Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:
As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
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Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:
The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism
by Jan Norden
August 1992 (revised March 1993)
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Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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(continued)
Discussion on Yugoslavia: Round One with Pablo
At its Seventh Plenum in April 1949, the IEC decided to open a discussion in the International on Yugoslavia. This discussion was marked by rampant confusion, as could be imagined from the FI’s shifting programmatic statements. Over the course of three years, a number of individuals changed position: Pablo was initially the most enthusiastically pro-Tito, but after the outbreak of the Korean War he most strongly emphasized the deformed character of the Yugoslav regime; in the French section, Lambert was initially critical of the I.S.’ capitulatory policy toward Tito, but by 1951 was criticizing Pablo for being too harsh on Yugoslavia; Bleibtreu was consistently soft on the Yugoslavs, first supporting Pablo, then Lambert; Mestre in turn was consistently harder on Yugoslavia, initially aligned with Lambert, later with Pablo; and Germain was consistently confusionist. Yet amid the confusion, one can discern the early stages of a battle which by 1951-53 was to put into question the very existence of the Fourth International.
At the heart of the internal struggle over Yugoslavia was a drive by Pablo to deny the need for an independent Trotskyist vanguard. He generalized his liquidationist program of chasing after Stalinist forces from initially tailing Tito to seeing revolutionary possibilities in the Kremlin itself and the European CPs which followed its orders. On the other hand, the response of those who opposed Pablo was marked by a formalistic pseudo-orthodoxy that was unable to explain events in East Europe when reality didn’t square with their undialectical categories. Reasoning that Stalinism, as a counterrevolutionary force, could never carry out a social revolution, however bureaucratically deformed, they first denied that Yugoslavia had overthrown capitalist rule, only to then claim that there had been an authentic proletarian revolution and Tito’s YCP had been able to establish a workers state because it was not Stalinist. The theoretical confusion that resulted from such contortions seriously undermined the struggle against Pabloist liquidationism, and eventually fed into the American SWP’s embrace of the same revisionist program a decade later over Cuba.
As head of the International Secretariat, Pablo was responsible for the initial “Open Letters” which embraced the Tito regime. In his first signed article on the Tito-Stalin split, “The Yugoslav Affair,” written in August 1948, Pablo argued that the Yugoslav CP during the war “led a real mass movement with distinct revolutionary tendencies which brought it to power.”[85] A year later, Pablo was already raising many of the themes which he later elaborated into a wholesale attack on Trotskyism. In September 1949 he wrote:
Thus, in the historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism we shall witness the rise not of normal workers’ states, but of more or less degenerated workers’ states, that is, states with strong bureaucratic deformations which can reach the point of complete political expropriation of the proletariat.[86]
Asserting that “in our epoch, the proletarian power established in a single country will inevitably and rapidly become bureaucratized,” Pablo argued that “there is no other remedy than to bring to bear the weight of the world organization of the proletariat,” which “alone is capable of counterbalancing the corrupting influence of national isolation upon the party in power.”[87]
Thus Pablo declared that Stalinist degeneration was no longer an exceptional situation but rather constituted “modifications in the norm of proletarian power”! In asserting that bureaucratization was “inevitable,” he simply wrote off the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy. Moreover, these “modified norms” were destined to last for a considerable time:
...in the whole historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, a period which can extend for centuries, we shall encounter a much more tortuous and complicated development of the revolution than our teachers foresaw—and workers’ states that are not normal but necessarily quite deformed.[88]
This is the revisionist perspective that came to be characterized by Pablo’s opponents as “centuries of deformed workers states.” It liquidates the need for the Fourth International as an independent revolutionary leadership, at best reducing it to the role of opposition after the necessary/ inevitable bureaucratization of the revolution, or, more likely given Pablo’s later evolution, to the role of “Marxist” braintrusters to the Stalinist regimes—or even to left-talking rulers of capitalist states. (In the early 1960s Pablo (Raptis) acted as a government adviser to Ben Bella’s Algeria, and in the early 1970s to a lesser extent to Allende’s Chile, peddling “self-management” schemes borrowed from Tito’s Yugoslavia.)
Already in 1949, Pablo referred to Yugoslavia as “a workers’ state deformed from its birth,” which was “led and controlled by a caste forming into a bureaucracy.”[89] But he pointedly did not call for a workers political revolution to oust this bureaucracy. (Logical enough, since according to him bureaucratization was “inevitable.”) Unfortunately, however, the far-reaching liquidationist implications of his analysis were largely ignored at the time, since his opponents were arguing that Yugoslavia along with the rest of East Europe remained capitalist. Thus most of his initial document was taken up with long quotes from Yugoslav officials demonstrating that the bourgeoisie had indeed been liquidated. Pablo again took up this same theme in February 1950, arguing against Germain’s construct of the East European states as capitalist states on the road to structural assimilation into the USSR.[90]
The main response to Pablo was given by Germain.[91] In his opus, Germain adduced all manner of arguments to show that the states of the “buffer zone” remained capitalist. But how did he square this with the Marxist definition of the state, since the armed force was entirely in the hands of the Stalinists (local and Soviet), and the economies had by this time been essentially collectivized except for agriculture? Referring to Engels’ “jewel-like formula” of the state as a body of armed men, he waved this aside, averring that it “suffices to explain to novices the Marxist theory of the state and to find one’s way in cases which are comparatively simple,” but was of no use at all in this complicated situation. Likewise he rejected the criterion of what class interests the state serves and dismissed the evidence of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie throughout East Europe, claiming that Mussolini did the same in his 1943-44 “Salò Republic” (in German-occupied northern Italy)!
Instead the erudite Marxist savant discerned “an entirely special type of capitalism.” He discovered an entirely new category, a “bastard” bourgeois state, or, “if one wishes,” “a degenerated bourgeois state on the road to structural assimilation with the USSR”![92] It is easy to poke holes in this contorted concoction. Germain in fact threw the Marxist theory of the state out the window in his desperate attempt to maintain the classification of the East European states as capitalist. To get around the problem of defending Belgrade against Moscow while arguing that capitalism hadn’t yet been destroyed in Yugoslavia, he labeled it a “workers and peasants government”—essentially giving Tito & Co. a certificate of revolutionary good conduct. His invention of a “bastard/degenerated bourgeois state” was simply playing with words, allowing him to keep on calling the buffer zone capitalist while emptying this term of all verifiable content. But why did he go to such absurd lengths?
Following Trotsky’s observation that “every sociological definition is at bottom an historical prognosis,” Germain warned that those who defined East Europe as workers states were adopting “a perspective of the possibility of a growth and increasing development of Stalinism on an international scale in the years and decades to come!” That “would oblige us to revise from top to bottom our historical appraisal of Stalinism....We would then have to repudiate the entire Trotskyist argument against Stalinism since 1924, a line of argument based on the inevitable destruction of the USSR by imperialism in the event of an extremely prolonged postponement of the world revolution.”[93] Germain was quite wrong to insist that recognizing East Europe as deformed workers states would mean abandoning Trotsky’s analysis and revolutionary program against Stalinism. But he did accurately discern that this is what Pablo & Co. were driving at. The same concern was voiced by various leaders of the SWP who were clearly driven by fear of the potential implications of recognizing the East European regimes as deformed workers states. Morris Stein, in a February 1950 report to the SWP National Committee plenum, noted: “their ‘workers states’ have come into existence not by means of proletarian revolution but through bureaucratic counterrevolution. How square this with our Marxist concepts of the proletarian revolution?”[94] John G. Wright, who called Germain’s tortured document “brilliant,” wrote:
Finally, to call the regimes in Eastern Europe “workers states” is to say that the Stalinists have been and are carrying out revolutionary tasks there, in a bureaucratic way, in a “deformed” way, qualify it how you may, revolutionary nonetheless. We must challenge that. We must say that just the contrary is true. It is the counterrevolutionary essence of Stalinism that has come to the fore in Eastern Europe, and not the reverse.[95]
This wooden orthodoxy of the SWP was based not on a dialectical and materialist analysis of the situation, but on fear that if it were admitted that capitalist rule was destroyed in the states of the Soviet-dominated “buffer zone,” then all of Marxism would collapse along with the justification for the very existence of the revolutionary party. The bankruptcy of this “method” was shown by what happened when the fact of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in East Europe could no longer be denied. Only five months after writing his treatise, Germain flipflopped and at the Eighth Plenum of the IEC (April 1950) suddenly declared that Yugoslavia was now “a non-degenerated workers’ state”![96] And when they had to face the truth on the buffer zone, Germain’s supporters simply pretended that his criteria for “structural assimilation” into the Soviet Union had been accomplished. Thus Murry Weiss, reporting for the National Committee to the SWP’s November 1950 convention, declared: “The salient characteristic of the whole process has been the destruction of these states as separate states, and their incorporation, in one form or another, into the USSR.”[97]
This is not successive approximations, but rather repeated obfuscation. In fact, Trotsky had laid the theoretical basis for recognizing that the Stalinists could, under unusual conditions, overthrow bourgeois rule. The Transitional Program states: “one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty-bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie.”[98] But where Trotsky wrote of this as a “highly improbable variant,” the Pabloist revisionists seized upon this phrase and turned it into the norm. The anti-Pablo forces denied reality as long as they could and then capitulated, rather than insisting that even in those exceptional conditions where revolutions led by Stalinist and other petty-bourgeois forces overthrow capitalism, this is accomplished against their own program, and the resulting bonapartist regimes remain a roadblock to international socialist revolution.
In the fight over Yugoslavia in the Fourth International, one can see the origins and early stages of Pabloism. Yet it was not yet the full-blown liquidationist program. One indication of this is that the lineup over Yugoslavia was not identical to that in 1953, when the battle came to a head. In the former case, not only those who later stood with Pablo, such as Bert Cochran (who used the name E.R. Frank) and Michèle Mestre, called for recognition that Yugoslavia and the rest of East Europe were workers states, but also Joseph Hansen, who was one of the leaders of the fight against the pro-Pablo Cochran-Clarke faction in the SWP. In a December 1949 document, Hansen noted: “Labelling such a country in Eastern Europe as Yugoslavia a ‘workers state’ concedes nothing to Stalinism and does not involve a revision of the Marxist theory of the state.” He stressed that events in Eastern Europe were merely “the positive side of a development that was a major blow to the socialist movement. While the borderlands experienced an upset in property relations, Stalin’s henchmen in France and Italy were knifing workers’ uprisings in the back. All Europe, including Germany, might have been socialist today were it not for the crimes of Stalinism at the close of the war.”[99]
Yet Hansen didn’t recognize that Tito, too, was a Stalinist, and the SWP went along with the FI’s capitulatory line on Yugoslavia. Once again, in this discussion the only treatment of Yugoslavia and East Europe that followed the lines of Trotsky’s own writings on Soviet Stalinism came from the British RCP. A May 1949 document by Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe,” pointed out anew how events had confirmed the RCP’s amendments at the Second World Congress a year earlier. Hunter noted that the position that Yugoslavia was a workers state, but the rest of East Europe wasn’t, amounted to a “halfway house,” insisting that comrades who took that line couldn’t hold to it for long. Hunter went back to Trotsky’s 1940 work, In Defense of Marxism,[100] for some guidelines:
Trotsky said of Poland in 1939, “This overturn was forced upon the Kremlin oligarchy through its struggle for self preservation under specific conditions.”
It was that same struggle for self preservation which was the determining factor of the Kremlin’s post war policy in Eastern Europe....The fact [that] Stalinism under certain specific circumstances carries out revolutionary measures does not cancel out its past, its origins, its conservative and counter-revolutionary aspects, its bureaucratic base and the effect of its methods on the world working class movement. On the other hand we cannot be blinded to the particular progressive measures Stalinism is forced to carry out because of the viability of the property form on which it rests. The Fourth International is not to be justified by ignoring facts, or attempting to pour them into preconceived theoretical vessels. In that way lies a fog of mysticism.
