary, non-deformable course, theorized as an integral whole not by any mind at any time, but by a collective class movement determined by the
fixed
epoch in which the contradiction between the capitalists and the proletarians appeared, an epoch more fruitful to this end than past
and later ones
. We – and amidst so much blurring of transmitted images, it is best to put it bluntly – are for a
body
of doctrine which one is not allowed to change, along the entire historical trajectory of the modern working class, from when it appeared to when classes disappear. If some historical lesson were to belie this “partisan” doctrinal construct of the past and the future, it would, in the terrible and contested hypothesis, collapse into nothingness, and could not be saved by contingent additions or bastard hybridizations. And we must, as we said, take our time, and refuse to play the game of quotations in which, by not placing them in their correct context, on the thread of time, and within the specific document from which they are derived, the attempt is made to use them to valorize this despicable eclecticism, back to which all defeatism, which has overwhelmed us so often but without dispersing us, ultimately leads.
The entire literature of Stalinism aims, inside its powerful organization, to achieve that goal. For example, it often has recourse to a short comment by Lenin, or one attributed to him, which distils the concept: “Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action”.
95 – The So-Called “Philosophy of Praxis”
This old expression, which Gramsci used to avoid the word ‘Marxism’ preventing his notebooks from getting past the unimaginative prison censor, is equivocal as well, and we won’t conclude the disquisition here, which would also require material related to the long history of communist politics, not just in Russia but in the rest of the world.
Marxism is concerned with
praxis
(a word that means human action, the behavior of the human species, and nothing more diabolical than that), but not to the extent that it makes it the subject, the core issue, the key to the social world and its history. It’s more accurate to say that Marxism is a doctrine or science of the causes and laws of praxis, and that it deals not with the praxis of individuals but average social behavior. The explanation it provides consists not of placing such behavior at the base, but at the summit of the research, which is not to say that this ‘effect’ of material, environmental causes related to the material life of the species, does not in its turn reverberate on the causes of the historical process: it does, and herein lies the mysterious “reversal” of praxis in its entirety, when it is found not in the thought and will of individual human beings, even exceptional ones, but in the intervention, when the time is ripe, of social classes in a broad sense, and of the class party in a more restricted sense. At this point and on this level one can see that the Marxist doctrine did not arise to titillate brains yearning to discover the rhetorical mystery of being, but to serve as the basis for the movement of a given social class and of the party which prepares its revolutionary victory.
In the light of this quick reminder, the phrase that
Marxism is not a dogma but a guide for action
, even if it figures, for reasons that it is easy enough to find from time to time, in propaganda, agitation, and battle slogans, says nothing and is worth nothing.
Dogma, in the common etymological and philosophical sense, means a statement, derived from a supra-human revelation, which is valid for all time and which one is not permitted to deny or even subject to critical analysis.
Transcendentalists
accept it, immanentists deny it in their own way, and we Marxists… don’t give a damn either way.
We say neither that dogma was revealed by God, nor that it was invented by some cunning individual, or gang of cunning individuals. Dogma arose in a determined society at a determined time, as the first embryonic science, and not abstract science but science that needed to serve
praxis
: both to hand down the
traditions
of praxis (of experience, even of primitive social activity), and as the basis of practical norms, of an ethical code. The dogmatic form arose from class interests which wanted to preserve a social structure, along with their control over it. Religion is not, for us, and does not come into being as a response to the need to understand the world, but as a response to a much older and more absorbing need: to control society (and
in general
to put a brake on its tendency to change).
In substance, for a Marxist,
dogmas
, historically speaking, were
guides to action
. The phrase Marxism is not dogma but a guide to action is therefore, if said by a Marxist, nonsense.
This exposes us to the risk of being confused with two bourgeois positions: one, that
current
class science has emerged from the fetters of revealed and authoritarian dogma, and therefore its rules apply equally to both their bourgeois lordships and to us. The other one, that with the condemnation of the fideist dogmas, one has done everything necessary to acquire the right to guide human action, and the period of revolutions is over. For us, the old societies had a system of dogmas to guide their actions; bourgeois society has as
its
guide to action a false science and a philosophy that is claimed wrongly to be anti-mythological and which consecrates its empty ideologisms about humanity, the personality, and freedom to the sole end of defending and preserving the capitalist mode of production – Marxism is a new way of overcoming
both
dogma
and
bourgeois anti-dogma, and of setting out, in a way that was never before possible, the true relationship between knowledge and praxis, doctrine and action, in all their dialectical inseparability.
We can rightly say that Marxism is not a dogma, insofar as it is a theory of a social class born at a given historical juncture which deals scientifically with the social facts of the present, the past and the future. Rightly it can be said that the Marxist theory has proved its validity in guiding party decisions, and in that sense it guides class actions.
The phrase which links the two terms, in the handy little slogan overindulged in by the opportunists, can serve only to rebut those who want to exhaust Marxism in the study of the historical process, while obscuring the essential side of it which is the collective participation in historical action.
96 – The still
Filotempist
Lenin
Taking a position of contingent lack of faith in the Soviets is historically of the utmost importance, because it converges with a key Marxist and Leninist thesis which opposes all workerism, laborism, syndicalism and right and left-wing factory councilism, and it is one we quote often. The revolution is not a question of organizational forms. That is to say: it is not a constitutional question, but a question of class forces.
This is further demonstrated when one gets to see that that
lack of faith
, not contradicting faith in the final result of the conquest of power, is still, long after October, considered entirely justifiable, during the said period from July to September. Here is the evidence.
At the 2nd Moscow Congress of the Communist International, in June 1920, on the question of parliamentarism Lenin, and Bukharin (the speaker) rejected the proposal, to abandon participation in parliamentary elections in Europe, advocated by the Italian Abstentionist Communist Fraction. Both of the speakers remarked that the Fraction had not fallen into the error of proposing that Soviets be immediately formed in Italy, as supported by some other groups were later to converge in the formation in Livorno in 1921 of the Communist Party (Bombacci, Gennari and others: as for the Turinese, they, with their distinctive doctrine, failed to differentiate the network of factory organizations, immersed in existing society, from the organs of a new revolutionary political power).
Bukharin observed that the abstentionist comrades “recognize with us that one cannot proceed to the immediate organization of workers’ Soviets in all countries. Soviets are combat organs of the proletariat. If the conditions that render possible this combat are lacking, there is no point in creating Soviets, because they would be transformed into philanthropic-cultural appendages of other, purely reformist institutions, and there is a grave danger that they would be organized according to the French model, in which a couple of individuals meet in pacifist and humanitarian associations, which have no revolutionary value”.
It was no accident therefore at Lenin dealt with the same point, remarking that the representative of the Italian anti-parliamentarists “said that the struggle must be carried into another sphere, into the Soviets. But then recognised that Soviets cannot be created artificially. The Russian example shows that Soviets can be organized either during a revolution or on the eve of a revolution. Even in the Kerensky period, the Soviets (which were Menshevik Soviets) were organized in such a way that they could not possibly constitute a proletarian government”.
It is clear that the deduction of both speakers was that until the Soviets arose out of the struggle itself, the aim – then common to all – of destroying the bourgeois parliament was to be achieved by working
inside
the parliaments
in order to sabotage them
. The abstentionists obeyed, but remaining on their positions they formulated the loose prediction that no parliament would ever collapse due to sabotage from within, and that any party entering them would succumb to Marxist “parliamentary cretinism”. This is not the point we are making here, but rather proving how strictly linked together, in a coherent progression, the interpretation of the revolution in Russia was, in general for over thirty years, and especially during the unsettling transitions in the months of 1917, the year of fire.
In moving on from the subject we will point out – much to the confusion of those who consider our reconstruction to be a cold historiography of things that are dead and buried – what a flavor of irony there is in the article in
Pravda
, written by he who would be the successor
in pectore
of the general secretary of the Italian Communists, on the latest anniversary of the Soviet revolution, Two opportunities, he wrote, were
missed to sovietise Italy
: in the first post war period in 1919-20, and in the liberation movement during the second post war period.
During both periods, whether on the defensive or offensive, the Italian proletariat – powerful in the city and the countryside, in the majority and the main social force in Italy, and nauseated by having drunk to the dregs from the slimy chalice of the bourgeois parliamentary democracies which at each stage surpassed themselves in their ignominy – would be distracted on the threshold of class revolution by a whole range of “compromisers”, and was shipwrecked in the Aventines and the National Liberation Committees; forms so regressive that compared to them the most Menshevik and Kerenskian of Russia’s Soviets appeared as models of revolutionary strength.
Sanctimonious regret sounds like bitter mockery on the lips of those who drowned the revolution in the most blatant constitutionalism, and those who even do so, in incidents nowadays, in
sub-parliamentary
ways. A Gronchi is a much lesser man than a Kerensky! Though equally fond of theatrics.
97 – The Famous “Anti-Right Front”. Kornilov
The new situation was therefore this: the Bolshevik Party had openly declared that there was no longer any possibility of achieving power by peaceful means and through the Soviets: the latter, headed by the social-opportunists, were increasingly yoked up to the coalition government with the bourgeoisie led by Kerensky, who no less openly initiated the repression of the revolutionary proletarian movement and the outlawing of the Bolsheviks.
Meanwhile, the offensive at the front unleashed by the Kerensky government had ended in disaster, and the Germans were advancing.
The army was commanded by General Kornilov, who on August 3rd/16th O.S., developing a systematic reactionary plan, imposed the institution of the death penalty for soldiers, not only at the front but also in the rear.
The Provisional Government, which aimed to disperse the Soviets, although they were not rebelling against it, announced a “State Conference” for August 12th/25th in Moscow, one of the many attempts to set up, before the elections for the Constituent Assembly, a “popular” representative body aligned with bourgeois interests.
The Soviets were represented in it as usual by the Mensheviks and SRs. Kerensky threatened to forcibly repress any activity in the cities and any attempted expropriations in the countryside. Kornilov went further in calling for the dissolution of the Soviets. To his headquarters with offers of all kinds of help there came big landowners, industrialists and bankers, and with it the agents of the French and British
allies
established close ties.
The Bolsheviks, who were working flat out and gaining influence among the masses, opposed the conference with a general strike in Moscow and other cities. Kornilov, with Kerensky’s agreement, moved the troops with revolutionary tendencies out of Petrograd and brought in regiments he considered to be “loyal”. The severity of these measures began to frighten Kerensky and his government, spreading bewilderment among the Menshevik and SR soldiers.
