Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Markin comment on this post:
As noted in my commentary on the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920), reposted below since it also applies to these theses, such documents give the political movement it is addressed to its marching order. In a general sense, at least. These theses codify those general propositions outlined in the manifesto. Note here that this Second Congress took place as the international working class movement was going through a regroupment process right after World War I between the reformist socialists, the emerging communist vanguard, and the bewildered anarchists. Note also the difference in approaches to the more hardened reformist-led socialist parties, and to the ill-formed but more revolutionary-spirited anarchist formations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) here in America in their good days.
A manifesto, particularly a political manifesto, and especially a revolutionary communist manifesto like the one that issued out of the historic Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 should give a cogent analysis of the world political situation. It should also describe the nature of the period (revolutionary, non-revolutionary, heading toward or away from either, an estimation of the enemy’s capacities, and the obstacles in the way both inside and outside the workers movement (out side the treachery of the liberals and inside the perfidy of the labor bureaucracy resting on the labor bureaucracy). In short, give the international proletariat its marching orders. The Manifesto of the Second World Congress does just those things at a time when the fledgling Communist International was trying to consolidate its vanguard position in the world working class movement. The Communist International then, and for some time after, did yeoman’s work in that regard, not always perfectly but from a revolutionary perspective. Even as it degenerated politically toward the middle and late 1920s there were, as the Leon Trotsky-led International Left Opposition held, reasons, good reasons to adhere to its tenets. Only with the debacle around Hitler’s coming to power in Germany did Trotsky throw in the towel. That seemed right then, and now. I would argue that the Seventh (and last) World Congress in 1935 unquestionably put paid to that notion. We did not need a vanguard national party, or a vanguard revolutionary international party for that matter, to give the lead in the political struggle to the liberal bourgeoisie as the popular frontist politics of the CI proclaimed from that time onward (with a few “left” turns). There was an international for that “strategy”, or rather a mail-drop address, it was (is) called the Second International.
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Markin comment on this session:
This is the defining session on the proper communist oppositonal attitude toward, and work within, bourgeois parliaments as a "tribune" of the people. This is the one lots of later revolutionries, from the left and from the right has gotten wrong, in some cases badly wrong.
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Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
Eighth Session
August 2
Zinoviev: The session is open.
It was precisely a year ago today that the Hungarian Soviet Republic fell. During this year we have, as you know, lost thousands and thousands of our best comrades in Hungary. It was also a year ago that one of our best friends, Comrade Tibor Szamuely, fell as the first victim of the Hungarian counter-revolution. I ask the Congress to rise in this comrade’s honour, and I express the hope that the time is no longer far off when we will once more have a soviet republic in Hungary. The soviet republic fell last year. Long live the Soviet Republic of Hungary!
Dittmann: On behalf of Comrade Crispien, who cannot attend the Congress because of illness, I have read the following declaration:
‘In the session of the Congress of July 30, 1920, in which I unfortunately could not take part because of illness, the reporter in his winding-up described me as a social-pacifist, that is he represented me as a man who dreams of the reconciliation of the classes or believes that class contradictions can be abolished peacefully.
‘In my more than 25 years of activity in the workers’ movement I have never represented social-pacifist ideas. I reject them decisively.
‘I am convinced that capitalist class society can only be overcome by the ruthless independent class struggle of the proletariat, by the conquest of political power by the working class and by the dictatorship of the proletariat.'
Wijnkoop: I already said during the last session that a further vote must take place. The chairman Serrati did not carry this out then. I therefore propose that a vote now take place on the question of whether the Executive be given a mandate to continue to negotiate with the USPD and the French Socialist Party in the way that is happening now or not. This mandate must be voted on, and I propose that we take this vote now. But I also propose, together with the delegates from Bulgaria and Mexico, that we do not take this vote in the way that has been done up until now, but that every country casts a vote here.
Radek: One could have hoped that, having had time on Saturday and Sunday to sleep on this question, Comrade Wijnkoop would not have put it, as it has already been decided. That is to say that we have passed a resolution calling on the Executive Committee to decide, after the parties in question have accepted our conditions at their congresses and it has been shown in practice whether or not they are going to carry them out, whether the parties will be accepted into the Communist International or not. If we give the Executive the right to decide whether or not a party will be accepted, then we cannot deny it the right to continue negotiations with that party. The motion cannot be discussed, it has already been decided, and I propose that we carry on with the agenda without any further discussion.
Zinoviev: It is proposed to close the debate. I shall first of all take a vote on this question. [Vote.] The Bureau’s proposal is accepted. Now we come to the material vote. All those in favour of Comrade Wijnkoop’s proposal please raise their hands. [Vote.] The motion is rejected.
I propose to use the English language now instead of the French language for the following reasons. Six or seven more comrades have come who do not understand French. We have held half of the Congress in French. We must now save time, and since the question of the trades unions and of parliament is now particularly being discussed we must speak English.
The next point on the agenda is Comrade Bukharin’s report.
Bukharin: Comrades! First of all I ask your forgiveness for my German. It will not be the German language at all, but a substitute language. We have shared the work in the following way: First of all I shall report on the principal questions raised and the appropriate solution of these questions: secondly Comrade Wolfstein will report on the work of our Commission, and then comes the report by Comrade Bordiga, who believes that in this epoch of the destruction of the world capitalist system in general we cannot take part in any parliaments at all.
And now to the matter in hand. We must, whenever we pose any problem, always start from the concrete epoch. And here we have a principal difference between the previous epoch of peaceful development and the present one, which is the epoch of the collapse of the capitalist system, the epoch of the class war, civil war and the proletarian dictatorship. The ‘peaceful’ epoch – and even this epoch, it must be said, was not peaceful if we take the colonies into account can be characterised as the epoch of a certain community of interest between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This community of interest rested, particularly with the proletariat of the highly developed capitalist countries, on the fact that the big capitalist countries followed terrible imperialist policies. For that reason the capitalist classes of the countries in question were in a position to make super-profits and from these super-profits to pay out higher wages to the proletariat of their own countries. What in his day Kautsky said, that imperialist policies were of no advantage at all to the working class, is in principle incorrect. If we were to regard the matter from the standpoint of the temporary interests of the working class, one could claim that imperialist policies brought a certain advantage, and that was the higher wages of the workers which could be paid out of the capitalists’ super-profits.
If we can regard this epoch as the epoch of a certain community of interest between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, then we are thus given a second characteristic of this epoch, that is to say that it was also the epoch of the growing over of the workers’ organisations into the bourgeois state apparatus. What the reformists described as the growth of socialism was the growing over of the working class and also of the workers’ organisations into the bourgeois state apparatus. This phenomenon emerged particularly blatantly in the period of state capitalism, when in fact practically all the workers’ organisations and quite large workers’ organisations – appeared as components of the state-capitalist state apparatus. If we consider the great political parties of the working class, the yellow social democracy and the trades unions during the war, we can find that all these mass organisations at that time became components of the capitalist state. They were nationalised in a bourgeois way. The starting point of this development lay already in the period before the war. It was implicit in the process of growing over into capitalism just as before the war almost all the organisations of the working class were in this process of growing over. Thus we can also claim that the parliamentary representatives of the working class and the factions of the workers’ parties grew over into the bourgeois parliament. Instead of being something that was directed against the system as a whole in general and against the bourgeois parliament, they became a component of the parliamentary apparatus as such. That was the earlier epoch of peaceful capitalism. We also see such phenomena at the beginning of the war.
Then came the new epoch of the collapse of capitalism and the civil war. As far as the working class as a class is concerned it has , in this process, lost its earlier, rather imperialist ideology. This ideology, which reached its highest point in the slogan of ‘national defence’, collapsed and all the phenomena consequent upon it collapsed with it. Instead of being components of the capitalist system, the workers’ organisations gradually became instruments of the class struggle. Thus, from being tools upon which the capitalist system rested, they became instruments of its destruction. Parallel with this occurred the transformation of the parliamentary factions which, from being a component of the whole parliamentary apparatus, became instruments of its destruction. And thus the new parliamentarism arose, whose supporters we Communists can and must be.
Comrades, I shall not by any means comment on all the paragraphs of our Theses, which are very detailed. I shall select a few main points and speak about them. And then we can solve the disputed questions.
If we have before us these two epochs of completely different character, then we can already say a priori that the process of transition from one epoch to the other, from the old parliamentarism to the new, must be regarded as a process which will bring with it at every concrete moment various remnants of earlier conceptions among the working class. The more this process develops, the more these remnants will disappear. But now we can see these left-overs of earlier conceptions in many parties very clearly, even in those that are already to be found in the Communist International. In general, opportunism and the vacillating parties are still present in the working class, the ideology of collaboration with the bourgeoisie still exists in part, and that is reflected in the presence of the earlier parliamentarism.
Let us consider first the whole picture of the parliamentary activity of the working class. Let us take the composition of the various parliamentary factions, and we will gain a peculiar picture. For example the USPD: This party now has 82 members in parliament. But if, in the framework of this party, which of itself is already rather moderate and opportunist, we were to consider the composition of its parliamentary faction, we would obtain more or less the following figures: of these 82 members of the parliamentary faction 20 belong more or less directly to the right, about 40 to the ‘swamp’, and more or less 20 to the left USPD. Let us take the Italian Party and its parliamentary faction. This party belongs to us and is in the Communist International: If we were to divide the members of this parliamentary faction into three, that is to say into the supporters of Turati and Lazzari, those of Serrati, and the so-called Bombaccists, then we would have the following figures: 30 per cent of the whole faction belong to the Turati tendency, 55 per cent to the centre and 15 per cent to the left.
[In the struggles inside the Italian Socialist Party, Turati and Treves led the right-wing reformists, Serrati represented the ‘maximalist’ majority, Bombacci favoured adhesion to the Communist International and became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Later moved to the right, was expelled in 1928 and became a leading supporter of Mussolini; shot by partisans in 1945.]
Comrade Serrati has given me a few other figures. In his opinion the reformists count 41 seats. That is an official figure given by Comrade Serrati and represents a very big percentage within the Communist Party. If we consider the French Party we have the following figures: 68 parliamentarians, among them 40 explicit reformists within a party which is already opportunist, and 26 in the centre – not in our sense of the word, here the word means the centre of the French Party, which means the centre to the power 4! As for the Communists, they have perhaps two seats. In the Norwegian Party, which is quite a good party, the parliamentary faction has 19 members. Of these, approximately 11 are right wingers, 6 centrists and 2 are Communists. The Swedish parliamentary faction has quite a few comrades who cannot be called Communists in any sense. To sum up then, a rather sad picture. The composition of the parliamentary factions is below any criticism. And if we consider the cause of this phenomenon, then it is given in the fact that these parties even as parties are not sufficiently clearly communist, because quite a large number of opportunists are to be found within them.
I shall now proceed from the composition of the parties to the politics, that is to say their parliamentary policies, and here we can justifiably claim that these policies ‘are as far from revolutionary parliamentarism as heaven is from earth. I shall take the USPD as a model. During the war, when the thing to do was to call on the peoples to subdue the war, they appealed to the government. I remember a conversation with Comrade Haase. He wanted to prove to us, when we were in Berlin, that he was carrying out a really revolutionary parliamentarism. As the best proof of this he quoted one of his speeches in which he claimed that the German government had committed an abuse in sending German troops to Finland. These troops could be misused. Thus, if these troops are sent to the French front that is not an abuse, only sending them to Finland is an abuse. That is a proof not of revolutionary but of opportunist parliamentarism.
Let us take everything that has been written and said in the German parliament about the question of nationalisation. It is laughable. If we look at these speeches we see no trace of a revolutionary point of view. And as late as 1920, as I know, Comrade Däumig represented this opportunist way of posing the question in writing on the plans for nationalisation. Or, for example, the speech on the Constitution by Oscar Colin, the USPI) representative. This speech is rather long, but it contains not a trace of the revolutionary way of posing the question. Here we hear that the Constitution is sick. Not a word on Noske. That is the method of Kautsky. For when he discusses the question of bourgeois democracy he talks about apes and wild men. The speech by Comrade Oscar Cohn is just the same. Here our principled point of view could be developed in quite a revolutionary way. Let us take for example the story of the Commission of Inquiry into those who were responsible for the war. The Independents want to investigate the question of guilt in a parliamentary way through this pure farce, which was carried out on the basis of the material supplied by the German Foreign Office. In this, however, there is not the slightest trace of any sort of revolutionary activity at all.
Let us take Comrade Oscar Cohns’s motion in the German parliament on the abolition of the law of protective custody. This law applied only to political prisoners. We have everything possible here except the revolutionary standpoint of the revolutionary Communist. Let us take what we have heard here in this room from the comrades of the USPD. When they were excusing themselves for not having sent us an answer in time, Comrade Dittmann, or another representative, if I am not mistaken, said: ‘We had elections at the time, and because we had such a big thing as the elections, we could not immediately compose an answer’. That is a crying example that kills the comrades who quote it. If they have the elections on the one hand and the cause of the whole International on the other, then it is clear to every revolutionary that he must fight the elections under the watchword of the International. To set up a contradiction between the International and the elections is anything you like but nothing that has anything to do with membership of the Communist International. We can follow through the whole parliamentary activity of the USPD comrades without ever finding clear, conscious activity in the sense that we mean.
If we look at the French Socialist Party or other parties we will find the same sad picture. I shall not draw your attention to this since it suffices to quote one example in order to reconstruct the whole position. In all these phenomena, not only in the composition of the parliamentary factions but also in their tactics, remnants of the earlier parliamentarism show themselves which we must literally root out, for as long as we have this practice and these methods and such a composition of the parliamentary factions, we will not be able to develop revolutionary activity. To go into revolutionary struggle with such rubbish is absolutely out of the question.
Now we come to another question, that is to say the question of anti-parliamentarism in principle. This anti-parliamentarism is the legitimate child of the opportunism described above and the earlier parliamentary activity with all its sins. We much prefer this anti-parliamentarism on principle to opportunist parliamentarism. We can, I think, distinguish two main groups among the supporters of anti-parliamentarism: One group which really denies any participation in parliamentary activity, and the second group, which is against parliamentarism because of a special and specific assessment of the possibilities of parliamentary activity. In our epoch we can characterise the American IWW as the representatives of the first tendency. Comrade Bordiga will speak here today as the representative of the second tendency.
As far as anti-parliamentarism on principle is concerned, it can be claimed of the first group that these theories or these tactics, if they are followed theoretically, are based on a complete confusion of the basic concepts of political life. The IWW for example has no clear concept at all of what the political struggle really is. They do not think that to have a general strike of an economic nature, which in fact is directed against the bourgeois state, is a political struggle, if it is not led by the political party but by the trades unions. Thus they absolutely do not understand what political struggle really means. They confuse the political struggle with parliamentary activity. They think that by the political struggle can be understood only parliamentary activity or the activity of parliamentary parties.
It is quite clear that this negative attitude towards parliamentarism rests on various errors of a principled nature, above all on the false concept of what political struggle really is. Looked at historically, American parliamentarism displays so much vileness and corruption that many honest elements pass over to the camp of anti-parliamentarism in principle. The worker does not think abstractly at all, he is a rather crude empiricist, and if it cannot be proved to him empirically that revolutionary parliamentarism is possible, he simply rejects the whole thing. Such elements who have only seen the vileness go over to the camp of anti-parliamentarism on principle on a very large scale.
I come now to the second group, which is represented here in this room by Bordiga. He tells us that his standpoint is on no account to be confused with the standpoint of anti-parliamentarism on principle and I must say that, looked at formally, his standpoint has all the theoretical starting-points, but that’s all. Comrade Bordiga claims that precisely from the standpoint of the present epoch of the mass struggles of the proletariat, from the standpoint of the assessment of this epoch as an epoch of civil wars, only from this specific historical standpoint, one cannot enter parliament. That is what he thinks. But I think that there is a bridge in principle between the tactics of Comrade Bordiga and the tactics of those who are against it in principle. Comrade Bordiga has worked out his own Theses, and in them we read for example:
‘It is necessary to break with the bourgeois lie once and for all, the lie that tries to make people believe that every clash of the hostile parties, every struggle for the conquest of power, must be played out in the framework of the democratic mechanism, in election campaigns and parliamentary debates. It will not be possible to achieve this goal without renouncing completely the traditional method of calling on the workers to participate in the elections, where they work side by side with the bourgeois class, without putting an end to the spectacle of the delegates of the proletariat appearing on the same parliamentary ground as its exploiters.'
Here Comrade Bordiga says that if the delegate of the working class is to be found physically in the same room as a bourgeois, he is, ipso facto, working side by side with the bourgeois class. That is a naive idea that is typical of the IWW.
At the end of the 9th Thesis we read: ‘Therefore the Communist Parties will never achieve any great success with the propaganda of the revolutionary Marxist method if they do not base their work directly on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the workers’ councils and abandon any contact with bourgeois democracy.'
So physical contact in a room is in itself original sin, and then the whole thing goes wrong. I think, however, that this mistake will become even bigger because we do not always have the workers’ councils. Comrade Bordiga agrees with us that we cannot organise the workers’ councils straight away in every country. The councils are fighting organisations of the proletariat. If no conditions exist to carry out this direct struggle there is no sense in setting up these councils. Then they are transformed into cultural appendages of other institutions which become absolutely reformist, and the great danger exists that the workers’ councils will then so to speak be organised after the French pattern, where a couple of people come together and a humanitarian-pacifist organisation is formed. And none of these organisations yet exists at all, they are not yet given realities. But the bourgeois parliament is a given reality.
We say in our Theses that we must have our revolutionary agents here in these institutions, here our proletarian scouts must work side by side with the bourgeois class. Here a completely negative notion is given which is not logically worked out, but which is comprehensible from the emotional point of view. From the standpoint of revolutionary logic and expediency the decisive factor in the whole question is that we Communists claim that there is a possibility of going into the bourgeois parliaments to try to blow them up from inside. Earlier, when the parliamentary factions grew over into parliamentary institutions, they became parts of the system as such. We, however, want to develop our activity in such a way that an ever-sharper contradiction arises between the parliamentary system and our faction. We do not need to say that what is primary for us is that our parliamentary activity must be co-ordinated with the masses of the working class. Let us follow Comrade Bordiga’s Theses further.
First of all a small comment. I claim that anti-parliamentarism on principle exists in some comrades because they are afraid to emerge as revolutionary parliamentarians, as this ground is too dangerous for their liking and because they try in every possible way to run away from this most difficult revolutionary task. Big parties are quoted in order to prove that this activity is completely impossible. I do not say this of Comrade Bordiga; but in his faction there are such elements and when he comes to us and says in his 12th Thesis:
‘The actual character of the debates that take place in parliament and in other democratic organs excludes any possibility of moving on from a criticism of the opposing parties to propaganda against the principle of parliamentarism, to action that exceeds the limits of the parliamentary constitution.'
Comrade Bordiga says that it is technically impossible to exploit parliament; but that has to be proved. Nobody would say that we had better conditions under Tsarism in our Duma than today in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Nobody has tried to talk like that, as you know. Why have you already claimed a priori that it is impossible? Try it first; have a few scandals; get yourselves arrested; have a political trial in the grand style. You have done none of this. This tactic must be developed to an increasing degree. And I claim that this is possible. French comrades, for example Comrade Lefebvre, claim that it is impossible to say a sharp word against Clémenceau in the French Chamber. Nobody has tried it, nobody has made the attempt. I think there is simple fear here. People say: yes, that is too dangerous. We can only carry out purely legal work in propaganda. You have unmasked yourselves here. Because this ground is too dangerous you want to run away from this difficult task. Comrade Bordiga, in paragraph 10, as an argument against parliamentary election, says the following:
‘The excessively great importance ascribed in practice to the election campaigns and their results, the fact that the Party dedicates all its forces and human, press and economic resources to them for quite a long period of time, means on the one hand that, despite all the speeches at meetings and all the theoretical statements to the contrary, the conviction is strengthened that this really is the main action for the achievement of communist goals. On the other hand it leads to an almost complete renunciation of any work of revolutionary organisation and preparation by giving the party organisation a technical character that stands in complete contradiction to the requirements of legal and illegal revolutionary work.'
Perhaps something like that exists in Italy, but you must prove to us why that is logically necessary. If you adopt Comrade Dittmann’s point of view and say: ‘The election campaign is an opposite to the question of the International’, then you are right. But our standpoint consists in developing the whole election campaign from the revolutionary point of view. Then there can be no such opposite. It is not a logical contradiction when we say that we must develop the whole election campaign under the sharpest revolutionary slogans in order to go to the villages and to work where there is no political interest and in order to weld the people together as a mass organisation, to keep all these campaigns of various kinds in contact. ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘that is precisely to kill off revolutionary work.’ Comrade Bordiga wrote that because he has seen very little of really revolutionary election campaigning, just as the comrades of the IWW have never seen revolutionary parliamentarism. That is why Comrade Bordiga raises such claims, but he at least ought to substantiate them.
Nevertheless, I think that there are many empirical proofs of revolutionary parliamentarism. I shall repeat them, the names are known to us. There was the activity of Liebknecht, the activity of Höglund, then there were the Bulgarian comrades and ourselves. We had revolutionary parliamentarism under the most varied historical conditions, for example during the second Duma, during Kerensky’s Pre-parliament and during the Constituent Assembly. We were not afraid to put ourselves alongside the bourgeoisie, the Socialist Revolutionaries or the Cadets because we had a firm revolutionary tactic and completely clear tactical lines. For that reason this whole question, that is to say the question of the Party, is now the cardinal question. If you have a really Communist Party then you need not be afraid of sending one of your people into the bourgeois parliament, for he will act as a revolutionary must act. But if you have in the Party ‘a mish-mash where 40 per cent are pure opportunists, then of course precisely these gentlemen will sneak into the parliamentary faction, to the places that suit them best. That is why they are almost all members of the parliamentary factions. Then they cannot carry out their parliamentary duties as revolutionary communists. That is a Party question.
I repeat, if we have among the parties of the Communist International really Communist Parties that do not shelter any opportunists or reformists in their bosoms, if we have already carried out this purge, then we have the guarantee that we will not have the old parliamentarism but a really revolutionary parliamentarism and a reliable method of destroying the bourgeoisie, the whole bourgeois state apparatus and the bourgeois system.
Wolfstein: Comrades, let me briefly say the following on the work of the Commission on Parliament: Instead of paragraph 1 on page 60 an exhaustive historical introduction to the question of parliamentarism, written by Comrade Trotsky, has been decided upon. The main heading of the Theses now reads ‘The Communist Parties and Parliamentarism’. The first paragraph, in place of the former paragraph 1, ‘The New Epoch and the New Parliamentarism’, reads:
‘The attitude of the socialist parties towards parliamentarism was in the beginning, in the period of the First International, that of using bourgeois parliaments for the purpose of agitation. Participation in parliament was considered from the point of view of the development of class consciousness, i.e. of awakening the class hostility of the proletariat to the ruling class. This relationship was transformed, not through the influence of theory, but under the influence of Political development. Through the uninterrupted increase of the productive forces and the constant extension of the area of capitalist exploitation, capitalism, and with it the parliamentary states, became firmer and more permanent.
‘Hence there arose the adaptation of the parliamentary tactics of the socialist parties to the “organic” legislative work of the bourgeois parliament, and hence was derived the ever greater importance of the struggle for reforms within the framework of capitalism. The result was the dominance of the so-called minimum programme of social democracy and the transformation of the maximum programme into a debating formula for an exceedingly distant ‘final goal’. On this basis then developed the phenomena of parliamentary careerism, of corruption and of the open and concealed betrayal of the most elementary interests of the working class.
