Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky-related post from his Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
Is the Time Ripe for the Slogan:‘The United States of Europe(A Discussion Article)-Leon Trotsky, June 30, 1923
Introduction by Jack Bernard
The following discussion article, first published in Pravda, June 30, 1923, has significance today in the light of the growing centrality of the European question within British politics and as a guide to the character of programme that revolutionary Marxists need to develop al establish.
The present beginnings of discussion on the European question within the working-class movement in Britain have revealed a division into maximilsm and minimalism. Some feel happy merely to counterpose to the plans of Maastricht a call for a socialist Europe of the indefinite future, others simply proclaim their preference for a European bourgeois state opposed to the present British bourgeois state. Of these two choices, the latter is preferable because merely opposing Maastricht on an abstract basis means to effectively endorse the status quo. 1t means defending the present wretched British state through failure to pose a feasible alternative.
In, the following article, Trotsky transcends the maximalist minimalist dilemma by filling his slogan of a United States of Europe with a transitional content. Arguing that ‘“The United States of Europe” is a slogan in every respect corresponding with the slogan “A Workers (or Workers’ and Peasants’) Government”’ he, for instance, says that ‘The Europe of Workers and Peasants will have its ... budget ... based upon a graduated income tax, upon levies on capital.’ Clearly, if capital still exists in this Europe then this is not the socialist Europe of the far distant future but a revolutionary Europe where the economy still conflicts with the state. In other words, though, it signifies a workers’ state and not merely a self-professed workers’ government that has been elected under the bourgeois political order and begrudgingly allowed to ‘govern’ within constraints set by the dominant power, i.e., not really a workers’ government. Trotsky’s United States of Europe is a Europe that is in transition from the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to that of the proletariat. The key point is that the programme for this United States of Europe is neither the programme of socialism nor a reformist programme.
As Trotsky explained elsewhere, as long as revolutionary Marxists do not have the ear of the masses they must adopt a definite stance to those who do, to those ’Parties and organisations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name’. This does not mean simply calling, at a European level, for a vote for Social Democracy and kindred parties. Instead it means demanding that these parties ‘break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers’ and peasants’ government’ Trotsky continued: ‘On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the programme of the “workers’ and peasants’ government”.’ Such demands are not limited to what’s achievable or feasible under the bourgeois order but neither are they fantastic demands that can, only be realised under a future, planned economy.
The value of this article by Trotsky, is that it is a particularly, important illustration of the method of Marxisim, applied to formulating political slogans. The latter are based in an analysis of the world economic whole, i.e., in this case the particular plight of European economy within this economic whole, but they also relate to the subjective factor, how they ‘Stem ... from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class’ but nevertheless ‘unalterably lead ... to one final conclusion. the conquest of power by the proletariat.’
Of course, the wording of a slogan cannot contain the entire content to be given, to the slogan. By ‘United States of Europe’ Trotsky signified a single-state federation of nations, i.e., the destruction of the national state in Europe. Those who vehemently oppose Maastricht by effectively defending the national state of their own bourgeoisie, often combine this defence of the utopia of ‘One nation, one state’ by, for example, supporting the re-Balkanisation of Yugoslavia under the guise of defending the principle of national self-determination. This pan-nationalism – that often attempts to pass itself off as Trotskyism, – has its roots in the privileges enjoyed by much of the working class of the imperialist metropolis. At best it attempts to explain Trotsky’s slogan in terms of a confederation of national states rather than a single-state federation of nations. This is the antithesis of internationalism, and an unfortunate indicator that apparently all the organisations that claim a heritage of the Fourth International or claim to be the Fourth International, have, like the Second and Third Internationals before them, degenerated to forms of national socialism.
NOTES
1. Trotsky: The Death Agony, of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, (the Transitional Progamme), 1938.
2. ibid.
3. Marx and Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels: Selected Works (in 3 vols.), vol.1, p.120, Moscow, 1969.
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The motor force driving to war was this, that the capitalist forces of production had outgrown the framework of European national states. Germany had set herself the task of ‘organising’ Europe, i.e., of uniting economically the European continent under her own control, in order then seriously to set about contending with Britain for world power. France’s aim was to dismember Germany. The small population of France, her predominantly agricultural character and her economic conservatism, make it impossible for the French bourgeoisie even to consider the problem of organising Europe, which indeed proved to be beyond the powers of German capitalism, backed though it was by the military machine of the Hohenzollerns. Victorious France is now maintaining her mastery only by Balkanising Europe. Great Britain is inciting and backing the French policy of dismembering and exhausting Europe, all the time concealing her work. In connection with the slogan of ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’, the time is appropriate, in my opinion, for issuing the slogan of ‘The United States of Europe’. Only by, coupling these two slogans shall we get a definite systematic and progressive response to the most burning problems of European development.
The last imperialist war was at bottom a European war. The episodic participation of America and Japan did not alter its European character.
Having secured what she required, America withdrew her hands from the European bonfire and returned home.
Britain’s traditional mask of hypocrisy. As a result, our unfortunate continent is cut up, divided, exhausted, disorganised and Balkanised – transformed into a madhouse. The invasion of the Ruhr is a piece of violent insanity accompanied by far-sighted calculation (the final ruination of Germany) a combination not unfamiliar to psychiatrists.
At bottom of the war lay the need of the productive forces for a broader arena of development, unhampered by tariff walls. Similarly, in the occupation of the Ruhr so fatal to Europe and to mankind, we find a distorted expression of the need for uniting the coal of the Ruhr with the iron of Lorraine. Europe cannot develop economically within the state and customs frontiers imposed at Versailles. Europe is compelled either to remove these frontiers, or to face the threat of complete economic decay. But the methods adopted by the ruling bourgeoisie to overcome the frontiers it itself had created are only increasing the existing chaos and accelerating the disintegration.
To the toiling masses of Europe it is becoming ever clearer that the bourgeoisie is incapable of solving the basic problems of restoring Europe’s economic life. The slogan: ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ is designed to meet the growing attempts of the workers to find a way out by, their own efforts. It has now become necessary to point out this avenue of salvation more concretely, namely, to assert that only in the closest economic co-operation of the peoples of Europe lies the avenue of salvation for our continent from economic decay and from enslavement to mighty American capitalism.
America ’s standing aloof from Europe, tranquilly biding her time until Europe’s economic agony has reached such a pitch as will make it easy to step in and buy up Europe – as Austria was bought up for a mere pittance. But France cannot stand aloof from Germany, nor can Germany stand aloof from France. Therein lies the crux, and therein lies the solution, of the European problem. Everything else is incidental. Long before the imperialist war we recognised that the Balkan states are incapable of existing and of developing except within a federation. The same is true of the various fragments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of the western portions of tsarist Russia now living outside the Soviet Union. The Apennines, the Pyrenees and Scandinavia are limbs of the European body stretching out toward the seas. They are incapable of an independent existence. The European continent in the present state of development of its productive forces is an economic unit – not a shut-in unit, of course, but one possessing profound internal ties – as was proved in the terrible catastrophe of the world war, and again revealed by the mad paroxysm of the Ruhr occupation. Europe is not a geographical term; Europe is an economic term, something incomparably more concrete especially in the present post-war conditions – than the world market. Just as federation was long ago recognised as essential for the Balkan peninsula, so now the time has arrived for stating definitely and clearly that federation is essential for Balkanised Europe.
There remain to be considered the question of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and that of Great Britain, on the other. It goes without saying that the Soviet Union will not be opposed either to the federative union of Europe, or to its own adhesion to such a federation. Thereby, too, a reliable bridge will be secured between Europe and Asia.
The question of Great Britain is far more conditional; it depends on the tempo at which her revolutionary development proceeds. Should the ‘Government of Workers and Peasants’ triumph on the European mainland before British imperialism is overthrown – which is quite probable – then the European Federation of Workers and Peasants will of necessity be directed against British capitalism. And, naturally, the moment British capitalism is overthrown the British Isles will enter as a welcome member into the European Federation.
It might be asked: Why a European Federation and not a World Federation? But this manner of posing the question is much too abstract. Of course, the world economic and political development tends to gravitate toward a unified world economy, with its degree of centralisation dependent upon the existing technological level. But we are now concerned not with the future socialist economy of the world, but with finding a way out of the present European impasse. We have to offer a solution to the workers and peasants of torn and ruined Europe, quite independently of how the revolution develops in America, Australia, Asia or Africa. Looked at from this point of view, the slogan of ‘The United States of Europe’ has its place on the same historical plane with the slogan ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’; it is a transitional slogan, indicating a way out, a prospect of salvation, and furnishing at the same time a revolutionary impulse for the future.
It would be a mistake to measure the entire process of the world revolution with the same footrule. America came out of the war not enfeebled, but strengthened. The internal stability of the American bourgeoisie is still quite considerable. The American bourgeoisie is reducing its dependence upon the European market to a minimum. The revolution in America – considered apart from Europe – may thus be a matter of decades. Does that mean that the European revolution must align itself with the American revolutions? Certainly not. If backward Russia did not (and could not) await the revolution in Europe, all the less can and will Europe await the revolution in America. Workers’ and Peasants’ Europe, blockaded by capitalist America (and at first, perhaps even by Great Britain), will be able to maintain itself and develop as a closely consolidated military and economic union.
It must not be overlooked that the very danger arising from the United States of America (which is spurring the destruction of Europe, and is ready to step in subsequently as Europe’s master) furnishes a very substantial bond for uniting the peoples of Europe who are ruining one another into a ‘European United States of Workers and Peasants’. This opposition between Europe and the United States stems organically from the differences in the objective situations of the European countries and of the mighty transatlantic republic, and is not in any way directed against the international solidarity of the proletariat, or against the interests of the revolution in America. One of the reasons for the retarded development of the revolution throughout the world is the degrading European dependence on the rich American uncle (Wilsonism, the charitable feeding of the worst famine districts of Europe, American ‘loans’, etc., etc.). The sooner the popular masses of Europe regain the confidence in their own strength which was sapped by the war, and the more closely they rally around the slogan of ‘United Workers’ and Peasants’ Republics of Europe’, the more rapidly will the revolution develop on both sides of the Atlantic. For just as the triumph of the proletariat in Russia gave a mighty impetus to the development of the Communist parties of Europe so, and even to an incomparably greater degree, will the triumph of the revolution in Europe give an impetus to the revolution in America and in all parts of the world. Although, when we abstract ourselves from Europe, we are obliged to peer into the mists of decades to perceive the American revolution, yet we may safely assert that by the natural sequence of historical events the triumphant revolution in Europe will serve in a very few years to shatter the power of the American bourgeoisie.
Not merely the question of the Ruhr, i.e., of European fuel and iron, but also the question of reparations fits into the pattern of ‘The United States of Europe’. The question of reparations is a purely European question, and it can and will be solved in the period immediately ahead only by European means. The Europe of Workers and Peasants will have its own reparations budget – as it will have its own war budget – so long as it is menaced by dangers from without. This budget will be based upon a graduated income tax, upon levies on capital, upon the confiscation of wealth plundered during wartime, etc. Its allotments will be regulated by the appropriate bodies of the European Federation of Workers and Peasants.
We shall not here indulge in speculations as to the speed at which the unification of the European republics will proceed, in what economic and constitutional forms it will express itself, and what degree of centralisation will be obtained in the first period of the workers’ and peasants’ regime. All these considerations we may safely leave to the future, remembering the experience already gained by the Soviet Union, constructed on the soil of former Tsarist Russia. What is perfectly obvious is that the customs barriers must be thrown down. The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life.
It might be argued that we are in reality speaking of a European Socialist Federation as an integral part of the future World Federation, and that such a r6gime can be brought about only by the dictatorship of the proletariat. We shall not, however, pause to answer this argument, since it has been refuted by the international analysis made during the consideration of the question of a ‘Workers’ Government’. ‘The United States of Europe’ is a slogan in every respect corresponding with the slogan ‘A Workers’ (or Workers’ and Peasants’) Government’. Is the realisation of a ‘Workers’ Government’ possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat? Only a conditional reply can be given to this question. In any case, we regard the ‘Workers’ Government’ as a stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therein lies the great value of this slogan for us. But the slogan ‘The United States of Europe’ has an exactly similar and parallel significance. Without this supplementary slogan the fundamental problems of Europe must remain suspended in mid-air.
