Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION
In their tireless efforts to betray the struggles of the workers and peasants, the Stalinists must continue to maintain a pretense of revolutionism. Yet their doctrines stand counterposed to the line of Marxism. This presents them with a dilemma, which they can only resolve by resorting to systematic lies about the Trotskyists. This goes from distortions of the political positions of Trotsky (as well as Marx and Lenin), to denying Trotsky's leading role as the military organizer of the October Revolution and accusing him of carrying out espionage for the Mikado! While many of the specific charges leveled against Zinoviev, Bukharin and other leading Bolsheviks accused of Trotskyism during the Moscow Trials were admitted by Khrushchev in 1956 to be total fabrications, the method remains. Today we are witnessing a widespread revival of the "Stalin School of Falsification" especially on the part of the various Maoist groups. Just as Stalin in his day needed a cover to justify his crimes against the working class, so today must the Maoists resort to vicious slander in order to cover for their counterrevolutionary policies in Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere. This series is intended as a reply to these lies and an introduction to some of the basic concepts of Trotskyism, as they have developed in the struggle against Stalinist reformism during the past fifty years.
The struggle between the reformist line of Stalinism and the revolutionary policies of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky is no academic matter of interest only to historians. The counterrevolutionary policies of the "Great Organizer of Defeats" (Stalin) led not only to the assassination of Trotsky by an agent of Stalin's GPU and the murder of tens of thousands of Russian Left Oppositionists in the Siberian concentration camps, but also to the strangulation of the Chinese (1927), German (1933), French (1936), Spanish (1937), Indonesian (1965) and French (1968) revolutions as well as the sellout "peace agreements" of the Vietnamese Stalinists in 1946 and 1954. The struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism is literally a matter of life and death for the revolutionary movement and must be given the closest attention by militants who are seeking the road to Marxism.
What is the Permanent Revolution?
At the heart of this conflict is the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. This theory, first advanced at the time of the 1905 Russian revolution, was summarized by Trotsky in his article "Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution," written in 1939:
"...the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only the democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism."
It is this theory which Davidson and the Stalinists reject when they say that "Trotsky's views on the course of the Russian revolution, like those of the Mensheviks, were refuted by history" (Guardian, 4 April 1973). In fact, only because the uprising never reached the seizure of power was Trotsky's theory not confirmed in practice in 1905. The course of the Russian Revolution of 1917 fully verified this theory. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in soviet power, could solve the questions of land and peace, as well as liberating oppressed nations from czarist rule. Moreover, a careful analysis of Lenin's views in 1905 and 1917 shows that he came over to agreement with all the essential aspects of Trotsky's formulation, and abandoned his own earlier slogan of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."
The Stalinist claim that Lenin still stood for a "democratic" revolution in 1917 and called for "socialism in one country" is pure fabrication. Likewise, their accusation that Trotsky's slogan was "Down with the Czar, For a Workers Government," supposedly ignoring the peasantry, was repeatedly denied by Trotsky. The slogan of permanent revolution was, rather, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry.
In Trotsky's view, because of the uneven and combined development of the world economy, the bourgeoisie of the backward countries is tightly bound to the feudal and imperialist interests, thereby preventing it from carrying out the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois revolution--democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation. In the presence of an aroused peasantry and a combative working class, each of these goals would directly threaten the political and economic dominance of the capitalist class. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution can be solved only by the alliance of the peasantry and the proletariat.
Marxism holds that there can only be one dominant class in the state. Since, as the Communist Manifesto states, the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary class, this alliance must take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the peasantry. In carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, the proletarian state must inevitably make "despotic inroads into the rights of bourgeois property" (e.g., expropriation of landlords), and thus the revolution directly passes over to socialist tasks, without pausing at any arbitrary "stages" or, as Lenin put it, without a "Chinese wall" being erected between the bourgeois and proletarian phases. Thus the revolution becomes permanent, eventually leading to the complete abolition of classes (socialism).
But socialism is the product of the liberation of the productive forces at the highest level of capitalist development: classes can be abolished only by eliminating want, that is, scarcity. Thus, while the dictatorship of the proletariat may be established in an isolated and backward country, socialism must be the joint achievement of at least several advanced countries. For these complementary reasons the revolution must extend and deepen itself--or else perish. Thus the opposition between Trotsky's "permanent revolution" and Stalin's "socialism in one country" is in reality the opposition between socialism on a world scale and the most brutal regime of bourgeois-feudal reaction (barbarism); there is no middle road.
While the theory of permanent revolution was the achievement of Leon Trotsky, the concept was first introduced by Karl Marx in 1850. Davidson, in his effort to cloak Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country" with the mantle of Marxism, maintains that Marx's use of the phrase "permanent revolution" was simply a general observation about class struggle continuing until socialism:
"Thus the revolution is 'permanent' in two ways. First in looking toward the future, its course is one of uninterrupted class struggle until classes themselves are abolished. Second, looking back historically once classes are abolished, the revolution is permanent in the sense that there is no longer class struggle and the seizure of power and domination of one class by another."
