From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-On The Organization Question At The Third Congress Of The Communist International (1921) -Introduction-ICL Translator

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:

In the history of the communist movement, since right from the days of Marx and Engels, the question of the organization of the revolution has been intermingled with all the political questions associated with that struggle. For anarchists and others the organization question is sealed with seven seals (or more) but for those of us who stand in the early Bolshevik tradition handed down from the Russian revolution in 1917 it is key. And that question is linked up, sealed up, if you like, with the notion of a vanguard party. These documents and reports from the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921 are a codification of that experience. For those who think that international imperialism, led by the American monster, will crumble on its own, or worst, can be just patched up brand new with a little tweaking don’t read this material, all other read and re-read this stuff until your eyes are sore.
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Report on Organisation, Comintern 1921


Translator’s Introduction

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Written: by Prometheus Research Library.


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We are proud to publish what appears to be the only complete and accurate English translation of the final text of “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work,” and “Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International,” both Resolutions adopted by the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921. In addition we publish as appendices, also for the first time to our knowledge, English translations of the German stenographic record of the reports on and discussion of these Resolutions at the 22nd and 24th sessions of the Congress.

“Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” is one of the great documents of the international communist movement, standing as the codification of communist organizational practice as it was forged by the Bolsheviks and tested in the light of the world’s first successful proletarian revolution. The Third Congress of the Communist International systematized the Russian Bolshevik experience for the fledgling international communist movement, producing both the Organizational Resolution and the “Theses on Tactics” and serving, in the words of Leon Trotsky, as “the highest school of revolutionary strategy.”[1]

The Third Congress met in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921 when the revolutionary wave which had swept Europe in the wake of World War I had nearly receded. The lack of steeled and tested communist parties had proved decisive to the defeat of proletarian revolutions in Germany, Hungary and in part in Italy. The international Social Democracy, reorganized as the Amsterdam-based Second International and still claiming the allegiance of substantial proletarian forces, had shown itself to be for the time an indispensable tool of bourgeois rule. By 1921 a certain temporary stability had been reimposed on the capitalist world: the ruling classes of Europe had learned some lessons from the Russian Bolshevik victory.

The young and untested communist parties still had to learn their lessons from the victory of the Bolsheviks. The left wing of world Social Democracy, as well as a significant section of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, had been won to the communist banner under the impact of the October Revolution. By 1921 large communist parties existed in many countries, but many were “communist” in little more than name, harboring centrist leaders who had followed their membership into the new International only reluctantly. The “Conditions of Admission to the Communist International” (more popularly known as the Twenty-One Conditions) were adopted by the Comintern’s Second Congress in an attempt to separate out this centrist chaff and make the new parties break both programmatically and organizationally with the reformists. The Twenty-One Conditions established democratic centralism as the organizational basis for the Communist International. Yet democratic-centralist organizational norms were only lightly sketched by the Second Congress, which met in July 1920 in the midst of immense revolutionary ferment. Earlier that year the Red Army had turned back the invading Polish Army of Marshal Pilsudski, and as the Congress opened Soviet troops stood at the gates of Warsaw. It was the hope and expectation of the Soviet government and of the Congress delegates (who closely followed the Red Army’s progress on a map in the Congress hall) that the Red Army’s advance would spark a proletarian revolution in Poland. This would have moved the proletarian revolution west to the borders of Germany, with its still unfinished revolutionary developments. Unfortunately this hope proved unfounded and the Third Congress had to take stock of a more somber world situation.

In “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” the Third Congress expanded upon the organizational norms laid out by the Second Congress. V.I. Lenin explained the purpose and importance of this Organizational Resolution in a letter to the German Communists written shortly after the Third Congress completed its work:

In my opinion, the tactical and organisational resolutions of the Third Congress of the Communist International mark a great step forward. Every effort must be exerted to really put both resolutions into effect. This is a difficult matter, but it can and should be done.

First, the Communists had to proclaim their principles to the world. That was done at the First Congress. It was the first step.

The second step was to give the Communist International organisational form and to draw up conditions for affiliation to it-conditions making for real separation from the Centrists, from the direct and indirect agents of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement. That was done at the Second Congress.

At the Third Congress it was necessary to start practical, constructive work, to determine concretely, taking account of the practical experience of the communist struggle already begun, exactly what the line of further activity should be in respect of tactics and of organisation. We have taken this third step. We have an army of Communists all over the world. It is still poorly trained and poorly organised. It would be extremely harmful to forget this truth or be afraid of admitting it. Submitting ourselves to a most careful and rigorous test, and studying the experience of our own movement, we must train this army efficiently; we must organise it properly, and test it in all sorts of manoeuvres, all sorts of battles, in attack and in retreat. We cannot win without this long and hard schooling....

In the overwhelming majority of countries, our parties are still very far from being what real Communist Parties should be; they are far from being real vanguards of the genuinely revolutionary and only revolutionary class, with every single member taking part in the struggle, in the movement, in the everyday life of the masses. But we are aware of this defect, we brought it out most strikingly in the Third Congress resolution on the work of the Party.[2]

In fact Lenin played a major role in the drafting of the Organizational Resolution and can rightly be called its ideological author: the Finnish Communist Otto W. Kuusinen wrote the text under Lenin’s direction, sending him the first draft on 6 June 1921. Lenin made detailed suggestions for reworking this draft and all Lenin’s suggested additions, itemized in a letter to Kuusinen written on 10 June, were subsequently incorporated into the Resolution’s final text. According to the editors of the Collected Works, Lenin also read a second draft of the Resolution sent to him in mid-June, before approving yet another draft on 9 July, the day before the Resolution was first discussed by the Congress.[3]

At that point Lenin suggested two additions to the draft Resolution and these number among the revisions made by the Commission on Organization and finally adopted by the Congress on 12 July. Yet the Commission on Organization made a number of other changes to the text approved by Lenin-in particular a whole new section, “On the Organization of Political Struggles,” was added. To understand the reason for this addition one has to understand the major political disputes that took place at the Third Congress. In the first instance these revolved around the recent tactics of the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD)-the infamous “March Action.”

By 1921 the VKPD had won a following among the coal miners of Mansfeld in central Germany, which was then the country’s center of labor militancy. Strikes and plant occupations swept the region; on 16 March the government deliberately provoked the workers by sending in troops and police. The VKPD responded with a call for armed resistance—a quasi-insurrectionary call. While the workers of Mansfeld fought heroically, if sporadically, in the rest of Germany the VKPD’s call was for the most part unheeded. Yet instead of seeking to retreat in good order, the VKPD made matters worse by calling for a general strike. Isolated strikes by VKPD supporters ensued, and they were easy targets for bourgeois repression. The casualties were very high and a number of VKPD leaders were arrested. Within three months, the VKPD membership dropped by half.

The Comintern had sent the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun (leader of the failed 1919 Revolution in Hungary) to Germany early in March and Kun’s insistence that a communist party always be on the offensive against the bourgeoisie (the so-called “theory of the offensive”) played no small role in inspiring the 1921 “March Action.” Given the disastrous events in Germany, both Lenin and Trotsky saw in Kun’s false “left” current a mortal danger to the future of the Communist International and they resolved to wage a fight against this adventurist current at the Third Congress. According to Clara Zetkin, the leading opponent of the leftists in the German party, before the opening of the Third Congress Lenin spoke to her on the “theory of the offensive” in the following terms:

Is it a theory anyway? Not at all, it is an illusion, it is romanticism, sheer romanticism. That is why it was manufactured in the “land of poets and thinkers,” with the help of my dear Bela, who also belongs to a poetically gifted nation and feels himself obliged to be always more left than the left. We must not versify and dream. We must observe the world economic and political situation soberly, quite soberly, if we wish to take up the struggle against the bourgeoisie and to triumph.[4]

However in the Political Bureau (PB) of the Russian party Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin (the latter a candidate member) originally supported Kun and failed to see the danger that the adventurist theory posed to the young Communist International. While full documentation of the Political Bureau dispute on this question awaits the opening of the archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we do have Trotsky’s account:[5] Lenin obtained Lev Kamenev’s support for his and Trotsky’s position, thus securing a majority against the “left” on the five-man PB. However, in the Russian delegation to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) Karl Radek, along with Zinoviev and Bukharin, generally supported the “left.” Trotsky and Lenin drew Kamenev into meetings of the Russian ECCI delegation, though Kamenev was not formally an ECCI member. Trotsky reports that, for a period of time, the two opposing sides met in separate caucuses, indicating a pre-factional situation. The seriousness with which Lenin viewed the situation is clear from his remarks to a meeting of the ECCI which preceded the Third Congress: “But if the Left succeeded in making Béla Kun’s views prevail, that would destroy Communism.”[6]

In the end, however, the members of the Russian delegation apparently came to some agreement among themselves, compromising on the “Theses on Tactics” and for the most part presenting a united face to the Congress. Clara Zetkin says that, prior to the Congress, Lenin lectured her on the necessity of being lenient with the “left."[7] While Lenin spoke against the “theory of the offensive” on the floor of the Congress, for the most part the battle took place in the various Commissions which met in conjunction with the Congress.[8] The compromise formulations adopted in the various resolutions allowed the “left” to save face.

While combatting a real danger on the left, Lenin and Trotsky also had to wage battles against the centrist elements which were still influential in many parties: the sorting-out process initiated by the Twenty-One Conditions had only just begun. The Congress confirmed the expulsion of VKPD leader Paul Levi, who had publicly and slanderously denounced the party’s course in March as a “Bakuninist putsch” (point 51 of the Organizational Resolution, on party discipline, was obviously written—and amended by the Congress—with Levi in mind). On the “March Action” there was a compromise. While condemning the tactical errors of the VKPD, the “Theses on Tactics” also described the “March Action” as a step forward insofar as it represented the heroic response of a section of the German working class, fighting under communist leadership, to an overt provocation by the bourgeois state. Yet Lenin also insisted that the “Theses on Tactics” firmly endorse Levi’s attempt to apply united-front tactics to Germany-the “Open Letter,” which Levi had authored (with help from Radek) before his expulsion and which had been widely denounced as “opportunist” in the German party.[9] The Open Letter, printed in Die Rote Fahne on 8 January 1921, had proposed joint actions of all German working-class organizations (including the Social Democrats) against the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the pitiful living standards of the German proletariat.

With Germany still very unstable and the German party one of the largest in the Comintern, the perspective of world revolution reduced itself in the first instance to the perspective of a German revolution. Lenin was especially concerned that the German party overcome Kun’s adventuristic pseudo-leftism: the “March Action” fiasco had clearly demonstrated that the party had very little idea of how to win leadership of the majority of the working class away from the defenders of the bourgeois order in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), part of the “yellow” Second International based in Amsterdam.

The party had to find the road to the masses. And the VKPD wasn’t the only party in the International in need of guidance on this question. Most parties had to overcome the paralyzing effects of the social-democratic organizational forms that they had inherited with their membership. Thus the Organizational Resolution explains in extensive, sometimes painful, detail the means for forging the reciprocal ties between the party leadership and the membership, and between the membership and the class, which would allow the communists to involve all their members in ongoing work and prove themselves the best leaders of the proletariat in action. As Lenin wrote in his 10 June letter to Kuusinen:

There is no everyday work (revolutionary work) by every member of the Party.

This is the chief drawback.

To change this is the most difficult job of all.

But this is the most important.[10]

In this letter Lenin urged Kuusinen to find a “real German” comrade to improve the German text of the Resolution and read Kuusinen’s report to the Congress. On 11 June Lenin wrote urgently to Zinoviev to make the same point:

I have just read Kuusinen’s theses and one-half of the article (the report)....

I do insist that he and he alone ((i.e., not Béla Kun)) should be allowed to give a report at this congress without fail.

This is necessary.

He knows and thinks (was sehr selten ist unter den Revolutionären)

([which is a great rarity among revolutionaries])

What needs to be done right away is to find one German, a real one, and give him strict instructions

to make stylistic corrections at once,

and dictate the corrected text to a typist.

And at the congress read out for Kuusinen his article-report....