But will not this slogan play into the hands of the pacifists? I do not believe that there exists such ‘lefts’ nowadays as would consider this danger sufficient grounds for rejecting the slogan. After all, we are living in 1923, and have learned a little from the past. There are the same reasons, or absence of reasons, for fearing a pacifist interpretation of ‘The United States of Europe’as there are for fearing a democratic-SR-ist interpretation of the slogan ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’. Of course, if we advance 'The United States of Europe' as an independent programme, as a panacea for achieving pacification and reconstruction, and if we isolate this slogan from slogans of ‘A Workers’ Government’, of the united front, and from the class struggle, we shall certainly end in democratised Wilsonism, i.e., in Kautskyism, and even in something more degrading (assuming there is anything more degrading than Kautskyism). But I repeat, we live in the year 1923 and have learned a little from the past. The Communist International is now a reality, and it will not be Kautsky, who will initiate and control the struggle associated with our slogans. Our method of posing the problem is diametrically opposed to Kautsky’s method. Pacifism is an academic programme, whose object is to avoid the necessity of revolutionary action. Our formulation, on the contrary, is an incentive to struggle. To the workers of Germany, not the Communists (it is not necessary to convince them), but to the workers in general, and in the first place to the Social-Democratic workers, who fear the economic consequences of a fight for a workers’ government; to the workers of France, whose minds ire still obsessed by the questions of reparations and of the national debt; to the workers of Germany, France and of all Europe, who fear lest the establishment of the workers’ regime lead to the isolation and economic ruin of their countries, we say: Even if temporarily isolated (and with such a great bridge to the East as the Soviet Union, Europe will not be easily isolated), Europe will be able not only to maintain herself, but to consolidate and build herself up, once she has broken down the customs barriers and his united herself economically to the inexhaustible natural riches of Russia. ‘The United States of Europe’ – a purely revolutionary perspective – is the next stage in our generally revolutionary perspective. It arises from the profound difference in the situations of Europe and America. Whoever ignores this difference, will willy-nilly, drown the true revolutionary perspective in mere historical abstractions. Naturally, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Federation will not stop in its European phase. As we have said, our Soviet Union affords Europe an outlet into Asia, and from Asia into Europe. We are therefore, here envisaging only a stage, but a stag of great historical importance, through which we must first pass.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s Concept of the Party
Click on the headline to link to a Rosa Luxemburg-related post from the American Left History blog.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s Concept of the Party
THE ESSAY on Lenin’s Concept of the Party by Hal Draper, in What Next? No.9, ends before considering how the Communist International (CI) was structured as a world party, how the individual sections were structured, or how the ruling Soviet party structure developed. It would seem to me that these matters bear on the subject tackled, particularly in the case of the CI and the national Communist Parties, whereas one could argue that the ruling Soviet CP was a special case owing to the conditions imposed by civil war, imperialist intervention and isolation due to the lack of revolutionary success elsewhere.
The Second Congress of the Communist International in July-August 1920 (and in fact the first real one, as the first merely established the rudiments of a new International) adopted both the Statutes and the 21 Conditions. The former demanded ‘a strongly centralised organisation’ and granted the ECCI (Executive Committee) supreme power) while the latter, in Point 12, which declares Democratic Centralism a principle, demands on organisation ‘as centralised as possible’, with ‘iron discipline’, and a party centre ‘equipped with the most comprehensive powers’.
Of course, the above-quoted phrases do not necessarily mean a Stalinist-type set-up, and the legal CPs tended to have quite a democratic structure, with remnants of the rank-and-file cheeks and balances associated with the social-democratic parties. The removal of the election of the party functionaries and their accountability to the membership and the substitution of a top-down appointed method with all decisions residing in the Central Committee, came about through ‘Bolshevisation’ in the mid-1920s. However, the power of the ECCI was established already in 1920, so it seems to me that Rosa Luxemburg’s objections to Lenin’s party-concept need more serious consideration than given in Hal Draper’s essay.
Very little by Rosa Luxemburg was in print in 1963, when Draper penned his piece. The 5-volume Gesammelte Werke appeared between 1970 and 1975, the 5-volume Gesammelte Briefe between 1982 and 1984, a sixth volume of correspondence appeared in 1993, and a sixth volume of her works, translated from Polish, is at present under preparation.
The objections mentioned by Draper in Luxemburg’s Organisational Questions ... (1904) were not a one-off occurrence, but, according to renowned Polish Luxemburg scholar Feliks Tych, run through her writings up to her death. In Revolutionary History, Vol.6, No.2/3, I resuméd a number of articles on the latest research on Luxemburg-Jogiches regarding the question of their attitude towards Lenin’s party-concept and his methods, plus some newly found texts, contained in the respected German historical quarterly Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz ..., Vol.27, No.3. Writing in the Czerwony Sztandar in July 1912, following the split in the RSDLP, Luxemburg sees Lenin’s conception of organisation thus: ‘the Central Committee is everything whereas the real party is only its appendage, a mindless mass which moves mechanically on the orders of the leader like the army exercising on the parade ground and like a choir performing under the baton of the conductor’. That sounds just like a criticism of the ECCI as set out in 1920.
Mike Jones
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s Concept of the Party
THE ESSAY on Lenin’s Concept of the Party by Hal Draper, in What Next? No.9, ends before considering how the Communist International (CI) was structured as a world party, how the individual sections were structured, or how the ruling Soviet party structure developed. It would seem to me that these matters bear on the subject tackled, particularly in the case of the CI and the national Communist Parties, whereas one could argue that the ruling Soviet CP was a special case owing to the conditions imposed by civil war, imperialist intervention and isolation due to the lack of revolutionary success elsewhere.
The Second Congress of the Communist International in July-August 1920 (and in fact the first real one, as the first merely established the rudiments of a new International) adopted both the Statutes and the 21 Conditions. The former demanded ‘a strongly centralised organisation’ and granted the ECCI (Executive Committee) supreme power) while the latter, in Point 12, which declares Democratic Centralism a principle, demands on organisation ‘as centralised as possible’, with ‘iron discipline’, and a party centre ‘equipped with the most comprehensive powers’.
Of course, the above-quoted phrases do not necessarily mean a Stalinist-type set-up, and the legal CPs tended to have quite a democratic structure, with remnants of the rank-and-file cheeks and balances associated with the social-democratic parties. The removal of the election of the party functionaries and their accountability to the membership and the substitution of a top-down appointed method with all decisions residing in the Central Committee, came about through ‘Bolshevisation’ in the mid-1920s. However, the power of the ECCI was established already in 1920, so it seems to me that Rosa Luxemburg’s objections to Lenin’s party-concept need more serious consideration than given in Hal Draper’s essay.
Very little by Rosa Luxemburg was in print in 1963, when Draper penned his piece. The 5-volume Gesammelte Werke appeared between 1970 and 1975, the 5-volume Gesammelte Briefe between 1982 and 1984, a sixth volume of correspondence appeared in 1993, and a sixth volume of her works, translated from Polish, is at present under preparation.
The objections mentioned by Draper in Luxemburg’s Organisational Questions ... (1904) were not a one-off occurrence, but, according to renowned Polish Luxemburg scholar Feliks Tych, run through her writings up to her death. In Revolutionary History, Vol.6, No.2/3, I resuméd a number of articles on the latest research on Luxemburg-Jogiches regarding the question of their attitude towards Lenin’s party-concept and his methods, plus some newly found texts, contained in the respected German historical quarterly Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz ..., Vol.27, No.3. Writing in the Czerwony Sztandar in July 1912, following the split in the RSDLP, Luxemburg sees Lenin’s conception of organisation thus: ‘the Central Committee is everything whereas the real party is only its appendage, a mindless mass which moves mechanically on the orders of the leader like the army exercising on the parade ground and like a choir performing under the baton of the conductor’. That sounds just like a criticism of the ECCI as set out in 1920.
Mike Jones
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Soviets in Action-John Reed
Click on the healdine to link to a John Reed-related entry from the American Left History blog.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
From Issue no.8, of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk.
Soviets in Action-John Reed
This piece was first published in October 1918 in The Liberator, a radical monthly edited by Max Eastman, which did pioneering work in rallying support for Bolshevism in the United States. The article provides an eye-witness account of the role of the soviets, and other organs of workers’ democracy such as the factory committees, before and after the October Revolution. The author is well-known for his celebrated account of the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. On his return to the USA, John Reed helped to found the Communist Labor Party, and was delegated to the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920. While in Russia, Reed contracted typhus and died. He was buried in Moscow’s Red Square.
THROUGH ALL the chorus of abuse and misrepresentation directed against the Russian Soviets by the capitalist press there runs a voice shrill with a sort of panic, which cries: ‘There is no government in Russia! There is no organisation among the Russian workers! It will not work! It will not work!’
There is method in the slander.
As all real socialists know, and as we who have seen the Russian Revolution can testify, there is today in Moscow and throughout all the cities and towns of the Russian land a highly complex political structure, which is upheld by the vast majority of the people and which is functioning as well as any newborn popular government ever functioned. Also the workers of Russia have fashioned from their necessities and the demands of life an economic organisation which is evolving into a true industrial democracy.
The Soviet state is based upon the Soviets – or Councils – of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. These Councils – institutions so characteristic of the Russian Revolution – originated in 1905, when, during the first general strike of the workers, Petrograd factories and labour organisations sent delegates to a Central Committee. This Strike Committee was named Council of Workers’ Deputies. It called the second general strike of the fall of 1905, sent out organisers all over Russia, and for a short time was recognised by the Imperial Government as the authorised spokesman of the revolutionary Russian working class.
Upon the failure of the 1905 Revolution, the members of the Council either fled or were sent to Siberia. But so astoundingly effective as a political organ was this type of union that all revolutionary parties included a Council of Workers’ Deputies in their plans for the next uprising.
In March 1917, when, in the face of all Russia rearing like a sea, the Tsar abdicated and Grand Duke Michael declined the throne, and the reluctant Duma was forced to assume the reins of government, the Council of Workers’ Deputies sprang fully-fledged into being. In a few days it was enlarged to include delegates of the Army, and called the Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Except for Kerensky the Duma Committee was composed of bourgeois, and had no connection with the revolutionary masses whatever. Fighting had to be done, order had to be restored, the front guarded. The Duma members had no way of executing these duties; they were obliged to appeal to the representatives of the workers and soldiers – in other words the Council. The Council took charge of the work of Revolution, of co-ordinating the activities of the people, preserving order. Moreover, it assumed the task of assuring the Revolution against its betrayal by the bourgeoisie.
From the moment when the Duma was forced to appeal to the Council, two governments existed in Russia and these two governments struggled for the mastery until November 1917, when the Soviets, with the Bolsheviks in control, overthrew the coalition government.
There were, as I have said, Soviets of both Workers’ and of Soldiers’ Deputies. Somewhat later there came into being Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. In most cities the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets met together; they also held their All-Russian Congress jointly. The Peasants’ Soviets, however, were held aloof by the reactionary elements in control, and did not join with the workers and soldiers until the November revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Government.
THE SOVIET is based directly upon the workers in the factories and the peasants in the field. At first the delegates of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Soviets were elected according to rules which varied with the needs and population of various localities. In some villages the peasants chose one delegate for each fifty voters. Soldiers in garrison were given a certain number of delegates for each regiment, regardless of its strength; the army in the field, however, had a different method of electing their Soviets. As for the workers in the great cities, they soon found out that their Soviets became unwieldy unless the delegates were limited to one for each five hundred. In the same way, the first two All-Russian Congresses of Soviets were roughly based upon one delegate for each twenty five thousand voters, but in fact the delegates represented constituencies of various sizes.
Until February 1918 anybody could vote for delegates to the Soviets. Even had the bourgeoisie organised and demanded representation in the Soviets, they would have been given it. For example, during the regime of the Provisional Government there was bourgeois representation in the Petrograd Soviet – a delegate of the Union of Professional Men which comprised doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.
Last March, the constitution of the Soviets was worked out in detail and applied universally. It restricted the franchise to: citizens of the Russian Socialist Republic of both sexes who shall have completed their eighteenth year by the day of election; all who have acquired the means of living through labour that is productive and useful to society and who are members of labour unions. Excluded from the right to vote were: employers of labour for profit; persons who lived on unearned increment; merchants and agents of private business; employers of religious communities; former members of the police and gendarmerie; the former ruling dynasty; the mentally deficient; the deaf and dumb; and those who had been punished for selfish and dishonourable misdemeanours.
As far as the peasants are concerned, each hundred peasants in the villages elect one representative to the Volost, or Township, Soviet. These Volost Soviets send delegates to the Uyezd, or County, Soviets, which in turn send delegates to the Oblast, or Provincial, Soviet, to which also are elected delegates from the Workers’ Soviets in the cities.
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was in operation when I was in Russia, may serve as an example of how the urban units of government function under the socialist state. It consisted of about 1,200 deputies, and in normal circumstances held a plenary session every two weeks. In the meantime, it elected a Central Executive Committee of 110 members, based upon party proportionality, and this Central Executive Committee added to itself by invitation delegates from the central committees of all the political parties, from the central committees of the professional unions, the factory shop committees, and other democratic organisations.
Besides the big City Soviet, there were also the Rayori, or Ward, Soviets. These were made up of the deputies elected from each ward to the City Soviet, and administered their part of the city. Naturally, in some wards there were no factories, and therefore normally no representation of the ward either in the City Soviet or in Ward Soviets of their own. But the Soviet system is extremely flexible, and if the cooks and waiters, or the street sweepers, or the courtyard servants, or the cab drivers of that ward organised and demanded representation, they were allowed delegates.
Elections of delegates are based on proportional representation, which means that the political parties are represented in exact proportion to the number of voters in the whole city. And it is political parties and programmes which are voted for – not candidates. The candidates are designated by the central committees of the political parties, which can replace them by other party members. Also the delegates are not elected for any particular term, but are subject to recall at any time.
No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revolution the popular will changes with great rapidity. For example, during the first week of December 1917, there were parades and demonstrations in favour of a Constituent Assembly -that is to say, against the Soviet power. One of these parades was fired on by some irresponsible Red Guards, and several people killed. The reaction to this stupid violence was immediate. Within twelve hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet changed. More than a dozen Bolshevik deputies were withdrawn, and replaced by Mensheviki. And it was three weeks before public sentiment subsided – before the Mensheviki were retired one by one and the Bolsheviki sent back.
