From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- "Lenin And The Vanguard Party"-Part One- "Kautskyism & the Origins of Russian Social Democracy"

Lenin And The Vanguard Party

Markin comment on this series of articles:

Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.

Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
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Markin comment on this article:

The key point to be taken from this article is that the vanguard party idea, while embedded in all that Bolshevism stood for from the start in the disputes of the Russian Social Democracy, only had its parameters defined over time, and in the process of the class struggle first in Russia (in both 1905 and 1917) and later, after the formation of the Communist International in 1919, internationally. Additionally, as the recent events in the Middle East point out, once again, without a vanguard party, against a vanguard party, over the head of a vanguard party (meaning some anarchist “free for all” notion of revolution) the working masses and their allies cannot take power and institute the necessary socialist reconstruction of society. There are no short-cuts if you are serious about revolutionary change. If not, then you do not need a vanguard party, no question. But what do you have, as the Middle east situation again points out, after all those struggles?
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From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One

Preface to the Second Edition

Lenin and the Vanguard Party, first issued as a Spartacist pamphlet in 1978, comprises articles by SL/U.S. Central Committee member Joseph Seymour originally published in 1977 and 1978 as a series in Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S. The articles take up Lenin's fight to forge a revolutionary leadership, an internationalist vanguard party, to lead the proletariat to the conquest of state power through socialist revolution. The pamphlet also includes, under the title "In Defense of Democratic Centralism," excerpts from a speech by SL/U.S. national chairman James Robertson given to a national conference of the West German group, Spartacus (Bolschewiki-Leninisten), in February 1973.

In this second, slightly edited edition of Lenin and the Vanguard Party we have added the transcript of a presentation by SL/U.S. Central Committee member Al Nelson to a Spartacus Youth Club gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area which appeared originally in Workers Vanguard No. 634, 1 December 1995. Titled "The Fight for a Leninist Vanguard Party," this presentation provides an overall historical and political summation of the crucial importance of the "party question."

A number of the organizations which nominally claimed the heritage of Leninism and whose positions are polemi-cized against in comrade Seymour's series, no longer exist as such. The British International Marxist Group (IMG), an affiliate of the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec) and in the 1970s one of the largest groups on the British left, has long since ceased to exist. Under the impact of the imperialist anti-Soviet Cold War II of the 1980s, the IMG liquidated into the pro-imperialist Labour Party. The shattered remnants regrouped into a number of much smaller organizations, including Socialist Outlook which claims affiliation to the USec.

The hallmark of the USec has long been its liquidation of the need for a revolutionary party and its corresponding pur¬suit of social forces other than the proletariat and vehicles other than a Leninist vanguard party to further the cause of human emancipation. Having spent the 1980s tailing after the social democrats and championing the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, today the USec is in a state of near-terminal disintegration. With the destruction of the bureaucratically deformed workers states in East Europe and the Soviet Union and the triumphalism of the world's bourgeois rulers over the "death of communism," the USec, together with much of the rest of the left, has repudiated even the pretense of Leninism as it seeks "regroupment" with social democrats, ex-Stalinists, Greens, other so-called "progressives" and even openly cap¬italist forces, within larger reformist organizations.

In the 1970s, Gerry Healy's International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) postured as the defender of Trotskyist orthodoxy against the USec. Healy's organization imploded in 1985 amidst a welter of exposes of its bought-and-paid-for services on behalf of a number of oil-rich Arab regimes in the Middle East (see Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86). The criminal political machinations of the Healy-ites—which grotesquely included cheering the 1979 murder of members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the strongman regime of Saddam Hussein—were matched internally by a brutal bureaucratic regime. The Healyites practiced gangsterism, cop-baiting and a deranged interpretation of "dialectics." The purpose of these techniques was to ensure the membership's cowed acceptance of whatever line the leader¬ship divined in the pursuit of its own opportunist advantage.

It was a biographical rendition of Lenin as a Menshevik, written by British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) head Tony Cliff, which impelled us to write the Lenin and the Van¬guard Party series. Today, the SWP continues to peddle its reformist wares as a so-called "socialist alternative." The origins of the SWP lie in Cliff's rejection of the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the gains of the October Revolution—which continued to be represented in the proletarian property forms of the Soviet Union, how¬ever bureaucratically deformed, and of the deformed workers states of East Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam—at the time of the Korean War. Born of capitulation to the anti-communism of the imperialist rulers, the politics of the SWP and its international satellites continue to be defined by an accommodation to the rule of capital whose "excesses" they seek merely to alleviate. Thus the Cliffites are a modern-day expression of the Kautskyite/ Menshevik rejection of the struggle for a Leninist vanguard party.

Today, in the aftermath of the final betrayal of the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution by the Stalinist misrulers who opened the gates for the destruction of the former Soviet Union by the forces of world imperialism, the idea that the key to the liberation of mankind lies through a proletarian socialist revolution like that successfully pursued by Lenin's Bolshevik Party seems rather esoteric even to sub¬jective leftists. This is due in no small measure to the crimes of the Stalinists, who made a mockery of the ideals of revolutionary Marxism and the instrument for achieving their realization, a Leninist vanguard party.

We of the International Communist League fight for new October Revolutions. In reissuing Lenin and the Vanguard Party we intend to arm those who seek to oppose this system, which is based on the exploitation and oppression of the many by the few, with the program desperately needed to eradicate it. Serving as the memory of the working class, imbuing the proletariat and the new generations of youth with the historic lessons of those who fought before them, is a vital purpose of the vanguard party, necessary to lead the working class to new victories.
—5 August 1997
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Kautskyism & the Origins of Russian Social Democracy

Recently the British International Marxist Group (IMG) and the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party—SWP/IS), two of the largest groups of the British "far left," have taken to revising the history of the Bolsheviks. These groups have attempted to deny or obfuscate the principle of a democratic-centralist vanguard party by pointing to those elements of classic Social Democracy retained by the pre-1914 Bolsheviks as well as to Lenin's tactical maneuvers against the Mensheviks.

The IMG, British section of the pseudo-Trotskyist United Secretariat, has performed the remarkable feat of making Lenin out to be a unity-above-all conciliator on the grounds that until 1912 the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were formally factions within a unitary Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP). The aim of this particular revisionism is to justify a grand unity maneuver for the British left. Their line is that "the political differences which Lenin and Trotsky considered could be contained within a united organization were vastly greater than those which divide the revolutionary left in Britain today" (Red Weekly, 11 November 1976). For an extended treatment of the IMG's revisionism and its shabby tactical purpose, see "IMG Turns Lenin into a Menshevik," Workers Vanguard No. 164, 1 July 1977.

The most ambitious rewriting of Bolshevik history is that of Tony Cliff, longtime leader of the workerist-reformist SUT/IS. The Cliff tendency today sports a "left" veneer" sometimes they even parade around with portraits of Lenin anc Trotsky. But this group had its 4th of August long ago, in 1950, under the pressure of intensely anti-Communist public opinion, it refused to defend North Korea ---' U.S. imperialism and broke with the Trotskyist movement over this question. And yet this utterly shameless CIA "socialist" now presumes to lecture on what Lenin reallly meant to say in What Is To Be Done?

In the past, Cliff has been a prominent, explicitly anti-Leninist purveyor of Menshevism. His 1959 pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg states: "For Marxists in the advanced industrial countries Lenin's original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg's." This bald statement was the second (1968) edition, but Cliff's substantive position remained the same.

However the Cliffites are nothing if not trendy. And in contrast to the 1950s and '60s, "hard" Bolshevism is now "in" among young leftists. So recently Cliff has written a seemingly sympathetic biography of Lenin, of which two of three projected volumes have appeared. Here Cliff presents Lenin in his own image as a nationally limited, workerist eclectic. Cliff's central message is that there are no Leninist principles or even norms on the organization question:

"Lenin's attitude to organisational forms was always historically concrete, hence its strength. He was never taken in by abstract, dogmatic schemes of organisation, but always ready to change the organisational structure of the party to reflect the development of the class struggle.

"Organisation is subordinate to politics. This does not mean that it has no independent influence on politics. But it is, and must be, subordinated to the concrete policies of the day. The truth is always concrete, as Lenin reiterated again and again. And this also applies to the organisational forms needed to undertake the concrete tasks." [emphasis in original]
In other words, whatever works at the time, do it.

Genuine Leninists recognize the primacy of the principles embodied in the first four congresses of the Communist International over pre-1914 Bolshevik practice. Furthermore, Trotsky in building the Fourth International systematized and deepened Leninist concepts developed in rudimentary form during the revolutionary turmoil of 1917-23. To deny the evolution of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1917 is to obliterate the principled opposition of Leninism to Kautskyism. To appeal to pre-1914 Bolshevik practice against the democratic centralism of Trotsky's Fourth International is equivalent to citing Lenin's "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" against Trotsky's "permanent revolution."

The Kautskyan Party of the Whole Class

The first volume of Cliff's biography, subtitled "Building the Party," ends in 1914. This work mentions Kautsky exactly twice and the Second International not at all! Such an incredible omission warrants dismissing Cliff's book out of hand as a serious study of Lenin's position on the party question.

From August Bebel's offer in 1905 to mediate the Bolshevik-Menshevik split to the "unity conference" arranged by the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of World War I, the International leadership played a significant role in the internal life of the RSDRP. The pro-unity elements in particular, above all Luxemburg and Trotsky, sought to achieve through the German-centered International what they could not attain within the Russian movement.

