Paul Levi 1924-Introduction to Trotsky’s Lessons of October
All editorial notes etc. were made in 1994 and since then more material may have come to light. Note by transcriber Ted Crawford, October 2009.
In December 1924 Paul Levi wrote an introduction for the edition of Trotsky’s Lessons of October that was published by E. Laub of Berlin in 1925. Another edition was published later by Trotsky’s admirer Franz Pfemfert. It will no doubt come as a surprise to those who judge Levi by the epithets ‘renegade’, ‘Menshevik’, etc, heaped upon him by the official Communist movement, to discover that his political position here is in essence the same as his outlook when he was a leader of the German section of that movement. This article has been translated by Mike Jones from Paul Levi, Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemokratie (EVA, Frankfurt, and Europa Verlag, Vienna, 1969), pp. 138–47. This is a collection of Levi’s articles, speeches, letters, etc, which has been edited and introduced by Charlotte Beradt, Levi’s biographer. The notes to this edition are sometimes superfluous and inaccurate, and so we have provided our own.
THE effect that the following exposition by Leon Trotsky exercises and will exercise on the Russian Communist Party and perhaps the Russian state is neither self-evident nor understood. This is an historical consideration with – in itself – a not excessively sharp critique of the errors at the time [October 1917] of the present leader of the Communist International,
[1] but in the meantime the latter has also wholly admitted these himself, so that does not by itself explain the excitement, and, after all, do not the saints of the Catholic Church also get to heaven, not thanks to their innate virtues, but on account of overcoming their inherent defects? This criticism refers to things from the past, and where it does include more recent matters, it does not, in our opinion, even start with the correct assumptions. And finally, in these more topical parts, the criticism does not even refer to Russian affairs, but it is German sufferings that are brought up, and the great effect they have on the Russian situation. In our opinion, these are apparent contradictions for which the German reader requires an explanation.
Trotsky persists in the thesis that a situation existed in Germany during October 1923 in which the Communist Party, with a decisive leadership – as that of Lenin in October 1917 – would have succeeded in taking power. Why Trotsky arrives at this assumption is, for us, understandable. The war in the Ruhr had been lost. One can confidently maintain that what occurred was something unequalled in modern history, and perhaps in history in general. A people had been dragged through a terrible war lasting four years, whose end only exacerbated the suffering. According to general opinion, one must believe that the lesson has taken root: only the pike gives two consecutive bites on the fish hook, and so it is said not to feel the pain. The Germans – an extremely emotional nation as is known – took two bites. The war in the Ruhr was fought according to the formula of the World War. Like that, it was a fight over principle, a fight about the sanctity of treaties and all manner of fine things. But the German government carried out this second war with more inhuman methods than the Wilhelmine government carried out the World War. From the standpoint of the German bourgeoisie, the World War had at least still a trace of decency within it. One shot the ‘enemy’ dead and got on with plundering one’s own people only as an agreeable sideline, so to speak. In the war in the Ruhr, these side effects became shameless and the whole point of the thing: the French hardly bothered fighting the whole swindle; on the contrary, the longer the thing lasted the greater their chance of gaining a permanent foothold in the Ruhr, whereas the effects internally were devastating. Such a total undermining of every social condition in the short space of a few months, as occurred at that time in Germany, has perhaps not yet been seen anywhere else. Out of the ocean of tears represented by the war in the Ruhr emerged a small stratum of capitalists with increased economic power and increased lust for political power, and who had begun to undertake a terrible sorting out within their own capitalist ranks. The earlier inflationary bloodletting faded away, and the ‘honest ones’, who had not grasped the possibility of the Ruhr robberies
[2] in good time, were brought to their knees. The middle class, both those in industry and the intellectuals, lost their economic foundations. The workers saw their wages in gold pfennigs drastically reduced, and this effect on their economic basis also meant that all their organisational structures, trade unions, cooperatives and so forth, were brought to their knees. It was – one can safely say – a much stronger social earthquake than that upon which the events described by Trotsky are based. Trotsky’s assumption has a certain logic on its side: since mankind has not yet died out, after such a social catastrophe some power will emerge that forms a new structure. And to such an extent one can still go along with Trotsky: for
logically the force that must emerge after such a catastrophe will not be the one that caused it, so it is only logical that it will end with the seizure of power by the proletariat.