AT LEAST twice a year delegates are elected from all over Russia to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Theoretically these delegates are chosen by direct popular election: from the provinces, one for each hundred and twenty five thousand voters - from the cities, one for each twenty five thousand; in practice, however, they are usually chosen by the provincial and the urban Soviets. An extraordinary session of the Congress can be called at any time upon the initiative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or upon the demand of Soviets representing one third of the working population of Russia.
This body, consisting of about two thousand delegates, meets in the capital in the form of a great Soviet, and settles upon the essentials of national policy. It elects a Central Executive Committee, like the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which invites delegates from the central committees of all democratic organisations.
This augmented Central Executive Committee of the Russian Soviets is the parliament of the Russian Republic. It consists of about three hundred and fifty persons. Between All-Russian Congresses it is the supreme authority; it must not act outside the lines laid down by the last Congress, and is strictly responsible in all its acts to the next Congress. For example, the Central Executive Committee can, and did, order that the peace treaty with Germany be signed, But it could not make this treaty binding on Russia. Only the All Russian Congress has power to ratify the treaty.
The Central Executive Committee elects from its midst eleven Commissars, to be chairmen of committees in charge of the different branches of government, in place of ministers. These Commissars can be recalled at any time. They are strictly responsible to the Central Executive Committee. The Commissars elect a chairman. Ever since the Soviet Government has been formed, this chairman – or Premier – has been Nicolai Lenin. If his leadership were unsatisfactory, Lenin could be recalled at any moment by the delegation of the masses of the Russian people, or in a few weeks’ time directly by the Russian people themselves.
The chief function of the Soviets is the defence and consolidation of the Revolution. They express the political will of the masses, not only in the All Russian Congresses, for the whole country, but also in their own localities, where their authority is practically supreme. This decentralisation exists because the local Soviets create the central government, and not the central government the local Soviets. In spite of local autonomy, however, the decrees of the Central Executive Committee, and the orders of the Commissars, are valid throughout all the country, because under the Soviet Republic there are no sectional or private interests to serve, and the cause of the Revolution is everywhere the same.
Ill-informed observers, mostly from the middle class intelligentsia, are fond of remarking that they are in favour of the Soviets, but against the Bolsheviks. This is an absurdity. The Soviets are the most perfect organs of working class representation, it is true, but they are also the weapons of proletarian dictatorship, to which all anti-Bolshevik parties are bitterly opposed. So the measure of the adherence of the people to the policy of proletarian dictatorship is not only measured by the membership of the Bolshevik Party – or, as it is now called, the Communist Party – but also by the growth and activity of local Soviets all over Russia.
The most striking example of this is among the peasants, who did not take the leadership of the revolution, and whose primitive and almost exclusive interest in it was the confiscation of the great estates. The Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies at first had practically no other function except the solution of the land question. It was the failure of the land solution under the coalition government which turned the attention of the great mass of peasants to the social reasons behind this failure – that, coupled with the ceaseless propaganda of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and of the Bolsheviki, and the return to the villages of the revolutionary soldiers.
The traditional party of the peasants is the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The great inert mass of peasants whose only interest was in their land, and who had neither fighting stamina nor political initiative, at first refused to have anything to do with the Soviets. Those peasants, however, who did participate in the Soviets soon awoke to the idea of the proletarian dictatorship. And they almost invariably joined the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and became fighting partisans of the Soviet government.
In the Commissariat of Agriculture in Petrograd hangs a map of Russia, sprinkled with red-headed pins. Each of these red-headed pins represents a Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies. When I first saw the map, hanging in the old headquarters of the Peasants’ Soviets at 6 Fontanka, the red points were sprinkled sparsely over the vast country, nor did the numbers grow. For the first eight months of the revolution there were volosts, uyezds, whole provinces in fact where only one or two large towns would show a Peasants’ Soviet, and perhaps a scattering of villages. After the November Revolution, however, you could see all Russia redder under your eyes, as village after village, county after county, province after province, awoke and formed its Peasant Council.
At the time of the Bolshevik insurrection a Constituent Assembly with an anti~Soviet majority could be elected; one month later it would have been impossible. I saw three All-Russian Peasants Conventions in Petrograd. The delegates arrived – the vast majority of them Right Socialist Revolutionaries They met in session – and very stormy sessions they always were – under the presidency of conservatives of the type of Avksentiev and Peshekhanov. In a few days they would move to the left and be dominated by pseudo-radicals like Tchernov. A few days later the majority would become very radical, and Maria Spiridonova would be elected chairman. Then the conservative minority would split off and set up a rump convention, which in a few days dwindled to nothing. And the main body would send delegates to join the Soviets at Smolny. This happened every time.
I shall never forget the Peasants’ Conference which took place towards the end of November, and how Tchernov fought for control and lost it, and that wonderful procession of grizzled proletarians of the soil who marched to Smolny through the snowy streets, singing, their blood-red banners floating in the bitter wind. It was dark night. On the steps of Smolny hundreds of working men were waiting to receive their peasant brothers, and in the dim light the two masses moving one down and the other up, rushed together and embraced, and wept, and cheered.
The Soviets can pass decrees effecting fundamental economic changes, but these must be carried out by the local popular organisations themselves. The confiscation and distribution of the land, for example, were left to the Peasants’ Land Committees. These Land Committees were elected by the peasants at the suggestion of Prince Lvov, first premier of the Provisional Government Some settlement of the land question was inevitable, by which the great estates should be broken up and distributed among the peasants. Prince Lvov asked the peasants to elect Land Committees, which should not only determine their own agricultural needs, but should also survey and make a valuation of the landed estates. But when these Land Committees attempted to function, the landlords had them arrested.
When the Soviets seized the power, its first action was to promulgate the Decree of the Land. This Land Decree was not a Bolshevik project at all, but the programme of the Right (or moderate) Socialist Revolutionary Party, drawn up on the basis of several hundred peasant memorials. It abolished forever private title to land or to natural resources in Russia, and gave over to the Land Committees the task of apportioning the land among the peasants, until the Constituent Assembly should finally settle the question. After the dissolution of the Constitution Assembly, the Decree was made final.
Outside of these few general propositions, and a section providing for the emigration of surplus population in congested neighbourhoods, the details of confiscation and distribution were left entirely to the local Land Committee. Kalagayev, the first Commissar of Agriculture, drew up an elaborate set of rules to guide the peasants in their action. But Lenin, in a speech before the Central Executive Committee, persuaded the government to leave the peasants to manage the matter in a revolutionary way, merely advising the poor peasants to combine against the rich peasants. (‘Let ten poor peasants oppose every rich peasant’, said Lenin.)
Of course no peasant could own his land, but still, he could take what land was due him and treat it as his private property. But the policy of the government, acting through the local Land Committee, is to discourage this tendency. Peasants who wish to become private landlords may do so, but they are not assisted by the government On the other hand, peasants who farm co-operatively are given credit, seed, implements and modern technical training.
Attached to the Land Committees are agricultural and forestry experts. In order to co-ordinate the practices of the local Committees a central body is elected from them, known as the Main Land Committee, which sits in the capital, in close touch with the Commissariat of Agriculture.
WHEN THE March Revolution broke, the owners and administrators of many industrial plants either left or were driven out by the workers. In the government factories, where labour had long been at the mercy of irresponsible bureaucrats appointed by the Tsar, this was particularly the case.
Without superintendents, foremen, and in many cases engineers and bookkeepers, the workers found themselves faced with the alternative of keeping the works going or of starving. A committee was elected, one delegate from each ‘shop’ or department; this committee attempted to run the factory. Of course, at first this plan seemed hopeless. The functions of the different departments could be co-ordinated in this way, but the lack of technical training on the part of the workers produced some grotesque results.
Finally there was a committee meeting at one of the factories, where a workman rose and said: ‘Comrades, why do we worry? The question of technical experts is not a difficult one. Remember the boss wasn’t a technical expert; the boss didn’t know engineering or chemistry or bookkeeping. All he did was to own. When he wanted technical help, he hired men to do it for him. Well, now we are the boss. Let’s hire engineers, bookkeepers, and so forth – to work for us!’
In the government factories the problem was comparatively simple, since the Revolution automatically removed the ‘boss’, and never really substituted another. But when the Factory Shop Committees spread to the privately-owned works, they were viciously fought by factory owners, most of whom were making contracts with the unions.
In the private factories, too, the shop committees were the product of necessity. After the first three months of the Revolution, during which the middle class and the proletarian organisations worked together in utopian harmony, the industrial capitalists began to be afraid of the growing power and ambition of the workers’ organisations – just as the country landowners feared the Land Committee, and the officers the soldiers’ committees and Soviets. Along about the first part of June began the more or less conscious campaign of the entire bourgeoisie to halt the Revolution, and break down the democratic organisations. Beginning with the Factory Shop Committees, the industrial owners planned to make a clean sweep of everything. including the Soviets. The army was disorganised, supplies and munitions and food diverted from it, and actual positions betrayed to the Germans – like Riga; in the country the peasants were persuaded to hoard their grain, and provoked to disorders, which gave the excuse to the Cossacks to ‘restore peace’; and in industry, more important than all, the machinery and operation of the factories themselves were sabotaged, transportation was still further wrecked, and the coal mines, metal mines and sources of raw materials damaged as much as possible. Every effort was made to shut down the factories and starve the workers back into submission to the old industrial regime.
This the workers were forced to resist. The Factory Shop Committee sprang up and took charge. At first, of course, Russian workers made ludicrous mistakes, as all the world has been told again and again. They demanded impossible wages – they attempted to run complicated scientific manufacturing processes without proper experience; in some cases, even, they asked the boss to return at his own terms. But such cases are the great minority In the majority of plants the workers were resourceful enough to be able to conduct the industry without bosses.
The owners attempted to falsify the books, to conceal orders; the Factory Shop Committee was forced to find out ways to control the books. The owners tried to strip the works – so the committee had to rule that nothing should go in or out of the plant without permission. When the factory was going to close down for lack of fuel, raw material, or orders, the Factory Shop Committee had to send men half across Russia to the mines, or down into the Caucasus for oil, to Crimea for cotton; and agents had to be sent out by the workers to sell the product. In the breakdown of the railroads, committee agents had to make agreements with the Railwaymen’s Union for transportation of freight. To guard against strike-breakers, the committee had to take over the function of hiring and discharging workers.
Thus the Factory Shop Committee was the creation of Russian anarchy, forced by necessity to learn how to manage industry, so that when the time came the Russian workers could take over actual control with little friction.
As an instance of how the masses worked together, there is the matter of two hundred thousand poods of coal, which was taken from the bunkers of the Baltic battle fleet in December, and turned over by the sailors’ committees to keep the factories of Petrograd running during the coal famine.
Obukhov Works was a steel plant manufacturing supplies for the Navy. The chairman of the Obukhov committee was a Russian-Arnerican, Petrovsky by name, well known here as an anarchist. One day the foreman of the torpedo department told Petrovsky that the department would have to close down owing to the impossibility of procuring certain small tubes used in the manufacture of torpedoes. The tubes were manufactured by a factory across the river, whose product was contracted for three months ahead. The closing down of the torpedo department meant that four hundred men would be out of work.
‘I’ll get the tubes’, said Petrovsky. He went direct to the tube factory, where, instead of calling upon the manager, he sought the chairman of the local Factory Shop Committee. ‘Comrade’, he said, ‘if we don’t get tubes in two days, our torpedo department will have to close down, and four hundred of the boys will be out of a job.’
The chairman called for his factory’s books, and discovered that some thousands of the tubes were contracted for by three private plants in the vicinity. He and Petrovsky thereupon visited these three plants, and called on the Factory Shop Committee chairmen. At two of the factories it was discovered that the tubes were not immediately needed; and next day the tubes were delivered to the Obukhov Works, and the torpedo department didn’t shut down.
In Novgorod was a textile mill. At the outbreak of the revolution the owner said to himself. ‘Here’s trouble coming. We won’t be able to make any profits while this revolution is on. Let’s shut down the works until the thing blows over.’ So he shut down the works, and he and the office force, the chemists, engineers and manager, took the train for Petrograd. The next morning the workers opened the mill.
Now these workers were perhaps a little more ignorant than most workers. They knew nothing of the technical processes of manufacture, of bookkeeping or management, or selling. They elected a Factory Shop Committee, and finding a certain amount of fuel and raw materials in stock, set to work to manufacturing cotton cloth.
Not knowing what was done with cotton cloth when manufactured, they first helped themselves to enough for their families. Next, some of the looms being out of order, they sent a delegate to a nearby machine-shop saying that they would give cotton cloth in exchange for mechanical assistance. This done, they made a deal with the local city co-operative, to supply cloth in exchange for food. They even extended the principle of barter so far as to exchange bolts of cloth for fuel with the coal miners of Kharkov, and with the Railwaymen’s Union for transportation.
But finally they glutted the local market with cotton cloth, and then they ran up against a demand which cloth could not satisfy – rent. This was in the days of the Provisional Government when there were still landlords. Rent had to be satisfied with money. So they loaded a train with cloth and sent it, in charge of a committeeman, to Moscow. The committeeman left his train at the station, and went down the street. He came to a tailor shop and asked if the tailor needed cloth.
’How much?’ asked the tailor.
’A train-load’, answered the committeeman.
’What does it cost?
’I don’t know. What do you usually pay for cloth?’