To declare that under every and all particular conditions the Stalinist bureaucracy must compromise with the bourgeoisie means never to understand the events in Eastern Europe....However, this does not mean that the bureaucracy has taken up the banner of world revolution. Its struggle still remains a defensive one within the framework of gaining the best possible compromise with world imperialism.[101]
Unfortunately, even though Hunter’s document was promised in the introduction to the first SWP International Information Bulletin announcing the start of discussion on Yugoslavia in the FI, it never appeared.[102] For that matter, as far as we could discover, none of the RCP’s letters and statements against the I.S./IEC line(s) on Yugoslavia and East Europe were ever widely circulated, or published in the SWP’s internal bulletins. Instead, Morris Stein, in opening the discussion on East Europe in the SWP Political Committee, simply dismissed them with a wave of the hand, remarking, “I am not dealing with the position of the British RCP,” since it “represents no new factor” and its views were already “overwhelmingly rejected” by the 1948 World Congress.[103]
Round Two: Pabloite Liquidationism Takes Shape
The discussion inside the Fourth International over Yugoslavia and the class character of the East European states was the first stage in the appearance of Pabloism as a full-fledged liquidationist current. But it was only the first stage. That it didn’t represent the “degeneration” of the FI is indicated by the fact that both sides pulled back. In fact, the earlier alignment over Yugoslavia had been largely reversed, with the initially strongly pro-Tito Pablo now attacking his detractors in the FI for capitulating to the Yugoslavs. Mainly the change of position over Yugoslavia was due to Belgrade’s capitulation before imperialism over the Korean War.
But by this point, the attack on Trotskyism had gone beyond the issue of Yugoslavia. As a result of the East Europe discussion, Pablo & Co. generalized an initial opportunist position into a full-blown revisionist program, while major sections of the Fourth International one by one drew back and went into opposition as the liquidationist implications of this program became clear to them, above all when it hit them on the national terrain. Pablo’s line on Yugoslavia certainly gave a foretaste of what was to come. Thus in his January 1951 revisionist manifesto “Where Are We Going?” Pablo points back to his December 1949 document “On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia”:
As for us, we reaffirm what we wrote in the first article devoted to the Yugoslav affair: this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from “pure” forms and norms.
We are aware that this statement has shocked certain comrades and served others as a springboard to attack our “revisionism.”
But we do not disarm.[104]
Taking Trotsky’s negative observation in the Transitional Program that “one cannot categorically deny” that under certain “completely exceptional” circumstances the petty-bourgeois parties “may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie,” Pablo turned this into a positive program, declaring: “The Yugoslav affair as well as the march and the victory of the Chinese revolution...have demonstrated that the Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.”[105] When these statements provoked a storm of protest in the International, Pablo and his followers declared that “centuries” referred to the whole transitional period before full socialism and not just the degenerated/deformed workers states, and that “outlining a revolutionary orientation” only meant that the Stalinists could go so far as to take power. But this was only to throw sand in the eyes of those who didn’t want to see.
For Pablo went further. In the same article he declared that since World War II the world has entered “a period essentially different from everything we have known in the past.” And what was this “new reality”? “For our movement objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements by and large constitute objective social reality....” So where the “old reality” consisted of the two fundamental classes of capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and intermediate forces such as the peasantry and more broadly the petty bourgeoisie, this new world reality consists of “the capitalist regime” and the “Stalinist world.” And where does the working class fit in this schema? According to Pablo, “the revolutionary spirit of the masses directed against imperialism acts as an additional force, supplementing the material and technical forces raised against imperialism.”[106] So in effect the world working class becomes an auxiliary to the Soviet Army, a kind of “National Guard,” as Bleibtreu put it.
What lay behind this “new reality” was the spectre of an impending third world war. Earlier Pablo had argued that this general war was “many years” away, but in “Where Are We Going?” he wrote that “capitalism is now rapidly heading toward war, for it has no other short or long-term way out.” “It is with the Korean war,” he added, “that our movement for the first time realized the important factor that the relationship of forces on the international chess-board is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.” The coming war would “take on, from the very beginning, the character of an international civil war”; the continents of Europe and Asia “would rapidly pass over under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, of the Communist Parties, or of the revolutionary masses.” In sum: “War under these conditions, with the existing relationship of forces on the international arena, would essentially be Revolution.” To the “new reality” corresponded a new programmatic conception, “the conception of Revolution-War, of War-Revolution which is emerging and upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest.”[107]
In part, Pabloism consists of Cold War impressionism. Under the impact of imperialism’s “Cold War” against the Soviet Union, Stalin is obliged to expropriate the bourgeoisie in the “buffer zone” of East Europe; a maverick “national Stalinist” regime in Yugoslavia breaks with Stalin to seize power—and Pablo concludes that the CPs can sometimes “roughly outline a revolutionary orientation.” The North Koreans take Seoul, drive the puppet capitalist regime into the Pusan pocket; U.S. imperialism counterattacks with the Inchon landing, crosses the 38th parallel; China enters the war, Truman hints at using the A-bomb—and Pablo concludes that the third world war is around the corner, with imperialism holding the short end of the stick.
Pabloism is also characterized by objectivism. In language that would be echoed years later by the Argentine pseudo-Trotskyist adventurer Nahuel Moreno, Pablo declared in his report to the February 1952 Tenth Plenum of the IEC: “The situation is prerevolutionary all over in various degrees and evolving toward the revolution in a relatively brief period. And this process from now on is in general irreversible.”[108] Pabloism also incorporates themes raised by the Zhdanov line, the Kremlin’s quarter-turn to the left in response to the Cold War Marshall Plan. At the founding meeting of the Cominform in 1947, Andrei Zhdanov in his theses declared: “The struggle between these two camps, between the imperialist and anti-imperialist camp, unfolds under conditions of a continued deepening of the overall crisis of capitalism, of a weakening of the forces of capitalism, and of the strengthening of the forces of socialism and democracy.”[109] The struggle between “camps” instead of classes, the international balance of forces unfavorable to capitalism: these premises were shared by Pablo and Zhdanov.
But most fundamentally the “program” of Pabloism was the denial of the need for a Trotskyist vanguard. Under the impact of the unexpected postwar surge of Stalinism and the weakness of the Trotskyist forces, with new questions posed by events in East Europe and China, a whole section of the leadership of the Fourth International, particularly centered in Europe where the pressures were strongest, not only rejected Trotsky’s prognosis about the outcome of the imperialist war, but threw out the Trotskyist program as well. Instead of an independent proletarian leadership, they saw “new vanguards,” first Tito’s Yugoslavia and Mao’s China, and then the whole “Stalinist world.” Pablo and his acolytes were increasingly explicit in their revisionism. Pablo’s main report to the Third World Congress was published under the title, “World Trotskyism Rearms.”[110] The English version of the theses of the Third World Congress included a subhead on the “New Course of Trotskyism,” and Germain (Mandel), who by this time had capitulated to Pablo, gave a report to the congress on the activity of the I.S. and IEC under the title, “Three Years of the New Course of Trotskyism.”[111] The most blatant expression was from Pablo’s American follower George Clarke, who made his battle cry “Junk the Old Trotskyism”![112]
As the developing Pabloite revisionist current passed from particular positions to a general program, it also began to draw organizational consequences. Thus in his report to the Third World Congress, Pablo declared: “What we have understood for the first time in the history of our movement and of the workers’ movement in general...is that we must be capable of finding our place in the mass movement as it is.” This is specified as understanding “the necessity of subordinating all organizational considerations, of formal independence or otherwise, to real integration into the mass movement.”[113] A few months later, at the Tenth Plenum of the IEC (February 1952), Pablo spelled out what came to be known as “deep entrism.” He cited as a precedent the British section’s entry into the Labour Party (under massive pressure from the I.S.). This was “almost qualitatively different” from the “entrism” advocated by Trotsky during 1934-38, for this was intended to be “long-term” in nature. Of the reformist parties, he stated:
We are not entering these parties in order to come out of them soon. We are entering them in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility which exists of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions, develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objective revolutionary processes in their respective countries.[114]
In fact, he stressed, the aim was “to help in the development of their centrist tendencies”!
As for the official Communist parties, since the Stalinist tops would prevent any internal factions and likely prevent many known Trotskyists from entering, Pablo advocated “entrism of a special kind, sui generis,” arguing that the Stalinist movement will produce “much greater and more important centrist tendencies” than the social-democratic reformists. To accomplish this task, a member should “not hesitate” to “conceal his Trotskyism”:[115] “In order to remain there and work, it will be necessary for a whole period, at first, that our militants completely conceal their Trotskyist identity” and they must “not undertake any political work based on our own ideas.” “Ruses’ and ‘capitulations’ are not only admissible but necessary,” in order to carry out this “entrism sui generis.”[116] As for those on the outside, their chief aim was to assist the entry work. So when the anti-Pabloites wrote of the “liquidation” of the Trotskyist program and party, this was no projection or exaggeration, but the explicit, immediate program of Pablo and his associates.
What, then, of the opposition to Pablo? As we remarked at the outset, it was partial, belated, largely on the national terrain, and did not come to grips theoretically with the new questions which gave rise to Pabloism. But they did fight, and we take sides with those who sought, in however flawed a manner, to combat the forces that were liquidating Trotskyism!
First came the British RCP majority. In his report to the Third World Congress, Germain noted the expulsion of Haston and Grant from the International Executive Committee after its Eighth Plenum in April 1951, describing them as “embodying the tendency of British Trotskyism which obstinately refused to integrate itself into the International, to assimilate the new course of Trotskyism.”[117] Indeed the Haston/Grant majority derived from the old British Workers International League (WIL), which for purely cliquist reasons placed itself outside the British section of the Fourth International from 1938 to 1944. But in 1951 Pablo and Germain were far more concerned by the fact that the RCP majority had refused for more than three years to liquidate into the Labour Party, despite the insistent attempts by the I.S. to force them to do so. In the end, Pablo engineered by remote control a split led by Gerry Healy, who took about a third of the organization into the Labour Party. Haston/Grant didn’t go along with the I.S./IEC fiction that East Europe was still capitalist in 1948-49, and partly because their vision wasn’t distorted by these pseudo-orthodox blinders, they saw Tito clearly for what he was: a nationally based Stalinist who wanted to build socialism in his one country. In a 1950 statement written shortly before he was expelled, Grant rightly listed as the first of three reasons for the collapse of the FI in Britain “capitulation to Tito-Stalinism internationally.”[118]
In order to destroy Haston and Grant, Pablo’s I.S. destroyed the RCP in the process. To do so, they resorted to organizational methods reminiscent of Zinoviev’s Comintern regime. So when Healy split the British section in 1947, the IEC granted his entry group independent status, reporting directly to the I.S. Later, in late 1948-early 1949, when first Haston and then Grant capitulated and came out for entry into the Labour Party, the I.S. turned on them and denounced them for...liquidationism! “Their proposal of entry looks like a desperate man drowning himself in deep water,” commented the I.S. “Entry on such a pessimistic and liquidationist line...would only accelerate the process of political disintegration and destroy all perspective for the Fourth International.”[119] When Healy demanded and got from the I.S. control of the section now reunited in the Labour Party, even though he and his supporters were in a minority, with a year’s leeway until elections were to be held, he proceeded to drive out and expel his opponents, some legitimately (like the Cliff group, whose supporters publicly denounced “Russian imperialism” and refused to support the North in the Korean War), most not.
Healy, who had also been a leader of the old WIL, was implementing Pablo’s line in London. The “deep entrist” policy Healy carried out in Britain (which eventually resulted in the Socialist Labour League when he exited in the late ’50s) was certainly a precursor of the “entrism sui generis” which Pablo attempted to shove down the throats of the French PCI a few years later. The RCP had been set up only in 1944, as a forced (by the I.S.) fusion of the WIL and a disintegrated Revolutionary Socialist League (official FI section), and it was rent by inherited animosities at the top. Its principal leaders eventually abandoned Trotskyism, Haston openly, and Grant through carrying out an entry into the Labour Party so deep that his Militant group only exited in 1992 (and that over Grant’s opposition). But in the late ’40s the RCP, more than any other section of the International, tried rather successfully to grapple on the basis of Trotsky’s program with the issues that had been thrown up by history. And they were ground up by a leadership that subsequently sought to liquidate the Fourth International itself. In an interview on Healy’s history, Spartacist League Central Committee member James Robertson remarked:
Cannon and also Pablo were very much on the RCP’s case, and Healy was their local inside man. I don’t know all the rights and wrongs but I do believe that they did not try to reshape the RCP, but successfully destroyed it. And so far as I know that was the last Trotskyist organization in Britain, the SLL in the period from 1957-67 proving to be hollow.[120]
Pabloite Revisionism Ravages the Fourth International
The French PCI was the second section that Pablo targeted for destruction. As noted earlier, the then PCI majority opposed the I.S.’ 1948 letters to the Yugoslav CP for “idealizing Tito.” The PCI passed a motion demanding that the I.S. reject Pablo’s August 1948 article on “The Yugoslav Affair.” And while the composition of the PCI majority as well as its line on Yugoslavia changed, the French party was almost constantly in opposition to Pablo on East Europe and Stalinism. Working closely with the International Secretariat, which was then located in Paris, they smelled an anti-Trotskyist rat early on. The fight came to a head during 1950-52, in the period leading up to and following the Third World Congress. The first object of dispute was the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” written by Pablo and submitted to the Ninth Plenum of the IEC at the end of November 1950, as part of the discussion for the upcoming Third World Congress.[121] The discussion was particularly colored by the appearance in January 1951 of Pablo’s revisionist treatise “Where Are We Going?” with its “new reality” and perspective of “centuries of deformed workers states.”