On August 21st/September 3rd Kornilov abandoned the city of Riga to the Germans: four days later he moved towards Petrograd. In vain had Kerensky negotiated with him to rescind the order: Kornilov cast aside his mask and moved against the civilian government.
Kerensky now declared the general a “traitor to the Fatherland” and invoked the help of the popular masses. In the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, Sokolnikov, representing the Bolsheviks, declared that his party was ready to “negotiate military measures with the organs of the Soviet majority” to repel Kornilov. That is how Trotski put it adding that "Mensheviks and SRs accepted this offer with thanks and with gritting of teeth, for the soldiers and workers were now following the Bolsheviks”.
It is important that this example of a united front of all the workers’ parties, much debated later to justify other forms of “political” united front tactics, arose on the military level and not as an actual agreement between the committees leading the parties. It is to be noted that the Official History itself says that “livid with fear, the SR and Menshevik leaders asked the Bolsheviks for protection in those days, convinced as they were that they were the only real force in the capital capable of defeating Kornilov. But in mobilizing the masses for Kornilov’s defeat, the Bolsheviks did not relinquish their struggle against the Kerensky government. The Kerensky government, the Mensheviks and the SRs, who by their political conduct had objectively favored Kornilov’s counterrevolutionary plot, were unmasked before the masses”.
There was no need to pass on from the mobilization of the working masses to an out and out civil war. Against the advancing Eighth Cavalry Corps under Krymov’s command there lined up on the outskirts of Petrograd armed workers from the trade unions, Red Guards, and units of sailors from Kronstadt. Bolshevik agitators won over the Cossack “wild division”: the troop refused to continue with its march on the Red City. General Krymov shot himself in the head: Kornilov himself with his followers Lukomsky and Denikin was arrested at Mogilev’s headquarters on September 1st/14th. Kerensky, still in power, would free them soon afterwards. It was an
adventure
which in substance was bloodless. But it increased in a decisive way the prestige of the Bolsheviks.
98 – Weakened Front, Advancing Bolshevism
With Kornilov beaten, Lenin stipulates the need to revive the slogan of power to the Soviets, which, thanks to the strength of the Bolshevik movement, had shown they had easily won a battle which Kerensky would have lost. Through the press Lenin proposed, as Trotski’s tells it “a compromise to the
supporters of compromise
” who he had put to such shame. You commit yourself, he said, to guaranteeing complete freedom of propaganda to the Bolsheviks, and the latter would undertake not to attack “Soviet legality”, that is, they will respect the will of the Soviet majority without resorting to insurrectionary force.
But as Lenin well knew the “compromisers” would reject a compromise with the Bolsheviks. It brought them no advantage: the Bolsheviks were close to outnumbering them. And here Trotski, also a great historian, writes:
“As in 1905, the preponderance which the first wave of revolution brought to the Mensheviks soon melted in the atmosphere of the sharpening class struggle. But unlike the tendency in the First Revolution, the growth of Bolshevism now corresponded to the
rise
rather than the
decline
of the mass movement”.
There is a big difference, as we will see in due course, between the game of compromise and of the “offer of compromise” played out in a country just emerging from the anti-feudal revolution, and in one in which it is a distant memory, taken for granted, and in the past. Still, this phrase reminds us of a report to Moscow from the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy after the general strike against fascism in August 1922, marking the true date of the victory of the capitalist bourgeois counterrevolution and of the traditional State, usually confused with the farce of the March on Rome and of the 28th October, a so-called revolution dressed up in Quirinalesque tailcoats. The Italian party wrote: the proletariat after having fought valiantly has been defeated not by the fascists but by the bourgeois State and its armed forces. Its forces are retreating, but those of our Party are advancing in comparison with those of the opportunist parties. The struggle must continue against the fascist bourgeoisie as well as against the opportunist socialists.
It seemed this was the way to prepare a new revolutionary phase, in which the Communist Party would advance in a situation of proletarian and revolutionary recovery.
In 1924 Moscow dictated the slogan: Coalition for Freedom with all anti-fascists. Those who had the stomach for it are still with us today, up to their necks in parliamentary popularism, and hungry for government blocs not just with social-democrats and liberals, but even with Catholics. A situation of intrinsic and extrinsic forward movement like that in the Bolshevik September of 1917 cannot even be glimpsed.
Most wretched of the wretched will be those poor workers who will dream of it in a new “review” of the voting system, in which the degeneration of the whole masquerade will become even clearer, with every competing shade of opinion represented.
99 – Preparliament and Boycott
Seeing how the “State Conference” had paved the way for Kornilov (the Bolsheviks were not even invited), the coalition government attempted to turn things around with a “Democratic Conference”, convened this time by the Soviet Executive Committee on the same day Kornilov was arrested, on September 1st/14th. It was passed off as the precursor to a Pre-parliament or Council of the Republic. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were going from one success to another. On September 3rd/16th Trotski and their other leaders were freed. The day after that, in the Petrograd Soviet, a vote gave the Bolsheviks a majority for the first time. On 9th/22nd the old presidium was obliged to step down; on 11th/24th, by replacing Chkheidze as chair, Trotski took back the post he had held in 1905.
The Bolsheviks are immediately faced with the question of whether they should take part in the so-called Pre-Parliament. This is time when the famous letters from Lenin to the Central Committee start arriving, which raise the question of insurrection, and in a rising crescendo urge the committee to set about organizing it. Finally, and opposing any further wavering, they call for it to be triggered.
On the question of the Pre-parliament there were, as usual, differences of opinion. The Bolsheviks designated as members of aforesaid advisory Council took part in the first sessions: it is not long before Lenin, having set the tone of the initial declarations by denouncing any possible further compromise with the parties that had rejected it, calls for the party “fraction” (we say group) to withdraw.
The Central Committee, divided, referred the problem to the meeting of the “fraction”. At that meeting Stalin and Trotski were for boycotting the Pre-parliament, gaining Lenin’s approval in a letter of 22-24 September (5-7 October) But Rykov and Kamenev, obtaining the majority, were for participating in it. Lenin’s phrase was a particularly drastic one; we must give the masses a clear and precise slogan: get rid of Kerensky and his Pre-parliament!
Finally on September 24th/October 7th the Bolshevik fraction walked out of the laughable pseudo-parliament:
We appeal to the masses! All power to the Soviet!
A month later this slogan had become a reality.
100 – Insurrection Is an Art!
We will give a very quick account of the struggle to take power. Its main events are well-known, but given the notable fact that a current of the party was against it, we must give precedence to this “political” question in order to then examine the social program on which the Bolshevik party based the conclusive battle, and to establish once again that there was a continuity of perspective.
Undoubtedly it will never be possible to establish the correct sequence of the correspondence between Lenin and the party center, or of the minutes of the Central Committee in which the historic points were debated; That is, the preparation of the armed attack, and choosing when best to launch it.
On Sept. 1st/14th Lenin would write at length on the problem of the economic crisis, and the “impending catastrophe” for a Russia ruled by bourgeois and social-traitors and threatened by right-wing coups. But a letter to the Central Committee a few days afterwards (13th/26th) places front and center the topic of taking power (
Marxism and Insurrection
). The very urgent communication does not omit to refer to the doctrinal basics. The right-wing revisionists of Marxism have accused the radical Marxists of Blanquism. In Marx’s writings on the other hand insurrection is treated as an
art
, in the same sense that it is terminologically correct to speak of an art of war, and of its norms and rules.
Revolutionary Marxists distinguish themselves from Blanquists by the fact they do not consider insurrection as their sole political activity and further do not consider it an activity that can be undertaken any time. War, military theorists say, is an extension of state policy. No State is always at war, normally the means by which it conducts its foreign policy and its relations with other states, even when in conflict with them, is negotiation, diplomacy: when from this it passes on (as we see happening today in the most varied ways and transitional phases) to declared war, there is an art to conducting it, which is entrusted to the General Staff.
The extreme form of the contrast between the social classes is civil war; Marx is always saying it.
Lenin makes clear how Blanquism differs in establishing that to mount an insurrection the will of a conspiratorial group or even of a revolutionary party (always indispensable, not sufficient in itself or in all cases and all times) is not enough. It requires a certain level of activity among the masses, which in general is recognized at only one point in the course of a great classist struggle. Discovering that moment, how to prepare for it and lead the armed action, is an art the party needs to study, know, and successfully apply.
Lenin examines the balance of forces on July 3rd-4th and concludes that at that moment the party should not launch the attack. The adversaries were still unperturbed by the events, and the revolutionary momentum of the proletariat was limited.
After the Kornilov affair, everything, on both sides, is changed. Now “our victory is assured”. Lenin dispels the alternative, which he knows some believe in, of action inside the Pre-parliament.
“The power of decision lies
outside
the Conference, in the working-class quarters of Petrograd and Moscow”!
The Germans are threatening Petrograd. The government can no longer defend it but neither does it want to make peace. We, says Lenin putting at this stage both sides of the terrible international problem, we alone can do both things. We will propose peace, even an armistice would be enough for us. “Obtaining it now would in itself mean winning the
whole world
”. But if we cannot hold back the tide, we will conduct a desperate revolutionary war instead: we shall take from the capitalists boots and bread to send to the front! Brest-Litovsk would overcome this more than tragic alternative.
For the Conference Lenin advocates not speeches but a brief declaration from the Bolsheviks, to be followed by a boycott of the Pre-parliament derived from it. Complete break with the bourgeoisie, dismissal of the whole of the existing government, complete rupture with the Anglo-French imperialists, and immediate transfer of all power into the hands
of a revolutionary democracy led by the revolutionary proletariat.
Lenin emphasizes these last words and therein reconfirms that the line from 1905 to April remains unbroken, even if Trotski doesn’t like it: in connection, he adds, with our draft program: peace for the peoples, land for the peasants, confiscation of the scandalous profits of the capitalists, and suppression of the scandalous sabotage of production perpetrated by them. For the hundredth time: socialist revolution, but not socialist society (which will come, we will see it soon enough, from the West).
After this, intense activity in the factories and barracks (take note: during this feverish phase of the attack there is no expectation of insurgent peasant allies). Immediately after this,
choosing the most propitious moment for the insurrection
.
As Trotski remarks (while here Lenin wishes only
to show how
one cannot remain faithful to Marxism and the Revolution unless one understands that insurrection must be treated as an
art
) his communications pass on to application in practice, enlarging on the details of insurrectionary strategy, the places to be taken, the forces to be deployed...
