From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-Bourgeois Pacifism and Socialist Pacifism (1917)

Markin comment:


It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).

Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
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V. I. Lenin
Bourgeois Pacifism and Socialist Pacifism[1]

Published: First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany II. Signed: N. Lenin. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 23, pages 175-194.
Translated: M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and Others
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README


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ARTICLE (OR CHAPTER) I
THE TURN IN WORLD POLITICS
There are symptoms that such a turn has taken place, or is about to take place, namely, a turn from imperialist war to imperialist peace.

The following are the outstanding symptoms: both imperialist coalitions are undoubtedly severely exhausted; continuing the war has become difficult; the capitalists generally, and finance capital in particular, find it difficult to skin the people substantially more than they have done already in the form of outrageous “war” profits; finance capital in the neutral countries, the United States, Holland, Switzerland, etc., which has made enormous prof its out of the war, is satiated; the shortage of raw materials and food supplies makes it difficult for it to continue this “profitable” business; Germany is making strenuous efforts to induce one or another ally of England, her principal imperialist rival, to desert her; the German Government has made pacifist pronouncements, followed by similar pronouncements by a number of neutral governments.

Are there any chances for a speedy end to the war?

It is very hard to give a positive reply to this question. In our opinion, two possibilities present themselves rather definitely.

First, conclusion of a separate peace between Germany and Russia, though perhaps not in the usual form of a formal written treaty. Second, no such peace will be concluded; England and her allies are still in a position to hold out for another year or two, etc. If the first assumption is correct the war will come to an end, if not immediately, then in the very near future, and no important changes in its course can be expected. If the second assumption is correct, then the war may continue indefinitely.

Let us examine the first possibility.

That negotiations for a separate peace between Germany and Russia were conducted quite recently, that Nicholas II himself, or the top Court clique, favour such a peace, that a turn has taken place in world politics from a Russo-British imperialist alliance against Germany to a no less imperialist Russo-German alliance against England—all that is beyond doubt.

The replacement of Stürmer by Trepov, the tsarist government’s public declaration that Russia’s “right” to Constantinople has been recognised by all the Allies, and the setting up by Germany of a separate Polish state—these seem to indicate that the separate peace negotiations have ended in failure. Perhaps tsarism entered into them solely to blackmail England, obtain formal and unambiguous recognition of Nicholas the Bloody’s “right” to Constantinople and certain “weighty” guarantees of that right?

There is nothing improbable in that assumption, considering that the main, fundamental purpose of the present imperialist war is the division of the spoils among the three principal imperialist rivals, the three robbers, Russia, Germany and England.

On the other hand, the clearer it becomes to tsarism that there is no practical, military possibility of regaining Poland, winning Constantinople, breaking Germany’s iron front, which she is magnificently straightening out, shortening and strengthening by her recent victories in Rumania, the more tsarism is finding itself compelled to conclude a separate peace with Germany, that is, to abandon Its imperialist alliance with England against Germany for an imperialist alliance with Germany against England. And why not? Was not Russia on the verge of war with England as a result of their imperialist rivalry over the division of the spoils in Central Asia? And did not England and Germany negotiate in 1898 for an alliance against Russia? They secretly agreed then to divide up the Portuguese colonies “in the event” of Portugal failing to meet her financial obligations!

The growing trend among leading imperialist circles in Germany towards an alliance with Russia against England was already clearly defined several months ago. The basis of this alliance, apparently, is to be the partition of Galicia (it is very important for tsarism to strangle the centre of Ukrainian agitation and Ukrainian liberty), Armenia and perhaps Rumania! In fact there was a “hint” in a German newspaper that Rumania might be divided among Austria, Bulgaria and Russia! Germany could agree to other minor concessions to tsarism if only she could achieve an alliance with Russia, and perhaps also with Japan, against England.

A separate peace between Nicholas II and Wilhelm II could have been concluded secretly. There have been in stances in diplomatic history of treaties known only to two or three persons and kept secret from everyone else, even Cabinet Ministers. Diplomatic history knows instances of the “Great Powers” gathering at “European” congresses after the principal rivals had secretly decided the main questions among themselves (for example, the secret agreement between Russia and England to plunder Turkey, prior to the Berlin Congress of 1878). It would not be at all surprising if tsarism rejected a formal separate peace between the governments for the reason, among others, that the present situation in Russia might result in Milyukov and Guchkov, or Milyukov and Kerensky, taking over the government, while at the same time, it may have concluded a secret, informal, but none the less “durable” treaty with Germany to the effect that the two “high contracting parties” undertake jointly to pursue such-and-such a policy at the forthcoming peace congress!

It is impossible to say whether or not this assumption is correct. At any rate, it is a thousand times nearer the truth, is a far better description of things as they actually are than are the pious phrases about peace between the present governments, or between any bourgeois governments for that matter, on the basis of no annexations, etc. These phrases either express innocent desires or are hypocrisy and lies meant to conceal the truth. And the truth of the present time, of the present war, of the present attempts to conclude peace, is the division of the imperialist spoils. That is at the bottom of it all; and to understand this truth, to express it, “to show things as they actually are”, is the fundamental task of socialist policy as distinct from bourgeois policy, the principal aim of which is to conceal, to gloss over this truth.

Both imperialist coalitions have grabbed a certain amount of loot, and the two principal and most powerful of the robbers, Germany and England, have grabbed most. England has not lost an inch of her territory or of her colonies; but she has “acquired” the German colonies and part of Turkey (Mesopotamia). Germany has lost nearly all her colonies, but has acquired immeasurably more valuable territory in Europe, having seized Belgium, Serbia, Rumania, part of France, part of Russia, etc. The fight now is over the division of the loot, and the “chieftain” of each of the robber gangs, i.e., England and Germany, must to some degree reward his allies, who, with the exception of Bulgaria and to a lesser extent Italy, have lost a great deal. The weakest of the allies have lost most: in the English coalition, Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania have been crushed; in the German coalition, Turkey has lost Armenia and part of Mesopotamia.

So far Germany has secured undoubtedly far more loot than England. So far Germany has won; she has proved to be far stronger than anyone anticipated before the war. Naturally, therefore, it would be to Germany’s advantage to conclude peace as speedily as possible, for her rival might still be able, given the most favourable opportunity conceivable (although not very probably), to mobilise a larger reserve of recruits, etc.

Such is the objective situation. Such is the present position in the struggle for the division of the imperialist loot. It is quite natural that this situation should give rise to pacifist strivings, declarations and pronouncements, mainly on the part of the bourgeoisie and governments of the German coalition and of the neutral countries. It is equally natural that the bourgeoisie and its governments are compelled to exert every effort to hoodwink the people, to cover up the hideous nakedness of an imperialist peace—the division of the loot—by phrases, utterly false phrases about a democratic peace, the liberty of small nations, armaments reduction, etc.

