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Workers Vanguard No. 1033
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1 November 2013
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From the Archives of Marxism
The Proletarian Revolution in Russia
By Louis Fraina
To mark the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, we print
below excerpts from Louis Fraina’s introduction to The Proletarian Revolution
in Russia (1918). The book mainly consists of articles by Bolshevik leaders
V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky that were written, as Fraina noted, “during the
actual course of the Revolution,” from the overthrow of the tsar in February to
the workers’ seizure of power and the birth of the Soviet state.
In 1919, Fraina and other members of a left-wing faction in the
Socialist Party who were expelled for advocating Bolshevism went on to found the
Communist Party of America that September. James P. Cannon, a leader of the
early Communist Party and later of American Trotskyism, remarked that Fraina in
that period “did more than anybody else to explain and popularize the basic
program of the Russian Bolsheviks” (First Ten Years of American Communism
[1962]). In later years, Fraina, writing under the name Lewis Corey, renounced
Communism. But as Cannon put it, “The best part of Fraina—the young part—belongs
to us.”
* * *
The persistence of Czarism in Russia after its historical necessity
had ceased, its clinging to power after Capitalism had come into being, produced
a dual political and social development. Within the shell of Czarism developed
the bourgeoisie, the class of capitalists, and the proletariat,—a mature and
aggressive proletariat. As the bourgeoisie developed power, the proletariat
simultaneously developed its own power, while politically and officially Czarism
retained ascendancy. When the shell of Czarism was burst by revolutionary
action, Czarism disappeared as easily as a dream upon awakening, in violent and
suggestive contrast to the painful and prolonged struggles required to overthrow
the absolute monarchy in France, and in England; and the failure of the
revolutionary movement in Germany in 1848. This unparalleled rapidity of
accomplishment in Russia was directly and largely traceable to the development
of the revolutionary proletariat.
Upon the overthrow of Czarism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat
faced each other in battle array; where previous revolutions found the
proletariat scattered and without decisive power, the Russian Revolution found
the proletariat disciplined and inspired by traditions of revolutionary
struggle, organized by the mechanism of capitalist production itself,—stronger
than the bourgeoisie, and able to conquer for itself the power of the state.
This emergence of the proletariat, its independent class policy and
class organizations, the Soviets, constitutes the decisive feature of the
Russian Revolution,—an emergence definite and sufficiently aggressive to conquer
power for the revolutionary proletariat....
As the tendency of action of the Russian proletariat was adumbrated
[prefigured] in previous revolutions, so its class organizations, the Soviets,
are, in general features, partially, incompletely apparent in these previous
revolutions in which the proletariat instinctively tried to emerge for the
conquest of power.
The revolutionary masses of the people, during the French
Revolution, particularly in Paris, organized their own forms of revolutionary
struggle and government, the sections and the
Commune. While the average historian dwells minutely upon the
action of the various parliaments and the Clubs, the sections and the Commune of
the masses were of decisive importance. These sections and the Commune were not
alone instruments of revolutionary action, but usurped certain functions of
government, the tendency being to place all government power in the Commune,
which was simply the organized masses trying to act independently of
parliamentary forms and bourgeois representatives. This tendency was expressed
in a more definite form in the Paris Commune of 1871, which completely dispensed
with the forms and functions of the bourgeois parliamentary state, its purpose
being to unite all France by means of self-governing communes, and from which
Marx derived that fundamental canon of the proletarian revolution: the
proletariat can not simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the bourgeois
state, and use it for its own purposes.
The Soviets, the Councils of Workers and Peasants, are a much
higher form and definite expression of this tendency of the proletarian masses
to become the state. Originally created as instruments of the
revolution, the Soviets have become organs of government, functioning through a
temporary dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviets are revolutionary
organizations of the masses; but they are more: they are forms for the creation
of a new type of government, which shall supersede the bourgeois political
state. Instead of being amorphous “mass organizations” as were the sections and
Communes in the French Revolution, the Soviets are industrial organizations
uniting the functions of industry and government. In the Soviets appears the
true form of government of the proletariat, based upon the producers organized
in the workshops. In the workshops lies not only the power of the workers for
the revolution, but equally the groupings upon which is based the
self-government of the oncoming communist society of Socialism. And the Soviets,
combining temporarily political and industrial functions, are developing the
forms out of which will emerge the communist, industrial “government” of the
days to come. The tendency of previous revolutions is the dominant
fact of the Russian Revolution.
The proletarian revolution in Russia has revealed clearly and in
definite form the methods and the purposes, the action and the “state” by means
of which the proletariat can conquer power and accomplish its emancipation.
The definite success of the proletarian revolution in Russia
depends not alone upon the Russian masses, but much more upon the revolutionary
action of the masses in the rest of Europe. The Russian Revolution cannot
accomplish that which the French Revolution accomplished—wage war upon the whole
of Europe. The strength and the weakness of the proletarian revolution in Russia
is precisely that the other European nations are much more highly developed
economically. Revolutionary France was the most advanced nation economically in
Europe (except England), and this greater economic power was a source of
unparalleled political and military vigor to France, making feasible a war
against all of Europe. But the proletarian revolution in Russia is vulnerable to
a concerted attack of European Imperialism, because the other nations of Europe
can mobilize infinitely superior economic forces; simultaneously, this situation
is one favorable to the Russian Revolution, since the higher stage of economic
development in the other nations prepares the conditions for supplementary
revolutionary action, which alone can ultimately preserve the Russian
Revolution. Monarchic Europe could not produce a revolution in accord with that
in France; modern Europe can produce a proletarian revolution in accord with
that in Russia. The proletarian revolution in Russia requires and struggles for
the Social Revolution in Europe. The revolution of the proletariat is an
international revolution.
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