The tailor got his cloth for a song, and the committeeman, who had never seen so much money at one time, went back to Novgorod highly elated.
So it was that all over Russia the workers were getting the necessary education in the fundamentals of industrial production, and even distribution, so that when the November Revolution came they could take their places in the machinery of workers’ control.
It was in June 1917 that the first meeting of delegates from the shop committees was held. At this time the committees had hardly spread outside of Petrograd. It was a remarkable gathering, composed of delegates of the actual rank and file, most of them Bolsheviks, many of them Anarcho-Syndicalists; and its character was that of protest against the tactics of the trade unions. In the political world the Bolsheviks were reiterating that no socialist had any right to participate in a coalition government with the bourgeoisie. The meeting of shop committee delegates put itself on record as taking the same attitude toward industry. In other words, the employing class and the workers have no interests in common; no class conscious worker can be a member of an arbitration or conciliation board except to acquaint the employers with the demands of the workers. No contracts between employers and the workers. Industrial production must be absolutely controlled by the workers.
At first the unions fought bitterly against the Factory Shop Committees. But the shop committees, who were in a position to clutch the command of industry at its heart, easily extended and consolidated their power. Many workmen could not see the necessity of joining a union; but all of them saw the necessity of participating in the elections of the shop committee, which controlled their immediate jobs. On the other hand, the shop committees recognised the value of the unions; no new worker was employed unless he could show a union card; it was the shop committees which applied locally the regulations of the different unions. At the present time the unions and the Factory Shop Committees work in perfect harmony, each in its place.
PRIVATE OWNERSHIP of industry in Russia is not yet abolished. In many factories the owner still holds title, and is allowed a certain limited profit on his investment, on condition that he works for the success and increase of scope of the enterprise; but control is taken away from him. Those industries whose owners attempt to lock out their workers, or who, by fraud or force, try to hinder the operations of the plant, are immediately confiscated by the workers. Conditions, hours and wages in all industries, private or government-owned, are uniform.
The reason for this survival of semi-capitalism, in a proletarian state, lies in the backwardness of Russia’s economic life, the surrounding highly-organised capitalist states, and the necessity for industrial production in Russia immediately, to combat the pressure of foreign industry.
The agency by which the state controls industry, both labour and production, is called the Council of Workers’ Control. This central body, sitting in the capital, is composed of delegates elected from local Councils of Workers’ Control, which are made up of members of Factory Shop Committees, Professional Union officials, and technical engineers and experts. A central executive committee manages the affairs of each locality, composed of common workmen, but the majority is composed of workmen from other districts, so that its rulings shall be unprejudiced by sectional interests. The local councils recommend to the All-Russian Council the confiscation of plants, report on the needs in fuel, raw materials, transportation and labour in their districts, and assist the workmen in learning to manage the various industries. The All-Russian Council has power to confiscate plants and to equalise the economic resources of the different localities.
If it had not been for democratic organisations which existed already before the revolution, there is little doubt that the Russian revolution would have been starved to its knees long before this time. The ordinary commercial machinery of distribution had been completely smashed. Only the consumers’ co-operative societies managed to feed the people, and their system has since been adopted by the municipalities, and even by the government. Before the revolution there were more than twelve million members of the co-operative societies of Russia. It is a very natural way for Russians to combine, because of its resemblance to the primitive co-operation of Russian village life for centuries. In the Putilov factory, where more than 40,000 workers are employed, the co-operative society fed, housed and even clothed more than 100,000 people – sending all the way to England for clothing.
It is this quality in the Russians that is forgotten by people who think that Russia can have no government, because there is no central force; and whose mental picture of Russia is a servile committee in Moscow, bossed by Lenin and Trotsky, and maintained by Red Guard mercenaries. Quite the contrary is true. The organisations which I have described are reproduced in almost every community in Russia. And if any considerable part of Russia were seriously opposed to the Soviet government, the Soviets could not last an hour.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
From Issue no.8, of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk.
Soviets in Action-John Reed
This piece was first published in October 1918 in The Liberator, a radical monthly edited by Max Eastman, which did pioneering work in rallying support for Bolshevism in the United States. The article provides an eye-witness account of the role of the soviets, and other organs of workers’ democracy such as the factory committees, before and after the October Revolution. The author is well-known for his celebrated account of the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. On his return to the USA, John Reed helped to found the Communist Labor Party, and was delegated to the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920. While in Russia, Reed contracted typhus and died. He was buried in Moscow’s Red Square.
THROUGH ALL the chorus of abuse and misrepresentation directed against the Russian Soviets by the capitalist press there runs a voice shrill with a sort of panic, which cries: ‘There is no government in Russia! There is no organisation among the Russian workers! It will not work! It will not work!’
There is method in the slander.
As all real socialists know, and as we who have seen the Russian Revolution can testify, there is today in Moscow and throughout all the cities and towns of the Russian land a highly complex political structure, which is upheld by the vast majority of the people and which is functioning as well as any newborn popular government ever functioned. Also the workers of Russia have fashioned from their necessities and the demands of life an economic organisation which is evolving into a true industrial democracy.
The Soviet state is based upon the Soviets – or Councils – of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. These Councils – institutions so characteristic of the Russian Revolution – originated in 1905, when, during the first general strike of the workers, Petrograd factories and labour organisations sent delegates to a Central Committee. This Strike Committee was named Council of Workers’ Deputies. It called the second general strike of the fall of 1905, sent out organisers all over Russia, and for a short time was recognised by the Imperial Government as the authorised spokesman of the revolutionary Russian working class.
Upon the failure of the 1905 Revolution, the members of the Council either fled or were sent to Siberia. But so astoundingly effective as a political organ was this type of union that all revolutionary parties included a Council of Workers’ Deputies in their plans for the next uprising.
In March 1917, when, in the face of all Russia rearing like a sea, the Tsar abdicated and Grand Duke Michael declined the throne, and the reluctant Duma was forced to assume the reins of government, the Council of Workers’ Deputies sprang fully-fledged into being. In a few days it was enlarged to include delegates of the Army, and called the Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Except for Kerensky the Duma Committee was composed of bourgeois, and had no connection with the revolutionary masses whatever. Fighting had to be done, order had to be restored, the front guarded. The Duma members had no way of executing these duties; they were obliged to appeal to the representatives of the workers and soldiers – in other words the Council. The Council took charge of the work of Revolution, of co-ordinating the activities of the people, preserving order. Moreover, it assumed the task of assuring the Revolution against its betrayal by the bourgeoisie.
From the moment when the Duma was forced to appeal to the Council, two governments existed in Russia and these two governments struggled for the mastery until November 1917, when the Soviets, with the Bolsheviks in control, overthrew the coalition government.
There were, as I have said, Soviets of both Workers’ and of Soldiers’ Deputies. Somewhat later there came into being Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. In most cities the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets met together; they also held their All-Russian Congress jointly. The Peasants’ Soviets, however, were held aloof by the reactionary elements in control, and did not join with the workers and soldiers until the November revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Government.
THE SOVIET is based directly upon the workers in the factories and the peasants in the field. At first the delegates of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Soviets were elected according to rules which varied with the needs and population of various localities. In some villages the peasants chose one delegate for each fifty voters. Soldiers in garrison were given a certain number of delegates for each regiment, regardless of its strength; the army in the field, however, had a different method of electing their Soviets. As for the workers in the great cities, they soon found out that their Soviets became unwieldy unless the delegates were limited to one for each five hundred. In the same way, the first two All-Russian Congresses of Soviets were roughly based upon one delegate for each twenty five thousand voters, but in fact the delegates represented constituencies of various sizes.
Until February 1918 anybody could vote for delegates to the Soviets. Even had the bourgeoisie organised and demanded representation in the Soviets, they would have been given it. For example, during the regime of the Provisional Government there was bourgeois representation in the Petrograd Soviet – a delegate of the Union of Professional Men which comprised doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.
Last March, the constitution of the Soviets was worked out in detail and applied universally. It restricted the franchise to: citizens of the Russian Socialist Republic of both sexes who shall have completed their eighteenth year by the day of election; all who have acquired the means of living through labour that is productive and useful to society and who are members of labour unions. Excluded from the right to vote were: employers of labour for profit; persons who lived on unearned increment; merchants and agents of private business; employers of religious communities; former members of the police and gendarmerie; the former ruling dynasty; the mentally deficient; the deaf and dumb; and those who had been punished for selfish and dishonourable misdemeanours.
As far as the peasants are concerned, each hundred peasants in the villages elect one representative to the Volost, or Township, Soviet. These Volost Soviets send delegates to the Uyezd, or County, Soviets, which in turn send delegates to the Oblast, or Provincial, Soviet, to which also are elected delegates from the Workers’ Soviets in the cities.
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was in operation when I was in Russia, may serve as an example of how the urban units of government function under the socialist state. It consisted of about 1,200 deputies, and in normal circumstances held a plenary session every two weeks. In the meantime, it elected a Central Executive Committee of 110 members, based upon party proportionality, and this Central Executive Committee added to itself by invitation delegates from the central committees of all the political parties, from the central committees of the professional unions, the factory shop committees, and other democratic organisations.
Besides the big City Soviet, there were also the Rayori, or Ward, Soviets. These were made up of the deputies elected from each ward to the City Soviet, and administered their part of the city. Naturally, in some wards there were no factories, and therefore normally no representation of the ward either in the City Soviet or in Ward Soviets of their own. But the Soviet system is extremely flexible, and if the cooks and waiters, or the street sweepers, or the courtyard servants, or the cab drivers of that ward organised and demanded representation, they were allowed delegates.
Elections of delegates are based on proportional representation, which means that the political parties are represented in exact proportion to the number of voters in the whole city. And it is political parties and programmes which are voted for – not candidates. The candidates are designated by the central committees of the political parties, which can replace them by other party members. Also the delegates are not elected for any particular term, but are subject to recall at any time.
No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revolution the popular will changes with great rapidity. For example, during the first week of December 1917, there were parades and demonstrations in favour of a Constituent Assembly -that is to say, against the Soviet power. One of these parades was fired on by some irresponsible Red Guards, and several people killed. The reaction to this stupid violence was immediate. Within twelve hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet changed. More than a dozen Bolshevik deputies were withdrawn, and replaced by Mensheviki. And it was three weeks before public sentiment subsided – before the Mensheviki were retired one by one and the Bolsheviki sent back.
AT LEAST twice a year delegates are elected from all over Russia to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Theoretically these delegates are chosen by direct popular election: from the provinces, one for each hundred and twenty five thousand voters - from the cities, one for each twenty five thousand; in practice, however, they are usually chosen by the provincial and the urban Soviets. An extraordinary session of the Congress can be called at any time upon the initiative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or upon the demand of Soviets representing one third of the working population of Russia.
This body, consisting of about two thousand delegates, meets in the capital in the form of a great Soviet, and settles upon the essentials of national policy. It elects a Central Executive Committee, like the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which invites delegates from the central committees of all democratic organisations.
This augmented Central Executive Committee of the Russian Soviets is the parliament of the Russian Republic. It consists of about three hundred and fifty persons. Between All-Russian Congresses it is the supreme authority; it must not act outside the lines laid down by the last Congress, and is strictly responsible in all its acts to the next Congress. For example, the Central Executive Committee can, and did, order that the peace treaty with Germany be signed, But it could not make this treaty binding on Russia. Only the All Russian Congress has power to ratify the treaty.
The Central Executive Committee elects from its midst eleven Commissars, to be chairmen of committees in charge of the different branches of government, in place of ministers. These Commissars can be recalled at any time. They are strictly responsible to the Central Executive Committee. The Commissars elect a chairman. Ever since the Soviet Government has been formed, this chairman – or Premier – has been Nicolai Lenin. If his leadership were unsatisfactory, Lenin could be recalled at any moment by the delegation of the masses of the Russian people, or in a few weeks’ time directly by the Russian people themselves.
The chief function of the Soviets is the defence and consolidation of the Revolution. They express the political will of the masses, not only in the All Russian Congresses, for the whole country, but also in their own localities, where their authority is practically supreme. This decentralisation exists because the local Soviets create the central government, and not the central government the local Soviets. In spite of local autonomy, however, the decrees of the Central Executive Committee, and the orders of the Commissars, are valid throughout all the country, because under the Soviet Republic there are no sectional or private interests to serve, and the cause of the Revolution is everywhere the same.
Ill-informed observers, mostly from the middle class intelligentsia, are fond of remarking that they are in favour of the Soviets, but against the Bolsheviks. This is an absurdity. The Soviets are the most perfect organs of working class representation, it is true, but they are also the weapons of proletarian dictatorship, to which all anti-Bolshevik parties are bitterly opposed. So the measure of the adherence of the people to the policy of proletarian dictatorship is not only measured by the membership of the Bolshevik Party – or, as it is now called, the Communist Party – but also by the growth and activity of local Soviets all over Russia.
The most striking example of this is among the peasants, who did not take the leadership of the revolution, and whose primitive and almost exclusive interest in it was the confiscation of the great estates. The Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies at first had practically no other function except the solution of the land question. It was the failure of the land solution under the coalition government which turned the attention of the great mass of peasants to the social reasons behind this failure – that, coupled with the ceaseless propaganda of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and of the Bolsheviki, and the return to the villages of the revolutionary soldiers.