‘The attitude of the Communist International towards parliamentarism is determined, not by a new doctrine, but by the change in the role of parliamentarism itself. In the previous epoch parliament performed to a certain degree a historically progressive task as a tool of developing capitalism. Under the present conditions of unbridled imperialism, however, parliament has turned into a tool for lies, deception, violence and enervating chatter. In the face of imperialist devastation, plundering, rape, banditry and destruction, parliamentary reforms, robbed of any system, permanence and method, lose any practical significance for the toiling masses.
‘Like the whole of bourgeois society, parliamentarism too is losing its stability. The sudden transition from the organic epoch to the critical creates the basis for a new tactic of the proletariat in the field of parliamentarism. Thus the Russian Labour Party (the Bolsheviks) had already worked out the nature of revolutionary parliamentarism in the previous period, because since 1905 capitalist Russia had been shaken from its political and social equilibrium and had entered the period of storms and shocks.
‘To the extent that some socialists, who tend towards communism, point out that the moment for the revolution has not yet come in their countries and refuse to split from the parliamentary opportunists, they proceed, in the essence of the matter, from the conscious estimate that their country is still in an epoch of the relative stability of imperialist society, and assume that on this basis a coalition with the Turatis and Longuets can bear practical results in the struggle for reforms.
‘Theoretically clear communism, on the other hand, will correctly estimate the character of the present epoch. (Highest point of capitalism; imperialist self-negation and self-destruction; uninterrupted growth of civil war, etc.) The forms of political relations and groupings can be different in different countries. The essence however remains everywhere one and the same; what is at stake for us is the immediate political and technical preparations for the insurrection of the proletariat, the destruction of the bourgeois power and the establishment of the new proletarian power.
‘At present, parliament, for communists, cannot at all become the arena for the struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the position of the working class within the capitalist economic mode, as was the case at certain times in the previous period. The centre of gravity of political life has at present been removed finally and completely beyond the bounds of parliament. On the other hand the bourgeoisie is forced, not only by reason of its relations to the toiling masses, but also by reason of the complex mutual relations within the bourgeois class, to carry out part of its measures one way or another in parliament, where the various cliques haggle for power, reveal their strong sides, betray their weak sides , expose themselves, etc.
‘Therefore it is the historical task of the working class to wrest this apparatus from the hands of the ruling class, to smash it, to destroy it and replace it with new proletarian organs of power. At the same time however, the revolutionary general staff of the working class has a strong interest in having its scouts in the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeoisie in order to make this task of destruction easier. Thus is demonstrated quite clearly the basic difference between the tactics of the communist, who enters parliament with revolutionary aims, and the tactics of the socialist parliamentarian. The latter proceeds from the assumption of the relative stability and the indeterminate duration of the existing rule. He makes it his task to achieve reforms by every means, and he is interested in seeing to it that every achievement is suitably assessed by the masses as a merit of parliamentary socialism. (Turati, Longuet and Co.).
‘In the place of the old adaptation to parliamentarism the new parliamentarism emerges as a tool for the annihilation of parliamentarism in general. The disgusting traditions of the old parliamentary tactics have, however, repelled a few revolutionary elements into the camp of the opponents of parliamentarianism on principle (IWW) and of the revolutionary syndicalists (KAPD). The Second Congress therefore adopts the following Theses:'
Thereafter various things are changed in all the paragraphs.
After amendment by the Commission, paragraph 1 reads:
‘Parliamentarism as a state system has become a “democratic” form of the rule of the bourgeoisie which at a certain stage of development requires the fiction of popular representation, which appears externally to be the organisation of a “popular will” that stands outside of the classes, but which, in reality, is a machine for oppression and subjugation in the hands of the rule of capital.'
In paragraph 4 line 3 is added: ‘can as such not be conquered in the long run’.
Further paragraph 9 line 4: ‘Mass actions will be organised and led by the revolutionary mass organisations (trades unions, party, workers’ councils) of the proletariat under the general leadership of a unified, disciplined, centralised Communist Party.'
Paragraph 11 line 8 now says: ‘But from inside Parliament to help the masses to smash the state machine and parliament itself by action.'
In paragraph 12 there must be added to line 5: ‘Caught up in democratic illusions, look towards the parliamentary tribunal.'
Then paragraph 13 has been completely taken out in its previous form and replaced with a new paragraph on behaviour in local government institutions, should a majority be won there:
‘Should the communists have the majority in local government institutions, they should: a) carry out revolutionary opposition to the bourgeois central power; b) do everything to be of service to the poorer population (economic measures, introduction or attempted introduction of an armed workers’ militia, etc.); c) at every opportunity show the limitations placed on really big changes by the bourgeois state power; d) on this basis develop the sharpest revolutionary propaganda without fearing the conflict with the power of the state; e) under certain circumstances replace the local administration by local workers’ councils. The whole activity of the communists in the local administration must therefore be part of the general work of disrupting the capitalist system.'
In the last sentence of paragraph 15 Höglund’s name has been deleted because Höglund only developed this revolutionary activity in parliament for a certain time. Today he is no longer active in this sense.
Section 3 is now called ‘Revolutionary Parliamentarism’. Only unimportant, more editorial alterations have been undertaken in it.
The main work of the Commission, which, with two votes against, was in agreement with the contents of the Theses, consisted mainly in producing a good German, French and English text. That was definitely a more difficult task than disposing of Bordiga’s Theses, for which only two votes were cast in the Commission. The results of the other votes were: Trotsky’s introduction adopted with 2 votes against; paragraphs 1-6 unanimous; paragraphs 7 and 10 with 2 votes against; 8-9 unanimous; 11-18 with one vote against; 19 unanimous. Section 3 paragraphs 1-4 with 1 vote against, paragraph 5 with 2 votes against, paragraphs 6-7 unanimous, the remaining paragraphs with 1 abstention. The two votes cast against the Theses in principle were the representatives of Switzerland and of the IWW. The representative of the IWW was not present at the last session of the Commission as a result of illness.
Bordiga: The left faction of the Italian Socialist Party is antiparliamentarian in its views, and that for reasons which are not valid for Italy alone but which have a general character.
Are we dealing here only with a question of principle? Certainly not. In principle we are all, after all, opponents of parliamentarism, because we reject it as a means of liberating the proletariat and as a political form of the proletarian state. The anarchists are antiparliamentarian on principle since they declare themselves to be against any agency of power. The syndicalist opponents of the political action of the Party, who have a completely different conception of the process of the liberation of the proletariat, are also against it. As far as we are concerned, our anti-parliamentarism is based on the Marxist critique of bourgeois democracy. I shall not repeat here the arguments of critical communism, which unmask the bourgeois lie of political equality as a means to blur economic inequality and the class struggle. This conception is based on the idea of a historic process in which the liberation of the proletariat is achieved after a violent class struggle which is supported by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This theoretical conception, which is elucidated in the Communist Manifesto, found its first historical realisation in the Russian revolution. Between these two facts there is a long time-span. During this the development of the capitalist world has advanced a long way. The Marxist movement has been debased into a social-democratic one, and has created a field of common work for the petty interests of the collaboration of individual groups of workers and bourgeois democracy. The same phenomenon is to be observed in the trades unions and in the socialist parties.
The Marxist task of the Marxist party, which ought to have spoken on behalf of the whole working class and remembered its old historical tasks, has therefore been almost completely forgotten. A new ideology has been fabricated which has nothing in common with Marxism, which rejects violent measures and ignores the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to put in its place the illusion of a social development on peaceful and democratic paths.
The Russian revolution has realised Marxist theory in an admirable manner by proving the necessity of a violent struggle and the introduction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the historical conditions under which the Russian revolution developed are different from the conditions for the proletarian revolution in the countries of Western Europe and America. The position in Russia could perhaps be compared with the position in Germany in 1848, where two revolutions broke out one after the other, one bourgeois-democratic and one proletarian.
The tactical experiences of the Russian revolution cannot be transferred to other countries where bourgeois democracy has already long since been introduced and where the revolutionary crisis will consist of a direct transition from this order to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Marxist significance of the Russian revolution lies in this, that in its final phase (the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the seizure of power by the soviets) it was built up on a Marxist basis and prepared the ground for the development of every new movement, the development of the Communist International, which has finally broken with the social democrats who, be it said to their shame, completely failed during the war.
The revolutionary problem demands, above all in Western Europe, an abandonment of the ground of bourgeois democracy, the proof that the bourgeoisie’s demand that every political struggle should only be carried out through the mechanism of parliament is false, and that the struggle for the conquest of power must be carried out in a new way, through direct revolutionary activity.
The Party needs a new technical organisation, that is to say a new historical formation. This is realised through the Communist Party which, as the Executive Committee’s Theses on the question of the role of the party say, was born ‘in the epoch of the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat’. (Thesis 4.)
The first mechanism of the bourgeoisie that must be destroyed before one can move on to the economic construction of communism and create the new mechanism of the proletarian state that is to represent the government apparatus, is parliament.
Bourgeois democracy works among the masses with indirect means of defence, while the state apparatus stands ready to apply direct means of violence which are set into activity as soon as the last attempts to draw the proletariat onto the ground of legal democratic politics have failed.
It is therefore of extreme importance to unmask this ploy of the bourgeoisie and to show the masses the whole deception of bourgeois parliamentarism.
Even before the world war the practice of the traditional Socialist Parties had brought about an anti-parliamentarian reaction in the ranks of the proletariat: the anarcho-syndicalist reaction that denied the value of ‘any political activity in order to concentrate the activity of the proletariat in the field of economic organisation and which thus spread the false idea that there is no political activity outside of electoral and parliamentary activity. This idea must be fought, as must social democratic illusions. This conception is far removed from the true revolutionary method and leads the proletariat on a false road in its struggle for liberation.
Great clarity is needed in propaganda; the masses need a clear and simple mode of expression.
Starting from Marxist principles, we propose that, in countries where the democratic order has long since developed, the agitation for the dictatorship of the proletariat should be built up on the spreading of the boycott of the elections and of the bourgeois democratic organs.
The great importance that is ascribed to electoral activity in practice contains a double danger: on the one hand it gives the impression that that is the main activity, and on the other it absorbs all the party’s forces, which paralyses the work of all the other branches of the Party. The social democrats are not the only ones who ascribe a great importance to the elections. Even the Theses proposed by the Executive say that it is important to use all means of agitation in the election campaigns. (Thesis 15).
The organisation of the Party which carries out electoral activity, develops a quite special technical character which is sharply different from the character of the organisation which corresponds to legal or illegal revolutionary needs. The Party divides into a number of election committees which are solely concerned with the preparation and mobilisation of the electors. If the Party in question is an old social democratic party that has affiliated to the Communist movement, there is a great danger in the carrying out of parliamentary action as it was previously practised. We have numerous proofs of this.
As far as the Theses proposed and defended by the speakers are concerned, they are preceded by a historical introduction with the first part of which I am in almost complete agreement. It says there that the First International used parliamentarism for the purposes of agitation, criticism and propaganda. Later, in the Second International, there emerged the harmful effects of parliamentarism, which led to reformism and class collaboration (the ‘Burgfrieden'). In the Introduction the conclusion is drawn from this that the Communist International should return to the parliamentary tactic for the purpose of destroying parliament from the inside. The Communist International must, however, if it adopts the same doctrine as the First International, take the completely different historical circumstances into account and develop a completely different activity, that is to say, not collaborate with bourgeois democracy.
The first part of the Theses that follow do not stand in any way in contradiction to the ideas I support either. The difference only begins where it is a question of the use of the election campaign and the parliamentary tribune for mass actions. But they cannot be used in the same way as the press, the freedom of association, etc. Here it is a question of a means of action, there of a bourgeois institution which must be replaced by proletarian institutions, by workers’ soviets. We are not thinking of giving up the use of the press, of propaganda, etc. after the revolution; but we do strive before all else to destroy the democratic apparatus and to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat in its place. We do not put forward that argument any more than we do the one about the ‘leaders’ of the movement. There can be no question at all that leaders can be abolished.
We know very well, and we have told the anarchists since the beginning of the war, that it is not correct to reject parliamentarism in order to abolish leaders. We will always need them as propagandists, journalists, etc.
Certainly in a revolution a centralised party that leads the activity of the working class is necessary. Naturally this party also needs leaders. But the role of the party, the role of the leaders, is completely different from what it was with the social democrats. The party leads the activity of the proletariat in the sense that it carries out the most dangerous work which demands the greatest sacrifice. The leaders of the party are not only the leaders of the victorious revolution, they are also the first to fall under the enemy’s blows in a defeat. Their position is quite different from the position of the parliamentary leaders, who occupy the most advantageous posts in bourgeois society.
We are told: ‘One can also carry out propaganda from the rostrum of parliament.’ I would like to answer that with a somewhat childish argument: What one says on the rostrum of parliament is repeated in the press. If it is the bourgeois press, everything will be distorted, and if it is our press, then it is a waste of time to say from the rostrum what will later be printed.
The evidence quoted by the speaker will not harm our Theses. Liebknecht worked in the Reichstag at a time when we recognised the possibility of parliamentary activity, all the more so for the fact that it was not then a matter of sanctioning parliamentarism itself, but of criticising bourgeois power.
But if we weigh Liebknecht, Höglund, and the few other cases of revolutionary activity in parliament, against the whole mass of the treachery of the social democrats, then the result will be thoroughly unfavourable to revolutionary parliamentarism.
The parliamentary activities of the Bolsheviks in the Duma, in Kerensky’s Pre-parliament and in the Constituent Assembly were carried out under conditions completely different from those under which we propose to abandon the parliamentary tactic. I shall not come back to the difference there is between the development of the revolution and the revolution in the other bourgeois countries.
I am also not in favour of the idea that elections for bourgeois local government institutions must be used. But I cannot pass over a very important problem in silence. I mean using the election campaign for the purposes of agitation and propaganda for the communist revolution. But this agitation will be all the more effective, the more powerfully we preach the boycott of bourgeois elections to the masses.
It is moreover impossible to foresee what the disruptive activity that the communists could carry out in parliament is to consist of. The reporter proposed to us the draft of a rule concerning the activity of communists in bourgeois parliaments. That is, so to speak, the purest utopia. It will never develop a parliamentary activity that contradicts the principles of parliamentarism and goes beyond the bounds of parliamentary rules.
Now a few words on the arguments quoted by Comrade Lenin in his pamphlet on ‘left’ communism.
I do not think that one can take our anti-parliamentary tendency to be one that demands withdrawal from the trades unions.
However rotten, the trade union is still a workers’ milieu. To withdraw from the social democratic trades unions would be to share the conception of the syndicalists, who wish to unite themselves in revolutionary fighting organs of a different economic type.
From the Marxist standpoint that is a mistake that has nothing to do with the argument on which our anti-parliamentarism rests.
The Theses, however, say that the question of parliamentarism is only secondary for the communist revolution; but with the question of the trades unions, matters stand differently.
I do not think that one can pass a final judgement on individual comrades or Communist Parties on the basis of opposition to parliamentary activity. In his interesting work, Comrade Lenin describes a communist tactic, by deciding his very broad activity, on the basis of a very attentive analysis of the situation in the bourgeois world, and he proposes that the experience of the Russian revolution should be applied in this analysis in the capitalist countries.
He also emphasises the necessity of taking account of the differences between the various countries.
I shall not here undertake a discussion of this method.
I would only like to note that a Marxist movement in the democratic Western countries requires a much more direct tactic than the tactic that was applied during the Russian revolution.
Comrade Lenin accuses us of trying to avoid the problem of communist action in parliament because his slogan seems too difficult to us and because the anti-parliamentarian tactic costs the least effort.
We completely agree that the tasks of the proletarian revolution are very great and difficult. We are convinced that if, after dealing with the problem of parliamentary action, we go on to discuss and decide on the other, far more important, problems, we will still not have made any progress, and that their solution will not be as simple as we think.
Therefore we intend to use the main forces of the communist movement in fields that are more important than parliament.
We do not flinch in the face of any difficulties. We only note that the opportunist parliamentarians, who also chose an easy tactic, are not for that reason any the less burdened with work by their parliamentary activity.
From that we conclude that we will need enormous effort and tireless activity for the solution of the problems of communist parliamentarism according to the proposed Theses (if we adopt this solution), and that then little energy and few resources will remain for really revolutionary activity.
In the bourgeois world, one cannot go through those stages in the political field that will have to be fought out only after the revolution, through the economic transformation of capitalism into communism.
The transfer of power from the exploiters to the exploited brings behind it a change in the apparatus of representation. Bourgeois parliamentarism must be replaced by the soviet system. The old democratic mask of the class struggle must be torn up so that direct revolutionary action can be introduced.
That is our standpoint on parliamentarism, a standpoint that is in complete harmony with the revolutionary Marxist method.
I can close with a view that we share with Comrade Bukharin. This question can and must not lead to a split in the Marxist movement.
If the Communist International wishes to take on itself the creation of a communist parliamentarism, we will submit to its decision. We do not think that this plan will succeed; but we declare that we will do nothing to disrupt this work.
I hope that the next congress of the Communist International will not need to debate the results of parliamentary action, but will much
rather examine the victory of the communist revolution in a great number of countries.
Should that not be possible, then I wish for Comrade Bukharin’s sake that he will be able to present us with a less dreary picture of communist parliamentarism than that with which he had to begin his introduction this time.
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Comrade Bordiga thereupon reads the following Theses:
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Theses on parliamentarism, drawn up by Comrade Bordiga on behalf of the communist abstentionist faction of the Socialist Party of Italy.
1. Parliamentarism is the form of political representation peculiar to the capitalist order. The principled criticism by revolutionary Marxists of parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy leads in general to the conclusion that the franchise granted to all citizens of all social classes in the elections to the representative bodies of the state cannot prevent every government apparatus of the state from becoming the committee for the defence of the interests of the ruling capitalist class, and the state from organising itself as the historical organ of the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletarian revolution.
2. Communists deny the possibility that the working class will ever conquer power through a majority of parliamentary seats. The armed revolutionary struggle alone will take it to its goal. The conquest of power by the proletariat, which forms the starting point of communist economic construction, leads to the violent and careful abolition of the democratic organs and their replacement by organs of proletarian power – by workers’ councils. The exploiting class is in this way robbed of all political rights and the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. a government system with class representation, is set up. The abolition of parliamentarism becomes a historical task of the communist movement. Even more, representative democracy is precisely the first form of bourgeois society that must be brought down, and moreover even before capitalist property, even before the bureaucratic state machinery.
3. The same must happen with local government institutions, which should not be theoretically posed as an opposite to the state organs. In reality their apparatus is identical with the state mechanism of the bourgeoisie. They must similarly be destroyed by the revolutionary proletariat and replaced by local soviets of workers’ deputies.
4. At the present moment, the task of the communists in mentally and materially driving forward the revolution is to free the proletariat above all from the illusions and prejudices that were spread in the muses by the treachery of the old social democratic leaders. In those countries which have been ruled for a longer time by a democratic order which is rooted in the habits and thoughts of the masses, and also in the old socialist parties, this task is of special importance, and assumes the first place among the problems of the preparation of the revolution.
5. Participation in elections and in parliamentary activity at a time when the thought of the conquest of power by the proletariat was still far distant and when there was not yet any question of direct preparations for the revolution and of the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat could offer great possibilities for propaganda, agitation and criticism. On the other hand, in those countries where a bourgeois revolution has as yet only started and is creating new institutions, the entry of communists into the representative bodies, which are still in the formative stage, can have a big influence on the development of events in order to bring about a favourable outcome of the revolution and the final victory of the proletariat.
6. In the present historical epoch, which has opened with the end of the world war and its consequences for the social organisation of the bourgeoisie – with the Russian revolution as the first realisation of the idea of the conquest of power by the working class, and the formation of the new International in opposition to the traitors of the social democracy – and in the countries where the democratic order was introduced a long time ago, there is no possibility of exploiting parliamentarism for the revolutionary cause of communism. Clarity of propaganda no less than preparation of the final struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat demand that communists carry out propaganda for a boycott of the elections on the part of the workers.
7. Under these historical conditions, under which the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat has become the main problem of the movement, every political activity of the Party must be dedicated to this goal. It is necessary to break with the bourgeois lie once and for all, with the lie that tries to make people believe that every clash of the hostile parties, every struggle for the conquest of power, must be played out in the framework of the democratic mechanism, in election campaigns and parliamentary debates. It will not be possible to achieve this goal without renouncing completely the traditional method of calling on workers to participate in the elections, where they work side by side with the bourgeois class, without putting an end to the spectacle of the delegates of the proletariat appearing on the same parliamentary ground as its exploiters.
8. The ultra-parliamentary practice of the old socialist parties spread the dangerous conception that all political action consists only of election campaigns and parliamentary activity. On the other hand the proletariat’s aversion for this treachery has created a fertile soil for syndicalist and anarchist tendencies which deny that the political action and activity of the party have any value. Therefore the Communist Parties will never achieve great success in propagating the revolutionary Marxist method if they do not base their work directly on the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the workers’ councils, and abandon any contact with bourgeois democracy.
9. The excessively great importance ascribed in practice to the election campaigns and their results, the fact that the party dedicates to them all its forces and human, press and economic resources for quite a long period of time means on the one hand that despite all the speeches at meetings and all the theoretical statements to the contrary, the conviction is strengthened that this really is the main action for the achievement of communist goals. On the other hand it leads to an almost complete renunciation of any work of revolutionary organisation and preparation by giving the party organisation a technical character that stands in complete contradiction to the requirements of legal and illegal revolutionary work.
10. As far as those parties are concerned that have affiliated to the Communist International by a majority decision, further participation in election campaigns prevents the required sifting out of the social democratic elements, without whose removal the Communist International will not be able to carry out its historic role.
11. The actual character of the debates that take place in parliament and in other democratic organs excludes any possibility of moving on from a criticism of the opposing parties to propaganda against the principle of parliamentarism, to action that exceeds the limits of the parliamentary constitution. In exactly the same way it is impossible to obtain a mandate that gives the right to speak if one refuses to submit to all the formalities of the electoral process.
Success in the parliamentary fight can be achieved merely by skill in the use of the common weapon of the principles on which the institution bases itself and by using the nuances in the rules, just as success in the election campaign will be judged more and more according to the number of votes and seats obtained.
Every attempt by the Communist Parties to lend the practice of parliamentarism a totally different character will simply lead to a bankruptcy of the energies that will have to be sacrificed to this labour of Sisyphus. The cause of the communist revolution calls summarily for direct action against the capitalist system of the exploiters.
Zinoviev: I have the following proposal to submit to you on behalf of the Bureau . Nineteen speakers have asked for permission to speak. We think, however, that from today we should work somewhat more quickly, so that we can finish on Thursday. There are now two Draft Theses, and therefore we propose to nominate general speakers, for example three speakers for Bukharin’s Theses and three for Bordiga’s Theses, and to make do with that on this question.
Radek: I propose to let one speaker speak for and one against participation in parliament. People are sick and tired of this parliamentary business. The general arguments have already been sufficiently dilated upon. I propose that on this question we give the floor to one speaker in favour and one against, and then the two reporters. [Both proposals are voted upon. Zinoviev’s proposal is adopted.]
Zinoviev: We must now carry out a little research. I shall ask who is in favour of Bordiga’s Theses and who is in favour of Bukharin’s Theses.
Both groups should gather together and nominate their general speakers.
Gallacher: I am very sorry to have to say that the Communist International too is on the road to becoming opportunist. Instead of finding ways and means to bring the spirit of revolt into the masses, people here are thinking of how they are to participate in parliamentary elections. It is naive to think that, if unreliable elements come into parliament, they will fight in the direction of the Communist International and the revolution.