The German will read it out well. The benefit will be enormous.[11]

Thus it was that at the last moment Wilhelm Koenen of the VKPD was drawn into the redrafting of the Resolution. It was Koenen who gave the reports on the Organizational Resolution to the 22nd and 24th sessions of the Third Congress. Koenen had recently come over to the Communists with the Left Wing of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD) and had given the organizational report at the founding conference of the VKPD in December 1920. Arriving in Moscow in early 1921, Koenen had been co-opted onto the “Smaller Bureau” (Presidium) of the ECCI.[12]

Koenen was certainly a “real German"-and also a supporter of the “theory of the offensive.” In the Report he delivered to the Congress on 10 July (Appendix A, “Report on the Organization Question”) Koenen quotes Béla Kun favorably at least six times and never even mentions Otto Kuusinen or Lenin, the actual authors of the Resolution. Koenen’s opening remarks repeat many of the points that he made in his report to the founding conference of the VKPD.[13] Thus it would appear that the report delivered by Koenen to the Third Congress was not precisely the one prepared by Kuusinen and endorsed by Lenin in his letter to Zinoviev.

Koenen spends the bulk of his Report detailing a number of changes made to the draft Resolution and he explicates some of the Resolution’s points, stressing, for example, the importance of building ties with the revolutionary syndicalist shop stewards movements which then existed in a number of European countries (Koenen had been active in the shop stewards movement in Germany while a leader of the USPD). Yet over half of Koenen’s Report is spent explaining the new section of the Resolution. While Koenen gives lip service to Levi’s “Open Letter,” it is clear from his Report that he viewed this new section, which was incorporated into the final text of the Resolution in a slightly modified form (Section V—“On the Organization of Political Struggles”), as a partial justification of Kun’s “offensive” tactics. Indeed Section V—a highly organizational and hence confused rendition of points better made in the “Theses on Tactics"-is written more turgidly and with much less political depth than the rest of the Organizational Resolution. This section does not appear in the published draft of the Resolution and it is doubtful that it was distributed to the delegates before being introduced to the Congress; we have found no evidence that it was seen by Lenin.[14]

In his 10 July Report Koenen also introduced a Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International. This Resolution, which calls for the strengthening of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, was written at the suggestion of the VKPD delegation. The Congress referred both the draft Organizational Resolution and this new Resolution on the Communist International to a Commission on Organization, which was to meet in two subcommittees the following day.

The Commission on Organization met on 11 July under considerable pressure-they had only one day to make revisions before reporting back to the 24th and final session of the Congress. They made many minor additions and changes to the Resolution, but it is unlikely that by the opening of the 24th session they were able to produce a new printed version incorporating all their changes—even a text in German, which was the language of the draft Resolution and the main language used on the floor of the Congress. Koenen’s report to the 24th session implies that only the change in the section on democratic centralism was available to the delegates. In any event the Congress adopted the Organizational Resolution in this last session as it had been amended by the Commission, including the new section proposed by Koenen. With the Congress now over, the Comintern’s production apparatus must have been under considerable strain to produce the various language texts of the final Resolution before the delegates left Moscow.

It is thus not surprising that there exist discrepancies between the various language versions of the Organizational Resolution and of the Resolution on the Communist International. The stenographic record of the Congress provides the only guide as to the definitive text of these Resolutions, which is why we have appended a translation of the relevant portions of the German-language stenographic report of the Congress.

One provision of the Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International engendered a heated debate at the 24th session, resulting in the only roll-call vote at the Third Congress (see Appendix B). The dispute arose over the composition of the Presidium (at the time called the Smaller Bureau) of the Comintern’s Executive Committee. Point 5 of the draft Resolution allowed the ECCI to co-opt non-ECCI members to its Smaller Bureau. Boris Souvarine, a French delegate speaking in the name of the French, Spanish, Swiss, Yugoslav, Austrian and Australian delegations, opposed this co-option provision. He proposed an amendment limiting Smaller Bureau membership to elected members of the ECCI. Souvarine’s amendment may have been a maneuver against the supporters of the “theory of the offensive”: the only non-ECCI members of the Smaller Bureau at the time were Béla Kun and Koenen himself.[15] Radek, speaking in the name of the entire Russian delegation, vehemently opposed Souvarine’s amendment on the grounds that it did not give the ECCI adequate flexibility. The amendment failed. At that point Zinoviev stepped in with a proposal for a “compromise” which allowed the ECCI to co-opt non-ECCI members to the Smaller Bureau only as an “exception.” Zinoviev’s compromise formulation was adopted overwhelmingly.

We have translated the Resolutions from the German text of the Third Congress Theses published in Hamburg in 1921, the only version which contains Zinoviev’s compromise formulation in the Resolution on the Organization of the CI (see “A Note on the Translation”).

There appears to be one other issue of major controversy relating to the Organizational Resolution at the Third Congress. In Koenen’s Report to the 22nd session (Appendix A, “Report on the Organization Question”), he mentions “certain differences—which, I believe, still cannot be definitively resolved at this Congress—over whether from now on the organizations can finally be built on cells in the factories, as the basis of the organizations.” Koenen goes on to imply that trade-union “cells” would be preferable to “working groups” based on district, or territorial, forms of party organization. Since the bureaucratizing Zinoviev-Stalin faction, and then later the anti-revolutionary Stalin faction, distorted this concept in the direction implied by Koenen, it is worth quoting in full the key provisions of the 1921 Organizational Resolution:

11. In order to carry out daily party work, every party member should as a rule always be part of a smaller working group—a group, a committee, a commission, a board or a collegium, a fraction or cell. Only in this way can party work be properly allocated, directed and carried out.

Participation in the general membership meetings of the local organizations also goes without saying. Under conditions of legality it is not wise to choose to substitute meetings of local delegates for these periodic membership meetings; on the contrary, all members must be required to attend these meetings regularly....

12. Communist nuclei are to be formed for day-to-day work in different areas of party activity: for door-to-door agitation, for party studies, for press work, for literature distribution, for intelligence-gathering, communications, etc.

Communist cells are nuclei for daily communist work in plants and workshops, in trade unions, in workers cooperatives, in military units, etc.—wherever there are at least a few members or candidate members of the Communist Party. If there are several party members in the same plant or trade union, etc., then the cell is expanded into a fraction whose work is directed by the nucleus.

This concept of a disciplined communist working group, variously called a fraction, cell or nucleus-the link between the party and the broad working masses-is key to the Organizational Resolution. In its advocacy of disciplined communist working groups functioning in conjunction with party branches organized on a territorial basis, the Third Congress Resolution follows the organizational norms evolved by the Bolsheviks for work in prerevolutionary Russia:

2. it is desirable that Social Democratic cells in trade unions, which are organized along occupational lines, should function wherever local conditions permit in conjunction with party branches organized on a territorial basis....[16]

In contrast to the resolutions of the later Stalinized Comintern, the Third Congress Organizational Resolution does not require that communist parties abolish all territorial forms of organization and base themselves solely on “cells” in the plants, factories and enterprises. We should note that, given Lenin’s role in the drafting of the Resolution, this could hardly have been an accidental oversight or a misformulation.

The exclusive “occupational cell” form of organization was adopted by the Russian party only in December 1919, i.e., only when it had become the ruling party of the Soviet state, struggling to maintain its proletarian character under Civil War conditions in a largely peasant country. In contrast to the Russian party’s 1919 usage the Third Congress Organizational Resolution, like the Second Congress resolution “Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution” and the Twenty-One Conditions, uses the term “cell” to mean a specific kind of working group-a communist nucleus working in any non-party workers organization.

Only in January 1924, the month Lenin died, did the ECCI issue its first instructions that all parties organize themselves solely on the basis of factory “cells.” At first these instructions remained a dead letter in most parties. However, in the summer of 1924 the Fifth Comintern Congress declared “Bolshevization” of the various national parties to be the most important task of the coming period. After the Fifth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI in March-April 1925 the “Bolshevization” campaign began in earnest, and it became synonymous with the Comintern’s insistence that all parties divide up their membership, at least on paper, into “cells”—small, easily controlled units. Large territorial membership meetings became rare occurrences—when they were held these meetings became rubber stamps for the expulsion of oppositionists rather than forums for open political debate. Three oppositionists expelled from the French Communist Party in May 1928 described the chaotic reorganization process and the bureaucratization which resulted:

The “Bolshevization” of the party...consisted of officially suppressing the locals and replacing them by artificially creating-on paper only-factory cells, district cells and regional cells. The immediate result of this substitution was to drive thousands of militants away from the party, leaving most of the rest in a state of disarray and totally paralyzing the others by imposing a regime of centralism that was not democratic but bureaucratic, and which wiped out any control by the base of the party over its leadership-resulting in the creation of a veritable caste of functionaries at every level in the party, which gradually substituted for the party itself.[17]

“Bolshevization” proved a very useful organizational device for the Stalinist bureaucratic caste as it obtained its precarious (but still maintained) victory. First the maneuverist Comintern leadership of Zinoviev-Stalin, and then the right-wing faction of Bukharin-Stalin, removed and installed leaderships in the various national parties. In the end all parties had “leaders” whose principal recommendation was slavish loyalty to Stalin’s dictates. Ruth Fischer, an ultraleftist who was installed as the Zinovievite leader of the German party in 1924 (and then expelled from the party in 1926, after Zinoviev had broken with Stalin and formed the Leningrad Opposition), described the process by which the “cell” structure was used to eliminate democratic norms in the German party:

Under the slogan, “Concentrate party work in the factories,” the old stratification of the party into regional assemblies, with town groups and factory cells within the framework of the regional groups, was liquidated. The System Pieck was introduced; party units larger than one single factory cell were formally prohibited, and even large factory cells were split into smaller units of no more than ten to fifteen members. The party was atomized; every coherent group of militants was disintegrated. Convention delegates were thrice screened: first small cell groups elected representatives; these representatives elected delegates to a regional party convention; and only this regional convention had the right finally to elect delegates to the Reich congress.[18]

With the imposition of the exclusive “cell” organization the Stalinized Comintern in fact revived the old social-democratic dichotomy between passive members and active leaders-an evil that the Organizational Resolution had been written to overcome.

* * *
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in November-December 1922, Lenin repeatedly stressed the significance of the Organizational Resolution adopted by the Third Congress. According to the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works, throughout November Lenin had “a series of talks with delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International on the organisational pattern of Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their work.”[19] In his only public speech to the Congress, on 13 November, Lenin again spoke about the Organizational Resolution. This was almost the last public speech of his life—he spoke publicly only once more, to the Moscow Soviet on 20 November. It was a major physical effort for Lenin to make his last intervention into the political life of the Communist International: in the words of one Congress delegate Lenin appeared “deeply marked by paralysis.”[20] His speech was by no means an off-the-cuff presentation. Lenin had prepared notes and he stuck to his outline, correcting the German transcript of his remarks at a later date. If Lenin’s December 1922 “Letter to the Congress” is rightly regarded as his last “Testament” to the Russian Bolsheviks, so his last words to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International can be taken with equal seriousness to be his last testament to the international communist movement.[21]

Lenin’s Fourth Congress remarks on the Organizational Resolution are often misrepresented—E.H. Carr, for example, states that Lenin “attacked” the Resolution.[22] On the contrary, Lenin spoke to the urgent necessity of the parties understanding and implementing the Resolution, and his remarks remain today the best testimony as to the crucial significance of “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” for the international communist movement:

At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian—it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out. This is its third defect. I have talked with a few of the foreign delegates and hope to discuss matters in detail with a large number of delegates from different countries during the Congress, although I shall not take part in its proceedings, for unfortunately it is impossible for me to do that. I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution, namely, that we blocked our own road to further success. As I have said already, the resolution is excellently drafted; I am prepared to subscribe to every one of its fifty or more points. But we have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners. All that was said in the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not realise this, we shall be unable to move ahead. I think that after five years of the Russian revolution the most important thing for all of us, Russian and foreign comrades alike, is to sit down and study. We have only now obtained the opportunity to do so. I do not know how long this opportunity will last. I do not know for how long the capitalist powers will give us the opportunity to study in peace. But we must take advantage of every moment of respite from fighting, from war, to study, and to study from scratch....