In the I.S. itself there was resistance to Pablo’s theses (from Germain, Frank and Privas). Immediately following the plenum, at the beginning of December 1950, the French CC met, criticizing revisionist elements in the Ninth Plenum theses and refusing to approve the document. It also approved a political report for the PCI’s upcoming Seventh Congress. There followed, in January and March 1951, CC meetings at which Pablo’s emissaries (initially Clarke from the U.S.) tried to browbeat the French majority into submission. Germain intimated to Bleibtreu his intention to write a document to counterbalance Pablo’s theses, and to submit it for a vote. Germain did eventually write his famous “Ten Theses” document, a veiled attack on Pablo’s “Where Are We Going?” But Pablo cracked the whip, ordering Germain to defend the Ninth Plenum theses or be expelled from the I.S., and sent a letter to the French CC demanding that they rewrite their perspectives document along the lines of his theses. At the March meeting Germain, Frank and Privas capitulated and spoke for Pablo’s theses. In April 1951, Pablo himself attended a French CC meeting to attack the leadership; the CC formally split into majority (anti-Pablo) and minority.[122]
Also in April the PCI’s principal leader, Marcel Bleibtreu, wrote a document “Where the Disagreements Lie,” which was later developed into his famous “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?” (Neither of these, nor any of the other French documents, were ever translated and distributed internationally by the I.S.) When Germain’s “Ten Theses” was published in March (although dated 15 January 1951), the French PB adopted them as a resolution for the World Congress (minus the author’s preamble, which endorsed Pablo’s Ninth Plenum theses).[123] At the PCI’s Seventh Congress in July, there were counterposed majority and minority reports and resolutions on both international and national work, and the majority voted down the Ninth Plenum theses. At the World Congress of the FI in August 1951, Bleibtreu spoke against Pablo’s theses, and the PCI introduced a series of amendments. The French were isolated, a vote was not permitted on their amendments or on Germain’s “Ten Theses,” and the PCI delegates voted almost alone against the main resolution, which included Pablo’s “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation.” A French commission was set up to replace the PCI majority leadership. In the end Bleibtreu et al. were left in place, but with the proviso that if they didn’t carry out the line of the World Congress, “the IEC and I.S. will be charged with taking all organizational measures to rectify the situation in the PCI.”[124]
There was plenty of thunder and lightning. But did the French fight Pabloite liquidationism programmatically in all this, or was it simply an organizational power fight, as some (such as Workers Power) would have it? There were plenty of weaknesses and errors in the PCI majority’s documents. Bleibtreu declared that “the essential difference concerns the revisionist view of the nature of the bureaucracy of the USSR” in Pablo’s texts.[125] But Bleibtreu’s definition of Stalinism excluded any ideological/programmatic elements: “When you speak of the Stalinism of a Communist Party, you are not speaking of a theory, of an overall program, of definite and lasting concepts, but only of its leadership’s subordination to orders from the Kremlin bureaucracy.”[126] Bleibtreu mocked the very idea of “Stalinism without Stalin.” And the PCI did not object to the statement in the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation” that under certain circumstances, “like those which occurred during the war in Yugoslavia, in China, and recently in Korea,” certain CPs “can project a revolutionary orientation,” and that “from that moment on, they would cease to be strictly Stalinist parties.”[127]
Bleibtreu did not give a Trotskyist definition of Stalinism, for he excluded the programmatic components of “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, and ignored Stalinism’s material base, a nationally limited bureaucracy—both of which were common to Yugoslavia and China as well as the USSR. Bleibtreu wanted to limit Stalinism to only those parties directly under the Kremlin’s thumb, in order to exclude the Chinese and Yugoslavs. If anything, his texts were even more favorable to the Mao and Tito regimes than were Pablo’s (e.g., declaring that “it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a ‘victory of Stalinism in China’”).[128] But this was an attempt, if flawed, to fight against Pablo’s program, which ascribed revolutionary potential to Stalinism itself; Bleibtreu’s answer to the question of how CPs could take power and still be counterrevolutionary was to define the problem away, describing them as non-Stalinist. In rejecting Pablo’s assertion that “defense of the USSR constitutes the strategic line of the Fourth International,” Bleibtreu correctly stated that the strategic line of Trotskyism is world socialist revolution. But he did not emphasize, as Trotsky did, that Soviet defensism was also a strategic task of the FI.
Despite these errors, the French did attempt to fight the Pabloites’ policies of tailing after Stalinism. And thus they were an obstacle in the way of Pabloism’s revisionist course. Round Two of the showdown came as Pablo returned to the offensive, demanding that the PCI liquidate into the Stalinist movement under the rubric of “entrism sui generis.” Following his usual “salami tactics” Pablo had not called at the World Congress for entrism into the Stalinist parties, and in fact he had referred to the “necessarily independent” character of the Trotskyist organizations, as he admitted in his report to the February 1952 Tenth Plenum of the IEC. The policy of “entrism sui generis” was first raised in a January 1952 I.S. letter to the French leadership accusing the PCI of refusing to follow the line of the Third World Congress: “Let us define this policy once again clearly: what’s involved in a country like France is carrying out, more and more, a sort of sui generis entrist policy toward the organizations and workers influenced by the Stalinists.”[129]
When the January CC meeting of the PCI refused Pablo’s ultimatum to hand over control of the party to the Pabloite minority (via a “parity” Political Bureau with a double vote for a representative of the I.S.), Pablo decreed on the spot the suspension of the 16 majority members of the Central Committee! This bureaucratic atrocity was subsequently ratified by the I.S., reportedly with the votes of the British (Gerry Healy) and American (George Novack) representatives. At the Tenth Plenum (February 1952), the IEC revoked the suspensions, but decreed that the PCI CC could not meet unless the minority Political Bureau judged it necessary.[130]
But even when, in order to buy time, the French majority submitted to this grotesque measure, it wasn’t enough for Pablo, who demanded that discussion at the upcoming congress of the PCI be limited to implementing the entrist line of the Tenth Plenum, and that the CC elected at the previous congress not be allowed to present its political report.[131] Seeing an impending split, in late June the Pabloites removed typewriters and mimeograph machines from the PCI office. Two months earlier they had secretly filed a statement with the police registering a “PCI” with a completely pro-Pablo leadership. So on 14 July 1952, two PCI congresses were held in Paris, on different floors of the same building. In November the anti-Pablo PCI was formally expelled, again with the votes of the British and Americans. But this only whetted Pablo’s appetite. With the French out of the way, he then went after the big one, the Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon and conserving the largest group of Trotskyist cadres dating back to the time of Trotsky.
As in the case of the PCI, and even more so, the struggle against Pabloism in the SWP was fought out over the party question. The question of Yugoslavia seemed more remote on the American terrain, and an orientation of entrism into the discredited and relatively small American Stalinist party—which had gone semi-clandestine due to McCarthyite repression—was not only liquidationist but downright absurd for anyone with the slightest pretense of revolutionary politics. Cannon was able to easily demonstrate that the pro-Pablo minority was a rotten bloc consisting of New York petty bourgeois (led by George Clarke) who were looking to the popular-front milieu, and a layer of older Detroit trade unionists (led by Bert Cochran) who were looking for a way out of organized left politics altogether. But as we noted in “Genesis of Pabloism”: “The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a pro-Pabloism tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction, manifested itself within the American party.” Moreover, when Cannon did finally take up the battle he did so in a way that “deepened [the SWP’s] isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism,” counterposed to international democratic centralism. In a review of Cannon’s Speeches to the Party, which covers this fight, we wrote of:
...the major weakness revealed during the struggle—Cannon’s failure to carry out an international faction fight against Pabloism. To avoid having to implement Pabloist policies, Cannon posited a federated International. (This deviation came home to roost in the later formation of the “United Secretariat” in which differences over the 1953 split, China and other questions were papered over as each national organization went its merry way.) Cannon’s federalist concept of internationalism was reflected in a polemic against (of all things) “Cominternism”![132]
The SWP leadership claimed to have disagreed with Pablo earlier, both politically and over some of his more blatant organizational atrocities. Thus for the Third World Congress, the SWP Political Committee sent off a “Contribution to the Discussion on International Perspectives” to “balance” Pablo’s “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation.” In particular, in this memo the SWP argued that “it is imperative to reaffirm our previous characterization of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force”; they opposed any recognition (“implicitly or explicitly”) of “the perspective of ‘deformed workers’ states’ as the line of historical development for an indefinite period”; they opined that it was “one-sided” to say that the CPs “may be compelled to outline a revolutionary orientation,” since the Stalinists could also work to strangle revolutions; and they argued for reaffirming the central importance of the crisis of proletarian leadership.[133] But the SWP’s “fraternal” delegate, Clarke, who happened to be one of Pablo’s chief hatchetmen, didn’t present this “contribution.” In fact, he later said, he was so “ashamed” of it that he burned the document!
Be that as it may, none of the changes the SWP advocated on paper were made, except for a ritual mention (in the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation”) of “the selection of a new revolutionary leadership.” Nonetheless the SWP supported the Third World Congress documents. They also supported the Tenth Plenum documents ordering entrism. Questioned on this in a letter by French PCI leader Daniel Renard, a trade unionist who had been expelled by the Stalinist-led CGT, Cannon replied: “We do not see any revisionism there....We consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist.”[134] Cannon later claimed that the SWP leadership “hit the ceiling” and was “flabbergasted” when they heard about the International Secretariat diktat removing the elected Political Bureau of the French party and replacing it with a “parity committee” with an I.S. representative as arbiter.[135] But not only did the SWP do nothing about this travesty, its representative on the I.S. voted for the suspension of the French PB and then later for the expulsion of the PCI from the Fourth International.
Cannon admitted that the SWP consciously soft-pedaled and papered over differences with Pablo in order to boost the latter’s “authority.” A fellow party leader dissuaded Cannon from writing against the conception of “centuries of deformed workers states,” arguing that this would damage Pablo’s “prestige” and that “If it appears in the International that Cannon is attacking Pablo, the whole alliance will appear to be broken.” Cannon related that there were repercussions inside the American party as well, quoting SWP leader Arne Swabeck, who at a plenum “told us that a girl comrade got up in the Chicago branch and asked: ‘What is this? If there are going to be centuries of Stalinism, what’s the sense of my going out and selling ten papers on the street corner?’” “A very good question,” commented Cannon, adding, “But we kept quiet about all this in the party.”[136] After consulting with Cannon, Murry Weiss answered the Johnsonites in Los Angeles (who in 1950 were calling for “Cannonism against Pabloism”), saying: “You don’t need to fear about us rushing into Pablo’s arms; we’re already in his arms.”[137]
This false diplomacy and “prestige” building prevented the necessary fight for political clarity that perhaps could have headed Pablo off at the pass and prevented the destruction of the Fourth International. We have repeatedly and sharply criticized Cannon and the SWP’s conduct during the 1950-53 fight along the lines given above. But it is also necessary to stress that when the decisive hour came, Cannon fought and fought hard. “We are at war with this new revisionism,” he declared in his speech to the November 1953 SWP National Committee plenum. And he hammered away on the key question that had been given only secondary attention in the earlier battles with Pablo— the question of leadership, the party question: “The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part— the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party.”[138]
This has been denigrated, in particular by the British Workers Power group. Thus they publish a snotty article by Emile Gallet, declaring:
The problem with the SWP majority’s line on “Pabloism” was that they failed to get the true measure of the beast. They actually held to the fundamental tenets of the Pablo-Mandel method. However, like Bleibtreu, they balked at the logical conclusion of the third Congress view of Stalinist parties becoming transformed into centrist ones (e.g. Yugoslavia, China), that is, entry into the CPs. They therefore concentrated their fire on the most striking yet superficial aspect of “Pabloism,” which for them “boils down to one point and is concentrated in one point...the question of the party” [our emphasis].[139]
Later on, the author argues that “the SWP, like the rest of the FI, was unable to measure up to the problem of re-applying Trotsky’s method to the post-war world,” and thus “there are major centrist flaws which must lead us to reject any view which sees the SWP or Cannon as revolutionary communists in the post-war period.”[140] This puerile polemic shows just the opposite, that while the SWP had major flaws in its analysis, when it came down to the question of questions, that of the revolutionary leadership, for all their faults they fought liquidationism. And the fact that the party question is “superficial” for the likes of Workers Power shows that they can never measure up to the little finger of a Cannon.