Lenin was a revolutionary social democrat and, as Cliff himself notes in his second volume, Kautsky "had been the only living socialist leader whom Lenin revered." (This is actually an overstatement: in 1905 when Kautsky supported the Mensheviks, Lenin was harshly critical of him.) An understanding of Lenin's position on the party question must therefore begin with the orthodox Kautskyan position; this was the doctrine of the "party of the whole class," or "one class—one party." Kautsky's "party of the whole class" did not mean the recruitment of the entire proletarian population to the party. He recognized that the political activists within the working class would be an elite minority. No social democrat denied that membership standards involved some level of socialist consciousness, activism and discipline. What the Kautskyan doctrine did mean was that all tendencies regard¬ing themselves as socialist should be in a unitary party. Kautsky maintained that revolutionary social democrats could unite and even have comradely collaboration with non-Marxist reformists. Thus the leadership of the German Social Democracy (SPD) at various times collaborated closely with the avowedly reformist, eclectic French socialist, Jean Jaures.

The SPD leadership was immensely proud of their party's disciplined unity, which they regarded as the main source of its strength. Bebel/Kautsky played a decisive role in the 1905 reunification of the French socialists, overcoming the split between the Marxist Parti Socialiste de France led by Jules Guesde and the reformist Parti Socialiste Francais of Jaures. During the campaign to reunite the French, the Interna¬tional adopted the doctrine of "one class—one party" in resolution form at its 1904 Amsterdam Congress:

"In order that the working class may put forth all its strength in the struggle against capitalism it is necessary that in every country there exist vis a vis the bourgeois parties, only one socialist party, as there exists only one proletariat. Therefore, it is the imperative duty of all comrades and socialist organiza¬tions to make every effort to bring about this unity on the basis of the principles established by the international congresses, a unity necessary in the interests of the proletariat before which they are responsible for all fatal consequences of a continued breach." [emphasis in original]

—reproduced in Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War (1940)

Before World War I, Lenin never challenged the above principle and on occasion affirmed it. When in 1909 the Bol¬sheviks expelled the ultraleft Otzovists (the "Ultimatists") from their ranks, Lenin justified this by contrasting the exclusiveness of a faction to the inclusiveness of a social-democratic party:

"In our Party Bolshevism is represented by the Bolshevik section. But a section is not a party. A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory. In the German party, side by side with the pronouncedly revolutionary wing of Kautsky, we see the ultra-revisionist wing of Bernstein." [emphasis in original]
—"Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial
Board of Proletary" (July 1909)

In practice in Russia, Lenin strove to create a disciplined, programmatically homogeneous revolutionary vanguard. Until World War I, however, he did not break in principle with the Kautskyan doctrine of "the party of the whole class." The resolution of that dialectical contradiction was one of the important elements creating Leninism as a world-historic doctrine, as the Marxism of our epoch.

Kautsky's Analysis of Opportunism

The Kautskyan doctrine of the inclusive party was predicated on a particular historico-sociological theory oppor tunism. Opportunist tendencies, it was argued, were a survival of petty-bourgeois democracy carried mainly by the intelli¬gentsia and conditioned by the economic and ideological backwardness or immaturity of the working masses. The growth of the proletariat and of its organization would eventually strengthen revolutionary social democracy. Thus, Kautsky could tolerate a current like Jauresism as a kind of inevitable transition from radical democracy to revolutionary Marxism.

Kautsky's identification of opportunism with pre-Marxist tendencies delved from the history of the European left in the decades following the revolutions of 1848. The principal tendencies opposed to Marxism (e.g., Proudhonism, Lassalleanism, Bakuninism) all expressed the desire of the artisan class to prevent its descent into the industrial proletariat. Marx and Engels understood that artisan Utopian socialism could not be defeated simply through propaganda and agitation but required the actual development of capitalist society. It was recognized in the Second International that Marxism superseded such primitivist tendencies as Lassalleanism in Germany and Proudhonism in France primarily through the transformation of the urban artisan classes into a modern proletariat. The process by which Marxism overcame Lassalleanism, Proudhonism, Bakuninism, etc. became for Kautsky a paradigm of the strug¬gle against opportunism in general.

The view of reformism as a historic lag or regression accounts for Kautsky's limited aims in the "revisionist" con¬troversy with Bernstein. He drew a sharp line between naive, pre-Marxian reformists, like Jaures, and the conscious revisers of Marxism. In a letter of 23 May 1902 to Victor Adler, Kautsky defended the Belgian Socialist leadership from the charge of revisionism on the grounds that they were never Marxists to begin with, nor did they pretend to be:

"I maintain an entirely unprejudiced attitude towards them; the talk about their revisionism leaves me cold. They have nothing to revise, for they have no theory. The eclectic vulgar socialism to which the revisionists would like to reduce Marxism is something beyond which they [the Belgian Socialists] have not even begun to advance. Proudhon, Schaffle, Marx—it is all one to them, it was always like that, they have not retrogressed in theory, and I have nothing to reproach them with." —quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism (1961)

Kautsky's aim in the "revisionist" controversy was not to purge the Second International of reformist tendencies or even practices, but to preserve the doctrinal integrity of the Marxist camp. If this were achieved, believed Kautsky, the development of the class struggle would eventually ensure the triumph of revolutionary social democracy.

Kautsky located the weakness of revolutionary social democracy in the backwardness of the proletariat, which reflected either a continued identification with the petty bourgeoisie or a lack of confidence in the strength of the workers movement:

"To a large degree hatched out of the small capitalist and small farmer class, many proletarians long carry the shells of these classes about with them. They do not feel themselves proletar¬ians, but as would-be property owners.... Others, again, have gone further, and have come to recognize the necessity of fighting the capitalists that stand in antagonism to them, but do not feel themselves secure enough and strong enough to For Kautsky, the growth of the proletariat, of the trade unions, etc. strengthened the objectively revolutionary forces in society. What was required of Social Democracy was a patient, pedagogical attitude toward backward workers, although Kautsky also recognized that class consciousness could leap ahead during a revolutionary crisis.

With the partial exception of Luxemburg, no pre-war social democrat located the main source of reformism in the conservatism of the socially privileged bureaucracy created by the growth and strength of the labor movement, of the social-democratic parties and their trade-union affiliates.

Lenin's Sociological Analysis of Menshevism

Lenin, following Kautsky's methodology, regarded Menshevism as an extension of 19th-century petty-bourgeois radicalism into the workers movement. Because he considered the Mensheviks an "intellectualist" tendency, in a sense standing outside of the workers movement, he could split from them without positing the.existence of two competing social-democratic parties, the one revolutionary, the other reformist. Lenin was convinced that the growth of social democratic organization among the Russian proletariat would ensure the triumph of Bolshevism.

Lenin regarded the 1903 Martovite grouping as an expression and the attitudes and values of the old, freewheeling, individualistic revolutionary intelligentsia, as a rebellion of the circle spirit against against the construction of a real workers party:

Nonetheless, we regard the Party's sickness as a matter of growing pains.
We consider that the underlying cause of the crisis the transition from the circle form to party forms of the life of the Social Deemocracy; the essence of its internal struggle is a conflict between the circle spirit and the party spirit. And, consequently, only by shaking off this sickness can our Party become a real party....

Lastly, the opposition cadres have in general been drawn chiefly form those elements of our Party which consist primarily of intellectulas. The intelligentsia is always more individualistic than the proletariat, owing to its very conditions of life and work which do not directly involve a large-scale combination of efforts, which do not directly educate it through organised collective labor. The intellectual elements therefore find it harder to adapt themselves to the discipline of Party life, and those of them who ar enot equal to it naturally raise the standard
organisational limitations."

-"To The Party" (August 1904)

Lenin likewise analyzed Menshevik Liquidationism during the 1908-12 period (opposition to the underground party) in terms of intellectuals versus the proletariat:

"The first to flee from the underground were the bourgeois intellectuals who succumbed to the counter-revolutionary mood, those'fellow-travellers' of the Social-Democratic working-class movement who, like those in Europe, had been attracted by the liberating role played by the proletariat...in the bourgeois revolution. It is a well-known fact that a mass of Marxists left the underground after 1905 and found places for themselves in all sorts of legal cozy corners for intellectuals."

—"How Vera Zasulich Demolishes Liquidationism" (September 1913)

Lenin's sociological analysis of Menshevism was valid as far as it went. The Martovite grouping in 1903 did represent in part the habits of the old revolutionary intelligentsia; one thinks of Vera Zasulich in this regard. Menshevik Liquida¬tionism did represent in part the fleeing of intellectuals from the RSDRP toward bourgeois respectability during a period of reaction. But Menshevism was not primarily a tendency external to the labor movement. The Russian Mensheviks antici¬pated the labor reformism of the Second International as a whole, including particularly its mass parties. It was only dur¬ing World War I, in the studies which led to Imperialism, that Lenin located the source of social-democratic opportunism within the workers movement—in a labor bureaucracy resting on the upper stratum of the working class.

Iskraism

Organized Russian Marxism originated in 1883 when Plekhanov broke from the dominant populist current to form the tiny exile Emancipation of Labor group. During the late 1880s-early '90s, Marxism in Russia consisted of localized propaganda circles designed to educate a thin layer of advanced workers. In the mid-1890s, the Marxist propaganda circles turned toward mass agitation intersecting a major strike wave. This turn was in part inspired by the Jewish Bund. Ethnic solidarity enabled the Jewish Marxist intelli¬gentsia to reach and organize Jewish workers in advance of Russian Social Democracy as a whole.