There are many examples of this in Britain. What is done there? The main consideration is how to participate legally in the elections. It has often been said that if one goes into parliament one can make speeches there and thus agitate. The result is, however, that the proletariat becomes accustomed to believing in the democratic institutions. One cannot demand agitation from those who enter parliament. The Communist Parties all over the world have now something other to do than wasting time on parliamentary elections. What is important now is to study revolutionary ways and means and tactics under the leadership of the Executive. And now instead of that you wish to divert attention from this goal. The Communist Party that is forming in Britain swears by its membership of the Communist International. But that is a fashion, just as it is also a fashion to speak out in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
What are we to say? Are people prepared to work for the dictatorship of the proletariat? I say no. Liebknecht certainly did great things, but only in so far as he also worked among the masses outside parliament. If he had merely spoken in parliament, he would have stayed alive like MacDonald and many others too. As far as the Russian example is concerned, it has its own history, from which one cannot, however, generalise. The struggle and the experience of the Russian revolutionaries was forged by tears and blood. The attitude of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Duma is the result of many years of hard struggle by the mass of workers. There is now an alternative in front of the Communist International, as there is in front of the people of every country. There are two tactics; one that, through all kinds of democratic phrases, develops the feeling of submission in the people, and the other that consists in developing the revolutionary spirit in the masses. The example of the Member of Parliament, Maclean, who, in big election meetings, said he was a Bolshevik and would overthrow parliament, is typical. Since Maclean has been in parliament he has been a petty-bourgeois socialist who states that he is not a Bolshevik. Our energies must now be applied to sharpening the revolutionary struggle in the masses. The Communist International finds itself now faced with the alternative of taking either the road of submission or that of struggle.
Shablin: Comrades, the Bulgarian Communist Party has already had experiences in relation to parliamentarism which show that, where there still is a bourgeois parliament, Communist Parties can and must carry on the struggle of the revolutionary masses of workers hand in hand with the struggle in parliament. Even if the Theses Comrade Bordiga proposes to us proclaim a Marxist phraseology, it must be said that they have nothing in common with the really Marxist idea according to which the Communist Party must use every opportunity offered us by the bourgeoisie to come into contact with the oppressed masses and to help communist ideas to be victorious among them. These Theses only contain the remnants of the petty bourgeois prejudices that still exist in the labour movements of many countries. I think that the Bulgarian experiences are the best answer to Comrade Bordiga’s Theses, and I therefore ask you to pay some attention to my short introduction to this question, all the more so for the fact that it contains no empty, so-called Marxist phrases, but facts drawn from life itself.
The Bulgarian Communist Party fought energetically against the Balkan War of 1912-13, and, when this war ended with a defeat and a deep-going economic crisis for the country, the influence of the Party in the masses had grown so far that in the elections for the legislative bodies in 1914 it won 45,000 votes and 11 seats in parliament on the basis of a strictly principled agitation. The parliamentary group protested violently on several occasions against the decision of the Bulgarian government to participate in the European war, and voted each time demonstratively against war loans. With the help of pamphlets and illegal leaflets, through zealous agitation and propaganda, the Party carried out a violent struggle against the imperialist war once it had been declared, not only inside the country but also at the front.
This revolutionary activity brought about the persecution of the parliamentary group and the whole Party. Three Communist deputies, Lukanov, Dimitrov and Ziporanov, were condemned to 3 to 5 years in prison by field court martial during the war, imprisoned for a few months and then set free. Hundreds of comrades were condemned to the most varied punishments, and a number of communists were shot. The Army General Staff had forbidden the soldiers to read our Party organ, Raboinitscheski Vestnik, and the soldiers who broke the ban were arrested, persecuted and shot.
This bitter struggle against the war, the complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie’s policy of conquest and the serious crisis caused by the war gave the Communist Party the opportunity to extend its field of work and its influence among the masses and to become the strongest political party in our country. In the parliamentary elections of 1919 the Communist Party received 120,000 votes and entered parliament with 47 Communist deputies. The social-patriots, the ‘socialists’, could only muster 34 representatives, although the Ministry of the Interior was in the hands of one of the leaders of this party, in the hands of the Bulgarian Noske of sad memory, Pastuchov.
The success of the Communist Party and its exploitation of the parliamentary rostrum for revolutionary purposes caused the alarmed bourgeoisie to dissolve the chamber. New elections were called which took place in March 1920. These elections, too, yielded a brilliant victory for the Communist Party, despite the terror directed exclusively against us by the government; thousands of comrades were arrested, hundreds maltreated and beaten in the prisons, and many killed; courts martial, the censorship, the gendarmerie, the regular army, the white army and the whole government machine of annihilation and oppression was directed against us.
The Party not only maintained the position it had won, but greatly strengthened it. It obtained 187,000 votes and 50 deputies, and the number of ‘socialist’ seats fell from 39 to 9. The government now found itself in the minority. In order to make a majority, nine Communist deputies were then deprived of their seats and thrown out of parliament. In this way the Communist parliamentary group was reduced to 41 deputies by the government. By this fact the bourgeoisie had to take off the mask of hypocritical loyalty. The basis of the legality of the democratic bourgeois parliament was thus destroyed in the eyes of the masses, and its influence on the toiling masses of the country impaired. The workers and peasants of the two constituencies of Philippopel (Plovdiv) and Vratsa, whose representatives had been driven out of parliament, gathered in great protest meetings, at which they struggled for the destruction of the bourgeois parliament to which the real representatives of the people have no access, and at which they declared themselves in favour of the creation of workers’ and peasants’ soviets.
The Communist Party carried out the election campaign on the basis of the communist programme adopted at the congress of May 1919; it openly declared that it did not defend any illusions with regard to parliament and that the conquest of power by the proletariat is only possible through the revolutionary action of the masses, which has to be taken as far as the armed uprising of the workers and peasants and the destruction of parliament and the bourgeois state itself.
The Communist Party is carrying out an unrelenting struggle in parliament against the left as against the right bourgeois parties. It subjects all the government’s draft laws to strict criticism and uses every opportunity to develop its principled standpoint and its slogans. In this way the Communist Party exploits the parliamentary rostrum in order to develop its agitation on the broadest basis among the masses. It shows the toilers the necessity of fighting for workers’ and peasants’ soviets, destroys the authority of and belief in the importance of parliament, and calls on the masses to put the dictatorship of the proletariat in the place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
The Bulgarian Communist Party fights simultaneously in parliament and among the masses. The parliamentary group participated in the most energetic way in the great strike of the transport workers, which lasted 53 days from December 1919 until February 1920. For this revolutionary activity the Communist deputies were robbed of their legal protection by the government, and several deputies were arrested. Comrades Stefan Dimitrov, the representative from Dubnitza, and Temelke Nenkov, the representative from Pernik, were sentenced, the first to 12, the second to 5 years imprisonment, because they had opposed the state power arms in hand. Both comrades are today languishing in jail. A third Communist deputy, Comrade Kesta Ziporanov, is being prosecuted by the military authorities for high treason. The members of the Central Committee, three members of parliament, were prosecuted because in parliament and in the masses they carried out an energetic struggle against the government, which was supporting Russian counter-revolutionaries. They were provisionally released from custody on a bail of 300,000 Leu, which was guaranteed and paid in in the course of two days by the proletariat of Sofia. All the Communist members’ speeches in the chamber against the bourgeoisie are of such violence that they frequently end in a great scandal, and the government majority and the Communist group come to blows.
The Communist parliamentary group is under the direct supervision of the Central Committee. The deputies work constantly among the masses and use their privileged position to play the most active part in all the struggles of the proletariat.
At the beginning of 1919 a weak current that was opposed to participation in the parliamentary elections arose in the Party. The representatives of this tendency demanded a boycott of the bourgeois parliament. But the national party congress that met in May 1919 in Sofia unanimously rejected this standpoint and adopted the standpoint of the Central Committee. It decided to exploit the elections for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeois parliamentary system and for the workers’ and peasants’ soviets. After a short time this standpoint was confirmed by a circular of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, as well as by the results that we had achieved for the development of our political and trade union organisation in the elections for parliament and for local government bodies.
The election campaign, like the struggle in parliament, and in local government, have contributed greatly to developing and consolidating the Communist organisations and awakening the Communist self-consciousness of the proletarian masses. Today the Party numbers 40,000 members, the trade union federation 35,000 workers, and the Party’s daily organ prints 30,000 copies.
The Communist Party has also participated in the elections for the provincial and local government bodies. In the local government elections in December 1919 and in the provincial elections of January 1920 the Party received 140,000 votes and won the majority in local government in almost all the towns and in about a hundred villages. In many other town and village councils the Party is represented by large minorities. For local and provincial government bodies the Party possesses a programme for the organising of workers’ and peasants’ soviets in the towns and villages, the particular sections of which will substitute themselves for and take over the functions of the local and provincial government bodies at the moment of the revolution.
So far, in the councils in which it has possessed a majority, the Communist Party has fought for their autonomy; it calls on the workers and poorer peasants to support by mass action the budgets adopted by the Communist councils, by which the bourgeoisie is to be burdened with a progressive tax, which can be extended as far as the confiscation of their capital, and frees the working class from all taxes. Big sums can then be spent for public works, elementary schools, and other purposes that serve the interests solely of the working class and the poor, and the special interests of the minority of the bourgeoisie and of the capitalists go completely unheeded.
We use the struggle carried out in the Communist local government to make it comprehensible to the masses that their organisation of the central power alone is the way to inculcate respect for the decisions taken by the Communist councils on the question of food, housing and price increases, and on all the other immediate needs of the working population.
All the proposals of the Communist local government bodies are put before the local Party committee and then submitted to a general discussion in the meetings, in which the whole working population take part and can express their opinions. Disputed questions are then submitted to a vote. Communist members of the local government bodies in every district are led by a central commission which is based on Sofia and is under the supervision of the Central Committee of the Party.
It is understandable that the bourgeois central power cannot tolerate such activity by Communist local governments. It used ridiculous excuses to persecute the Communist assemblies in order to paralyse the revolutionary activity of our Party in these local governments. The government arrested the Communist majority in Philippopel and dissolved the town council. The government has persecuted and murdered several comrades from various Communist local councils. But through all these persecutions the mass of the workers and of the dissatisfied group themselves all the closer around the Communist Party.
In order to defend our ‘communes’ we call on the masses to support us with every means. We show them the necessity of extending the struggle to the conquest of the central power, which frustrates all the workers’ attempts to defend their interests in local government by decisions adopted by the majority. Through the struggle carried out by the masses for the defence of the Communist local councils, they themselves come to be convinced that the bourgeois state must be directly attacked, and that not simply with the ballot form, but above all through direct mass actions and armed insurrections.
In this way parliamentarism in the local councils is, in the hands of the Communist Party, transformed into a powerful means of setting the masses into motion, of organising them, of deepening their class-consciousness and uniting all their forces into one common revolutionary fighting front for the conquest of the central stronghold of bourgeois power, the capitalist state.
The experiences of our Party have shown that it is possible to unite revolutionary mass actions on the streets with the revolutionary struggle in parliament and in bourgeois local government. Our delegation therefore supports the Theses proposed to the Congress by the Executive Committee.
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The session is closed at 5. 15.
Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
Evening Session
of August 2
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The session is opened at 9.30. The debate on parliamentarism is continued.
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Herzog: Dear comrades, the attempt is being made here to force through a decision that the Communist Parties must apply revolutionary parliamentarism in all those countries of which Comrade Bukharin said that, up to now, no revolutionary activity at all on the Russian pattern has yet been practised in their parliaments, although the economic developments in those countries, like, for example, France, England and Switzerland, have long been ripe for a proletarian revolution.
Why is the proletariat in these countries so backward in revolutionary tactics? Precisely because, in these republics and democracies, the possibility of improving the life of the proletariat existed. It was possible there, with the help of parliamentarism, to achieve many good reforms for the proletariat, and because that was possible it is understandable why no revolutionary activity could develop there. That is the reason why the workers in these countries are so slow to arrive at revolution and find it so difficult to take on the revolutionary strength to act that is present in the Russians. In Russia it was quite different. The proletariat could not work legally. It could not force through reforms there and improve its conditions. It had to go onto the streets and carry out revolutionary actions. And therefore no parliamentarism could develop here in Russia as it did in the Western European countries. Now our Russian comrades come to us and say: ‘Things in Western Europe will now be different from what they were previously. Previously it was impossible to act in a revolutionary way in parliament, but now we are in a different situation and now such a possibility does exist, even in Western Europe and America. We will give all the Communist Parties certain guidelines. We will tell the factions how they must work, and then revolutionary work will be done there as well.'
But I do not think that that is possible. For one thing, simply because these rules themselves leave open the possibility that the Communist Parties too can work in an opportunist way. We had a long discussion in the Commission on how Communist representatives on local councils should behave, what Communist local councillors must do if they are in a majority. Comrade Bukharin said there: ‘If you are in the majority you must try to improve the conditions of the workers in order to sharpen the contradiction between the Communist local council and the state.’ That is precisely what the opportunists too tell us when they go into parliament.
They say: ‘We go in in order to sharpen from here outwards the conflicts between the proletariat and the state. We want to fight for improvements, but all that has the purpose merely of sharpening the Conflict between capital and labour.’ Here the possibility is left open for precisely these opportunist elements, which are here already inside the Communist International, to work in an opportunist way even as Communist Parties, and to bring all parliamentarism to this slippery path. Another possibility is also provided by the course the Communist International has taken in order to accept all ‘revolutionary’ parties into the Communist International. It will not be long before the majority of the USPD and of the French Socialist Party are In the Communist International. Naturally the majority of the small social-democratic parties must also come to Moscow. Platten has already been sent to Switzerland on this mission. Thus still more opportunist elements will manage to enter the Communist International, who will not become revolutionary Communists overnight. They will carry out exactly the same policies in the Communist International as they carried out previously in the Second International.
That is the danger that we see and that makes us recognise that, in the form that is proposed here, parliamentarism cannot in fact be applied in the western countries. We have a practical example of that. We have been told today that the Bulgarian Communist Party is a model example of revolutionary parliamentarism, that its parliamentary faction works splendidly. I recently read an article which said precisely the opposite. Further, I had the opportunity to talk to a Bulgarian comrade who went from Moscow to Bulgaria a parliamentarian and who, when he saw how the Bulgarian Communist parliamentary faction worked, became a supporter of anti-parliamentarism, and returned as such. That is proof that parliamentarism cannot be developed in every country in the same way that it was carried out earlier in Russia by the Communists.
The Social Democrats in Germany too, old Wilhelm Liebknecht and Bebel, declared: ‘We only go into parliament in order to exploit this rostrum in a revolutionary way.’ This revolutionary activity, however, was soon transformed into opportunism and reformism, because the possibility for it existed, and now the Social Democratic Party is an open party of social traitors.
Naturally you can decide that parliamentarism must be carried out by the communist Parties. We are not anti-parliamentarian in such a doctrinaire way as to say: ‘We shall not submit to the decision of the Communist International.’ We can try the experiment for a period, but we are convinced that it will not succeed, and that after a year or two, at the next Congress, on the basis of practice and experience, it will be said: ‘It would have been better if we had kept our hand off that and concentrated all our forces in the factories, in the army and among the peasants. That would have been much more advantageous for the development of the revolution and for the Communist International.'
Murphy: On the question of parliamentarism I do not agree with my colleague from the Shop Stewards who spoke this afternoon. I believe that all the attacks that have been made against parliamentarism today, and all the criticism that has been directed against it, referred to bourgeois parliamentarism and not revolutionary parliamentarism.
It is true that many representatives of the socialist movement who have entered parliament have become traitors. But that is not sufficient reason to condemn any activity at all within parliamentary institutions. I have never yet heard anyone claim that the tactics that Comrade Liebknecht followed in the German Reichstag and the Bolshevik representatives in the Russian Duma produced anything other than good results for the revolutionary movement.
It is senseless to claim that we must remain outside an institution simply because the people inside look bourgeois, or that one is forced to remain outside the trades unions and similar organisations because, although its members belong to the working class, no one can deny that their ideology is, in the main, petty bourgeois.
The problem before us is not one of keeping ourselves pure before the world, but of taking the revolutionary fight not only into the institutions of the working class but also into the enemy’s camp. Many arguments have been brought forward which deal with the propagandist and agitational value of revolutionary parliamentarism, arguments that I shall not repeat. In my view there are other, very important prospects which show that revolutionary parliamentarism can be of great value and is of great value even where the industrial organisations of the workers are highly developed.
No important struggle of the workers against the exploiting class can take place outside parliament without having a mighty echo inside parliament. That was especially confirmed in the experience of the shop stewards movement. From time to time, when the workers were driven into a big industrial struggle, the state machine operated against them, and even those who had declared themselves to be anti-parliamentarians invariably saw themselves forced to collaborate with the labour representatives in parliament, and thus became part of the agitation within the parliamentary institution. From time to time the members of the industrial movement, including the anti-parliamentarians, visited the labour representatives and other members of parliament in order to secure their help in the form of a protest or agitation within that institution. This tactic is forced on the militant movement precisely through the changing situation in which the workers find themselves from time to time. It is not always possible to undertake strike action, and strike movements cannot always be maintained by the enthusiasm of the workers. There are moments when it is possible to cast down the gauntlet to the enemy and refuse negotiations, that is to say when a frontal attack proves to be possible. But there are also times when enthusiasm wanes and the enemy proves to be stronger than we are. Then it is necessary to unite all possible forces, to make flanking attacks, to stage protest meetings here and there, briefly, to do everything to hold our forces together. It is especially on such occasions that we recognise the value of agitational forces inside parliament, and on such occasions our movement is forced to exploit them.
It must also not be forgotten that crises have their origins in centres other than in those of the industrial organisations. We have repeatedly seen that proposals and measures have been laid before parliament which, if they came into force, would have a vital effect on the movement outside parliament. We have seen such proposals and measures become law without the slightest agitation in the industrial and social life of the masses being carried out before their acceptance. Had there been revolutionaries in parliament who stood in living contact with the movement outside parliament, then the proposal of these measures would have been the signal not only for a protest inside parliament but also for a rising of the masses and the mobilisation of their forces for the fight outside parliament.
These situations and these experiences force us to recognise the many-sided nature of our struggle. To renounce the weapon of parliamentary representation by the Communists on the one hand, and to be in the shameful position of having to appeal to the liberal and reformist people of the Labour Party for help on the other, would be the summit of stupidity. We must fight inside parliament as revolutionaries, as revolutionaries who know how to confront the changing necessities of the struggle, and who are not afraid to go amongst the enemy when the occasion demands such a measure.
Revolutionary parliamentarism is not an end but a means , and wherever we turn our Communist Party into a really revolutionary fighting organ, parliamentarism is a very effective means of contributing to the mobilisation of the masses for the conquest of power. For these reasons I support the Theses of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on parliamentarism.
Souchy: Comrades, first of all it gives me a certain satisfaction to see that, here at the Congress, where fundamentally radical Social-Democrats are gathered, the standpoint of anti-parliamentarism is represented not only by the Anarcho-Syndicalists but also by the Communists. That is a concession to the standpoint of the Anarchists as adopted 40 years ago. When today one heard Comrade Bukharin defending his standpoint, one had the feeling that he was defending something that he himself does not rightly believe in. And I do not believe that I am the only one to have had this feeling. Comrade Bukharin defended parliamentarism as a means that cannot lead to socialism. All are agreed that parliamentarism is not a means to lead to communism. Nevertheless, this means is recommended to revolutionary workers. That is a remarkable standpoint. To recommend a means which one admits cannot lead to the end is senseless. The Executive Committee of the Communist International is committing precisely this stupidity by recommending this standpoint.
We must be agreed that it is precisely parliamentarism that has contributed most of all to lulling the masses, and that it is precisely parliamentarism that prevented them from adopting really revolutionary means and applying direct action. That is an old argument. But the standpoint that one is trying to represent here as the new parliamentarism is just as old and threadbare, and one is trying to reintroduce it here as ‘new’. Does one then not know that precisely now in Germany, Finland and Russia parliamentarism has gone most strikingly bankrupt? Is it not half-baked to recommend this bankrupt parliamentarism once more to the workers? Of course, gentlemen like the Independents, who are professional politicians, will try to recommend it to the workers; but the workers, and also a large part of the Communists, are turning away from it more and more. Those who defend parliamentarism here are those gentlemen who tried to call off the General Strike during the Kapp Week’ in Germany.
[This refers to the army putsch headed by General von Luttwitz which on March 13, 1920 ousted the government of Gustav Bauer and Gustav Noske and proclaimed Wolfgang Kapp, a reactionary politician from East Prussia, as Chancellor. The trades unions declared a general strike and Kapp fell after only four days. However, the KPD (German Communist Party) was unable to gain any advantage from the situation, one in which the working class had power in its grasp.]
The attitude of the Communist International towards parliamentarism is dished up as new, revolutionary parliamentarism. This new parliamentarism however reveals itself to be the old error of social democracy in its infancy, for social democracy adopted precisely the same standpoint in its early days. It is the same error into which one is falling here. New arguments are being sought for the old, worn-out parliamentarism. One is Marxist, and that means a lot. One is theoretically prejudiced and dogmatic. Marxists have taken the idea of parliamentarism in with their mother’s milk as children. Parliamentarism has entered the flesh and blood of these dogmatists, and has grown together organically not only with their thinking but also with their emotions and their desires. With these dogmatists parliamentarism is anchored, not in the realm of logic, but in the sub-conscious, in the realm of the psyche. If, then, even today revolutionaries talk about the applicability of parliamentarism, then we are not dealing with a logically based means of fighting, but with a psychological phenomenon. The attempt is made to prove by logic what is regarded as the best from the very start. This is where we must seek the roots of the ‘new, revolutionary’ parliamentarism, not in any logical argumentation. One is simply dogmatic from the very start. Thus parliamentarism is an opportunist illusion, but not a means of struggle of the revolutionary workers for communism. We must regard this so-called means of struggle as such an illusion, and not as a ‘new revolutionary’ parliamentarism, as Comrade Murphy has just said.
It is said that it is, admittedly, impossible to achieve communism in this way, but that the wish is to use parliament as a rostrum to reach circles that one could not otherwise reach. I tell you that this argument is very difficult to justify logically. If there was no other means, then one would have, admittedly, to adopt this one. But it is not true, there are other means; if we occupy ourselves with it in an unprejudiced way we will find them. Let us be conscious of the fact that, precisely by recommending parliamentarism, we repel the revolutionary elements of the working class who do not recognise parliamentarism. If the elements on the one hand that are repelled are weighed against those on the other that could possibly be reached, I think that the former would prove to be far more important for the social revolution than the latter. For this reason this standpoint has very weak foundations. Apart from that, if one adopts the standpoint of parliamentarism in order to carry out agitation, then it can be done without becoming a parliamentarian. Thus for example an anti-militarist in Vienna threw anti-militarist leaflets down from the public gallery of parliament. Here you have an example of how you can use parliament as a rostrum for agitation without participating in the election swindle and without wasting so much strength, energy and money on the elections. This action is much more important for the workers. Write about it in your papers and you have what you want: agitation from parliament.
Lenin: Comrade Bordiga supposedly wanted to defend the point of view of the Italian Marxists here; but he has nevertheless not answered any of the arguments advanced here by other Marxists in favour of parliamentary action.