Continue on...
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Notes
85 Michel Pablo, “The Yugoslav Affair,” Fourth International, December 1948, 241.
86 Michel Pablo, “On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia,” SWP International Information Bulletin, December 1949, 2.
87 Ibid., 3.
88 Ibid., 3.
89 Ibid., 27.
90 Michel Pablo, “Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zone,” SWP International Information Bulletin, May 1950.
91 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory” (October 1949), SWP International Information Bulletin, January 1950.
92 Ibid., 32.
93 Ibid., 42.
94 Morris Stein, “The Class Nature of the Buffer Countries in Eastern Europe,” SWP Discussion Bulletin No. 3, June 1950, 8.
95 John G. Wright, “The Importance of Method in the Discussion on the Kremlin-Dominated Buffer Zone,” SWP Discussion Bulletin No. 2, April 1950, 5.
96 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “Draft Resolution on the Development of the Yugoslav Revolution,” SWP International Information Bulletin, September 1950, 12.
97 Murry Weiss, “Report on Yugoslavia and Related Questions,” SWP Discussion Bulletin No. 6, January 1951, 2.
98 Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 135.
99 Joseph Hansen, “The Problem of Eastern Europe,” SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. XII, No. 2, February 1950, reprinted in CPSEER, 33.
100 Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942).
101 Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe.” A photocopy of an original from the archives of Sam Bornstein is in the holdings of the Prometheus Research Library.
102 International Secretariat, Introduction (October 1949), SWP International Information Bulletin, December 1949.
103 “Remarks by M. Stein Opening Political Committee Discussion on IEC Resolution on Eastern Europe” (12 July 1949), SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. XI, No) 5, October 1949, reprinted in CPSEER, 17.
104 Michel Pablo, “Where Are We Going?”, SWP International Information Bulletin, March 1951, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “International Secretariat Documents 1951-1954” (March 1974) (hereafter referred to as I.S. Documents), Vol. 1, 10.
105 Ibid., 8.
106 Ibid., 4-6.
107 Ibid., 6-7 (emphasis in original).
108 Michel Pablo, “The Building of the Revolutionary Party” (excerpts of report to IEC Tenth Plenum), SWP International Information Bulletin, June 1952, reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 34.
109 Quoted in Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, IC Documents, Vol. 1, 18.
110 Michel Pablo, “World Trotskyism Rearms,” Fourth International, November-December 1951, 168-76.
111 The Third World Congress resolution, “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” is available in English in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 25-30, and in French in LCQI, Vol. 4, 147-60. Germain/Mandel’s report, “Trois années de cours nouveau du trotskysme,” appears in LCQI, Vol. 4, 303-26.
112 Cited by James P. Cannon in a speech to the Los Angeles SWP branch, 5 December 1953, SWP Discussion Bulletin A-13 (January 1954), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 159.
113 Michel Pablo, “World Trotskyism Rearms,” op. cit., 172.
114 Michel Pablo, “The Building of the Revolutionary Party,” op. cit., 35.
115 Ibid., 37-39.
116 Michel Pablo, “Rapport sur les applications tactiques de la ligne du IIIe Congrès mondial,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 355-56. These quoted passages were not included in the SWP’s “excerpted” version of Pablo’s report cited above, note 108. This appears to have been a political “edit” job in order to excise the most opportunist aspects, since almost the entire rest of his report is printed. At the time the SWP leadership was still backing Pablo against the French PCI majority.
117 Ernest Mandel, “Trois années de cours nouveau du trotskysme,” op. cit., 305.
118 Unsigned (Ted Grant), “Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth International]” (n.d., ca. summer 1950). A photocopy of this document is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library.
119 Cited in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, op. cit., 225-26.
120 “On the 1966 Split,” Spartacist (English edition) No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86 (a special issue titled “Healyism Implodes”).
121 Pablo’s draft “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation” were adopted by the Ninth Plenum and published as “Thèse sur les perspectives internationales et l’orientation de la IVe Internationale,” Quatrième Internationale, January 1951. They were also published in English in SWP International Information Bulletin, January 1951. They were subsequently adopted with minor amendments by the Third World Congress. See note 111 for publication information on the theses adopted by the congress.
122 “The Struggle of the French Trotskyists Against Pabloite Liquidationism,” SWP Discussion Bulletin A-17 (May 1954), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 1, 25-29.
123 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “What Should Be Modified and What Should Be Maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism? (Ten Theses),” SWP International Information Bulletin, April 1951, reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 16-24. According to the SWP IIB, the “Ten Theses” first appeared in the March 1951 Bulletin of the International Secretariat. “Genesis of Pabloism” contains a discussion of Germain’s theses.
124 “Résolution sur le PCI français,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 331.
125 Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Où résident les divergences,” La Vérité, June 1951, 2-11.
126 Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, IC Documents, Vol. 1, 12.
127 “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” op. cit., 27.
128 Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, op. cit., 16.
129 “Lettre adressée par le secrétariat international au comité central du PCI” (14 January 1952), LCQI, Vol. 4, 401.
130 Rodolphe Prager, Introduction to “Dossier sur la crise et la scission du PCI,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 373.
131 “The Struggle of the French Trotskyists Against Pabloite Liquidationism,” op. cit., 29.
132 “Cannon Versus Pablo,” Workers Vanguard No. 28, 14 September 1973.
133 “Contribution to the Discussion on International Perspectives” (5 June 1951), IC Documents, Vol. 1, 4-6. The SWP apparently never published this document until the Education for Socialists series came out in 1974.
134 James P. Cannon, Letter to Daniel Renard (29 May 1952), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 1, 23-25.
135 James P. Cannon, “Internationalism and the SWP” (18 May 1953 speech to majority caucus of the SWP), Speeches to the Party (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 79; and letter to Sam Gordon (4 June 1953), IC Documents, Vol) 1, 54.
136 James P. Cannon, “Internationalism and the SWP,” op. cit., 80-81.
137 Cited by James P. Cannon, “Report to the May Plenum,” Speeches to the Party, 140.
138 James P. Cannon, “Factional Struggle and Party Leadership” (speech to the November 1953 plenum of the SWP), Speeches to the Party, 181.
139 Emile Gallet, “The SWP (US) in the ‘American Century’—A Case Study of ‘Orthodoxy’,” Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988, 120.
140 Ibid., 122.
Monday, January 10, 2011
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Early German Communist Party Leaderkarl Korsch
Markin comment:
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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Karl Korsch 1921
Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers Councils in Germany
First Published: in Neue Zeitung fur Mittelhüringen, Vol.3, March 1921.
Source: the Collective Action Network Website.
Marked up: by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I
The counterrevolutionary character of political developments in Germany since November 9, 1918 is most clearly demonstrated by the history of the political workers councils. Of those revolutionary councils of workers and soldiers which in November 1918 were generally recognized as platforms of sovereignty, and which exercised the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Reich, the state governments, the municipalities and the army, all that remained in November 1919 was a meager handful of “local workers councils”, deprived of power and the means to exercise it, which were still tolerated – that is the word – as burdensome remains of a revolutionary era already viewed as the “past”, but which in certain regions are still conceded some respect. In this miserable sort of existence the local workers councils survived, and occasionally they still fulfill a certain function in some small towns, whenever a conflict breaks out between the municipality’s administrative organs and the local proletariat. But there have been no authentic political councils among us in the revolutionary sense of the term. It is true that the legal “Enterprise Councils” and those examples that still remain of the institutions formed for various purposes and organized according to the Council principle (Shop Stewards and factory delegates, Council Associations and Federations, Councils of the Unemployed, Councils of Housewives, etc.) still incidentally exercise a political function, just like the trade unions; in their innermost essence, however, they are only economic councils and sometimes they are not even councils. And as for the revolutionary “Soldiers Councils”, it is true that, as was verified in a recent court case, to everyone’s surprise, they have not yet been formally abolished or declared illegal. In practice, however, it has naturally been a long time since soldiers’ councils existed.
Thus, a history of the political workers councils as authentic institutions in Germany ends in late 1919. From then on one can only trace the development of the problem of the political workers councils in the form of the various positions on the question of the political workers councils taken by the diverse political orientations over the course of time, and their vicissitudes.
If we look back on the general development of the political councils in Germany, we can state that, in the chapter on the causes of the rapid decline and disintegration of the Council institutions, together with the well-known main causes, which are naturally found in the domain of general economic and political developments, other concomitant causes of an ideological kind must be mentioned as having played a role: in the brief period of time when the real preconditions for laying the foundations for and building a solid proletarian dictatorship existed in Germany, the opportunity was necessarily wasted due to the fact that, among broad swaths of the revolutionary proletariat, even in its own functioning “Councils”, there was an almost total lack of real understanding concerning the organizational bases of a revolutionary Council System and the essential tasks which it must perform.
1.The most important organizational failing consisted in the fact that, in most cases, the political Councils were not elected by the proletarians themselves organized by factories and trades, as they should have been, but by the socialist parties; and simultaneously, almost on the same day, a “Workers Council” was formed in every town and city in Germany (even the smallest peasant communities of a totally non-proletarian character elected their “Workers Councils” through a kind of political mimicry ... in order to protect their local interests against the interference of the neighboring urban “Workers Councils”). Nevertheless, if afterwards the will to create authentic councils were to have been clearly asserted and seriously invigorated, this shortcoming could very well have been rectified over the following months. But this happened practically nowhere. It is true that some discredited members were “deposed” and that others, deceived romantics of the revolution, withdrew on their own initiative; the great majority of the members of the political workers Councils, however, “stuck” to their posts until, more or less by the force of circumstances, the whole splendor of the Councils fell to earth.
2.The extremely grave consequence which resulted from this ignorance of the tasks of the political councils consisted in the fact that the “sovereign” Councils were in many if not most cases content with a very ineffective “control”, when in reality they should have demanded full powers in the legislative, executive and judicial fields. Due to this self-limitation, not only was the preparation of the later repression and elimination of the Councils by the new organs of the democratically-constituted State power made possible, but, from the very beginning, a good part of the pre-revolutionary powers and laws were left completely intact. In this way, after a brief waiting period, the pre-revolutionary tribunals and the old bureaucracy as well as even a good number of legislative organs of the pre-revolutionary period were able to conduct their old activities without too much interference. Only the “Executive Committee” of the Greater Berlin region (Berlin and its environs) tried, as long as it was capable of doing so, to make a clean break with the old powers; it demanded full legislative and regulatory powers, and allowed only the six “Peoples Delegates” nominated by the workers and soldiers committees of Greater Berlin to form the “Executive”.