But while it is natural for the bourgeoisie to try to hoodwink the people, how are the socialists fulfilling their duty? This we shall deal with in the next article (or chapter).


ARTICLE (OR CHAPTER) II
THE PACIFISM OF KAUTSKY AND TURATI
Kautsky is the most authoritative theoretician of the Second International, the most prominent leader of the so-called “Marxist centre” in Germany, the representative of the opposition which organised a separate group in the Reichstag, the Social-Democratic Labour Group (Haase, Ledebour and others). A number of Social-Democratic newspapers in Germany are now publishing articles by Kautsky on the terms of peace, which paraphrase the official Social-Democratic Labour Group declaration on the German Government’s well-known note proposing peace negotiations. The declaration, which calls on the German Government to propose definite terms of peace, contains the following characteristic statement:

“...In order that this [German Government] note may lead to peace, all countries must unequivocally renounce all thought of annexing foreign territory, of the political, economic or military subjection of any people whatsoever....”

In paraphrasing and concretising this, Kautsky set out to “prove” in his lengthy articles that Constantinople must not go to Russia and that Turkey must not be made a vassal state to anyone.

Let us take a closer look at these political slogans and arguments of Kautsky and his associates.

In a matter that affects Russia, i. e., Germany’s imperialist rival, Kautsky advances, not abstract or “general” demands, but a very concrete, precise and definite demand: Constantinople must not go to Russia. He thereby exposes the real imperialist designs ... of Russia. In a matter that affects Germany, however, i.e., the country where the majority of the party, which regards Kautsky as its member (and appointed him editor of its principal, leading theoretical organ, Die Neue Zeit), is helping the bourgeoisie and the government to conduct an imperialist war, Kautsky does not expose the concrete imperialist designs of his own government, but confines himself to a “general” desideratum or proposition: Turkey must not be made a vassal state to anyone!!

How, in substance, does Kautsky’s policy differ from that of the militant, so to speak, social—chauvinists (i.e., socialists in words but chauvinists in deeds) of France and England? While frankly exposing the concrete imperialist actions of Germany, they make shift with “general” desiderata or propositions when it is a matter of countries or nations conquered by England and Russia. They shout about the seizure of Belgium and Serbia, but are silent about the seizure of Galicia, Armenia, the African colonies.

Actually, both the policy of Kautsky and that of Sembat and Henderson help their respective imperialist governments by focusing attention on the wickedness of their rival and enemy, while throwing a veil of vague, general phrases and sentimental wishes around the equally imperialist con duct of “their own” bourgeoisie. We would cease to be Marxists, we would cease to be socialists in general, if we confined ourselves to the Christian, so to speak, contemplation of the benignity of benign general phrases and refrained from ex posing their real political significance. Do we not constantly see the diplomacy of all the imperialist powers flaunting magnanimous “general” phrases and “democratic” declarations in order to conceal their robbery, violation and strangulation of small nations?

“Turkey must not be made a vassal state to anyone If I say no more than that, the impression is that I favour Turkey’s complete freedom. As a matter of fact, I am merely repeating a phrase usually uttered by German diplomats who are deliberately lying and deceiving, and employ that phrase to conceal the fact that Germany has already converted Turkey into her financial and military vassal! And if I am a German socialist, my “general” phrases can only be to the advantage of German diplomacy, for their real significance is that they put German imperialism in a good light.

“All countries must renounce all thought of annexations... of the economic subjection of any people whatsoever....” What magnanimity! A thousand times the imperialists have “renounced all thought” of annexations and of the financial strangulation of weak nations. But should we not compare these renunciations with the facts, which show that any one of the big banks of Germany, England, France and the United States does hold small nations “in subjection”? Can the present bourgeois government of a wealthy country really renounce annexations and the economic subjugation of alien peoples when millions and millions have been invested in the railways and other enterprises of weak nations?

Who is really fighting annexations, etc.? Those who bandy magnanimous phrases, which, objectively, have the same significance as the Christian holy water sprinkled on the crowned and capitalist robbers? Or those who explain to the workers the impossibility of eliminating annexations and financial strangulation without overthrowing the imperialist bourgeoisie and its governments?

Here is an Italian illustration of the kind of pacifism Kautsky preaches.

Avanti!, the Central Organ of the Socialist Party of Italy, of December 25, 1916, contains an article by the well—known reformist, Filippo Turati, entitled “Abracadabra”. On November 22, 1916, he writes, the socialist group tabled a peace resolution in the Italian Parliament. It declared that “the principles proclaimed by the representatives of England and Germany were identical, and these principles should be made the basis of a possible peace”; and it invited “the government to start peace negotiations through the mediation of the United States and other neutral countries”. This is Turati’s own account of the socialist proposal.

On December 6, 1916, the Chamber “buries” the socialist resolution by “adjourning” the debate on it. On December 12, the German Chancellor proposes in the Reichstag the very thing the Italian socialists proposed. On December 22, Wilson issues his Note which, in the words of Turati, “paraphrases and repeats the ideas and arguments of the socialist proposal”. On December 23, other neutral countries come on the scene and paraphrase Wilson’s Note.

We are accused of having sold ourselves to the Germans, exclaims Turati. Have Wilson and the neutral countries also sold themselves to Germany?

On December 17, Turati delivered a speech in Parliament, one passage of which caused an unusual and deserved sensation. This is the passage, quoted from the report in Avanti!:

“Let us assume that a discussion similar to the one proposed by Germany is able, in the main, to settle such questions as the evacuation of Belgium and France, the restoration of Rumania, Serbia and, if you will, Montenegro; I will add the rectification of the Italian frontiers in regard to what is indisputably Italian and corresponds to guarantees of a strategical character”.... At this point the bourgeois and chauvinist Chamber interrupts Turati, and from all sides the shout goes up: “Excellent! So you too want all this! Long live Turati! Long live Turati!”...

Apparently, Turati realised that there was something wrong about this bourgeois enthusiasm and tried to “correct” himself and “explain”.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “there is no occasion for irrelevant jesting. It is one thing to admit the relevance and right of national unity, which we have always recognised, but it is quite another thing to provoke, or justify, war for this aim.”

But neither Turati’s “explanation”, nor the articles in Avanti! in his defence, nor Turati’s letter of December 21, nor the article by a certain “B.B.” in the Zurich Volksrecht can “correct” or explain away the fact that Turati gave him self away!... Or, more correct, not Turati, but the whole of socialist pacifism represented by Kautsky, and, as we shall see below, the French “Kautskyites”, gave itself away. The Italian bourgeois press was right in seizing upon and exulting over this passage in Turati’s speech.

The above-mentioned “B.B.” tried to defend Turati by arguing that the latter referred only to “the right of nations to self-determination”.