Comrade Bordiga has admitted that historical experiences do not arise in an artificial way. He simply tells us that the struggle must be transferred to a different field. Does he then not know that every revolutionary crisis has been accompanied by a parliamentary crisis? He has, it is true, mentioned the fact that the struggle should be transferred to a different field, for example the soviets. But Comrade Bordiga has himself admitted that one cannot set up soviets artificially. The example of Russia proves that soviets can only be set up either during the revolution or immediately before it. Even in Kerensky’s days the soviets were composed in such a way (that is to say, Menshevik) that they could not form themselves into a proletarian power.
Parliament is a product of historical development which one cannot abolish from the world until one is strong enough to scatter the bourgeois parliament. Only if one is a member of parliament can one combat bourgeois society and parliamentarism from the given historical standpoint. The same means that is applied by the bourgeoisie in smuggle must also be applied by the proletariat, naturally with quite different ends. You can surely not deny that it is so, and if you deny it, then you cross out the experience of all the revolutionary events in the world. You have said that the trades unions too are opportunist, that they too represent a danger. On the other hand, however, you have said that one should make an exception for the trades unions because they represent a workers’ organisation. But that is only true to a certain degree. In the trades unions too there are very backward elements. A part of the proletarian petty bourgeoisie, the backward workers and small peasants, all these elements really think that their interests are represented in parliament, and one must combat that through work in parliament and teach the masses the truth through facts. The backward masses cannot be taught by theory, they need experiences. That has been seen in Russia, too. Even after the victory of the proletariat we were forced to call the Constituent Assembly in order to prove to the backward proletariat that it can achieve nothing that way. The soviets had to be contrasted concretely to parliament for the comparison of one experience against the other, and the soviets had to be presented to it as the only weapon.
Comrade Souchy, the revolutionary syndicalist, defended the same theory; but logic is not on his side. He said he was not a Marxist, so that is understandable. But when you, Comrade Bordiga, say you are a Marxist, we must demand more logic of you. You must know how parliament can be smashed. If you can do it by an armed insurrection in every country, then that is very good. You know that in Russia we showed our determination to destroy. the bourgeois parliament not only in theory but also in practice. But you have lost sight of the fact that that is impossible without quite lengthy preparations, and that in most countries it is not yet possible to smash parliament at a single blow. We are forced to use the parliamentary struggle for the smashing of parliament. You are substituting your revolutionary determination for the conditions that determine the political line followed by every class of modern society. Therefore you forget that, in order to destroy the bourgeois parliament in Russia, we first had to call the Constituent Assembly, and that even after our victory. You have said: ‘It is true that the Russian revolution is an example that cannot be applied to conditions in Western Europe’. But you have not advanced a single watertight argument to prove that to us. We went through the period of bourgeois democracy. We went through it quickly at a time when we were forced to call for elections to the Constituent Assembly. And even later, when the proletarian class was able to seize power, the peasants still believed that the bourgeois parliament was necessary.
Taking account of these backward masses we had to call the elections and show the masses, by example and by facts, that this Constituent Assembly, which was elected at a time of the greatest general need, did not express the aspirations and demands of the exploited classes. Thus the conflict between soviet power and bourgeois power became completely clear, and that not just for us, for the vanguard of the working class, but also for the overwhelming majority of the peasant class, for the petty clerks, the petty bourgeoisie, etc. In every capitalist country there are backward elements of the working class who are convinced that parliament is the true representative of the people, and do not see that dirty methods are used here.
It is, you say, the instrument with which the bourgeoisie deceives the masses. But this should be turned against you and it does turn against your Theses. How will you reveal the true nature of parliament to the really backward masses deceived by the bourgeoisie if you do not enter it? How will you expose this or that parliamentary manoeuvre, the attitude of this or that party, if you are not in parliament? If you are Marxists you must recognise that the relation between the classes in a bourgeois society and the relationship between the parties are closely connected. I repeat, how will you show all that if you are not members of parliament, if you reject parliamentary action? The history of the Russian revolution has clearly proved that the great masses of the working class, of the peasant class and of the petty clerks would not have been convinced by any arguments if they had not made their own experiences.
It has been said here that much time is wasted by participating in parliamentary struggles. Can one think of any other institution in which all classes participate to the same extent that they do in parliament? That cannot be created artificially. If all classes are drawn to participate in the parliamentary struggle, then it is because class interests and conflicts have their reflection in parliament. If it were possible everywhere to stage, let us say, immediately decisive general strikes to make a clean sweep all at one go, then the revolution would already have taken place in various countries. One must, however, take account of the facts, and parliament represents the arena of the class struggle. Comrade Bordiga and those that adopt his standpoint should tell the masses the truth. Germany is the best proof of the fact that a Communist faction is possible in parliament, and therefore you should tell the masses openly: ‘We are too weak to create a party with a rigid organisation’. That would be the truth, which you should speak openly. But if you were to admit this weakness to the masses, they would not become your supporters, but your opponents, supporters of parliamentarism.
If you said: ‘Comrades, workers, we are so weak that we cannot create such a disciplined party that forces its members of parliament to obey it’, then the workers would desert you, they would say to themselves: ‘How shall we set up the dictatorship of the proletariat with such weak people?'
If you believe that on the day of the victory of the proletariat the intellectuals, the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie will become communist, then you are very naive.
If you do not have this illusion, then starting today you must prepare the working class to impose its will. There is not a single exception to this rule in any field of state work. The day after the revolution we find everywhere opportunist lawyers who call themselves communists, petty bourgeois who recognise the discipline neither of the Communist Party nor of the proletarian state. If you do not prepare the workers to found a really disciplined Party that will force all its members to subordinate themselves to its discipline, then you will never prepare the dictatorship of the proletariat. I think that that is why you do not admit that it is the weakness of very many new Communist Parties that forces them to deny parliamentary action. I am convinced that the great majority of really revolutionary workers will follow us and speak out against your anti-parliamentarian Theses.
Bordiga: Comrade Lenin’s objections to the Theses I have proposed and against my arguments have opened up some very interesting questions which I do not wish to touch upon myself here and which reflect the problem of Marxist tactics in its entirety.
Without any doubt parliamentary events and ministerial crises stand in a close relation to the development of the revolution and the crisis of bourgeois organisation. However, for proletarian political action to have any influence on events, we must take into account the considerations of method which caused the Marxist left of the international socialist movement, even before the war, to reject participation in ministries and the parliamentary support of bourgeois ministries, although these were indubitably means of gaining influence on the development of events.
It is the necessity of uniting the revolutionary forces of the working class into an organisation for the final struggle of Communism that leads to a tactic that rests on certain general rules of action, even if these can be regarded as being too simple and insufficiently flexible.
I believe that the present historical mission leads us to a new tactic laid down by circumstances, i.e. the rejection of participation in parliaments. That is, indeed., merely a means of influencing events in a revolutionary sense.
The argument that the practical problem of Communist parliamentary action, subordinated to Party discipline, must be solved because, even in the post-revolutionary period, people from bourgeois and semi-bourgeois milieus will have to be organised and put in line, this argument could just as well be used to justify the appropriateness of socialist ministers under bourgeois domination.
But this is not the moment to go deeper into this problem, and I shall confine myself to stating that I shall keep my views on the argument that is occupying us to myself. I am more than ever convinced that the Communist International will never succeed in bringing about action that is parliamentary and at the same time truly revolutionary.
Finally, since it has been recognised that the Theses that I have proposed are based on purely Marxist principles and have nothing to do with anarchist and syndicalist arguments against parliamentarism, I hope that they will be voted for by the comrades whose views are anti-parliamentarian and who accept them as a whole and in their spirit, since they share the Marxist propositions that represent the content of the Theses.
Bukharin: First, comrades, a small preliminary comment. In my first speech I did not think it necessary to repeat various things that had already been explained in the Theses. Meanwhile the comrades who have opposed me have mentioned many things in their remarks that do not need to be discussed at all. In his first speech Comrade Bordiga spoke of the difference between bourgeois democracy and soviet power and about various characteristics of bourgeois democracy; all undeniable things with which we are in absolute agreement and against which we were the first to speak. Thus nine tenths of Comrade Bordiga’s first speech, like those of the others, were things that are above discussion, since we all agree with them. I shall not repeat these things in my closing speech either. Of course, when Comrade Gallacher comes and says: ‘We are in favour of direct action’, that is not a secondary matter, but one of the greatest importance. But I shall not talk about it because we are all in agreement with it, and do not need to spend any time on it. Comrade Lenin has spoken about the weaknesses of the Communists, and has aptly remarked that those Communist Parties that are weakest are anti-parliamentarian on principle. He has, so to speak, deduced this conclusion. I have proved that empirically for some. I have spoken with an anti-parliamentarian, with Comrade Herzog, and he told me: ‘Of course, if we had such a strong party as you had, then it would be a different matter.’ Comrade Marie Nielsen, who is also an anti-parliamentarian, told me: ‘If the Executive and the Communist International give us the people for parliamentary activity, then it would be a different matter’. Those are two proofs, and these two anti-parliamentarians – that is to say, forty per cent of all the anti-parliamentarians present – support Comrade Lenin’s argument that they have anti-parliamentarian views because of weakness. That is perhaps the best proof of the inner untenability of the allegedly fundamental anti-parliamentarian position. We can also prove that on a larger scale.
Russia, which has the strongest Communist Party, is in favour of the exploitation of parliament, Germany similarly, and Italy too, to a great extent. But Switzerland and Denmark, where only small groups exist, are anti-parliamentarian.
Now a few of the arguments against us. We claim that the possibility of revolutionary parliamentarism is empirically proved, and quote the example of Liebknecht and others. How are we answered? Comrade Bordiga tells us: ‘We had a Liebknecht but we also had yellow Social Democracy, and the total balance sheet of this parliamentary activity is very bad.’ The base activity of the Social Democratic Party weighs more in scales for the assessment of parliamentarism than the activity of Liebknecht. But it is clear to everybody that this argument is absolutely false. We are talking about Communist parliamentarism. One cannot take things that are different in principle into consideration. That is hocus-pocus to swindle us. Now to be sure Comrade Gallacher tells us: ‘Liebknecht did great things, but only in so far as he also worked among the masses on the streets.’ But we are precisely the representatives of the opinion that parliamentary work must be linked with work on the streets! And certainly Comrade Gallacher too knows that Liebknecht called for the insurrection from the parliamentary rostrum. Nobody will dare to claim that that was damaging. Comrades faced with this reality flee from the argument.
The third opponent, the syndicalist Comrade Souchy, said: ‘At the time when parliamentarism has gone so bankrupt in Russia and Finland, you preach parliamentarism.’ But on the one hand parliamentarism went completely broke in Russia, and on the other we also in part accelerated this bankruptcy by fighting in parliament. That is a fact. Moreover, this whole way of posing the problem for Russia at present is false. There certainly cannot be any question of parliamentarism in Russia any more. What you had to prove was that our earlier tactic was wrong, when we practised parliamentarism, but you were not able to advance a single argument for that. Because we followed the correct tactics we won the victory. Comrade Bordiga has tried to invent several very artificial arguments. He says, for example: ‘It is true that we can use various means, but parliamentarism is not a means, but an institution’, and he thinks that with that he has discovered such a weighty argument that our arguments collapse. But tell us, Comrade Bordiga, how and when a difference in principle can exist between a means and an institution?
Let us take an example: the imperialist government mobilises for war. The question now arises for us whether we should boycott the army or, on the contrary, enter the army. From the beginning of the war we were for entry into the army. Even at the beginning of the war we said: ‘The people can win victory most easily if it is armed.’ Therefore it must use the opportunity to get the rifle in its hands. Is the army an institution? Of course, it is a bourgeois institution in the hands of finance capital. Will someone now say that we did not use this army as a means? Naturally, as a means. Comrade Bordiga can easily see from this example that there is no contradiction between a means and an institution. I have quoted this example to show that even this most important instrument of oppression by capital can become a weapon against capital in our hands. We have proved that empirically. I emphasise again and again that what we are dealing with here are not personalities and forms of thought, not phrases, but real facts. In general Comrade Bordiga is vacillating between two standpoints. First of all he defended the standpoint of which I said that it was different from the standpoint of the anarchists and syndicalists. And then there is his Thesis which says that if we sit in parliament we work side by side with the bourgeoisie. That is an anarchist argument. And when he further says that one must not use parliament because of the specific conditions of today, then that is yet another kind of argument. But with him the kinds of argument are all tangled and grown together. And naturally it is rather difficult to disentangle these knots.
Now an argument from Gallacher. He says: ‘We have already repeatedly had the experience that as soon as a man enters parliament he becomes a traitor there.’ The other comrade – I believe it was Herzog – claimed in his speech that in general parliament offers big opportunities for corruption. Of course we take into account the fact that such opportunities exist; but I ask Comrade Gallacher whether he does not know that such opportunities also exist within the trades unions? There is a classical example of the corruption of a trade union secretary ... Or have we not experienced cases where the editor of a previously revolutionary newspaper became a rascal? We know of very many such cases from our practice. For example, we have had the illegal Party, and after the first, February Revolution, it often happened that half the people in our Party organisations were nothing but police spies. All the opportunists said against us: ‘Do you see where the illegal Party leads to? Illegality is always bound up with police spying. We must be against illegal work, because an illegal Party is always a nest for the most varied police spies on the Party.’ In every country the opportunists come forward with this argument. Every opportunist always says, with great pride, of those that stand to the left: ‘He is an anarchist, an agent provocateur.’ That is supposed to be an argument against illegal work. It has been analogous with this matter of parliamentarism. From the fact that in Italy and France the parliamentary factions are very opportunistic and by no means carry out communist policies, some people draw the conclusion that the whole matter is such that all parliamentarism – the revolutionary kind too – is bound up with treachery to the working class. But one cannot claim that at all, for the facts prove something else.
Two ways of looking at things are possible: either we assess the present epoch as a really revolutionary epoch or we do not.
The comrades who are anti-parliamentarian on principle hold the present epoch to be highly revolutionary. And if they start from this premise, then they must also say that precisely the revolutionary character of the epoch offers the best guarantee against corruption and against the opportunism of the parliamentary faction, and the basis for the building of truly communist, centralised parties. These two premises are the most important, and there are no others that can give us any better guarantee. The rapid revolutionary development of the working class on the one hand and the supervision of the centralised Communist Party that is being built on the other is the best guarantee against opportunism in the parliamentary faction. From my standpoint that is also an argument against Comrade Herzog. He says: ‘Bebel was an opportunist.’ Why he also said that about Wilhelm Liebknecht I cannot grasp. I can confirm that Bebel was a great opportunist. There is no doubt about that as far as I am concerned any more than I doubt that Jaurès would have become a social patriot in all the traditions of the French revolution. But Bebel is a personification of the earlier epoch. How can one therefore quote him as an example of today’s conditions? The example is somewhat unfortunately chosen.
One further small remark on the speech of the German syndicalist. He said of me that in the innermost part of my soul I was against parliamentarism, but that I was forced to defend this unjust cause. And he says that he was unable to get rid of this feeling throughout my whole speech. I too had a feeling when he was speaking, the feeling that he was weeping over somebody. And I do not think that he advanced a single factual argument at all. I at least was unable to discover one in his speech. What Comrade Bordiga said in his last speech was a testimony against his own standpoint. In that we see a further proof of the correctness of our tactics, and we call on all comrades to enter parliament with the cry: ‘Down with parliamentarism!'
Murphy: The other representatives of the Shop Stewards present assure me that on no occasion have they ever done any work in parliament or the House of Commons.
As I would not like to slander anybody, I ask permission to read their statement out and to strike from my speech any personal comments I made. I accept the statement.
That does not, however, change the course of our factual discussion.
Shablin: Comrades, in his speech Comrade Herzog had the audacity to deny the truth of facts that I laid before you concerning the parliamentary activity of the Bulgarian Communist Party. We are amazed at the audacity of this comrade who, without checking with our delegation, permits himself to slander and to insult our Party on the basis of information he has drawn from dubious sources with a vested interest. On behalf of the Bulgarian delegation I protest against this attitude and this mode of behaviour on Comrade Herzog’s part, which is by no means an appropriate attitude for a Party comrade.
The revolutionary activity of the Bulgarian Communist Party is public and known to all. In order to lay before you the details of this activity, which might interest the Comrades at the Congress, I quoted dozens of noteworthy facts, the names of our members of parliament who have been sentenced, and dates. A slander such as that uttered by Herzog cannot touch our Party.
Goldenburg: I propose the following addendum to Comrade Bordiga’s Theses:
‘At a time of revolutionary crisis, which is suitable for the armed insurrection for the conquest of power, the boycott of elections is an urgent necessity. At such a moment, in which the struggle between parliament, the organ of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and the soviet regime, the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is unleashed, to call for participation in parliamentary elections is to confuse the heads of the workers and to betray the cause of the proletariat. Such an action can only consolidate the position of the bourgeoisie, as it gives them time to rally their forces to the detriment of the proletariat, whose revolutionary action is thus paralysed. One must not forget that parliamentary action is subordinate to extra-parliamentary action, and that the struggle for power that is carried out outside parliament is the centre of gravity of the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. That explains the slight importance of the question of parliamentarism in comparison with the question of t he dictatorship of the proletariat and that of the struggle of the masses for the conquest of power.'
Polano: Being personally in agreement with the Theses on parliamentarism proposed by the Executive Committee, I cast my vote for them, but must state that this vote on my part does not correspond to the attitude adopted on this question by the Italian Socialist Youth Federation whose representative at this Congress I am.
In anticipation of a division between the supporters of participation in elections and its opponents, the Italian Socialist Youth Federation decided at its last Congress not to deal with the question of elections and to give its individual members complete freedom, without giving up membership of the Italian Socialist Party, of joining that communist faction (supporters or opponents of elections) which most corresponded to their individual convictions.
I declare that, when I return to Italy, I shall fight with all my strength to lead the Italian Socialist Federation of Youth out of this ambiguous position and to place it on the platform of the guidelines for which I am now voting.
I further declare that my vote also has the significance of a protest against the attitude, little compatible with communist activity, of a group of Italian socialist politicians, and hope that the leadership of the Italian Party will subject this activity to strict discipline and place it on a communist basis.
Serrati: Permit me, first of all, to thank Comrade Bukharin, who has made me the leader of a political group. I am only the Editor in Chief of Avanti and a member of the Party leadership. [Bordiga laughs and asks to be allowed to say a few words.]
You do not have the right to laugh. I have never claimed to be the leader of a group. There is no Serrati tendency. There is only a fighter who has always carried out his duty as a Communist.
I declare that I shall vote for the Theses that have been proposed by the majority of the Commission, since they agree with what was decided at the Bologna Congress (1919) and what we are in the process of doing in Italy thanks to the efforts of the Party leadership, wherein of course the given conditions must be taken into account. I am particularly of the opinion that it is absolutely necessary to unite the forces of the Party, to prevent any autonomy on the part of the parliamentary faction and to place it under the strictest supervision of the Party leadership.
At the same time I declare that the classification of the Italian Socialist parliamentary faction that Comrade Bukharin has made here is somewhat arbitrary, and that it agrees only distantly with the real conditions in this faction.
It is true that anti-communist manifestations have become audible within the Italian parliamentary faction. But there are others, much more numerous, that have a revolutionary character. For example, during the first session of the Italian parliament our parliamentary faction applied Comrade Bukharin’s principles on communist parliamentary activity. Our members of parliament unfolded the red flag m front of the King and left the hall singing the Internationale. [Bordiga: ‘That is not yet the revolution.']
It is sabotage of the bourgeois parliamentary regime. We do it unceasingly and systematically. That is indeed revolutionary action in parliament.
We are also in favour of introducing draft laws in the bourgeois parliament. It is not a question of proposing laws so that they will be accepted, but of showing the proletariat what the bourgeoisie cannot do and what the proletariat must do.
I shall therefore vote unreservedly for the Theses of the Executive Committee.
Herzog: In my remarks on the activities of the Communist parliamentary faction in Bulgaria the Bulgarian delegation saw a slander. This accusation will not stand up. I believe that the source from which I obtained the material for my remarks is thoroughly reliable, and I do not need to take back anything I said. All the less so for the fact that the Bulgarian delegation accused me of slander without even trying to prove the real or alleged dubiousness of the source.
Zinoviev: I propose that we close the discussion.
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The proposal is accepted.
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Zinoviev: We are today in a position to hear a report on the checking of credentials, and after we have heard it we will vote by delegations.
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A vote is taken on Bukharin’s Theses, which read as follows:
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Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism
1. The New Epoch and the New Parliamentarism.
The attitude of the socialist parties towards parliamentarism was in the beginning, in the period of the First International, that of using bourgeois parliaments for the purpose of agitation. Participation in parliament was considered from the point of view of the development
of class consciousness, i.e. of awakening the class hostility of the proletariat to the ruling class. This relationship was transformed, not through the influence of theory, but through the influence of political development. Through the uninterrupted increase of the productive forces and the extension of the area of capitalist exploitation, capitalism, and with it the parliamentary state, gained continually increasing stability.
Hence there arose: The adaptation of the parliamentary tactics of the socialist parties to the ‘organic’ legislative work of the bourgeois parliament and the ever greater importance of the struggle for reforms in the framework of capitalism, the domination of the so-called minimum programme of social democracy, the transformation of the maximum programme into a debating formula for an exceedingly distant ‘final goal’. On this basis then developed the phenomena of parliamentary careerism, of corruption and of the open or concealed betrayal of the most elementary interests of the working class.
The attitude of the Communist International towards parliamentarism is determined, not by a new doctrine, but by the change in the role of parliament itself. In the previous epoch parliament performed to a certain degree a historically progressive task as a tool of developing capitalism. Under the present conditions of unbridled imperialism, however, parliament has been transformed into a tool for lies, deception, violence and enervating chatter. In the face of imperialist devastation, plundering, rape, banditry and destruction, parliamentary reforms, robbed of any system, permanence and method, lose any practical significance for the toiling masses.
Like the whole of bourgeois society, parliamentarism too is losing its stability. The sudden transition from the organic epoch to the critical creates the basis for a new tactic of the proletariat in the field of parliamentarism. Thus the Russian Labour Party (the Bolsheviks) had already worked out the nature of revolutionary parliamentarism in the previous period because since 1905 Russia had been shaken from its political and social equilibrium and had entered the period of storms and shocks.
To the extent that some socialists, who tend towards communism, point out that the moment for the revolution has not yet come in their countries, and refuse to split from parliamentary opportunists, they proceed, in the essence of the matter, from the conscious assessment of the coming epoch as an epoch of the relative stability of imperialist society, and assume that on this basis a coalition with the Turatis and the Longuets can bring practical results in the struggle for reforms. Theoretically clear communism, on the other hand, will correctly estimate the character of the present epoch: highest stage of capitalism; imperialist self-negation and self-destruction; uninterrupted growth of civil war, etc. The forms of political relations and groupings can be different in different countries. The essence however remains everywhere one and the same; what is at stake for us is the immediate political and technical preparations for the insurrection of the proletariat, the destruction of bourgeois power and the establishment of the new proletarian power.
At present, parliament, for communists, can in no way become the arena for the struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the position of the working class, as was the case at certain times in the previous period. The centre of gravity of political life has at present been removed finally and completely beyond the bounds of parliament.
On the other hand the bourgeoisie is forced, not only by reason of its relations to the toiling masses, but also by reason of the complex mutual relations within the bourgeois class, to carry out part of its measures one way or another in parliament, where the various cliques haggle for power, reveal their strong sides, betray their weak sides expose themselves, etc.