In part because of the imprisonment of the more experienced Marxist leaders (e.g., Lenin, Martov), the turn towatd mass agitation rapidly degenerated into reformism. This tendency, dubbed Economism by a hostile Plekhanov, limited its agitation to elementary trade-union demands, while passively supporting the bourgeois liberal efforts to reform tsarist absolutism. In terms of international Social Democracy, the Economists were hostile to orthodox Marxism and consequently were loosely associated with Bernsteinism in Germany and possibilisme in France. In the later 1890s, Economism was the dominant tendency among Russian social democrats.

In 1900, the second generation of Russian Marxists (Lenin, Martov) coalesced with the founding fathers (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich) to return Russian Social Democracy to its revolutionary traditions as embodied in the original Emancipation of Labor program. The revolutionary Marxist tendency was organized around the paper Iskra. Lenin was the organizer of the Iskra group. He ran the agents in Russia whose task was to win over the local social-democratic committees or if necessary split them. Iskra provided, for the first time, an organizing center for a Russian social-democratic party.

In polemicizing against Lenin's successful splitting tactics, the Economists pointed out that the German center did not seek to exclude the Bernsteinians. Lenin did not and in a sense could not argue for the exclusion of opportunists from the social-democratic party as a principle. Rather he justified his splitting tactics by a series of arguments based on the particularities of the Russian party situation. Right up to World War I, Lenin would appeal to one or another aspect of Russian particularism to justify constructing a programmatically homogeneous, revolutionary vanguard.

What were Lenin's arguments for building the RSDRP without and against the Economists? The German party had strong revolutionary traditions and an authoritative leadership. The Russian party was embryonic and could easily fall prey to opportunism. The German leadership, Bebel/Kautsky, were revolutionary while the Bernsteinians were a small minority; in contrast, the Economists were temporarily the dominant trend in Russian Social Democracy. The German "revisionists" accepted party discipline, the Russian Economists were incapable of accepting party discipline. And in any case, the RSDRP did not exist as a centralized organization. These arguments are presented in What Is To Be Done? (1902):

"The important thing to note is that the opportunist attitude towards revolutionary Social-Democrats in Russia is the very opposite of that in Germany. In Germany...revolutionary Social-Democrats are in favor of preserving what is: they stand in favor of the old program and tactics which are universally known.... The 'critics' desire to introduce changes, and as these critics represent an insignificant minority, and as they are very shy and halting in their revisionist efforts, one can under¬stand the motives of the majority in confining themselves to the dry rejection of 'innovation.' In Russia, however, it is the critics and Economists who are in favor of what is; the 'critics' wish us to continue to regard them as Marxists, and to guarantee them the 'freedom of criticism' which they enjoyed to the full (for, as a matter of fact, they never recognized any kind of Party ties, and, moreover, we never had a generally recognized Party organ which could 'restrict' freedom of criti¬cism even by giving advice)." [emphasis in original]

As is generally recognized, Lenin's 1902 What Is To Be Done? was the authoritative statement of Iskraism. Despite his supposed sympathy toward Lenin, Cliff is much too much a workerist and Menshevik to accept What Is To Be Done? In fact, a central purpose of his biography is to argue that the 1902 polemic is an exaggerated, one-sided statement which in substance Lenin subsequently repudiated.

First Cliff vulgarizes Lenin's position and then polemi-cizes against his own straw-man creation:

"In general the dichotomy between economic and political struggle is foreign to Marx. An economic demand, if it is sectional, is defined as 'economic' in Marx's terms. But if the same demand is made of the state it is 'political'.... In many cases economic (sectional) struggles do not give rise to political (class-wide) struggles, but there is no Chinese wall between the two, and many economic struggles do spill over into political ones." [emphasis in original]

Lenin did not attack the Economists for being indifferent to governmental policy. The Russian Economists agitated for state-initiated economic reforms and supported democratic rights, particularly the right to organize. In this purpose they passively supported the liberals. In What Is To Be Done? Lenin attacks the Economists' political program as encapsulated in the slogan "giving the economic struggle itself a political character":

"Giving 'the economic struggle itself a political character' means, therefore, striving to secure satisfaction for these trade demands, the improvement of conditions of labor in each separate trade by means of 'legislative and administrative measures'.... This is exactly what the trade unions do and have always done....

"Thus, the pompous phrase 'giving the economic struggle itself a political character' which sounds so 'terrifically' profound and revolutionary, serves as a screen to conceal what is in fact the traditional striving to degrade Social-Democratic politics to the level of trade union politics!" [emphasis in original]

For Lenin political class consciousness, or socialist consciousness, was the recognition by the proletariat of the need to become the ruling class and reconstruct society on socialist foundations. Anything less was trade-union consciousness.

Like all other current workerists and social democrats, Cliff must attack Lenin's famous statement that socialist consciousness is brought to the workers from without by revolutionary intellectuals, that political class consciousness does not arise simply through the proletariat's struggles to improve its conditions. Here are Cliff's fatuous remarks on this question:

"There is no doubt that this formulation overemphasized the difference between spontaneity and consciousness. For in fact the complete separation of spontaneity from consciousness is mechanical and non-dialectical. Lenin, as we shall see later, admitted this. Pure spontaneity does not exist in life.... "The logic of the mechanical juxtaposition of spontaneity and consciousness was the complete separation of the patty from the actual elements of working-class leadership that had already risen in the struggle. It assumed that the party had answers to all the questions that spontaneous struggle might bring forth. The blindness of the embattled many is the obverse of the omniscience of the few." [emphasis in original]

It is important to quote Lenin's statement in full to under¬stand what it means and does not mean:

"We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic con¬sciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity of combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the govern¬ment to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. Accord¬ing to their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bour¬geois intelligentsia. Similarly in Russia, the theoretical doc¬trine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the labor movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia." [emphasis in original]

—What Is To Be Done?

This is not a programmatic statement, but rather a historical analysis with implications for the organizational question. The socialist movement predated the development of mass economic organizations of the industrial proletariat. The socialist movement arose out of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary currents (the Babouvist tradition represented by Blanquism in France and the League of the Just in Germany). Except for Britain, the earliest trade unions arose through the transformation of the old mercantilist artisan guild system.

For example, in the German revolution of 1848 Stephan Bora's mass trade-union movement, the Workers Brotherhood, was largely based on the traditional guild structure. The leaders of the embryonic trade unions were generally the traditional authority figures of the plebeian community. Methodist ministers, like the Tory radical J.R. Stephens, played a significant leadership role in the early 19th-century British workers movement. Catholic priests played a similar role in the first French trade unions, for example among the rebellious silk workers of Lyons. In most countries the emergence of a socialist labor movement resulted from the political victory of the revolutionary intelligentsia over the traditionalist leaders of the early workers organizations. When Lenin wrote What Is To Be Done? the mass economic organizations of the Russian working class were the police-led unions (Zubatovite) whose most prominent leader was the priest Gapon.

Lenin was a dialectician who understood that the consciousness and leadership of the working class underwent qualitative changes historically. With the important exception of the U.S., trade-union economism (associated with bourgeois liberal illusions and religious obscurantism) is no longer the dominant ideology of the world's proletariat. In the advanced capitalist countries, it is socialist reformism, carried through the social-democratic and Stalinist labor bureaucracies, which binds the working class to the bourgeois order. In backward countries, populist nationalism with a socialist coloration (e.g., Peronism, Nasserism) is the characteristic form of bourgeois ideological dominance over the working masses.

In the Russia of 1902, a small, homogeneous Marxist vanguard, composed of declassed intellectuals with a thin layer of advanced workers, was able to break the mass of the workers from police trade unionism and the Orthodox church. Today it requires an international Trotskyist vanguard, necessarily composed in its first stages of declassed intellectuals with relatively few advanced workers, to break the world's working classes from the domination of social-democratic and Stalinist reformism and populist nationalism. In exactly the opposite sense of Cliff, What Is To Be Done? cannot be regarded as the definitive Leninist statement on the party question. Despite the angularity of its formulations, the 1902 polemical work does not go beyond the bounds of orthodox, pre-1914 Social Democracy. If this work had represented a radical break with Social Democracy, Plekhanov, Martov et al. would never have endorsed it. It was only after the split in 1903 that Martov, Axelrod and other Menshevik leaders discovered in What Is To Be Done? alleged substitutionalist and Blanquist conceptions. It was Lenin's intransigent attitude in practice toward opportunism, circle-spirit cliquism and all obstacles to building a revolu¬tionary RSDRP that caused the Menshevik split, not particularly the ideas expressed in What Is To Be Done? If Cliff finds What Is To Be Done? too Leninist for his liking, it is because his hostility to Bolshevism is so strong that he must reject Lenin even when the latter was still a revolutionary social democrat. In reality the 1902 work is an anticipation, not a full-blown exposition, of post-1917 communism.

It is common in left-wing circles to regard What Is To Be Done? as the definitive Leninist statement on the party question. For example, the American Shachtmanite Bruce Landau, in a critical review of Cliff's biography (Revolutionary Marxist Papers No. 8), concentrates on the Iskra period. He justifies this narrow focus by quoting Trotsky on Lenin's development:

"It was precisely during this short time that Lenin became the Lenin he was to remain. This does not mean that he did not develop further. On the contrary. He grew in stature...until October and after; but this was really organic growth." —On Lenin: Notes for a Biography (1924)

Trotsky is here referring to the development of Lenin's political personality, not to his ideas and their programmatic expression. The decisive period for the development of Leninist communist doctrine was 1914-17, not 1900-03.