--Guardian, 4 April 1973
At this level of abstraction, it is no wonder that Davidson concludes that differences arise only "in the particularity of the question." But let us take a look first at what Marx actually said:
"While the democratic petty-bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above demands, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one."
--Karl Marx, "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League," 1850
This is in fact a powerful polemic, 75 years in advance, against Stalin's sophistry about "socialism in one country." Trotsky's theory is a further development of these fundamental propositions in the epoch of imperialism, when capitalism has penetrated throughout the backward regions and the objective prerequisites for socialism on a world scale already exist (thereby endangering even the young bourgeoisies of the ex-colonial countries).
Revolution by Stages: Germany 1848
According to the Stalinists the chief error of Trotskyism is the failure to recognize the necessity of "stages" of the revolution, in particular the democratic stage as opposed to the socialist stage. One of Davidson's more illustrious predecessors wrote (a few years before Stalin murdered him as a "Trotskyite"!):
"Comrade Trotsky put the dictatorship of the working class at the beginning of the process, but did not see the steps and transitions that led to this dictatorship; he ignored the concrete relation of forces...he did not see the stages of the revolution...."
--N. Bukharin, "On the Theory of Permanent Revolution," 1925
Let us consider this "theory" of two-stage revolution, the "particularity" of the permanent revolution. Did Marx, perhaps, have such a theory? Marx, of course, rigorously distinguished the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions as to their social content, since they represent different epochs of historical development. But even in the mid-19th century it was becoming clear that the bourgeoisie was too weak and the proletariat too powerful for there to exist a "Chinese wall" between the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Distinct in social content, they would be closely linked historically. The German revolution of 1848 made this link particularly clear. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:
"Communists pay special attention to Germany. There are two reasons for this. First of all, Germany is upon the eve of a bourgeois revolution. Secondly, this revolution will take place under comparatively advanced conditions as far as the general civilization of Europe is concerned, and when the German proletariat is much more highly developed than was the English proletariat in the seventeenth century or the French proletariat in the eighteenth. Consequently, in nineteenth-century Germany, the bourgeois revolution can only be the immediate precursor of a proletarian revolution."
Marx did not believe that the working class could directly achieve victory in 1848, but that it would be forced to support the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie insofar as they fought against feudal-absolutist reaction. But even in this pre-imperialist period, when the proletariat was quite weak and politically dominated by the artisan and democratic petty-bourgeois interests, he counseled the workers to "simultaneously erect their own revolutionary workers' government hard by the new official government" in order to oppose their previous ally, as well as bring about "the arming of the whole proletariat."
Marx's prediction that proletarian revolution would closely follow the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 was not borne out. But neither were there successful bourgeois revolutions, precisely because the fear that proletarian revolution would break out if the least step were taken to rouse the masses drove the liberals into the arms of Prussian and Austrian reaction. Tied to the feudalists by a common dread of social revolution, the liberals strove not to overthrow the monarchy (as did the French bourgeoisie in 1789), but to share power with the feudalists. The German bourgeoisie could not rise above the level of a "shopocracy," as Engels put it.
Revolution by Stages: Russia 1905
The Russian revolution of 1905 again raised the question of permanent revolution, but in much sharper form. The Russian bourgeoisie was far weaker even than the German. For centuries the main characteristic of Russian development was its primitiveness and slowness, resulting from Russia's unfavorable geographic location and sparse population. Capitalist development in the northern empire was primarily imported from the West by the autocratic state, simply grafted on to the existing feudal economy. Thus while a modern industrial proletariat was forming in the main cities, concentrated in large factories which utilized the most advanced techniques, the town handicrafts and early forms of manufacture which had formed the economic base for the bourgeoisie in the West, never had time to develop. With large industry primarily in the hands of European capital and state banks, the Russian capitalist class remained small in number, isolated, half-foreign and without historical traditions. Moreover, it remained tied by a thousand strands to the feudalist-absolutist state and the landed aristocracy. A bourgeois-led revolution which could solve the tasks of democracy, agrarian revolution and national emancipation, was utterly out of the question. And yet the tasks of the bourgeois revolution remained.
Faced with this reality the two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took sharply opposed positions. The Mensheviks with scholastic formalism and utter spinelessness deduced from the democratic character of the initial tasks of the revolution the "strategy" of an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. In a speech at the "Unification Congress" of the RSDLP (1906), Axelrod, a leading Menshevik, remarked:
"The social relations of Russia have ripened only for a bourgeois revolution....While this general political lawlessness persists, we must not even so much as mention the direct fight of the proletariat against other classes for political power....It is fighting for the conditions of bourgeois development. Objective historical conditions doom our proletariat to an inevitable collaboration with the bourgeoisie against our common enemy."