Trotsky only errs on one point, but this error is important. It does not follow that this force must therefore be the Communist Party, just because the German Communist Party is affiliated to the Communist International, and simply because, once upon a time, in a comparable situation in Russia, Lenin risked this gamble and won, and since also by chance – we don’t know whether Trotsky agrees also with this third premise – Gregory Zinoviev is in charge of this Third International. So when all three preconditions coincide, when the German situation is wholly comparable to the Russian one, when the Communist International has become the most flawless organisation ever created, and when Gregory Zinoviev has become a politician of great stature and not just an idiot of European fame, there we have it: nevertheless, even if all that occurred, the KPD has still not yet earned the legal title to put itself forward as the force which could shape the state after that catastrophe. This title can only be earned legitimately. The Bolsheviks too could not have gained power in October on the basis of a declaration that they felt themselves fit for the job, but only on the basis of a determined policy which had been pursued from April to October 1917. Only this policy gave the Bolsheviks the necessary legitimacy.
In the tragic circumstances in Germany such a policy was not so difficult to put forward. As pointed out, there was of course the previous experience of the World War; it took really no more than that to demonstrate how this war in the Ruhr was a shameless bout of plunder by German capitalists against German non-capitalists, and the end of this policy must ensure that the social classes who suffered by it turn on the originator of the policy. In this situation, which if they were real Communists was an unprecedented stroke of luck, one know-all and an even bigger know-all once again distinguished themselves by deciding the fate of the Communist Party. So Karl Radek – in Moscow – made that Schlageter speech, and the flashes from his spectacles, sparkling with enthusiasm, were seen in Berlin. Comrade Zinoviev gave it his blessing, for no ‘national nihilism’ can be tolerated in the Communist ranks. If the ‘slogan’ was issued in such a way at the summit, one can imagine its effect further down. Then, as in all similar institutions, particularly those like the army, but also in the Communist Party, the law of exaggeration from top to bottom came into play. After all, the Muscovites spoke in this way, so anyone can imagine how it became further elaborated lower down, when the district sergeants Remmele,
[3] Könen
[4] and Ruth Fischer
[5] passed it on, and how it was perceived issuing from such illustrious mouths – not to speak of the lesser functionaries in Saxony, Thuringia and the Rhineland. And the result of all this was that, instead of a strong proletarian force at the end of the war in the Ruhr, there was a nationalist-Communist stench which poisoned the whole of Germany. The National Socialists lay claim to the same right which the Communists assert, to be the heirs of the foundering Germany: the one presents itself as National Communist, and the other as Communist-nationalist, so at bottom both were the same. Both registered their claims almost simultaneously, one in Saxony, the other in Munich. History rejected both such claims; certainly not because it wanted to approve or ratify the existing state of affairs, but only because those who registered their claim to the inheritance then failed to prove they were the legitimate heirs. We are neither glorifiers of the past nor of the present – for we see its end approaching. We have had the good fortune to avert the fate of either a dictatorship of Muscovite soldiery or Austrian sexual-pathology, and justifiably so, historically, politically and ethically.
And so we believe, that in this actual assumption, Leon Trotsky’s starting point is incorrect.
If, as far as the German circumstances of 1923 are concerned, the Trotskyist criticism is incorrect in its actual assumptions, it is even more incomprehensible how it could have had such a huge effect in Russia. We believe that to make this understandable, we must demonstrate two peculiarities of this criticism.