Therefore it is the historical task of the working class to wrest this apparatus from the hands of the ruling class, to smash it, to destroy it, and replace it with new proletarian organs of power. At the same time, however, the revolutionary general staff of the class has a strong interest in having its scouts in the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeoisie in order to make this task of destruction easier. Thus is demonstrated quite clearly the basic difference between the tactic of the communist, who enters parliament with revolutionary aims, and the tactics of the socialist parliamentarian. The latter proceeds from the assumption of the relative stability and the indeterminate duration of the existing rule. He makes it his task to achieve reform by every means, and he is interested in seeing to it that every achievement is suitably assessed by the masses as a merit of parliamentary socialism. (Turati, Longuet and Co.).
In the place of the old adaptation to parliamentarism the new parliamentarism emerges as a tool for the annihilation of parliamentarism in general. The disgusting traditions of the old parliamentary tactics have, however, repelled a few revolutionary elements into the camp of the opponents of parliamentarism on principle (IWW) and of the revolutionary syndicalists (KAPD). The Second Congress therefore adopts the following Theses.
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2. Communism, the Struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and the Utilisation of Bourgeois Parliaments
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I
1. Parliamentarism as a state system has become a ‘democratic’ form of the rule of the bourgeoisie, which at a certain stage of development requires the fiction of popular representation which outwardly appears to be an organisation of a ‘popular will’ that stands outside the classes, but in essence is a machine for oppression and subjugation in the hands of ruling capital.
2. Parliament is a definite form of state order; therefore it cannot at all be the form of communist society, which knows neither classes nor class struggle nor any state power.
3. Nor can parliamentarism be a form of proletarian state administration in the period of transition from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the moment of sharpened class struggle, in the civil war, the proletariat must inevitably build up its state organisation as a fighting organisation, into which the representatives of the previous ruling classes are not permitted. In this stage any fiction of the ‘popular will’ is directly harmful to the working class. The proletariat does not need any parliamentary sharing of power, it is harmful to it. The form of the proletarian dictatorship is the soviet republic.
4. The bourgeois parliaments, one of the most important apparatuses of the bourgeois state machine, cannot as such in the long run be taken over, just as the proletariat cannot at all take over the proletarian state. The task of the proletariat consists in breaking up the bourgeois state machine, destroying it, and with it the parliamentary institutions, be they republican or a constitutional monarchy.
5. It is no different with the local government institutions of the bourgeoisie, which it is theoretically incorrect to counterpose to the state organs. In reality they are similar apparatuses of the state machine of the bourgeoisie, which must be destroyed by the revolutionary proletariat and replaced by local soviets of workers’ deputies.
6. Consequently communism denies parliamentarism as a form of the society of the future. It denies it as a form of the class dictatorship of the proletariat. It denies the possibility of taking over parliament in the long run; it sets itself the aim of destroying parliamentarism. Therefore there can only be a question of utilising the bourgeois state institutions for the purpose of their destruction. The question can be posed in this, and only in this, way.
II
7. Every class struggle is apolitical struggle, for in the final analysis it is a struggle for power. Any strike at all that spreads over the whole country becomes a threat to the bourgeois state and thus takes on a political character. Every attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to destroy its state means carrying out a political fight. Creating a proletarian state apparatus for administration and for the oppression of the resisting bourgeoisie, of whatever type that apparatus will be, means conquering political power.
8. Consequently the question of political power is not at all identical with the question of the attitude towards parliamentarism. The former is a general question of the proletarian class struggle, which is characterised by the intensification of small and partial struggles to the general struggle for the overthrow of the capitalist order as a whole.
9. The most important method of struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, i.e. against its state power, is above all mass action. Mass actions are organised and led by the revolutionary mass organisations (trades unions, parties, soviets) of the proletariat under the general leadership of a unified, disciplined, centralised Communist Party. Civil war is war. In this war the proletariat must have its bold officer corps and its strong general staff, who direct all operations in all theatres of the struggle.
10. The mass struggle is a whole system of developing actions sharpening in their form and logically leading to the insurrection against the capitalist state. In this mass struggle, which develops into civil war, the leading party of the proletariat must as a rule consolidate all its legal positions by making them into auxiliary bases of its revolutionary activity and subordinating these positions to the plan of the main campaign, the campaign of the mass struggle.
11. The rostrum of the bourgeois parliament is such an auxiliary base. The argument that parliament is a bourgeois state institution cannot at all be used against participation in the parliamentary struggle. The Communist Party does not enter these institutions in order to carry out organic work there, but in order to help the masses from inside parliament to break up the state machine and parliament itself through action (for example the activity of Liebknecht in Germany, of the Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, in the ‘Democratic Conference’, in Kerensky’s ‘Pre-Parliament’, in the ‘Constituent Assembly’ and in the town Dumas, and finally the activity of the Bulgarian Communists).
12. This activity in parliament, which consists mainly in revolutionary agitation from the parliamentary rostrum, in unmasking opponents, in the ideological unification of the masses who still, particularly in backward areas, are captivated by democratic ideas, look towards the parliamentary rostrum, etc., should be totally and completely subordinated to the aims and tasks of the mass struggle outside parliament.
Participation in election campaigns and revolutionary propaganda from the parliamentary rostrum is of particular importance for winning over those layers of the workers who previously, like, say, the rural toiling masses, stood far away from political life.
13. Should the communists have the majority in local government institutions, they should a) carry out revolutionary opposition to the bourgeois central power; b) do everything to be of service to the poorer population (economic measures, introduction or attempted introduction of an armed workers’ militia, etc.); c) at every opportunity show the limitations placed on really big changes by the bourgeois state power; d) on this basis develop the sharpest revolutionary propaganda without fearing the conflict with the power of the state; e) under certain circumstances replace the local administration by local workers’ councils. The whole activity of the Communists in the local administration must therefore be part of the general work of disrupting the capitalist system.
14. Election campaigns should not be carried out in the spirit of the hunt for the maximum number of parliamentary seats, but in the spirit of the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses for the slogans of the proletarian revolution. Election campaigns should be carried out by the whole mass of the Party members and not only by an elite of the Party. It is necessary to utilise all mass actions (strikes, demonstrations, ferment among the soldiers and sailors, etc.) that are taking place at the time, and to come into close touch with them. It is necessary to draw all the proletarian mass organisations into active work.
15. In observing all these conditions, as well as those in a special instruction, parliamentary activity is the direct opposite of that petty politicking done by the social democratic parties of every country, who go into parliament in order to support this ‘democratic’ institution. or at best to ‘take it over’. The Communist Party can only be exclusively in favour of the revolutionary utilisation of parliament in the spirit of Karl Liebknecht and of the Bolsheviks.
III
16. ‘Anti-parliamentarism’ on principle, in the sense of absolute and categorical rejection of participation in elections and revolutionary parliamentary activity, is therefore a naive, childish doctrine below any criticism, a doctrine which occasionally has a basis in healthy nausea at politicking parliamentarians, but which does not see at the same time the possibility of a revolutionary parliamentarism. Moreover, this doctrine is often linked with a completely incorrect conception of the role of the party, which sees in the Communist Party not the centralised shock troops of the workers, but a decentralised system of loosely allied groups.
17. On the other hand an absolute recognition of the necessity of actual elections and of actual participation in parliamentary sessions under all circumstances by no means flows from the recognition in principle of parliamentary activity. That is dependent upon a whole series of specific conditions. Withdrawal from parliament can be necessary given a specific combination of these conditions. This is what the Bolsheviks did when they withdrew from the Pre-parliament in order to break it up, to rob it of any strength and boldly to counterpose to it the St. Petersburg Soviet on the eve of the insurrection. They did the same in the Constituent Assembly on the day of its dissolution, raising the Third Congress of Soviets to the high point of political events. According to circumstances, a boycott of the elections and the immediate violent removal of not only the whole bourgeois state apparatus but also the bourgeois parliamentary clique, or on the other hand participation in the elections while parliament itself is boycotted, etc., can be necessary.
18. In this way the Communist Party, which recognises the necessity of participating in the elections not only to the central parliament, but also to the organs of local self-government and work in these institutions as a general role, must resolve this problem concretely, starting from the specific peculiarities of any given moment. A boycott of elections or of parliament and withdrawal from the latter is mainly permissible when the preconditions for the immediate transition to the armed struggle and the seizure of power are already present.
19. In the process, one should always bear in mind the relative unimportance of this question. Since the centre of gravity lies in the struggle for state power carried out outside parliament, it goes without saying that the question of the proletarian dictatorship and the mass struggle for it cannot be placed on the same level as the particular question of the utilisation of parliament.
20. The Communist International therefore emphasises decisively that it holds every split or attempted split within the Communist Parties in this direction and only for this reason to be a serious error. The Congress calls on all elements who base themselves on the recognition of the mass struggle for the proletarian dictatorship under the leadership of the centralised party of the revolutionary proletariat exerting its influence on all the mass organisations of the workers, to strive for the complete unity of the communist elements despite possible differences of opinion over the question of the utilisation of bourgeois parliaments.
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3. Revolutionary Parliamentarism
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In order to secure the actual carrying out of revolutionary parliamentary tactics it is necessary that:
1. The Communist Party as a whole and its Central Committee, already in the preparatory stage, that is to say before the parliamentary election, must take care of the high quality of the personal composition of the parliamentary faction. The Central Committee of the Communist Party must be responsible for the whole work of the parliamentary faction. The Central Committee of the Communist Party must have the undeniable right to raise objections to any candidate whatever of any organisation whatever, if there is no guarantee that if he gets into parliament, he will pursue really communist policies.
The Communist Party must break the old social democratic habit of putting up exclusively so-called ‘experienced’ parliamentarians, predominantly lawyers and similar people, as members of parliament. As a rule it is necessary to put up workers as candidates, without baulking at the fact that these are mainly simple party members without any great parliamentary experience. The Communist Party must ruthlessly stigmatise those careerist elements that come around the Communist Parties in order to get into parliament. The Central Committees of the Communist Parties must only ratify the candidatures of those comrades who have shown their unconditional devotion to the working class by long years of work.
2. When the elections are over, the organisation of the parliamentary faction must be completely in the hands of the Central Committee of the Communist Parties, irrespective of whether the whole Party is legal or illegal at the time in question. The chairman and the committee of the communist parliamentary faction must be ratified by the Central Committee of the Party. The Central Committee of the Party must have a permanent representative in the parliamentary faction with a right of veto, and on all important political questions the parliamentary faction shall ask the Central Committee of the Party in advance for instructions concerning its behaviour. Before any big forthcoming action by the communists in parliament the – Central Committee has the right and the duty to appoint or to reject the speaker for the faction, and to demand of him that he previously submit the main points of his speech or the speech itself for approval by the Central Committee. A written undertaking must be officially obtained from every candidate on the proposed communist list that, as soon as he is called upon to do so by the Party, he is prepared to resign his seat, so that in a given situation the action of withdrawing from parliament can be carried out in a united way.
3. In those countries where reformist, semi-reformist or merely careerist elements have managed to penetrate into the communist parliamentary faction (as has already happened in some countries) the Central Committees of the Communist Parties have the obligation of carrying out a thorough purge of the personal composition of the faction proceeding on the principle that it is much more useful for the cause of the working class to have a small, but truly communist faction, than a large faction without consistent communist policies.
4. On the decision of the Central Committee, the communist member of parliament has the obligation to combine legal with illegal work. In those countries where the communist members of parliament enjoy immunity from bourgeois law, this immunity must be utilised to support the Party in its illegal work of organisation and propaganda.
5. Communist members of parliament must subordinate all parliamentary action to the activity of their Party outside parliament. The regular introduction of demonstrative draft laws, which are not intended to be accepted by the bourgeois majority, but for the purposes of propaganda, agitation and organisation, must take place on the instructions of the Party and its Central Committee.
6. In the event of demonstrations by workers in the streets and other revolutionary actions, the communist members of parliament have the duty to place themselves in the most conspicuous leading place at the head of the masses of workers.
7. Communist members of parliament must use every means at their disposal (under the supervision of the Party) to create written and any other kind of links with the revolutionary workers, peasants and other toilers. Under no circumstances can they act like social democratic members of parliament, who pursue business connections with their voters. They must be constantly at the disposal of the Party for any propaganda work in the country.
8. Every communist member of parliament must bear in mind that he is not a legislator seeking an understanding with other legislators, but a Party agitator who has been sent into the enemy camp in order to carry out Party decisions there. The communist member of parliament is responsible, not to the scattered mass of voters, but to his Party, be it legal or illegal.
9. Communist members of parliament must speak a language that can be understood by every simple worker, every peasant, every washerwoman and every shepherd, so that the Party is able to publish the speeches as leaflets and distribute them to the most distant corners of the country.
10. Simple communist workers must appear in the bourgeois parliament without leaving precedence to so-called experienced parliamentarians – even in cases where the workers are only newcomers to the parliamentary arena. If need be the members of parliament from the ranks of the working class can read their speeches from notes, so that the speeches can be printed in the press and as leaflets.
11. Communist members of parliament must use the parliamentary rostrum for the unmasking not only of the bourgeoisie and its hacks, but also of the social-patriots, and the reformists, of the vacillations of the politicians of the ‘centre’ and of other opponents of communism, and for broad propaganda for the ideas of the Communist International.
12. Even in cases where there are only a few of them in the whole parliament, communist members of parliament have to show a challenging attitude towards capitalism in their whole behaviour. They must never forget that only he is worthy of the name of a communist who is an arch enemy of bourgeois society and its social democratic hacks not only in words but also in deeds.
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Bukharin’s Theses are accepted. All amendments are handed over to the Commission.
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Radek: I think that it is necessary for me to read out the list of delegates; it will be classified. The composition of the Congress is then the following, country by country. [He reads the list out.] We cannot reach any agreement on what we are to do with East Galicia. At the moment it has not yet been liberated; it belongs neither to Poland nor to Hungary, nor is it independent. We have admitted it as an independent country with two votes.
The credentials of the Swiss comrade, Burgsdorf, were challenged in the Commission with the claim that the delegate in question had recently been the editor of a bourgeois newspaper. It emerged that the comrade was the editor of such a paper a long time ago, but then he became a socialist and gave up the editing of the paper. The question was investigated in Switzerland and the case was resolved.
As far as the question of apportioning votes is concerned, very little was changed in the Executive’s proposals. By and large we accepted the method of apportioning that was adopted by the Executive. The number of votes was reduced in only one case that I shall talk about shortly. It was decided to grant Germany, France, England, Russia, America and Italy ten votes each, Austria and Holland seven votes each, Mexico, Persia, India, Switzerland, Turkey and Bulgaria, and possibly Ireland, Estonia and Korea four votes each, and Lithuania two votes.
The Commission decided to propose to the Congress to give Holland only four votes instead of seven.. The decision was taken by a majority of the Executive. Holland’s higher number of votes is in contradiction to the actual conditions. Neither the country nor the Party is big enough for it to march as a power of the second rank in the International. We have received a protest against the granting of credentials to Palestine, with the argument that it does not do to drive the Jewish proletariat to Palestine.
The Commission will still have to concern itself with that. The Congress has to reach a decision on two further questions, the question of the division of the American and British votes. As far as Britain is concerned, they fall into two parts; the BSP and the Shop Stewards. I personally am of the opinion that they should share the votes. The Congress will have to decide on this. As far as America is concerned, the situation is as follows: We have received the report on the unification of the American Parties, the American Communist Party and the American [Communist – Trans.] Labour Party. But the unification is not complete. Part of one of the parties does not want to participate. And now the question arises, how are we to share the votes? The unified Communist Party declares that it wants to have all the votes. But the part that has not entered the new party demands a share of the votes for itself. The Congress will have to decide on this question.
Zinoviev: The question arises: should we sanction the report of the Credentials Commission or open a discussion? I shall take a vote. Who is in favour of sanctioning all the proposals of the Credentials Commission on behalf of the Congress? [A vote is taken. The proposal is carried.]
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The session is closed at 11. 30.
Monday, March 07, 2011
The Anti-War Protest Season Continues-New York City Anti-War Rally April 9
The Anti-War Protest Season Continues-New York City Anti-War Rally April 9
Markin comment:
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
Markin comment:
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
Sunday, March 06, 2011
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)- From "Memoirs of a Revolutionary"- Victor Serge -On Third Congress of Comintern
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Victor Serge
from Chapter 4.
On Third Congress of Comintern
The Third Congress of the Communist International met at Moscow, in an atmosphere much the same as that of the previous Congress, except that the attendance was larger and the proceedings were more relaxed. With the coming of the N.E.P., the famine was getting a little less severe, and people anxiously expected a policy of appeasement to follow. The foreign delegates showed no interest in the tragedy of Kronstadt and, except for a few, deliberately closed their minds to any understanding of it. They sat in commission to condemn the Workers’ Opposition; this they did with enthusiasm, without giving it a hearing. They considered N.E.P., amenably enough, to be (as one of the French delegates put it to me) ‘an inspired turn to the Right’ that had saved the Revolution. It was hardly inspiration to yield to a famine after the situation had become quite insupportable. But the majesty of the Russian Revolution disarmed its supporters of all critical sense; they seemed to believe that approval of it entailed the abdication of the right to think.
At the Kremlin, in the great throne-room of the Imperial Palace, Lenin defended the New Economic Policy. As he spoke, he stood beneath tall, extravagantly gilded columns, under a canopy of scarlet velvet bearing the insignia of the Soviets. Dealing with international strategy, he argued for an armistice and a real effort to win over the masses. He was warm, friendly, genial, talking as simply as he could; it was as if he was determined to emphasize with every gesture that the head of the Soviet Government and the Russian Communist Party was still just another comrade — the leading one, of course, through his acknowledged intellectual and moral authority, but no more than this, and one who would never become just another statesman or just another dictator. He was obviously concerned to steer the International by persuasion. While some of the speeches were going on he would come down from the platform and sit on the steps, near the shorthand reporters, with his note-pad on his knee. From this position he would interrupt now and then with a little caustic comment that made everybody laugh, and a mischievous smile would light up his face. Or he would buttonhole foreign delegates, people who were almost unknown and practically insignificant,’ and take them into a corner of the hall to carry on, face to face, with the argument he had put forward. The Party must go to the masses! Yes, the masses! And not turn into a sect! And the N.E.P. was not nearly so dangerous as it looked from outside, because we still kept all the fullness of power.
Several times I saw him coming away from the Congress, wearing his cap and jacket, quite alone, walking along at a smart pace with the old cathedrals of the Kremlin on either side of him. I saw him batter Bela Kun with a speech of merciless invective, genial as ever, his face bursting with health and good spirits. This was at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the International, held during the Congress in a banqueting-room of a hotel on Theatre Square below the Kremlin, the Continental, I think. This speech marked a real turning-point in Communist policy.
I had some personal knowledge of Bela Kun, whom I found a wholly unattractive personality. We had been most anxious on his behalf when, after the defeat of the Hungarian Soviets, he had been interned in a Vienna mental asylum, where the Austrian Social-Democrats actually lavished attention on him. A Socialist who in the course of military service had been taken prisoner in Russia, he had begun his revolutionary career in Siberia with the Tomsk Bolsheviks. At the time of the Left Social-Revolutionary uprising of 19 18 in Moscow, he had won some distinction by his creation of an international brigade in support of the Party of Lenin and Trotsky. He was jailed at home and came out to become Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Hungary and leader of the Hungarian Communist Party. In these posts he had been responsible for a succession of faults and vacillations; he riddled his own Party with backstage repression and allowed a military conspiracy to gain control over practically the whole country. His personal role during the defeat of the Hungarian Soviets had been pathetic (though this was hardly ever mentioned, since a popular legend was being allowed to grow around his name). After some reverses the small Red Armies of Hungary regained the initiative. They beat the Rumanians and advanced into Czechoslovakia, where the popular movement gave them a sympathetic welcome. Clemenceau, alarmed by this recovery, sent a telegram to Bela Kun, asking him to call off the offensive and hinting that, if this were done, the Entente would negotiate with Red Hungary. Kun was taken in by this trick and halted the offensive; the Rumanians rallied their forces and counterattacked. That was the end.
I cannot help thinking that for the rest of his life Bela Kun was dominated by his sense of failure, and never stopped trying to compensate for it. During his mission in Germany he had, on 18 March of the previous year (192 1), instigated an uprising in Berlin which was both bloody and, given the undeniable weakness of the Communist Party, doomed to failure from the beginning. The Party emerged from the incident weakened, and divided by the expulsion of Paul Levi who strongly opposed such ‘insurrectionary adventures’.
[Paul Levi (1883-1930): Rosa Luxemburg’s lawyer and a former leader of the Independent Social-Democrats; co-founder of the Spartakusbund and later a leader of the early German Communist Party; supported Serrati’s objections to the ‘21 Conditions'; after 1921, founded a small independent group, then joined the Left wing of the Social Democrats; apparently committed suicide.]
After his return from Germany in the disgrace of another failure, Bela Kun had gone off to win glory in the Crimea.
At a meeting of the Executive of the International Lenin made a lengthy analysis of the Berlin affair, this putsch initiated without mass support, serious political calculation, or any possible outcome but defeat. There were few present, because of the confidential nature of the discussion. Bela Kun kept his big, round, puffy face well lowered; his sickly smile gradually faded away. Lenin spoke in French, briskly and harshly. Ten or more times, he used the phrase ‘les betises de Bela Kun': little words that turned his listeners to stone. My wife took down the speech in shorthand, and afterwards we had to edit it somewhat: after all it was out of the question for the symbolic figure of the Hungarian Revolution to be called an imbecile ten times over in a written record!
Actually, Lenin’s polemic marked the end of the International’s tactics of outright offensive. The failure of this approach had to be clearly stated, and besides Russia was now entering a period of internal appeasement; of these two considerations, of unequal worth, I am not sure which was the more influential. In its official resolution the Congress still praised the fighting spirit of the German Communist Party, and Bela Kun was not removed from the Executive.
If the Revolution had not been in such a parlous condition at the time, Kun would have had to face questioning about two other crimes. He had been a signatory to the treaty of alliance with Makhno’s Black army; he had also been one of those who tore it up as soon as the joint victory had been achieved. Then too, he had been a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Red Army, which in November 1920 had forced Baron Wrangel out of the Crimea. In this capacity Bela Kun had negotiated the surrender of the remnants of the White army. To this assortment of former Monarchist officers he promised an amnesty and the right to resume civilian work; later he ordered them to be massacred. Thousands of war prisoners were thus treacherously exterminated, in the name of ‘purging the country’.
Trotsky came to the Congress many times. No one ever wore a great destiny with more style. He was forty-one and at the apex of power, popularity and fame — leader of the Petrograd masses in two revolutions; creator of the Red Army, which (as Lenin had said to Gorky) he had literally ‘conjured out of nothing'; personally the victor of several decisive battles, at Sviazhsk, Kazan, and Pulkovo; the acknowledged organizer of victory in the Civil War — ‘Our Carnot!’ as Radek called him. He outshone Lenin through his great oratorical talent, through his organizing ability, first with the army, then on the railways, and by his brilliant gifts as a theoretician. As against all this Lenin possessed only the pre-eminence, which was truly quite immense, of having, even from before the Revolution, been the uncontested head of the tiny Bolshevik Party which constituted the real backbone of the State, and whose sectarian temper mistrusted the over-rich, over-fluid mind of the Chairman of the Supreme War Council. For a short time there was some talk, in various small groups at the Congress, of elevating Trotsky to the chairmanship of the International. Zinoviev must have been outraged by these pressure-groups, and doubtless Lenin preferred to keep his own spokesman at the top of the ‘World Party’. Trotsky himself intended to give his attention to the Soviet economy.