101 – Still Disagreement in the Party
In his letter of Oct. 8th/21st Lenin again urges insurrection and even discusses figures as regards the armed forces needed to break the government’s resistance. In this situation he goes back to quoting Karl Marx: “Insurrection is an art quite as much as war”. He applies the advice given by Marx sixty-five years earlier and concludes with a final quote from Danton “the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known:
de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace
!” And Lenin closes thus: “Let us hope that if action is decided on, the leaders will successfully apply the great precepts of Danton and Marx”.
“The success of both the Russian and
of the world revolution
will depend on two or three days’ fighting”!
At the historic meeting of the Central Committee on Oct. 10th/23rd (a fortnight before the victory) which Lenin attends in disguise, a motion is passed which deduces the urgency of attacking from motives derived
from the international situation
: the mutiny of the fleet in Germany, as highest manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of the world socialist revolution… the military situation, etc… are putting armed insurrection on the agenda.
The decision was not a consensus. Kamenev and Zinoviev voted against. We will not follow here all the maneuverings of official history to get people to believe that Trotski also dissented in some way, and that it wasn’t him who fully directed the art of the insurrection. From 1920 to 1926 his deeds were recounted in Moscow, with no-one, not even the stones, dissenting.
On October 16th/29th at the enlarged meeting of the Central Committee the two returned to speak against the insurrection. They were defeated yet again, but what was more serious was that two days later, from the columns of a Menshevik newspaper, they asserted that their party was making a mistake, by launching itself into a dangerous adventure.
Lenin’s new letter on the same day is crushing. He pledges to ask the Congress for the two men to be expelled from the party, he calls them
gentlemen
and challenges them to form a dissident party “with a couple of dozen of confused people or candidates for the Constituent Assembly”. Lenin dwells on the revelation of an internal party decision. He refers to their “ideological arguments”: the waiting for the constituent assembly, hoping (!) to hold out until then, and their “querulous pessimism”: the bourgeois are very strong, the workers still too weak.
Lenin’s dramatic conclusion is this: “Difficult times. A hard task. A grave betrayal”. Not for one moment does Lenin give up on the workers. “The workers will consolidate their ranks, the peasant revolt and the extreme impatience of the soldiers at the front will do their work! Let us close our ranks—the proletariat must win!” But he sees the two or three-day struggle sabotaged, encircled by the big capital cities.
102 – The Organs of struggle
Early on, at the time of the abandonment of the Pre-Parliament, an Information Bureau on Fighting the Counterrevolution was formed by the party (according to Trotski’s account) which was entrusted to Trotski, Sverdlov and, proposed by Stalin in his stead, Bubnov. According to Trotski Stalin was for insurrection, but he did not believe the party was ready. According to Stalin, it was the opposite, or even that Trotski made a proposal to torpedo it. It is incredible this extreme that has been reached, in our day and age, in the way History is recounted: where lies are told
à la Danton
: de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace! May the ghost of the great Jacobin forgive us, for borrowing his historic words for such a vile thing.
On Oct. 9th/22nd the conflict between Soviet and government was about to break out due to the threatened transfer to the front of the revolutionary garrison. Within the Soviet, Trotski proposed and formed the Revolutionary Military Committee.
Under Bolshevik pressure, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was convened for October 20th/November 2nd. Since it was necessary for power to be seized at least in Petrograd before the 20th, so that the Congress, in which a majority for the Bolshevik thesis was assured, could take the power to govern already won, at the 10th/23rd session of the Central Committee mentioned earlier, the day for insurrection was set for the 15th/28th. To the Military Committee 5 days did not seem enough (Stalin was counting on this) and what is more by the time of the enlarged meeting on the 16th/29th one had already gone. During that meeting, as the deadline approached, and Zinoviev and Kamenev tried to get everything postponed at least until the meeting of the Congress, Stalin rambled on without proposing dates. The grave situation was resolved by the leaders of the All-Russian Committee, still not Bolshevik, who decided to move the Soviet Congress to October 25th/November 7th.
Those five extra days were enough for the Military Revolutionary Committee. But in the meantime, the matter was complicated by the stance of
Rabochy Put
, which although not setting itself against Lenin said that his article against Kamenev and Zinoviev was far too harsh.
On 16th/29th it was decided to organize a Party "Military Revolutionary Center" too, with Sverdlov, Stalin, Uricky, Dzerzhinsky and Bubnov. Stalin later inflated the work of this center, which for various reasons, according to Trotski, was forgotten about, and which in any case in Lenin’s written decision was to be part of the Military Committee of the Soviet, which was clearly the protagonist of the action. We won’t dwell on this unedifying matter, but certainly Trotski is not the one making things up: the documents he cites, and the general notoriety of his action, support his case, as does the recognition of it by Lenin and thousands of others who took part at the time.
103 – The Supreme Moment
Lenin writes the last historic letter on the evening of Oct. 24th/Nov. 6th; it appears that on the same day, but before receiving it, the Central Committee decided to take action.
In the record of the meeting Trotski makes the key proposals and communications: Stalin, absent, never explained why. The official story of his participation – even if Trotski nor anyone else ever accused him of lacking courage – is made not of steel, but of plastic.
More than the details of the timing and the fighting, well known from a variety of sources, we are interested in Lenin’s assessment of the glaring urgency of the situation.
“Comrades, […] It is absolutely clear that to delay the uprising now would be fatal. With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people.
We must at all costs, this very evening, this very night, arrest the government, having first disarmed the officer cadets (defeating them, if they resist), and so on.
We must not wait! We may lose everything!
Who must take power? That is not important at present. Let the Revolutionary Military Committee take it, or ‘some other institution’, declaring that it will relinquish the power only to the true representatives of the interests of the people, the interests of the army (the immediate proposals for peace), the interests of the peasants (the land to be taken immediately and private property abolished), and the interests of the starving.
… under no circumstances should power be left in the hands of Kerensky and Co. until the 25th - not under any circumstances; the matter must be decided without fail this very evening, or this very night.
…If we seize power today, we seize it not in opposition to the Soviets but on their behalf. The seizure of power is the business of the uprising; its political purpose will become clear after the seizure. It would be a disaster, or a sheer formality, to await the wavering vote of November 7 (October 25)”.
“The government is wavering. It must be destroyed at all costs! To delay action will be fatal”.
On the night of October 25th/November 6th Lenin arrives at the Smolny. At midnight between the 6th and 7th the action begins. At 3 in the afternoon Lenin appears at the Petrograd Soviet. At 9 the operations against the Winter Palace begin. At 11 in the evening on the 7th the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opens.
The social-traitors abandon it. The Congress takes power. On the same day the Bolshevik Party’s manifesto to the “Citizens of Russia” declared that the Provisional Government had finally been overthrown.
The great cycle of struggle was completed with the phase of the insurrectionary seizure of power.
The party was confronted with its program. But, long before the social tasks, the program itself and history meant it was still faced with tremendous political tasks. Proletarian and socialist ones, the latter, one hundred per cent. The former, however, still enveloped in thick democratic capitalist dross.
104 – Power Conquered
Our work is only an attempt to write, not a history (in the sense pedants denote with the term
historiography
) but just a few chapters on
historical science
, a term which for all modern thought is blasphemy.
Modernism
boasts that it has expelled causality and determinism from all of science, including the natural and non-human ones (for Marxism the science of the human species is a natural science), merely because many problems – and not just recent ones –have been tackled and resolved, where Mathematics is involved, by using the probabilistic method. That is to say, one is no longer assumed to have determined, by means of discovered laws, the precise value of an unknown datum, but only to have established knowledge of a certain
field
of values in which the datum one is enquiring about has a good probability of “being around”. In place of a knowledge of the future (or better, of the unknown, since an unknown in the past may be a hundred times more difficult to calculate than one in the future: for instance, knowing the chemical composition of Cleopatra’s black eye make-up, as opposed to knowing the time, down to the last second, of the next lunar eclipse) that is rigorous and precise, binding and certain, there is substituted knowledge of it that is elastic and approximate. We will not elaborate on the point that this alternative is essentially philosophical masturbating in spineless times: the absolute certainty of the solution is just a convenient fiction, a convention, which in the praxis of the species has always proved its worth in bringing forth the blazing power of knowledge; like the classic mistaking the East for the West, like Galileo’s “
altissimum planetam tergeminunt observavi
”, (“I have observed that the highest planet is threefold”) when he first gazed upon ringed Saturn. Mathematical certainty is just an expedient to avoid making total blunders; the collective endowment of the experience of the species, which in history we call religion, philosophy, empiricism, science, is an edifice erected with many building blocks, on each of which can be written: Individual bunkum.
It is thus that for us it would seem a major result if the forecast should prove true that World War III will happen around 1975, three-quarters of the way through the century, and will not be preceded by a general civil war between the proletariat and capitalism in the advanced countries of the West, offering only the possibility of such a magnificent event. And we would then be disposed to admit that such a date cannot be derived from any equation (far too vague that 1945 – 1918 + 1945 = 1972) and it is just the result of
probabilistic
inductions. In the
Dialogue with Stalin
we showed that in that
prophecy
the thinking of Stalin, that of the liberal economist Corbino, and that of the very small and very anonymous orthodox Marxist left corresponded.
This digression serves to highlight that naturally we, too, are influenced by the traditional way of dealing with the subject, and just as we are victims of the abuse of the names of illustrious people, so are we also of the craze for “mathematical” date setting.
Dealing with the subject of Russia at the Bologna meeting we presented a first part which ‘assayed’ the Marxist exposition of that country’s history, up to the Great Revolution. At the Naples and Genoa meetings we passed on to consider the theme of Russia’s current structure, with the content of that exposition divided into two parts: the struggle for power in the two revolutions, and second part which addresses the theme more directly: namely, by providing evidence for the thesis that Russian society today is a capitalist society in its youthful phase, and not a socialist one.
Having got up to October 26th/November 8th, 1917, we should bring the first topic to an abrupt close: the Bolsheviks have taken power. Now let’s put them to the test: How did they govern? How did they implement their program? Undoubtedly in Marxism the possession of power is a means, not an end – a departure, not an arrival. But numerous arguments remain which are still within the field of the struggle for power, and not in that of the social form, the transition to which it opened the way.
105 – The Light of October
Marxists
shouldn’t really commemorate dates on set days, that is for sure,
but it’s not a crime if they do: that advance in the
collective
knowledge
of the species, is accomplished, as previously mentioned, by bringing
together heterogeneous materials, small trifles and lots of
ingenuousness, above all resounding contradictions, while traversing
labyrinths without meeting any Ariadnes. And only at the end of a
millenary journey (long after this retching of ours) a journey which
cannot proceed without mishaps and failures, will the “Filo del
Tempo”, the Thread of Time, eventually be found.