Part Two Will Appear On March 20, 2011.

From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- "Why We Are Marxists"-From The IMT Leader Alan Woods

Why we are Marxists
Written by Alan Woods
Monday, 13 December 2010


Two decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, proclaiming the definitive triumph of market economics and bourgeois democracy. This idea seemed to be confirmed by almost 20 years of soaring markets and virtually uninterrupted economic growth. Politicians, central bankers and Wall Street managers were convinced that they had finally tamed the economic cycle of booms and slumps.

Now, two decades after the fall of the USSR, not one stone upon another remains of the illusions of the bourgeoisie. The world is experiencing the deepest crisis since the 1930s. Faced with a catastrophic situation on a world scale, the bourgeois of the USA, Europe and Japan are in a state of panic. In the 1930s, Trotsky said that the bourgeoisie was “tobogganing to disaster with its eyes closed.” These words are precisely applicable to the present situation. They could have been written yesterday.

For the last twenty years the bourgeois economists boasted that there would be no more boom and slump, that the cycle had been abolished. It is an actual fact that for decades, the bourgeois economists never predicted a single boom and never predicted a single slump. They had worked out a wonderful new theory called the “efficient market hypothesis.” Actually, there is nothing new about it at all. It amounts to the old idea that: “Left to itself the market will solve everything. It will automatically balance itself out. As long as the government doesn’t interfere, sooner or later everything will be fine.” To which, John Maynard Keynes issued the very celebrated reply, “Sooner or later we’re all dead.”

In the first decade of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has exhausted its progressive potential. Instead of developing industry, science and technology, it is steadily undermining them. The productive forces stagnate, factories are closed as if they were matchboxes, and millions are thrown out of work. All these are symptoms that show that the development of the productive forces on a world scale has gone beyond the narrow limits of private property and the nation state.

That is the most fundamental reason for the present crisis, which has exposed the bankruptcy of capitalism in the most literal sense of the word. The plight of Ireland and Greece provides graphic confirmation of the diseased state of European capitalism. Tomorrow the contagion will spread to Portugal and Spain. But Britain and Italy are not far behind. And France, Germany and Austria will follow them inexorably on the downward path.

The bourgeois economists and politicians, and above all, all the reformists, are desperately seeking some sort of revival to get out of this crisis. They look to the recovery of the business cycle as salvation. The leaders of the working class, the trade union leaders and the Social Democratic leaders believe that this crisis is something temporary. They imagine it can be solved by making some adjustments to the existing system, that all that is needed is more control and regulation, and that we can return to the previous conditions. But this crisis is not a normal crisis, it is not temporary. It marks a fundamental turning point in the process, the point at which capitalism has reached a historical dead end. The best that can be expected is a weak recovery, accompanied by high unemployment and a long period of austerity, cuts and falling living standards.

The crisis of bourgeois ideology
Marxism is in the first place a philosophy and a world outlook. In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels we do not find a closed philosophical system, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the methodological armoury of science.

Nowhere is the crisis of bourgeois ideology clearer than in the realm of philosophy. In its early stages, when the bourgeoisie stood for progress, it was capable of producing great thinkers: Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel. But in the epoch of its senile decay, the bourgeoisie is incapable of producing great ideas. In fact, it is not capable of producing any ideas at all.

Since the modern bourgeoisie is incapable of bold generalisations it denies the very concept of ideology. That is why the post-modernists talk of the “end of ideology”. They deny the concept of progress simply because under capitalism no further progress is possible. Engels once wrote: “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.” Modern bourgeois philosophy prefers the former to the latter. In its obsession to combat Marxism, it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn and sterile past.

Dialectical materialism is a dynamic view of understanding the workings of nature, society and thought. Far from being an outmoded idea of the 19th century, it is a strikingly modern view of nature and society. Dialectics does away with the fixed, rigid, lifeless way of looking at things that was characteristic of the old mechanical school of classical physics. It shows that under certain circumstances things can turn into their opposite.

The dialectical notion that gradual accumulation of small changes can at a critical point become transformed into a gigantic leap has received a striking confirmation in modern chaos theory and its derivatives. Chaos theory has put an end to the kind of narrow mechanical reductive determinism that dominated science for over a hundred years. Marxist dialectics is a 19th century expression of what chaos theory now expresses mathematically: the inter-relatedness of things, the organic nature of relations between entities.

The study of phase transitions constitutes one of the most important areas of contemporary physics. There are an infinite number of examples of the same phenomenon. The transformation of quantity into quality is a universal law. In his book Ubiquity Mark Buchanan shows this in phenomena as diverse as heart attacks, avalanches, forest fires, the rise and fall of animal populations, stock exchange crises, wars, and even changes in fashion and schools of art. Even more astonishing, these events can be expressed as a mathematical formula known as a power law.

These remarkable discoveries were anticipated long ago by Marx and Engels, who put the dialectical philosophy of Hegel on a rational (that is, materialist) basis. In his Logic (1813) Hegel wrote: “It has become a common jest in history to let great effects arise from small causes.” This was long before the “butterfly effect” was ever heard of. Like volcano eruptions and earthquakes, revolutions are the result of a slow accumulation of contradictions over a long period. The process eventually reaches a critical point at which a sudden leap occurs.

Historical materialism
Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings. That its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what Francis Fukuyama wished to demonstrate when he assured us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of “free enterprise” is the only possible system—just when it is beginning to sink.

Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something eternally fixed. The analogy between society and nature is, of course, only approximate. But even the most superficial examination of history shows that the gradualist interpretation is baseless. Society, like nature, knows long periods of slow and gradual change, but also here the line is interrupted by explosive developments ‑ wars and revolutions, in which the process of change is enormously accelerated. In fact, it is these events that act as the main motor force of historical development.

The root cause of revolutionary changes is the fact that a particular socio-economic system has reached its limits and is unable to develop the productive forces as before. Marxism analyses the hidden mainsprings that lie behind the development of human society from the earliest tribal societies up to the modern day. The materialist conception of history enables us to understand history, not as a series of unconnected and unforeseen incidents, but rather as part of a clearly understood and interrelated process. It is a series of actions and reactions which cover politics, economics and the whole spectrum of social development

The relationship between all these phenomena is a complex dialectical relationship. Very often attempts are made to discredit Marxism by resorting to a caricature of its method of historical analysis. The usual distortion is that Marx and Engels “reduced everything to economics.” This patent absurdity was answered many times by Marx and Engels, as in the following extract to Engels’ letter to Bloch:

“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining element in history is the production and reproduction of life. More than this neither Marx nor myself have asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract and senseless phrase.”

The Communist Manifesto
The most modern book that one can read today is the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. True, this or that detail will have to be changed, but in all the fundamentals, the ideas of the Communist Manifesto are as relevant and true today as when they were first written. By contrast, the immense majority of the books written one and a half centuries ago are today merely of historical interest.

What is most striking about the Manifesto is the way in which it anticipates the most fundamental phenomena which occupy our attention on a world scale at the present time. Let us consider one example. At the time when Marx and Engels were writing, the world of the big multinational companies was still the music of a very distant future. Despite this, they explained how “free enterprise” and competition would inevitably lead to the concentration of capital and the monopolisation of the productive forces.

It is frankly comical to read the statements made by the defenders of the “market” concerning Marx’s alleged mistake on this question, when in reality it was precisely one of his most brilliant and accurate predictions. Today it is an absolutely indisputable fact that the process of concentration of capital foreseen by Marx has occurred, is occurring, and indeed has reached unprecedented levels in the course of the last ten years.

For decades the bourgeois sociologists attempted to disprove these assertions and “prove” that society was becoming more equal and that, consequently, the class struggle was as antiquated as the handloom and the wooden plough. The working class had disappeared, they said, and we were all middle class. As for the concentration of capital, the future was with small businesses, and “small is beautiful”.

How ironic these claims sound today! The entire world economy is now dominated by no more than 200 giant companies, the great majority of which are based in the USA. The process of monopolisation has reached unprecedented proportions. In the first quarter of 2006 mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to $10 billion dollars a day. This feverish activity does not signify a real development of the productive forces, but the opposite. And the pace of monopolisation does not diminish but increases. On November 19-20, 2006 the value of mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to a record of $75 billion - in just 24 hours! Takeovers are a kind of corporate cannibalism that is inevitably followed by asset-stripping, factory closures and sackings – that is, by the wholesale and wanton destruction of means of production and the sacrifice of thousands of jobs on the altar of Profit.

At the same time there is a constant increase in inequality. In all countries the share of profits in the national income is at a record high level, while the share of wages is at a record low. The real secret of the current boom is that the capitalists are extracting record amounts of surplus value from the working class. In the USA the workers are producing on average a third more than ten years ago, yet real wages stagnate or fall in real terms. Profits have been booming and the wealthy are becoming ever wealthier at the expense of the working class.

Let us take another, even more striking example: globalisation. The crushing domination of the world market is the most important manifestation of our epoch, and this is supposed to be a recent discovery. In fact, globalisation was predicted and explained by Marx and Engels over 150 years ago. Yet when the Manifesto was written, there was practically no empirical data to support such a hypothesis. The only really developed capitalist economy was England. The infant industries of France and Germany (which did not even exist as a united entity) still sheltered behind high tariff walls ‑ a fact which is conveniently forgotten today, as Western governments and economists deliver stern lectures to the rest of the world on the need to open up their economies.