He made his appearance dressed in some kind of white uniform, bare of any insignia, with a broad, flat military cap, also in white, for headgear; his bearing was superbly martial, with his powerful chest, jet-black beard and hair, and flashing eye-glasses. His attitude was less homely than Lenin’s, with something authoritarian about it. That, maybe, is how my friends and I saw him, we critical Communists; we had much admiration for him, but no real love. His sternness, his insistence on punctuality in work and battle, the inflexible, correctness of his demeanour in a period of general slackness, all imparted a certain demagogic malice to the insidious attacks that were made against him. I was hardly influenced by these considerations, but the political solutions prescribed by him for current difficulties struck me as proceeding from a character that was basically dictatorial. Had he not proposed the fusion of the trade unions with the State — while Lenin quite rightly wanted the unions to keep some of their independence? We did not grasp that the trade-union influence might have actually worked upon the structure of the State, modifying it more effectively in a working-class direction. Had he not set up labour armies ? And suggested the militarization of industry as a remedy for its incredible state of chaos? We did not know that earlier, in the Central Committee, he had unsuccessfully proposed an end to the requisitioning system. Labour armies were a good enough expedient in the phase of demobilization. Had he not put his signature to a repulsively threatening manifesto against Kronstadt? The fact was that he had been in the thick of everything, acting with a self-confident energy which tried out directly opposite solutions by turns.
During one session, he came down straight from the platform and stood in the middle of our French group to give a translation of his own speech. He spoke passionately, in slightly incorrect but fluent French. He replied sharply when he was heckled — about the Terror, about violence, about Party discipline. Our little group appeared to irritate him. Vaillant-Couturier, Andre Morizet, Andre Julien, Fernand Loriot, Jacques and Clara Mesnil, and Boris Souvarine were all there. Trotsky was easy and cordial, but imperious in argument. On another occasion he flew at the Spanish delegate, Orlandis, who was attacking the persecution of the anarchists. Trotsky seized him violently by the coat-lapels and almost shouted, ‘I should certainly like to see that happening to you, petty-bourgeois that you people are!'
During this summer of 1921 I formed, among the comrades from abroad, a number of lasting and even life-long friendships. I resorted to those who came to Moscow with more concern for truth than orthodoxy, more anxiety for the future of the Revolution than admiration for the proletarian dictatorship. Our relationships were always initiated by conversations of an absolute frankness in which I set myself the responsibility of disclosing all the evils, dangers, difficulties, and uncertain prospects. In an era of fanatical conformism this was, as I still believe, a meritorious thing to do, demanding some courage. I gravitated towards people of a free spirit, those who were fired by a desire to serve the Revolution without closing their eyes. Already an ‘official truth’ was growing up, which seemed to me the most disastrous thing imaginable. I became acquainted with Henriette Roland-Holst, a Dutch Marxist and a notable poet.
[Henriette Roland-Holst (1869-1952): Dutch ‘Tribunist’ and then Communist; founded a short-lived Independent Communist Party in 1924; later became a Christian Socialist, pacifist, and opponent of colonialism; doyenne of Dutch literature over many years.]
Lank, scrawny and grey-haired, her neck disfigured by a goitre, she had a delicately sculptured face with an expression of gentleness and intellectual austerity.’ The questions she raised with me were symptomatic of a most scrupulous anxiety.
Two young men from the Spanish delegation gave us pledges for the future which they were destined to fulfil at tremendous cost: Joaquin Maurin and Andreu Nin. I have always believed that human qualities find their physical expression in a man’s personal appearance. A single glance was enough to tell the calibre of Maurin, the teacher from Lerida, and Nin, the teacher from Barcelona. Maurin had the bearing of a young Cavalier from a pre-Raphaelite painting; Nin, behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, wore an expression of concentration which was softened by his evident enjoyment of life. Both of them gave their lives to the cause: Maurin destined to an unending succession of jails; Nin to a horrible death during the Spanish Revolution. At this time the overwhelming impression they conveyed was one of idealism and the thirst for understanding.
The French, more sophisticated and more sceptical characters, were generally of a different stuff. Andre Morizet, the mayor of Boulogne, paraded his admirably sound and practical face and his drinking-songs for the benefit of us all. (Even now, at Suresnes, in occupied France, he is still fighting to keep his office as Labour mayor; he has returned, after a long interval, to traditional Socialism.) Andre Julien was piling up countless annotations for a work so compendious that he was never to write it. (In 1936 and 1937, he was to be one of the Socialist stalwarts of the Popular Front.)
Paul Vaillant-Couturier, a tank officer during the war, a poet, popular orator and ex-servicemen’s leader, was a tall, chubby young man of extraordinary talents, but fated to become a great disappointment to me. He understood everything that was going on; but in the future he was to acquiesce in his own corruption, to become increasingly entangled with all the villainies of Bolshevism’s degeneration, and to die, in working-class Paris, enviably popular.
Boris Souvarine, a Russian Jew by origin but a naturalized Frenchman, had no Socialist background; he came to us, at the age of twenty-five, from the world of left-wing journalism rather than from the working-class movement, with an amazing zest for knowledge and action. Slight and short, his eyes masked by lenses of unusual thick ness, speech lisping slightly, manner aggressive and often quick both to offend and to take offence, he had a habit of coming out suddenly with awkward questions; he would deliver mercilessly realistic verdicts on French personalities and events, and amuse himself by deflating swollen heads by smart pinpricks of his own devising. His stock was then very high, even though his first request on arrival was for a tour of the prisons. All the time he showed a magnificent facility for analysis, a lively grasp of realities, and an aptitude for polemic that was designed to leave a trail of indignation wherever he went. He became one of the leaders of the International and a member of its Executive Committee. Souvarine, despite his expulsion from the Comintern in 1924, was for some ten years to be one of the most trenchant and perceptive brains of European Communism.
I was on very close terms with both the French Communist groups in Russia, and was more or less the leader of the one in Petrograd. These groups formed striking instances of the law whereby mass-movements transform individuals, impel them into unpredictable courses of development, and mould their convictions. They also illustrated the law that the ebb-tide of events carries men away just as surely as the flood-tide brings them in. Although their ranks included several former French Socialists (whose inclinations had been quite alien to Bolshevism), these zealous Communists, who for the most part were perfectly sincere, came from all points of the political horizon only to make a speedy departure once again in equally variegated directions. The Moscow group was a little nest of vipers, although it was led by Pierre Pascal, a man of exemplary character. The quarrels, grudges, denunciations, and counter-denunciations of its two leading figures at the time, Henri Guilbeaux and Jacques Sadoul, completely demoralized it and finally earned the attentions of the Cheka. Guilbeaux’s whole life was a perfect example of the failure who, despite all his efforts, skirts the edge of success without ever managing to achieve it. He wrote cacophonous poetry, kept a card-index full of gossip about his comrades, and plagued the Cheka with confidential notes. He wore green shirts and pea-green ties with greenish suits; everything about him, including his crooked face and his eyes, seemed to have a touch of mould. (He died in Paris, about 1938, by then an anti-Semite, having published two books proving Mussolini to be the only true successor of Lenin.)
Jacques Sadoul was quite different: a Paris lawyer, an army captain, an information-officer in Russia on behalf of Albert Thomas, a member of the Comintern Executive, a flatterer of Lenin and Trotsky, a great charmer, a splendid raconteur, a sybarite, and a cool careerist to boot. However, he had produced a volume of Letters on the Revolution which is still a document of the first importance.
[Albert Thomas (1878-1932) was Minister of Munitions in the First World War and visited Russia after the February Revolution of 1917 in an attempt to arouse enthusiasm for the Allies.]
He had been condemned to death in France for crossing over to the Bolshevik side, but was one day to return home, times having changed, with an acquittal. After that he trailed alongside the full course of Stalinism, both as a lawyer acting for Soviet interests and as an agent in Parliamentary circles, though at heart he did not entertain the slightest illusion about Russia. The bread of bitterness tasted by revolutionaries held no temptations for him.
Rene Marchand, once the Petrograd correspondent for the Catholic-reactionary Figaro, was a fresh convert troubled by perpetual crises of conscience. He was soon to go off to Turkey, there to renounce Bolshevism and become an apologist, doubtless a sincere one, for Kemal Ataturk.
The outstanding figure in the Moscow French Communist group was Pierre Pascal, probably a distant descendant of Blaise Pascal, of whom he reminded me. I had met him in Moscow in 1919. There, his head shaven Russian-style, sporting a big Cossack moustache and smiling perpetually with his bright eyes, he would walk through the city barefoot and clad in a peasant tunic to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where he used to draft messages for Chicherin. A loyal and circumspect Catholic, he used St. Thomas’s Summa to justify his adherence to Bolshevism and even his approval of the Terror. (The texts of the learned saint lent themselves admirably to this task.) Pascal led an ascetic life, sympathizing with the Workers’ Opposition and hobnobbing with the anarchists. He had been a lieutenant with the French Military Mission, in charge of coding; he had crossed over to the Revolution in the middle of the intervention, to dedicate himself to it body and soul. He discussed its mystical significance with Berdyaev and translated Blok’s poems. He was to suffer terribly as the birth of totalitarianism progressed. I met him again in Paris in 1936. He was now a professor at the Sorbonne, the author of a solid biography of the Archpriest Avvakum, and more or less a Conservative. We, who had almost been brothers, could not talk together about the battle of Madrid....
The Executive had decided, on Russian initiative of course, to set up a trade-union International affiliated to the Comintern. Salomon Abramovich Lozovsky’ (or Dridzo), an ex-Menshevik of recent vintage and an inexhaustible orator, was in charge of the new organization.
[Lozovsky afterwards became Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then head of the Soviet Information Office; he was shot in 1952 at the age of 74.]
He had the air of a slightly fastidious schoolmaster amidst his world-wide assortment of trade-union militants whose political horizons did not extend very far beyond their own working-class districts at home. Not far from him, a one-eyed giant would pass through the crowd, downcast and solitary, but now and then distributing vigorous thumps on the shoulders of his mates. This was Bill Haywood, a former timberman, organizer of the I.W.W., who had come to end his days in the stuffy rooms of the Lux Hotel, among Marxists not one of whom tried to understand him and whom he scarcely understood himself. Still, he got a big thrill out of the red flags in the public squares.
Here too I met a Russian militant who had been in a British prison and was now home from Latin America: Dr. Alexandrov, I think. He was thirty-five, with a swarthy commonplace face, dark hair, and black moustache; very well-informed on all the happenings in the great world outside. He was later to become Comrade Borodin, the Russian political adviser to the Kuomintang at Canton.
[Later still Borodin edited the Moscow News, an English-language newspaper produced, at first, largely for foreign technicians working in the Soviet Union. In 1949 he was arrested with most of his staff, and deported to Siberia, where he died early in 1953. Chinese intervention is said to have saved him from execution.]
On the whole, the foreign delegates were a rather disappointing crowd, charmed at enjoying appreciable privileges in a starving country, quick to adulate and reluctant to think. Few workers could be seen among them, but plenty of politicians. ‘How pleased they are’, Jacques Mesnil remarked to me, ‘to be able to watch parades, at long last, from the official platform!’ The influence of the International was expanded only at the expense of quality. We began to ask ourselves whether it had not been a grave error to split the Socialist movement to form new little parties, incapable of effective action, fed with ideas and money by the Executive’s emissaries, and fated to become propaganda factories for the Soviet Government. We were already putting these problems to ourselves, but were reassured by the instability of Western Europe and the wave of enthusiasm which still held us. All the same, I did conclude that, in the International as well, the danger lay in ourselves.
The New Economic Policy was, in the space of a few months, already giving marvellous results. From one week to the next, the famine and the speculation were diminishing perceptibly. Restaurants were opening again and, wonder of wonders, pastries which were actually edible were on sale at a rouble apiece. The public was beginning to recover its breath, and people were apt to talk about the return of capitalism, which was synonymous with prosperity. On the other hand, the confusion among the Party rank-and-file was staggering. For what did we fight, spill so much blood, agree to so many sacrifices? asked the Civil War veterans bitterly. Usually these men lacked all the necessities: clothes, decent homes, money; and now everything was turning back into market-value. They felt that money, the vanquished foe, would soon come into its kingdom once again.
I personally was less pessimistic. I was glad that the change had taken place, though its reactionary side — the outright obliteration of every trace of democracy — worried and even distressed me. Would any other resolution of the drama of War Communism have been possible? This was by now a problem of only theoretical interest, but one worthy of some reflection. On this I developed some ideas, which I remember expounding on one occasion particularly, at a confidential meeting I had at the Lux Hotel with two Spanish Socialists. Fernando de los Rios was one of them.
[Fernando de los Rios (1879-1949): Professor of Ethics at Granada University, Minister of justice and of Education in the first Spanish Republican Government, and Ambassador to Washington during the Civil War.]
They ran as follows:
Through its intolerance and its arrogation of an absolute monopoly of power and initiative in all fields, the Bolshevik regime was floundering in its own toils. The big concessions to the peasantry were unavoidable, but small-scale manufacture, medium-scale trading, and certain industries could have been revived merely by appealing to the initiative of groups of Producers and consumers. By freeing the State-strangled co-operatives, and inviting various associations to take over the management of different branches of economic activity, an enormous degree of recovery could have been achieved straight away. The country was short of both shoes and leather; but the rural areas had leather, and shoe-makers’ cooperatives would have easily got hold of it and, once left to themselves, would have sprung into action at once. Of necessity they would have charged relatively high prices, but the State could, in the process of assisting their operations, have exercised a downward pressure upon their prices, which in any case would have been lower than those demanded by the black market. In Petrograd I could see what was happening to the book trade; the stocks of the bookshops, which had been confiscated, were rotting away in cellars which as often as not became flooded with water in the spring. We were most thankful to the thieves who salvaged a goodly number of books and put them back, clandestinely, into circulation. The book trade could, if it had been turned over to associations of book-lovers, have speedily recovered its health. In a word, I was arguing for a ‘Communism of associations’ — in contrast to Communism of the State variety. The competition inherent in such a system and the disorder inevitable in all beginnings would have caused less inconvenience than did our stringently bureaucratic centralization, with its muddle and paralysis. I thought of the total plan not as something to be dictated by the State from on high, but rather as resulting from the harmonizing, by congresses and specialized assemblies, of initiatives from below. However, since the Bolshevik mind had already ordained other solutions, it was a vision confined to the realms of pure theory.
Ever since Kronstadt some of my friends and I had been asking ourselves what jobs we were going to do. We had not the slightest desire to enter the ruling bureaucracy and become heads of offices or secretaries of institutions. I was offered entry into a diplomatic career, in the Orient at first. I was attracted by the prospect of the Orient, but not by diplomacy. We thought we had found a way out. We would found an agricultural colony in the heart of the Russian countryside; while the N.E.P. reinstated bourgeois habits in the towns and furnished the new rulers with sinecures and easy careers, we would live close to the earth, in the wilds. The earth of Russia,
with its sad and calm expanses, is endlessly fascinating. Without much ado we found a large, abandoned estate north of Petrograd, not far from Lake Ladoga, comprising some hundreds of acres of woodland and waste field, thirty head of cattle, and a landlord’s residence. There, together with French Communists, Hungarian prisoners-of-war, a Tolstoyan doctor and my father-in-law Russakov, we founded ‘the French Commune of Novaya-Ladoga.
We made a valiant beginning to this experiment, which turned out to be very hard going. The estate had been abandoned because the peasants would not agree to exploit it collectively; they demanded that it be shared out among them. Two chairmen of short-lived communes there had been murdered in the space of eighteen months. The village nearby boycotted us, although the children came at all hours to stare at the extraordinary creatures that we were. At the same time they spied everywhere, and if you forgot a shovel it disappeared at once. One night our entire stock of corn, which was to last for both food and seed until harvest-time, was stolen from us. It was a real state of famine and siege. Every night we waited up in case anyone tried to set the house on fire. We knew who was hiding our corn, but we did not, as they expected, go out with our revolvers to search for it, which only increased the suspicion and hatred surrounding us. The peasants had all the necessities, but refused to sell anything to the ‘Jews’ and ‘Anti-Christs’ that we were.
We decided to break this blockade; I went off to the village with Dr. N — , an old believer and Tolstoyan whose musical voice and benign solemnity would, we hoped, have some effect. A peasant woman curtly refused us everything we asked for. The doctor opened the neck of his blouse and brought out the little golden cross that he wore over his breast. ‘We are Christians too, little sister!’ Their faces lit up and we were given eggs! And little girls made so bold as to come to see us in the evenings, when we would all sing French songs together.... However, it could not last; in three months hunger and weariness forced us to abandon the project.
Since Kronstadt there had been a revival of the Terror in Petrograd. The Cheka had just ‘liquidated’ the Tagantsev conspiracy by executing some thirty people. I had known Professor Tagantsev a little: a skinny little old man with white side-whiskers, a jurist and one of the longest-established university teachers in the former capital. With him they shot a lawyer named Bak to whom I used to send translation jobs and who had never concealed his counterrevolutionary opinions from me.
At the same time they executed the splendid poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, my comrade and adversary back in Paris. I called on his home at the Moyka Art House, where he had a room with his very young wife, a tall girl with a slender neck and the eyes of a terrified gazelle. It was a huge room, with murals showing swans and lotuses — it had once been the bathroom of a merchant who had a taste for poetry with this sort of imagery. Gumilev’s young wife said to me in a low voice, ‘Haven’t you heard? They took him away three days ago.'
['Monsieur Bak, a former businessman and journalist for an Iron and Steel Board in the days of the Empire, a small, smooth-faced gentleman, appallingly refined and nice, was agreeable to translating articles on theory, but not revolutionary appeals. “Pardon me, citizen,” he would remark, “my conscience....” Naturally, I respected his conscience. . . .’ Serge, Deux Rencontres.]
The comrades at the Soviet Executive gave me news which was both reassuring and disturbing: Gumilev was being very well treated at the Cheka, he had spent some nights there reciting his poems — poems overflowing with stately energy — to the Chekists there; but he had admitted to having drafted certain political documents for the counter-revolutionary group. All this seemed likely enough. Gumilev had never concealed his ideas. During the Kronstadt revolt the circle at the university must have believed that the regime was about to fall, and had thought to assist in its liquidation. The ‘conspiracy’ could have gone no further than that. The Cheka made ready to shoot all of them: ‘This isn’t the time to go soft!’ One comrade travelled to Moscow to ask Dzerzhinsky a question: ‘Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia’s two or three poets of the first order?’ Dzerzhinsky answered, ‘Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?’ It was dawn, at the edge of a forest, when Gumilev fell, his cap pulled down over his eyes, a cigarette hanging from his lips, showing the same calm he had expressed in one of the poems he brought back from Ethiopia: ‘And fearless I shall appear before the Lord God.’ That, at least, is the tale as it was told to me. Over and over again, with mingled admiration. and horror, I read the verses which he had entitled ‘The Worker’, where he describes a gentle, grey-eyed man who, before going to bed, finishes making ‘the bullet that is going to kill me. ...'
The faces of Nikolai and Olga Gumilev were to haunt me for years afterwards.
At the same time another of our greatest poets was dying of debility, which was the same thing as starvation: Alexander Blok, at the age of forty-one. I knew him only slightly, but admired him boundlessly. Together with Andrei Bely and Sergei Yesenin he had inspired the mystical vision of the Revolution: ‘the Christ crowned with roses’ who, ‘invisible and silent’, walks in the snow-storm before the Twelve Red Guards, soldiers in peak-caps whose rifles are aimed at the city’s shadows. He had told me of his rebellions against the Revolution’s new absolutism, and I had heard him reading his last great work. His two poems, ‘The Twelve’, and ‘The Scythians’, were being translated into many languages, and they remain spiritual monuments of that era. The first proclaimed the Messianic character of the Revolution; the second revealed its ancient, Asiatic face. Contradictory, but so was reality. Blok was a gentlemanly Westerner, rather like an Englishman, blue-eyed and with a long, serious face that hardly ever smiled. He was restrained in his gestures, with a fine dignity about him. Ever since the rise of Symbolism, fifteen years ago, he had been the foremost Russian poet. I followed his corpse to the Vassili-Ostrov cemetery at the moment when the Cheka was passing sentence on Gumilev.
I belonged to the last surviving free-thought society; in all probability I was the only Communist member. This was the Free Philosophic Society, or Volfila, whose real guiding spirit was another brilliant poet, Andrei Bely. We organized big public debates, in which one of the speakers was often a shabby, squinting little man, wretchedly dressed, whose face was scored with perpendicular wrinkles. He was Ivanov-Razumnik, the historian and philosopher, still one of the finest representatives of the old revolutionary intelligentsia of Russia. Sometimes the discussion would dissolve into grand lyrical effusions on the problems of existence, consciousness, and the Cosmos. Like Blok, both Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik were somewhat attracted, by reason of their revolutionary romanticism, to the persecuted and silenced Left Social-Revolutionary Party. On account of this sympathy, and because the philosophical flights of the two poets trespassed beyond the bounds of Marxism, the Cheka and the Party had their eye on the Volfila. Its organizers wondered every day whether they were going to be arrested. We held our private meetings at Andrei Bely’s. At the time he was living in a huge room of the old military headquarters opposite the Winter Palace, just above the offices of the police-militia. There we would ask one another how we could preserve liberty of thought as a principle, and prove that it was not a counter-revolutionary principle. Bely suggested convening a World Congress of Free Thought in Moscow, and inviting to it Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and Gandhi. A chorus of voices cried back: ‘It'll never be allowed!’ I told them that if they appealed to intellectuals abroad, who were certainly incapable of any real understanding of revolutionary Russia, the Russian intellectuals ran a risk of discrediting the Revolution, which was already the object of indiscriminate attacks by the émigrés.
Andrei Bely, a daring stylist, a splendid writer of poetry and prose, and a theosophist (or anthroposophist, as he himself termed it) was just over forty. He was embarrassed at being bald, and so always wore a black skull-cap beneath which his great seer’s eyes, of a stony greenish-blue, gave out a continual glitter. The vitality and variety of his mind was prodigious. His whole behaviour reflected spiritual idealism, with sometimes the postures of a visionary, sometimes the frank outbursts of a child. In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, he had won fame through a psychological novel about the period, a mystical, revolutionary work impregnated with German and Latin culture. Now he was beginning to feel that his great energies were bankrupt.
‘What can I do now in this life?’ he asked me despondently one evening. ‘I cannot live outside this Russia of ours and I cannot breathe within it!'
I answered that the state of siege was sure to end, and that Western Socialism would open out vast prospects for Russia. ‘Do you think so?’ he said thoughtfully. However, at the beginning of the autumn of 1921, as the carnage of the Terror was filling us with horror, we saw even the Volfila disintegrate.
I am well aware that terror has been necessary up till now in all great revolutions, which do not happen according to the taste of well-intentioned men, but spontaneously, with the violence of tempests; and that it is our duty to employ the only weapons that history affords us if we are not to be overwhelmed through our own folly. But at the same time I saw that the perpetuation of terror, after the end of the Civil War and the transition to a period of economic freedom, was an immense and demoralizing blunder. I was and still am convinced that the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had henceforth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and the rights of all individuals without exception.
The tragedies continued. From Odessa we had monstrous news: the Cheka had just shot Fanny Baron (the wife of Aaron Baron) and Lev Chorny, one of the theoreticians of Russian anarchism. Lev Chorny had been well known to me in Paris twelve years earlier. A figure straight out of a Byzantine icon, with a waxy complexion and eyes that flashed from hollow sockets, he lived in the Latin Quarter, cleaning restaurant windows and then going off to write his Sociometry beneath the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens. His death incensed Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
[Aaron Baron was later deported to the north; but he was arrested during the purges of 1937 and never heard of again.]