This conclusion was derived by simply mechanically pasting the classical scheme of European (and more particularly French) development onto Russian conditions, with the implications that proletarian revolution could only come after many decades of capitalist development. The kernel of the Menshevik position was captured by Plekhanov's remark that "we must prize the support of the non-proletarian parties and not drive them away from us by tactless behavior." To this Lenin responded: "...the liberals among the landed gentry will forgive you millions of 'tactless' acts, but they will never forgive incitements to take away their land."
As against Plekhanov's coalition with the bourgeoisie, Lenin called for a bloc with the peasantry to carry out the agrarian revolution. This was codified in his formula of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry":
"We must be perfectly certain in our minds as to what real social forces are opposed to 'tsarism....The big bourgeoisie, the landlords, the factory owners, and 'society,' which follows the Osvobozhdeniye [the liberals'] lead, cannot be such a force....We know that owing to their class position they are incapable of waging a decisive struggle against tsarism; they are too heavily fettered by private property, by capital and land to enter into a decisive struggle. They stand in too great need of tsarism, with its bureaucratic, police, and military forces for use against the proletariat and the peasantry, to want it to be destroyed. No, the only force capable of gaining 'a decisive victory over tsarism' means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." [emphasis in original]
--V.I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," 1905
This policy was irreconcilably opposed to the insipid liberalism of the Mensheviks, instead fanning the flames of peasant revolt and leading the proletariat in a "tactless" assault on the czarist autocracy. But at the same time he insisted on the characterization of the revolution as bourgeois, with power to be placed in the hands of the peasantry and the future opened to a flowering of capitalist development:
"Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of bourgeois rule, on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class."
--Ibid.
Trotsky's view, quoted at the beginning of this article, was distinct from those of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, though immeasurably closer to the latter. As he later wrote:
"The theory of the permanent revolution, which originated in 1905...pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day."
--"Permanent Revolution," 1929
According to Davidson, Lenin "insisted that the revolution would develop in stages" while Trotsky supposedly completely ignored the bourgeois-democratic stage. This is simply a smokescreen. Trotsky never denied the bourgeois character of the initial phases of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and perspectives:
"Already in 1905, the Petersburg workers called their soviet a proletarian government. This designation passed into the everyday language of that time and was completely embodied in the program of the struggle of the working class for power. At the same time, we set up against Tsarism an elaborated program of political democracy (universal suffrage, republic, militia, etc.). We could act in no other way. Political democracy is a necessary stage in the development of the working masses--with the highly important reservation that in one case this stage lasts for decades, while in another, the revolutionary situation permits the masses to emancipate themselves from the prejudices of political democracy even before its institutions have been converted into reality." [emphasis in original]
--L. D. Trotsky, "Introduction" to The Year 1905, 1922
Davidson again tries to cloud the issues by claiming that Trotsky was "hostile to the peasantry" while "Lenin's view is directly_ opposite." This is pure fabrication. It is true that Trotsky dismissed out of hand the idea that the peasantry as a whole could be a "socialist ally" of the working class:
"From the very first moment after its taking power, the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and the village rich, between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie."
--L. D. Trotsky, "Results and Prospects," 1905
But in this respect, Lenin's view was identical:
"The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged."
--V.I. Lenin, "Petty-Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism," 1905
The dispute between Lenin and Trotsky was not over whether or not the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution could be skipped or whether an alliance between the workers and peasants was necessary, but concerned the political mechanics of the collaboration of the proletariat and peasantry, the degree of independence of the latter. Trotsky pointed out (as had been shown by all past revolutionary experience, as well as the writings of Marx and Engels) that because of its intermediate position and heterogeneity of its social composition, the peasantry as a class was incapable of taking an independent role or forming its own independent party. It was compelled to follow the lead of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
Revolution in Stages: 1917
It is no accident that Davidson's articles hardly mention the 1917 October Revolution, going instead from the disputes in 1905 over the role of the peasantry straight to the question of "socialism in one country." Indeed, had Davidson reproduced Lenin's writings from this period he would have had to print statements radically different from Lenin's view of the 1905-1907 period. Before Lenin's arrival from Europe on 4 April the majority of the Bolshevik party called for "critical support" to the bourgeois Provisional Government of Prince Lvov, which had taken power after the February revolution overthrew the czar. Stalin was the chief spokesman for this viewpoint at the March 1917 Bolshevik Party Conference. In his report on the attitude to the Provisional Government, he said:
"...the Provisional Government has in fact taken the role of fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people....It is not to our advantage at present to force events, hastening the process of repelling the bourgeois layers, who will in the future inevitably withdraw from us. It is necessary for us to gain time by putting a brake on the splitting away of the middle-bourgeois layers....Insofar as the Provisional Government fortifies the steps of the revolution, to that extent we must support it; but insofar as it is counterrevolutionary, support to the Provisional Government is not permissible."