That resolution must be carried out. It cannot be carried out overnight; that is absolutely impossible. The resolution is too Russian, it reflects Russian experience. That is why it is quite unintelligible to foreigners, and they cannot be content with hanging it in a corner like an icon and praying to it. Nothing will be achieved that way. They must assimilate part of the Russian experience. Just how that will be done, I do not know. The fascists in Italy may, for example, render us a great service by showing the Italians that they are not yet sufficiently enlightened and that their country is not yet ensured against the Black Hundreds. Perhaps this will be very useful. We Russians must also find ways and means of explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent.[23]

The Organizational Resolution fully embodied Lenin’s final understanding of the means and ways to shape a “communist party” into an authentic revolutionary workers vanguard. Lenin dealt centrally with the case of mass “communist parties” that were still partially digested former social-democratic parties or large components of such parties. In particular he centered on the mass German party—the VKPD—which had resulted after a large majority of the Independent Socialists (USPD) voted to fuse with the Communists at the Halle Congress in October 1920.

“Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” cannot be seen in any way as separate from the working political program of the Communist International in the time of Lenin and Trotsky. Hence the Resolution must be taken together with such defining political documents as Lenin’s 1920 “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder and Trotsky’s Lessons of October (1924). Behind both of these works stands Lenin’s profound and illuminating The State and Revolution written in 1917 (the balance of material from that interrupted work was used somewhat differently in Lenin’s 1918 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).

Few declared Marxists, aside from those with an anarcho-syndicalist bent, have taken issue with Lenin’s“Left-Wing” Communism. However, many of those who reject the Comintern founders’ vision of world revolution take issue with Trotsky’s Lessons of October. These revisionists see a revolutionary outcome of the German crisis of 1923 as—at best—improbable. They also dismiss or ignore the revolutionary potential in Bulgaria in 1923, Estonia in 1924, Poland in 1926 (the Pilsudski coup), England in 1926, and the profound revolutionary developments in China in 1925-27. Trotsky’s “lessons” were meant as a warning and a guide for precisely such revolutionary, or pre-revolutionary, situations. Revisionists of Leninism-Trotskyism are always quick to note that none of these situations was brought to a revolutionary conclusion. Such skeptics are at one with the post-Leninist Comintern which only postured and mechanically played at revolution, ensuring the outcome not of mere failure, but of defeat.

With the benefit of almost 70 years of hindsight we can say that “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” has stood the test of time. We might note certain omissions—the Resolution lacks, for example, any mention of the necessity for communists in many parts of the world to compete with nationalists for leadership of the struggle for social liberation (the Comintern was already grappling with the issue of nationalism in the colonial East at the Second Congress). But the Resolution was written for Western Europe, particularly Germany, and here nationalism played a reactionary, more or less fascist, role.

One can hardly fault the Resolution for failing to insist on one of the touchstones of pre-Civil War Bolshevik organizational practice—the right of communists to debate, and run for leadership on the basis of, counterposed political platforms (factional rights). The delegates to the Third Congress could not have anticipated the rise of the bureaucratic caste which would usurp political power in the Soviet Union, using for its own purposes the temporary banning of factions which had been adopted as an emergency measure by the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1921. This bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, strangled the revolutionary Communist International, abandoning the struggle for world proletarian revolution in favor of the reactionary/utopian program of building “socialism in one country.”

It was the Trotskyists who retained the revolutionary program which had armed the Communist International under Lenin. Thus it was left to them to fight the rise of Stalinism. Leopold Trepper, Polish Jewish Communist and heroic leader of the Red Orchestra Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied West Europe, paid tribute to the Trotskyists, who fought Stalin because they continued to fight for world proletarian revolution:

Who rose up to voice his outrage?

The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honor. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra.

Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not “confess,” for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.[24]

At the end of World War II numerous countries faced revolutionary opportunities, but these were either stillborn or bureaucratically deformed. Since the Spanish Civil War, desperate international imperialism no longer had to rely simply on the decrepit Social Democracy of the Second International.[25] Counterrevolution had a powerful new ally in the thoroughly Stalinized parties who used the enormous prestige of the Red Army’s victory over Nazism and their own role in the anti-Nazi resistance in Western Europe to derail the revolutionary upsurge through their universal strategy of building “popular fronts” with sections of the bourgeoisie. By the time the Comintern itself was officially dissolved in 1943 the Stalinist parties were thoroughly reformist-social democrats of the second mobilization.

The programmatic material, both political and organizational, of the Communist International of Lenin’s time is the concentrated expression of that leadership which did see the Russian Revolution through its many vicissitudes to victory. This material ought, therefore, to be powerfully educative for those in later generations who aspire through necessary social struggle to win socialism on this planet. The highest embodiment of the systematic formulation of the structure and work of Leninist communist parties is found in the Third Congress Resolution here presented, and this formulation stands on the same plane of importance as any of the main political aims of the Communist International. Without the systematic discipline and implementation Lenin called for, the great goals of the movement remain abstract and unobtainable in practice.

Prometheus Research Library

August 1988

Notes

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1. Leon Trotsky, “The School of Revolutionary Strategy” (Speech at a General Party Membership Meeting of the Moscow Organization, July 1921), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. II (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1953), 8.

2. V.I. Lenin, “A Letter to the German Communists,” Collected Works (CW), 4th ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960-1970), vol. 32, 519-523.

3. See V.I. Lenin, “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen” and “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen and W. Koenen,” CW vol. 42, 316-318 and 318-319; see also note 368, pp. 567-568.

4. Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 23.

5. Leon Trotsky, “Letter to the Bureau of Party History,” dated 21 October 1927 and circulated by hand in the Soviet Union. This letter was first published in English in The Real Situation in Russia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928); the section on the Third Congress appears on pp. 246-250. Trotsky’s letter was also published in a selection of his works entitled The Stalin School of Falsification (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937). Trotsky makes no mention of Stalin’s position on the “theory of the offensive,” though Stalin was of course the other full member of the Russian PB at the time.

6. Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1966), 227, citing Rapport du Secrétariat International (1921?), 3-4. Lenin’s speech to this Plenum is not included in the English-language 4th edition of the Collected Works or in the Russian-language 5th edition.

7. Zetkin, op. cit., 24-25. For evidence of the agreement in the Russian delegation see Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers 1917-1922, vol. II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), Documents 700, 701, 703-705, pp. 467-479. Werner T. Angress refers to the evident Russian agreement in Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921-1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 176-177.

8. V.I. Lenin, “Speech in Defence of the Tactics of the Communist International,” CW vol. 32, 468-477.

9. V.I. Lenin, “Remarks on the Draft Theses on Tactics for the Third Congress of the Communist International,” CW vol. 42, 319-323. In this letter to Zinoviev, Lenin says: “All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress.”

10. V.I. Lenin, “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen,” CW vol. 42, 317.

11. V.I. Lenin, “To G.Y. Zinoviev,” CW vol. 45, 185-186.

12. Koenen was not appointed to the ECCI or re-elected to the VKPD’s Zentralausschuß following the Congress. However, he remained a real leader of the German Party through its Stalinist degeneration, serving on and off on the party’s leading committee until 1953 when he was censured and removed as head of the party organization in Saxony. He died, an East German “elder statesman,” in 1963. See Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, rev. ed. (Stanford, Cal.: The Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 222.

13. Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Vereinigungsparteitages der U.S.P.D. (Linke) und der KPD (Spartakusbund) (Berlin: Frankes Verlag, G.m.b.H., 1921), 108-121.

14. A copy of the draft Resolution exists in French translation in the Library of the Institute Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan: O.W. Kuusinen and W. Koenen, Thèses sur la structure et l’organisation des partis communistes (Moscow: Section de la Presse de l’Internationale Communiste, 1921).

15. For a list of the membership of the ECCI and the Smaller Bureau, see Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents, vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 453-454.

16. “On the Character and Organizational Forms of Party Work,” resolution adopted by the 1912 Prague Conference of the RSDLP, in The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1898-October 1917, ed. Ralph Carter Elwood, vol. I of Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, general ed. Robert H. McNeal (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974), 149.

17. Marcel Fourrier, Francis Gérard and Pierre Naville, “Sur l’organisation du parti,” theses appended to “Lettre au 6e Congrès mondial de l’Internationale communiste,” dated 1 July 1928 and published in Pierre Naville, L’Entre-deux guerres: La lutte des classes en France 1927-1939 (Paris: Etudes et Documentation Internationales, 1975), 62. Translation by PRL.

Pierre Naville and Francis Gérard (better known as Gérard Rosenthal) were from the time of their expulsion from the Communist Party until WWII leading figures in the Trotskyist movement in France.

18. Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 503. After their expulsion Fischer and her compatriot Arkadi Maslow formed the German Leninbund, maintaining a sort of pseudo-leftist, maneuverist brand of politics into the early 1930s. They took refuge in Paris after Hitler came to power, and Fischer passed briefly through the Trotskyist movement in the mid-1930s. She spent most of WWII in the United States and died in Paris in 1961.

19. “The Life and Work of V.I. Lenin, Outstanding Dates (August 1921-January 1924),” in CW vol. 33, 555.

20. Alfred Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow (London: Pluto Press, 1971), 169.

21. Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress” is printed in CW vol. 36, 593-597. The notes for Lenin’s speech to the Fourth Congress can be found in the same volume, 585-587.

22. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 3 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), 393. In the same vein see also Rosmer, op. cit., 170 and to a lesser extent Degras, op. cit., 257.

23. V.I. Lenin, “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution,” CW vol. 33, 430-432.

24. Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 55-56. Trepper was won to Communism in Poland (in his words) “in the glow of October.” He attended Comintern school in Moscow, eventually joining Soviet Intelligence. As he wrote, “Between the hammer of Hitler and the anvil of Stalin, the path was a narrow one for those of us who still believed in the Revolution.”

After his heroic service in WWII, Trepper arrived in Moscow only to be imprisoned for ten years in Lubianka. Freed after Stalin’s death, Trepper returned to Poland where, in the early 1970s, he was the victim of an anti-Semitic campaign by the Stalinists. He was allowed to leave Poland in 1973 only after an international campaign of protest. He died in 1982.

25. On the Stalinists in Spain see, e.g., the material in Revolutionary History (London) vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1988).

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Blind Alfred Reed's "HOW CAN A POOR MAN STAND SUCH TIMES AND LIVE?" (1929)

Click on the headlne to link to a YouTube film clip of Blind Alfred Reed performing HOW CAN A POOR MAN STAND SUCH TIMES AND LIVE?

Markin comment:

This song, with appropriate changes for the times and not many at that, could have been written today. Right?


HOW CAN A POOR MAN STAND SUCH TIMES AND LIVE? (BLIND ALFRED REED) (1929)

Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).


This song was recorded by Blind Alfred Reed in New York, NY, 4 Dec 1929 and released as RCA VICTOR Vi V-40236.
Manfred Helfert


Lyrics as reprinted in liner notes for "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?" Rounder 1001, 1972


There once was a time when everything was cheap,
But now prices nearly puts a man to sleep.
When we pay our grocery bill,
We just feel like making our will --
I remember when dry goods were cheap as dirt,
We could take two bits and buy a dandy shirt.
Now we pay three bucks or more,
Maybe get a shirt that another man wore --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?
Well, I used to trade with a man by the name of Gray,
Flour was fifty cents for a twenty-four pound bag.
Now it's a dollar and a half beside,
Just like a-skinning off a flea for the hide --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Oh, the schools we have today ain't worth a cent,
But they see to it that every child is sent.
If we don't send everyday,
We have a heavy fine to pay --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Prohibition's good if 'tis conducted right,
There's no sense in shooting a man 'til he shows flight.
Officers kill without a cause,
They complain about funny laws --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Most all preachers preach for gold and not for souls,
That's what keeps a poor man always in a hole.
We can hardly get our breath,
Taxed and schooled and preached to death --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Oh, it's time for every man to be awake,
We pay fifty cents a pound when we ask for steak.
When we get our package home,
A little wad of paper with gristle and a bone --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Well, the doctor comes around with a face all bright,
And he says in a little while you'll be all right.
All he gives is a humbug pill,
A dose of dope and a great big bill --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Defend Angela Davis !(1972)

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this article:

The case of Angela Davis, after those myriad cases of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, galvanized much of the left, and garnered more than its normal fair share of liberal support as well. On such democratic/labor defense questions that liberal support is always welcomed. Moreover, the Davis case’s importance as an example of the old Wobblie (IWW, Industrial Workers of The World) labor defense slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” is obvious. Particularly since as a member, a key member, of the Stalinist American Communist Party it would have been easy to let Angela Davis’ case hang in the wind in to avoid the problems of the residual anti-communist then still present in the country. However, the combination of “red” professor, her links with the still popular Black Panthers, and her connection, in some sense, as a link back to the then somewhat fashionable Marxism pushed her case forward.