The traditional party of the peasants is the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The great inert mass of peasants whose only interest was in their land, and who had neither fighting stamina nor political initiative, at first refused to have anything to do with the Soviets. Those peasants, however, who did participate in the Soviets soon awoke to the idea of the proletarian dictatorship. And they almost invariably joined the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and became fighting partisans of the Soviet government.
In the Commissariat of Agriculture in Petrograd hangs a map of Russia, sprinkled with red-headed pins. Each of these red-headed pins represents a Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies. When I first saw the map, hanging in the old headquarters of the Peasants’ Soviets at 6 Fontanka, the red points were sprinkled sparsely over the vast country, nor did the numbers grow. For the first eight months of the revolution there were volosts, uyezds, whole provinces in fact where only one or two large towns would show a Peasants’ Soviet, and perhaps a scattering of villages. After the November Revolution, however, you could see all Russia redder under your eyes, as village after village, county after county, province after province, awoke and formed its Peasant Council.
At the time of the Bolshevik insurrection a Constituent Assembly with an anti~Soviet majority could be elected; one month later it would have been impossible. I saw three All-Russian Peasants Conventions in Petrograd. The delegates arrived – the vast majority of them Right Socialist Revolutionaries They met in session – and very stormy sessions they always were – under the presidency of conservatives of the type of Avksentiev and Peshekhanov. In a few days they would move to the left and be dominated by pseudo-radicals like Tchernov. A few days later the majority would become very radical, and Maria Spiridonova would be elected chairman. Then the conservative minority would split off and set up a rump convention, which in a few days dwindled to nothing. And the main body would send delegates to join the Soviets at Smolny. This happened every time.
I shall never forget the Peasants’ Conference which took place towards the end of November, and how Tchernov fought for control and lost it, and that wonderful procession of grizzled proletarians of the soil who marched to Smolny through the snowy streets, singing, their blood-red banners floating in the bitter wind. It was dark night. On the steps of Smolny hundreds of working men were waiting to receive their peasant brothers, and in the dim light the two masses moving one down and the other up, rushed together and embraced, and wept, and cheered.
The Soviets can pass decrees effecting fundamental economic changes, but these must be carried out by the local popular organisations themselves. The confiscation and distribution of the land, for example, were left to the Peasants’ Land Committees. These Land Committees were elected by the peasants at the suggestion of Prince Lvov, first premier of the Provisional Government Some settlement of the land question was inevitable, by which the great estates should be broken up and distributed among the peasants. Prince Lvov asked the peasants to elect Land Committees, which should not only determine their own agricultural needs, but should also survey and make a valuation of the landed estates. But when these Land Committees attempted to function, the landlords had them arrested.
When the Soviets seized the power, its first action was to promulgate the Decree of the Land. This Land Decree was not a Bolshevik project at all, but the programme of the Right (or moderate) Socialist Revolutionary Party, drawn up on the basis of several hundred peasant memorials. It abolished forever private title to land or to natural resources in Russia, and gave over to the Land Committees the task of apportioning the land among the peasants, until the Constituent Assembly should finally settle the question. After the dissolution of the Constitution Assembly, the Decree was made final.
Outside of these few general propositions, and a section providing for the emigration of surplus population in congested neighbourhoods, the details of confiscation and distribution were left entirely to the local Land Committee. Kalagayev, the first Commissar of Agriculture, drew up an elaborate set of rules to guide the peasants in their action. But Lenin, in a speech before the Central Executive Committee, persuaded the government to leave the peasants to manage the matter in a revolutionary way, merely advising the poor peasants to combine against the rich peasants. (‘Let ten poor peasants oppose every rich peasant’, said Lenin.)
Of course no peasant could own his land, but still, he could take what land was due him and treat it as his private property. But the policy of the government, acting through the local Land Committee, is to discourage this tendency. Peasants who wish to become private landlords may do so, but they are not assisted by the government On the other hand, peasants who farm co-operatively are given credit, seed, implements and modern technical training.
Attached to the Land Committees are agricultural and forestry experts. In order to co-ordinate the practices of the local Committees a central body is elected from them, known as the Main Land Committee, which sits in the capital, in close touch with the Commissariat of Agriculture.
WHEN THE March Revolution broke, the owners and administrators of many industrial plants either left or were driven out by the workers. In the government factories, where labour had long been at the mercy of irresponsible bureaucrats appointed by the Tsar, this was particularly the case.
Without superintendents, foremen, and in many cases engineers and bookkeepers, the workers found themselves faced with the alternative of keeping the works going or of starving. A committee was elected, one delegate from each ‘shop’ or department; this committee attempted to run the factory. Of course, at first this plan seemed hopeless. The functions of the different departments could be co-ordinated in this way, but the lack of technical training on the part of the workers produced some grotesque results.
Finally there was a committee meeting at one of the factories, where a workman rose and said: ‘Comrades, why do we worry? The question of technical experts is not a difficult one. Remember the boss wasn’t a technical expert; the boss didn’t know engineering or chemistry or bookkeeping. All he did was to own. When he wanted technical help, he hired men to do it for him. Well, now we are the boss. Let’s hire engineers, bookkeepers, and so forth – to work for us!’
In the government factories the problem was comparatively simple, since the Revolution automatically removed the ‘boss’, and never really substituted another. But when the Factory Shop Committees spread to the privately-owned works, they were viciously fought by factory owners, most of whom were making contracts with the unions.
In the private factories, too, the shop committees were the product of necessity. After the first three months of the Revolution, during which the middle class and the proletarian organisations worked together in utopian harmony, the industrial capitalists began to be afraid of the growing power and ambition of the workers’ organisations – just as the country landowners feared the Land Committee, and the officers the soldiers’ committees and Soviets. Along about the first part of June began the more or less conscious campaign of the entire bourgeoisie to halt the Revolution, and break down the democratic organisations. Beginning with the Factory Shop Committees, the industrial owners planned to make a clean sweep of everything. including the Soviets. The army was disorganised, supplies and munitions and food diverted from it, and actual positions betrayed to the Germans – like Riga; in the country the peasants were persuaded to hoard their grain, and provoked to disorders, which gave the excuse to the Cossacks to ‘restore peace’; and in industry, more important than all, the machinery and operation of the factories themselves were sabotaged, transportation was still further wrecked, and the coal mines, metal mines and sources of raw materials damaged as much as possible. Every effort was made to shut down the factories and starve the workers back into submission to the old industrial regime.
This the workers were forced to resist. The Factory Shop Committee sprang up and took charge. At first, of course, Russian workers made ludicrous mistakes, as all the world has been told again and again. They demanded impossible wages – they attempted to run complicated scientific manufacturing processes without proper experience; in some cases, even, they asked the boss to return at his own terms. But such cases are the great minority In the majority of plants the workers were resourceful enough to be able to conduct the industry without bosses.
The owners attempted to falsify the books, to conceal orders; the Factory Shop Committee was forced to find out ways to control the books. The owners tried to strip the works – so the committee had to rule that nothing should go in or out of the plant without permission. When the factory was going to close down for lack of fuel, raw material, or orders, the Factory Shop Committee had to send men half across Russia to the mines, or down into the Caucasus for oil, to Crimea for cotton; and agents had to be sent out by the workers to sell the product. In the breakdown of the railroads, committee agents had to make agreements with the Railwaymen’s Union for transportation of freight. To guard against strike-breakers, the committee had to take over the function of hiring and discharging workers.
Thus the Factory Shop Committee was the creation of Russian anarchy, forced by necessity to learn how to manage industry, so that when the time came the Russian workers could take over actual control with little friction.
As an instance of how the masses worked together, there is the matter of two hundred thousand poods of coal, which was taken from the bunkers of the Baltic battle fleet in December, and turned over by the sailors’ committees to keep the factories of Petrograd running during the coal famine.
Obukhov Works was a steel plant manufacturing supplies for the Navy. The chairman of the Obukhov committee was a Russian-Arnerican, Petrovsky by name, well known here as an anarchist. One day the foreman of the torpedo department told Petrovsky that the department would have to close down owing to the impossibility of procuring certain small tubes used in the manufacture of torpedoes. The tubes were manufactured by a factory across the river, whose product was contracted for three months ahead. The closing down of the torpedo department meant that four hundred men would be out of work.
‘I’ll get the tubes’, said Petrovsky. He went direct to the tube factory, where, instead of calling upon the manager, he sought the chairman of the local Factory Shop Committee. ‘Comrade’, he said, ‘if we don’t get tubes in two days, our torpedo department will have to close down, and four hundred of the boys will be out of a job.’
The chairman called for his factory’s books, and discovered that some thousands of the tubes were contracted for by three private plants in the vicinity. He and Petrovsky thereupon visited these three plants, and called on the Factory Shop Committee chairmen. At two of the factories it was discovered that the tubes were not immediately needed; and next day the tubes were delivered to the Obukhov Works, and the torpedo department didn’t shut down.
In Novgorod was a textile mill. At the outbreak of the revolution the owner said to himself. ‘Here’s trouble coming. We won’t be able to make any profits while this revolution is on. Let’s shut down the works until the thing blows over.’ So he shut down the works, and he and the office force, the chemists, engineers and manager, took the train for Petrograd. The next morning the workers opened the mill.
Now these workers were perhaps a little more ignorant than most workers. They knew nothing of the technical processes of manufacture, of bookkeeping or management, or selling. They elected a Factory Shop Committee, and finding a certain amount of fuel and raw materials in stock, set to work to manufacturing cotton cloth.
Not knowing what was done with cotton cloth when manufactured, they first helped themselves to enough for their families. Next, some of the looms being out of order, they sent a delegate to a nearby machine-shop saying that they would give cotton cloth in exchange for mechanical assistance. This done, they made a deal with the local city co-operative, to supply cloth in exchange for food. They even extended the principle of barter so far as to exchange bolts of cloth for fuel with the coal miners of Kharkov, and with the Railwaymen’s Union for transportation.
But finally they glutted the local market with cotton cloth, and then they ran up against a demand which cloth could not satisfy – rent. This was in the days of the Provisional Government when there were still landlords. Rent had to be satisfied with money. So they loaded a train with cloth and sent it, in charge of a committeeman, to Moscow. The committeeman left his train at the station, and went down the street. He came to a tailor shop and asked if the tailor needed cloth.
’How much?’ asked the tailor.
’A train-load’, answered the committeeman.
’What does it cost?
’I don’t know. What do you usually pay for cloth?’
The tailor got his cloth for a song, and the committeeman, who had never seen so much money at one time, went back to Novgorod highly elated.
So it was that all over Russia the workers were getting the necessary education in the fundamentals of industrial production, and even distribution, so that when the November Revolution came they could take their places in the machinery of workers’ control.
It was in June 1917 that the first meeting of delegates from the shop committees was held. At this time the committees had hardly spread outside of Petrograd. It was a remarkable gathering, composed of delegates of the actual rank and file, most of them Bolsheviks, many of them Anarcho-Syndicalists; and its character was that of protest against the tactics of the trade unions. In the political world the Bolsheviks were reiterating that no socialist had any right to participate in a coalition government with the bourgeoisie. The meeting of shop committee delegates put itself on record as taking the same attitude toward industry. In other words, the employing class and the workers have no interests in common; no class conscious worker can be a member of an arbitration or conciliation board except to acquaint the employers with the demands of the workers. No contracts between employers and the workers. Industrial production must be absolutely controlled by the workers.
At first the unions fought bitterly against the Factory Shop Committees. But the shop committees, who were in a position to clutch the command of industry at its heart, easily extended and consolidated their power. Many workmen could not see the necessity of joining a union; but all of them saw the necessity of participating in the elections of the shop committee, which controlled their immediate jobs. On the other hand, the shop committees recognised the value of the unions; no new worker was employed unless he could show a union card; it was the shop committees which applied locally the regulations of the different unions. At the present time the unions and the Factory Shop Committees work in perfect harmony, each in its place.
PRIVATE OWNERSHIP of industry in Russia is not yet abolished. In many factories the owner still holds title, and is allowed a certain limited profit on his investment, on condition that he works for the success and increase of scope of the enterprise; but control is taken away from him. Those industries whose owners attempt to lock out their workers, or who, by fraud or force, try to hinder the operations of the plant, are immediately confiscated by the workers. Conditions, hours and wages in all industries, private or government-owned, are uniform.
The reason for this survival of semi-capitalism, in a proletarian state, lies in the backwardness of Russia’s economic life, the surrounding highly-organised capitalist states, and the necessity for industrial production in Russia immediately, to combat the pressure of foreign industry.
The agency by which the state controls industry, both labour and production, is called the Council of Workers’ Control. This central body, sitting in the capital, is composed of delegates elected from local Councils of Workers’ Control, which are made up of members of Factory Shop Committees, Professional Union officials, and technical engineers and experts. A central executive committee manages the affairs of each locality, composed of common workmen, but the majority is composed of workmen from other districts, so that its rulings shall be unprejudiced by sectional interests. The local councils recommend to the All-Russian Council the confiscation of plants, report on the needs in fuel, raw materials, transportation and labour in their districts, and assist the workmen in learning to manage the various industries. The All-Russian Council has power to confiscate plants and to equalise the economic resources of the different localities.