--"Draft Protocol of the March 1917 All-Russian Conference of Party Workers"
While the bulk of the party leadership called for "completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution," Lenin insisted that the only revolutionary policy was calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In taking this position he came over to Trotsky's program of permanent revolution, and was accused of Trotskyism by the right wing. This required an ideological rearming of the party and at one point Lenin threatened to resign from the Central Committee in order to take the struggle to the ranks when his "April Theses" were initially voted down by the leadership. The key passage in these theses stated:
"The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution--which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants."
--V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution," 1917
In direct opposition to Stalin's position of less than a week earlier, Lenin demanded "No Support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear..." (Ibid.). The opposition to Lenin was led by Y. Kamenev who claimed that "the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed....As for Comrade Lenin's general scheme, it appears to us unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution." In his "Letters on Tactics" Lenin replied to this charge:
"After the revolution [of February-March 1917], the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie....
"To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed.
"But at this point we hear a clamor of protest from people who readily call themselves 'old Bolsheviks.' Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'?...My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently....
"'The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies'--there you have the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' already accomplished in reality.
"This formula is already antiquated....
"A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defensist, internationalist, 'Communist' elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements....
"The person who now only speaks of a 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of 'Bolshevik' pre-revolutionary antiques....
"Comrade Kamenev...has repeated the bourgeois prejudice about the Paris Commune having wanted to introduce socialism 'immediately.' This is not so. The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in introducing socialism. The real essence of the Commune is...in the creation of a state of a special type. Such a state has already arisen in Russia, it is the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies!"
--V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics," April 1917
And the Paris Commune, Brother Davidson, was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In an article for Pravda at about this time, Lenin formulated the question in a manner identical to that of Trotsky:
"We are for a strong revolutionary government....The question is--what class is making this revolution? A revolution against whom?
"Against tsarism? In that sense most of Russia's landowners and capitalists today are revolutionaries....
"Against the landowners? In this sense most of the peasants, even most of the well-to-do peasants, that is, probably nine-tenths of the population in Russia, are revolutionaries. Very likely, some of the capitalists, too are prepared to become revolutionaries on the grounds that the landowners cannot be saved anyway....
"Against the capitalists? Now that is the real issue. That is the crux of the matter, because without a revolution against the capitalists, all that prattle about 'peace without annexations' and the speedy termination of the war by such a peace is either naivete and ignorance, or stupidity and deception....
"The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie--the intellectuals, the Prosperous peasants, the present parties of the Narodniks...and the Mensheviks--are not at present in favor of a revolution against the capitalists....
"The conclusion is obvious: only assumption of power by the proletariat, backed by the semi-proletarians, can give the country a really strong and really revolutionary government."
--V. I. Lenin, "A Strong Revolutionary Government," May 1917
It is true that Lenin both at this time and later occasionally referred to the soviets in the period February-October 1917 as an expression of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," but those soviets did not hold state power. The struggle for "All Power to the Soviets" was, as Lenin put it, the struggle against the petty bourgeoisie, which did not wish to struggle against capitalism. And the state which resulted from the October Revolution was the dictatorship of the working class, supported by the peasantry. From 1917 on Lenin never implied that there could be such a creature as a state of two classes, such as envisioned by Stalin and Mao. As he put it in his polemic against Kautsky, "The Soviets are the Russian form of the proletarian dictatorship" ("The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," 1918).
Slogans and programs of revolutionary parties have a real meaning in the class struggle: they call for certain courses of action and oppose others. Kamenev who in April led the fight to retain the slogan of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" in October opposed the revolutionary insurrection, and after the successful uprising actually resigned from the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars in protest. In this behavior there was at least a semblance of consistency.
But Davidson and Stalinists everywhere would have us believe that the "Old Bolshevik" program was confirmed by the October Revolution! Behind this deception lies a purpose, namely to justify the anti-revolutionary policies of Stalinism. It is always "too soon" for socialist demands, we must always go through a "democratic stage" before the peasants can seize the land and the proletariat can expropriate the expropriators. As a true proletarian revolutionary, Lenin learned from the experience of the 1917 revolution, advancing a new program when the inadequacy of the old one had been clearly revealed. But what can one say of people who not only refuse to assimilate these lessons but insist on proclaiming that black is white? In the mouth of Stalin in 1927 the slogan of a "democratic dictatorship" was a justification for ordering the Chinese Communist Party to give up its arms just as Chiang Kai-shek prepared to massacre thousands of Communists and militant workers. Today, when the same slogan is used to justify support for "anti-imperialists" such as Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, it will have the same result--annihilation of the revolutionaries and strangulation of the revolution. The choice is posed world-wide: Either socialism or barbarism, there is no middle ground!
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