During the Third Congress of the International Emma Goldman had thought of making a scene, after the manner of the English suffragettes, by chaining herself to a bench on one of the public balconies and shouting out her protest to the Congress. The Russian anarchists had persuaded her to change her mind. In the country of the Scythians such demonstrations had little value; far better to keep on nagging at Lenin and Zinoviev.
Meanwhile, our persistent campaign for the release of the victimized prisoners had met with some success: ten anarchist prisoners, including the syndicalist Maximov and Boris Voline, were authorized to leave Russia, and others were freed. Kamenev promised that Aaron Baron would be banished; a promise that was not fulfilled, since the Cheka was to oppose it.’ Certain Mensheviks, notably Martov, also obtained passports to travel abroad.
What with Kronstadt, these tragedies, and the influence of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman on the working-class movement in the Old World and the New, an unbridgeable gap was now to open between Marxists and libertarians: Later in history, this division would play a fatal part: it was one of the causes of the intellectual confusion and final defeat of the Spanish Revolution. In this respect, MY worst forebodings were fulfilled.
The American background of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman estranged them from the Russians, and turned them into representatives of an idealistic generation that had completely vanished in Russia. (I have no doubt that they were just as disconcerted and indignant over a good deal of what happened in Makhno’s movement.) They embodied the humanistic rebellion of the turn of the century: Emma Goldman with her organizing flair and practical disposition, her narrow but generous prejudices, and her self-importance, typical of American women devoted to social work; Berkman with the inward tension that sprang from his idealism in years long past. His eighteen years in an American prison had frozen him in the attitudes of his youth when, as an act of solidarity with a strike, he had offered up his life by shooting at one of the steel barons. When his tension relaxed he became dejected, and I could not help thinking that he was often troubled by ideas of suicide. In fact, it was only much later that he was to end his life, in 1936, on the Côte d'Azur.
The winds of an immeasurable calamity swept upon us from the parched plains of the Volga. The Civil War had crossed these regions, and now drought had destroyed them. Millions, starved of all necessities, fled from the famine. I saw them coming up even as far as Petrograd, on foot or in carts. Not everyone had the strength or the means to flee; these were all to die in millions on the spot. This scourge, which struck at both the Ukraine and the Crimea, devastated areas populated by 23,000,000 inhabitants. The blow was so severe that authority tottered. Could the Bolshevik dictatorship overcome the ghastly spectre of death? I met Maxim Gorky, bony, grey, and frowning as never before; he told me of the formation of a committee of leading intellectuals and non-Communist technicians, which was to appeal to all the latent energies of the country, and might well be the germ of tomorrow’s democratic government. (The Government at first recognized this committee, which was headed by the Marxist-revisionist economist Prokopovich and the Liberal publicist, Ekaterina Kusskova; then it had these two arrested and expelled from the country.)
[S. N. Prokopovich (1871-1955) and his wife Ekaterina Kusskova (1869-1958) were prominent on the Liberal (and subsequently the ‘revisionist') wing of the Russian Labour and co-operative movement. Prokopovich served as a Minister under Kerensky and wrote in exile important works on the Soviet economy. Kusskova was a leading figure in the group of émigrés who believed in the eventual liberalization of the Soviet regime.]
I did not share Gorky’s opinion; the revolutionary regime seemed to me already encased in so impenetrable an armour that the skeleton hand of famine could not manage to dislodge it from power. And, despite everything, I was very definitely committed to the regime’s survival; I had faith in its future and I knew that for some years Russia would be incapable of any fresh thrust forward from her present condition.
The two groups of friends whose company I kept, the French and the Russian, both suffered from a similar distress. Most of my comrades decided to abandon either political life or the Party. Novomirsky, a high official in the International, an ex-terrorist from 1905, an ex-convict and former anarchist who had been won for Bolshevism by Lenin’s goodwill, now sent his membership card back to the Central Committee on account of his fundamental disagreements. He devoted himself to scientific work, and nobody thought of bearing him any grudge. (All the same, he was to be remembered in 1937 when he disappeared, along with his wife, into the concentration-camps.) Marcel Body, a Socialist worker, arranged to be sent to the Soviet Embassy in Oslo. Another got sent to Turkey. Another went to manage a sawmill in the heart of the Far East. Pierre Pascal quietly withdrew from the Party and earned his living as a translator, at the same time working on his history of the schism of the Russian Church. I was tougher inside, and enjoyed (as I think) a broader vision of the Revolution, as well as having less individualistic sentiment in my make-up. I did not feel disheartened or disoriented. I was disgusted at certain things, psychologically exhausted by the Terror and tormented by the mass of wrongs that I could see growing, which I was powerless to counteract. My conclusions were that the Russian Revolution, left to itself, would probably, in one way or another, collapse (I did not see how: would it be through war or domestic reaction?); that the Russians, who had made superhuman efforts to build a new society, were more or less at the end of their strength; and that relief and salvation must come from the West. From now on it was necessary to work to build a Western working-class movement capable of supporting the Russians and, one day, superseding them. I decided to leave for Central Europe, which seemed to be the focus Of events to come. (The condition of my wife, who was now on the verge of tuberculosis as a result of all the privations, was another factor that encouraged me in this direction.) Zinoviev and the comrades on the Executive offered me a post in Berlin, working in illegality. If danger was within us, salvation must lie within us no less.
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Victor Serge
from Chapter 4.
On Third Congress of Comintern
The Third Congress of the Communist International met at Moscow, in an atmosphere much the same as that of the previous Congress, except that the attendance was larger and the proceedings were more relaxed. With the coming of the N.E.P., the famine was getting a little less severe, and people anxiously expected a policy of appeasement to follow. The foreign delegates showed no interest in the tragedy of Kronstadt and, except for a few, deliberately closed their minds to any understanding of it. They sat in commission to condemn the Workers’ Opposition; this they did with enthusiasm, without giving it a hearing. They considered N.E.P., amenably enough, to be (as one of the French delegates put it to me) ‘an inspired turn to the Right’ that had saved the Revolution. It was hardly inspiration to yield to a famine after the situation had become quite insupportable. But the majesty of the Russian Revolution disarmed its supporters of all critical sense; they seemed to believe that approval of it entailed the abdication of the right to think.
At the Kremlin, in the great throne-room of the Imperial Palace, Lenin defended the New Economic Policy. As he spoke, he stood beneath tall, extravagantly gilded columns, under a canopy of scarlet velvet bearing the insignia of the Soviets. Dealing with international strategy, he argued for an armistice and a real effort to win over the masses. He was warm, friendly, genial, talking as simply as he could; it was as if he was determined to emphasize with every gesture that the head of the Soviet Government and the Russian Communist Party was still just another comrade — the leading one, of course, through his acknowledged intellectual and moral authority, but no more than this, and one who would never become just another statesman or just another dictator. He was obviously concerned to steer the International by persuasion. While some of the speeches were going on he would come down from the platform and sit on the steps, near the shorthand reporters, with his note-pad on his knee. From this position he would interrupt now and then with a little caustic comment that made everybody laugh, and a mischievous smile would light up his face. Or he would buttonhole foreign delegates, people who were almost unknown and practically insignificant,’ and take them into a corner of the hall to carry on, face to face, with the argument he had put forward. The Party must go to the masses! Yes, the masses! And not turn into a sect! And the N.E.P. was not nearly so dangerous as it looked from outside, because we still kept all the fullness of power.
Several times I saw him coming away from the Congress, wearing his cap and jacket, quite alone, walking along at a smart pace with the old cathedrals of the Kremlin on either side of him. I saw him batter Bela Kun with a speech of merciless invective, genial as ever, his face bursting with health and good spirits. This was at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the International, held during the Congress in a banqueting-room of a hotel on Theatre Square below the Kremlin, the Continental, I think. This speech marked a real turning-point in Communist policy.
I had some personal knowledge of Bela Kun, whom I found a wholly unattractive personality. We had been most anxious on his behalf when, after the defeat of the Hungarian Soviets, he had been interned in a Vienna mental asylum, where the Austrian Social-Democrats actually lavished attention on him. A Socialist who in the course of military service had been taken prisoner in Russia, he had begun his revolutionary career in Siberia with the Tomsk Bolsheviks. At the time of the Left Social-Revolutionary uprising of 19 18 in Moscow, he had won some distinction by his creation of an international brigade in support of the Party of Lenin and Trotsky. He was jailed at home and came out to become Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Hungary and leader of the Hungarian Communist Party. In these posts he had been responsible for a succession of faults and vacillations; he riddled his own Party with backstage repression and allowed a military conspiracy to gain control over practically the whole country. His personal role during the defeat of the Hungarian Soviets had been pathetic (though this was hardly ever mentioned, since a popular legend was being allowed to grow around his name). After some reverses the small Red Armies of Hungary regained the initiative. They beat the Rumanians and advanced into Czechoslovakia, where the popular movement gave them a sympathetic welcome. Clemenceau, alarmed by this recovery, sent a telegram to Bela Kun, asking him to call off the offensive and hinting that, if this were done, the Entente would negotiate with Red Hungary. Kun was taken in by this trick and halted the offensive; the Rumanians rallied their forces and counterattacked. That was the end.
I cannot help thinking that for the rest of his life Bela Kun was dominated by his sense of failure, and never stopped trying to compensate for it. During his mission in Germany he had, on 18 March of the previous year (192 1), instigated an uprising in Berlin which was both bloody and, given the undeniable weakness of the Communist Party, doomed to failure from the beginning. The Party emerged from the incident weakened, and divided by the expulsion of Paul Levi who strongly opposed such ‘insurrectionary adventures’.
[Paul Levi (1883-1930): Rosa Luxemburg’s lawyer and a former leader of the Independent Social-Democrats; co-founder of the Spartakusbund and later a leader of the early German Communist Party; supported Serrati’s objections to the ‘21 Conditions'; after 1921, founded a small independent group, then joined the Left wing of the Social Democrats; apparently committed suicide.]
After his return from Germany in the disgrace of another failure, Bela Kun had gone off to win glory in the Crimea.
At a meeting of the Executive of the International Lenin made a lengthy analysis of the Berlin affair, this putsch initiated without mass support, serious political calculation, or any possible outcome but defeat. There were few present, because of the confidential nature of the discussion. Bela Kun kept his big, round, puffy face well lowered; his sickly smile gradually faded away. Lenin spoke in French, briskly and harshly. Ten or more times, he used the phrase ‘les betises de Bela Kun': little words that turned his listeners to stone. My wife took down the speech in shorthand, and afterwards we had to edit it somewhat: after all it was out of the question for the symbolic figure of the Hungarian Revolution to be called an imbecile ten times over in a written record!
Actually, Lenin’s polemic marked the end of the International’s tactics of outright offensive. The failure of this approach had to be clearly stated, and besides Russia was now entering a period of internal appeasement; of these two considerations, of unequal worth, I am not sure which was the more influential. In its official resolution the Congress still praised the fighting spirit of the German Communist Party, and Bela Kun was not removed from the Executive.
If the Revolution had not been in such a parlous condition at the time, Kun would have had to face questioning about two other crimes. He had been a signatory to the treaty of alliance with Makhno’s Black army; he had also been one of those who tore it up as soon as the joint victory had been achieved. Then too, he had been a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Red Army, which in November 1920 had forced Baron Wrangel out of the Crimea. In this capacity Bela Kun had negotiated the surrender of the remnants of the White army. To this assortment of former Monarchist officers he promised an amnesty and the right to resume civilian work; later he ordered them to be massacred. Thousands of war prisoners were thus treacherously exterminated, in the name of ‘purging the country’.
Trotsky came to the Congress many times. No one ever wore a great destiny with more style. He was forty-one and at the apex of power, popularity and fame — leader of the Petrograd masses in two revolutions; creator of the Red Army, which (as Lenin had said to Gorky) he had literally ‘conjured out of nothing'; personally the victor of several decisive battles, at Sviazhsk, Kazan, and Pulkovo; the acknowledged organizer of victory in the Civil War — ‘Our Carnot!’ as Radek called him. He outshone Lenin through his great oratorical talent, through his organizing ability, first with the army, then on the railways, and by his brilliant gifts as a theoretician. As against all this Lenin possessed only the pre-eminence, which was truly quite immense, of having, even from before the Revolution, been the uncontested head of the tiny Bolshevik Party which constituted the real backbone of the State, and whose sectarian temper mistrusted the over-rich, over-fluid mind of the Chairman of the Supreme War Council. For a short time there was some talk, in various small groups at the Congress, of elevating Trotsky to the chairmanship of the International. Zinoviev must have been outraged by these pressure-groups, and doubtless Lenin preferred to keep his own spokesman at the top of the ‘World Party’. Trotsky himself intended to give his attention to the Soviet economy.
He made his appearance dressed in some kind of white uniform, bare of any insignia, with a broad, flat military cap, also in white, for headgear; his bearing was superbly martial, with his powerful chest, jet-black beard and hair, and flashing eye-glasses. His attitude was less homely than Lenin’s, with something authoritarian about it. That, maybe, is how my friends and I saw him, we critical Communists; we had much admiration for him, but no real love. His sternness, his insistence on punctuality in work and battle, the inflexible, correctness of his demeanour in a period of general slackness, all imparted a certain demagogic malice to the insidious attacks that were made against him. I was hardly influenced by these considerations, but the political solutions prescribed by him for current difficulties struck me as proceeding from a character that was basically dictatorial. Had he not proposed the fusion of the trade unions with the State — while Lenin quite rightly wanted the unions to keep some of their independence? We did not grasp that the trade-union influence might have actually worked upon the structure of the State, modifying it more effectively in a working-class direction. Had he not set up labour armies ? And suggested the militarization of industry as a remedy for its incredible state of chaos? We did not know that earlier, in the Central Committee, he had unsuccessfully proposed an end to the requisitioning system. Labour armies were a good enough expedient in the phase of demobilization. Had he not put his signature to a repulsively threatening manifesto against Kronstadt? The fact was that he had been in the thick of everything, acting with a self-confident energy which tried out directly opposite solutions by turns.
During one session, he came down straight from the platform and stood in the middle of our French group to give a translation of his own speech. He spoke passionately, in slightly incorrect but fluent French. He replied sharply when he was heckled — about the Terror, about violence, about Party discipline. Our little group appeared to irritate him. Vaillant-Couturier, Andre Morizet, Andre Julien, Fernand Loriot, Jacques and Clara Mesnil, and Boris Souvarine were all there. Trotsky was easy and cordial, but imperious in argument. On another occasion he flew at the Spanish delegate, Orlandis, who was attacking the persecution of the anarchists. Trotsky seized him violently by the coat-lapels and almost shouted, ‘I should certainly like to see that happening to you, petty-bourgeois that you people are!'
During this summer of 1921 I formed, among the comrades from abroad, a number of lasting and even life-long friendships. I resorted to those who came to Moscow with more concern for truth than orthodoxy, more anxiety for the future of the Revolution than admiration for the proletarian dictatorship. Our relationships were always initiated by conversations of an absolute frankness in which I set myself the responsibility of disclosing all the evils, dangers, difficulties, and uncertain prospects. In an era of fanatical conformism this was, as I still believe, a meritorious thing to do, demanding some courage. I gravitated towards people of a free spirit, those who were fired by a desire to serve the Revolution without closing their eyes. Already an ‘official truth’ was growing up, which seemed to me the most disastrous thing imaginable. I became acquainted with Henriette Roland-Holst, a Dutch Marxist and a notable poet.
[Henriette Roland-Holst (1869-1952): Dutch ‘Tribunist’ and then Communist; founded a short-lived Independent Communist Party in 1924; later became a Christian Socialist, pacifist, and opponent of colonialism; doyenne of Dutch literature over many years.]
Lank, scrawny and grey-haired, her neck disfigured by a goitre, she had a delicately sculptured face with an expression of gentleness and intellectual austerity.’ The questions she raised with me were symptomatic of a most scrupulous anxiety.
Two young men from the Spanish delegation gave us pledges for the future which they were destined to fulfil at tremendous cost: Joaquin Maurin and Andreu Nin. I have always believed that human qualities find their physical expression in a man’s personal appearance. A single glance was enough to tell the calibre of Maurin, the teacher from Lerida, and Nin, the teacher from Barcelona. Maurin had the bearing of a young Cavalier from a pre-Raphaelite painting; Nin, behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, wore an expression of concentration which was softened by his evident enjoyment of life. Both of them gave their lives to the cause: Maurin destined to an unending succession of jails; Nin to a horrible death during the Spanish Revolution. At this time the overwhelming impression they conveyed was one of idealism and the thirst for understanding.
The French, more sophisticated and more sceptical characters, were generally of a different stuff. Andre Morizet, the mayor of Boulogne, paraded his admirably sound and practical face and his drinking-songs for the benefit of us all. (Even now, at Suresnes, in occupied France, he is still fighting to keep his office as Labour mayor; he has returned, after a long interval, to traditional Socialism.) Andre Julien was piling up countless annotations for a work so compendious that he was never to write it. (In 1936 and 1937, he was to be one of the Socialist stalwarts of the Popular Front.)
Paul Vaillant-Couturier, a tank officer during the war, a poet, popular orator and ex-servicemen’s leader, was a tall, chubby young man of extraordinary talents, but fated to become a great disappointment to me. He understood everything that was going on; but in the future he was to acquiesce in his own corruption, to become increasingly entangled with all the villainies of Bolshevism’s degeneration, and to die, in working-class Paris, enviably popular.
Boris Souvarine, a Russian Jew by origin but a naturalized Frenchman, had no Socialist background; he came to us, at the age of twenty-five, from the world of left-wing journalism rather than from the working-class movement, with an amazing zest for knowledge and action. Slight and short, his eyes masked by lenses of unusual thick ness, speech lisping slightly, manner aggressive and often quick both to offend and to take offence, he had a habit of coming out suddenly with awkward questions; he would deliver mercilessly realistic verdicts on French personalities and events, and amuse himself by deflating swollen heads by smart pinpricks of his own devising. His stock was then very high, even though his first request on arrival was for a tour of the prisons. All the time he showed a magnificent facility for analysis, a lively grasp of realities, and an aptitude for polemic that was designed to leave a trail of indignation wherever he went. He became one of the leaders of the International and a member of its Executive Committee. Souvarine, despite his expulsion from the Comintern in 1924, was for some ten years to be one of the most trenchant and perceptive brains of European Communism.
I was on very close terms with both the French Communist groups in Russia, and was more or less the leader of the one in Petrograd. These groups formed striking instances of the law whereby mass-movements transform individuals, impel them into unpredictable courses of development, and mould their convictions. They also illustrated the law that the ebb-tide of events carries men away just as surely as the flood-tide brings them in. Although their ranks included several former French Socialists (whose inclinations had been quite alien to Bolshevism), these zealous Communists, who for the most part were perfectly sincere, came from all points of the political horizon only to make a speedy departure once again in equally variegated directions. The Moscow group was a little nest of vipers, although it was led by Pierre Pascal, a man of exemplary character. The quarrels, grudges, denunciations, and counter-denunciations of its two leading figures at the time, Henri Guilbeaux and Jacques Sadoul, completely demoralized it and finally earned the attentions of the Cheka. Guilbeaux’s whole life was a perfect example of the failure who, despite all his efforts, skirts the edge of success without ever managing to achieve it. He wrote cacophonous poetry, kept a card-index full of gossip about his comrades, and plagued the Cheka with confidential notes. He wore green shirts and pea-green ties with greenish suits; everything about him, including his crooked face and his eyes, seemed to have a touch of mould. (He died in Paris, about 1938, by then an anti-Semite, having published two books proving Mussolini to be the only true successor of Lenin.)
Jacques Sadoul was quite different: a Paris lawyer, an army captain, an information-officer in Russia on behalf of Albert Thomas, a member of the Comintern Executive, a flatterer of Lenin and Trotsky, a great charmer, a splendid raconteur, a sybarite, and a cool careerist to boot. However, he had produced a volume of Letters on the Revolution which is still a document of the first importance.
[Albert Thomas (1878-1932) was Minister of Munitions in the First World War and visited Russia after the February Revolution of 1917 in an attempt to arouse enthusiasm for the Allies.]
He had been condemned to death in France for crossing over to the Bolshevik side, but was one day to return home, times having changed, with an acquittal. After that he trailed alongside the full course of Stalinism, both as a lawyer acting for Soviet interests and as an agent in Parliamentary circles, though at heart he did not entertain the slightest illusion about Russia. The bread of bitterness tasted by revolutionaries held no temptations for him.
Rene Marchand, once the Petrograd correspondent for the Catholic-reactionary Figaro, was a fresh convert troubled by perpetual crises of conscience. He was soon to go off to Turkey, there to renounce Bolshevism and become an apologist, doubtless a sincere one, for Kemal Ataturk.
The outstanding figure in the Moscow French Communist group was Pierre Pascal, probably a distant descendant of Blaise Pascal, of whom he reminded me. I had met him in Moscow in 1919. There, his head shaven Russian-style, sporting a big Cossack moustache and smiling perpetually with his bright eyes, he would walk through the city barefoot and clad in a peasant tunic to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where he used to draft messages for Chicherin. A loyal and circumspect Catholic, he used St. Thomas’s Summa to justify his adherence to Bolshevism and even his approval of the Terror. (The texts of the learned saint lent themselves admirably to this task.) Pascal led an ascetic life, sympathizing with the Workers’ Opposition and hobnobbing with the anarchists. He had been a lieutenant with the French Military Mission, in charge of coding; he had crossed over to the Revolution in the middle of the intervention, to dedicate himself to it body and soul. He discussed its mystical significance with Berdyaev and translated Blok’s poems. He was to suffer terribly as the birth of totalitarianism progressed. I met him again in Paris in 1936. He was now a professor at the Sorbonne, the author of a solid biography of the Archpriest Avvakum, and more or less a Conservative. We, who had almost been brothers, could not talk together about the battle of Madrid....
The Executive had decided, on Russian initiative of course, to set up a trade-union International affiliated to the Comintern. Salomon Abramovich Lozovsky’ (or Dridzo), an ex-Menshevik of recent vintage and an inexhaustible orator, was in charge of the new organization.
[Lozovsky afterwards became Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then head of the Soviet Information Office; he was shot in 1952 at the age of 74.]
He had the air of a slightly fastidious schoolmaster amidst his world-wide assortment of trade-union militants whose political horizons did not extend very far beyond their own working-class districts at home. Not far from him, a one-eyed giant would pass through the crowd, downcast and solitary, but now and then distributing vigorous thumps on the shoulders of his mates. This was Bill Haywood, a former timberman, organizer of the I.W.W., who had come to end his days in the stuffy rooms of the Lux Hotel, among Marxists not one of whom tried to understand him and whom he scarcely understood himself. Still, he got a big thrill out of the red flags in the public squares.
Here too I met a Russian militant who had been in a British prison and was now home from Latin America: Dr. Alexandrov, I think. He was thirty-five, with a swarthy commonplace face, dark hair, and black moustache; very well-informed on all the happenings in the great world outside. He was later to become Comrade Borodin, the Russian political adviser to the Kuomintang at Canton.
[Later still Borodin edited the Moscow News, an English-language newspaper produced, at first, largely for foreign technicians working in the Soviet Union. In 1949 he was arrested with most of his staff, and deported to Siberia, where he died early in 1953. Chinese intervention is said to have saved him from execution.]