For a flavor of the liberal mindset of that period in relationship to the heated black nationalist environment, exemplified by the Black Panthers, and how it held the liberals in thrall Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mau-ing The Flack-Catchers still retains its value. The Angela Davis case was able to draw from that same “liberal guilt” well. Finally, over many years the American Communist Party had developed through fellow-travelers, former members, and left-liberals (to speak nothing of the Moscow connections) the most significant left-wing political defense organizations in America. Of course, those organizations were galvanized to defend Angela Davis and presented her case to the liberal public widely. However, in good Stalinist “popular front” form they “neglected” to highlight her co-defendant, Ruchell McGee’s case. Apparently, in order to win liberal support, a radical prison convict didn’t have the allure or cache of a “red” professor.
*************

From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 11, March-April 1972

BERKELEY--The Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY) held a rally here in late January for the defense of Angela Davis. Invitations were sent to other tendencies on the left including Progressive Labor, Workers League, Worker-Student Alliance, International Socialists (IS), Young Socialists for Jenness and Pulley, Revolutionary Women, Campus Friend of the AFT, Campus Friends of the NLF, Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), Revolutionary Union, Young Socialists, Female Liberation, Anti-Stalinism Study Group and Anti-Imperialist Coalition. Only the IS, Anti-Stalinism Study Group, Revolutionary Women, and Female Liberation responded positively; the other groups totally ignored this call to demonstrate class solidarity in the face of repression by the bourgeois state. The SMC went so far as to arrange to scab on the rally. Subsequent to being notified of the Defend Angela Davis rally, it called for another rally, to protest the presence of military recruiters on the campus—an issue which it had virtually ignored previously. The plan was to march the rally over to a "peaceful protest picket, " but when this single issue evaporated (the recruiters refused to come to the campus) the SMC was left with nothing to organize and was forced to cancel its rally.

The RCY stands for Davis' unconditional defense against persecution by the bourgeois state. Davis' arrest, the Attica massacre and the recent killings in Baton Rouge once again demonstrate the depth and ferocity of racial oppression in this country and the state's intention to crush ruthlessly all rebellion.

Fight Racial Oppression!

Black youth have shown over the past several years an increasing determination to fight racial oppression and degradation; yet even at its most radical and militant—e. g., the Panthers—this impulse has been unable to secure any permanent or basic changes for black peo¬ple or to protect them from attacks by the state. The black movement has been unable to transcend reformism and nationalist illusions. Only a united working class, politicized and conscious of its power, can successfully challenge the oppression of blacks and other minorities or repressive measures taken by the bourgeoisie against those who rebel against their oppression. Struggle against racial oppression—particularly in the trade unions--is crucial for proletarian class unity. Divisions along racial or sexual lines render the class impotent when faced with the ruling class' solidarity in its attack on the working people. The defense of Angela Davis is therefore obligatory for the left and the working-class movement. The obligation is not conditional on her "innocence" by standards of bourgeois justice, nor on support of the adventurist tactics of the Marin Court House incident, nor on agreement with the opportunist line of Davis' Communist Party (CP). Rather we must defend Angela Davis as an expression of class solidarity for mutual defense.

Who Will Be Next?

Without this class solidarity no proletarian organization is safe from bourgeois repression. No group can win exemption from persecution by disassociating itself from the or¬ganizations which first come under attack. Workers who acquiesced when reds were purged from their unions have been rewarded only by wage controls and anti-strike injunctions. SDS, which ever since Progressive Labor (PL) assumed its leadership, has been indecently eager to assure the bourgeoisie that its members "absolutely condemn and have nothing to do with terrorist bombings, " has been banned from some campuses nonetheless. Even the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), notorious for sending condolences to the widow Kennedy and dismissing political terrorists as "berserk, " has lately been the object of congressional "investigation." This stampede into the swamps of respectability is as incapable of securing safety as it is disgusting.

Lack of solidarity of the left frees the bourgeoisie to concentrate the full force of its repressive apparatus against one individual or one group at a time. Finding little support from other leftists the persecuted victims may be tempted to seek aid from anti-working class "civil libertarians. " Davis' defense, controlled by the sellout artists of the CP, has succumbed to this temptation and secured the "support" of such groups as the National Bar Association and the National Committee of Black Churchmen. These groups have no real interest in defending militant blacks from the capitalist state and if the going gets rough they will surely abandon the Davis case. Indicative of the manner in which the CP conducts her defense is the Peoples World comment on a church service honoring Davis: "Amidst choir selections and thoughtful prayer was a rever¬ence that transcended... the place of worship, a reverence for justice. " As Rosa Luxemburg said of Bernstein, the prototypical revisionist and class collaborator, we must say of the CP: In abandoning Marxism it returns "to the principle of justice, to the old war horse on which the reformers of the earth have rocked for ages, for the lack of surer means of historic transportation." This seemingly classless "justice" in fact aids the bourgeoisie, as do all class-"neutral" positions. The CP embellishes Bernstein's position only by draping his hobby horse in sacramental robes. Pandering to bourgeois ideology, the CP again eliminates itself as a revolutionary force, saving the bourgeoisie the trouble of doing so.

The CP's reconciliation with "respectability" does little to trick the bourgeoisie into being lenient on Davis but a good deal to disorient the proletariat. It might be argued that couching agitation in terms soothing to bourgeois sensibilities may not fool the ruling class, but will at least help suck the petty bourgeoisie (professionals, shopkeepers, artisans, many technicians, farmers, petty administrators, etc.) into the defense of proletarian militants. Such an argument implicitly assumes that the petty bourgeoisie is permanently wedded to its, present world.view, but actually it is the most volatile of all classes. As bourgeois democracy begins to visibly crumble, the petty bourgeoisie tends to align itself with the class that seems most capable of supplanting chaos by its class dictatorship. If the proletariat is strong, conscious and organized the petty bourgeoisie can be won over to supporting the revolutionary cause. If the dictatorship of the proletariat appears unattainable, due to the weakness or incapacity of the proletarian vanguard, then the petty bourgeoisie will leap into the camp of the only force capable of restoring "law and order" on a capitalist basis—the fascists. "Left" pandering to petty-bourgeois forces reveals a profound pessimism about the ability of the work¬ing class to achieve political consciousness, and therefore reveals a rejection of the struggle for socialism.

Only a policy of class solidarity—in defense of victimized militants as in all other matters —can demonstrate to the proletariat and its" potential allies that the left has the will and ability to lead them to revolutionary victory.

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-To the Workers Who Support the Struggle Against the War and Against the Socialists Who Have Sided With Their Governments(1916)

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 the 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
To the Workers Who Support the Struggle Against the War and Against the Socialists Who Have Sided With Their Governments

Published: First published in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia No. 5 (28), 1924. Written at the close of December (old style) 1916. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 23, pages 229-235.
Translated: M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and Others
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (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


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The international situation is becoming increasingly clear and increasingly menacing. Both belligerent coalitions have latterly revealed the imperialist nature of the war in a very striking way. The more assiduously the capitalist governments and the bourgeois and socialist pacifists spread their empty, lying pacifist phrases—the talk of a democratic peace, a peace without annexations, etc.—the sooner are they exposed. Germany is crushing several small nations under her iron heel with the very evident determination not to give up her booty except by exchanging part of it for enormous colonial possessions, and she is using hypocritical pacifist phrases as a cover for her readiness to conclude an immediate imperialist peace.

England and her allies are clinging just as tightly to the colonies seized from Germany, part of Turkey, etc., claiming that in endlessly continuing the slaughter for possession of Constantinople, strangulation of Galicia, partition of Austria, the ruin of Germany, they are fighting for a “just” peace.

The truth, of which only a few were theoretically convinced at the beginning of the war, is now becoming palpably evident to an increasing number of class-conscious workers, namely, that a serious struggle against the war, a struggle to abolish war and establish lasting peace, is out of ,the question unless there is a mass revolutionary struggle led by the proletariat against the government in every country, unless bourgeois rule is overthrown, unless a socialist revolution is brought about. And the war itself, which is imposing an unprecedented strain upon the peoples, is bringing mankind to this, the only way out of the impasse, is compelling it to take giant strides towards state capitalism, and is demonstrating in a practical manner how planned social economy can and should be conducted, not in the interests of the capitalists, but by expropriating them, under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat, in the interests of the masses who are now perishing from starvation and the other calamities caused by the war.

The more obvious this truth becomes, the wider becomes the gulf separating the two irreconcilable tendencies, policies, trends of socialist activity, which we indicated at Zimmerwald, where we acted as a separate Left wing, and in a manifesto to all socialist parties and to all class—conscious workers issued on behalf of the Left wing immediately after the conference. This is the gulf that lies between the attempts to conceal the obvious bankruptcy of official socialism and its representatives’ desertion to the bourgeoisie and their governments, as well as the attempts to reconcile the masses with this complete betrayal of socialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the efforts to expose this bankruptcy in all its magnitude, to expose the bourgeois policy of the “social-patriots”, who have deserted the proletariat for the bourgeoisie, to destroy their influence over the masses and to create the possibility and the organisational basis for a genuine struggle against the war.

The Zimmerwald Right wing, which was in the majority at the conference, fought the idea of breaking with the social-patriots and founding the Third International tooth and nail. Since then the split has become a definite fact in England; and in Germany the last conference of the “opposition”, on January 7, 1917, revealed to all who do not wilfully shut their eyes to the facts, that in that country too there are two irreconcilably hostile labour parties,, working in opposite directions. One is a socialist party, working for the most part underground, and with Karl Liebknecht one of its leaders. The other is a thoroughly bourgeois, social-patriot party, which is trying to reconcile the workers to the war and to the government. The same division is to be observed in every country of the world.

At the Kienthal Conference the Zimmerwald Right wing did not have so large a majority as to be able to continue its own policy. It voted for the resolution against the social-patriot International Socialist Bureau, a resolution which condemned the latter in the sharpest terms, and for the resolution against social-pacifism, which warned the workers against lying pacifist phrases, regardless of socialist trimmings. Socialist pacifism, which refrains from explaining to the workers the illusory nature of hopes for peace without overthrowing the bourgeoisie and organising socialism, is merely an echo of bourgeois pacifism, which instils in the workers faith in the bourgeoisie, presents the imperialist governments and the deals they make with each other in a good light and distracts the masses from the maturing socialist revolution, which events have put on the order of the day.

But what transpired? After the Kienthal Conference, the Zimmerwald Right, in a number of important countries, in France, Germany and Italy, slid wholly and entirely into the very social-pacifism Kienthal bad condemned and reject ed! In Italy, the Socialist Party has tacitly accepted the pacifist phrases of its parliamentary group and its principal speaker, Turati, though, precisely now, when absolutely the same phrases are being used by Germany and the Entente and by representatives of the bourgeois governments of a number of neutral countries, where the bourgeoisie has accumulated and continues to accumulate enormous war profits—precisely now their titter falsehood has been exposed. In fact, pacifist phrases have proved to be a cover for the new turn in the fight for division of imperialist spoils!

In Germany, Kautsky, the leader of the Zimmerwald Right, issued a similar meaningless and non-committal pacifist manifesto, which merely instils in the workers hope in the bourgeoisie and faith in illusions. Genuine socialists, the genuine internationalists in Germany, the Internationale group and the International Socialists of Germany, who are applying Karl Liebknecht’s tactics in practice, were obliged formally to dissociate themselves from this manifesto.