If it had not been for democratic organisations which existed already before the revolution, there is little doubt that the Russian revolution would have been starved to its knees long before this time. The ordinary commercial machinery of distribution had been completely smashed. Only the consumers’ co-operative societies managed to feed the people, and their system has since been adopted by the municipalities, and even by the government. Before the revolution there were more than twelve million members of the co-operative societies of Russia. It is a very natural way for Russians to combine, because of its resemblance to the primitive co-operation of Russian village life for centuries. In the Putilov factory, where more than 40,000 workers are employed, the co-operative society fed, housed and even clothed more than 100,000 people – sending all the way to England for clothing.
It is this quality in the Russians that is forgotten by people who think that Russia can have no government, because there is no central force; and whose mental picture of Russia is a servile committee in Moscow, bossed by Lenin and Trotsky, and maintained by Red Guard mercenaries. Quite the contrary is true. The organisations which I have described are reproduced in almost every community in Russia. And if any considerable part of Russia were seriously opposed to the Soviet government, the Soviets could not last an hour.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History pots related to this entry.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
From What Next? No.12, 1999
A Letter About Lenin-From What Next? No.12, 1999
A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky
After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.
DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.
He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.
But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.
Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).
But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.
However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.
Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.
Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.
It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.
In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.
Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.
This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.
Vienna, 28 January 1924
Karl Kautsky
After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.
DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.
He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.
But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.
Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).
But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.
However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.
Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.
Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.
It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.
In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.
Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.
This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.
Vienna, 28 January 1924
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
From What Next? No.12, 1999
A Letter About Lenin-From What Next? No.12, 1999
A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky
After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.
DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.
He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.
But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.
Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).
But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.
However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.
Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.
Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.
It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.
In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.
Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.
This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.
Vienna, 28 January 1924
Karl Kautsky
After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.
DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.
He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.
But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.
Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).
But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.
However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.
Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.
Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.
It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.
In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.
Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.
This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.
Vienna, 28 January 1924
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The German Left and Bolshevism by Walter Held
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History post related to this entry.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
From Issue no.6, 1997 of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk, who introduces the article..
The German Left and Bolshevism by Walter Held
Like the previous piece, this article first appeared in the February 1939 issue of the New International. It is a reply to Max Shachtman’s article, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, which was reprinted in What Next? No.4. In contrast to the ‘revisionist’ approach to the history of the early Communist International which Held would adopt in his later article Why the German Revolution Failed (reprinted in the first issue of this journal), he presents here a fiercely orthodox defence of Leninism against Luxemburgism. In doing so, he raises a number of issues – the relationship between spontaneity and Marxism, and the appropriate form of revolutionary political organisation, for example – which will hopefully be the subject of further discussion.
INTELLECTUAL life in the Soviet Union throughout the rule of the epigones has consisted exclusively of the struggle against ‘Trotskyism’, to the point where it finally perished on this diet and all that is wafted to us today from Stalin’s realm is the icy air of the grave. The struggle against Trotsky, which was conducted under the sign of canonising Lenin and Bolshevism as Stalin understood them, also collided with the disturbing shade of Rosa Luxemburg. And upon the ukase of the ruffian and illiterate to whom not very deferential history, by one of its odd dialectical capers, confided the heritage of one of the most gifted scientific minds of all times, a pack of yelping curs flung themselves upon the corpse of the great revolutionist that was thrown before them. At that time it was the self-evident duty of every Marxian publicist who takes his task seriously, to come forward in defence of the memory of the great proletarian leader and to underscore as they deserved to be her progressive sides, her immortal merits. In contrast to Stalin’s kept young rogues, Rosa Luxemburg had to an outstanding degree those qualities which distinguish a true revolutionary leader: scientific seriousness in the treatment of every question, unselfish absorption in the cause, self-discipline and exemplary courage.
If, however, the question is once more put today of the content of the differences between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg – and it must be put again, in so far as this question relates to the solution of present tasks – we cannot content ourselves with a simple obeisance to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. Besides, it would mean today to profane instead of honour Rosa’s memory if we were to allow the discussion on this theme to be influenced in the slightest by the Stalinist publications. Shafts from this side cannot touch Rosa Luxemburg. As an ideological current Stalinism is dead. It does not stand before history as accuser, but as accused.
On the other hand, there are today numerous currents which counter-pose to the Bolshevik conception, so to speak, a Luxemburgian conception. These gentleman see in Stalin’s total police dictatorship and the Moscow Trials the direct result of Lenin’s ‘centralism’ and deduce that Rosa Luxemburg has remained correct in her polemic against Lenin’s alleged overestimation of centralised leadership. This at first blush fascinating argument overlooks, nevertheless, the fact that if Lenin is to be made responsible for Stalin, it is no less justified to load Rosa Luxemburg with the responsibility for the rule ... of Hitler. And actually there is in both assertions a kernel, only a kernel, of truth, but it is just this kernel that must be discovered.
Comrade Max Shachtman, in an exceptionally interesting article on this theme (Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, New International, May 1938), endeavoured to explain the differences between Lenin and Luxernburg by the historic diversity of Russian and German conditions. Now such an investigation of the objective background of the divergences is naturally entirely necessary for an understanding of them. But the investigation cannot stop there; otherwise we run the risk of falling into Austro-Marxism, that is, a Marxism which confines itself to demonstrating, with the aid of the Marxian method (a caricature of the Marxian method), that everything happened as it had to happen, and which thus eliminates from history the responsibility of the subjective factor. In reality, however, we all know that the revolutionary labour movement up to now foundered not on the objective situation as such but on its subjective subjugation. Then if we are to overcome the crisis of the labour movement, we must pitilessly lay bare the ultimate causes of this subjective failure and make the balance sheet of this dearly paid-for historical experience part of the inalienable theoretical capital of the Fourth International.
International significance of Lenin
In defence of Luxemburg’s ‘anti-Bolshevism’ comrade Shachtman correctly points out that even Lenin erred in his estimation of the factions of the German social democracy. Lenin’s great mistake consisted in this, that he applied his organisational, literary, strategical and tactical plan only to Russia, and pursued it to its final consequences only within the Russian movement, that, indeed, he regarded Bolshevism as the representation of the tendency of Bebel and Kautsky on Russian soil. So great was Lenin’s confidence in Kautsky that he paid no attention to the difference that arose in 1910 between Kautsky and the German left, and thus missed a highly favourable opportunity to create a firm support for Bolshevism in Germany, to extend the Bolshevik plan internationally. And in the last analysis, this mistake, this failure, this exclusively national application of the essentially international Bolshevik plan, is the deepest reason for the isolation of the Russian Revolution and, therefore, for the Stalinist Thermidor and impending fall of the Soviet Union. Or in other words: the gifted Leninist works What Is To Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back of the first years of this century are in no wise of specifically Russian – as comrade Shachtman seems to assume -but of international significance. The ideas developed in these books on the relationship of spontaneity to conscious plan, on the role, organisational structure and tasks of the revolutionary party and their relationship to the proletariat and the other classes of society, the relationship of Marxian science and the labour movement – all these ideas have nothing specifically Russian in them,
In his work which appeared three years after the victory of the October Revolution, ‘Left Wing’ Communism – an Infantile Disorder, Lenin then tried to make the Bolshevik conception of 1903 accessible and understandable to the West European workers. The question why this attempt failed should be treated anew in connection with the hapless March adventure of the German Communist Party, and we reserve this for a later article. Here it is a question only of the following: whoever studies attentively ‘Left Wing’ Communism and compares it with the early writings of Lenin, will find again the same ideas and the same conception, even if in highly popularised form. That, however, would refute the view that Lenin did not consider his ideas of 1903 as ‘export commodities’. In 1903, Lenin did not think of any exporting only because he imagined lie was importing into ‘backward’ Russia the ideas of Bebel and Kautsky which had long ago become avowed truisms in ‘progressive’ Germany, in order to have them prevail over the revisionist, opportunistic and centrist currents of Martinov and Martov; whereas in reality it should have been a question of counter-posing the Bolshevik conception, the programme of What Is To Be Done?, to the whole theory and practice of the Second International, the Bernsteinian as well as the Kautskyian and Luxemburglan tendencies.
It would, however, be wrong to ignore the enormous qualitative difference in the historical mistakes of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. While Lenin succeeded in creating the first truly Marxian party, which led the Russian proletariat to the summits of power and thereby gave the world proletariat a tremendous impulsion and a vast mass of new points of view, experiences and lessons; while Lenin’s conception of 1903 found its highest confirmation in the planfully directed October uprising; Rosa’s conception suffered a terrible shipwreck in January 1919, and the German left presented us, besides a series of remarkable characters and martyrs to the cause, only the bitter lesson of a new defeat.
At bottom, the disastrous mistake of Rosa Luxemburg was concentrated in the question of the role of the party, in the definition of the social democracy as ‘the self-movement of the working class’, which she counter-posed to the brilliant Leninist definition of ‘the revolutionary social democrats as Jacobins bound up with the working class’. ‘The social democracy as the self-movement of the working class’ can never be anything but trade unionism transferred to the political sphere. Such a social democracy will never shake bourgeois society to its foundations. It will either run its head vainly against the solid walls of the bourgeois state or voluntarily submit to the latter as it stands. The proletarian class as a whole is, under the conditions of capitalism, not in a position to raise itself to such a level of consciousness as to be able to confront the bourgeoisie in a superior manner in all fields, to destroy bourgeois authority and to replace it with proletarian authority. Capitalism would not be suppression, exploitation and slavery if that were not the case. That is just why the problem is to create out of the specialists closely bound up with the working class a firmly disciplined organisation which, with the aid of Marxian armour, destroys bourgeois authority first in theory and then in practical reality, and leads the ’self-movement’ of the working class beyond the limits set for it-
Two Mistakes
Now Rosa Luxemburg had the advantage over Lenin of observing the German party at closer range. That is why she recognised its conservative character as early as 1904. She sees that the party is stuck in the mud of tradition, refuses to raise up new problems, limps behind the masses. And what conclusions does she draw from this? ‘The conscious initiative of the party leadership in the shaping of tactics plays only a slight role.’ ‘The fighting tactic of the social democracy is the result of a continuous series of great creative acts of the experimental, often elementary class struggle.’ ‘The unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its bearers.’ ‘The only subject upon whom the role of guide now devolves is the mass of the working class.’ In short, in her despair over the conservative inertia of the social democratic apparatus in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg created what Lenin characterised with full justice as the ‘not-to-be-taken-seriously nonsense of organisation and tactics as a process’, although, to be sure, he overlooked the fact, as we have already emphasised, that Rosa was completely in the right in her characterisation of the German party. But even here Rosa committed the grosser mistake. She separated form from content, she combated centralism as such, instead of counterposing the centralism of the revolutionary Marxists to that of the opportunists. In this way, Rosa, in spite of the fact that she agreed with Bolshevism in most political questions at the international congresses, was driven to the same position to which Menshevism fled in the face of Lenin’s intransigence. And history prepared the same fate for both of them, deciding each time in its own manner for centralism; while the Bolsheviks drive the Mensheviks out of the soviets, Noske succeeds in flinging Spartacus out of the chamber of the German revolution and shutting the door behind it.
The lack of final consistency accompanied Rosa throughout her political life, whereas Lenin, precisely because of the relentlessness with which he carried out a once recognised necessity, was in a position to accomplish his historic mission.
In her work written in 1899, Social Reform or Social Revolution, which will forever remain a pearl in Marxian polemical literature, Rosa Luxemburg rightfully demanded the expulsion of the Bemsteinians from the party. In the second edition of this work, which appeared in 1908, she omitted all the corresponding passages. Bemsteinism had eaten its way into the flesh of the German party like a fungus; the flesh was decomposing. But what new consequence did Rosa draw? None at all. She threatened the petrified leadership: the masses will teach you new mores! But if the masses will correct the mistakes of the party out of their own initiative, why then the demand for Bernstein’s expulsion in 1899? In 1910, Rosa saw through the pedantic officialdom of Kautsky and attacked him sharply in a series of articles. Yet again she does not draw the final consequence of her judgement. Although she stops her Sunday visits to Kautsky and thus gives new evidence of her spotless and exemplary character, she is nevertheless lacking politically in the same measure of resoluteness. If the party was ravaged by Bernsteinism and even the ‘Marxian centre’ of the Neue Zeit had come to a standstill in the routine of the ‘tactic that stood the test for forty years’, then it was absolutely necessary to unfurl the Marxian banner anew and in the eyes of all, with the formal question whether to constitute a new party immediately or to remain for a while inside the social democracy as a firmly-disciplined faction, playing a minor role. In any case, however, it was necessary to come out against the reformism and centrism of the social democracy in every single question and permanently, to drive it out of reality instead of letting oneself be driven out by it. The German left never raised the question clearly, much less did it have a firm plan for resolving it.