On a world scale the results of globalised “market economics” are horrifying. In 2000 the richest 200 people had as much wealth as the 2 billion poorest. According to the figures of the UN, 1.2 billion people are living on less than two dollars a day. Of these eight million men, women and children die every year because they do not have enough money to survive. Everybody agrees that the murder of six million people in the Nazi Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity, but here we have a silent Holocaust that kills eight million innocent people every year and nobody has anything to say on the subject.

Alongside the most appalling misery and human suffering there is an orgy of obscene money-making and ostentatious wealth. Worldwide there are at present 945 billionaires with a total wealth of $3.5 trillion. Many are citizens of the USA. Bill Gates has a personal fortune estimated at around $56 billion. Warren Buffet is not far behind with $52 billion. Now they boast that this unseemly wealth is spreading to “poorer nations”. Among the super-rich there are 13 Chinese, 14 Indians – and 19 Russians. And this is supposed to be a reason to celebrate!

Class struggle
Historical materialism teaches us that conditions determine consciousness. The problem is that consciousness is lagging behind the objective situation, the mass organisations are lagging behind that, and above all, the leadership of the working class is lagging even further behind. This is the main contradiction of the present period. It must be resolved, and it will be resolved.

Idealists have always presented consciousness as the motor force of all human progress. But even the most superficial study of history shows that human consciousness always tends to lag behind events. Far from being revolutionary, it is innately and profoundly conservative. Most people do not like the idea of change and still less of a violent upheaval that transforms existing conditions. They tend to cling to the familiar ideas, the well-known institutions, the traditional morality, religion and values of the existing social order. But dialectically, things change into their opposite. Sooner or later, consciousness will be brought into line with reality in an explosive manner. That is precisely what a revolution is.

Marxism explains that in the final analysis, the key to all social development is the development of the productive forces. As long as society is going forward, that is to say, as long as it is capable of developing industry, agriculture, science and technology, it is seen to be viable by the great majority of people. Under such conditions, men and women do not generally question the existing society, its morality and laws. On the contrary, they are seen as something natural and inevitable: as natural and inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.

Great events are necessary to permit the masses to throw off the heavy burden of tradition, habit and routine and to embrace new ideas. Such is the position taken by the materialist conception of history, which was brilliantly expressed by Karl Marx in the celebrated phrase “social being determines consciousness.” It takes great events to expose the unsoundness of the old order and convince the masses of the need for its complete overthrow. This process is not automatic and takes time.

In the last period it appeared that the class struggle in Europe was a thing of the past. But now all the accumulated contradictions are coming to the surface, preparing the way for an explosion of the class struggle everywhere. Even in countries like Austria, where for decades the ruling class bought social peace by reforms, stormy events are being prepared. Sharp and sudden changes are implicit in the situation.

When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, they were two young men, 29 and 27 years old respectively. They were writing in a period of black reaction. The working class was apparently immobile. The Manifesto itself was written in Brussels, where its authors had been forced to flee as political refugees. And yet at the very moment when the Communist Manifesto first saw the light of day in February 1848, revolution had already erupted onto the streets of Paris, and over the following months had spread like wildfire through virtually the whole of Europe.

We are entering into a most convulsive period which will last for some years, similar to the period in Spain from 1930 to 1937. There will be defeats and setbacks, but under these conditions the masses will learn very fast. Of course, we must not exaggerate: we are still in the early beginnings of a process of radicalisation. But it is very clear here that we are witnessing the beginning of a change of consciousness of the masses. A growing number of people are questioning capitalism. They are open to the ideas of Marxism in a way that was not the case before. In the coming period ideas that were confined to small groups of revolutionaries will be eagerly followed by millions.

We can therefore answer Mr. Fukuyama as follows: history has not ended. In fact, it has hardly begun. When future generations look back at our present “civilisation”, they will have approximately the same attitude that we adopt towards cannibalism. The prior condition for attaining a higher level of human development is the ending of capitalist anarchy and the establishment of a rational and democratic plan of production in which men and women can take their lives and destinies into their own hands.

“This is an impossible Utopia!” we will be told by self-styled “realists”. But what is utterly unrealistic is to imagine that the problems facing humanity can be solved on the basis of the present system that has brought the world to its present sorry state. To say that humanity is incapable of finding a better alternative to the laws of the jungle is a monstrous libel on the human race.

By harnessing the colossal potential of science and technology, freeing them from the monstrous shackles of private ownership and the nation state, it will be possible to solve all the problems that oppress our world and threaten it with destruction. Real human history will only commence when men and women have put an end to capitalist slavery and taken the first steps towards the realm of freedom.

London, November 19, 2010

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews

Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95

This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.

Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.

Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.

But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.

Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).

If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).

The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).

A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.

For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:

The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).

A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.

Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.

Al Richardson

*On Paying Homage To Leftist (And Other) Political Opponents- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky Internet Archives online copy of his political obituary for German Social- Democratic Party and pre- World War I Second International leader, and a former co-thinker, the "pope" of Marxism in that era, Karl Kautsky. This is a good example of a model for the way to deal with the contributions of political opponents.

Markin comment:

First question: What do the murdered heroic Kansas abortion provider, Doctor George Tiller, the 17th century Puritan revolutionary poet and propagandist, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, and the early 20th century labor and civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, defender of “Big” Big Haywood and John Scopes, among others, have in common? Similar expertise in similar fields? No. Common political vision? Hell, no. Could it be that they, each in their own way, contributed to the store of our human progress? Well, yes. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.

Second question: What do the pre-World War II American communist renegade from Marxism, Max Shachtman, the old English socialist and novelist turned British imperial informer, George Orwell, and the German “pope” of pre- World War I Marxism in the Second International , Karl Kautsky have in common? I will not prolong the agony on this one because I have to make my point before the next millennium so it is that they have made contributions to our common socialist movement before they went over to the other, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist side (one way or the other). And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.

Third question: What do the old-fashioned 19th century French revolutionary and Paris Commune member, Louis–August Blanqui, the iconic American black liberation fighter, Malcolm X, and the old Industrial Workers of World (IWW-Wobblies) organizer extraordinaire, Vincent St. John, have in common? Again, I will cut to the chase; they were all, one way or the other, political opponents of Marxism. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.

Okay, by my count I see zero legendary Bolshevik names listed above. Names like Leon Trotsky, V.I. Lenin, N. Krupskaya, J. Sverdlov, Jim Cannon, John Reed, “Big” Bill Haywood, and so on. Oh, they have been honored in this space, profusely. Of course. (Although I do not believe that there was a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them either, that was pure bourgeosi propaganda, always). And that is exactly my point here.

Let me back track on this one, a little. Recently I did a series of reviews of the work of American detective fiction writer, Dashiell Hammett. (see blogs, dated August 15-18, 2010). Beyond a review of his outstanding literary work I noted that Hammett was a prominent supporter of the Stalinized American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. In that dead night of the "red scare", which many from that time and since would prefer to obliterate from American "democratic" memory, especially the memory of their own silence and complicity, just said no to the committees that wanted him to “name names.” He didn’t and paid the price for his courageous act. Others, including long time Stalinists and fellow–travelers squawked to high heaven before those committees, sometimes without the least bit of pressure. A simple acknowledgement of Hammett’s deed, noting along the way, that Hammett and our Trotskyist forbears were still political opponents at the end of the day seemed less than controversial.

Not so, at least from an e-mail that I received, claiming (for me) the mantle of Stalinophile for such a “tribute”. First, I assume that the person, for good or ill, had not read my "tributes” to arch-Stalinist American Communist Party supporters, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who I have termed “heroic” for their deeds in behalf of the Soviet Union, when those deeds counted. Or that if the person had deeds, like Hammett's, involving less than going to meet death fearlessly by Stalinists are not worthy of kudos. In any case, this person is all wrong.

Go back to the first question above where basically non-political types were noted for their contributions to human progress. That is the “missing link” to this person’s mistaken position. I could have gone on and on about various persons that have been honored in this American Left History blog. But that seemed to me to be unnecessarily hammering home the point. Here is the real point. We have had few enough occasions when our fellows get it right to narrow the parameters of what contributes to human progress. If we get too picky we are left with honoring Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other Bolsheviks. Oh yes, and, of course, those few of us who claim to be contemporary Bolsheviks- including, I presume, the heroic, non-Stalinophile, e-mail sender. Enough said.

Note: I did not mention this e-mail sender’s political affiliation although it was provided. Let us just put it this way. The organization that the person belongs to (and I am not sure the person knows all the organization’s history, it didn’t seem so) has a history of “bailing water” (my term)for the “progressive" wing of the Democratic party (whatever that is?) and wondered out loud why I did not honor the likes of California’s’ current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney,and so on. Jesus, give me a break. But, wait a minute, if the shades of old Dashiell Hammett were around today or those of some of his fellow reprobate Stalinists, those are the same kindreds that they would be kowtowing to, as well. Hey, I just tipped my hat to old Hammett I did not try to "steal" his "progressive/ popular front" political strategy. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Double, Jesus give me a break.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Trotskyism in India

Click on the headline to link to the “Revolutionary History” Journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "International Socialist Organization" Website

Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.

ISR Issue 72, July–August 2010


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Economic crisis and class struggle
Are recessions better for the left or right, asks Phil Gasper?

The most fundamental argument in favor of socialism is that capitalism is an irrational system that over the long term cannot meet the basic needs of the majority of the population because of its tendency to go into economic crisis. But what if economic crisis leads not to the growth of the left but to the rise of the far right? This is the argument of the radical economist Doug Henwood in a short article published in May on the MRzine Web site.