Poor defence! What has this to do with “the right of nations to self-determination”, which, as everyone knows, the Marxist programme regards—and the programme of inter national democracy has always regarded—as referring to the defence of oppressed nations? What has it to do with the imperialist war, i.e., a war for the division of colonies, a war for the oppression of foreign countries, a war among predatory and oppressing powers to decide which of them shall oppress more foreign nations?

How does this argument about self-determination of nations, used to justify an imperialist, not national, war, differ from the speeches of Alexinsky, Hervé and Hyndman? They argue that republican France is opposed to monarchist Germany, though everyone knows that this war is not due to the conflict between republican and monarchist principles, but is a war between two imperialist coalitions for the division of colonies, etc.

Turati explained and pleaded that he does not “justify” the war.

We will take the reformist, Kautskyite Turati’s word for it that he did not intend to justify the war. But who does not know that in politics it is not intentions that count, but deeds, not good intentions, hut facts, not the imaginary, but the real?

Let us assume that Turati did not want to justify the war and that Kautsky did not want to justify Germany’s placing Turkey in the position of a vassal to German imperialism. But the fact remains that these two benign pacifists did justify the war! That is the point. Had Kautsky declared that “Constantinople must not go to Russia, Turkey must not be made a vassal state to anyone” not in a magazine which is so dull that nobody reads it, but in parliament, before a lively, impressionable bourgeois audience, full of southern temperament, it would not have been surprising if the witty bourgeois had exclaimed: “Excellent! Hear, hear! Long live Kautsky!”

Whether he intended to or not, deliberately or not, the fact is that Turati expressed the point of view of a bourgeois broker proposing a friendly deal between imperialist robbers. The “liberation” of Italian areas belonging to Austria would, in fact, be a concealed reward to the Italian bourgeoisie for participating in the imperialist war of a gigantic imperialist coalition. It would be a small sop thrown in, in addition to the share of the African colonies and spheres of influence in Dalmatia and Albania. It is natural, perhaps, for the reformist Turati to adopt the bourgeois standpoint; but Kautsky really differs in no way from Turati.

In order not to embellish the imperialist war and help the bourgeoisie falsely represent it as a national war, as a war for the liberation of nations, in order to avoid sliding into the position of bourgeois reformism, one must speak not in the language of Kautsky and Turati, hut in the language of Karl Liebknecht: tell one’s own bourgeoisie that they are hypocrites when they talk about national liberation, that this war cannot result in a democratic peace unless the proletariat “turns its gulls” against its own governments.

That is the only possible position of a genuine Marxist, of a genuine socialist and not a bourgeois reformist. Those who repeat the general, meaningless, non-committal, goody-goody desires of pacifism are not really working for a democratic peace. Only he is working for such a peace who exposes the imperialist nature of the present war and of the imperialist peace that is being prepared and calls upon the peoples to rise in revolt against the criminal governments.

At times some try to defend Kautsky and Turati by arguing that, legally, they could no more than “hint” at their opposition to the government, and that the pacifists of this stripe do make such “hints”. The answer to that is, first, that the impossibility of legally speaking the truth is an argument not in favour of concealing the truth, but in favour of setting up an illegal organisation and press that would be free of police surveillance and censorship. Second, that moments occur in history when a socialist is called upon to break with all legality. Third, that even in the days of serfdom in Russia, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky man aged to speak the truth, for example, by their silence on the Manifesto of February 19, 1861,[2] and their ridicule and castigation of the liberals, who made exactly the same kind of speeches as Turati and Kautsky.

In the next article we shall deal with French pacifism, which found expression in the resolutions passed by the two recently held congresses of French labour and socialist organisations.

ARTICLE (OR CHAPTER) III
THE PACIFISM OF THE FRENCH SOCIALISTS AND SYNDICALISTS
The congresses of the French General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du Travail)[3] and of the French Socialist Party[4] have just been held. The true significance and true role of socialist pacifism at the present moment were quite definitely revealed at these congresses.

This is the resolution passed unanimously at the trade union congress. The majority of the ardent chauvinists headed by the notorious Jouhaux, the anarchist Broutchoux and... the “Zimmerwaldist” Merrheim all voted for it:

“This Conference of National Corporative Federations, trade unions and labour exchanges, having taken cognisance of the Note of the President of the United States which ‘invites all nations now at war with each other to publicly expound their views as to the terms upon which the war might be brought to an end’—

“requests the French Government to agree to this proposal;

“invites the government to take the initiative in making a similar proposal to its allies in order to speed the hour of peace;

“declares that the federation of nations, which is one of the guarantees of a final peace, can be secured only given the independence, territorial inviolability and political and economic liberty of all nations, big and small.

“The organisations represented at this conference pledge themselves to support and spread this idea among the masses of the workers in order to put an end to the present indefinite and ambiguous situation, which can only benefit secret diplomacy, against which the working class has always protested.”

There you have a sample of “pure” pacifism, entirely in the spirit of Kautsky, a pacifism approved by an official labour organisation which has nothing in common with Marxism and is composed chiefly of chauvinists. We have before us an outstanding document, deserving the most serious attention, of the political unity of the chauvinists and the “Kautskyites” on a platform of hollow pacifist phrases. In the preceding article we tried to explain the theoretical basis of the unity of ideas of the chauvinists and the pacifists, of the bourgeois and the socialist reformists. Now we see this unity achieved in practice in another imperialist country.

At the Zimmerwald Conference, September 5–8, 1915, Merrheim declared: “Le parti, les Jouhaux, le gouvernement, ce ne sont que trois totes sous un bonnet” (“The party, the Jouhaux and the government are three heads under one bonnet”, i.e., they are all one). At the C.G.T. Conference, on December 26, 1916, Merrheim voted together with Jouhaux for a pacifist resolution. On December 23, 1916, one of the frankest and most extreme organs of the German social-imperialists, the Chemnitz Volksstimme, published a leading article entitled “The Disintegration of the Bourgeois Parties and the Restoration of Social-Democratic Unity”. Needless to say, it praises peace-loving Südekum, Legien, Scheidemann and Co., the whole German Social-Democratic Party majority and, also, the peace-loving German Government. It proclaims: “The first party congress convened after the war must restore party unity, with the exception of the few fanatics who refuse to pay party dues [i.e., the adherents of Karl Liebknecht!]; ...Party unity based on the policy of the Party Executive, the Social-Democratic Reichstag group and the trade unions.”

This is a supremely clear expression of the idea, and a supremely clear proclamation of the policy of “unity” between the avowed German social-chauvinists on the one hand and Kautsky and Co. and the Social-Democratic Labour Group on the other—unity on the basis of pacifist phrases—“unity” as achieved in France on December 26, 1916, between Jouhaux and Merrheim!