Luxemburg’s Allusions
It is known that Lenin first regarded as a Hohenzollern forgery the number of the Vorwärts which bought the report of the vote of the German social democracy in the Reichstag. This is not to be wondered at and is in accord with his previous attitude, i.e., with his illusions relative to Kautsky and the German centre. But Rosa, who had seen through the opportunistic character of the German party ten years earlier, who experienced the worst disillusionment above all at the Jena congress of 1913 – what was her attitude? She gave way to convulsive sobbing in the Vorwärts editorial board, thought she was going mad, yes, even the thought of suicide came to her mind. Again a reaction which wrings from us the greatest human sympathy and respect for this singular woman, but which nevertheless also clearly discloses the main political weakness of the German lefts. She had seen through the Bernsteinians and the Scheidemanns, the Legiens and even the Kautskys and Hilferdings, and in spite of it she was steeped in illusions about the social democracy, in spite of it she believed that this Bemstein-Kautsky social democracy would pass a great historical test. In reality, if the German left had drawn the final consequence from its criticism of the official social-democracy – and whoever does not draw the final consequence in politics, lands unfailingly under the wheels – it would have been prepared for the Fourth of August, foretold it and warned against it. It is clear that in this case the catastrophe of the Fourth of August would not have taken on anything like its scope, the reorganisation of the vanguard would have proceeded much more easily and the revolutionary maturing accelerated much differently, and the German revolution in general would have taken a different course. Thus even Liebknecht allowed himself to be taken by surprise by the decision of the Reichstag fraction and it took months for the tiny handful to assemble again: Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogisches, Paul Levi. The profounder reason for the illusions of the German left with regard to the whole social democracy was founded, in turn, in its main error, in the disastrous ignoring of the reciprocal relation between party and masses. Rosa Luxemburg and her friends consoled themselves with this, that in the great historical crisis the masses would correct the party and sweep it along, Now they had to witness the fact that there was nothing for the masses to do in this situation except to follow – even perhaps while gritting their teeth – the instructions of the party.
Yet, while Lenin immediately draws the last consequence from the Fourth of August with his customary keenness – ‘The Second International Is dead, long live the Third!’ – and now seeks to develop, also in the International, all the elements to a Bolshevik conception of things (see, for example, his criticism of the Junius brochure), the German left continues to remain steeped in its fundamental mistake. The same erroneous conceptions on the role of the party which Rosa Luxemburg defended in 1904, recur in an article she published on 31 March 1917 in the Duisburg organ of the USPD, Der Kampf. ‘The Spartacus League tendency’, it says, ‘does not counter-pose to the Independent social democracy another programme and a fundamentally quite different tactic, which supply at every moment and as a permanent structure the basis of a separate party existence [that’s just what the problem was! W.H.], rather it is only [!] another historical tendency of the whole movement of the proletariat, from which follows, to be sure, a different attitude in almost every question of tactics and organisation. The opinion, however, that from this follows the necessity or even only the objective possibility of now jamming the workers into different, carefully separated party cages corresponding to the two tendencies of the opposition, is based upon a conventicle-conception of the party.’
From the ‘not-to-be-taken-seriously’ nonsense of the organisation as a process runs a straight line to this no less curious philosophy of an organisation which, although it does not counterpose to the opportunistic tendency any independent programme and any fundamentally quite different tactic, nevertheless does embody ‘another historical tendency’. With such light ideological baggage did Spartacus march in the German revolution. The catastrophic effect was not to be averted.
The German Catastrophe
Came November 9, the ’spontaneous people’s revolution’, which the SPI) resisted to the very last minute, but for which neither the Independent SPD nor Spartacus had taken the initiative. The November revolution in Germany could overturn the solid structure of capitalism just as little as could the February revolution in Russia; in both cases they were only able to eliminate the monarchistic embellishment. The real work first began after November. It is of course to the honour of Spartacus that it recognised this and refused to be party to the general round of fraternisation which always followed every popular uprising organised ‘from below’ and victorious at the first shot and into which such ‘Bolsheviks’ as Stalin also fell in February 1917. Still, Spartacus committed the reverse mistake and adopted an ultimatist attitude towards the masses. The same Rosa Luxemburg who in her criticism of the Russian revolution had reproached the Bolsheviks for the lack of democracy and the suppression of the soviet minority, refused to be elected onto the Executive Council of the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils together with the social democrats of the Ebert tendency. The masses did not accept this ultimatum of the Spartacus League, and the result was an Executive Council without Spartacus. The further result was that Spartacus did not get the slightest influence upon the elections to the first German Council Congress and remained without representation in it. Liebknecht had to confine himself to impotent attempts to conquer the congress ‘from without’. These events ought now to have sufficed to show Spartacus what its task was: namely, Lenin’s programme of April 1917. Patiently explain, restrain the small revolutionary minority from ill-considered steps, penetrate into the mass organisations and all the classes of the population, expose and polemically annihilate the reformists and centrists, in order, finally, at the historically ripe moment, to proceed to the insurrection.
The founding conference of the Communist Party, which finally takes place at the end of December 1918, decides however to drive the line of abstentionism to the point of absurdity, to boycott the elections to the National Assembly; there is even a discussion on withdrawing from the mass trade unions, And Rosa, who had just accused the Bolsheviks because they renounced the institution of the National Assembly after the victory, that is, possessing power they exercised the dictatorship – Rosa suffered the misfortune of becoming the prisoner of a party which renounces the National Assembly before the victory, and which, as a small minority, undertakes the hopeless task of imposing its ultimatum on the vast majority. Although she herself spoke for participation in the elections and lamented the ‘immaturity’ of the congress, she did not recognise that her own disorganising organisational principles had suffered shipwreck here, that in her own way she had created a Utopian-radical instead of a Marxian party. No surgeon can operate with a dull knife, no Marxist can act with an undisciplined, Utopian party. And still Rosa does not dare to carry out the break with this Utopian element, she herself becomes the victim of the organisational fetishism with which she wrongly reproached Lenin, and she goes to the operating table of history with a dull instrument. Possibly it is only because she has still not yet grasped the fact that the success or failure of the revolution depends upon her own self, upon her own policy. And thus we also find once more in the Spartacus programme, adopted, characteristically, unanimously by the same congress which decided on abstention from the elections, the old mistakes. Just read the following passage: ‘In tenacious struggle with capital, breast to breast in every factory, by direct pressure of the masses, by strikes, by creating their permanent organs of representation, the workers can achieve control over production and finally the actual direction.’ ‘The Spartacus League is not a party which seeks to reach dominion over the working masses or through the working masses. The Spartacus League is only [!] the most conscious part of the proletariat, which, at every step of the whole broad mass of the working class, points out its historical tasks.’ It follows clearly that Rosa Luxemburg had an entirely inadequate picture of the course of the proletarian revolution, She conceived of the proletarian revolution as a sort of new November revolution, as a chain of strikes and uprisings which finally merge into a general strike or even a popular uprising. With her the role of the party was confined to summoning the masses to action, until fully the power will fall into the lap of the party as a ripe fruit, something like the social democracy reaped the fruits of the first revolution. She did not recognise that it is the task of the party to assemble the masses and to discipline them like troops for a battle, and that the leadership of the party, like a gifted field commander or general staff, must have the strategic plan of battle in its head and convert it into a reality.
It was the ignoring of this task of the party that led Spartacus to the worst mistake that a revolutionary party can ever commit, namely, to play with the insurrection. For the Spartacus insurrection of January 1919 was nothing but a completely planless, quite inconceivably naive playing with the fire of insurrection. The narrow-minded counter-revolutionists, Hohenzollern sergeant-majors, stupid fanatics of Order and bloodhounds of the bourgeoisie, Noske and Ebert, set a trap for Spartacus and Spartacus fell into the trap with covered eyes. And thus did also Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogisches suffer the typical fate of all German revolutionists, which the exceptionally talented poet Oska Panizza, who later went mad, epitomised in the unsentimental phrase: ‘Until now the Germans have unfortunately known only the passive form of beheading ... being beheaded.’ While, on the contrary, the Russians under the leadership of the Bolsheviks proceeded to the realisation of the prediction made as far back as 1896 by the same Panizza: ‘Russia, that lurking brain, will some day burst out frightfully and the people of the Bakunins and Dostoievskys will gain its freedom by a fallen head.’ Between beheading and being beheaded, however, between active and passive, between Lenin and Luxemburg, there is no compromise.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
From Issue no.6, 1997 of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk, who introduces the article..
The German Left and Bolshevism by Walter Held
Like the previous piece, this article first appeared in the February 1939 issue of the New International. It is a reply to Max Shachtman’s article, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, which was reprinted in What Next? No.4. In contrast to the ‘revisionist’ approach to the history of the early Communist International which Held would adopt in his later article Why the German Revolution Failed (reprinted in the first issue of this journal), he presents here a fiercely orthodox defence of Leninism against Luxemburgism. In doing so, he raises a number of issues – the relationship between spontaneity and Marxism, and the appropriate form of revolutionary political organisation, for example – which will hopefully be the subject of further discussion.
INTELLECTUAL life in the Soviet Union throughout the rule of the epigones has consisted exclusively of the struggle against ‘Trotskyism’, to the point where it finally perished on this diet and all that is wafted to us today from Stalin’s realm is the icy air of the grave. The struggle against Trotsky, which was conducted under the sign of canonising Lenin and Bolshevism as Stalin understood them, also collided with the disturbing shade of Rosa Luxemburg. And upon the ukase of the ruffian and illiterate to whom not very deferential history, by one of its odd dialectical capers, confided the heritage of one of the most gifted scientific minds of all times, a pack of yelping curs flung themselves upon the corpse of the great revolutionist that was thrown before them. At that time it was the self-evident duty of every Marxian publicist who takes his task seriously, to come forward in defence of the memory of the great proletarian leader and to underscore as they deserved to be her progressive sides, her immortal merits. In contrast to Stalin’s kept young rogues, Rosa Luxemburg had to an outstanding degree those qualities which distinguish a true revolutionary leader: scientific seriousness in the treatment of every question, unselfish absorption in the cause, self-discipline and exemplary courage.
If, however, the question is once more put today of the content of the differences between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg – and it must be put again, in so far as this question relates to the solution of present tasks – we cannot content ourselves with a simple obeisance to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. Besides, it would mean today to profane instead of honour Rosa’s memory if we were to allow the discussion on this theme to be influenced in the slightest by the Stalinist publications. Shafts from this side cannot touch Rosa Luxemburg. As an ideological current Stalinism is dead. It does not stand before history as accuser, but as accused.
On the other hand, there are today numerous currents which counter-pose to the Bolshevik conception, so to speak, a Luxemburgian conception. These gentleman see in Stalin’s total police dictatorship and the Moscow Trials the direct result of Lenin’s ‘centralism’ and deduce that Rosa Luxemburg has remained correct in her polemic against Lenin’s alleged overestimation of centralised leadership. This at first blush fascinating argument overlooks, nevertheless, the fact that if Lenin is to be made responsible for Stalin, it is no less justified to load Rosa Luxemburg with the responsibility for the rule ... of Hitler. And actually there is in both assertions a kernel, only a kernel, of truth, but it is just this kernel that must be discovered.
Comrade Max Shachtman, in an exceptionally interesting article on this theme (Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, New International, May 1938), endeavoured to explain the differences between Lenin and Luxernburg by the historic diversity of Russian and German conditions. Now such an investigation of the objective background of the divergences is naturally entirely necessary for an understanding of them. But the investigation cannot stop there; otherwise we run the risk of falling into Austro-Marxism, that is, a Marxism which confines itself to demonstrating, with the aid of the Marxian method (a caricature of the Marxian method), that everything happened as it had to happen, and which thus eliminates from history the responsibility of the subjective factor. In reality, however, we all know that the revolutionary labour movement up to now foundered not on the objective situation as such but on its subjective subjugation. Then if we are to overcome the crisis of the labour movement, we must pitilessly lay bare the ultimate causes of this subjective failure and make the balance sheet of this dearly paid-for historical experience part of the inalienable theoretical capital of the Fourth International.
International significance of Lenin
In defence of Luxemburg’s ‘anti-Bolshevism’ comrade Shachtman correctly points out that even Lenin erred in his estimation of the factions of the German social democracy. Lenin’s great mistake consisted in this, that he applied his organisational, literary, strategical and tactical plan only to Russia, and pursued it to its final consequences only within the Russian movement, that, indeed, he regarded Bolshevism as the representation of the tendency of Bebel and Kautsky on Russian soil. So great was Lenin’s confidence in Kautsky that he paid no attention to the difference that arose in 1910 between Kautsky and the German left, and thus missed a highly favourable opportunity to create a firm support for Bolshevism in Germany, to extend the Bolshevik plan internationally. And in the last analysis, this mistake, this failure, this exclusively national application of the essentially international Bolshevik plan, is the deepest reason for the isolation of the Russian Revolution and, therefore, for the Stalinist Thermidor and impending fall of the Soviet Union. Or in other words: the gifted Leninist works What Is To Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back of the first years of this century are in no wise of specifically Russian – as comrade Shachtman seems to assume -but of international significance. The ideas developed in these books on the relationship of spontaneity to conscious plan, on the role, organisational structure and tasks of the revolutionary party and their relationship to the proletariat and the other classes of society, the relationship of Marxian science and the labour movement – all these ideas have nothing specifically Russian in them,
In his work which appeared three years after the victory of the October Revolution, ‘Left Wing’ Communism – an Infantile Disorder, Lenin then tried to make the Bolshevik conception of 1903 accessible and understandable to the West European workers. The question why this attempt failed should be treated anew in connection with the hapless March adventure of the German Communist Party, and we reserve this for a later article. Here it is a question only of the following: whoever studies attentively ‘Left Wing’ Communism and compares it with the early writings of Lenin, will find again the same ideas and the same conception, even if in highly popularised form. That, however, would refute the view that Lenin did not consider his ideas of 1903 as ‘export commodities’. In 1903, Lenin did not think of any exporting only because he imagined lie was importing into ‘backward’ Russia the ideas of Bebel and Kautsky which had long ago become avowed truisms in ‘progressive’ Germany, in order to have them prevail over the revisionist, opportunistic and centrist currents of Martinov and Martov; whereas in reality it should have been a question of counter-posing the Bolshevik conception, the programme of What Is To Be Done?, to the whole theory and practice of the Second International, the Bernsteinian as well as the Kautskyian and Luxemburglan tendencies.