Henwood begins by criticizing “radicals [who] have fantasized that a serious recession—or depression—would lead to mass radicalization,” and he goes on to argue that there is empirical support for the opposite view—that economic crisis actually benefits the far right not the radical left. The evidence he cites is recent research by the economists Markus Brükner and Hans Peter Grüner. Brükner and Grüner studied sixteen European countries and discovered that between 1970 and 2002, every 1 percent decline in economic growth in these countries was associated with an increase in the vote share of far right and nationalist parties of between 1 and 2 percent.

By contrast, Brükner and Grüner found no corresponding increase in electoral support for communist parties during the same periods of economic decline. Henwood concludes that “recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right,” and that Brükner and Grüner’s research “helps explain the rise of the Tea Partiers and other strange life forms on the right.”

The first thing to note is that this is an incredibly narrow study on which to base the sweeping conclusion that “recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right.” In fact Henwood himself immediately notes one “major exception,” namely the United States during the Great Depression, when economic crisis led to a series of mass strikes, the birth of industrial unions, and the growth of the Communist Party to about 80,000 members. However, he adds that this was only because the scale of the crisis was so severe, with unemployment rates reaching 25 percent and, additionally, the “Great Depression didn’t do much for the left in Europe.”

In fact that last claim is not accurate. While the far right obviously grew as a result of the Depression, eventually seizing power in Germany, Spain, and Austria, the left also grew in many European countries, and there was nothing inevitable about its ultimate defeat. In Germany, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties had millions of supporters, and in the election of November 1932, the last genuinely free vote before Hitler took power, their combined support was several percentage points ahead of the Nazis. The tragedy was that the two left-wing parties were fatally divided and unable to agree on a common strategy to defeat the far right in the streets as well as at the ballot box. Similarly in Spain the left grew significantly. It eventually lost the civil war as a result of major conflicts between the different left-wing parties and outside support for Franco’s fascists.

Second, economic crises are a fact of life under capitalism, and one of the main arguments in favor of a different kind of economic system. Henwood instructs the left to “stop hoping for the worst,” but our hopes either way are irrelevant to how the economy actually performs, and severe recessions will periodically take place no matter what we think about them. If it were true that in such circumstances the right will grow and the left will not, there would be grounds for thoroughgoing political pessimism. During periods of economic growth and stability, the radical transformation of society would seem unnecessary, while during periods of economic crisis it would be impossible.

Henwood is certainly right about one thing—there is no automatic relationship between economic crisis and “mass radicalization.” But it is equally wrong to think that there is an automatic connection between crisis and the growth of the right. Whether or not an economic slump results in an increase in class struggle and gains for the left depends on a whole set of complex factors, including the nature of the crisis and the constellation of political forces going into it.

Perhaps no one has written about the relationship between economic booms, slumps, and political consciousness with more insight than the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who addressed these issues several times in the 1920s and the 1930s. In a report he wrote for the Communist International in 1921, Trotsky noted that, “there is no automatic dependence of the proletarian revolutionary movement upon a crisis. There is only a dialectical interaction. It is essential to understand this.” The example that Trotksy used to illustrate this point is worth quoting at length:

Let us look at the relations in Russia. The 1905 revolution was defeated. The workers bore great sacrifices. In 1906 and 1907 the last revolutionary flare-ups occurred and by the autumn of 1907 a great world crisis broke out. The signal for it was given by Wall Street’s Black Friday. Throughout 1907 and 1908 and 1909 the most terrible crisis reigned in Russia too. It killed the movement completely, because the workers had suffered so greatly during the struggle that this depression could act only to dishearten them. There were many disputes among us over what would lead to the revolution: a crisis or a favorable conjuncture?
At that time many of us defended the viewpoint that the Russian revolutionary movement could be regenerated only by a favorable economic conjuncture. And that is what took place. In 1910, 1911 and 1912, there was an improvement in our economic situation and a favorable conjuncture which acted to reassemble the demoralized and devitalized workers who had lost their courage. They realized again how important they were in production; and they passed over to an offensive, first in the economic field and later in the political field as well. On the eve of the war [in 1914] the working class had become so consolidated, thanks to this period of prosperity, that it was able to pass to a direct assault.

This period of class militancy was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War, when a wave of patriotism swept over the country, engulfing all but the most class-conscious workers. But as the war dragged on and Russia suffered massive casualties, patriotism gave way to cynicism and then anger, which eventually culminated in the successful revolutions of 1917.
One conclusion that Trotsky drew from examples like these was that class struggle was not simply the result of economic slump or of economic boom, but was often the result of the rapid shift from slump to boom and back again. Slumps can show the necessity for change, but they can also weaken the power of the working class as some lose their jobs and others become desperate to hang on to theirs. A return to economic growth can give workers renewed confidence to make significant demands, but if the new expansion is long-lived, the possibility for radical change will be lost until a new crisis begins. Here is Trotsky again:

Many of you will recall that Marx and Engels wrote in 1851—when the boom was at its peak—that it was necessary at that time to recognize that the Revolution of 1848 had terminated, or, at any rate, had been interrupted until the next crisis. Engels wrote that while the crisis of 1847 was the mother of revolution, the boom of 1849–51 was the mother of triumphant counter-revolution. It would, however, be very one-sided and utterly false to interpret these judgments in the sense that a crisis invariably engenders revolutionary action while a boom, on the contrary, pacifies the working class…
The irresolute and half-way Revolution of 1848 did, however, sweep away the remnants of the regime of guilds and serfdom and thereby extended the framework of capitalist development. Under these conditions and these conditions alone, the boom of 1851 marked the beginning of an entire epoch of capitalist prosperity which lasted till 1873. In citing Engels it is very dangerous to overlook these basic facts…. At issue here is not whether an improvement in the conjuncture is possible, but whether the fluctuations of the conjuncture are proceeding along an ascending or descending curve. This is the most important aspect of the whole question.

So it was the long period of capitalist expansion in the 1850s and 1860s that stabilized the system and led to a relatively low level of class struggle. By contrast, the period after the First World War, according to Trotsky, was one of long-term instability and decline, during which “upswings can only be of a superficial…character, while crises become more and more prolonged and deeper going.”
The effect of booms and slumps will thus depend in part on the underlying state of the economy—whether it is in a period of sustained expansion in which recessions are relatively minor interruptions, or whether it is in a period of decline in which the booms are short-lived and sustained growth cannot be achieved.

Today we find ourselves in a period of long-term economic instability, in which a return to sustained growth seems unlikely any time in the near future. During the past decade the U.S. economy has experienced two recessions—the most recent, the worst since the Great Depression—and low growth. Even when the economy was growing in the middle of the decade real wages continued to decline. Now the economy is growing again, but unemployment remains high (the real figure is around 15 percent) and there is a strong chance that there will soon be another recession.

Will the current period prove more favorable to the left or to the right? Over the past eighteen months we have certainly seen the growth of the right, including vicious scapegoating of immigrants and the emergence of the Tea Party, with its attacks on “big government” and the supposed socialism of the Obama administration, and its strong undercurrent of racism. Some commentators, including Noam Chomsky, are convinced that there is a real threat of fascism, with parallels to the decline of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis.

There is certainly no reason to be complacent about these developments, but the comparison with Germany in the 1930s makes little sense. Far from being a mass movement, the journalists Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street describe the Tea Party as “a top-down interest group led by national and local political officials and financed by corporate America” and “fundamentally dependent upon the Republican Party.”

While the Tea Party has been able to mobilize a few thousand people and demonstrations around the country, these have been dwarfed by recent progressive mobilizations, including hundreds of thousands demonstrating for LGBT and immigrant rights. But progressive demonstrations generally receive very little media attention, while the cable channels—particularly, of course, Fox News—have given Tea Party events a level of exposure totally disproportionate to the numbers involved.

DiMaggio and Street argue that, despite some impressive recent mobilizations, much of the left has been “significantly pacified and demobilized by Obama and the corporate Democrats, has surely failed to capitalize on the recent economic downturn, and has generally failed to establish a progressive movement in the short term.” But they also point out that “the Tea Party represents a concession from Republican Party elites that they (along with their Democratic counterparts) no longer enjoy much legitimacy among the American people. Their only way of appealing to voters is to appear as if they are not political leaders, but ‘average people’ taking part in a populist uprising against a corrupt political system.”

Opinion polls show that there has been a significant shift to the left in terms of political attitudes over the past few years. In May, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of people under the age of thirty in the United States view socialism favorably, exactly the same percentage as those with a favorable view of capitalism. That figure alone shows that there is a remarkable opportunity for the left to grow in the current period. We have to honestly acknowledge that organizations to the left of the Democratic Party are tiny and that the labor movement in this country is at a low ebb. But if we are serious about changing the world, now is the time to get involved and rebuild them. The left can grow in a period of economic crisis.

Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.

*From Cyberspace-"The Max Shachtman Internet Archives"-Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s "Problems of the Chinese Revolution"(1931)

Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.

Markin comment:

The article below is prima facie evidence that when Max Shachtman was a revolutionary in his younger days he could "speak" Marxism with the best of them. Right, Leon Trotsky and Jim Cannon?