The Central Organ of the Socialist Party of Italy, Avanti!, writes in a leading article in its issue of December 28, 1916:

“Although Bissolati and Südekum, Bonomi and Scheidemann, Sembat and David, Jouhaux and Legien have deserted to the camp of bourgeois nationalism and have betrayed [hanno tradito] internationalist ideological unity, which they promised to serve faithfully and loyally, we shall stay together with our German comrades, men like Liebknecht, Ledebour, Hoffmann, Meyer, and with our French comrades, men like Merrheim, Blanc, Brizon, Raffin-Dugens, who have not changed and have not vacillated.”

Note the confusion expressed in that statement:

Bissolati and Bonomi were expelled from the Socialist Party of Italy as reformists and chauvinists before the war. Avanti! puts them on the same level as Südekum, and Legien, and quite rightly, of course. But Südekum, David and Legien are at the head of the alleged Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which, in fact, is a social-chauvinist party, and yet this very Avanti! is opposed to their expulsion, opposed to a rupture with them, and opposed to the formation of a Third International. Avanti! quite correctly describes Legien and Jouhaux as deserters to the camp of bourgeois nationalism and contrasts their conduct with that of Liebknecht, Ledebour, Merrheim and Brizon. But we have seen that Merrheim votes on the same side as Jouhaux, while Legien, in the Chemnitz Volksstimme, declares his confidence that party unity will be restored, with the single exception, however, of Liebknecht supporters, i.e., “unity” with the Social-Democratic Labour Group (including Kautsky) to which Ledebour belongs!!

This confusion arises from the fact that Avanti! confuses bourgeois pacifism with revolutionary Social-Democratic internationalism, while experienced politicians like Legien and Jouhaux understand perfectly well that socialist and bourgeois pacifism are identical.

Why, indeed, should not M. Jouhaux and his organ, the chauvinist La Bataille,[5] rejoice at the “unanimity” between Jouhaux and Merrheim when, in fact, the unanimously adopted resolution, which we have quoted in full above, contains nothing but bourgeois pacifist phrases; not a shadow of revolutionary consciousness, not a single socialist idea!

Is it not ridiculous to talk of the “economic liberty of all nations, big and small”, and yet not say a word about the fact that, until the bourgeois governments are overthrown and the bourgeoisie expropriated, this talk of “economic liberty” is just as much a deception of the people as talk of the “economic liberty” of the individual in general, of the small peasants and rich, workers and capitalists, in modern society?

The resolution Jouhaux and Merrheim unanimously voted for is thoroughly imbued with the very ideas of “bourgeois nationalism” that Jouhaux expresses, as Avanti! quite rightly points out, while, strangely enough, failing to observe that Merrheim expresses the same ideas.

Bourgeois nationalists always and everywhere flaunt “general” phrases about a “federation of nations” in general and about “economic liberty of all nations, big and small”. But socialists, unlike bourgeois nationalists, always said and now say: rhetoric about “economic liberty of all nations, big and small”, is disgusting hypocrisy as long as certain nations (for example, England and France) invest abroad, that is to say, lend at usurious interest to small and backward nations, billions of francs, and as long as the small and weak nations are in bondage to them.

Socialists could not have allowed a single sentence of the resolution, for which Jouhaux and Merrheim unanimously voted, to pass without strong protest. In direct contrast to that resolution, socialists would have declared that Wilson’s pronouncement is a downright lie and sheer hypocrisy, because Wilson represents a bourgeoisie which has made billions out of the war, because he is the head of a government that has frantically armed the United States obviously in preparation for a second great imperialist war. Socialists would have declared that the French bourgeois government is tied hand and foot by finance capital, whose slave it is, and by the secret, imperialist, thoroughly predatory and reactionary treaties with England, Russia, etc., and therefore cannot do or say anything except utter the same lies about a democratic and a “just” peace. Socialists would have declared that the struggle for such a peace cannot be waged by repeating general, vapid, benign, sentimental, meaning less and non-committal pacifist phrases, which merely serve to embellish the foulness of imperialism. It can be waged only by telling the people the truth, by telling the people that in order to obtain a democratic and just peace the bourgeois governments of all the belligerent countries must be overthrown, and that for this purpose advantage must be taken of the fact that millions of workers are armed and that the high cost of living and the horrors of the imperialist war have roused the anger of the masses.

This is what socialists should have said instead of what is said in the Jouhaux-Merrheim resolution.

The Congress of the French Socialist Party, which took place in Paris simultaneously with that of the C.G.T., not only refrained from saying this, but passed a resolution that is even worse than the one mentioned above. It was adopted by 2,838 votes against 109, with 20 abstentions, that is to say, by a bloc of the social-chauvinists (Renaudel and Co., the so-called “majoritaires”) and the Longuet-ists (supporters of Longuet, the French Kautskyites)!! Moreover, the Zimmerwaldist Bourderon and the Kienthalian Raffin-Dugens voted for this resolution!!

We shall not quote the resolution—it is inordinately long and totally uninteresting: it contains benign, sentimental phrases about peace, immediately followed by declarations of readiness to continue to support the so-called “national defence” of France, i.e., the imperialist war France is waging in alliance with bigger and more powerful robbers like England and Russia.

In France, unity of the social-chauvinists with pacifists (or Kautskyites) and a section of the Zimmerwaldists has become a fact, not only in the C.G.T., but also in the Socialist Party.

ARTICLE (OR CHAPTER) IV
ZIMMERWALD AT THE CROSSROADS
The French newspapers containing the report of the C.G.T. Congress were received in Berne on December 28, and on December 30, Berne and Zurich socialist newspapers published another manifesto by the Berne I.S.K. (Internationale Sozialistische Kommission), the International Socialist Committee, the executive body of Zimmerwald. Dated the end of December 1916, the manifesto refers to the peace proposals advanced by Germany and by Wilson and the other neutral countries, and all these governmental pronouncements are described, and quite rightly described, of course, as a “farcical game of peace”, “a game to deceive their own peoples”, “hypocritical pacifist diplomatic gesticulations”.

As against this farce and falsehood the manifesto declares that the “only force” capable of bringing about peace, etc., is the “firm determination” of the international proletariat to “turn their weapons, not against their brothers, but against the enemy in their own country”.

The passages we have quoted clearly reveal the two fundamentally distinct policies which have lived side by side, as it were, up to now in the Zimmerwald group, but which have now finally parted company.

On the one hand, Turati quite definitely and correctly states that the proposals made by Germany, Wilson, etc., were merely a “paraphrase” of Italian “socialist” pacifism; the declaration of the German social-chauvinists and the voting of the French have shown that both fully appreciate the value for their policy of the pacifist screen.

On the other hand, the International Socialist Committee manifesto describes the pacifism of all belligerent and neutral governments as a farce and hypocrisy.

On the one hand, Jouhaux joins with Merrheim; Bourderon, Longuet and Raffin-Dugens join with Renaudel, Sembat and Thomas, while the German social-chauvinists, Südekum, David and Scheidemann, announce the forthcoming “restoration of Social-Democratic unity” with Kautsky and the Social-Democratic Labour Group.