In France, Merrheim and Bourderon, who took part in the Zimmerwald Conference, and Raffin-Dugens, who took part in the Kienthal Conference, have voted for meaningless and, objectively, thoroughly false pacifist resolutions, which, in the present state of affairs, are so much to the advantage of the imperialist bourgeoisie that even Jouhaux and Renaudel, denounced as betrayers of socialism in all the Zimmerwald and Kienthal declarations, voted for them!

That Merrheim voted with Jouhaux and Bourderon and Raffin-Dugens with Renaudel is no accident, no isolated episode. It is a striking symbol of the imminent merger everywhere of the social-patriots and social-pacifists against the international socialists.

The pacifist phrases in the notes of a long list of imperialist governments, the same pacifist phrases uttered by Kautsky, Turati, Bourderon and Merrheim—Renaudel extending a friendly hand to the one and the other—all this exposes pacifism in actual politics as a means of placating the people, as a means of helping the governments to condition the masses to continuation of the imperialist slaughter!

This complete bankruptcy of the Zimmerwald flight has been still more strikingly revealed in Switzerland, the only European country where the Zimmerwaldists could meet freely, and which served as their base. The Socialist Party of Switzerland, which has held its congresses during the war without interference from the government and is in a better position than any other party to promote international solidarity between the German, French and Italian workers against the war, has officially affiliated to Zimmerwald.

And yet, on a decisive question affecting a proletarian party, one of this party’s leaders, the chairman of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, a prominent member and representative of the Berne International Socialist Commit tee, National Councillor R. Grimm, deserted to the social-patriots of his country. At the meeting of the Parteivorstand[1] of the Socialist Party of Switzerland on January 7, 1917, he secured the adoption of a decision to postpone indefinitely the party congress, which was to be convened for the express purpose of deciding the fatherland defence issue and the party’s attitude towards the Kienthal Conference decisions condemning social-pacifism.

In a manifesto signed by the International Socialist Committee and dated December 1916, Grimm describes as hypocritical the pacifist phrases of the governments, but says not a word about the socialist pacifism that unites Merrheim and Jouhaux, Raffin-Dugens and Renaudel. In this manifesto Grimm urges the socialist minorities to fight the governments and their social-patriot hirelings, but at the same time, jointly with the “social-patriot hirelings” in the Swiss party, he endeavours to bury the party congress, thus rousing the just indignation of all the class-conscious and sincerely internationalist Swiss workers.

No excuses can conceal the fact that the Parteivorstand decision of January 7, 1917 signifies the complete victory of the Swiss social-patriots over the Swiss socialist workers, the victory of the Swiss opponents of Zimmerwald over Zimmerwald.

The Grütlianer, that organ of the consistent and avowed servants of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement, said what everyone knows is true when it declared that social-patriots of the Greulich and Pflüger type, to whom should be added Seidel, Huber, Lang, Schneeberger, Dürr, etc., want to prevent the congress from being held, want to prevent the workers from deciding the fatherland defence issue, and threaten to resign if the congress is held and a decision in the spirit of Zimmerwald is adopted.

Grimm resorted to an outrageous and intolerable false hood at the Parteivorstand and in his newspaper, the Berner Tagwacht, of January 8, 1917, when he claimed that the congress bad to he postponed because the workers were not ready, that it was necessary to campaign against the high cost of living, that the “Left” were themselves in favour of postponement, etc.[2]

In reality, it was the Left, i.e., the sincere Zimmerwaldists, who, anxious to choose the lesser of two evils and also to expose the real intentions of the social-patriots and their new friend, Grimm, proposed postponing the congress until March, voted to postpone it until May, and suggested that the meetings of the cantonal committees be held before July; but all these proposals were voted down by the “fatherland defenders”, led by the chairman of the Zimmerwald arid Kienthal conferences, Robert Grimm!!

In reality, the question was: shall the Berne International Socialist Committee and Grimm’s paper he allowed to hurl abuse at foreign social-patriots and, at first by their silence and then by Grimm’s desertion, shield the Swiss Social patriots; or shall an honest internationalist policy be pursued, a policy of fighting primarily the social-patriots at home?

In reality, the question was: shall the domination of the social-patriots and reformists in the Swiss party he concealed by revolutionary phrases; or shall we oppose to them a revolutionary programme and tactics on the question of combating the high cost of living, as well as of combating the war, of putting on the order of the day the fight for the socialist revolution?

In reality, the question was: shall the worst traditions of the ignominiously bankrupt Second International be continued in Zimmerwald; shall the workers be kept ignorant of the things the party leaders do and say at the Parteivorstand; shall revolutionary phrases be allowed to cover up the vileness of social-patriotism and reformism, or shall we be internationalists in deeds?

In reality, the question was: shall we in Switzerland too, where the party is of primary importance for the whole of the Zimmerwald group, insist upon a clear, principled and politically honest division between the social-patriots and the internationalists, between the bourgeois reformists and the revolutionaries; between the counsellors of the proletariat, who are helping it carry out the socialist revolution, and the bourgeois agents or “hirelings”, who want to divert the workers from revolution by means of reforms or promises of reforms: between the Grütlians and the Socialist Party—or shall we confuse and corrupt the minds of the workers by conducting in the Socialist Party the “Grütlian” policy of the Grütlians, i.e., the social-patriots in the ranks of the Socialist Party?

Let the Swiss social-patriots, those “Grütlians” who want to operate their Grütlian policy, i.e., the policy of their national bourgeoisie, abuse the foreigners, let them defend the “inviolability” of the Swiss party from criticism by other parties, let them champion the old bourgeois-reformist policy, i.e., the very policy that brought on the collapse of the German and other parties on August 4, 1914—we, who adhere to Zimmerwald in deeds and not merely in words, interpret internationalism differently.

We are not prepared passively to regard the efforts, now definitely revealed, and sanctified by the chairman of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, to leave everything unchanged in decaying European socialism and, by means of hypocritical professions of solidarity with Karl Liebknecht, to bypass the real slogan of this leader of the international workers, his appeal to work for the “regeneration” of the old parties from “top to bottom”. We are convinced that on our side are all the class-conscious workers in all countries, who enthusiastically greeted Karl Liebknecht and his tactics.

We openly expose the Zimmerwald Right, which has deserted to bourgeois-reformist pacifism.

We openly expose Grimm’s betrayal of Zimmerwald and demand convocation of a conference to remove him from his post on the International Socialist Committee.

The word Zimmerwald is the slogan of international socialism and revolutionary struggle. This word must not serve to shield social-patriotism and bourgeois reformism.

Stand for true internationalism, which calls for the struggle, first of all, against the social-patriots in your own country! Stand for true revolutionary tactics, which are impossible if there is a compromise with the social-patriots against the revolutionary socialist workers!


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Notes
[1] Executive.—Ed.

[2] The allusion, apparently, is to the editorial “Parteibeschlüsse” (“Party Decisions”) in the Berner Tagwacht of January 8, 1917 (No. 6).

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Junius Pamphlet (1916)

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)

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.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Junius Pamphlet

Written: Written in July, 1916
Published: Published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No. 1, October 1916. Signed: N. Lenin. Published according to the text in Sbornik.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, UNKNOWN, [19xx], Moscow, Volume 22, pages 305-319.
Translated: UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
Transcription\Markup: Charles Farrell and D. Walters
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2000 (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


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At last there has appeared in Germany, illegally, without any adaptation to the despicable Junker censorship, a Social-Democratic pamphlet dealing with questions of the war! The author, who evidently belongs to the “Left-radical” wing of the Party, signs himself Junius[3] (which in Latin means junior) and gave his pamphlet the title: The Crisis of Social-Democracy. Appended are the “Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy,” which have already been submitted to the Berne I.S.C. (International Socialist Committee) and published in No. 3 of its Bulletin; the theses were drafted by the “International” group, which in the spring of 1915 published one issue of a magazine under that title (with articles by Zetkin, Mehring, R. Luxemburg, Thalheimer, Duncker, Ströbel and others), and which in the winter of 1915-16 convened a conference of Social-Democrats from all parts of Germany[4] at which these theses were adopted.

The pamphlet, the author says in the introduction dated January 2, 1916, was written in April, 1915, and published “without any alteration”. “Outside circumstances” prevented it from being published earlier. The pamphlet is devoted not so much to the “crisis of Social-Democracy” as to an analysis of the war, to refuting the legend of its being a war for national liberation, to proving that it is an imperialist war on the part of Germany as well as on the part of the other Great Powers, and to a revolutionary criticism of the behaviour of the official party. Written in a very lively style, Junius’ pamphlet has undoubtedly played and will play an important role in the struggle against the ex-Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which has deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie and the Junkers, and we heartily greet the author.

To the Russian reader who is familiar with the Social-Democratic Literature published abroad in Russian in 1914-16, Junius’ pamphlet offers nothing new in principle. But in reading this pamphlet and comparing the arguments of this German revolutionary Marxist with what has been stated, for example, in the manifesto of the Central Committee of our Party (September-November, 1914) in the Berne resolutions (March, 1915) and in the numerous commentaries on them, it becomes dear that Junius’ arguments are very incomplete and that he commits two errors. Proceeding to criticise Junius’ faults and errors we must strongly emphasise that we do so for the sake of self criticism, which is so necessary for Marxists, and of submitting to an all-round test the views which must serve as the ideological basis of the Third International. On the whole, Junius’ pamphlet is a splendid Marxian work, and in all probability its defects are, to a certain extent, accidental.

The chief defect in Junius’ pamphlet, and what marks a definite step backward compared with the legal (although immediately suppressed) magazine, international, is its silence regarding the connection between social-chauvinism (the author uses neither this nor the less precise term social-patriotism) and opportunism. The author rightly speaks of the “capitulation” and collapse of the German Social-Democratic Party and of the “treachery” of its “official leaders,” but he goes no further than this. The International, however, did criticise the “Centre,” i.e., Kautskyism, and quite properly poured ridicule on it for its spinelessness, its prostitution of Marxism and its servility to the opportunists. This magazine also began to expose the role the opportunists are really playing by making known, for example, the very important fact that on August 4, 1914, the opportunists came forth with an ultimatum, with their minds made up to vote for the war credits under any circumstances. Neither in Junius’ pamphlet nor in the theses is anything said about opportunism or about Kautskyism! This is wrong from the standpoint of theory, for it is impossible to explain the “betrayal” without linking it up with opportunism as a trend with a long history, the history of the whole Second International. It is a mistake from the practical-political standpoint, for it is impossible to understand the “crisis of Social-Democracy” or overcome it without making clear the meaning and the role of two trends: the avowedly opportunist trend (Legien, David etc.) and the masked opportunist trend (Kautsky and Co.). This is a step backward compared with the historic article by Otto Ruhle in Vorwärts of January 13, 1916, in which he directly and openly pointed out that a split in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was inevitable (the editors of the Vorwärts answered him by repeating honeyed and hypocritical Kautskyist phrases, for they were unable to advance a single material argument to disprove the assertion that there were already two parties in existence, and that these two parties could not be reconciled). It is astonishingly inconsistent, because the international thesis No. 12 directly states that it is necessary to create a “new” International, owing to the “treachery” of the “official representatives of the Socialist Parties of the leading countries” and their “adoption of the principles of bourgeois imperialist politics.” Clearly, to suggest that the old Social-Democratic Party of Germany, or parties which tolerate Legien, David and Co, would participate in a “new” International is simply ridiculous.

We do not know why the international group took this step backward. A very great defect in revolutionary Marxism in Germany as a whole is its lack of a compact illegal organisation that would systematically pursue its line and educate the masses in the spirit of the new tasks; such an organisation would also have to take a definite stand towards opportunism and Kautskyism. This is all the more necessary now, since the German revolutionary Social-Democrats have been deprived of their last two daily papers: the one in Bremen (Bremen = Burger-zeitung),[5] and the one in Brunswick (Volksfreund),[6] both of which have gone over to the Kautskyists. That the “International Socialists of Germany” (I.S.D.) group alone remains at its post is definitely clear to everybody.