It would, however, be wrong to ignore the enormous qualitative difference in the historical mistakes of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. While Lenin succeeded in creating the first truly Marxian party, which led the Russian proletariat to the summits of power and thereby gave the world proletariat a tremendous impulsion and a vast mass of new points of view, experiences and lessons; while Lenin’s conception of 1903 found its highest confirmation in the planfully directed October uprising; Rosa’s conception suffered a terrible shipwreck in January 1919, and the German left presented us, besides a series of remarkable characters and martyrs to the cause, only the bitter lesson of a new defeat.
At bottom, the disastrous mistake of Rosa Luxemburg was concentrated in the question of the role of the party, in the definition of the social democracy as ‘the self-movement of the working class’, which she counter-posed to the brilliant Leninist definition of ‘the revolutionary social democrats as Jacobins bound up with the working class’. ‘The social democracy as the self-movement of the working class’ can never be anything but trade unionism transferred to the political sphere. Such a social democracy will never shake bourgeois society to its foundations. It will either run its head vainly against the solid walls of the bourgeois state or voluntarily submit to the latter as it stands. The proletarian class as a whole is, under the conditions of capitalism, not in a position to raise itself to such a level of consciousness as to be able to confront the bourgeoisie in a superior manner in all fields, to destroy bourgeois authority and to replace it with proletarian authority. Capitalism would not be suppression, exploitation and slavery if that were not the case. That is just why the problem is to create out of the specialists closely bound up with the working class a firmly disciplined organisation which, with the aid of Marxian armour, destroys bourgeois authority first in theory and then in practical reality, and leads the ’self-movement’ of the working class beyond the limits set for it-
Two Mistakes
Now Rosa Luxemburg had the advantage over Lenin of observing the German party at closer range. That is why she recognised its conservative character as early as 1904. She sees that the party is stuck in the mud of tradition, refuses to raise up new problems, limps behind the masses. And what conclusions does she draw from this? ‘The conscious initiative of the party leadership in the shaping of tactics plays only a slight role.’ ‘The fighting tactic of the social democracy is the result of a continuous series of great creative acts of the experimental, often elementary class struggle.’ ‘The unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its bearers.’ ‘The only subject upon whom the role of guide now devolves is the mass of the working class.’ In short, in her despair over the conservative inertia of the social democratic apparatus in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg created what Lenin characterised with full justice as the ‘not-to-be-taken-seriously nonsense of organisation and tactics as a process’, although, to be sure, he overlooked the fact, as we have already emphasised, that Rosa was completely in the right in her characterisation of the German party. But even here Rosa committed the grosser mistake. She separated form from content, she combated centralism as such, instead of counterposing the centralism of the revolutionary Marxists to that of the opportunists. In this way, Rosa, in spite of the fact that she agreed with Bolshevism in most political questions at the international congresses, was driven to the same position to which Menshevism fled in the face of Lenin’s intransigence. And history prepared the same fate for both of them, deciding each time in its own manner for centralism; while the Bolsheviks drive the Mensheviks out of the soviets, Noske succeeds in flinging Spartacus out of the chamber of the German revolution and shutting the door behind it.
The lack of final consistency accompanied Rosa throughout her political life, whereas Lenin, precisely because of the relentlessness with which he carried out a once recognised necessity, was in a position to accomplish his historic mission.
In her work written in 1899, Social Reform or Social Revolution, which will forever remain a pearl in Marxian polemical literature, Rosa Luxemburg rightfully demanded the expulsion of the Bemsteinians from the party. In the second edition of this work, which appeared in 1908, she omitted all the corresponding passages. Bemsteinism had eaten its way into the flesh of the German party like a fungus; the flesh was decomposing. But what new consequence did Rosa draw? None at all. She threatened the petrified leadership: the masses will teach you new mores! But if the masses will correct the mistakes of the party out of their own initiative, why then the demand for Bernstein’s expulsion in 1899? In 1910, Rosa saw through the pedantic officialdom of Kautsky and attacked him sharply in a series of articles. Yet again she does not draw the final consequence of her judgement. Although she stops her Sunday visits to Kautsky and thus gives new evidence of her spotless and exemplary character, she is nevertheless lacking politically in the same measure of resoluteness. If the party was ravaged by Bernsteinism and even the ‘Marxian centre’ of the Neue Zeit had come to a standstill in the routine of the ‘tactic that stood the test for forty years’, then it was absolutely necessary to unfurl the Marxian banner anew and in the eyes of all, with the formal question whether to constitute a new party immediately or to remain for a while inside the social democracy as a firmly-disciplined faction, playing a minor role. In any case, however, it was necessary to come out against the reformism and centrism of the social democracy in every single question and permanently, to drive it out of reality instead of letting oneself be driven out by it. The German left never raised the question clearly, much less did it have a firm plan for resolving it.
Luxemburg’s Allusions
It is known that Lenin first regarded as a Hohenzollern forgery the number of the Vorwärts which bought the report of the vote of the German social democracy in the Reichstag. This is not to be wondered at and is in accord with his previous attitude, i.e., with his illusions relative to Kautsky and the German centre. But Rosa, who had seen through the opportunistic character of the German party ten years earlier, who experienced the worst disillusionment above all at the Jena congress of 1913 – what was her attitude? She gave way to convulsive sobbing in the Vorwärts editorial board, thought she was going mad, yes, even the thought of suicide came to her mind. Again a reaction which wrings from us the greatest human sympathy and respect for this singular woman, but which nevertheless also clearly discloses the main political weakness of the German lefts. She had seen through the Bernsteinians and the Scheidemanns, the Legiens and even the Kautskys and Hilferdings, and in spite of it she was steeped in illusions about the social democracy, in spite of it she believed that this Bemstein-Kautsky social democracy would pass a great historical test. In reality, if the German left had drawn the final consequence from its criticism of the official social-democracy – and whoever does not draw the final consequence in politics, lands unfailingly under the wheels – it would have been prepared for the Fourth of August, foretold it and warned against it. It is clear that in this case the catastrophe of the Fourth of August would not have taken on anything like its scope, the reorganisation of the vanguard would have proceeded much more easily and the revolutionary maturing accelerated much differently, and the German revolution in general would have taken a different course. Thus even Liebknecht allowed himself to be taken by surprise by the decision of the Reichstag fraction and it took months for the tiny handful to assemble again: Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogisches, Paul Levi. The profounder reason for the illusions of the German left with regard to the whole social democracy was founded, in turn, in its main error, in the disastrous ignoring of the reciprocal relation between party and masses. Rosa Luxemburg and her friends consoled themselves with this, that in the great historical crisis the masses would correct the party and sweep it along, Now they had to witness the fact that there was nothing for the masses to do in this situation except to follow – even perhaps while gritting their teeth – the instructions of the party.
Yet, while Lenin immediately draws the last consequence from the Fourth of August with his customary keenness – ‘The Second International Is dead, long live the Third!’ – and now seeks to develop, also in the International, all the elements to a Bolshevik conception of things (see, for example, his criticism of the Junius brochure), the German left continues to remain steeped in its fundamental mistake. The same erroneous conceptions on the role of the party which Rosa Luxemburg defended in 1904, recur in an article she published on 31 March 1917 in the Duisburg organ of the USPD, Der Kampf. ‘The Spartacus League tendency’, it says, ‘does not counter-pose to the Independent social democracy another programme and a fundamentally quite different tactic, which supply at every moment and as a permanent structure the basis of a separate party existence [that’s just what the problem was! W.H.], rather it is only [!] another historical tendency of the whole movement of the proletariat, from which follows, to be sure, a different attitude in almost every question of tactics and organisation. The opinion, however, that from this follows the necessity or even only the objective possibility of now jamming the workers into different, carefully separated party cages corresponding to the two tendencies of the opposition, is based upon a conventicle-conception of the party.’
From the ‘not-to-be-taken-seriously’ nonsense of the organisation as a process runs a straight line to this no less curious philosophy of an organisation which, although it does not counterpose to the opportunistic tendency any independent programme and any fundamentally quite different tactic, nevertheless does embody ‘another historical tendency’. With such light ideological baggage did Spartacus march in the German revolution. The catastrophic effect was not to be averted.
The German Catastrophe
Came November 9, the ’spontaneous people’s revolution’, which the SPI) resisted to the very last minute, but for which neither the Independent SPD nor Spartacus had taken the initiative. The November revolution in Germany could overturn the solid structure of capitalism just as little as could the February revolution in Russia; in both cases they were only able to eliminate the monarchistic embellishment. The real work first began after November. It is of course to the honour of Spartacus that it recognised this and refused to be party to the general round of fraternisation which always followed every popular uprising organised ‘from below’ and victorious at the first shot and into which such ‘Bolsheviks’ as Stalin also fell in February 1917. Still, Spartacus committed the reverse mistake and adopted an ultimatist attitude towards the masses. The same Rosa Luxemburg who in her criticism of the Russian revolution had reproached the Bolsheviks for the lack of democracy and the suppression of the soviet minority, refused to be elected onto the Executive Council of the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils together with the social democrats of the Ebert tendency. The masses did not accept this ultimatum of the Spartacus League, and the result was an Executive Council without Spartacus. The further result was that Spartacus did not get the slightest influence upon the elections to the first German Council Congress and remained without representation in it. Liebknecht had to confine himself to impotent attempts to conquer the congress ‘from without’. These events ought now to have sufficed to show Spartacus what its task was: namely, Lenin’s programme of April 1917. Patiently explain, restrain the small revolutionary minority from ill-considered steps, penetrate into the mass organisations and all the classes of the population, expose and polemically annihilate the reformists and centrists, in order, finally, at the historically ripe moment, to proceed to the insurrection.
The founding conference of the Communist Party, which finally takes place at the end of December 1918, decides however to drive the line of abstentionism to the point of absurdity, to boycott the elections to the National Assembly; there is even a discussion on withdrawing from the mass trade unions, And Rosa, who had just accused the Bolsheviks because they renounced the institution of the National Assembly after the victory, that is, possessing power they exercised the dictatorship – Rosa suffered the misfortune of becoming the prisoner of a party which renounces the National Assembly before the victory, and which, as a small minority, undertakes the hopeless task of imposing its ultimatum on the vast majority. Although she herself spoke for participation in the elections and lamented the ‘immaturity’ of the congress, she did not recognise that her own disorganising organisational principles had suffered shipwreck here, that in her own way she had created a Utopian-radical instead of a Marxian party. No surgeon can operate with a dull knife, no Marxist can act with an undisciplined, Utopian party. And still Rosa does not dare to carry out the break with this Utopian element, she herself becomes the victim of the organisational fetishism with which she wrongly reproached Lenin, and she goes to the operating table of history with a dull instrument. Possibly it is only because she has still not yet grasped the fact that the success or failure of the revolution depends upon her own self, upon her own policy. And thus we also find once more in the Spartacus programme, adopted, characteristically, unanimously by the same congress which decided on abstention from the elections, the old mistakes. Just read the following passage: ‘In tenacious struggle with capital, breast to breast in every factory, by direct pressure of the masses, by strikes, by creating their permanent organs of representation, the workers can achieve control over production and finally the actual direction.’ ‘The Spartacus League is not a party which seeks to reach dominion over the working masses or through the working masses. The Spartacus League is only [!] the most conscious part of the proletariat, which, at every step of the whole broad mass of the working class, points out its historical tasks.’ It follows clearly that Rosa Luxemburg had an entirely inadequate picture of the course of the proletarian revolution, She conceived of the proletarian revolution as a sort of new November revolution, as a chain of strikes and uprisings which finally merge into a general strike or even a popular uprising. With her the role of the party was confined to summoning the masses to action, until fully the power will fall into the lap of the party as a ripe fruit, something like the social democracy reaped the fruits of the first revolution. She did not recognise that it is the task of the party to assemble the masses and to discipline them like troops for a battle, and that the leadership of the party, like a gifted field commander or general staff, must have the strategic plan of battle in its head and convert it into a reality.
It was the ignoring of this task of the party that led Spartacus to the worst mistake that a revolutionary party can ever commit, namely, to play with the insurrection. For the Spartacus insurrection of January 1919 was nothing but a completely planless, quite inconceivably naive playing with the fire of insurrection. The narrow-minded counter-revolutionists, Hohenzollern sergeant-majors, stupid fanatics of Order and bloodhounds of the bourgeoisie, Noske and Ebert, set a trap for Spartacus and Spartacus fell into the trap with covered eyes. And thus did also Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogisches suffer the typical fate of all German revolutionists, which the exceptionally talented poet Oska Panizza, who later went mad, epitomised in the unsentimental phrase: ‘Until now the Germans have unfortunately known only the passive form of beheading ... being beheaded.’ While, on the contrary, the Russians under the leadership of the Bolsheviks proceeded to the realisation of the prediction made as far back as 1896 by the same Panizza: ‘Russia, that lurking brain, will some day burst out frightfully and the people of the Bakunins and Dostoievskys will gain its freedom by a fallen head.’ Between beheading and being beheaded, however, between active and passive, between Lenin and Luxemburg, there is no compromise.
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