First of all, the criticism assumes the person of Lenin in a supposed political situation, and sets up, against this hypothetically acting Lenin in a hypothetical situation, the actual Zinoviev. Thus one peculiarity of the present intellectual life in the Russian Communist Party is demonstrated. We believe that we can assure readers beforehand that we do not want the smallest suspicion to develop that we wish to belittle the labours of Lenin, and that those people who wield Marxist phrases, who even today in the whole of the Russian Revolution see no more than an extended Communist putsch, are totally foreign to us and our views. Lenin’s achievements are great and will continue to be so, for in our opinion he was the first Socialist who confidently faced up to the problem of the ‘seizure of power by the proletariat’. Most Socialists in the West fear this problem like the head of Medusa. Instead of correctly, truthfully and concretely formulating and considering this problem, they thereupon indulge in all sorts of nice and round phrases about democracy, about coalition, about the transitional stage and other fine matters which, all in all, do not clarify but disguise the problem. Lenin, on the other hand, long ago recognised this problem, and had taken steps for its resolution. Whether the solution chosen for Russia is correct and whether it is, without more ado, applicable to all other countries, is quite another question, and those like us who do not reply in the affirmative are not thereby doing any damage to the stature of the Leninist achievement. Today, Columbus is rightly celebrated as the discoverer of America, even if he believed he was travelling to India.
But this recognition of Lenin’s stature, in itself no bad thing and shared by many, leads on to two phenomena whose dangers can be seen in the work of Trotsky. One is the emergence of a Lenin philology, similar to the Goethe philology in Germany or the Pandects literature
[6] of the Middles Ages. So in every single situation, volume, chapter, paragraph and clause of a sentence by Lenin will be quoted which will either fit the given situation or not as the case may be. In place of living criticism comes the conception,
autos epha, the master has spoken. Not only does Trotsky quote Lenin’s words in this way, he does it with a certain roguish justification, because he contrasts Lenin’s words with the present fleshly leaseholders of Lenin’s soul. His adversaries are not idle, for Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin hold up all the works, words and hints of Lenin to refute Trotsky. Commentaries and treatises are delivered and put forth. The
Tausves Jontof[7] has yet to be written, but we are sure that it will be.
Just as the person of Lenin is both fossilised and sanctified, so the same thing is happening to his works. As we said, Lenin’s stature was a problem because most people were too timid to tackle him even theoretically. What raises him above the ranks of other Marxists is what he created organisationally. This has made the unthinking among his successors see only the organisational aspect. That is a very easy manner in which to examine all political problems. So all political problems are reduced to organisational mucking about, and it is not only that the brains of real children are never so successful and inventive as in play, but this is particularly true of the politically childlike. The history of the German Communist Party proves it. The childlike urge to play was mainly expressed in the use of military terminology, and the ‘little dears’ talked of putting on the helmet and buckling on the sword.
We have a hint that Trotsky – whose past, however, defends him against this charge, since his earlier disputes with Lenin were in this area – to some extent puts this danger to rest. It cannot be taken amiss when the founder of the Red Army indulges in military images – after all, it is his field. But nevertheless what does it mean when Trotsky too, almost in the style of Zinoviev, speaks of separate periods of strategy and tactics, as if one period is replaced by another. What are tactics, then? Nothing more than the sum of measures necessary for the attainment of an existing military objective. Therefore, tactics without strategy are not a campaign and not even a manoeuvre, whilst strategy without tactics does not exist. One must picture it in order to comprehend the whole absurdity of transferring these military conceptions to the proletarian class struggle. The proletarian class struggle has an objective indeed – it is the emancipation of the working class and the replacement of capitalism. As is well known, this aim will be achieved, not by a pitchfork revolution, but in a total movement of the working class. Within it, the individual movements and struggles of the class are not technical-tactical measures, but are part of the objective itself. So to what ridicule should Communist policy of recent years be condemned if strategy and tactics in the class struggle were not coordinated and had even been divided? What ‘tactical’ measures have they foisted on us? First there was the united front, then the splitting of the trade unions, and then grinding our teeth in exasperation, we all got together again and so on. And the aim of this ‘strategy’? There was none. These tactical manoeuvres were so poorly arranged that the Commissar for War, Trotsky, would have dismissed any general who had so aimlessly chased the Red Army around any Russian parade ground. In the proletarian class struggle there are in truth no strategic or tactical objectives in the military sense, and whoever tries to operate with such concepts is mistaken.