On the other hand, most of the urban and rural local communal councils limited themselves to the exercise of mere control functions, even with regard to State and municipal “legislative” bodies. Thus, not only were the organs of the local legislative branch (elected in Prussia, and elsewhere as well, in accordance with the Three Estates voting law!) and the legislative organs of the Reich and all the larger states and most (but not all!) of the smaller ones not abolished, but they were even granted legal recognition; precisely the same thing had previously taken place with respect to the executive organs of the Reich, the states and the municipalities (regional Councils, presidents, etc.), with only purely sporadic dismissals taking place and the prevailing attitude being restricted to a certain “control” of their activities, becoming less effective with each passing day; and, in precisely the same way, a complete distrust towards “independent jurisdiction” was manifest, and the controlling organs only declared they were satisfied when, during the first period, this jurisdiction gave no signs of life. Together with this great lack of clarity with respect to Council power on the part of the Councils’ own local representatives, a great deal of the fault with regard to these sins of omission lies with the “Council of Peoples Commissars”, which was hostile to the Councils; and even the “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin, later so revolutionary, was not totally blameless either, since on November 11, 1918 it promulgated an appeal whose first sentence reads: “All the communal authorities of the various Länder, of the entire Reich, and of the army are to continue in their activities.” Such was the lack of clarity which, during the first period immediately following the November events, prevailed with respect to the essential tasks of the Council dictatorship, even among the most renowned defenders of the revolutionary idea of the Councils in Germany.
3.Another point where understanding was lacking regarding the tasks of the political Councils and which also had fatal consequences in the subsequent period, consisted in the fact that no one knew how to distinguish the tasks of the political Councils from those of the economic Councils, a distinction which is totally necessary in the period of transition from a capitalist order to a socialist order of society. Many months after November the greatest lack of clarity continued to persist concerning this distinction, which enabled the government, the bourgeoisie, the SPD, the trade unions and other open or disguised enemies of the Council System to manipulate the Workers Councils by successively confronting them with their economic and political tasks (thus, for example, for a certain period at the beginning of 1919, some leading right wing members of the socialist party demanded that the Councils be restricted to “economic” tasks, while on the other hand the leaders of the right wing socialist trade unions sought to restrict the Councils to “political” tasks). This entire trend culminated in Article 165 of the new Reich Constitution, which, together with the workers councils restricted to purely economic tasks (enterprise councils, territorial workers councils, Reich workers councils), also envisioned the creation of various economic councils (territorial economic Councils, Economic Council of the Reich) which would authorize and promote “far-reaching socio-political legislative proposals” and which would also be granted certain “jurisdictions of administration and control”. As a result, in these provisions of the Reich Constitution not only did the whole economic system of the councils find written expression, but so too did the whole political system of the Councils which, in post-revolutionary Germany, became a legal institution.
II
If we now follow the vicissitudes of political power in particular, we can distinguish: 1) the period of the Councils properly speaking, from November 1918 until the First Congress of the Councils on December 16, 1918. This period of provisional Council rule was followed, after the elections for the National Assembly on January 18, 1919 and for the executive of the National Assembly on February 6, 1919 in Weimar, by 2) the period of struggle between the democratic principle and the Council principle. This period came to a conclusion with the definitive government challenge to the economic system of the Councils, under the pressure of the great general strike in the Rhineland, Westphalia, central Germany and Greater Berlin at the end of February and the beginning of March 1919. Then came 3) the period of the extinction of the remains of the political institutions of the Councils, a period which lasted until the end of 1919 (the Second Congress of the Councils was held on April 8, 1919!); and 4) the survival of the political idea of the Councils, in other forms, to the present.
These four stages of the political evolution of the Councils can be more fully characterized as follows:
During the first period, both the extreme right as well as the center, the SPD and the USPD right wing, pressed fervently and anxiously for the National Assembly. But at the same time the idea of the Councils was surging: extensive circles reaching even to the highest layers of the intelligentsia and wealth, spoke, wrote and dreamed of the Council principle as a supreme organic principle, in opposition to the mechanical procedure of democracy, with its slip-of-paper voting. This went so far as to lead to the founding of “Humanist Workers Councils” and things of that sort. The sovereignty of the Councils was then universally recognized as a provisional condition that would last until the constitution of a National Assembly.
In terms of institutions, during this period there were:
1.the Council of People’s Commissars, elected by the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, which comprised the Executive, and later also exercised the Legislative power;
2.the Executive Committee of Greater Berlin as a municipal Workers Council;
3.territorial Executive Workers Councils in all the population centers of each state;
4.local Workers Councils; and
5.rural and property-owners councils, in all rural and urban communities.
In addition to the above:
a.“Workers Councils” in every large factory or industrial complex; in the big cities these met in plenary assemblies that elected their Executive Committees and imposed upon the latter strict mandates and resolutions;
b.“Soldiers Councils” in every military detachment, organized and coordinated by company, battalion, etc. These were represented at the First Congress of Councils, where they passionately demanded the National Assembly and where they won recognition of the so-called “Hamburg Seven Points” concerning military command. [1] Later, at the beginning of March 1919, they also held their own “General Reich Congress of Soldiers Councils” in Berlin. Shortly thereafter they quickly disappeared almost without a trace, in step with the dissolution of the remains of the old army.
The First Congress of Councils in 1918 (which Däumig called a “suicide club”) almost completely relinquished political power. It voted for elections to a National Assembly slated for January 19, 1919; until that date it handed over Executive and Legislative powers to the Council of People’s Commissars, and elected a “Central Council” whose powers were limited to minor jurisdictions with nearly non-existent powers of control, after the fashion of the old central German Councils, and in which neither the communists nor the independents were represented (which consequently also led to the resignation of the three USPD people’s commissars). This Central Council (composed of members of the SPD, with Cohen-Reuss as its president) was dragging out its colorless and insipid existence – as we immediately expected – until the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920. It only yielded its powers over the Reich to the National Assembly which met at the beginning of February, and handed over its powers in Prussia to the National Assembly of Prussia which convened in mid-March, but it continued to exist; it still convoked the Second Congress of Councils, but retreated whenever the least insinuation of government power was brought up, and proceeded on its own initiative to enact a restriction of the Councils, limiting their tasks to purely economic affairs through the creation of community-labor “chambers of labor” (which were later rejected by the general assembly of the SPD and by the National Assembly of Weimar and which today, however, have undergone something of a resurrection in the current government proposals concerning the constitution of higher economic Councils, territorial economic Councils and a Reich economic Council). Along with this Central Council, the revolutionary “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin still existed (composed of members of the SPD, the USPD, the KPD and the democratic parties; and later also the USP and KPD with Däumig, Müller, etc., as presidents) more or less illegally, based on the plenary assembly of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, until it was violently expelled by Noske’s troops on November 6, 1919 from the offices it had originally been assigned in a government building; then it moved, following a brief period of complete illegality, to Münzstrasse, where it continued to conduct business as a “Council Central”, and today is the “VKPD Trade Union Central”.
III
On January 11, 1919, Noske entered Berlin. The 19th, elections for the National Assembly! A bourgeois majority! Nonetheless, the great general strike movements of February and March came to have great political significance for both the socialization question as well as the Councils. Throughout this period the political newspapers were filled with the most violent polemics concerning possible points of agreement between “the Council System and the parliamentary-democratic system”. Some elements (the majority of the USPD, some members of the SPD and some democrats) wanted to “find a place for the Councils in the constitution”, that is, to introduce, alongside the democratic parliament (as a chamber of consumers), a chamber of producers in accordance with the Council principle (a chamber of labor); others, individually (the Hamburg communist Dr. Laufenberg, for example), wanted to do the opposite, to find a place for parliament, as representative of bourgeois interests, in the Council System; and there were also other diverse positions between these two outlooks (some of which are still making the rounds today among numerous people, disappearing and reappearing when the time is ripe). The only consistent supporters of the political system of the Councils as a form of the rule of the dictatorship of the proletariat were the recently created KPD and the sections of the USPD grouped around Däumig and his journal Der Arbeiterrat (The Workers Council). But even the supporters of the revolutionary vocation of the Councils ended up making many concessions in practice, for the purpose of staying alive as communal Workers Councils and to continue to receive public subsidies. Such communal Workers Councils had nothing to do with the revolutionary idea of the Councils, and instead served to discredit it. These “Political Workers Councils” no longer carried out any “illegal” planned projects on a large scale; in short, they passed from their first stage as spokesmen of revolutionary demands, when the momentary political situation seemed favorable, to sink below the surface again as the revolutionary barometer fell. With respect to the revolution, their practical activity was futile enough; they usually played the role of intermediary between the authorities and the public, and organized the supply of food, coal, housing and expropriations and even the formation of civil guards, as auxiliary organs. The warnings of the leaders of the Council Centrals, calling for an end to this fruitless “positive” work for the revolution, and for a strict focus on revolutionary agitation and the preparation of revolutionary actions, for most part had no significant impact of any kind.
The Second Council Congress, held on April 8, 1919, could not affect the course of this development, and in fact did not try to do so, given that the revisionist, majority-socialist element, which was basically hostile to the Councils, now openly supported other arrangements. It is true that the Central Council, which had already in January tried to declare the communal Workers Councils extinct after the introduction of universal suffrage, was made responsible for fighting to preserve the communal Workers Councils as control offices by a Congress resolution. But these last remains of political Councils lost their miserable prerogatives almost everywhere during the course of the year; in most cases their end was imposed by the fact that they lost their public subsidies. And on this reef of the financial question the feeble attempt by the Central Council, in October 1919, to convoke elections for a Third Council Congress also came to grief.
From that moment on, the political movement of the Councils was totally transformed into an economic movement of the Councils, above all in the struggle over the Enterprise Councils. At the same time, the supporters of the “pure council movement” (the USPD left) continued to attempt to oppose the isolated system of enterprise councils created by legislation, with a “revolutionary Council organization” (that is, a unity organically articulated by industrial sectors and economic regions, of Councils and regional offices which, regardless of party or trade union affiliation, were to be conceived solely in their role as revolutionary Councils), and to transfigure this Council organization so that it should be the bearer of not just the economic idea but also the political idea of the Councils. They were supposed to become the specific organization of the class of the revolutionary proletariat, at both the economic and the political levels. But this attempt, in which the communist party quickly ceased to participate, only had a temporary practical impact in certain industrial centers (Greater Berlin, central Germany, Rhineland-Westphalia), and can today be judged as a failure. Other attempts occasionally undertaken in situations judged to be opportune by the KPD and groups further to the left, for the purpose of getting the working class, “over the heads of the party and trade union leaders”, to demand new elections to revolutionary political Workers Councils, also failed. In Germany today there is no longer an “independent Council movement”. The political Councils have completely disappeared, the economic Councils exist only as legal representative bodies of the workers (Enterprise Councils), which are under the influence of the trade unions, are usually elected along party lines, and often also congeal into fractions based on party membership. Parliamentarism, the party and the trade union system have thus obtained, externally, a total victory over the revolutionary “Council System”, and it is only underground where, in the consciousness of the suffering masses, the embers of the idea of the revolutionary Council System continue to smolder, together with the idea of the revolution, in an insoluble unity. On the day of revolutionary action this idea will re-arise like the Phoenix from the ashes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note
1. The “Hamburg Points” stipulated that the power of command over the army and the navy be transferred to the Council of People’s Commissars under the control of the Central Council; that the symbols of rank be abolished; that the carrying of arms off-duty be prohibited; that the responsibility for the troops’ loyalty be transferred to the Soldiers Council; that military commanders be elected; that the existing army be abolished; and that a people’s militia be formed as soon as possible. The Congress ratified these points. (Author’s note)
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Karl Korsch 1921
Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers Councils in Germany
First Published: in Neue Zeitung fur Mittelhüringen, Vol.3, March 1921.
Source: the Collective Action Network Website.
Marked up: by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I
The counterrevolutionary character of political developments in Germany since November 9, 1918 is most clearly demonstrated by the history of the political workers councils. Of those revolutionary councils of workers and soldiers which in November 1918 were generally recognized as platforms of sovereignty, and which exercised the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Reich, the state governments, the municipalities and the army, all that remained in November 1919 was a meager handful of “local workers councils”, deprived of power and the means to exercise it, which were still tolerated – that is the word – as burdensome remains of a revolutionary era already viewed as the “past”, but which in certain regions are still conceded some respect. In this miserable sort of existence the local workers councils survived, and occasionally they still fulfill a certain function in some small towns, whenever a conflict breaks out between the municipality’s administrative organs and the local proletariat. But there have been no authentic political councils among us in the revolutionary sense of the term. It is true that the legal “Enterprise Councils” and those examples that still remain of the institutions formed for various purposes and organized according to the Council principle (Shop Stewards and factory delegates, Council Associations and Federations, Councils of the Unemployed, Councils of Housewives, etc.) still incidentally exercise a political function, just like the trade unions; in their innermost essence, however, they are only economic councils and sometimes they are not even councils. And as for the revolutionary “Soldiers Councils”, it is true that, as was verified in a recent court case, to everyone’s surprise, they have not yet been formally abolished or declared illegal. In practice, however, it has naturally been a long time since soldiers’ councils existed.