On the other hand, the International Socialist Committee calls upon the “socialist minorities” vigorously to fight “their own governments” and “their social-patriot hirelings” (Söldlinge).

Either one thing, or the other.

Either expose the vapidity, stupidity and hypocrisy of bourgeois pacifism, or “paraphrase” it into “socialist” pacifism. Fight the Jouhaux, Renaudels, Legiens and Davids as the “hirelings” of the governments, or join with them in empty pacifist declamations on the French or German models.

That is now the dividing line between the Zimmerwald Right, which has always strenuously opposed a break with the social-chauvinists, and the Left, which at the Zimmerwald Conference had the foresight publicly to dissociate itself from the Right and to put forward, at the Conference and after it in the press, its own platform. It is no accident that the approach of peace, or even the intense discussion by certain bourgeois elements of the peace issue, has led to a very marked divergence between the two policies. To bourgeois pacifists and their “socialist” imitators, or echoers, peace has always been a fundamentally distinct concept, for neither has ever understood that “war is the continuation of the policies of peace and peace the continuation of the policies of war”. Neither the bourgeois nor the social—chauvinist wants to see that the imperialist war of 1914–17 is the continuation of the imperialist policies of 1898–1914, if not of an even earlier period. Neither the bourgeois pacifists nor the socialist pacifists realise that without the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois governments, peace now can only be an imperialist peace, a continuation of the imperialist war.

In appraising the present war, they use meaningless, vulgar, philistine phrases about aggression or defence in general, and use the same philistine commonplaces in appraising the peace, disregarding the concrete historical situation, the actual concrete struggle between the imperialist powers. And it was quite natural for the social-chauvinists, these agents of the governments and the bourgeoisie in the workers’ parties, to seize upon the approach of peace in particular, or even upon mere peace talk, in order to gloss over the depth of their reformism and opportunism, exposed by the war, and restore their undermined influence over the masses. Hence, the social-chauvinists in Germany and in France, as we have seen, are making strenuous efforts to “unite” with the flabby, unprincipled pacifist section of the “opposition”.

Efforts to gloss over the divergence between the two irreconcilable lines of policy will certainly be made also in the Zimmerwald group. One can foresee that they will follow two lines. A “practical business” conciliation by mechanically combining loud revolutionary phrases (like those in the International Socialist Committee manifesto) with opportunist and pacifist practice. That is what happened in the Second International. The arch-revolutionary phrases in the manifestos of Huysmans and Vandervelde and in certain congress resolutions merely served as a screen for the arch-opportunist practice of the majority of the European parties, but they did not change, disrupt or combat this practice. It is doubtful whether these tactics will again be successful in the Zimmerwald group.

The “conciliators in principle” will try to falsify Marxism by arguing, for example, that reform does not exclude revolution, that an imperialist peace with certain “improvements” in nationality frontiers, or in international law, or in armaments expenditure, etc., is possible side by side with the revolutionary movement, as “one of the aspects of the development” of that movement, and so on and so forth.

This would be a falsification of Marxism. Reforms do not, of course, exclude revolution. But that is not the point at issue. The point is that revolutionaries must not exclude themselves, not give way to reformism, i.e., that socialists should not substitute reformist work for their revolutionary work. Europe is experiencing a revolutionary situation. The war and the high cost of living are aggravating the situation. The transition from war to peace will not necessarily eliminate the revolutionary situation, for there are no grounds whatever for believing that the millions of workers who now have excellent weapons in their hands will necessarily permit themselves to be “peacefully disarmed” by the bourgeoisie instead of following the advice of Karl Liebknecht, i.e., turning their weapons against their own bourgeoisie.

The question is not, as the pacifist Kautskyites maintain: either a reformist political campaign, or else the renunciation of reforms. That is a bourgeois presentation of the question. The question is: either revolutionary struggle, the by-product of which, in the event of its not being fully successful, is reforms (the whole history of revolutions throughout the world has proved this), or nothing but talk about reforms and the promise of reforms.

The reformism of Kautsky, Turati and Bourderon, which now comes out in the form of pacifism, not only leaves aside the question of revolution (this in itself is a betrayal of socialism), not only abandons in practice all systematic and persistent revolutionary work, but even goes to the length of declaring that street demonstrations are adventurism (Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit, November 26, 1915). It goes to the length of advocating and implementing unity with the outspoken and determined opponents of revolutionary struggle, the Südekum, Legiens, Renaudels, Thomases, etc., etc.

This reformism is absolutely irreconcilable with revolutionary Marxism, the duty of which is to take the utmost possible advantage of the present revolutionary situation in Europe in order openly to urge revolution, the overthrow of the bourgeois governments, the conquest of power by the armed proletariat, while at the same time not renouncing, and not refusing to utilise, reforms in developing the revolutionary struggle and in the course of that struggle.

The immediate future will show what course events in Europe will follow, particularly the struggle between reformist pacifism and revolutionary Marxism, including the struggle between the two Zimmerwald sections.

Zurich, January 1, 1917


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Notes
[1] Lenin intended this article for the newspaper Novy Mir (New World) published in New York by Russian socialist émigrés. The article did not appear in Novy Mir and Lenin re-edited the first two sections, which were published in the last issue (No. 58) of Sotsial-Demokrat, January 31, 1917, under the heading “A Turn in World Politics” (see pp. 262–70 of this volume).

[2] The Manifesto of February 19, 1861 abolished serfdom in Russia.

[3] The French Confédération générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour) was founded in 1895 and was strongly influenced by anarcho-syndicalists and reformists. Its leaders recognised only economic struggle, opposed proletarian party leadership of the trade union movement, sided with the imperialist bourgeoisie in the First World War and advocated class collaboration and “defence of the fatherland”.

The congress mentioned by Lenin met in Paris on December 24–26, 1916 and discussed: (1) report of the Executive for the period from August 1914, and (2) industrial issues. At the concluding session the Executive informed the congress of President Wilson s peace appeal to the belligerent nations, and the congress adopted, by a nearly unanimous vote, the resolution cited by Lenin.

[4] The French Socialist Party was founded in 1905 by the merger of the Socialist Party of France led by Guesde and the French Socialist Party led by Jaurès. Dominated by reformists, the party adopted a chauvinist position from the very start of the imperialist war. Its leaders openly supported the war and justified participation in the bourgeois government. The Centrist wing, led by Longuet, took a social-pacifist line and a conciliatory attitude towards the social-chauvinists. The Left, revolutionary wing adhered to internationalist positions and drew its support mainly from the party rank and file.

The party congress mentioned by Lenin met on December 25–30, 1916, the chief agenda item being the question of peace. A number of resolutions were adopted, including one opposing propaganda of the Zimmerwald principles, and another, moved by Renaudel. am proving socialist participation in the war-time government.