These little traits and peculiarities – not Lenin’s but those of Leninism – have been often mentioned. Here they are only of special significance when they are put alongside another fact, which is that the whole dispute over Trotsky’s book revolves around the present Russian situation, but speaks of a past German one. And yet everyone also knows that at its heart are very serious differences over Russian matters which have arisen between former comrades in arms. Thus in essence the Bolsheviks have to make a decision. The European revolution, which was the premise on which they made their revolution, has not happened. That the Bolsheviks made such an assumption is not, in our eyes, to their discredit, because it was their Socialist duty to locate their policy on this probability. There is no point in seeking the guilt or innocence of those involved in the revolution’s failure, and who erred in the West and who erred in Russia is of no interest today. But the fact of its non-appearance is clear, and forces the Bolsheviks to certain conclusions. There must be a showdown between them and the social stratum which, for the moment, has gained most from the Russian Revolution – the Russian peasantry. This could happen with a change of position by the Bolsheviks internally. It could be along the lines of democratic enlightenment within rural society, or it could be in the form of a violent revolt by the peasants. But, whatever it is, the Bolsheviks will have to make certain decisions, and everything that worries the Russian Communists in the last analysis boils down to this question of when and what decisions must be made.
With all this, why do the Bolsheviks argue over the past and over German issues? It seems to us that here the Russian movement is, in a way, returning once again to its roots. In earlier years none of us really came into close contact with the Russian labour movement. They operated in different ways from us in Europe. They developed within feudal absolutism. The forms of expression of the rest of the European labour movement which grew on a bourgeois-democratic basis – parliament, trade union, press, party, cooperative – were almost or wholly foreign to them. They operated in illegality, and therefore developed in a literary manner so that the stages in their development were – the 1905 events apart – resolutions and splits, the latter occurring mainly over resolutions. No European worker outside Russia would have understood a split because of a resolution. We were always sympathetic to such phenomena in the Russian labour movement, seeing them from a passive angle, and taking into account the oppressive burden of persecution.
Today, we are in the situation of looking at the active side of this. As they themselves proudly say, the Bolsheviks are the only legal party in Russia. Only they have freedom of press and assembly, and only they have freedom of speech. But freedom which exists for one alone, only one person, only one party, is just not freedom. Freedom for one person alone existed in Russia of old. Börne even says that in Russia, therefore, there is greater freedom since only a single one has it there, and, as always, the greater the number of participants, the smaller will be the portions. This greater freedom for one individual is in fact one single unfreedom – the freedom which the Bolsheviks take for themselves, like the Tsar, deprives others of some of their freedom, which therefore loses all its qualities. And so the Bolsheviks will suffer the same handicaps from their freedom that they once had from their unfreedom, and since their freedom has no complementary freedoms, they will lose all connection to reality, become lifeless, and, in place of the real political life and the wide vision which arises from this freedom, we see the literature and resolutions. The recent history of the Bolsheviks and the effects of this book both illustrate the point, for, without it, the effect of the book on Russia would be incomprehensible. And thus it seems to us that the Bolshevik movement has, as we said long ago, reached an ad absurdum point, for not only the past intransigent persecution but also its present intransigent rule condemn it to the life of a sect, and so force it, in the last analysis, to become its political opposite.
In this way, Trotsky’s book can be of decisive significance, and by whom better than Trotsky, who already a decade or more ago with brilliant derision, irony and good grounds, exposed the disadvantageous aspects of Bolshevik thought?
[8] And here perhaps lies the international significance of this book by Trotsky. In the international labour movement that will again emerge out the ashes of the last decade, and on a higher level too than ever before, the Russian labour movement cannot and will not be found wanting. So this book appears to us to be a sign that the real interests of the working class will destroy the move to Caesarism just at the point when Caesar has declared the
Communist Manifesto a national religious shrine.
Notes
(cf n50, Jakob Reich’s article in this issue of Revolutionary History)
cf n64, Jakob Reich’s article in this issue of Revolutionary History.