For
well over a century it has been unwinding from its spindle, yet only
in it lies the miracle, that more than the luminaries of the official
world it can point out the right path to any idiot whatsoever; due to
the superiority of the last helmsman, with his eye on the magnetic
compass, over the magnificent Dantean Ulysses, who didn’t stop his
“mad flight” into the unknown, “to pursue virtue and knowledge”
until the ocean
enveloped
the sacrilege of he and his crew.
It
is therefore of great significance to insist that the Old Style date
of October 26th marks an instantaneous shift, because in so doing one
emphasises a major historical lesson: the one contained in Lenin’s
letters which insist on not postponing for a day, not even for a few
hours, the overthrowing of the Kerensky government in Petrograd. In
fact this great truth, which is that the party must be able to spot
the moment, determined by history, from among the very rare ones in
which
praxis
is turned on its head
and the casting of the collective will into the balance can tip the
scales, but the fact remains that the struggle continues long after
that turning point, raised as a symbol: in the rest of Russia, in the
immense provinces, among the military units.
And
the fact remains that, even after the first victory had reverberated
from the capital across the whole of the country still free from the
German invasion, the struggle continued in the liquidation of the
war, in the elimination of the last allied party, the Left Socialist
Revolutionary Party, and the Constituent Assembly; and in the
resistance over many years to the internal rebellions and civil war
expeditions launched against the nascent proletarian republic.
The
lesson contained in these historic dates is even greater, insofar as
the content of these undertakings is entirely class-based, and
consecrates the October Revolution and the Soviet State led by the
Bolshevik Party as socialist and communist, in all of its political
action, inasmuch as it had one single
center
,
focussed not on a system of measures to govern and administer Russia,
but on the unrelenting struggle for the Communist Revolution in
Europe.
Harder, more difficult
and more complex is the lesson derived from studying the measures, so
to say, of internal administration.
More
difficult is its utilization for revolutionary purposes, which can be
achieved only by forcing oneself to admit that the content of such a
specifically “Russian” task, when the Western Revolution is on
the wane, is for the most part non-socialist.
But before demonstrating that, we need to consider some other important
matters first.
106 – Destruction of the State
The
class State is an immense machine, characterized by the existence of
a single, central “
command
centre
”.
The time has come, as Lenin says at the end of his classic
State
and Revolution
,
to juxtapose praxis with doctrine. Every State is defined, in Engels,
by a precise
territory
and by the nature of the ruling
class
.
It is thus defined by a
capital
city
where
the government sits, with the latter defined by Marxism as “the
committee for managing the interests of the ruling class”.
Not
even Russia can escape this definition of the passage from feudal to
bourgeois power: one machinery of domination must replace the other,
and this can only come about after a bloody struggle, which occurs in
February 1917. But it is inevitable that in this phase there arises
the political theory, totally and diametrically opposed, which in
every revolution in history has concealed the character of the
transition from feudalism to capitalism. It claims to destroy the
despotic and centralised power of a class, configured as that of a
monarch and of a dynasty, not in order to replace it with the
government of a new ruling class against another, but in order to
build a State, a government and a power which does not express the
subjection of one part of society to another ruling class but rather
is founded on “the people as a whole”.
The
greatest fact historically is that, there where fatally the greatest
tribute had to be paid to this democratic interpretation of the
revolution, which as in the European revolutions would rest on a wide
range of real requirements – and tenacious illusions – of a vast
social strata, there a series of positive historical actions would
highlight, for the proletarian world, the robustness of the
revolutionary Marxist dynamic based on classes, the dictatorship of
one of them, and the suppression of the freedoms of the others and of
their parties by violent means including by terror; a fact
incidentally which is inseparable from all revolutions even purely
bourgeois ones.
One
of the first of these actions is the
breaking
up
of the old State apparatus which the class after taking power must
have no hesitation about putting into practice. This was a lesson
already derived by Karl Marx from the struggles in France, and from
the Paris Commune, which installed itself against Versailles in the
Hôtel de Ville, set machine against armed machine, and suffocated in
terror, before being assassinated, the physical members of the enemy
class, and received from the world revolutionary proletariat, once
defeated, the formidable testimonial that if it was to blame for
anything, it was not for having been too violent, but for not having
been violent enough.
It
is not theory that we need to delve into again here, but just its
confirmation, the gloriously intoxicating news of which caused the
revolutionaries of the West to jump for joy.
The bourgeois
government is arrested at the Winter Palace, but its offices, with
their personnel, are not placed under the orders of the new heads of
government; they are shut down and the Red Guard camps out in the
corridors. The new government is formed from its very first cells
with new human-material at the Smolny Institute, the Bolshevik
headquarters. Trotsky recounts an episode, intended to mock Stalin
but from which everyone comes out quite well. The latter had been
appointed People’s Commissar of Nationalities (the title ‘People’s
Commissar’ instead of ‘Minister’ was, it seems, proposed by
Lenin: undoubtedly it defines – sunt nomina rerum –
a
democratic dictatorship
:
in Germany there would be Workers’ or Proletarian Commissars). But
what is so great is the way the new encampment was staked out, by
burning down the old. A Bolshevik comrade of modest talents, with an
obliging disposition, addresses Joseph Stalin in the rooms of the
Smolny: Do you have a Commissariat, comrade? No, replied Stalin.
Well, then, allow me to help: I just need a mandate. Stalin wrote it
on a piece of paper and had it signed in the council chamber (a
shared room where a wooden partition segregated the cubbyhole of the
typist and the telephonist). In one of the rooms of the Smolny
already occupied Pestkovsky found a vacant table and placed it
against the wall, pinning above it a sheet of paper with the
inscription: “People’s Commissariat for the Affairs of the
Nationalities”. To all this he added two chairs. “Comrade
Stalin, we haven’t a farthing to our name.” (…) “How much do
you need?” (…) “To begin with, a thousand roubles will do.”
(…) “Go to Trotsky: He has money. He found it in the former
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Pestkovsky adds that he went to
Trotsky with the formal receipt and borrowed three thousand roubles,
which as far as he knew, the Commissariat of Nationalities never
returned to the Foreign Ministry…
Over
the graves of the shot Communards there hovers Marx’s unparalleled
eulogy assigning them their place in history, but accusing them of
naïvety,
for not blowing the safes in the Bank of France.
The Revolution has no right to advance with clean hands.
107 – The Constituent Assembly
The
liberal-democratic revolution of February 19th, following in the
historical footsteps of every bourgeois revolution, convened an all
Russia elective Constituent Assembly, which was to promulgate the new
Constitution and parliamentary laws. In the troubled period that
followed, elections were continually postponed by the Provisional
Government, even when it became a coalition between the bourgeoisie
and opportunist right-wing socialists.
While
the Bolsheviks were conducting the struggle in the Soviets, and also
when taking the plunge they transferred the struggle onto the terrain
of civil war, they never officially disavowed the Constituent
Assembly or announced they would abandon the elections. Even while
agitating the formula of all power to the Soviets, they did not state
publicly that stable government ought not be designated by the
majority in the Constituent Assembly. They announced their candidates
for it repeatedly
We
know however that from the April Theses onwards Lenin proclaims the
principle that the republic should not be parliamentary but founded
on the Soviet system, thereby excluding the votes of non-workers,
although peasants-soldiers were being admitted to the Soviets
alongside workers. There was absolute loyalty to the formula of the
democratic dictatorship (this, once again, means not of one class
alone, but of several classes. If its basis were just one class, the
noun dictatorship stays and the adjective democratic goes – if it
is
all
classes, dictatorship goes, and democracy stays). The supposed
passing, advocated by the Stalinists, and in a certain limited sense
also by Trotsky, not just in theory but also in practice, to the
dictatorship of the proletariat without further explanation, how can
that be reconciled with the fact that today in Russia
all
citizens
vote? To reply that as there is no bourgeoisie the sanction is
superfluous, is silly: in any case, if there were any point in
showing that there is dictatorship, it would still be an interclass
dictatorship (allowed to vote are peasants, artisans, small
industrialists and merchants etc. which clearly exist to this day)
and therefore the step beyond the
democratic
dictatorship
,
as per Lenin in 1905, never happened: in fact it could only have
occurred as a consequence of revolution
outside
Russia
.
In
due course the question of studying the Constitutions, and of the
definition of Russia today as a capitalist republic which, despite
the totalitarian state praxis, is as
parliamentary
as the bourgeois ones of Hitler and Mussolini were.
Lenin
therefore theorizes that, even though not in the presence of a wholly
proletarian revolution, the overcoming of the parliamentary form of
State must immediately take place. Therefore, from April onwards he
condemns the Constituent Assembly. The same formula followed between
1903 -1913 had already condemned it as a
practical
program of government following the fall of the Tsar.
Finally,
as the reader is aware, we have quoted passages from Lenin which
implicitly contain the principle of not convening the Constituent
Assembly, even while protesting against the deferment of land
expropriation.
And
yet even Trotsky himself, who declares himself an advocate of
proletarian dictatorship
The
Permanent Revolution
believes he can only justify the dissolution of the Assembly,
convened after the Bolsheviks had seized power, in a contingent way.
Writing in 1918 he evidently thinks that the majority believed that
the dictatorship could be ditched by remaining in the realm of
democracy, rather than passing beyond democracy forever, by going
through the single-class, one-party dictatorship until the goal of
the non-State had been achieved – which is the only Marx-Engels
sense in which the dictatorship is “transitory”.
108 – Trotsky and Lenin
We
will quote Trotsky’s justification from the pamphlet ‘From October
to Brest-Litovsk’ written in fact during the long breaks in those
negotiations.
“When
we were declaring that the road to the Constituent Assembly was not
by way of Tseretelli’s Preliminary Parliament, but by way of the
seizure of the reins of government by the Soviets, we were quite
sincere. But the interminable delay in convoking the Constituent
Assembly was not without effect upon this institution itself…”
Trotsky goes on to explain that the strongest party in Russia in
numerical terms was the Socialist Revolutionary party, who’s
right-wing prevailed by a long way in the countryside, with a
left-wing minority of urban workers. Now even if elections did take
place in the first weeks after the October Revolution, the news was
slow to diffuse across the vast territory, and it was clear that the
right-wing
SRs
would gain a majority; meaning a majority for the deposed Kerensky
government: a nice idea calling him back and telling him: accept our
apologies and take your seat again, for us the principles of
democracy take priority and are universal: revolution, socialism and
proletariat, they are all subordinate to it!’