Some members of the international group have evidently slipped once again into the morass of unprincipled Kautskyism. Ströbel, for instance, went so far as to make obeisance, in the Neue Zeit, to Bernstein and Kautsky! And only the other day, on August 15, 1916, he had an article in the papers entitled “Pacifism and Social-Democracy,” in which he defends the most vulgar type of Kautskyian pacifism. Junius, however, strongly opposes Kautsky’s fantastic schemes for “disarmament,” “abolition of secret diplomacy” etc. Perhaps there are two trends in the international group: a revolutionary trend and a trend wavering in the direction of Kautskyism.

The first of Junius’ erroneous postulates, the first is contained in the International group’s thesis No. 5: “In the epoch (era) of this unbridled imperialism, there can be no more national wars. National interests serve only as an instrument of deception, to deliver the masses of the toiling people into the service of their mortal enemy, imperialism....” This postulate is the end of thesis No. 5, the first part of which is devoted to the description of the present war as an imperialist war. The repudiation of national wars in general may either be an oversight or a fortuitous over-emphasis of the perfectly correct idea that the present war is an imperialist war and not a national war. But as the opposite may be true, as various Social-Democrats mistakenly repudiate all national wars because the present war is falsely represented to be a national war, we are obliged to deal with this mistake.

Junius is quite right in emphasising the decisive influence of the “imperialist background” of the present war, when he says that behind Serbia there is Russia, “behind Serbian nationalism there is Russian imperialism”; that even if a country like Holland took part in the present war, she too would be waging an imperialist war, because, firstly, Holland would be defending her colonies, and, secondly, she would be an ally of one of the imperialist coalitions. This is indisputable in relation to the present war. And when Junius lays particular emphasis on what to him is the most important point: the struggle against the “phantom of national war, which at present dominates Social-Democratic policy” (p. 81, Junius’ pamphlet), we cannot but agree that his reasoning is correct and quite appropriate.

But it would be a mistake to exaggerate this truth; to depart from the Marxian rule to be concrete; to apply the appraisal of the present war to all wars that are possible under imperialism; to lose sight of the national movements against imperialism. The only argument that can be used in defence of the thesis: “there can be no more national wars” is that the world has been divided up among a handful of “Great” imperialist powers, and, therefore, every war, even if it starts as a national war, is transformed into an imperialist war and affects the interests of one of the imperialist Powers or coalitions (p. 81 of Junius’ pamphlet).

The fallacy of this argument is obvious. Of course, the fundamental proposition of Marxian dialectics is that all boundaries in nature and society are conventional and mobile, that there is not a single phenomenon which cannot under certain conditions be transformed into its opposite. A national war can be transformed into an imperialist war, and vice versa. For example, the wars of the Great French Revolution started as national wars and were such. They were revolutionary wars because they were waged in defence of the Great Revolution against a coalition of counter-revolutionary monarchies. But after Napoleon had created the French Empire by subjugating a number of large, virile, long established national states of Europe, the French national wars became imperialist wars, which in their turn engendered wars for national liberation against Napoleon’s imperialism.

Only a sophist would deny that there is a difference between imperialist war and national war on the grounds that one can be transformed into the other. More than once, even in the history of Greek philosophy, dialectics have served as a bridge to sophistry. We, however, remain dialecticians and combat sophistry, not by a sweeping denial of the possibility of transformation in general, but by concretely analysing a given phenomenon in the circumstances that surround it and in its development.

It is highly improbable that this imperialist war of 1914–16 will be transformed into a national war, because the class that represents progress is the proletariat, which, objectively, is striving to transform this war into civil war against the bourgeoisie; and also because the strength of both coalitions is almost equally balanced, while international finance capital has everywhere created a reactionary bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that such a transformation is impossible: if the European proletariat were to remain impotent for another twenty years; if the present war were to end in victories similar to those achieved by Napoleon, in the subjugation of a number of virile national states; if imperialism outside of Europe (primarily American and Japanese) were to remain in power for another twenty years without a transition to socialism, say, as a result of a Japanese-American war, then a great national war in Europe would be possible. This means that Europe would be thrown back for several decades. This is improbable. But it is not impossible, for to picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.

Further, national wars waged by colonial, and semi-colonial countries are not only possible but inevitable in the epoch of imperialism. The colonies and semi-colonies (China, Turkey, Persia) have a population of nearly one billion, i.e., more than half the population of the earth. In these countries the movements for national liberation are either very strong already or are growing and maturing. Every war is a continuation of politics by other means. The national liberation politics of the colonies will inevitably be continued by national wars of the colonies against imperialism. Such wars may lead to an imperialist war between the present “Great” imperialist Powers or they may not; that depends on many circumstances.

For example: England and France were engaged in a seven years war for colonies, i.e., they waged an imperialist war (which is as possible on the basis of slavery, or of primitive capitalism, as on the basis of highly developed modern capitalism). France was defeated and lost part of her colonies. Several years later the North American States started a war for national liberation against England alone. Out of enmity towards England, i.e., in conformity with their own imperialist interests, France and Spain, which still held parts of what are now the United States, concluded friendly treaties with the states that had risen against England. The French forces together with the American defeated the English. Here we have a war for national liberation in which imperialist rivalry is a contributory element of no great importance, which is the opposite of what we have in the war of 1914–16 (in which the national element in the Austro-Serbian war is of no great importance compared with the all determining imperialist rivalry). This shows how absurd it would be to employ the term imperialism in a stereotyped fashion by deducing from it that national wars are “impossible.” A war for national liberation waged, for example, by an alliance of Persia, India and China against certain imperialist Powers is quite possible and probable, for it follows logically from the national liberation movements now going on in those countries. Whether such a war will be transformed into an imperialist war among the present imperialist Powers will depend on a great many concrete circumstances, and it would be ridiculous to guarantee that these circumstances will arise.

Thirdly, national wars must not be regarded as impossible in the epoch of imperialism even in Europe. The “epoch of imperialism” made the present war an imperialist war; it inevitably engenders (until the advent of socialism) new imperialist war; it transformed the policies of the present Great Powers into thoroughly imperialist policies. But this “epoch” by no means precludes the possibility of national wars, waged, for example, by small (let us assume, annexed or nationally oppressed) states against the imperialist Powers, any more than it precludes the possibility of big national movements in Eastern Europe. With regard to Austria, for example, Junius shows sound judgment in taking into account not only the “economic,” but also the peculiar political situation, in noting Austria’s “inherent lack of vitality” and admitting that “the Hapsburg monarchy is not a political organisation of a bourgeois state, but only a loosely knit syndicate of several cliques of social parasites,” that “historically, the liquidation of Austria-Hungary is merely the continuation of the disintegration of Turkey and at the same time a demand of the historical process of development.” The situation is no better in certain Balkan states and in Russia. And in the event of the “Great Powers” becoming extremely exhausted in the present war, or in the event of a victorious revolution in Russia, national wars, even victorious ones, are quite possible. On the one hand, intervention by the imperialist powers is not possible under all circumstances. On the other hand, when people argue haphazardly that a war waged by a small state against a giant state is hopeless, we must say that a hopeless war is war nevertheless, and, moreover, certain events within the “giant” states—for example, the beginning of a revolution—may transform a “hopeless” war into a very “hopeful” one.

The fact that the postulate that “there can be no more national wars” is obviously fallacious in theory is not the only reason why we have dealt with this fallacy at length. It would be a very deplorable thing, of course, if the “Lefts” began to be careless in their treatment of Marxian theory, considering that the Third International can be established only on the basis of Marxism, unvulgarised Marxism. But this fallacy is also very harmful in a practical political sense; it gives rise to the stupid propaganda for “disarmament,” as if no other war but reactionary wars are possible; it is the cause of the still more stupid and downright reactionary indifference towards national movements. Such indifference becomes chauvinism when members of “Great” European nations, i.e., nations which oppress a mass of small and colonial peoples, declare with a learned air that “there can be no more national wars!” National wars against the imperialist Powers are not only possible and probable, they are inevitable, they are progressive and revolutionary, although, of course, what is needed for their success is either the combined efforts of an enormous number of the inhabitants of the oppressed countries (hundreds of millions in the example we have taken of India and China), or a particularly favourable combination of circumstances in the international situation (for example, when the intervention of the imperialist Powers is paralysed by exhaustion, by war, by their mutual antagonisms, etc.), or a simultaneous uprising of the proletariat of one of the Great Powers against the bourgeoisie (this latter case stands first in order from the standpoint of what is desirable and advantageous for the victory of the proletariat).

We must state, however, that it would be unfair to accuse Junius of being indifferent to national movements. When enumerating the sins of the Social-Democratic Parliamentary group, he does at least mention their silence in the matter of the execution of a native leader in the Cameroons for “treason” (evidently for an attempt at insurrection in connection with the war); and in another place he emphasises (for the special benefit of Messrs. Legien, Lensch and similar scoundrels who call themselves “Social-Democrats”) that colonial nations are also nations. He declares very definitely: “Socialism recognises for every people the right to independence and freedom, the right to be masters of their own destiny.... International socialism recognises the right of free, independent, equal nations, but only socialism can create such nations, only socialism can establish the right of nations to self-determination. This slogan of socialism,” justly observes the author, “like all its other slogans, serves, not to justify the existing order of things, but as a guide post, as a stimulus to the revolutionary, reconstructive, active policy of the proletariat.” (p. 77-78) Consequently, it would be a profound mistake to suppose that all the Left German Social-Democrats have stooped to the narrow-mindedness and distortion of Marxism advocated by certain Dutch and Polish Social-Democrats, who repudiate self-determination of nations even under socialism. However, we shall deal with the special Dutch and Polish sources of this mistake elsewhere.

Another fallacious argument advanced by Junius is in connection with the question of defence of the fatherland. This is a cardinal political question during an imperialist war. Junius has strengthened us in our conviction that our Party has indicated the only correct approach to this question: the proletariat is opposed to defence of the fatherland in this imperialist war because of its predatory, slave-owning, reactionary character, because it is possible and necessary to oppose to it (and to strive to convert it into) civil war for socialism. Junius, however, while brilliantly exposing the imperialist character of the present war as distinct from a national war, falls into the very strange error of trying to drag a national programme into the present non-national war. It sounds almost incredible, but it is true.

The official Social-Democrats, both of the Legien and of the Kautsky shade, in their servility to the bourgeoisie, who have been making the most noise about foreign “invasion” in order to deceive the masses of the people as to the imperialist character of the war, have been particularly assiduous in repeating this “invasion” argument. Kautsky, who now assures naive and credulous people (incidentally, through the mouth of “Spectator,” a member of the Russian Organization Committee) that he joined the opposition at the end of 1914, continues to use this “argument”! To refute it, Junius quotes extremely instructive examples from history, which prove that “invasion and class struggle are not contradictory in bourgeois history, as the official legend has it, but that one is the means and the expression of the other.” For example, the Bourbons in France invoked foreign invaders against the Jacobins; the bourgeoisie in 1871 invoked foreign invaders against the Commune. In his Civil War in France, Marx wrote:

“The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of the classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out in civil war.”[7]

“The classical example for all times,” says Junius, referring to 1793, “is the Great French Revolution.” From all this, he draws the following conclusion: “Century-old experience thus proves that it is not a state of siege, but heroic class struggle, which rouses the self-respect, the heroism and the moral strength of the masses of the people, and serves as the country’s best protection and defence against the foreign enemy.”

Junius’ practical conclusion is this:

“Yes, it is the duty of the Social-Democrats to defend their country during a great historical crisis. But the grave guilt that rests upon the Social-Democratic Reichstag group lies precisely in that, in solemnly declaring, on August 4, 1914, that ‘In the hour of danger we will not leave our fatherland unprotected,’ they at the same time belied those words. They did leave the fatherland unprotected in the hour of greatest peril. For their first duty to the fatherland in that hour was to show the fatherland what was really behind the present imperialist war; to tear down the web of patriotic and diplomatic lies with which this encroachment on the fatherland was enmeshed; to proclaim loudly and dearly that both victory and defeat in the present war are equally fatal for the German people; to resist to the last the throttling of the fatherland by declaring a state of siege; to proclaim the necessity of immediately arming the people and of allowing the people to decide the question of war and peace; resolutely to demand a permanent session of the people’s representatives for the whole duration of the war in order to guarantee vigilant central over the government by the people’s representatives, and the control over the people’s representatives by the people; to demand the immediate abolition of all restrictions on political rights, for only a free people can successfully defend its country; and, finally, to oppose the imperialist war programme, which is to preserve Austria and Turkey, i.e., perpetuate reaction in Europe and in Germany, with the old, truly national programme of the patriots and democrats of 1848, the programme of Marx, Engels and Lassalle: the slogan of a united, Great German republic. This is the banner that should have been unfurled before the country, which would have been a truly national banner of liberation, which would have been in accord with the best traditions of Germany and with the international class policy of the proletariat.... Hence, the grave dilemma—the interests of the fatherland or the international solidarity of the proletariat—the tragic conflict which prompted our parliamentarians ‘with a heavy heart’ to side with the imperialist war, is purely imaginary, it is bourgeois nationalist fiction. On the contrary, there is complete harmony between the interests of the country and the class interests of the proletarian International, both in time of war and in time of peace; both war and peace demand the most energetic development of the class struggle, the most determined fight for the Social-Democratic programme.”