********
Ernest Rogers
A Comment on Paul Levi’s Article
THE preface which Paul Levi wrote for the German edition of Leon Trotsky’s The Lessons of October, which itself was a preface to a collection of his writings during the Russian Revolution of October 1917, is written in a very cryptic and condensed manner (it was done under the constraints of the time; the KPD was illegal for several months after the events of October 1923). It requires some explanation and expansion. The following is an attempt to do so.
In the first paragraph Levi says: ‘This criticism [by Trotsky] refers to things from the past, and where it does include more recent matters, it does not, in our opinion, even start with the correct assumptions.’ He says that Trotsky persists in his thesis that in Germany during October 1923, a situation existed in which the KPD, with a decisive leadership (such as that of Lenin in October 1917) would have succeeded in seizing power. Here, Levi correctly states Trotsky’s position, but he had not grasped that Trotsky was using a hypothetical revolutionary position in Germany to beat the heads of Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s faction in the Soviet Union. The problems of Germany were being subordinated to a Russian conflict.
Levi does concede that after the occupation of the Ruhr and the hyperinflation, the German proletariat could have raised itself as a ruling power, but he strenuously denies that the KPD, with its support of nationalist policies as expressed in Radek’s
Schlageter Speech (in which he expressed support for a German Freikorps member executed by the French for sabotage activity during their occupation of the Ruhr), could play any role. He says that the result of all this was that instead of a strong proletarian force emerging at the end of the war in the Ruhr, ‘there was a nationalist-Communist stench which poisoned the whole of Germany’, and that the National Socialists and the Communists laid claim to the same right ‘to be the heirs of the foundering Germany’: one presenting itself as ‘National Communist’, and the other as ‘Communist-nationalist’, ‘so at bottom both were the same’. Levi concludes: ‘History rejected both such claims – we have had the good fortune to avert the fate of either a dictatorship of Muscovite soldiery or Austrian sexual-pathology.’ Here, Levi makes for the time a remarkable equation between the Nazi and Communist Parties. ‘Muscovite soldiery’ is a reference to the Soviet officers brought in to head the insurrection that never was, and ‘Austrian sexual-pathology’ is a reference to the attempted coup by Hitler, Ludendorff and Ernst Röhm in Munich. We had the good fortune to escape this fate, says Levi: 1933 and 1945 had yet to come.
In the third paragraph, Levi says: ‘If, as far as the German circumstances of 1923 are concerned, the Trotskyist criticism is incorrect in its actual assumptions, it is even more incomprehensible how it could have had such a huge effect in Russia.’ In the fourth paragraph, he attributes the huge effect to the ideological habits of Bolshevism. Here the facts of the life and death struggle for the Soviet Communist Party and state, which to a great extent Trotsky had already lost, were, it seems, unknown to Levi. As the facts are now common knowledge, there is no need to repeat them here.
But what were the incorrect assumptions to which Levi refers? The first occurs in
Lessons of October, when Trotsky says: ‘In the latter part of last year [1923], we witnessed in Germany a classic demonstration of how it is possible to miss a perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of world historic importance.’
[1] Trotsky then goes on to analyse not the German events and experience, but the Russian events of October 1917. Was this analogy of the two Octobers valid? A succinct answer was given by Lenin at the Third Congress of the Communist International. When replying to the supporters of the offensive of March 1921, he said:
In Europe, where almost all the proletarians are organised, we must win the majority of the working class, and anyone who fails to understand this is lost to the Communist movement – Comrade Terracini has understood very little of the Russian Revolution. In Russia, we were a small party, but we had with us in addition the majority of the Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country. Do you have anything of the sort? We had with us almost half the army, which then numbered at least 10 million men. Do you really have the majority of the army behind you? Show me such a country! If these views of Comrade Terracini are shared by three other delegations, then something is wrong in the International! Then we must say: ‘Stop! There must be a decisive fight! Otherwise the Communist International is lost.’
[2]
Elsewhere, Trotsky asks: ‘Were the masses in a fighting mood?’ He answers: ‘The entire history of the year 1923 leaves no doubt at all on this score.’