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Max Shachtman (1931)
Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s
Problems of the Chinese Revolution

There is hardly an event of greater world historical significance since the proletarian revolution in Russia than the awakening of the cruelly exploited and oppressed Orient, which found its most dramatic and most tragic expression in the great Chinese revolutionary movement of 1925-1927. For the first time in history, the capitalist countries of Europe, long ago matured for the socialist overthrow, gave way in revolutionary precedence to an Eastern land which bid fair to condense the experiences of capitalist evolution, under the titanic blows of the social revolution, into a brief span of time and, unlike the Occidental countries, enter boldly upon the path of socialist development. A more audacious enterprise, history could not imagine. Even the Russian working class was compelled to pass through a long period of capitalist development before it was peremptorily confronted with the opportunity and the need of breaking down the last barrier to the emancipation and free development of humanity. The Chinese proletariat, reaching a virile manhood at the crossroads of a revolutionary epoch, armed also with the strength of uncounted millions of insurgent peasants, was given the rare opportunity to choose between capitalist enslavement under its “own” bourgeoisie or socialist growth in alliance with the Soviet Union and the revolutionary working class of the West.

There is no point here in arguing the academic question as to whether China has matured economically for the establishment or construction of a socialist society. It is not a question to be settled statistically or statically in China—any more than it could have been established for Russia in 1917. This problem is solved primarily on an international scale, in the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist sectors of world economy. What has, however, been demonstrated since the day of the successful counter-revolution in China, if theoretical consideration and forecast were still inadequate, was that the basic problems of China, its. democratic tasks of national unification and independence, self- determination for its various peoples, and the agrarian revolution included, could be solved in no other way than by the victory of the workers acting independently as a class. In other words, all the problems and antagonisms arising out of the struggle against imperialist subjection, against the remnants of feudal relationships, which could have been but were not solved by the revolution of 1925-1927 or by the regime which succeeded it, will find a solution only with the success of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. It is in the opportunity offered for the attainment of this goal that lies the great importance of the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927.

But it is precisely in examining this opportunity that we encounter a monstrous historical anomaly. The revolution ended not with a victory, but with a horribly sanguinary defeat for the proletariat and the peasantry. How was this possible? In the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848, the young proletariat and the peasantry were the fighting troops for the equally youthful bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie triumphed over feudalism, and also over the proletariat. The latter still lived in the period of the rise of capitalism; it had not yet learned how to act independently as a class; it did not have at its head a conscious revolutionary leadership. Even the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 is not difficult to understand, nor could anybody have expected that this first faint dawn of the proletarian revolution could, under the circumstances of time and place, see the full daylight of life. One can even go farther ahead in history, to the very end of the world war. The German proletariat overthrew the kaiser in 1918, but it did not come to power because its social democratic leadership, corrupted by the bourgeoisie, ran to the head of the marching column of mutinous workers for the purpose of turning them off to the road of bourgeois democracy.

But in China we had a partly armed proletariat. Even the peasantry was armed to a certain extent. A Communist party was in the field and had every opportunity to develop. The prestige of the Soviet Union was incalculable—every Chinese worker knew that Bolshevism had rid Russia of the imperialists and of the bankers and exploiters, every Chinese peasant knew that the Soviets had given the Russian peasant the land. The official political counsellor to the nationalist government was the Russian Communist, Borodin, just as one of its principal military directors was the Russian Communist, Galen. On every occasion, the workers and the peasants showed their desire to emulate the Russians—the former by their struggles against their own bourgeoisie, the latter by their constant attempts to carry out the first real steps of the agrarian revolution. In the Communist party itself, there was a strong current that favored breaking away from the domination of the bourgeoisie and its Kuo Min Tang and taking the path of independent class action. Yet, with all these and other favorable conditions, the proletariat not only did not come within reach of taking power, but was made the last object crushed under the heel of the bourgeois counter-revolution which did take and hold the power.

Where does the most active cause for this truly monstrous catastrophe lie? It was not so much objective difficulties that stood in the way. It was not the classic interference of the socialist agents of capital in the labor movement. The Chinese proletariat was prohibited by the policies and instructions of the leadership of the Communist International, the organizing center of the world revolution, from fulfilling the role imposed upon it by history! There is the source that must be sought to explain the bitter tragedy of the Chinese revolution.

No greater indictment can be presented against the faction of Stalin and Bucharin than this: invested with all the formal authority of the Soviet Union, of the Communist International, holding to so great an extent the destiny of China—one might say, of the whole East—in their hands, entrusted with the awful responsibility of guiding an unprecedentedly huge revolutionary movement, all they did was to translate the theories and practises of Menshevism into the language of Chinese politics, palm them off as Bolshevism, and, in the name of Lenin, pursue a course against which Lenin had fought throughout his whole political life.

All through the revolutionary period, the official leadership of the Communist International staked its cards upon the national bourgeoisie instead of upon the worker and the peasant, upon Chiang Kai-Shek, and then upon Wang Chin Wei, but not upon the Shanghai proletarian. Worse yet, the latter was told in no uncertain terms that the national bourgeoisie was the leader of the revolution, figuring as the main partner in the ill-conceived “bloc of the four classes”. The Chinese Communist Party was driven into the bourgeois Kuo Min Tang with the Stalinist whip, and there it was compelled to swear allegiance to the petty bourgeois philosophy of Sun Yat Senism. The policy of class struggle was liquidated in the interests of the “united national front”. Strikes were prohibited or else settled by “arbitration commissions” in the best class collaborationist style, for how could the worker have a conflict of interests with the Chinese employer who was his leader in the “united national front” of the Kuo Min Tang? So as not to irritate the bourgeoisie, Stalin sent telegrams to the Chinese Communist Party, instructing it to restrain the peasants from taking the land. On pain of denunciation as “Trotskyists”, the equivalent among the Stalinist churchmen to excommunication, the Chinese Communists were prohibited from forming Soviets, first under the Chiang Kai-Shek regime and later under the Wuhan government because, you see, the latter was already the revolutionary center. Even though the caliber of the man was known—he had already attempted a reactionary coup d’État early in 1926—a veritable cult was built up for Chiang Kai-Shek by the international Communist press. What more striking condemnation of the official course is needed than the fact—characteristic of the whole policy—that on the eve of Chiang Kai-Shek’s march into Shanghai to establish the counter-revolutionary regime and to massacre the militant workers, the French Communist Party and its central organ L’HumanitÉ, sent him a solemn message of greetings, hailing the establishment of the Shanghai … Commune. Such “mistakes” are not accidental. They flowed from the whole past course. By the policy of Stalin and Bucharin, not only the Chinese Communists, but the international revolutionary movement was obliged to make the mistake of confusing a Gallifet with a Communard, the counter-revolution with the Commune.

For how many years, and how heavily has the Chinese proletarian and the Chinese peasant paid for this mistake in identity!

It would, however, be wrong to believe that this mistake was made by the whole Communist movement. No. The responsibility lies entirely upon the factions of Stalin and Bucharin, and lies doubly heavy because the Bolshevik wing of the party was wiser than they and did not trample upon the teachings of Marx and Lenin, or turn its back upon the revolutionary experiences and traditions of the past. It analyzed correctly that which was at the moment, it used Marxism not to spit at but as an instrument for probing into and preparing for the future, it warned against the consequences of the prevailing policy, and at every stage of the struggle it advanced the essentially correct course. In every important particular, it was as correct in its prospect as it has been justified a thousand times over in retrospect.

There is no possible justification, however, for the line of the officialdom. What the lessons of the past and the events of the moment might have failed to teach them, the Bolshevik-Leninists of Russia pointed out to them day in and day out. They were rewarded for this work by having abuse heaped upon them, by having their views deliberately distorted and misrepresented, by having their speeches hushed up and their writings suppressed, and, when the facts of life had accumulated into mountainous evidence of their correctness, they were finally expelled from the party, imprisoned, exiled or banished from the borders of the Soviet Union. The latter fate was reserved for the greatest living Bolshevik because he, more than anyone else, refused to regard the Gallifets of the Chinese revolution as its leaders, as its Communards.

But the bureaucratic, small-minded method of solving political and theoretical disputes solves nothing but a temporary consolidation of the power of the usurpers. Marx and his followers in the labor movement spent years, decades, in studying every phase of the ill-starred Paris Commune. In the discussion of the Commune and the defeated Russian revolution of 1905, Bolshevism became the dominant current in the movement and was finally able to lead the proletariat to power. In the same sense, it can be said today that without a thorough, all-sided study and assimilation of the lessons of the Chinese revolution, the Bolshevik regiments of tomorrow will not be assembled and trained to measure up to their tasks. For the lessons of the Chinese revolution have a living, timely application to the problems of the revolutionary movement in every country in the world. They relate to the fundamental principle questions of Marxism.

But such a study is today forbidden in the official Communist movement. This makes it all the more imperative that it be undertaken, for a real beginning has hardly been made. It is with this in mind that the following contributions by comrade Trotsky have been assembled and presented to American readers. With the exception of a few pages, none of them has even been published in the English language. As has unfortunately been the case with most of the serious Marxian writings of recent times, the works presented here have for the most part had to be sent out of the Soviet Union secretly. Their distribution has been made illegal by the Stalinist regime, and even when they were first presented to the Russian party and to the Communist International, those who listened to them or read them were confined to a select few hardened bureaucrats upon whom logic, arguments and facts made no impression. At the very height of the revolutionary events in China, the masses of the Communist workers were prevented from hearing the standpoint of the Left Opposition.