Trotsky
is under the influence of the orgy of imprecations that arrived from
the West on the news of the dispersal of the gaggle of new Honourable
Members to the sound of thudding musket butts but without a drop of
blood shed, from the detestable pedantries of Karl Kautsky, to which
he later dedicated a hefty tome:
Terrorism
and Communism
.
With
the history of the question having ruled out that playing the fool up
that point was even an option, he continues:
“We
must consider the question of principles. As Marxists, we have never
been idol-worshippers of formal democracy. In a society of classes,
democratic institutions not only do not eliminate class struggle, but
they give to class interests an utterly imperfect expression. The
propertied classes always have at their disposal innumerable means
for falsifying, subverting and violating the will of the toilers. And
democratic institutions become a still less perfect medium for the
expression of the class struggle under revolutionary circumstances.
Marx called revolutions “the locomotives of history”. Owing to
the open and direct struggle for power, the working people acquire
much political experience in a short time and pass rapidly from one
stage to the next in their development. The ponderous machinery of
democratic institutions lags behind this evolution all the more, the
bigger the country is and the less perfect its technical apparatus”.
This
is a good argument to use against the social democrats who still
acknowledge class struggle and the conquest of political power. But
it seems to us an insufficient analysis, believing as we do that the
more developed a country is as regards its technical development, and
the longer it has been exercising bourgeois representative democracy,
the more its apparatus lends itself to lying, corruption and
debasement of the masses, and is increasingly disposed, if consulted,
to say no to proletarian socialism.
Trotsky
also says that Lenin wanted to draw himself up the
eviction
decree himself. For at least six months it had been giving him
indigestion.
109 – Decree of Dissolution
Want
to get a taste of real dialectics? The Declaration of Rights of the
Working and Exploited People, core of the first Soviet constitution
which we will be examining later on, was written by Lenin on January
4th, 1918, and has as its grammatical subject the Constituent
Assembly. The decree, from the same pen, which dissolves the latter,
is dated January 7th.
As
a matter of fact, the Assembly, meeting on January 5th, had not
accepted the request by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
of the Soviets to adopt Lenin’s draft of the Declaration of Rights,
which begins with the statement that all central and local power
belongs to the Soviets.
Lenin’s
decree is based not on contingent events but heads straight to its
lapidary conclusion: “
the
Central Executive Committee resolves that the Constituent Assembly is
hereby dissolved
”.
The
decision takes off from the fact that the Russian Revolution from the
very beginning created Soviets, that these were developed to counter
any false hopes of collaborating with the bourgeois parties and “the
misleading polities of the bourgeois-democratic parliamentary
system”, and “after practical experience arrived at the
conclusion that the emancipation of the oppressed classes was
impossible unless they broke with these forms and with every kind of
compromise”. The break “came with the October Revolution, which
transferred all power to the Soviets”.
This
provoked the exploiters’ reaction and “the repression of this
desperate resistance fully demonstrated that
it
was the beginning of the socialist revolution
”.
This strict formula would be fully adopted by Marxists, insofar as it
concerned the international socialist revolution, and certainly not
bout the later fabled “building of socialism in Russia alone”.
The
text continues: “The working classes had to be persuaded, based on
experience, that the old bourgeois parliamentary system had had its
day [
new
in Russia,
old
in Europe, which is why the entire magnificent historical
demonstration erected then remains completely relevant today], that
it was absolutely incompatible with the aim of achieving socialism;
and that it was not national institutions, but only class
institutions, like the Soviets, that were capable of overcoming the
resistance of the propertied classes and putting in place [following
thread of logic and doctrine we add here:
by that very fact
]
the foundations of socialist society. Any renunciation of the
sovereign power of the Soviets, any renunciation of the Soviet
Republic installed by the people, to the advantage of the bourgeois
parliamentary system and the Constituent Assembly, would now be a
step backwards, and would cause the collapse of the October workers’
and peasants’ revolution”.
The text goes on to
say that the Constituent Assembly had rejected the thesis of power to
the Soviets and with that had “severed all ties with the Soviet
Republic of Russia. The abandonment of such an assembly by the
Bolshevik group and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who today
form the overwhelming majority in the Soviets and enjoy the
confidence of the workers and the majority [take note] of the
peasants, was inevitable”. The parties with a majority in the
Constituent Assembly are in reality conducting outside of it actions
that are directed towards defeating the revolution, defending the
capitalist saboteurs and the appeals by unknown counterrevolutionary
agents for terrorist action. “It is obvious that under these
circumstances the other part of the Constituent Assembly could only
serve as a screen for the struggle of the counterrevolutionaries to
overthrow the Soviet power”.
And
so, with the axe blow delivered, the great document ends.
The
greatness of this text is that it is not based on discounted
contingencies and details about the concrete development in Russia.
It offered only what was expected to happen: magnificent the
prediction that, in the elections, the revolutionaries wouldn’t
obtain a majority; it would be terribly embarrassing, and who knows
how many Bolsheviks would once again stumble.
The
historic text is based on matters of principle drawn not from the
accrued
history,
but from the
expected
history
of the world proletarian and communist revolution, on the
incompatibility between parliamentary democracy and the achievement
of socialism, which will follow the violent toppling of the social
obstacles, of the traditional forms of production, as written in the
Manifesto
.
The
followers of uncorrupted Marxism, ten frontiers away, hadn’t read
the proof, but for them the bare news of the fact that the minority
had walked out of the assembly and ordained that the majority be
reduced to silence, was quite enough for them to cheer on one of the
most blazing encounters between doctrinal forecast and living
history.
The
mass of exploited proletarians, elevated from war to revolutionary
struggle, understood the true greatness of the event, even if in less
scientific form; it shouted with a million voices that once again the
Light (call it, O philistines, if it upsets you, messianic: in our
lexicon it is not the Word made Flesh, but Theory made Reality!) had
arisen blazing on the Eastern horizon.
Only
then to fade into the fetid dullness of parliamentary decay.
To
this key turning point the official
History
of the Party dedicates a mere couple of lines. “The Constituent
Assembly, whose elections had largely been held prior to the October
Revolution, and which refused to recognize the decrees of the Second
Congress of Soviets on peace, land and the transfer of power to the
Soviets, is dissolved”. They are an out and out apology.
110 – War and Peace
The
passages in the Stalinist narrative that cover this point are such,
at least for those who lived through those times, that just citing
them in order to refute them is a confession of congenital idiocy.
Trotsky and Bukharin allegedly worked to oppose peace so that the
Germans, in whose pay they were, would conquer Russia and crush the
Revolution. Lenin’s genius prevented it: but how did that genius not
come to see that his chief collaborators, for years and years indeed
up to his death, were simply hired assassins? And how come Stalin,
for whose magnification this text was distributed, did not realize
that either? The two of them, and all the others, and all of us, what
a fantastically
idiotic
bunch
!
But anyway, let us leave it at that. We are not able in fact to
confess that the
Germans
also pay for the Filo del Tempo.
For
the same reason we are not interested in all of the details,
definitive though they are, of Trotsky’s confutation of such an
incredible construction. Those who believe socialism is a
construction, they can start “building history” too, just like
Kremlinesque officialdom does. In both cases it is on quicksand, and
more substantial things are what matter to us.
The
2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which took power on Oct.
26th/Nov. 8th, adopted in the same session the peace decree, prepared
by Lenin, and first act of the new power. The proposal it made was
that all warring countries immediately start negotiations “for a
just and democratic peace”. The text states straightaway what it
means by this formulation:
“An
immediate peace, for which the overwhelming majority of the working
class and other working people of all the belligerent countries,
exhausted, tormented and racked by the war, are craving […] an
immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of
foreign lands, without the forcible incorporation of foreign nations)
and without indemnities”.
A
further elucidation: "In accordance with the sense of justice of
democrats in general, and of the working class in particular, the
Russian government conceives the annexation or seizure of foreign
lands to mean every incorporation of a small or weak nation into a
large or powerful state without the precisely, clearly, and
voluntarily expressed consent and wish of that nation, irrespective
of the time when such forcible incorporation took place, irrespective
also of the degree of development or backwardness of the nation
forcibly annexed to the given state, or forcibly retained within its
borders, and irrespective, finally, of whether this nation is in
Europe or in distant, overseas countries”.
This
concrete proposal is not a theoretical construction. The Marxist
position is that a proletarian party can under no circumstances
support forced political annexations; but it does not consist of
making into an article of the party program the
ex
novo
organization of all homogeneous peoples into a new
politico-geographic ordering of States, reached and maintained by
consensus and without violence. The latter is considered by Marxists
to be a utopia that is incompatible with capitalist class society,
indeed more so than with any other one, whereas in a socialist
society the problem moves onto another basis, including
appeasement
and extinction of any State violence.
It
is a proposal which bourgeois countries
might
be able
to
accept, or at least which they cannot reject on
principle
,
thereby being unmasked if they did – as is sure to happen – due
to their appetite for imperial brigandage. It would therefore be
proven that states do not
de
facto
possess an international legal consciousness, and nor can it exist in
today’s world.
The
decree contains two other fundamental points: the renunciation of
diplomatic secrecy and the annulment of all treaties, secret or
otherwise, hitherto concluded by the Russian State – and the
proposal for an armistice of at least three months to enable
negotiations to take place.
The
conclusion to the speech expounding on the decree is a powerful one.
It explains that one cannot
not
offer to talk to other governments, and that the proposal for peace
"without annexations and indemnities” should not be presented
as an ultimatum, since the aim is to engage in discussion. But by
this one does not rule out talking directly to the people, to the
workers of every country, about overthrowing those governments which
oppose peace. “We are combating the deception practised by the
governments which pay lip-service to peace and justice, but in fact
wage annexationist and predatory wars”. The decree openly sings the
praises of the proletarian insurrection, of the mutinies in the
German fleet. It nevertheless rules out the possibility of
unilaterally ending the war. Only peace can bring this to an end: the
decree does not accommodate –not yet – any expectation of a
separate peace.
111 – Tragic Chronology
On
November 7th the proposal was transmitted to all the warring
governments. The response of the French, British allies, etc. was
transmitted not to the Bolshevik government but to the Army
Headquarters on November 11th: it was a clear threat to attack Russia
if it dared to conclude a separate peace with the Germans.
In
his closing speech Lenin had frankly explained that the proposal for
a general armistice had not been formulated as an ultimatum
threatening a separate peace, and that reliance was being placed on
the exhaustion of the belligerent masses forcing their governments to
the negotiating table: again he recalled the ferociously suppressed
mutiny in the German navy, and the Italian uprisings after Caporetto
and in the pitched battles in Turin in 1917: “Take Italy, where,
owing to this exhaustion, there was a prolonged revolutionary
movement demanding the termination of the slaughter”.