This is how Junius argues. The fallacy of his argument is strikingly evident, and since the masked and avowed lackeys of tsarism, Messrs. Plekhanov and Chkhenkeli, and perhaps even Messrs. Martov and Chkheidze may gloatingly seize upon Junius’ words, not for the purpose of establishing theoretical truth, but for the purpose of wriggling, of covering up their tracks and of throwing dust in the eyes of the workers, we must in greater detail elucidate the theoretical source of Junius’ error.

He proposes to “oppose” the imperialist war with a national programme. He urges the advanced class to turn its face to the past and not to the future! In France, in Germany, and in the whole of Europe it was a bourgeois-democratic revolution that, objectively, was on the order of the day in 1793 and 1848. Corresponding to this objective historical situation was the “truly national,” i.e., the national bourgeois programme of the then existing democracy; in 1793 this programme was carried out by the most revolutionary elements of the bourgeoisie and the plebeians, and in 1848 it was proclaimed by Marx in the name of the whole of progressive democracy. Objectively, the feudal and dynastic wars were then opposed with revolutionary democratic wars, with wars for national liberation. This was the content of the historical tasks of that epoch.

At the present time the objective situation in the biggest advanced states of Europe is different. Progress, if we leave out the possibility of temporary steps backward, is possible only towards socialist society, only towards the socialist revolution. Objectively, the imperialist bourgeois war, the war of highly developed capitalism, can, from the standpoint of progress, from the standpoint of the progressive class, be opposed only with a war against the bourgeoisie, i.e., primarily civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie for power; for unless such a war is waged serious progress is impossible; and after that—only under certain special conditions—a war to defend the socialist state against bourgeois stares is possible. That is why those Bolsheviks (fortunately, very few, and we quickly handed them over to the Prizyv-ists) who were ready to adapt the point of view of conditional defence, i.e., of defending the fatherland on the condition that there was a victorious revolution and the victory of a republic in Russia, were true to the letter of Bolshevism, but betrayed its spirit: 48 for being drawn into the imperialist war of the advanced European Powers, Russia, even under a republican form of government, would also be waging an imperialist war!

In saying that class struggle is the best means of defence against invasion, Junius applied Marxian dialectics only halfway, taking one step on the right road and immediately deviating from it. Marxian dialectics call for a concrete analysis of each specific historical situation. That class struggle is the best means of defence against invasion is true both with regard to the bourgeoisie, which is overthrowing feudalism, and with regard to the proletariat, which is overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Precisely because it is true with regard to every form of class oppression, it is too general, and therefore, inadequate in the present specific case. Civil war against the bourgeoisie is also a form of class struggle, and only this form of class struggle would have saved Europe (the whole of Europe, not only one country) from the peril of invasion. The “Great German Republic” had it existed in 1914-16, would also have waged an imperialist war.

Junius came very close to the correct solution of the problem and to the correct slogan: civil war against the bourgeoisie for socialism; but, as if afraid to speak the whole truth, he turned back to the fantasy of a “national war” in 1914, 1915 and 1916. Even if we examine the question from the purely practical and not theoretical angle, Junius’ error remains no less clear. The whole of bourgeois society, all classes in Germany, including the peasantry, were in favour of war (in all probability the same was the case in Russia—at least a majority of the well-to-do and middle peasantry and a very considerable portion of the poor peasants were evidently under the spell of bourgeois imperialism). The bourgeoisie was armed to the teeth. Under such circumstances to “proclaim” the programme of a republic, a permanent parliament, election of officers by the people (the “armed nation”), etc., would have meant, in practice, “proclaiming” a revolution (with a wrong revolutionary programme!).

In the same breath Junius quite rightly says that a revolution cannot be “made.” Revolution was on the order of the day in 1914–16, it was hidden in the depths of the war, was emerging out of the war. This should have been “proclaimed” in the name of the revolutionary class, and its programme should have been fearlessly and fully announced: socialism is impossible in time of war without civil war against the arch-reactionary, criminal bourgeoisie, which condemned the people to untold disaster. Systematic, consistent, practical measures should have been thought out, which could be carried out no matter what the rate of development of the revolutionary crisis might have been, and which would be in line with the maturing revolution. These measures are indicated in the resolution of our Party: 1) voting against war credits; 2) violation of “civil peace”; 3) creation of an illegal organisation; 4) fraternisation among the soldiers; 5) support to all the revolutionary actions of the masses.[1] The success of all these steps inevitably leads to civil war.

The promulgation of a great historical programme was undoubtedly of tremendous significance; not the old national German programme, which became obsolete in 1914-16, but the proletarian international and socialist programme. “You, the bourgeoisie, are fighting for plunder; we, the workers of all the belligerent countries, declare war upon you for socialism”—this is the sort of speech that should have been delivered in the Parliaments on August 4, 1914, by Socialists who had not betrayed the proletariat, as the Legiens, Davids, Kautskys, Plekhanovs, Guesdes, Sembats, etc. betrayed it.

Evidently Junius’ error is due to two mistakes in reasoning. There is no doubt that Junius is decidedly opposed to the imperialist war and is decidedly in favor of revolutionary tactics; and all Messrs. Plehhanovs’ gloating over Junius’ “defencism” cannot wipe out this fact. Possible and probable calumnies of this kind must be answered promptly and bluntly.

But, firstly, Junius has not completely rid himself of the “environment” of the German Social-Democrats, even the Lefts, who are afraid of a split, who are afraid to follow revolutionary slogans to their logical conclusions.[2] This is a mistaken fear, and the Left Social-Democrats of Germany must and will rid themselves of it. They will do so in the course of the struggle against the social-chauvinists. The fact is that they are fighting against their own social-chauvinists resolutely, firmly and sincerely, and this is the tremendous, the fundamental difference in principle between them and Messrs. Martovs and Chkheidzes, who, with one hand (à la Skobelev) unfurl a banner bearing the greeting, “To the Liebknechts of All Countries,” and with the other hand tenderly embrace Chkhenkeli and Potresov!

Secondly, Junius apparently wanted to achieve something in the nature of the Menshevik “theory of stages,” of sad memory; he wanted to begin to carry out the revolutionary programme from the end that is “more suitable,” “more popular” and more acceptable to the petty-bourgeoisie. It is something like the plan “to outwit history,” to outwit the philistines. He seems to say: surely, nobody would oppose a better way of defending the real fatherland; that real fatherland is the Great German Republic, and the best defence is a militia, a permanent parliament, etc. Once it was accepted, that programme would automatically lead to the next stage-to the socialist revolution.

Probably, it was reasoning of this kind that consciously or semi-consciously determined Junius’ tactics. Needless to say, such reasoning is fallacious, Junius’ pamphlet conjures up in our mind the picture of a lone man who has no comrades in an illegal organisation accustomed to thinking out revolutionary slogans to their conclusion and systematically educating the masses in their spirit. But this shortcoming—it would be a grave error to forget this-is not Junius’ personal failing, but the result of the weakness of all the German Lefts, who have become entangled in the vile net of Kautskyist hypocrisy, pedantry and “friendliness” towards the opportunists. Junius’ adherents have managed in spite of their isolation to begin the publication of illegal leaflets and to start the war against Kautskyism. They will succeed in going further along the right road.


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Notes
[1] See present edition, Vol. 21, “The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. Groups Abroad.”—Ed.

[2] We find the same error in Junius’ arguments about which is better, victory or defeat His conclusion is that both are equally bad (ruin, growth of armaments, etc.). This is the point of view not of the revolutionary proletariat, but of the pacifist petty bourgeois. If we speak about the “revolutionary intervention” of the proletariat—of this both Junius and the thews of the International group speak, although unfortunately in too general terms—then we must raise the question from another point of view, namely: 1) Is “revolutionary intervention” possible without the risk of defeat! 2) Is it possible to scourge the bourgeoisie and the government of one’s own country without taking that risk; 3) Have we not always asserted, and does not the historical experience of reactionary wars prove, that defeats help the cause of the revolutionary class? —Lenin

Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night-Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Mark Dinning performing Teen Angel.

Markin comment:


This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
************

MARK DINNING
"Teen Angel"

(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please

************
First off, get used to hearing ad finitum about angels, earth-bound, heaven-sent, hell-sent, angelic, yes, angelic, heart-broken, heart-breaking angels, and how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, Enough angels to make old revolutionary Puritan poet John Milton's angel fights in Paradise Lost seem, well, punk by comparison. That is if you really want to know about 1950s rock subject matter, all of the above, naturally being teen angels (as if there were any other kind), maybe even Milton's, and that brings us to the heart of this Mark Dinning teen angst classic, Teen Angel.

Frankly, I am bewildered by the bizarre lyrics and story line here, although it rates high, very high on my newly constructed teen song angst-o-meter. Peggy and Billy, okay I know they are not named, or maybe nameable, in the universal teen night but let’s call them that to give name to the kinds of fools we are dealing with, were stranded out on railroad tracks in old Billy’s apparently dead-ender car, probably his father’s hand-me-down. That should have been the first tip-off to Peggy. There were a million guys in town with “boss” cars, including Linc with his ’57 cherry red Chevy by the look on his face every time you passed by, who would have been more than happy to give you a tumble.

Or maybe Billy just didn’t have gas dough and the clunker ran out, unfortunately, ran out on that old dreaded isolated track with all those signs saying don’t stop, please don’t stop, on the tracks because even if trains were going out of style in the big 1950s freeway car exodus they still ran every now and again. No dough Billy, christ I knew seven guys (although not Linc) who had plenty of dough , or could get it, to show you a good time, including Frankie (and Frankie, supposedly only had eyes for his ever lovin’ sweetie, Joanne).

Okay, the ways of love are strange, no question, so Billy it was. But, jesus, he pulled you out, you were safe and then you went ballistic over some f-----g, cheapjack ring, some cheapjack fake gold (like about four carat gold filigree, maybe) with fako diamond and barely legible stuff written on it class ring. And you knew, since you had been out with Billy for a while by then that it was cheapo. Come on you couldn’t have been that naïve. Now you have left Billy all choked up over his teen angel lost, and I know for a fact that he stayed that way, for a while. But just recently he seems to be on the mend because didn’t Tommy T. see him and Linda Lou, ya, sweet “hot stuff’ Linda Lou, walking hand and hand into Kay’s jewelry store, the upscale jewelry store. I wonder what they were looking for?

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Peace Programme (1916)

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)

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.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Peace Programme

Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 52, March 25, 1916. Published according to the Sotsial-Demokrat text.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, UNKNOWN, [19xx], Moscow, Volume 22, pages 161-168.
Translated: UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
Transcription\Markup: Charles Farrell and D. Walters
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2000 (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


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The question of the Social-Democratic “peace programme.” Is one of the most important questions on the agenda of the Second International Conference of the “Zimmerwaldists”.[1]In order to bring home to the reader the essentials of this question we will quote a declaration made by Kautsky, the most authoritative representative of the Second International and most authoritative champion of the social-chauvinists in all countries.

“The International is not a fit instrument in time of war; it is, essentially, an instrument of peace... The fight for peace, class struggle in peace time.” (Neue Zeit. November 27, 1914.) “All peace programmes formulated by the International;the programmes of the Copenhagen, London and Vienna Congresses, all demand, and quite rightly, the recognition of the independence of nations. This demand must also serve as our compass in the present war.” (Ibid., May 21, 1915.)