On the whole, the foreign delegates were a rather disappointing crowd, charmed at enjoying appreciable privileges in a starving country, quick to adulate and reluctant to think. Few workers could be seen among them, but plenty of politicians. ‘How pleased they are’, Jacques Mesnil remarked to me, ‘to be able to watch parades, at long last, from the official platform!’ The influence of the International was expanded only at the expense of quality. We began to ask ourselves whether it had not been a grave error to split the Socialist movement to form new little parties, incapable of effective action, fed with ideas and money by the Executive’s emissaries, and fated to become propaganda factories for the Soviet Government. We were already putting these problems to ourselves, but were reassured by the instability of Western Europe and the wave of enthusiasm which still held us. All the same, I did conclude that, in the International as well, the danger lay in ourselves.
The New Economic Policy was, in the space of a few months, already giving marvellous results. From one week to the next, the famine and the speculation were diminishing perceptibly. Restaurants were opening again and, wonder of wonders, pastries which were actually edible were on sale at a rouble apiece. The public was beginning to recover its breath, and people were apt to talk about the return of capitalism, which was synonymous with prosperity. On the other hand, the confusion among the Party rank-and-file was staggering. For what did we fight, spill so much blood, agree to so many sacrifices? asked the Civil War veterans bitterly. Usually these men lacked all the necessities: clothes, decent homes, money; and now everything was turning back into market-value. They felt that money, the vanquished foe, would soon come into its kingdom once again.
I personally was less pessimistic. I was glad that the change had taken place, though its reactionary side — the outright obliteration of every trace of democracy — worried and even distressed me. Would any other resolution of the drama of War Communism have been possible? This was by now a problem of only theoretical interest, but one worthy of some reflection. On this I developed some ideas, which I remember expounding on one occasion particularly, at a confidential meeting I had at the Lux Hotel with two Spanish Socialists. Fernando de los Rios was one of them.
[Fernando de los Rios (1879-1949): Professor of Ethics at Granada University, Minister of justice and of Education in the first Spanish Republican Government, and Ambassador to Washington during the Civil War.]
They ran as follows:
Through its intolerance and its arrogation of an absolute monopoly of power and initiative in all fields, the Bolshevik regime was floundering in its own toils. The big concessions to the peasantry were unavoidable, but small-scale manufacture, medium-scale trading, and certain industries could have been revived merely by appealing to the initiative of groups of Producers and consumers. By freeing the State-strangled co-operatives, and inviting various associations to take over the management of different branches of economic activity, an enormous degree of recovery could have been achieved straight away. The country was short of both shoes and leather; but the rural areas had leather, and shoe-makers’ cooperatives would have easily got hold of it and, once left to themselves, would have sprung into action at once. Of necessity they would have charged relatively high prices, but the State could, in the process of assisting their operations, have exercised a downward pressure upon their prices, which in any case would have been lower than those demanded by the black market. In Petrograd I could see what was happening to the book trade; the stocks of the bookshops, which had been confiscated, were rotting away in cellars which as often as not became flooded with water in the spring. We were most thankful to the thieves who salvaged a goodly number of books and put them back, clandestinely, into circulation. The book trade could, if it had been turned over to associations of book-lovers, have speedily recovered its health. In a word, I was arguing for a ‘Communism of associations’ — in contrast to Communism of the State variety. The competition inherent in such a system and the disorder inevitable in all beginnings would have caused less inconvenience than did our stringently bureaucratic centralization, with its muddle and paralysis. I thought of the total plan not as something to be dictated by the State from on high, but rather as resulting from the harmonizing, by congresses and specialized assemblies, of initiatives from below. However, since the Bolshevik mind had already ordained other solutions, it was a vision confined to the realms of pure theory.
Ever since Kronstadt some of my friends and I had been asking ourselves what jobs we were going to do. We had not the slightest desire to enter the ruling bureaucracy and become heads of offices or secretaries of institutions. I was offered entry into a diplomatic career, in the Orient at first. I was attracted by the prospect of the Orient, but not by diplomacy. We thought we had found a way out. We would found an agricultural colony in the heart of the Russian countryside; while the N.E.P. reinstated bourgeois habits in the towns and furnished the new rulers with sinecures and easy careers, we would live close to the earth, in the wilds. The earth of Russia,
with its sad and calm expanses, is endlessly fascinating. Without much ado we found a large, abandoned estate north of Petrograd, not far from Lake Ladoga, comprising some hundreds of acres of woodland and waste field, thirty head of cattle, and a landlord’s residence. There, together with French Communists, Hungarian prisoners-of-war, a Tolstoyan doctor and my father-in-law Russakov, we founded ‘the French Commune of Novaya-Ladoga.
We made a valiant beginning to this experiment, which turned out to be very hard going. The estate had been abandoned because the peasants would not agree to exploit it collectively; they demanded that it be shared out among them. Two chairmen of short-lived communes there had been murdered in the space of eighteen months. The village nearby boycotted us, although the children came at all hours to stare at the extraordinary creatures that we were. At the same time they spied everywhere, and if you forgot a shovel it disappeared at once. One night our entire stock of corn, which was to last for both food and seed until harvest-time, was stolen from us. It was a real state of famine and siege. Every night we waited up in case anyone tried to set the house on fire. We knew who was hiding our corn, but we did not, as they expected, go out with our revolvers to search for it, which only increased the suspicion and hatred surrounding us. The peasants had all the necessities, but refused to sell anything to the ‘Jews’ and ‘Anti-Christs’ that we were.
We decided to break this blockade; I went off to the village with Dr. N — , an old believer and Tolstoyan whose musical voice and benign solemnity would, we hoped, have some effect. A peasant woman curtly refused us everything we asked for. The doctor opened the neck of his blouse and brought out the little golden cross that he wore over his breast. ‘We are Christians too, little sister!’ Their faces lit up and we were given eggs! And little girls made so bold as to come to see us in the evenings, when we would all sing French songs together.... However, it could not last; in three months hunger and weariness forced us to abandon the project.
Since Kronstadt there had been a revival of the Terror in Petrograd. The Cheka had just ‘liquidated’ the Tagantsev conspiracy by executing some thirty people. I had known Professor Tagantsev a little: a skinny little old man with white side-whiskers, a jurist and one of the longest-established university teachers in the former capital. With him they shot a lawyer named Bak to whom I used to send translation jobs and who had never concealed his counterrevolutionary opinions from me.
At the same time they executed the splendid poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, my comrade and adversary back in Paris. I called on his home at the Moyka Art House, where he had a room with his very young wife, a tall girl with a slender neck and the eyes of a terrified gazelle. It was a huge room, with murals showing swans and lotuses — it had once been the bathroom of a merchant who had a taste for poetry with this sort of imagery. Gumilev’s young wife said to me in a low voice, ‘Haven’t you heard? They took him away three days ago.'
['Monsieur Bak, a former businessman and journalist for an Iron and Steel Board in the days of the Empire, a small, smooth-faced gentleman, appallingly refined and nice, was agreeable to translating articles on theory, but not revolutionary appeals. “Pardon me, citizen,” he would remark, “my conscience....” Naturally, I respected his conscience. . . .’ Serge, Deux Rencontres.]
The comrades at the Soviet Executive gave me news which was both reassuring and disturbing: Gumilev was being very well treated at the Cheka, he had spent some nights there reciting his poems — poems overflowing with stately energy — to the Chekists there; but he had admitted to having drafted certain political documents for the counter-revolutionary group. All this seemed likely enough. Gumilev had never concealed his ideas. During the Kronstadt revolt the circle at the university must have believed that the regime was about to fall, and had thought to assist in its liquidation. The ‘conspiracy’ could have gone no further than that. The Cheka made ready to shoot all of them: ‘This isn’t the time to go soft!’ One comrade travelled to Moscow to ask Dzerzhinsky a question: ‘Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia’s two or three poets of the first order?’ Dzerzhinsky answered, ‘Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?’ It was dawn, at the edge of a forest, when Gumilev fell, his cap pulled down over his eyes, a cigarette hanging from his lips, showing the same calm he had expressed in one of the poems he brought back from Ethiopia: ‘And fearless I shall appear before the Lord God.’ That, at least, is the tale as it was told to me. Over and over again, with mingled admiration. and horror, I read the verses which he had entitled ‘The Worker’, where he describes a gentle, grey-eyed man who, before going to bed, finishes making ‘the bullet that is going to kill me. ...'
The faces of Nikolai and Olga Gumilev were to haunt me for years afterwards.
At the same time another of our greatest poets was dying of debility, which was the same thing as starvation: Alexander Blok, at the age of forty-one. I knew him only slightly, but admired him boundlessly. Together with Andrei Bely and Sergei Yesenin he had inspired the mystical vision of the Revolution: ‘the Christ crowned with roses’ who, ‘invisible and silent’, walks in the snow-storm before the Twelve Red Guards, soldiers in peak-caps whose rifles are aimed at the city’s shadows. He had told me of his rebellions against the Revolution’s new absolutism, and I had heard him reading his last great work. His two poems, ‘The Twelve’, and ‘The Scythians’, were being translated into many languages, and they remain spiritual monuments of that era. The first proclaimed the Messianic character of the Revolution; the second revealed its ancient, Asiatic face. Contradictory, but so was reality. Blok was a gentlemanly Westerner, rather like an Englishman, blue-eyed and with a long, serious face that hardly ever smiled. He was restrained in his gestures, with a fine dignity about him. Ever since the rise of Symbolism, fifteen years ago, he had been the foremost Russian poet. I followed his corpse to the Vassili-Ostrov cemetery at the moment when the Cheka was passing sentence on Gumilev.
I belonged to the last surviving free-thought society; in all probability I was the only Communist member. This was the Free Philosophic Society, or Volfila, whose real guiding spirit was another brilliant poet, Andrei Bely. We organized big public debates, in which one of the speakers was often a shabby, squinting little man, wretchedly dressed, whose face was scored with perpendicular wrinkles. He was Ivanov-Razumnik, the historian and philosopher, still one of the finest representatives of the old revolutionary intelligentsia of Russia. Sometimes the discussion would dissolve into grand lyrical effusions on the problems of existence, consciousness, and the Cosmos. Like Blok, both Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik were somewhat attracted, by reason of their revolutionary romanticism, to the persecuted and silenced Left Social-Revolutionary Party. On account of this sympathy, and because the philosophical flights of the two poets trespassed beyond the bounds of Marxism, the Cheka and the Party had their eye on the Volfila. Its organizers wondered every day whether they were going to be arrested. We held our private meetings at Andrei Bely’s. At the time he was living in a huge room of the old military headquarters opposite the Winter Palace, just above the offices of the police-militia. There we would ask one another how we could preserve liberty of thought as a principle, and prove that it was not a counter-revolutionary principle. Bely suggested convening a World Congress of Free Thought in Moscow, and inviting to it Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and Gandhi. A chorus of voices cried back: ‘It'll never be allowed!’ I told them that if they appealed to intellectuals abroad, who were certainly incapable of any real understanding of revolutionary Russia, the Russian intellectuals ran a risk of discrediting the Revolution, which was already the object of indiscriminate attacks by the émigrés.
Andrei Bely, a daring stylist, a splendid writer of poetry and prose, and a theosophist (or anthroposophist, as he himself termed it) was just over forty. He was embarrassed at being bald, and so always wore a black skull-cap beneath which his great seer’s eyes, of a stony greenish-blue, gave out a continual glitter. The vitality and variety of his mind was prodigious. His whole behaviour reflected spiritual idealism, with sometimes the postures of a visionary, sometimes the frank outbursts of a child. In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, he had won fame through a psychological novel about the period, a mystical, revolutionary work impregnated with German and Latin culture. Now he was beginning to feel that his great energies were bankrupt.
‘What can I do now in this life?’ he asked me despondently one evening. ‘I cannot live outside this Russia of ours and I cannot breathe within it!'
I answered that the state of siege was sure to end, and that Western Socialism would open out vast prospects for Russia. ‘Do you think so?’ he said thoughtfully. However, at the beginning of the autumn of 1921, as the carnage of the Terror was filling us with horror, we saw even the Volfila disintegrate.
I am well aware that terror has been necessary up till now in all great revolutions, which do not happen according to the taste of well-intentioned men, but spontaneously, with the violence of tempests; and that it is our duty to employ the only weapons that history affords us if we are not to be overwhelmed through our own folly. But at the same time I saw that the perpetuation of terror, after the end of the Civil War and the transition to a period of economic freedom, was an immense and demoralizing blunder. I was and still am convinced that the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had henceforth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and the rights of all individuals without exception.
The tragedies continued. From Odessa we had monstrous news: the Cheka had just shot Fanny Baron (the wife of Aaron Baron) and Lev Chorny, one of the theoreticians of Russian anarchism. Lev Chorny had been well known to me in Paris twelve years earlier. A figure straight out of a Byzantine icon, with a waxy complexion and eyes that flashed from hollow sockets, he lived in the Latin Quarter, cleaning restaurant windows and then going off to write his Sociometry beneath the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens. His death incensed Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
[Aaron Baron was later deported to the north; but he was arrested during the purges of 1937 and never heard of again.]
During the Third Congress of the International Emma Goldman had thought of making a scene, after the manner of the English suffragettes, by chaining herself to a bench on one of the public balconies and shouting out her protest to the Congress. The Russian anarchists had persuaded her to change her mind. In the country of the Scythians such demonstrations had little value; far better to keep on nagging at Lenin and Zinoviev.
Meanwhile, our persistent campaign for the release of the victimized prisoners had met with some success: ten anarchist prisoners, including the syndicalist Maximov and Boris Voline, were authorized to leave Russia, and others were freed. Kamenev promised that Aaron Baron would be banished; a promise that was not fulfilled, since the Cheka was to oppose it.’ Certain Mensheviks, notably Martov, also obtained passports to travel abroad.
What with Kronstadt, these tragedies, and the influence of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman on the working-class movement in the Old World and the New, an unbridgeable gap was now to open between Marxists and libertarians: Later in history, this division would play a fatal part: it was one of the causes of the intellectual confusion and final defeat of the Spanish Revolution. In this respect, MY worst forebodings were fulfilled.
The American background of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman estranged them from the Russians, and turned them into representatives of an idealistic generation that had completely vanished in Russia. (I have no doubt that they were just as disconcerted and indignant over a good deal of what happened in Makhno’s movement.) They embodied the humanistic rebellion of the turn of the century: Emma Goldman with her organizing flair and practical disposition, her narrow but generous prejudices, and her self-importance, typical of American women devoted to social work; Berkman with the inward tension that sprang from his idealism in years long past. His eighteen years in an American prison had frozen him in the attitudes of his youth when, as an act of solidarity with a strike, he had offered up his life by shooting at one of the steel barons. When his tension relaxed he became dejected, and I could not help thinking that he was often troubled by ideas of suicide. In fact, it was only much later that he was to end his life, in 1936, on the Côte d'Azur.
The winds of an immeasurable calamity swept upon us from the parched plains of the Volga. The Civil War had crossed these regions, and now drought had destroyed them. Millions, starved of all necessities, fled from the famine. I saw them coming up even as far as Petrograd, on foot or in carts. Not everyone had the strength or the means to flee; these were all to die in millions on the spot. This scourge, which struck at both the Ukraine and the Crimea, devastated areas populated by 23,000,000 inhabitants. The blow was so severe that authority tottered. Could the Bolshevik dictatorship overcome the ghastly spectre of death? I met Maxim Gorky, bony, grey, and frowning as never before; he told me of the formation of a committee of leading intellectuals and non-Communist technicians, which was to appeal to all the latent energies of the country, and might well be the germ of tomorrow’s democratic government. (The Government at first recognized this committee, which was headed by the Marxist-revisionist economist Prokopovich and the Liberal publicist, Ekaterina Kusskova; then it had these two arrested and expelled from the country.)
[S. N. Prokopovich (1871-1955) and his wife Ekaterina Kusskova (1869-1958) were prominent on the Liberal (and subsequently the ‘revisionist') wing of the Russian Labour and co-operative movement. Prokopovich served as a Minister under Kerensky and wrote in exile important works on the Soviet economy. Kusskova was a leading figure in the group of émigrés who believed in the eventual liberalization of the Soviet regime.]
I did not share Gorky’s opinion; the revolutionary regime seemed to me already encased in so impenetrable an armour that the skeleton hand of famine could not manage to dislodge it from power. And, despite everything, I was very definitely committed to the regime’s survival; I had faith in its future and I knew that for some years Russia would be incapable of any fresh thrust forward from her present condition.
The two groups of friends whose company I kept, the French and the Russian, both suffered from a similar distress. Most of my comrades decided to abandon either political life or the Party. Novomirsky, a high official in the International, an ex-terrorist from 1905, an ex-convict and former anarchist who had been won for Bolshevism by Lenin’s goodwill, now sent his membership card back to the Central Committee on account of his fundamental disagreements. He devoted himself to scientific work, and nobody thought of bearing him any grudge. (All the same, he was to be remembered in 1937 when he disappeared, along with his wife, into the concentration-camps.) Marcel Body, a Socialist worker, arranged to be sent to the Soviet Embassy in Oslo. Another got sent to Turkey. Another went to manage a sawmill in the heart of the Far East. Pierre Pascal quietly withdrew from the Party and earned his living as a translator, at the same time working on his history of the schism of the Russian Church. I was tougher inside, and enjoyed (as I think) a broader vision of the Revolution, as well as having less individualistic sentiment in my make-up. I did not feel disheartened or disoriented. I was disgusted at certain things, psychologically exhausted by the Terror and tormented by the mass of wrongs that I could see growing, which I was powerless to counteract. My conclusions were that the Russian Revolution, left to itself, would probably, in one way or another, collapse (I did not see how: would it be through war or domestic reaction?); that the Russians, who had made superhuman efforts to build a new society, were more or less at the end of their strength; and that relief and salvation must come from the West. From now on it was necessary to work to build a Western working-class movement capable of supporting the Russians and, one day, superseding them. I decided to leave for Central Europe, which seemed to be the focus Of events to come. (The condition of my wife, who was now on the verge of tuberculosis as a result of all the privations, was another factor that encouraged me in this direction.) Zinoviev and the comrades on the Executive offered me a post in Berlin, working in illegality. If danger was within us, salvation must lie within us no less.
Support The Saint Patrick's Day Parade Veterans For Peace Efforts To March- March 20th In South Boston
Click on the headline to link to a Smedley Butler Brigade of the Veterans For Peace Website entry concerning the efforts to join the 2011 South Boston Saint Patrick's Day Parade on March 20th.
When: Sunday, March 20, 2011, 2:00 pm
Where: Broadway MBTA Station - Look for VFP Flags • Dorchester Ave. & Broadway • do not attempt to drive - come by T • South Boston
Start: 2011 Mar 20 - 2:00pm
Themes for the Day:
· How is the War Economy Working for You
· Bring the Troops Home, Take Care of Them When They Get Here
· Cut Military Spending, Save Jobs: Teachers, Fireman, Police
· Peace is Patriotic! “Not a Dirty Word”
Please join Veterans For Peace and other peace and social justice organizations for this historic alternative “people’s parade” following the official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.
Background: Veterans for Peace were denied permission to walk in the “Official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade”. The stated reason was because the Allied War Veterans Council (War Council) did not want the word “peace” associated with the word “veteran”. They also stated that Veterans For Peace were too political for the parade. As if all the politicians, military formations and bands in the parade are not political?
The City of Boston has issued a permit to Veterans For Peace to have The Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, immediately following the “official parade”. Our parade is a “people’s parade for peace and justice”.
We invite all progressive groups (peace, environmental, women’s rights, civil rights, labor, GLBT etc.) in the greater Boston area to please join us as we follow behind the official parade. The South Boston parade is the largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country and is estimated to draw one million spectators. This is a huge opportunity for us to get our message out!
For more information please go to: Smedleyvfp.org or email ujpcoalition@gmail.com
For information on how your group can participate, contact:
Pat Scanlon, Veterans For Peace: 978-475-1776
United for Justice with Peace: 617-383-4857
American Friends Service Committee: 617-497-5273
*******
Markin comment:
Normally the efforts of anybody, individually or as an organization, trying to take part into the annual South Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade would be a yawner for this writer. Having grown up in a Irish working class neighborhood in suburban Boston and having about ten thousand roots to South Boston back to the “famine ships” of the 1840s when they embarked there with some forebears and now through various second and third cousins I, at least since I have come of leftist political age, have avoided the drunken brawls and other sham Irish stuff associated with Saint Patrick’s Day like the plague.
This situation though is different. This is about defending the public square (even though the august United States Supreme Court has already declared this specific parade a private affair and no subject to free speech guarantees). This is about political exclusion of the Veterans For Peace (as opposed to plenty of space for pro-war veterans and their associations) as was that attempt previously by various Irish gays and lesbians and their supporters to march in this parade that was the subject of the Supreme Court legal decision. That is where our fight is. And that is why this struggle is supportable and why it deserves space here. Although really when we talk about the Irish and Ireland I say the hell with the spirit of Saint Patrick. Rather think of the spirit of the fighters of Easter 1916. That is the real Irish deal. No question.
When: Sunday, March 20, 2011, 2:00 pm
Where: Broadway MBTA Station - Look for VFP Flags • Dorchester Ave. & Broadway • do not attempt to drive - come by T • South Boston
Start: 2011 Mar 20 - 2:00pm
Themes for the Day:
· How is the War Economy Working for You
· Bring the Troops Home, Take Care of Them When They Get Here
· Cut Military Spending, Save Jobs: Teachers, Fireman, Police
· Peace is Patriotic! “Not a Dirty Word”
Please join Veterans For Peace and other peace and social justice organizations for this historic alternative “people’s parade” following the official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.
Background: Veterans for Peace were denied permission to walk in the “Official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade”. The stated reason was because the Allied War Veterans Council (War Council) did not want the word “peace” associated with the word “veteran”. They also stated that Veterans For Peace were too political for the parade. As if all the politicians, military formations and bands in the parade are not political?
The City of Boston has issued a permit to Veterans For Peace to have The Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, immediately following the “official parade”. Our parade is a “people’s parade for peace and justice”.
We invite all progressive groups (peace, environmental, women’s rights, civil rights, labor, GLBT etc.) in the greater Boston area to please join us as we follow behind the official parade. The South Boston parade is the largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country and is estimated to draw one million spectators. This is a huge opportunity for us to get our message out!
For more information please go to: Smedleyvfp.org or email ujpcoalition@gmail.com
For information on how your group can participate, contact:
Pat Scanlon, Veterans For Peace: 978-475-1776
United for Justice with Peace: 617-383-4857
American Friends Service Committee: 617-497-5273
*******
Markin comment:
Normally the efforts of anybody, individually or as an organization, trying to take part into the annual South Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade would be a yawner for this writer. Having grown up in a Irish working class neighborhood in suburban Boston and having about ten thousand roots to South Boston back to the “famine ships” of the 1840s when they embarked there with some forebears and now through various second and third cousins I, at least since I have come of leftist political age, have avoided the drunken brawls and other sham Irish stuff associated with Saint Patrick’s Day like the plague.
This situation though is different. This is about defending the public square (even though the august United States Supreme Court has already declared this specific parade a private affair and no subject to free speech guarantees). This is about political exclusion of the Veterans For Peace (as opposed to plenty of space for pro-war veterans and their associations) as was that attempt previously by various Irish gays and lesbians and their supporters to march in this parade that was the subject of the Supreme Court legal decision. That is where our fight is. And that is why this struggle is supportable and why it deserves space here. Although really when we talk about the Irish and Ireland I say the hell with the spirit of Saint Patrick. Rather think of the spirit of the fighters of Easter 1916. That is the real Irish deal. No question.
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