The
reply to the allied threat of November 11
th
was a Soviet proclamation to the workers, soldiers and peasants
declaring that the Soviet power would never tolerate the blood “of
our army being shed under the whip of the foreign bourgeoisie”. The
Bolshevik government stuck to its call for an armistice, and its
pledge to publish all secret treaties.
On
November 30th, the Soviet government decided to begin peace
negotiations with the Central Powers, and in vain invited the Western
powers to participate. On December 2nd in Brest-Litovsk the
negotiations of the first delegation led by Joffe would begin:
between the 22nd and the 28th of December the peace conference took
place, concluding with very severe and unacceptable terms being set
by the Germans. The dates given are in the New Style, which we shall
follow from now onwards as in February 1918 a decree by the new
government adopted it throughout Russia.
An
armistice with the Germans had been concluded on December 5th.
Discussions had begun on the 9th, and the Germans initially pretended
to be ready to accept the legal basis for the peace proposed by the
Russians, which caused a great sensation. Kühlmann’s declaration
along these lines, after many postponements, was made on December
25
th
and provoked on the 28
th
a great mass demonstration in Petrograd for a democratic peace. But
on the following day the Joffe delegation returned denouncing the
German terms as involving the Baltic countries, Poland, and even
Ukraine, as effectively falling under the Germanic yoke.
On
January 10th the second delegation was sent, headed by Trotsky, and
further lengthy sessions got underway which continued until February
10th.
The
situation was complicated by a delegation from the Ukrainian Rada in
Kiev, which, flaunting its autonomy from the new Russian Republic,
was like a puppet in German hands, and on February 9th, with its
power becoming ever more fictitious, it signed a separate peace with
Germany and Austria.
The
next day the Russians declared that they could not accept such
exorbitant conditions, and they withdrew, declaring they would still
put an end to the war, by demobilizing the army.
It
was hoped the proletarians of Germany and Austria would react, It was
hoped the German army would not go ahead with its invasion. But that
was not to be. General Hoffmann, five days after the final session,
and violating the seven-day deadline agreed, declared the armistice
expired and resumed operations. The Russian front completely
collapsed. Finnish and Ukrainian counterrevolutionaries called on
German bayonets to resist the Bolsheviks who had overwhelmed them.
The threat hung over Petrograd. On February 19th the Russian
government made a radio announcement that it was ready to sign any
peace treaty dictated by the Germans, who didn’t pause and only on
the 23rd communicated the dreadful new terms. On February 28th the
third delegation, headed by Sokolnikov, arrived at Brest-Litovsk: on
March 3rd, 1918, the one-sided peace treaty is finally signed.
Estonia, Latvia and Poland passed to Germany, Ukraine became its
vassal state, and an indemnity was to be paid by Russia. But all of
this from a historical standpoint was destined to last only a few
months, until the German collapse in November and the general
armistice with the victorious Western powers. The Brest-Litovsk
crisis had in essence worn down Germany internally but not Russia.
112 – A Serious Crisis Within the Party
Throughout
the awful interchanges in Brest-Litovsk profound disagreements had
developed in the party. One current, who professed to be left
communists, yet who drew on support from the
right
of the governing coalition, that is from
the
SRs
,
sided against a separate peace and above all against the acceptance
of the onerous conditions. Since power had been seized by the
workers, they argued, the war was no longer a war fought on behalf of
imperialists and opportunists, but was a revolutionary war, a holy
war. It was necessary for the entire Russian people to rise up in
arms, not to sign and appear before foreign proletarians as traitors
to the international, and if the Russian proletarian forces were
crushed on the battlefield, it was better to lose power and the
conquests of the revolution and go down fighting.
Against
this position, steadfastly and with unbending decisiveness, Lenin, as
usual in certain phases almost alone, took his stand. His fundamental
argument was the need to keep faith in the European revolution, which
had to be given more than just a couple of weeks or months breathing
space, by sacrificing all the national concessions so as still to be
in power at the end of the war, even if it meant, as would turn out
to be the case, moving the capital to Moscow.
As
we have done before, we will recall that when the echoes of this
terrible debate reached Europe, and when many who passed for
left-wingers were getting excited about the idea of a desperate
anti-German war, the left members of the Italian party, although
almost entirely lacking the related documentation, would embrace the
Leninist thesis and support it in
Avanti!
And
in
L’Avanguardia,
the youth section newspaper, and what is more with the same intensity
as they had expressed their solidarity with the dispersal of the
Constituent Assembly and the tremendous crusade against the
opportunists and traitors within and outside Russia; calling on the
workers of Europe and Italy take on the task of extinguishing, of
burying the war by dousing a flame of patriotic fanaticism, on the
downward slope to interventionism, which was both traitorous and
anti-German.
The
Trotsky delegation returned with the news that it had not agreed to
sign the peace treaty on February 10th. But already the issue had
been discussed at a conference of 63 Bolsheviks on January 21st, to
which Trotsky had been summoned. Lenin’s thesis of signing the peace
treaty in the form the Germans wanted had been defeated having
received only 15 votes. Trotsky’s thesis of
neither
war nor peace
received 16. The absolute majority, 32 votes, went behind the
Bukharin thesis of refusing to sign and the proclamation of a
revolutionary war. On January 24th, the question was back before the
Party Central Committee. Lenin proposed not rejecting the signing,
but drawing out the negotiations: 12 yes, 1 no. Trotsky insisted on
the proposal: refusal to sign, and demobilization, with 9 for and 7
against.
On
January 25th It was discussed again at a meeting which included the
Left
SRs.
The majority decides to submit the formula ‘neither war nor peace’
to the Congress of Soviets.
On
February 10th, as mentioned, there is the return of the delegation
which had applied this line, against Lenin’s advice but not against
that of the majority. Krylenko the supreme commander gives the order
for demobilization. Military conditions in a technical sense were so
obvious that no one objected.
When
it became known that the Germans, following a conference chaired by
Kaiser Wilhelm in Hamburg, had resumed their advance, the Central
Committee convened again on February 17th. The German proposal to
resume negotiations and sign was rejected by 6 votes to 5. There were
no votes for revolutionary war, but only the abstentions of Bukharin,
Joffe and Lomov.
In
a long session on February 18th, first Lenin and Zinoviev supported
signing, Trotsky and Bukharin rejected it, and the proposal to
negotiate was rejected by seven votes to six: later it was decided to
send a telegram offering peace on the old or different terms, with
the approval of Lenin, Smilga, Stalin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Zinoviev,
Sokolnikov, with 5 against and one abstention. The response arrived
on the 23rd. The Central Committee voted to accept it, with 7 votes
against the four of Bukharin, Bubnov, Uritsky and Lomov. A vote on
preparations for a revolutionary war was nevertheless carried. On
March 3rd there was peace.
On
March 6th-9th violent arguments broke out at the Seventh Party
Congress, and in the face of animated opposition from the Bukharin
fraction, the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty was approved. Lenin’s
resolution obtained 30 votes, with 13 against, and 4 abstentions. At
this congress the party takes the name Communist (Bolshevik), as had
been proposed by Lenin in the previous year.
At
the Third Congress of Soviets the question is brought back, this
time, in the opposition there are the Left-SRs as well: the coalition
is broken, and the latter switch to opposing the Bolshevik government
in a more definite way. It is now March 15th-17th; a different
government has been formed, with Chicherin Commissar for Foreign
Affairs, Trotsky for War.
113 – Lenin’s Evaluation
Lenin’s
writings severely undermined the capacity of that ‘left’ which
wanted to reject any peace and engage in a holy war against the
Germans. The opposition had won over the party organization in
Moscow, and on February 24th it passed a vote of no confidence in the
Central Committee. Lenin called their position “strange and
monstrous”. The leftists should admit that such a war would be
hopeless and that the Germans were bound to advance and eventually
win, resulting in the collapse of Soviet power. They responded that
such an eventuality was preferable to the dishonor of suffering the
terms imposed by German imperialism. Lenin showed this to be a
position born of desperation and that it was not defeatism, as far as
the international revolution was concerned, to sign a horrible and
onerous peace treaty with German imperialism: his prediction that the
revolution would overcome this ghastly step would, yet again, have a
prophetic flavor.
However,
Lenin never condemned revolutionary war
as
a matter of principle
.
Indeed a few days before the text just cited, on February 22nd, he
drew up the appeal for revolutionary defense
which appeared in the
Works
under the heading (the wording of which may not be original, and as a
slogan it would be much abused in 1942): ‘The Socialist Homeland is
in Danger!’. Every preparation was made for a desperate resistance
to the invader, in case the latter sent back the delegation which had
already left to sign the peace treaty and deliberately continued to
enter the country.
But
later on, in his writings in preparation for the Seventh Congress
Bukharin and his people, based on draft reports of the real
situation, are fiercely stigmatized.
The
ending of the war was a fundamental objective, perhaps the most vital
of all, in a very long struggle, which had been underway since 1914
and in a certain sense since 1900. It was imperative that this
benchmark be established at any cost: the imperialist and Tsarist war
was over: social-chauvinist treachery was crushed; and it was just as
much a benchmark of the Russian revolution as it was, above all else,
of the international revolution. There would be no shortage of
struggles and civil wars to defend the revolution and the October
victories – Lenin knew this and clearly said as much.
But Brest was
however just a stage on the road which must necessarily lead from the
imperialist war to civil war in every country, as declared in 1914,
and indeed before then, by revolutionary Marxism. And the German
proletariat, with Spartacus in 1918, at the end of that dreadful
year, showed they had understood the obligation placed upon them
after the dreadful torture of the ‘horrible peace treaty’, to
which Bolshevism and Lenin, in a hugely courageous move, on the
historic third of March in Brest, knowingly appended their signature.
But it was to their triumphant and stipulating adversary to whom
history would deliver its knock-out blow.
At
the Brest stage the European Revolution was on its glorious forward
march. On the revolutionary political line, the Russian power
installed in October, alone held the red flag in its grasp, and was
eminently entitled to do so.
114 – The Terrible Civil War
The
departure from the government of the SRs was at the fourth Congress
of the Soviets which, immediately after the seventh Congress of the
(Bolshevik) Communist Party, as it was called from then on, approved
the line taken by Lenin at Brest-Litovsk; revolt followed the fifth
All-Russian Congress of Soviets (July 4-10, 1918), which ratified the
treaty once-and-for-all, adopted the First Constitution, proclaimed
the formation (underway since February) of a standing Red Army, and
rejected the SR theses against the fight to the death against the
rich peasant and agrarian capitalist (the
kulak
).