Thus, a history of the political workers councils as authentic institutions in Germany ends in late 1919. From then on one can only trace the development of the problem of the political workers councils in the form of the various positions on the question of the political workers councils taken by the diverse political orientations over the course of time, and their vicissitudes.
If we look back on the general development of the political councils in Germany, we can state that, in the chapter on the causes of the rapid decline and disintegration of the Council institutions, together with the well-known main causes, which are naturally found in the domain of general economic and political developments, other concomitant causes of an ideological kind must be mentioned as having played a role: in the brief period of time when the real preconditions for laying the foundations for and building a solid proletarian dictatorship existed in Germany, the opportunity was necessarily wasted due to the fact that, among broad swaths of the revolutionary proletariat, even in its own functioning “Councils”, there was an almost total lack of real understanding concerning the organizational bases of a revolutionary Council System and the essential tasks which it must perform.
1.The most important organizational failing consisted in the fact that, in most cases, the political Councils were not elected by the proletarians themselves organized by factories and trades, as they should have been, but by the socialist parties; and simultaneously, almost on the same day, a “Workers Council” was formed in every town and city in Germany (even the smallest peasant communities of a totally non-proletarian character elected their “Workers Councils” through a kind of political mimicry ... in order to protect their local interests against the interference of the neighboring urban “Workers Councils”). Nevertheless, if afterwards the will to create authentic councils were to have been clearly asserted and seriously invigorated, this shortcoming could very well have been rectified over the following months. But this happened practically nowhere. It is true that some discredited members were “deposed” and that others, deceived romantics of the revolution, withdrew on their own initiative; the great majority of the members of the political workers Councils, however, “stuck” to their posts until, more or less by the force of circumstances, the whole splendor of the Councils fell to earth.
2.The extremely grave consequence which resulted from this ignorance of the tasks of the political councils consisted in the fact that the “sovereign” Councils were in many if not most cases content with a very ineffective “control”, when in reality they should have demanded full powers in the legislative, executive and judicial fields. Due to this self-limitation, not only was the preparation of the later repression and elimination of the Councils by the new organs of the democratically-constituted State power made possible, but, from the very beginning, a good part of the pre-revolutionary powers and laws were left completely intact. In this way, after a brief waiting period, the pre-revolutionary tribunals and the old bureaucracy as well as even a good number of legislative organs of the pre-revolutionary period were able to conduct their old activities without too much interference. Only the “Executive Committee” of the Greater Berlin region (Berlin and its environs) tried, as long as it was capable of doing so, to make a clean break with the old powers; it demanded full legislative and regulatory powers, and allowed only the six “Peoples Delegates” nominated by the workers and soldiers committees of Greater Berlin to form the “Executive”.
On the other hand, most of the urban and rural local communal councils limited themselves to the exercise of mere control functions, even with regard to State and municipal “legislative” bodies. Thus, not only were the organs of the local legislative branch (elected in Prussia, and elsewhere as well, in accordance with the Three Estates voting law!) and the legislative organs of the Reich and all the larger states and most (but not all!) of the smaller ones not abolished, but they were even granted legal recognition; precisely the same thing had previously taken place with respect to the executive organs of the Reich, the states and the municipalities (regional Councils, presidents, etc.), with only purely sporadic dismissals taking place and the prevailing attitude being restricted to a certain “control” of their activities, becoming less effective with each passing day; and, in precisely the same way, a complete distrust towards “independent jurisdiction” was manifest, and the controlling organs only declared they were satisfied when, during the first period, this jurisdiction gave no signs of life. Together with this great lack of clarity with respect to Council power on the part of the Councils’ own local representatives, a great deal of the fault with regard to these sins of omission lies with the “Council of Peoples Commissars”, which was hostile to the Councils; and even the “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin, later so revolutionary, was not totally blameless either, since on November 11, 1918 it promulgated an appeal whose first sentence reads: “All the communal authorities of the various Länder, of the entire Reich, and of the army are to continue in their activities.” Such was the lack of clarity which, during the first period immediately following the November events, prevailed with respect to the essential tasks of the Council dictatorship, even among the most renowned defenders of the revolutionary idea of the Councils in Germany.
3.Another point where understanding was lacking regarding the tasks of the political Councils and which also had fatal consequences in the subsequent period, consisted in the fact that no one knew how to distinguish the tasks of the political Councils from those of the economic Councils, a distinction which is totally necessary in the period of transition from a capitalist order to a socialist order of society. Many months after November the greatest lack of clarity continued to persist concerning this distinction, which enabled the government, the bourgeoisie, the SPD, the trade unions and other open or disguised enemies of the Council System to manipulate the Workers Councils by successively confronting them with their economic and political tasks (thus, for example, for a certain period at the beginning of 1919, some leading right wing members of the socialist party demanded that the Councils be restricted to “economic” tasks, while on the other hand the leaders of the right wing socialist trade unions sought to restrict the Councils to “political” tasks). This entire trend culminated in Article 165 of the new Reich Constitution, which, together with the workers councils restricted to purely economic tasks (enterprise councils, territorial workers councils, Reich workers councils), also envisioned the creation of various economic councils (territorial economic Councils, Economic Council of the Reich) which would authorize and promote “far-reaching socio-political legislative proposals” and which would also be granted certain “jurisdictions of administration and control”. As a result, in these provisions of the Reich Constitution not only did the whole economic system of the councils find written expression, but so too did the whole political system of the Councils which, in post-revolutionary Germany, became a legal institution.
II
If we now follow the vicissitudes of political power in particular, we can distinguish: 1) the period of the Councils properly speaking, from November 1918 until the First Congress of the Councils on December 16, 1918. This period of provisional Council rule was followed, after the elections for the National Assembly on January 18, 1919 and for the executive of the National Assembly on February 6, 1919 in Weimar, by 2) the period of struggle between the democratic principle and the Council principle. This period came to a conclusion with the definitive government challenge to the economic system of the Councils, under the pressure of the great general strike in the Rhineland, Westphalia, central Germany and Greater Berlin at the end of February and the beginning of March 1919. Then came 3) the period of the extinction of the remains of the political institutions of the Councils, a period which lasted until the end of 1919 (the Second Congress of the Councils was held on April 8, 1919!); and 4) the survival of the political idea of the Councils, in other forms, to the present.
These four stages of the political evolution of the Councils can be more fully characterized as follows:
During the first period, both the extreme right as well as the center, the SPD and the USPD right wing, pressed fervently and anxiously for the National Assembly. But at the same time the idea of the Councils was surging: extensive circles reaching even to the highest layers of the intelligentsia and wealth, spoke, wrote and dreamed of the Council principle as a supreme organic principle, in opposition to the mechanical procedure of democracy, with its slip-of-paper voting. This went so far as to lead to the founding of “Humanist Workers Councils” and things of that sort. The sovereignty of the Councils was then universally recognized as a provisional condition that would last until the constitution of a National Assembly.
In terms of institutions, during this period there were:
1.the Council of People’s Commissars, elected by the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, which comprised the Executive, and later also exercised the Legislative power;
2.the Executive Committee of Greater Berlin as a municipal Workers Council;
3.territorial Executive Workers Councils in all the population centers of each state;
4.local Workers Councils; and
5.rural and property-owners councils, in all rural and urban communities.
In addition to the above:
a.“Workers Councils” in every large factory or industrial complex; in the big cities these met in plenary assemblies that elected their Executive Committees and imposed upon the latter strict mandates and resolutions;
b.“Soldiers Councils” in every military detachment, organized and coordinated by company, battalion, etc. These were represented at the First Congress of Councils, where they passionately demanded the National Assembly and where they won recognition of the so-called “Hamburg Seven Points” concerning military command. [1] Later, at the beginning of March 1919, they also held their own “General Reich Congress of Soldiers Councils” in Berlin. Shortly thereafter they quickly disappeared almost without a trace, in step with the dissolution of the remains of the old army.
The First Congress of Councils in 1918 (which Däumig called a “suicide club”) almost completely relinquished political power. It voted for elections to a National Assembly slated for January 19, 1919; until that date it handed over Executive and Legislative powers to the Council of People’s Commissars, and elected a “Central Council” whose powers were limited to minor jurisdictions with nearly non-existent powers of control, after the fashion of the old central German Councils, and in which neither the communists nor the independents were represented (which consequently also led to the resignation of the three USPD people’s commissars). This Central Council (composed of members of the SPD, with Cohen-Reuss as its president) was dragging out its colorless and insipid existence – as we immediately expected – until the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920. It only yielded its powers over the Reich to the National Assembly which met at the beginning of February, and handed over its powers in Prussia to the National Assembly of Prussia which convened in mid-March, but it continued to exist; it still convoked the Second Congress of Councils, but retreated whenever the least insinuation of government power was brought up, and proceeded on its own initiative to enact a restriction of the Councils, limiting their tasks to purely economic affairs through the creation of community-labor “chambers of labor” (which were later rejected by the general assembly of the SPD and by the National Assembly of Weimar and which today, however, have undergone something of a resurrection in the current government proposals concerning the constitution of higher economic Councils, territorial economic Councils and a Reich economic Council). Along with this Central Council, the revolutionary “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin still existed (composed of members of the SPD, the USPD, the KPD and the democratic parties; and later also the USP and KPD with Däumig, Müller, etc., as presidents) more or less illegally, based on the plenary assembly of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, until it was violently expelled by Noske’s troops on November 6, 1919 from the offices it had originally been assigned in a government building; then it moved, following a brief period of complete illegality, to Münzstrasse, where it continued to conduct business as a “Council Central”, and today is the “VKPD Trade Union Central”.
III
On January 11, 1919, Noske entered Berlin. The 19th, elections for the National Assembly! A bourgeois majority! Nonetheless, the great general strike movements of February and March came to have great political significance for both the socialization question as well as the Councils. Throughout this period the political newspapers were filled with the most violent polemics concerning possible points of agreement between “the Council System and the parliamentary-democratic system”. Some elements (the majority of the USPD, some members of the SPD and some democrats) wanted to “find a place for the Councils in the constitution”, that is, to introduce, alongside the democratic parliament (as a chamber of consumers), a chamber of producers in accordance with the Council principle (a chamber of labor); others, individually (the Hamburg communist Dr. Laufenberg, for example), wanted to do the opposite, to find a place for parliament, as representative of bourgeois interests, in the Council System; and there were also other diverse positions between these two outlooks (some of which are still making the rounds today among numerous people, disappearing and reappearing when the time is ripe). The only consistent supporters of the political system of the Councils as a form of the rule of the dictatorship of the proletariat were the recently created KPD and the sections of the USPD grouped around Däumig and his journal Der Arbeiterrat (The Workers Council). But even the supporters of the revolutionary vocation of the Councils ended up making many concessions in practice, for the purpose of staying alive as communal Workers Councils and to continue to receive public subsidies. Such communal Workers Councils had nothing to do with the revolutionary idea of the Councils, and instead served to discredit it. These “Political Workers Councils” no longer carried out any “illegal” planned projects on a large scale; in short, they passed from their first stage as spokesmen of revolutionary demands, when the momentary political situation seemed favorable, to sink below the surface again as the revolutionary barometer fell. With respect to the revolution, their practical activity was futile enough; they usually played the role of intermediary between the authorities and the public, and organized the supply of food, coal, housing and expropriations and even the formation of civil guards, as auxiliary organs. The warnings of the leaders of the Council Centrals, calling for an end to this fruitless “positive” work for the revolution, and for a strict focus on revolutionary agitation and the preparation of revolutionary actions, for most part had no significant impact of any kind.
The Second Council Congress, held on April 8, 1919, could not affect the course of this development, and in fact did not try to do so, given that the revisionist, majority-socialist element, which was basically hostile to the Councils, now openly supported other arrangements. It is true that the Central Council, which had already in January tried to declare the communal Workers Councils extinct after the introduction of universal suffrage, was made responsible for fighting to preserve the communal Workers Councils as control offices by a Congress resolution. But these last remains of political Councils lost their miserable prerogatives almost everywhere during the course of the year; in most cases their end was imposed by the fact that they lost their public subsidies. And on this reef of the financial question the feeble attempt by the Central Council, in October 1919, to convoke elections for a Third Council Congress also came to grief.