[5] La Bataille (The Battle)—organ of the French anarcho-syndicalists, published in Paris from 1915 to 1920 in place of the banned La Bataille Syndicaliste. Leading contributors included Grave, Jouhaux, and Cornelissen. Adopted a socialchauvinist position in the First World War.

In Honor of Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution-"Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin?" by August Thalheimer

Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin?
Mike Jones

THE ARTICLE below was first published in the 3 January 1930 issue of Gegen den Strom, It was apparently written both to mark the celebration of the ‘Three Ls’ (Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht) on 15 January 1930 and also to counter crude attacks on Luxemburg by those leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD) who were undertaking the final Stalinisation of the party in the aftermath of the adoption of the Comintern’s ultra-left ‘new line’. By then many of Luxemburg’s associates, who had founded and built up the party, had been expelled and were organised in the KPD (Opposition), whose theoretical weekly Gegen den Strom was. The Luxemburg tradition had come under attack earlier, under the Ruth Fischer-Arkadi Maslow leadership, allies of Zinoviev, who began the so-called ‘Bolshevisation’ of the KPD, uprooting the native democratic structures and adopting one resulting from the Russian experience – almost destroying the party in the process, because of the linked sectarian politics. Luxemburg, Trotsky and Brandler were all compared and denounced as ‘semi-Mensheviks’, etc.

Walter Held’s essay in the last What Next? would seem to stem from that tradition that thought the Bolsheviks had found all the answers. I see that outlook as ahistorical. As August Thalheimer points out, it was not a result of an ‘error’ that Rosa Luxernburg opposed centralism in Germany, but because of the level of capitalist development, the level of class struggle, and the corresponding forms of the labour movement thrown up by the workers themselves. In Russia and Poland, the level of capitalist development and of the class struggle, and the need for secrecy, all meant that the nascent movement was dominated by the intellectuals, with only a few advanced workers prepared to follow them. The organisations they set up were by nature of the Blanquist type. The 1903 dispute over the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party statutes reflects that.

The organisational form adopted by the workers’ organisations expressed the needs of the distinct stage of development. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg fought the centralism of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), as this was allowing the party to move away from the advanced workers and into class collaboration. For her, the workers’ party, rust be able to respond to the creative deeds of the revolutionary workers, to integrate into its arsenal their new conceptions, and to theorise such novel creations. The top-down centralised party cannot respond to such creative acts. It operates according to schemas drafted by all-powerful Central Committees. Witness the Bolshevik response to the 1905 events.

In accordance with her analysis of capitalist development – as set out in her The Accumulation of Capital – Rosa Luxemburg assumed that, as capitalism developed, its contradictions sharpened. The class struggle would increase accordingly and the working class would gradually radicalise, resulting in the SPI) shedding the petty bourgeois element and becoming the pure workers’ party required, as the radicalised workers began to determine its policy and tactics. For her, it was not the party that brought revolutionary consciousness to the working class, but the workers, becoming conscious through the actual struggles they undertook, who then brought their conceptions into the party. The party then reworks these discoveries into its programme and theory. Luxemburg saw the role of the party as that of raising the existing consciousness of the class, not as arriving from outside and imposing ready-made schemas.

For example, the Open Letter of January 1921, where the KPD advanced demands around which a United Front could materialise, came from the Stuttgart Demands, put forward by KPD metalworkers in that area; and they, in turn, originated in a discussion of the Württemberg District Committee of the KPD, at which Brandler and Walcher were present. The point being that Württemberg had been a stronghold of Spartakus, key KPD leaders came from there, and a layer of workers existed who had been schooled in Luxemburg’s understanding of Marxism. Hence the demands came not from the top down, but from that reciprocal relationship between the party and class.

Luxemburg’s struggle, waged over the years within the SPD, meant that she understood that reformism and centrism had deep material roots, that the removal of a few leaders was no solution, that these historical leaders had a following, even if, to a degree, this was based on illusions. No, the 4 August events resulted from a long historical process. Therefore she opposed any break from the SPD until no more could be done (and she was correct to oppose Lenin at Zimmerwald – as was Trotsky), as a small group of intellectuals and a tiny sector of advanced workers would have only separated themselves from the organised workers’ movement by a split, and made difficult the task of influencing those same workers, by participating in and influencing the process whereby they became aware of the need either to take over the old party or to found a new one. For Luxemburg, as for Marx, the emergence of the party does not result from the will of the intellectuals but from the conscious decision of the working class, out of a stage in its development, and out of the class struggle itself. Everything else is sect-building,

Hence it was no ‘error’ of Luxemburg to have neglected to split long before. August Thalheimer’s phrase ‘schoolboy notion’ sums up such a view. That view is still current in some of the sects today. Another one, just as erroneous, is that she should have created a ‘hard faction’ in the SPD. To what end? As long as Luxemburg and her comrades had freedom of speech, could operate freely, could not only publish in but even edit local newspapers, could run local and district SPD organisations, in other words have normal rights as party members – then why set up secret groupings? A current of opinion suffices in such circumstances. Secret groups can only alienate other comrades and cut oneself off from influencing them.

Years later, looking back, Thalheimer wrote: ‘still in 1914-15, we did not exclude the possibility of being able to still raise the flag of revolution within the Social Democracy and cleansing it of opportunist elements. Only gradually did we become convinced that within this old framework there was nothing more to expect, nothing more to gain. One must be clear, however, that inside the Social Democratic Party the severe factional struggles between the Lassalleans and Eisenachers were still fixed in the memory, the idea of a split met with the most difficult obstructions and the most grave hesitations among even the most progressive workers.’

In Chapter 5 of his Rosa Luxemburg biography, Paul Frö1ich evaluates our two protagonists, and although he has been accused of smoothing out the differences, it seem to me that, within the framework of the task he was set, he does face up to them. On the original argument over the type of party (1904), Frölich says that Luxemburg ‘observed in him [Lenin] a dangerous rigidity in argumentation, a certain scholasticism in his political ideas, and a tendency to ignore the living movement of the masses, or even to coerce it into accepting preconceived tactical plans’. But he goes on to say: ‘In any case, when big decisions had to be taken, he demonstrated a tactical elasticity which one would not have suspected from his writings. His associates, however, manifested that conservative inertia, as decried by Rosa Luxemburg.’ Summing up that first difference, Frölich concludes that: ‘Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any correction in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakeably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations ... it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass, for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.’

Frölich looks at Luxernburg’s approach to the party during the war in Chapter 11, and adequately outlines her reasoning. In Chapter 12, he does the same regarding her attitude in 1917 and the deeds of the Bolsheviks. Thalheimer does not deal with the questions of democracy or the terror, so I’ll restrict myself to a few comments only. In her unfinished brochure on the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg spoke up for ‘the dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique’. She also criticised the Bolsheviks justifying the measures they took, and even theoretising them, when they went counter to the Marxist programme. If we know that these measures were adopted ad hoc because of civil war and counter-revolution, we also know today where they led. Such measures became part and parcel of what passed for Communist theory. It seems to me that Luxemburg was correct here.