From opposition the SRs passed to revolt: on July 5th their follower
Blumkin (later, in a Totòesque
movie, presented as a Trotskyist agent) assassinates the German
ambassador Mirbach, in the hope of reigniting the war. In Moscow and
various other cities, the SRs rise up, even turning their cannons on
the Kremlin. The Communist Party without the slightest hesitation
arranges for the adventure to be liquidated, which it takes only a
few days to accomplish: this last residual ally, this last
coitus-ible
object of “bloc” and “united front”, to the horror of global
opportunism and to the joy of thick-skinned revolutionary Marxists
everywhere, is placed outside red law, and crushed like a nest of
vipers. They would then, true to their terrorist method, consecrated
by now to the counterrevolution, assassinate on August 30
th
the valiant Bolshevik Uritsky, a grave loss to the party, and by the
hand of Fanny Kaplan they would shoot and badly injure Lenin himself,
which perhaps shortened his life.
Around
this time, one after the other, there opened the fronts of external
intervention, of civil war; on 17
th
July cutting short another pernicious tradition the imperial family,
on the orders of the Bolshevik government in Yekaterinburg, were
disposed of, the arrival of the whites being imminent; and it is not
credible that anyone was allowed to escape.
The
period had opened after which the problem we alluded to at the end of
our summary of this series of party meetings: – What should the
revolutionary party do immediately after taking power? – would be
resolved, the solution being: fight a long, hard battle – in order
not to lose it. A struggle which, for both sides, could leave no
quarter to the losers.
115 – October’s Three Socialist Tasks
The
critical framework of this historical reconstruction of ours is based
on the dialectical assertion that the Russian Revolution did not lead
to a socialist Russia, but to a capitalist one; and that this does
not contradict the party’s historical theory of the part but
confirms it. Between Russian revolution and Russian socialist society
it placed the “bridge” which got missed: the European proletarian
revolution. And by asserting at the same time that, while February
1917 was a bourgeois political revolution, October 1917 was a
proletarian political revolution, and one that was
socialist
(and thus also a
social
revolution definable as socialist), and that remains the case even
if, afterwards, the dialectical road to the victory of socialism in
the capitalist world could not be traversed in its entirety. A
historical case is not lost, by having postponed it to a later
hearing.
We
have therefore based our demonstration of the ‘right’ of Russian
October to be classified as ‘socialist’, and ‘communist’, on
three of its tasks, which have remained solidly implanted in the
corpus
of human history.
The
first is the crushing of the traitorous nationalist opportunism of
the Second International and the liquidation of the capitalist war.
The
second task is the subsequent forceful dispersal of all the social
and political movements which set up camp between the bourgeoisie and
the revolutionary proletariat, by exhausting in a powerful
dialectical sequence their historical function as bit by bit they
lose their propulsive force, beginning with the collapse of
feudalism, and by assembling the real physical evidence of the
necessary unity and of the totalitarian, dictatorial, and when
necessary terroristic, revolutionary power, in the hands of the class
party, of the Marxist communist party.
The
third task consists of arriving at a solution, both theoretically and
practically, of the relationship between the revolutionary
proletarian class and the State. The emancipation of the working
class is impossible within the limits of the bourgeois State: the
latter must be defeated in the civil war and its apparatus
demolished, with which the social-democratic version of historical
progress is finally dispersed. After the revolutionary and
insurrectional victory, it is absolutely essential that another
historic state form should arise, the dictatorship of the
proletariat, led by the Communist Party, which will open the
historical stage in which socialist society arises and the state
withers
away
.
With that one can pass judgement on the struggle in 1870-72 between
the Marxists and libertarians: that the cycle of petty-bourgeois
anarchist illusions had closed, but the libertarians were correct to
argue that the state is not conquerable but must be destroyed.
116 – The Results are in
What
was the balance sheet of these three gigantic historical tasks, in
Russia and internationally?
First:
the defeat of the traitors in 1914 was definitive in the theoretical
field, as also was definitive, in the same field, the work of
founding the new International. In its historic implementation, as
regards Russia, it was fully carried out, with the destruction of the
looming menace of ‘defencism’ (Lenin – April), but, as regards
the International, its powerful critical and theoretical foundations
were not responded to with the same degree of success. Since a
victorious proletarian revolution in Europe had not happened, there
could be no grafting onto the Russian October Russian society’s
transition to socialism. But, what was worse, there was no convergent
development, consistent with the glorious foundations on which they
were based, of the communist parties in Russia and elsewhere.
However, in October 1917, a positive balance sheet nevertheless!
No
less positive was the balance sheet of the second task:
theoretically, the totalitarian destruction of the ‘allied’
parties remains a universal achievement, and at that time it was
achieved in Russia in a practical sense with no exceptions.
Internationally and for the same reasons given there would be a
regression from the heights of October.
The
third task of destroying the traditional state apparatus was on the
doctrinal level fulfilled in
State
and Revolution
,
by effecting a total restoration of Marxism, and in deed the task in
Russia was likewise pushed to its limits by obliterating both the
Tsarist apparatus and the faltering bourgeois efforts to organize
inside the provisional government and the abortive parliamentary
State. Back in October this balance sheet is striking in its
completeness, and it is a result that will be made full use of in the
future, despite the defeat of the revolution in Europe, and the
involution of the Russian power to social forms of capitalism, and
state versions of the demo-populist lie.
The
October Revolution and Lenin’s Communist Party went on to achieve
victory by conducting all of their activity along the correct
revolutionary lines, achieving all of the achievable outcomes and in
such a way as to favour the development of the international
proletarian revolution and of socialist society; the only forms
possible then, now and in the future.
The
resistance of the capitalist historical form in the modern world and
for even stronger reasons in Russia is to be linked again to the
tremendous defeat of the working-class movement, when put to the test
in August 1914.
Despite
later strategic reversals of the world proletariat, and despite the
new worse wave of opportunism that would kill off Lenin’s Party and
International, the pivotal point of October is still powerfully valid
and will remain so throughout the course of the Revolution to come.
Of the proletarian revolutions that history will record, the one in
October was the first to achieve victory, and to point out the one
road, from then on gloriously open.
117 – Solitary Supreme Effort
If
the historical lessons and “practice” acquired by the world
proletariat in October were immense as regards the totally one party
nature of the revolution, the crushing of the imperialist war, and
the shattering of the parliamentary State, no less great was the
real-life epic in which, over the course of three or so years of
dreadful civil war, every one of the ferocious counterrevolutionary
comebacks, fuelled by the ruling classes and conservative forces of
the entire world, and the established powers in each country, were
crushed without leaving a palpable trace.
An
enormous amount of the revolutionary potential which the Russian
proletarians and their formidable party possessed was absorbed by
this incredible effort. Their enemies were coming at them from every
direction, they were deployed on dozens of fronts and had bases and
operational resources everywhere, not just in a geographical but in a
political sense as well: the multiple, multifarious raids, by
classes, parties and States of every sort, whether white, yellow,
green or pink; by feudal reactionaries and big liberal capitalists;
by nasty petty-bourgeois radicals and horrible pseudo-worker
socialists, all of them were attacking with one goal in mind: to
bring down the Bolshevik power. There is no need to go into the
history of the long struggle, which we will outline in a brief
synthesis, but supporting our case by giving references to the times
and dates, the points from which attacks originated and where they
took place, and the names of the nationalities, governments, and
generals carrying them out. A hundred attacks against a single,
monochromatic defence, which won because it was “one-party”.
We
want to remark on two things here. Why, we propose to ask, in the
face of the incredible heterogeneity of the enemy, and the diverse
origins of the interests which prompted them to act and which backed
them, did it not occur to the revolution, not even for a second, to
play its enemies off against one another, to sow amongst them the
usual artfully contrived dissension, to divide them, viewing some as
better than others; why did it instead commit itself, with no ifs and
buts, to the simple, unique program of pushing back and annihilating
all of them, from the Tsarist to the anarchist? Why here no recourse
to the theory of the roundabout manoeuvre, which did so much damage
to the political strategy of the kaleidoscope of European parties,
and in which is rooted the present ruinous and disgusting
proliferating of equivocal nods and winks, the incessant wave of
monstrous
overtures
and
batting of eyelids to other parties on the political catwalk.
Secondly
we would like to point out that, even if there was no lack of
episodes of proletarian internationalism which stopped or delayed
quite a few of the attempted bourgeois and foreign interventions into
socialist Russia, there was too great a disproportion between the
part of the burden shouldered by the internal army of the revolution,
and the help provided by foreign proletarians and the struggle fought
to the cry of:
Hands
off Russia!
,
instead of to the cry of:
Take
power from the bourgeoisie, get out of Russia!
This enormous consumption of forces in a fierce life or death
struggle, in which everything was at stake at every step of the way,
was no small thing and was reflected in the weaknesses of the foreign
policies of the various parties, and in the not easily explained
fragility with which Bolshevism, strong in its tradition of
unparalleled steadfastness, then would allow, albeit after the
immolation of a considerable part of its great army, the programmatic
cornerstones of Marxism and revolution to be debased, perpetuating a
mean swindle on the value of social forms, and finally allowing the
dreadful degeneration that unfolded under the nonsensical slogan of
building socialism in Russia alone to rage out of control.
Everything
which the Russian proletariat and the Russian party could have done
on their own, at the time of the civil victory in 1920-21, had been
done. And all they could have given had been given. The advent of
socialism needed the international proletariat to take to the field.
But the latter did not get the same instructions the Red Army had
been getting ever since the extremely difficult and tormented phase
of its formation: to go up against all enemies on the same terms, and
attempt, without making any fawning distinctions, to strike at the
heart of them all.
118 – In Russia and in Europe
How
can this dual position be explained? Totally hitting the mark when on
military terrain, and wrong manoeuvres as regards politics and
foreign policy? The making of such choices is not in the hands of
bosses, leaders, governments and parties. It is the force of History
itself which determines which positions they take, which arise from
physical relationships within the substructure. In Russia, in a short
historic cycle, the revolutionary phase had matured to the stage of
making new forces and the destruction of dead forms an urgent
necessity; outside it in Europe, the situation was not as
revolutionary as it seemed, and the deployment of revolutionary
forces was indecisive; the uncertainty and the changing of position
was an effect and not a cause of the deflection of the historical
curve of class potential.