From that moment on, the political movement of the Councils was totally transformed into an economic movement of the Councils, above all in the struggle over the Enterprise Councils. At the same time, the supporters of the “pure council movement” (the USPD left) continued to attempt to oppose the isolated system of enterprise councils created by legislation, with a “revolutionary Council organization” (that is, a unity organically articulated by industrial sectors and economic regions, of Councils and regional offices which, regardless of party or trade union affiliation, were to be conceived solely in their role as revolutionary Councils), and to transfigure this Council organization so that it should be the bearer of not just the economic idea but also the political idea of the Councils. They were supposed to become the specific organization of the class of the revolutionary proletariat, at both the economic and the political levels. But this attempt, in which the communist party quickly ceased to participate, only had a temporary practical impact in certain industrial centers (Greater Berlin, central Germany, Rhineland-Westphalia), and can today be judged as a failure. Other attempts occasionally undertaken in situations judged to be opportune by the KPD and groups further to the left, for the purpose of getting the working class, “over the heads of the party and trade union leaders”, to demand new elections to revolutionary political Workers Councils, also failed. In Germany today there is no longer an “independent Council movement”. The political Councils have completely disappeared, the economic Councils exist only as legal representative bodies of the workers (Enterprise Councils), which are under the influence of the trade unions, are usually elected along party lines, and often also congeal into fractions based on party membership. Parliamentarism, the party and the trade union system have thus obtained, externally, a total victory over the revolutionary “Council System”, and it is only underground where, in the consciousness of the suffering masses, the embers of the idea of the revolutionary Council System continue to smolder, together with the idea of the revolution, in an insoluble unity. On the day of revolutionary action this idea will re-arise like the Phoenix from the ashes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note
1. The “Hamburg Points” stipulated that the power of command over the army and the navy be transferred to the Council of People’s Commissars under the control of the Central Council; that the symbols of rank be abolished; that the carrying of arms off-duty be prohibited; that the responsibility for the troops’ loyalty be transferred to the Soldiers Council; that military commanders be elected; that the existing army be abolished; and that a people’s militia be formed as soon as possible. The Congress ratified these points. (Author’s note)
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917) -The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International (1914)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
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V. I. Lenin
The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33 November 1, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat, checked against the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 35-41.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The gravest feature of the present crisis is that the majority of official representatives of European socialism have succumbed to bourgeois nationalism, to chauvinism. It is with good reason that the bourgeois press of all countries writes of them now with derision, now with condescending praise. To anyone who wants to remain a socialist there can be no more important duty than to reveal the causes of this crisis in socialism and analyse the tasks of the International.
There are such that are afraid to admit that the crisis or, to put it more accurately, the collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism.
Reference is made to the unanimity, for instance, among French socialists, and to the fact that the old groups in socialism have supposedly changed their stands in the question of the war. Such references, however, are groundless.
Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient; making a fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle, for fear of repelling the “broad masses of the population”(meaning the petty bourgeoisie)—such, doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. And it is from such soil that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most Second International leaders has developed. Observers representing the most various points of view have long noted that the opportunists are in fact prevalent in the Second International’s leadership. The war has merely brought out, rapidly and saliently, the true measure of this prevalence. There is nothing surprising in the extraordinary acuteness of the crisis having led to a series of reshufflings within the old groups. On the whole, however, such changes have affected only individuals. The trends within socialism have remained the same.
Complete unanimity does not exist among French socialists. Even Vaillant, who, with Guesde, Plekhanov, Hervé and others, is following a chauvinist line, has had to admit that he has received a number of letters of protest from French socialists, who say that the war is imperialist in character and that the French bourgeoisie is to blame for its outbreak no less than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Nor should it be overlooked that these voices of protest are being smothered, not only by triumphant opportunism, but also by the military censorship. With the British, the Hyndman group (the British Social-Democrats—the British Socialist Party [2]) has completely sunk into chauvinism, as have also most of the semi-liberal leaders of the trade unions. Resistance to chauvinism has come from MacDonald and Keir Hardie of the opportunist Independent Labour Party.[3] This, of course, is an exception to the rule. However, certain revolutionary Social-Democrats who have long been in opposition to Hyndman have now left the British Socialist Party. With the Germans the situation is clear: the opportunists have won; they are jubilant, and feel quite in their element. Headed by Kautsky, the “Centre” has succumbed to opportunism and is defending it with the most hypocritical, vulgar and smug sophistry. Protests have come from the revolutionary Social-Democrats—Mehring, Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, and a number of unidentified voices in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland. In Italy, the line-up is clear too: the extreme opportunists, Bissolati and Co. stand for “fatherland”, for Guesde-Vaillant-Plekhanov-Hervé. The revolutionary Social-Democrats (the Socialist Party), with Avanti! at their head, are combating chauvinism and are exposing the bourgeois and selfish nature of the calls for war. They have the support of the vast majority of progressive workers.[4] In Russia, the extreme opportunists of the liquidators’ camp[5] have already raised their voices, in public lectures and the press, in defence of chauvinism. P. Maslov and Y. Smirnov are defending tsarism on the pretext that the fatherland must be defended. (Germany, you see, is threatening to impose trade agreements on “us” at swordpoint, whereas tsarism, we are expected to believe, has not been using the sword, the knout and the gallows to stifle the economic, political and national life of nine-tenths of Russia’s population!) They justify socialists participating in reactionary bourgeois governments, and their approval of war credits today and more armaments tomorrow! Plekhanov has slid into nationalism, and is endeavouring to mask his Russian chauvinism with a Francophile attitude, and so has Alexinsky. To judge from the Paris Golos,[6] Martov is behaving with more decency than the rest of this crowd, and has come out in opposition to both German and French chauvinism, to Vorwärts, Mr. Hyndman and Maslov, but is afraid to come out resolutely against international opportunism as a whole, and against the German Social-Democratic Centrist group, its most “influential” champion. The attempts to present volunteer service in the army as performance of a socialist duty (see the Paris declaration of a group of Russian volunteers consisting of Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also a declaration by Polish Social-Democrats, Leder, and others) have had the backing of Plekhanov alone. These attempts have been condemned by the majority of our Paris Party group.[7] The leading article in this issue[1] will inform readers of our Party Central Committee’s stand. To preclude any misunderstanding, the following facts relating to the history of our Party’s views and their formulation must be stated here. After overcoming tremendous difficulties in re-establishing organisational contacts broken by the war, a group of Party members first drew up “theses” and on September 6-8 (New Style) had them circulated among the comrades. Then they were sent to two delegates to the Italo-Swiss Conference in Lugano (September 27), through Swiss Social-Democrats. It was only in mid-October that it became possible to re-establish contacts and formulate the viewpoint of the Party’s Central Committee. The leading article in this issue represents the final wording of the “theses”.
Such, briefly, is the present state of affairs in the European and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. The collapse of the International is a fact. It has been proved conclusively by the polemic, in the press, between the French and German socialists, and acknowledged, not only by the Left Social-Democrats (Mehring and Bremer Bürger Zeitung ), but by moderate Swiss papers (Volksrecht ). Kautsky’s attempts to cover up this collapse are a cowardly subterfuge. The collapse of the International is clearly the collapse of opportunism, which is now captive to the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie’s stand is clear. It is no less clear that the opportunists are simply echoing bourgeois arguments. In addition to what has been said in the leading article, we need only mention the insulting statements in Die Neue Zeit, suggesting that internationalism consists in the workers of one country shooting down the workers of another country, allegedly in defence of the fatherland!
The question of the fatherland—we shall reply to the opportunists—cannot be posed without due consideration of the concrete historical nature of the present war. This is an imperialist war, i.e., it is being waged at a time of the highest development of capitalism, a time of its approaching end. The working class must first “constitute itself within the nation”, the Communist Manifesto declares, emphasising the limits and conditions of our recognition of nationality and fatherland as essential forms of the bourgeois system, and, consequently, of the bourgeois fatherland. The opportunists distort that truth by extending to the period of the end of capitalism that which was true of the period of its rise. With reference to the former period and to the tasks of the proletariat in its struggle to destroy, not feudalism but capitalism, the Communist Manifesto gives a clear and precise formula: “The workingmen have no country.” One can well understand why the opportunists are so afraid to accept this socialist proposition, afraid even, in most cases, openly to reckon with it. The socialist movement cannot triumph within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new and superior forms of human society, in which the legitimate needs and progressive aspirations of the working masses of each nationality will, for the first time, be met through international unity, provided existing national partitions are removed. To the present-day bourgeoisie’s attempts to divide and disunite them by means of hypocritical appeals for the “defence of the fatherland” the class-conscious workers will reply with ever new and persevering efforts to unite the workers of various nations in the struggle to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie of all nations.
The bourgeoisie is duping the masses by disguising imperialist rapine with the old ideology of a “national war”. This deceit is being shown up by the proletariat, which has brought forward its slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war. This was the slogan of the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions, which had in mind, not war in general, but precisely the present war and spoke, not of “defence of the fatherland”, but of “hastening the downfall of capitalism”, of utilising the war-created crisis for this purpose, and of the example provided by the Paris Commune. The latter was an instance of a war of nations being turned into a civil war.
Of course, such a conversion is no easy matter and cannot be accomplished at the whim of one party or another. That conversion, however, is inherent in the objective conditions of capitalism in general, and of the period of the end of capitalism in particular. It is in that direction, and that direction alone, that socialists must conduct their activities. It is not their business to vote for war credits or to encourage chauvinism in their “own” country (and allied countries), but primarily to strive against the chauvinism of their “own” bourgeoisie, without confining themselves to legal forms of struggle when the crisis has matured and the bourgeoisie has itself taken away the legality it has created. Such is the line of action that leads to civil war, and will bring about civil war at one moment or another of the European conflagration.
War is no chance happening, no “sin” as is thought by Christian priests (who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism, humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for “peace at any price"! Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication, a piece of philistine “mythology”(as Golos aptly puts it). The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together, not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries. And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the next one.
The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “turncoats”(as Golos wishes), but of opportunism as well.
The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organising the proletarian masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See pp. 25–34 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] The British Socialist Party was founded in 1911, in Manchester, as a result of the Social-Democratic Federation merging with other socialist groups. The B.S.P. carried on its propaganda in the Marxist spirit, was “not opportunist, and . . . was really independent of the Liberals” (see present edition, Vol. 19, p. 273 Its small membership, however, and its isolation from the masses gave it a somewhat sectarian character.
During the First World War, a sharp struggle flared up in the party between the internationalist trend (William Gallacher, Albert Inkpin, John Maclean, Thomas Rothstein and others) and the social-chauvinist trend led by Hyndman. On a number of questions a section of the internationalists held Centrist views. In February 1916 a group of party members founded the newspaper The Call, which was instrumental in uniting the internationalist elements. When, at its Salford conference in April 1916, the Party denounced the social-chauvinist stand held by Hyndman and his followers, the latter broke away from the Party.
The British Socialist Party acclaimed the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, its members playing a prominent role in the British working people’s movement in support of Soviet Russia, and against the foreign intervention. In 1919 the majority of the local Party branches (98 against 4) declared for affiliation to the Communist International.
The British Socialist Party and the Communist unity group played the leading part in founding the Communist Party of Great Britain. At the first Unity Congress of 1920 the overwhelming majority of the B.S.P. branches merged in the newly founded Communist Party.
[3] The Independent Labour Partya reformist party founded by the leaders of “new trade unions” in 1893, when the strike struggle revived and there was a mounting drive for a labour movement independent of the bourgeois parties. The Party included members of the “new trade unions” and a number of the old trade unions, representatives of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, who were under Fabian influence. The Party’s leader was James Keir Hardie.
From its early days the Independent Labour Party held a bourgeois-reformist stand, concentrating on the parliamentary forms of struggle and parliamentary deals with the Liberals. Characterising this party, Lenin wrote that it was “actually an opportunist party that has always been dependent on the bourgeoisie” (V. I. Lenin, On Britain, Moscow, p. 401).
When the First World War broke out, the Party issued an anti-war manifesto, but shortly afterwards took a social-chauvinist stand.
[4] See Note 20 in Position and Tasks of the Socialist International.