[3] This confident assertion does not accord with the facts. The statistics of that period display the number of strikes, the number of strikers, and the length of the strikes, and they show an increasing reluctance of workers to engage in battle. In 1922 there were 4,750 strikes and lockouts, involving 1,895,800 employees, with 27,734,000 days ‘lost’. The figures for 1923 were 2,046, 1,626,800 and 12,344,000 respectively.
[4]
Trotsky goes on: ‘In Germany, the insurrection would have immediately blazed in scores of mighty proletarian centres.’
[5] But after the failure of Brandler to obtain support for a general strike at the Chemnitz trade union and factory committee conference, the KPD sent out an order cancelling the uprising that it had planned. This instruction either did not reach or was ignored by the party in Hamburg. The uprising took place there in test-tube conditions: there were 40,000 SPD members, 18,000 KPD members, and no Reichswehr troops in the vicinity (they had been sent to Central Germany). And a week before the uprising, the shipyards, transport system and factories of every kind were on strike. Three hundred brave KPD members, armed with 19 rifles and 27 revolvers, attacked the police stations.
[6] The workers of Hamburg did not support them.
In the summer of 1924, whilst attending a revolutionary military seminar in Moscow, Karl Retzlaw, an old Spartacist and an underground KPD official, was summoned by Trotsky to give a report on the events of 1923. Trotsky said that judging from the reports of the KPD’s Zentrale, and especially Brandler’s personal reports, he had estimated the developments in Germany to be more advanced than they were. Answering Trotsky’s question as to whether an open attack in the summer of 1923, at the climax of the German crisis, would have been successful, he said: ‘No, people were worn out. Their nerves had been frayed by the long, protracted crisis itself – even if we had launched an attack in October, we would have been annihilated, as the Hamburg insurrection had proved.’ He also told the astonished Trotsky that many more workers had volunteered for the police auxiliary services to help crush the Communists’ insurrection than had joined their side. Trotsky told him that he had not heard this before.
[7]
It is interesting to note that in all the discussions of 1923, there is little or no mention of the effect of the bloody fiasco of March 1921, when the KPD organised an uprising which received little support from the workers, and ended with dozens dead and thousands imprisoned. When Brandler, after speaking for over three hours, appealed to the Chemnitz conference for a vote in favour of a general strike as a prelude to an uprising, there could not have been a delegate at that conference who was not acquainted with the fiasco of 1921. Some may have been involved in it. In effect, Brandler was offering them a second-hand revolution. That he was turned down proves the truth of the saying ‘once bitten, twice shy’.
Although Trotsky asked in
The Lessons of October for a ‘concrete account, full of factual data, of last year’s developments in Germany’, nine years later in the discussions with Walcher, we find no new data, and no data is produced, only a metaphor. We can draw our own conclusions as to the truth of Levi’s charge of ‘unwarranted assumptions’.
Notes
1. L.D. Trotsky,
The Lessons of October,
The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923–25, New York 1975, p. 201.
2. V.I. Lenin,
Speech in Defence of the Tactics of the Communist International,
Collected Works, Volume 32, Moscow, 1975, pp. 470–1.
Umberto Terracini (1895–?) was a leading member of the Italian Communist Party, who was jailed under Mussolini’s regime, and became President of the National Assembly after the Second World War.
3. L.D. Trotsky,
On the Defeat of the German Revolution,
The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923–25,
op. cit., p. 169.
4. V.R. Berghahn,
Modern Germany, Cambridge 1987, p. 304.
5. L.D. Trotsky,
The Lessons of October,
op. cit., p. 231.
6. A. Neuberg,
Armed Insurrection, London, 1970, pp84–5.
7. K. Retzlaw,
Spartakus: Aufstieg und Niedergang, Erinnerungen eines Parteiarbeiters, Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 294–5. I quote from Karl Rennert’s English translation, which has not yet been published.
Karl Retzlaw (1886–?), whose real name was Friedberg, was a KPD official, and was a secret Trotskyist in the 1930s, working under the name of Erd after 1933.
