From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949-
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution For New October Revolutions!
Markin comment (repost from 2012):
On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.
This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.
What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.
That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
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In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time)
marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party
of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave
flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers
state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the
October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory;
its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet
Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while
calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist
Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we
uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and
Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent
the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a
Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political
conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing
the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of
the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the
necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a
scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the
material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and
Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the
globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the
power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another
class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet
state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from
Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October
revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the
monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in
the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed
nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural
conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s
words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the
irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the
revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the
backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale
of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the
outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the
victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one
condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist
group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves
Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally
became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle,
in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally
capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary
action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common
struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official
“public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted
itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of
factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If
we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the
people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course
of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave
the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.”
He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems
of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its
head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted
the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the
imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the
bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to
fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the
peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed
nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In
the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant.
The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of
the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the
insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no
playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the
use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold
calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost
without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves
at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the
globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October
Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world.
During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves
intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which
had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England,
France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of
bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination
of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat
on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the
chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to
fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth.
Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful
increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist
organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of
a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of
freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man
will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical
labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that
is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will
build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand.
This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray
through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its
functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense,
Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before
our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of
nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces.
Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have
illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical
energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is
not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn
manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature
once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his
relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and
most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with
religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first
victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been
ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state.
Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew
stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated
into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of
democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology
liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and
air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature,
to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and
demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man,
who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who
converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler
of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical
task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by
reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them
to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on
this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man
and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of
thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant,
21 January 1933)
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