So overcome with the fear of the Apposition’s arguments were the bureaucrats, that they not only prevented the publication of the former’s documents, but even their own writings and speeches, which events proceeded so rapidly to deride, had to be kept concealed. Thus, Stalin’s speech in defense of Chiang Kai-Shek, made a few days before the coup d’État in Shanghai, has never been made public. The whole Eighth Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, at which the discussion of the Chinese question occupied the main point on the agenda, met under the conditions of a complete censorship. For the first time in the history of the Communist International, the proceedings of so signal a Plenum were not made public, in full or in part, in the party press of any country. The Communist world knew about its sessions only from the official resolution finally adopted and from a scant article in Pravda, reprinted in the International Press Correspondence. The censorship was not, it seems, completely air-tight. Some of the Opposition’s documents and a speech or two, made their way to Germany soon after the Plenum, and they were issued in pamphlet form, first by the German Left Oppositionists and later by the French. Only for the purpose of counteracting the effect of these documents did the official publishing house of the Comintern finally print, one year after the Plenum, a slim brochure containing the speeches delivered by Bucharin, Stalin, Manuilsky, Smeral, Pepper, Ferdi, Petrov, and a number of other apparatus men, plus one of Trotsky’s speeches and one of Vuyovitch’s. Aside from this, and an odd pamphlet here and there by Tang Ping Shan—the official spokesman for Stalin and Bucharin in China who later turned renegade from Communism—by Heller, and a few others, the literary contributions of the Communist International on the problems of the Chinese revolution, in modern non-Russian languages, are confined to journalistic dispatches from China which distinguished themselves in every case by the fact that a week later the events robbed them of any pretension to truth or analytical importance. In English, the official literature is more limited and more worthless: a pamphlet by Earl Browder, another by R. Doonping—kindness and mercy dictate that nothing more be said about them.

These facts, as well as the intrinsic value of the material presented in this book, make a study of it one of the main duties of the revolutionary worker today. That it deals so largely “with the past” does not rob it of one iota of its value. The present cannot be understood unless the past in which it is rooted is understood. The criminal opportunism of yesterday is being paid for by the light-hearted adventurism of the Comintern in China today. The idea of the Soviets as the instruments of the proletarian insurrection and later the dictatorship, is being abused by Stalinism today, in the period of counter-revolution, as it was in 1927, in the period of the revolutionary ascent. Yesterday, the bourgeois regime of Wuhan was passed off as a substitute for arming the workers and peasants independently and forming their Soviets. Today, the struggles of isolated, desperate peasant bands, aroused by the belated echo in the village of the revolutionary clashes of four years ago, and doomed to degeneration without the leadership of a strong, well-knit, thoroughly restored movement of proletarian revolutionists in the cities—are this time passed off by the Stalinists as the Soviet regime. And above all, the “super-historical” formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” continues to be set up against the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution so as to guarantee in advance that the coming Chinese revolution will be strangled just as fatally as the last one.

There remain three other points which require comment before these remarks are brought to an end.

Among the conceptions, or rather the misconceptions, concerning the standpoint of the Opposition in the Chinese question, as contrasted to that defended by the official spokesmen, is that the divergences were confined to an issue which is now “outlived”: the establishment of Soviets in the 1927 period. It would be more accurate to say that the differences of the kernel of the Opposition with the Stalinist standpoint were and remain concerned with all the fundamental principal questions of the Chinese revolution in all its phases and at every stage. Even in the ranks of the Opposition, particularly among the ultra-Leftists, the idea took shape that the Opposition’s struggle was confined to views which excluded any “democratic” development for China, or the imperative need for advancing in China the most resolute and extreme slogans of democracy. Especially at the present stage of the counter-revolution, the need for putting forward the slogans of democracy in China becomes unpostponable. The Communists will lead the masses of workers and peasants on to the socialist path by demonstrations in life that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve for the people all the democratic tasks which stand on the order of the day for China. In this respect, there is no conflict between the emphasis placed by the Opposition in 1925-1927 and the emphasis it places on the slogans necessary for today. The conflict really arises in the ranks of Stalinism which, while putting forward the perspective of the “democratic dictatorship”, categorically rejects the advancement of the most necessary democratic slogans!

Further, in connection with the question of the “democratic dictatorship”, an apparent conflict may be perceived in the documents which make up this book. In the later articles, comrade Trotsky counterposes the permanent revolution to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, whereas the early articles do not make such a contrast; indeed, the 1927 Platform of the Opposition speaks for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. The conflict is more apparent than real and is derived from two sources. The first is that in the bloc established in 1926 between the “Trotsky” and the “Zinoviev” Oppositions (the Moscow Opposition of 1923 and the Leningrad Opposition of 1925), formal concessions of this kind were made by the former to the Left Centrists of Leningrad in the interests of maintaining the bloc against the Menshevik policy of Stalin and Bucharin. The second is that in 1925-1927, the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship”, borrowed literally and purely formally from Lenin’s pre-1917 writings, had not yet so clearly been filled with the reactionary content which the epigones poured into it. The Opposition, as proceeds plainly even from the early articles of comrade Trotsky, construed the slogan in the same sense that Lenin construed it in and after 1917, that is, that the “democratic dictatorship” was realized in the “democratic period” (the first six months) of the October revolution, but realized under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long before the revolution, Lenin had written that the slogan had a past and a future. For China, the epigones, looking backward only to the past—and even there with a distorted vision—filled the slogan with a reactionary content, which they still seek to apply not only to “backward China”, but to about four-fifths of the whole world … including modern Spain. One of the greatest contributions to the movement made by the Opposition, and in the first place, by comrade Trotsky, is the setting of the old Leninist slogan in its proper historical perspective, the frank—and not slavish—examination of the value of the slogan in the light of revolutionary experiences, and the restoration to its rightful place of the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution, expressed by Lenin for the East in particular, in those sections of the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International which speak of the non-capitalist path of development of the backward colonial and semi- colonial countries.

A third point which may interest readers, or arouse a certain amount of confusion, is another apparent contradiction in the standpoint of the Opposition. It is only in the later documents that comrade Trotsky speaks about the Opposition having stood against the integration of the proletarian party, the Communist Party of China, into the party of the bourgeoisie, the Kuo Min Tang. Any misunderstanding that may arise will be eliminated by reproducing part of a letter written by comrade Trotsky to the present writer on December 10, 1930, which I take the liberty of quoting.

”You are quite right when you point out that the Russian Opposition, as late as the first half of 1927, did not demand openly the withdrawal from the Kuo Min Tang. I believe, however, that I have already commented on this fact publicly somewhere. I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang, as well as against the acceptance of the Kuo Min Tang into the `Kuomintern’. Radek was always with Zinoviev against me. The younger members of the Opposition of 1923 were with me almost to a man. Rakovsky was in Paris and not sufficiently informed. Up to 1926, I always voted independently in the Political Bureau on this question, against all the others. In 1925, simultaneously with the theses on the Eastern Chinese Railway which I have quoted in the Opposition press, I once more presented the formal proposal that the Communist party leave the Kuo Min Tang instantly. This was unanimously rejected and contributed a great deal to the baiting later on. In 1926 and 1927, I had uninterrupted conflicts with the Zinovievists on this question. Two or three times, the matter stood at the breaking point. Our center consisted of approximately equal numbers from both of the allied tendencies, for it was after all only a bloc. At the voting, the position of the 1923 Opposition was betrayed by Radek, out of principle, and by Piatakov, out of unprincipledness. Our faction (1923) was furious about it, demanded that Radek and Piatakov be recalled from the center. But since it was a question of splitting with the Zinovievists, it was the general decision that I must submit publicly in this question and acquaint the Opposition in writing with my standpoint. And that is how it happened that the demand was put up by us so late, in spite of the fact that the Political Bureau and the Plenum of the Central Committee always contrasted my view with the official view of the Opposition. Now I can say with certainty that I made a mistake by submitting formally in this question. In any case, this mistake became quite clear only by the further evolution of the Zinovievists. At that time, the split with them appeared to the overwhelming majority of our faction as absolutely fatal. Thus, the manifesto [of the International Left Opposition on the Chinese question, issued late in 1930] in no way contradicts the facts when it contends that the Russian Opposition, the real one, was against the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang. Out of the thousands of imprisoned, exiled, etc., hardly a single one was with Radek in this question. This fact too I have referred to in many letters, namely, that the great majority of the capitulators were not sure and firm in the Chinese and the Anglo-Russian question. That is very characteristic! …”

The documents which follow are arranged more or less in chronological order. As a whole, they present a fairly thorough picture of the course of the Chinese revolution and the struggle for Bolshevism which the Opposition carried on in all the periods of its development, up to the present day. How brilliantly they demonstrate the indispensability of Marxism— which serves the revolutionist to foresee the coming day and to prepare for it—can be left to the reader to judge. As appendices, we have included articles and speeches by other comrades. The suppressed theses of Zinoviev present invaluable facts and documents, even though they present the relations between the Communist party and the Kuo Min Tang in a confused manner. The Shanghai letter by three Russian comrades, all of them opponents of “Trotskyism”, shows that the leadership of the Comintern was well aware of the real state of affairs in China. The letter is presented here for the first time. It suffered the same fate of suppression as so much other important material. Indeed, one of its authors, the youth comrade Nassonov, together with the party comrade, Mandalyan, were recalled in disgrace from China by Stalin. As punishment, Nassonov was “exiled” to the United States as representative of the Young Communist International, and I still recall how he would tell me that in spite of everything, Stalin had been “compelled in the end to carry out” his viewpoint….

In conclusion, the writer wishes to express his gratitude, and the appreciation of the publishers, to his comrades, Sam Gordon and Morris Lewit, who gave such indispensable assistance in the final checking of the translations.

NEW YORK, August 7,
1931
Max Shachtman.