In a number of quotes from Luxemburg’s brochure, Frölich sums up how she saw the role of the masses, as opposed to Lenin-Trotsky, and she wrote that: ‘socialist practice demands a total spiritual transformation in the masses’ (‘ganze geistige Umwälzung’ – the untranslatable ‘geistige’ can also mean ‘mental’, ‘intellectual’, etc.), and to me that sums up Luxemburg. For her the downtrodden masses had become conscious of the need to take power and emancipate themselves; that a party based on Marxism was pushing them aside and saying ‘leave things to us’ was incomprehensible. For me she represents more the Marxism of Marx, while Lenin (Trotsky became a Bolshevik and rejected his old criticism) has strong Blanquist traits that surely originate in the Russian populist tradition. A serious debate on these old arguments is welcome, and here I agree with Thalheimer, that one should reject the either/or, thereby constructing false poles, but approach the matters historically, and today with the benefit of much hindsight.

Notes
1. -

2. KPD-Opposition (KPO), 1964, Vol.2, pp.90-1, note 1. Hans Tittel, at that time Political Secretary of the Württemberg District, told Tjaden years later how the Stuttgart Demands came about. (Jakob Walcher was another future leader of the KPD-Opposition: editorial note.)

3. A.Thalheimer, Spartakus und die Weltkrieg, Inprekorr, No.83, 8 July 1924, cited by J. Kaestner, Die politische Theorie August Thalheimers, 1982, p.29.

4. P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, 1972, p.85.

5.

6.


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Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin?
August Thalheimer
ON THE 15 January, the revolutionary working class in Germany celebrates simultaneously Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Lenin. In the imagination and the sentiment of the German revolutionary worker they stand on the same level, as the hitherto greatest champions of the proletarian revolution. Each of them with their own traits, their own achievements, their own revolutionary character, their own role. The name of Lenin shines in the clear lustre of the victor of the first proletarian revolution and its convulsive and infectious impact worldwide. The names of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are surrounded by the gloomy lustre of the leaders of a revolution that was crushed in its first assault, of the martyrs of the revolutionary struggle, of the most outstandmig symbols of the arduous path of martyrdom and suffering, but also of the unbending fighting spirit of the German working class. If the former personifies the victorious present and true reality of the proletarian revolution, then the latter personify its future, its hope, its intention to break through to the advanced capitalist west. All three are equally dear to the hearts of the revolutionary working class.

Only the minor and ambitious fellows today at work on the shoulders of these giants, in dull ignorance, in order to misrepresent, to pervert and demolish what the others built up, now reserve the right to put the question: ‘Luxemburg or Lenin?’ And they decide it so: Rosa Luxemburg became stuck on the way to Bolshevism (the name Communism is apparently no longer sufficient), at centrism or semi-centrism, so to speak, that she was a – fortunately outmoded – stage towards the height to which these fellows have raised themselves.

It would, however, be just as wrong to counter-pose to this mistake the opposite one, that ‘Luxemburgism’ is the superior revolutionary doctrine to Leninism.

Not Luxemburg or Lenin – but Luxemburg and Lenin. Here it is not a question of an obscure mixture and obliteration of differences, but of recognising the particular role and significance of each of them for the proletarian revolution. Each of them gave the proletarian revolution something the other did not, and could not, give. The reasons can be found in the different historical role of the revolutionary movements in which they were, above all, rooted and which they, above all, influenced.

Firstly, we take the general conception of the proletarian revolution. Out of genuine revolutionary Marxism, both Rosa Luxemburg and also Lenin rescued the general conception of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of revolutionary violence within it. Rosa Luxemburg championed this conception first in the West not only against the revisionism of Bernstein, but also against Kautsky, against the ‘Marxist Centre’ – obviously so named because it tore the revolutionary centre from the Marxist conception of the proletarian revolution, by dispelling the proletarian dictatorship and limiting the revolutionary struggle to the democratic-parliamentary-trade union struggle.

The essence of the Marxist Centre, of Kautskyism, took shape in the years in which the struggle of the proletariat for power was felt to be approaching, and it implied that what was only a certain period in the struggle of the German and Western proletariat, the parliamentary and trade union struggle for reforms, was an absolute, the one and only way. Kautskyist thought faltered before the dialectical transformation of the method of struggle for reform into that of the immediate revolutionary struggle. For the whole of Marxism it substituted the fragment, which parliamentary-trade unionist struggle of the German social democracy during the years 1870-1914 embodied. Consequently, when history really posed the question of the proletarian revolution during the imperialist world war, Kautskyism sank back into social –pacifism and vulgar democracy, and vulgar democracy turned into naked counterrevolution.

Bernstein and Kautsky, the ‘siamese Twins’, the poles of the same vulgar democratic and semi-Marxist narrow-mindedness, today logically find themselves together again on the basis of the same conception.

In opposition to them, Rosa Luxemburg rescued the whole, and thereby the true, conception of Marxism, due to the fact that she saw far beyond the German and Western European sector of the proletarian struggle and therefore also in time beyond the purely parliamentary and purely trade union period.

However, she was no more able than Marx and Engels, or anyone else however ingenious, to anticipate out of the depths of the mind, discoveries and creations which only the struggle of the proletarian masses itself was able to accomplish. Bureaucrats of the revolution may imagine that they can replace the creative power of the historical process of the revolution (yet in reality it only results in powerless caricatures). As long as the proletarian revolution had not assumed a real form anywhere, the conception of the proletarian revolution could not go beyond the degree of precision conceived by Marx and Engels from out of the French Commune, i.e. it had to remain standing at a still very general and abstract conception.

An important and decisive step beyond that was first taken by the revolutionary Marxist leader of the working class who stood closest to the Russian revolution of 1905-6 and therefore knew how to fully evaluate its results theoretically. This role fell to Lenin. From the 1905-6 revolution he conceived the idea of the significance of the councils as the embryo of proletarian state power and in connection with the 1917 revolution as the concrete fundamental form of the state of the proletarian dictatorship.

The true creator of this form is the revolutionary working class itself. Lenin’s epoch-making accomplishment consists in recognising the general significance and historical importance of this form faster, more sharply and more profoundly than anyone else, and in having drawn practical-revolutionary conclusions from this perception.

Following a different direction, Lenin concretised the conception, and with that also the plan and strategy, of the proletarian revolution: with regard to the relation between the proletarian, the agrarian-peasant and the national revolution. The powerful experimental field of three Russian revolutions also produced the illustrative material for that. (In Trotsky’s description, in his An Attempt at an Autobiography, all that remains in semi-darkness, which might be agreeable for him, but is harmful for historical knowledge.)