These few words excellently express the “programme” of international social-chauvinist unity and conciliation. Everybody knows that Sudekum’s friends and adherents met in Vienna and acted entirely in his spirit, championing the cause of German imperialism under the cloak of “defence of the fatherland.” The French, English and Russian Sudekums met in London and championed the cause of “their” national imperialism under the same cloak. The real policy of the London and Vienna heroes of social-chauvinism is to justify participation in the imperialist war, to justify the killing of German workers by French workers, and vice versa, for the sake of determining which national bourgeoisie shall have preference in robbing other countries. And to conceal their real policy, to deceive the workers, both the London and the Vienna heroes resort to the phrase: We “recognise” the “independence of nations,” or in other words, recognise the self-determination of nations, repudiate annexations, etc., etc.

It is as clear as daylight that this “recognition” is a flagrant lie, despicable hypocrisy, for it justifies participation in a war which both sides are waging, not to make nations independent, but to enslave them. Instead of exposing, unmasking and condemning this hypocrisy, Kautsky, the great authority, sanctifies it. The unanimous desire of the chauvinist traitors to Socialism to deceive the workers is, in Kautsky’s eyes, proof of the “unanimity” and virility of the International on the question of peace!!! Kautsky converts nationalist, crude, obvious, flagrant hypocrisy, which is obvious to the workers, into international, subtle, cloaked hypocrisy, calculated to throw dust in the eyes of the workers. Kautsky’s policy is a hundred times more harmful and dangerous to the labour movement than Sudekum’s policy; Kautsky’s hypocrisy is a hundred times more repulsive.

This does not apply to Kautsky alone. Substantially the same policy is pursued by Axelrod, Martov and Chkheidze in Russia; by Longuet and Pressemane in France, Treves in Italy, etc. Objectively, this policy means fostering bourgeois lies among the working class; it means inculcating bourgeois ideas into the minds of the proletariat. That both Sudekum and Plekhanov merely repeat the bourgeois lies of the capitalists of “their” respective nations is obvious; but it is not so obvious that Kautsky sanctifies these lies and elevates them to the sphere of the “highest truth” of a “unanimous” International. That the workers should regard the Sudekums and Plekhanovs as authoritative and unanimous “Socialists” who have temporarily fallen out is exactly what the bourgeoisie wants. The very thing the bourgeoisie wants is that the workers should be diverted from the revolutionary struggle in wartime by means of hypocritical, idle and non-committal phrases about peace; that they should be lulled and soothed by hopes of peace without annexations, a democratic peace, etc., etc.

Huysmans has merely popularised Kautsky’s peace programme and has added: courts of arbitration, democratisation of foreign politics, etc. But the first and fundamental point of a Socialist peace programme must be to unmask the hypocrisy of the Kautskyist peace programme, which strengthens bourgeois influence over the proletariat.

Let us recall the fundamental postulates of Socialist doctrine, which the Kautskyists have distorted. War is the continuation, by forcible means, of the politics pursued by the ruling classes of the belligerent Powers long before the outbreak of war. Peace is a continuation of the very same politics, with a registration of the changes brought about in the relation of forces of the antagonists as a result of military operations. War does not change the direction in which politics developed prior to the war; it only accelerates that development.

The war of 1870–71 was a continuation of the progressive bourgeois policy (which was pursued for decades) of liberating and uniting Germany. The debacle and overthrow of Napoleon III hastened that liberation. The peace programme of the Socialists of that epoch took this progressive bourgeois result into account and advocated support for the democratic bourgeoisie, urging: no plunder of France; an honourable peace with the republic.

How clownish is the attempt slavishly to repeat this example under the conditions prevailing during the imperialist war of 1914-16! This war is the continuation of the politics of an over-ripe reactionary bourgeoisie, which has plundered the world, which has seized colonies, etc. Owing to the objective situation, the present war cannot, on the basis of bourgeois relations, lead to any democratic “progress” whatever; no matter what the outcome of the war may be, it can lead only to the intensification and extension of oppression in general, and of national oppression in particular.

That war accelerated development in a democratic bourgeois-progressive direction: it resulted in the overthrow of Napoleon III and in the unification of Germany. This war is accelerating development only in the direction of the socialist revolution. Then the programme of a democratic (bourgeois) peace had an objective historical basis. Now there is no such basis, and all phrases about a democratic peace is a bourgeois lie, the objective purpose of which is to divert the workers from the revolutionary struggle for socialism! Then the Socialists, by their programme of a democratic peace, supported a deep-going bourgeois-democratic movement of the masses (for the overthrow of Napoleon III and the unification of Germany), which had been manifesting itself for decades. Now, with their programme of a democratic peace on the basis of bourgeois relations the Socialists are helping the deception of the people by the bourgeoisie, whose aim is to divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution.

Just as phrases about “defence of the fatherland” inculcate into the minds of the masses the ideology of a national war of liberation by means of fraud, so phrases about a democratic peace inculcate that very same bourgeois lie in a roundabout way.

“That means that you have no peace programme, that you are opposed to democratic demands,” the Kautskyists argue, in the hope that inattentive people will not notice that this objection substitutes non-existent bourgeois-democratic tasks for the existing socialist tasks.

Oh no, gentlemen, we reply to the Kautskyists. We are in favour of democratic demands, we alone fight for them sincerely, for the objective historical situation prevents us from advancing them except in connection with the socialist revolution. Take, for example, the “compass” which Kautsky and Co. employ for the bourgeois deception of the workers.

Südekum and Plekhanov are “unanimous” in their “peace programme.” Down with annexations! Support the independence of nations! And note this: the Südekums are right when they say that Russia’s attitude towards Poland, Finland, etc., is an annexationist attitude. And so is Plekhanov right when he says that Germany’s attitude towards Alsace-Lorraine, Serbia, Belgium, etc, is also annexationist. Both are right, are they not) And in this way Kautsky “reconciles” the German Südekum with the Russian Südekums!!!

But every sensible worker will see immediately that Kautsky and both the Südekums are hypocrites. This is obvious. The duty of a Socialist is not to make peace with hypocritical democracy, but to unmask it. How can it be unmasked? Very simply. “Recognition” of the independence of nations can be regarded as sincere only where the representative of the oppressing nation has demanded, both before and during the war, freedom of secession for the nation which is oppressed by his own “fatherland.”

This demand alone is in accord with Marxism. Marx advanced it in the interests of the English proletariat when he demanded freedom for Ireland, although he admitted at the same time the probability that federation would follow secession. In other words, he demanded the right of secession, not for the purpose of splitting and isolating countries, but for the purpose of creating more durable and democratic ties. In all cases where there are oppressed and oppressing nations, where there are no special circumstances which distinguish revolutionary-democratic nations from reactionary nations (as was the case in the ’forties of the nineteenth century), Marx’s policy in relation to Ireland must serve as a model for proletarian policy. But imperialism is precisely the epoch in which the division of nations into oppressors and oppressed is the essential and typical division, and it is utterly impossible to draw a distinction between reactionary and revolutionary nations in Europe.

As early as 1913, our Party, in a resolution on the national question, made it the duty of Social-Democrats to apply the term self-determination in the sense here indicated. And the war of 1914-16 has fully shown that we were right.

Take Kautsky’s latest article in the Neue Zeit of March 3, 1916. He openly declares himself to be in agreement with Austerlitz, the notorious, extreme German chauvinist in Austria, the editor of the chauvinist Vienna Arbeirer-Zeitung,[2] when he says that “the independence of a nation must not be confused with its sovereignty”. In other words, national autonomy within a “nationality state” is good enough for the oppressed nations, and it is not necessary to demand for them the equal right to political independence. In this very article, however, Kautsky asserts that it is impossible to prove that “it is essential for the Poles to adhere to the Russian state”!!!

What does this mean? It means that to please Hindenburg, Südekum, Austerlitz and Co, Kautsky recognises Poland’s right to secede from Russia, although Russia is a “nationality state,” but not a word does he say about freedom for the Poles to secede from Germany!!! In this very article Kautsky declares that the French Socialists had departed from internationalism by wanting to achieve the freedom of Alsace-Lorraine by means of war. But he says nothing about the German Südekums and Co. deviating from internationalism when they refuse to demand freedom for Alsace-Lorraine to secede from Germany!

Kautsky employs the phrase “a nationality state”—a phrase that can he applied to England in relation to Ireland, and to Germany in relation to Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, etc.—obviously for the purpose of defending social-chauvinism. He has converted the slogan “fight against annexations” into a “programme of peace”... with the chauvinists, into glaring hypocrisy. And in this very article, Kautsky repeats the honeyed little udas speech: “The International has never ceased to demand the consent of the affected populations when state frontiers are to be altered.” Is it not clear that Südekum and Co. demand the “consent” of the Alsatians and Belgians to be annexed to Germany and that Austerlitz and Co. demand the “consent” of the Poles and Serbs to be annexed to Austria!

And what about the Russian Kautskyist Martov He wrote to the Gvozdevist journal Nash Golos[3] (Samara) to prove the indisputable truth that self-determination of nations does not necessarily imply defence of the fatherland in an imperialist war. But Martov says nothing about the fact that a Russian Social-Democrat betrays the principle of self-determination if he does not demand the right of secession for the nations oppressed by the Great Russians; and in this way Martov stretches out the hand of peace to the Alexinskys, the Gvozdevs, the Dotresovs, and the Plekhanovs! Martov is silent on this point also in the underground press! He argues against the Dutchman Gorter, although Gorter, while wrongly repudiating the principle of self-determination of nations, correctly applies it by demanding political independence for the Dutch Indies and by unmasking the betrayal of Socialism by the Dutch opportunists who disagree with this demand. Martov, however, does not argue against his secretary, Semkovsky, who in 1912-15 was the only writer in the liquidationist press who repudiated the right of secession and self-determination in general!

Is it not plain that Martov “advocates” self-determination just as hypocritically as Kautsky does; that he, too, is covering up his desire to make peace with the chauvinists?

And what about Trotsky? He is body and soul for self-determination, but in his case, too, it is an idle phrase, for he does not demand freedom of secession for nations oppressed by the “fatherland” of the Socialist of the given nationality; he is silent about the hypocrisy of Kautsky and the Kautskyists!

This kind of “struggle against annexations” serves to deceive the workers and not to explain the programme of the Social-Democrats; it is an evasion of the problem and not a concrete indication of the duty of internationalists; it is a concession to nationalist prejudices and to the selfish interests of nationalism (“we” all, bourgeois and social-chauvinists alike, derive “benefits” from “our” fatherland’s oppression of other nations!) but not a struggle against nationalism.

The “peace programme” of Social-Democracy must, in the first place, unmask the hypocrisy of the bourgeois, social-chauvinist and Kautskyist phrases about peace. This is the first and fundamental thing. Unless we do that we shall be willingly or unwillingly helping to deceive the masses. Our “peace programme” demands that the principal democratic point on this question—the repudiation of annexations—should be applied in practice and not in words, that it should serve to promote the propaganda of internationalism, not of national hypocrisy. In order that this may do so, we must explain to the masses that the repudiation of annexations, i.e., the recognition of self-determination, is sincere only when the Socialists of every nation demand the right of secession for the nations that are oppressed by their nations. As a positive slogan, one capable of drawing the masses into the revolutionary struggle and explaining the necessity for adopting revolutionary measures to attain a “democratic peace,” we must advance the slogan: Repudiation of the National Debt.

Finally, our “peace programme” must explain that the imperialist Powers and the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot grant a democratic peace. Such a peace must be sought and fought for, not in the past, not in a reactionary utopia of a non-imperialist capitalism, nor in a league of equal nations under capitalism, but in the future, in the socialist revolution of the proletariat. Not a single fundamental democratic demand can be achieved to any considerable extent, or any degree of permanency, in the advanced imperialist states, except by revolutionary battles under the banner of socialism.

Whoever promises the nations a “democratic” peace without at the same time preaching the socialist revolution, or while repudiating the struggle for it—the struggle which must be carried on now, during the war—is deceiving the proletariat.