[5] For liquidators see pp. 333-34 of this volume.
[6] Golos (The Voice )—a daily Menshevik paper, published in Paris from September 1914 to January 1915, which followed a Centrist line.
In the early days of the war of 1914-18 Golos published several of Martov’s articles directed against social-chauvinists. After Martov’s swing to the Right, the newspaper came out in defence of the social-chauvinists, preferring “unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those who are irreconcilably hostile to social chauvinism” (p. 113 in this volume)
In January 1915 Golos ceased publication and was replaced by Nashe Slovo (Our Word ).
[7] The Paris group or group for aid the R.S.D.L.P. was formed on November 5 (18), 1908. It separated from the common Menshevik and Bolshevik Paris group, to unite Bolsheviks alone. It was later joined by pro-Party Mensheviks and Vperyod supporters.
During the war the group consisted of N. A. Semashko, M. F. Vladimirsky, I. F. Armand, S. I. Gopner, L. N. Stal, V. K. Taratula, A. S. Shapovalov and others. Led by Lenin, the group took an internationalist stand and waged a vigorous struggle against the imperialist war and the opportunists.
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33 November 1, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat, checked against the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 35-41.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The gravest feature of the present crisis is that the majority of official representatives of European socialism have succumbed to bourgeois nationalism, to chauvinism. It is with good reason that the bourgeois press of all countries writes of them now with derision, now with condescending praise. To anyone who wants to remain a socialist there can be no more important duty than to reveal the causes of this crisis in socialism and analyse the tasks of the International.
There are such that are afraid to admit that the crisis or, to put it more accurately, the collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism.
Reference is made to the unanimity, for instance, among French socialists, and to the fact that the old groups in socialism have supposedly changed their stands in the question of the war. Such references, however, are groundless.
Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient; making a fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle, for fear of repelling the “broad masses of the population”(meaning the petty bourgeoisie)—such, doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. And it is from such soil that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most Second International leaders has developed. Observers representing the most various points of view have long noted that the opportunists are in fact prevalent in the Second International’s leadership. The war has merely brought out, rapidly and saliently, the true measure of this prevalence. There is nothing surprising in the extraordinary acuteness of the crisis having led to a series of reshufflings within the old groups. On the whole, however, such changes have affected only individuals. The trends within socialism have remained the same.
Complete unanimity does not exist among French socialists. Even Vaillant, who, with Guesde, Plekhanov, Hervé and others, is following a chauvinist line, has had to admit that he has received a number of letters of protest from French socialists, who say that the war is imperialist in character and that the French bourgeoisie is to blame for its outbreak no less than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Nor should it be overlooked that these voices of protest are being smothered, not only by triumphant opportunism, but also by the military censorship. With the British, the Hyndman group (the British Social-Democrats—the British Socialist Party [2]) has completely sunk into chauvinism, as have also most of the semi-liberal leaders of the trade unions. Resistance to chauvinism has come from MacDonald and Keir Hardie of the opportunist Independent Labour Party.[3] This, of course, is an exception to the rule. However, certain revolutionary Social-Democrats who have long been in opposition to Hyndman have now left the British Socialist Party. With the Germans the situation is clear: the opportunists have won; they are jubilant, and feel quite in their element. Headed by Kautsky, the “Centre” has succumbed to opportunism and is defending it with the most hypocritical, vulgar and smug sophistry. Protests have come from the revolutionary Social-Democrats—Mehring, Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, and a number of unidentified voices in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland. In Italy, the line-up is clear too: the extreme opportunists, Bissolati and Co. stand for “fatherland”, for Guesde-Vaillant-Plekhanov-Hervé. The revolutionary Social-Democrats (the Socialist Party), with Avanti! at their head, are combating chauvinism and are exposing the bourgeois and selfish nature of the calls for war. They have the support of the vast majority of progressive workers.[4] In Russia, the extreme opportunists of the liquidators’ camp[5] have already raised their voices, in public lectures and the press, in defence of chauvinism. P. Maslov and Y. Smirnov are defending tsarism on the pretext that the fatherland must be defended. (Germany, you see, is threatening to impose trade agreements on “us” at swordpoint, whereas tsarism, we are expected to believe, has not been using the sword, the knout and the gallows to stifle the economic, political and national life of nine-tenths of Russia’s population!) They justify socialists participating in reactionary bourgeois governments, and their approval of war credits today and more armaments tomorrow! Plekhanov has slid into nationalism, and is endeavouring to mask his Russian chauvinism with a Francophile attitude, and so has Alexinsky. To judge from the Paris Golos,[6] Martov is behaving with more decency than the rest of this crowd, and has come out in opposition to both German and French chauvinism, to Vorwärts, Mr. Hyndman and Maslov, but is afraid to come out resolutely against international opportunism as a whole, and against the German Social-Democratic Centrist group, its most “influential” champion. The attempts to present volunteer service in the army as performance of a socialist duty (see the Paris declaration of a group of Russian volunteers consisting of Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also a declaration by Polish Social-Democrats, Leder, and others) have had the backing of Plekhanov alone. These attempts have been condemned by the majority of our Paris Party group.[7] The leading article in this issue[1] will inform readers of our Party Central Committee’s stand. To preclude any misunderstanding, the following facts relating to the history of our Party’s views and their formulation must be stated here. After overcoming tremendous difficulties in re-establishing organisational contacts broken by the war, a group of Party members first drew up “theses” and on September 6-8 (New Style) had them circulated among the comrades. Then they were sent to two delegates to the Italo-Swiss Conference in Lugano (September 27), through Swiss Social-Democrats. It was only in mid-October that it became possible to re-establish contacts and formulate the viewpoint of the Party’s Central Committee. The leading article in this issue represents the final wording of the “theses”.
Such, briefly, is the present state of affairs in the European and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. The collapse of the International is a fact. It has been proved conclusively by the polemic, in the press, between the French and German socialists, and acknowledged, not only by the Left Social-Democrats (Mehring and Bremer Bürger Zeitung ), but by moderate Swiss papers (Volksrecht ). Kautsky’s attempts to cover up this collapse are a cowardly subterfuge. The collapse of the International is clearly the collapse of opportunism, which is now captive to the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie’s stand is clear. It is no less clear that the opportunists are simply echoing bourgeois arguments. In addition to what has been said in the leading article, we need only mention the insulting statements in Die Neue Zeit, suggesting that internationalism consists in the workers of one country shooting down the workers of another country, allegedly in defence of the fatherland!
The question of the fatherland—we shall reply to the opportunists—cannot be posed without due consideration of the concrete historical nature of the present war. This is an imperialist war, i.e., it is being waged at a time of the highest development of capitalism, a time of its approaching end. The working class must first “constitute itself within the nation”, the Communist Manifesto declares, emphasising the limits and conditions of our recognition of nationality and fatherland as essential forms of the bourgeois system, and, consequently, of the bourgeois fatherland. The opportunists distort that truth by extending to the period of the end of capitalism that which was true of the period of its rise. With reference to the former period and to the tasks of the proletariat in its struggle to destroy, not feudalism but capitalism, the Communist Manifesto gives a clear and precise formula: “The workingmen have no country.” One can well understand why the opportunists are so afraid to accept this socialist proposition, afraid even, in most cases, openly to reckon with it. The socialist movement cannot triumph within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new and superior forms of human society, in which the legitimate needs and progressive aspirations of the working masses of each nationality will, for the first time, be met through international unity, provided existing national partitions are removed. To the present-day bourgeoisie’s attempts to divide and disunite them by means of hypocritical appeals for the “defence of the fatherland” the class-conscious workers will reply with ever new and persevering efforts to unite the workers of various nations in the struggle to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie of all nations.
The bourgeoisie is duping the masses by disguising imperialist rapine with the old ideology of a “national war”. This deceit is being shown up by the proletariat, which has brought forward its slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war. This was the slogan of the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions, which had in mind, not war in general, but precisely the present war and spoke, not of “defence of the fatherland”, but of “hastening the downfall of capitalism”, of utilising the war-created crisis for this purpose, and of the example provided by the Paris Commune. The latter was an instance of a war of nations being turned into a civil war.
Of course, such a conversion is no easy matter and cannot be accomplished at the whim of one party or another. That conversion, however, is inherent in the objective conditions of capitalism in general, and of the period of the end of capitalism in particular. It is in that direction, and that direction alone, that socialists must conduct their activities. It is not their business to vote for war credits or to encourage chauvinism in their “own” country (and allied countries), but primarily to strive against the chauvinism of their “own” bourgeoisie, without confining themselves to legal forms of struggle when the crisis has matured and the bourgeoisie has itself taken away the legality it has created. Such is the line of action that leads to civil war, and will bring about civil war at one moment or another of the European conflagration.
War is no chance happening, no “sin” as is thought by Christian priests (who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism, humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for “peace at any price"! Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication, a piece of philistine “mythology”(as Golos aptly puts it). The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together, not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries. And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the next one.
The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “turncoats”(as Golos wishes), but of opportunism as well.
The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organising the proletarian masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See pp. 25–34 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] The British Socialist Party was founded in 1911, in Manchester, as a result of the Social-Democratic Federation merging with other socialist groups. The B.S.P. carried on its propaganda in the Marxist spirit, was “not opportunist, and . . . was really independent of the Liberals” (see present edition, Vol. 19, p. 273 Its small membership, however, and its isolation from the masses gave it a somewhat sectarian character.
During the First World War, a sharp struggle flared up in the party between the internationalist trend (William Gallacher, Albert Inkpin, John Maclean, Thomas Rothstein and others) and the social-chauvinist trend led by Hyndman. On a number of questions a section of the internationalists held Centrist views. In February 1916 a group of party members founded the newspaper The Call, which was instrumental in uniting the internationalist elements. When, at its Salford conference in April 1916, the Party denounced the social-chauvinist stand held by Hyndman and his followers, the latter broke away from the Party.
The British Socialist Party acclaimed the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, its members playing a prominent role in the British working people’s movement in support of Soviet Russia, and against the foreign intervention. In 1919 the majority of the local Party branches (98 against 4) declared for affiliation to the Communist International.
The British Socialist Party and the Communist unity group played the leading part in founding the Communist Party of Great Britain. At the first Unity Congress of 1920 the overwhelming majority of the B.S.P. branches merged in the newly founded Communist Party.
[3] The Independent Labour Partya reformist party founded by the leaders of “new trade unions” in 1893, when the strike struggle revived and there was a mounting drive for a labour movement independent of the bourgeois parties. The Party included members of the “new trade unions” and a number of the old trade unions, representatives of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, who were under Fabian influence. The Party’s leader was James Keir Hardie.
From its early days the Independent Labour Party held a bourgeois-reformist stand, concentrating on the parliamentary forms of struggle and parliamentary deals with the Liberals. Characterising this party, Lenin wrote that it was “actually an opportunist party that has always been dependent on the bourgeoisie” (V. I. Lenin, On Britain, Moscow, p. 401).
When the First World War broke out, the Party issued an anti-war manifesto, but shortly afterwards took a social-chauvinist stand.
[4] See Note 20 in Position and Tasks of the Socialist International.
[5] For liquidators see pp. 333-34 of this volume.
[6] Golos (The Voice )—a daily Menshevik paper, published in Paris from September 1914 to January 1915, which followed a Centrist line.
In the early days of the war of 1914-18 Golos published several of Martov’s articles directed against social-chauvinists. After Martov’s swing to the Right, the newspaper came out in defence of the social-chauvinists, preferring “unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those who are irreconcilably hostile to social chauvinism” (p. 113 in this volume)
In January 1915 Golos ceased publication and was replaced by Nashe Slovo (Our Word ).
[7] The Paris group or group for aid the R.S.D.L.P. was formed on November 5 (18), 1908. It separated from the common Menshevik and Bolshevik Paris group, to unite Bolsheviks alone. It was later joined by pro-Party Mensheviks and Vperyod supporters.
During the war the group consisted of N. A. Semashko, M. F. Vladimirsky, I. F. Armand, S. I. Gopner, L. N. Stal, V. K. Taratula, A. S. Shapovalov and others. Led by Lenin, the group took an internationalist stand and waged a vigorous struggle against the imperialist war and the opportunists.
*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Sojourner Truth
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Sojourner Truth.
February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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February Is Black History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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