As soon as the German revolution approached in 1918, Rosa Luxeinburg and Karl Lieblenecht, Franz Mehring, Leo Jogiches, and those united with them in the Spartakusbund, at once accepted this conception as their standpoint, and they knew how to use it with complete independence, in a country with substantially different class relations. In a country where the working class did not constitute a small minority of the population as in Russia, but the majority. Where the anti-feudal agrarian revolution had already been completed. Where capitalism had attained its highest level of development. Where the working class had for decades been used to broad mass organisations, etc.

Neither ‘centrists’ nor ‘semi-centrists’, not even mere pupils, not to mention bureaucratic subordinates of a bureaucratic supreme authority of the proletarian revolution, were capable of that task; only independent revolutionary brains could accomplish it. The outcome of these achievements, which continue the work of the Russian revolution on German ground, is the Spartakus Programme, is the Rote Fahne up to the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

In the bureaucratic regions of the KPD it has become customary to attribute to a subjective ‘error’ on Rosa Luxemburg’s part, that in November 1918 the Spartakusbund was not yet a strong mass party but only a numerically weak tendency in transition to wards a party. According to this conception, she already ‘failed’ to ‘split’ in 1914 or 1915, or even as early as 1903. This schoolboy notion fails to grasp that the conditions for the building of a revolutionary party out of an already existing mass party, which assembles within it the most progressive elements of the working class, are different from those where such a mass party and mass organisations do not yet exist, but where the task is to build the revolutionary core to which the unorganised proletarian masses then adhere. That was, however, the different situation in Russia.

Regarding the national question, Rosa Luxemburg’s consistent struggle in Poland against petty bourgeois nationalism remains a merit not disputed by Lenin. Her theoretical generalisation was mistaken. Lenin correctly accomplished it out of the great Russian experience.

Regarding the agrarian question, too, the different conceptions can be wholly explained by the different conditions. Where feudal or semi-feudal agrarian relations in the countryside still have to be overcome, as in Russia, but also in a series of other countries, the transitional stage in which the generalisation and levelling of the individual peasant holdings is unavoidable. However, on the other hand, the later Russian experience shows that the construction of socialist industry came very quickly into intolerable contradiction with the continued existence of the individual peasant holding, and that socialist industry must be supplemented by large-scale socialist enterprise on the land. Yet it goes without saying that from this general necessity it does not follow that this step can be made at any moment but that certain real preconditions must met. Trotsky erred in this question by ignoring these real preconditions. He erred moreover by not understanding that this transition could only be carried out not against but only together with the great majority of the small and the middle peasants. If it is correct that the transitional stage of the poor peasantry in Russia could not be skipped over, then it is just as true that under different conditions the aim of the large socialist agricultural enterprise can be attained in other shortened stages and in part by other means.

In the proletarian revolution too, indeed quite particularly in it, the historical dialectic makes itself felt, in that the very same method causes transformations in opposite directions depending on the different preconditions and that for the same purposes under different circumstances occasionally contrary means and methods are called for.

Some questions of the revolutionary organisation may serve as an example. In Russia, Lenin posed the question of the strictest revolutionary centralisation at first against the Mensheviks, in a situation where it was a matter of clearly distinguishing between the elements of the proletarian and the bourgeois revolution. The loose form of revolutionary organisation favoured by the Mensheviks was the organisational expression of the dominance of bourgeois-revolutionary intellectual elements, whereas strictest centralisation was the organisational expression of the proletarian revolutionary class character of the movement.

How different to Germany before the war! The sharpest form of organisational centralisation here was represented by the party bureaucracy, more or less corroded by opportunism. The rule of the opportunist tendency expressed itself organisationally by the domination of a strictly centralist, opportunist party apparatus. Against that the task was to appeal to the revolutionary self-activity of the members. In Russia the principle of strict centralisation was bound up with the proletarian-revolutionary tendency, while it was the opposite in Germany, where this was the principle of the opportunist-petty-bourgeois-bureaucratic tendency. The same formal organisational principle in fact combined contradictory contents regarding both the direction and, in the last analysis, class objectives. In Germany, therefore, the first task was to attack the opportunist-reformist-parliamentary centralism, to smash it, in order to create the preconditions for revolutionary centralisation. A classical dialectical course of development: from the opportunist centralisation through its abolition to the revolutionary centralisation.

However, revolutionary centralisation, too, in its turn undergoes anew a dialectical course of development.

That is shown most tangibly in the question of the ‘professional revolutionary’. The ‘professional revolutionary’ is a necessary product and tool of the leadership of the revolutionary organisation that is illegal and is not yet a mass organisation. In the legal Communist mass organisation there is no place for the ‘professional revolutionary’ in this sense. Here, as the movement grows, the ‘professional revolutionary’ too easily changes into the characterless, politically and materially corrupt careerist bureaucrat, for whom the revolutionary movement is a source of a living, of a career, of parliamentary and other posts.

Out of revolutionary centralism the danger of bureaucratic centralism develops anew, on a higher plane, and becomes a hindrance, a fetter on the movement, and against it one must appeal to the revolutionary self-activity of the party ranks. Is this danger present today in the Communist International and its sections? Undoubtedly! Consequently, however, in this question today, too, it is not a matter of Lenin or Luxemburg, but Lenin and Luxemburg. This means that upholding the Leninist principle of revolutionary centralisation today demands a struggle against the bureaucratic, opportunist or ultra-left degeneration of into bureaucratic centralism demands an appeal to the revolutionary self-activity of the membership of the Communist Party in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. In this struggle, however, we can also refer to Lenin, who began the struggle against party and state bureaucratism in the victorious Soviet state. These are only some examples for a general lesson that is still suitable for a variety of practical applications.

The party bureaucracy perceives Lenin and Luxemburg as opposed to each other and thereby proves that it has not understood either. We counterpose to the bureaucracy not only the formal but also the spiritual bond of these two great revolutionary champions of the working class and their closest comrades in arms, their mutual supplementary features as revolutionary leaders, as practicians and theoreticians. What unites them, is that they used the very same principle on different levels, situations and spheres of the great totality of the world revolution.

This whole also transcends the greatest individuals. The individual greatness of revolutionary leaders is also subject to the law of the dialectic: it exists only as much as it is not just an individual, but a general thing, as it participates in the greatness of the cause of the proletarian revolution. Where an attempt is made to bring it into play counter to, or independent from it, then the greatest individual talents and gifts shrivel up to a veritable zero, as shown by manifest examples.

[Translated by Mike Jones with assistance from Theodor Bergmann and some additional tinkering by the editor.]

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

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:

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


Translator’s Introduction

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Written: by Prometheus Research Library.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the chief drawback.

To change this is the most difficult job of all.

But this is the most important.[10]

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

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

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

This is necessary.

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

([which is a great rarity among revolutionaries])

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

to make stylistic corrections at once,

and dictate the corrected text to a typist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who rose up to voice his outrage?

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

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

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

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

Prometheus Research Library

August 1988

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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