If
error there was, and if the errors of men and politicians are worth
discussing, it did not consist in having missed historical boats that
could have been boarded, but rather in having conceived of the
struggle in Russia as the appearance of the supreme situation, in
having believed that in Europe it was possible to replace it with
illusionary subjective manoeuers and in not having had, on the part
of the movement, the courage to say that the bus of proletarian power
in the West had not gone by and therefore it was a falsehood to
announce the imminent arrival of the socialist economy in Russia.
History for us is not made by Heroes: but neither is it made by
Traitors.
The
timing and most auspicious period had instead been indicated in
Russia by the seismographs in its social subsoil. The readouts were
deciphered by Lenin, who yelled the October insurrection had to
happen within hours, and who supervised the unitary dynamic from the
center of a network of telegraph wires by tightening and loosening
the single halter around the revolution’s neck, to which the
hundreds of hands hauling it lent it a unified tension. From a Lenin,
who issued communications in the impelling style to which Trotsky
attests: to Kamenev (sent in the spring of 1919 to Ukraine in an
administrative capacity, and encircled by whites): “absolutely
necessary that you personally […] bring the reinforcements to
Lugansk and to the entire Don Basin, because otherwise there is no
doubt that the catastrophe will be tremendous and almost impossible
to resolve; we will most surely perish if we do not completely clear
the Don Basin in a short time”.
History
is not
made
,
let us repeat it again, and it is already a rare bit of luck to
decipher it: we accept though that every day there is one more idiot
who doesn’t understand this, who decides to set about making it,
all on his own...; Indeed, the way forward cannot be deciphered for
certain, which could result in fatalism, which horrifies those born
powerless…: all one can do is establish some links between given
conditions and corresponding developments.
No
analogous period of historical tremors in central-western Europe was
experienced over those years: it groped its way along, lurching back
and forth, and in the end, as Lenin’s body expired, having given
its all (the comparison is only of didactic value), so too the body
of the Russian party expired as well, and international communism
would lose its moorings.
119 – “Ionization” of History
To
give a better idea of the difference between the two environments (or
areas
as we sometimes say) and the two periods, or stages, we will allow
ourselves to resort to a physical image, and will say of Russia in
the civil war period that there was no mistaking in which direction
the artillery was pointing because in the vital periods of the
revolution the historical atmosphere was
ionized
.
Each
human
molecule
necessarily orientates itself, automatically, without the need to
expend energy
choosing
which
position to take.
The
discovery of ions served as a precursor to modern sub-atomic physical
chemistry, even if it was yet not a case of parts of atoms, and it
served as a prelude to the syntheses of mechanical, chemical and
electrical experimental data.
Each
molecule of a given chemical body is composed of two parts called
ions, united by an electrical bond. The two ions carry opposing
electrical charges, and therefore are attracted, holding firmly on to
one another. When the
sodium
ion with a positive charge and the
chloride
ion with a negative charge (metal and metalloid) are combined, they
form common salt, sodium chloride. Take note we are not talking here
about electrons and protons, which together form the neutron, for
here it is all the same to us. The salt molecule is, after that
electrochemical embrace, neutral, discharged, stable, indifferent; it
can place itself anywhere, even in a powerful electric field, and
does not deign to turn to face anyone.
But
when you ionize the salt! Which can often happen, as in the very
simple case of dissolving it in water and passing a slight electric
current through it (as the alchemist of a thousand years ago rightly
said
corpora
non agunt nisi soluta
,
bodies are active only in solution, and science in the end is always
both old and new); well, the two ions become detached, their polar
charge is back in evidence, and they can no longer take an arbitrary
attitude, along any axis, but become divided into
two
distinct
types: positive and negative. They can only flow in two opposite
directions along the same line: the former toward the influx of
negative electric force, the latter in the opposite direction.
If
we may apply a moment our little model – which at a more profound
level of investigation is applicable to all bodies and all fields in
physical nature, up to the sensational case of the Earth’s
atmosphere within which we are immersed, and which distant astral
cataclysms, or terrestrial human atomic bombs, get in various ways to
polarize, and render radioactive (which here is almost the same
thing) the historical course of the human agglomeration. At certain
times, as in 1956, in this deaf phase of Western bourgeois
civilization, the historical environment is not
ionized
,
and thus the innumerable human molecules, as individuals, are not
oriented on two antagonistic sides. In these horrible, deadly
periods, the person/molecule can orientate himself any way he wants,
as the historical “field” is null and void, and no one gives a
damn about it. It is during these periods that the inert and cold
molecule, not pervaded, or bound to an unswerving axis, by an
imperious current, covers itself with a kind of encrustation called
consciousness, and starts blathering about going wherever it wants
to, whenever it wants to, thus elevating its immeasurable nullity and
emptiness to the level of the motor, and causal subject, of history.
Allow
however that, as in Russia in the great civil war, the great forces
of the historical field awake, aroused by the shocks of the new
productive forces pressing against the network of the tottering
social forms; it is then, in our illustration of the historical
atmosphere, that the human social magma shows up in
ionized
form, and if there were a Geiger counter of revolution its pointer
would be going off like crazy. The lines in the force field are fixed
along their trajectories, everything is polarized between two
inexorable and antagonistic orientations, each element in the complex
chooses its pole and hurls itself against the opposite one, the
lethal wavering ends, every double-cross is ignobly screwed, the
individual-human-molecule speeds along in formation, flying along its
line of force, having forgotten at last that pathological idiocy
which over centuries of bewilderment had been extolled as
free
will
!
We
have wanted in this way to present the striking historical fact that,
during the long three-year war, the vast and glorious Bolshevik
revolution had dozens and dozens of enemy sides arrayed against it,
but the history of its portentous battle and its
superstructural
stance
knows but two camps, two directions, two clashing forces, just two
ways out from the social tragedy: either it is we who perish, or the
filthy hordes of
adjectiveless
counter-revolutionaries instead.
The
communist revolution can only win when, after the polarization of the
moribund atmosphere now suffocating has been polarized by new forces,
and the dispersion of the scientific blasphemy of the contemptible,
bland
coexistence
of enemy poles, the whole of the capitalist world is
ionized
in the revolutionary phase to come, and only two denouements have
been assumed before the supreme struggle commences.
What
ionizes history is not the itching of neutral molecules to the point
of lethal sterilization, nor has our revolution alone ionized it; an
example of it was when Christ, who was called God because he could
not be reduced to the risible role of Bossman or Hero, but who was in
fact an impersonal force in the historical field,
ionized
the world of ancient slave societies with the equivalent formula:
whoever is not with me is against me.
120 – Dialog between Colossi
An episode of
enormous eloquence will serve to explain our present-day
parable
.
It harks back to the time when the unitary revolutionary defence,
without drawing a breath, had to hurl itself against incursions made
by Germans, Bulgarians and Turks; against British, Americans, French
and Japanese disembarkations; against peasant uprisings supported by
opportunist and anarchist parties; against nests of feudal and
aristocratic forces of a tsarist stamp; against former monarchist
generals and bible-thumping reactionism; against bourgeois,
social-democrat and SR pseudo-governments; and all of this when the
unitary defence had only one weapon: the Red Army, of recent and
febrile formation, and inside of which at every step, and often
successfully, sabotage and betrayal tried to make inroads,
consummated by spies of every political coloration, with the common
goal of stabbing the Red government in the heart.
Every
army is a technical instrument, and its moving parts have to be ready
and trained to travel long distances. The extremely large Red Army
emerged out of earlier formations of armed workers and Red Guards,
whose grounding in the art of fighting as one body had drawn solely
on their revolutionary and class enthusiasm. Constantly it had to
choose between deploying elements who were secure politically, but
militarily inexperienced, and elements who were, to say the least,
politically dubious but who were technically adapted to war, and
properly prepared as far as education and training was concerned.
The
army, headed by Trotsky as supreme Commissar of War, was organized by
taking on as part of it not only communist and proletarian volunteers
but also soldiers and especially officers of various ranks from the
professional Tsarist army.
One
stance, undoubtedly open to accusations of infantilism, was taken by
some members of the party: that one should not be obliged to fight
with militants who had not given evidence of their revolutionary
faith, and to avoid betrayal the command of units should not be
entrusted to officers of the ex-Tsar.
Trotsky
had long since overcome such hesitations due to his own direct
experience of the complex activity and despite his undoubted
knowledge of many instances of defeatism. The issue was repeatedly
brought to Lenin for him to decide. It is Trotsky who narrates, again
from his book
Stalin
:
“In
March 1919 at the evening session of the Council of People’s
Commissars, in connection with a dispatch concerning the treason of
certain Red Army commanders, Lenin wrote me a note: ‘Hadn’t we
better kick out all the specialists and appoint Lashevich
Commander-in-Chief?’ I understood that the opponents of the policy
of the War Department, and particularly Stalin, had pressed Lenin
with special insistence during the preceding days and had aroused
certain doubts in him. I wrote my reply on the reverse side of his
query: "Childish!". Apparently the angry retort produced an
impression. Lenin appreciated clear-cut formulations. The next day,
with the report from the General Staff in my pocket, I walked into
Lenin’s office in the Kremlin and asked him:
’Do you know how many tsarist officers we have in the Army?’
’No, I don’t know,’ he answered, interested.
’Approximately?’
’I don’t know,’ he said, categorically refusing to guess [if we may interject: he wasn’t one for quizzes…].
’No less than thirty thousand!’
The figure simply astonished him. ’Now count up’, I insisted, ’the
percentage of traitors and deserters among them, and you will see
that it is not so great. In the meantime, we have built an army out
of nothing. This army is growing and getting stronger.’
Several days later at a meeting
in Petrograd, Lenin drew the balance sheet of his own doubts on the
question of military policy: ’When recently Comrade Trotsky told me
that… the number of officers runs into several tens of thousands, I
got a definite idea of how best to make use of our enemy; how to
compel those who are the opponents of Communism to build it; how to
build Communism out of the bricks amassed by the capitalists to use
against us…
We
have no other bricks.
’"
(
1
) - Carta Cambiata is the title in the original Italian publication and involves an untranslatable play on the word ‘carta’, which can mean paper,
playing card, paper, document, charter, etc. “Cambiare la carta”, for instance, means roughly ‘to change ones tune’, but to translate Carta cambiata as ‘changed charter’ conveys its main meaning,
in that it refers to the famous Stuttgart Resolution carried at the International Socialist Congress in 1907. This resolution took a classist anti‑war stance, and changing it (or rather dumping it) in 1914 effectively sounded the death knell of the Second International. The most revolutionary
element within the 1907 Resolution was the final paragraph, the contribution of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg,
which referred to what the working classes should do if attempts to prevent war failed,: “Should
war break out (...) it is their duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their
power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse
the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule”.