Showing posts with label zinoviev. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zinoviev. Show all posts

Monday, February 10, 2020

Friday, November 08, 2019

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Grigorii Zinoviev

Click on title to link to the Gregory Zinoviev Internet Archive's copy of his 1921 statement on the disciplinary measures on Paul Levy and Serrati. This is an important statement about Communist International discipline.

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Zinoviev's role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I know that he ran rough shot over the Communist International (although he also did some good work there). I also know that he was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's right hand man in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here. Hell, call me an unreconstructed Cannonite but that is the way the deal went down.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Grigorii Zinoviev

Click on title to link to the Gregory Zinoviev Internet Archive's copy of his 1919 article " To The Proletarian Youth".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Zinoviev's role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I know that he ran rough shot over the Communist International (although he also did some good work there). I also know that he was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's right hand man in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here. Hell, call me an unreconstructed Cannonite but that is the way the deal went down.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Grigorii Zinoviev

Click on title to link to the Gregory Zinoviev Internet Archive's copy of his 1916 article "What Is Imperialism?".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Zinoviev's role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I know that he ran rough shot over the Communist International (although he also did some good work there). I also know that he was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's right hand man in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here. Hell, call me an unreconstructed Cannonite but that is the way the deal went down.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Grigorii Zinoviev

Click on title to link to the Gregory Zinoviev Internet Archive's copy of his 1916 article "Wars-Defensive And Aggressive".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Zinoviev's role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I know that he ran rough shot over the Communist International (although he also did some good work there). I also know that he was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's right hand man in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here. Hell, call me an unreconstructed Cannonite but that is the way the deal went down.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Grigorii Zinoviev

Click on title to link to the Gregory Zinoviev Internet Archive's copy of his "Opening Address To The Second Congress Of The Communist International". Zinoviev was the first president of the Communist International, for better or worst.

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Zinoviev's role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I know that he ran rough shot over the Communist International (although he also did some good work there). I also know that he was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's right hand man in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here. Hell, call me an unreconstructed Cannonite but that is the way the deal went down.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- "Nikky" Bukharin

Click on title to link to the Nicolai Bukharin Internet Archive's copy of Bukharin's 1926 classic right-Bolshevik article, "The Tasks Of The Russian Communist Party".

Markin comment:

I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- "Nikky" Bukharin

Click on title to link to the Nicolai Bukharin Internet Archive's copy of Bukharin's 1924 article, "Imperialism And The Accumulation Of Capital".


Markin comment:

I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- "Nikky" Bukharin

Click on title to link to the Nicolai Bukharin Internet Archive's copy of Bukharin's 1921 article, "New Economic Policy Of Soviet Russia".

Markin comment:

I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- "Nikky" Bukharin

Click on title to link to the Nicolai Bukharin Internet Archive's copy of Bukharin's 1917 article, "The Significance Of The Russian Revolution".

Markin comment:

I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- "Nikky" Bukharin

Click on title to link to the Nicolai Bukharin Internet Archive's copy of Bukharin's classic Bolshevik restatement of the Marxist program up until the time of the Russian revolution, "The ABC Of Communism" (written with Eugenii Prebrazhensky).

Markin comment:

I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later

Saturday, January 19, 2019

From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series- The Third Congress (1921): Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization

The Third Congress (1921): Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization

by Reuben Samuels New York, 5 September 1998

The Second Congress of the Communist International [17 July-7 August 1920] that Steve dealt with took place at what in hindsight turned out to be the peak of a revolutionary wave that followed World War I and was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. As you will recall, a great map was hung at the Congress charting the progress of the Red Army and its march on Warsaw. But the Red Army was unable to take Warsaw.

The massive scope of the postwar class war reached the point of revolutionary crisis in countries like Hungary, Germany and Italy. It contributed decisively to the Red Army victory over the White Guard forces and their imperialist allies. The imperialists were unable to crush the Soviet workers state, but despite heroic battles, without a tempered and authoritative revolutionary party, the combative working classes of Hungary, Germany and Italy were unable to overthrow their own bourgeoisies.

As Lenin stated at the Third Congress in the summer of 1921:

"The result is a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious enables the Socialist republic to exist—not for long—of course, within the capitalist encirclement."
—"Theses for a Report on Tactics of the R.C.P.", Collected Works (CW), Vol. 32, p. 454, First English Edition (Progress Publishers, 1965)

The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries. So we had in the period leading up to the Third Congress a mighty coal miners strike in Britain that was betrayed by the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy. A very similar development took place in the fall of 1920 in Italy, which was the mightiest upsurge of the working people in all of Europe in that period, which was also betrayed by Social Democracy. Then there was the defeat of the German proletariat in Saxony, March 1921, crushed by social-democratic governments. In each case, the defeat was a confirmation of what Trotsky wrote in the Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, with a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer" (The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25, p. 252).

At the Third Congress, Trotsky, in concluding the opening report that he gave on the economic situation and the prospects for proletarian revolution, stated:

"Now for the first time we see and feel that we are not so immediately near to the goal, to the conquest of power, to the world revolution. At that time, in 1919, we said to ourselves: 'It is a question of months.' Now we say: 'It is perhaps a question of years'."
—quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 3, p. 385 (Macmillan, 1953)
The Third Congress was devoted to using this period of precarious equilibrium to prepare the communist parties that were often communist parties only in name and stated goals, but not in their activity and organization.

In summing up the work of the Third Congress, Trotsky made what I think is an important point about historical materialism, about the crises of the bourgeoisies such as developed directly out of WWI. This point was important to counteract crisis-mongers like the Healyites in the '60s—or for that matter the Stalinists in the Third Period—who claimed that there were crises so severe that their own dynamic alone would bring down the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie would create a form of social suicide. And Trotsky responded to this in light of his report to the Third Congress where he had emphasized the temporary stability of capitalism:

"History has provided the basic premise for the success of this [proletarian] revolution—in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself— in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists—the solutions of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian vanguard...History says to the working class, 'You must know that unless you cast down the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization. Try, solve this task!'" —
"School of Revolutionary Strategy," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, p. 6 (Monad Press, 1972)

So it was clear to the Bolsheviks—at least it was clear to Lenin and Trotsky going into the Third Congress—that it was no longer sufficient to lay out the broad outlines in principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. Equally important was transmitting the strategy of revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. The two decades of experience of building die Bolshevik Party, the instrument for the proletarian revolution, had to be made available to these fledgling communist parties that had gathered around the Comintern. This experience had to be made accessible to them and had to be applied by them to the specific circumstances in their own countries.

The debates that took place at this Congress, the debates over tactics, party building, the relationship to the trade unions, communist work among women and youth, could not have taken place without the programmatic ground-breaking work of the First and Second Congresses: the "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the "21 Conditions for Admission to the CI." These documents sought to draw the hard programmatic line against the centrists and opportunists who sought to destroy the new revolutionary international from within with their own brand of anti-revolutionary entrism. This was the framework in which this discussion could take place. It was not going to be a discussion with the centrists who would not split with the reformists.

Now this doesn't mean there was a cleavage between these Congresses. Lenin and Trotsky realized from the very beginning the necessity to impart their organizational and tactical experience to these revolutionaries who had been won to the October Revolution, but not yet won to Bolshevism. Lenin wrote the manual on tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism-An Infantile Disorder, so that it was in the hands of all the delegates to the Second Congress of the CI. But it was still necessary at this Congress to devote significant time to the struggle against the centrists and opportunists who were seeking to "get on the bandwagon" of the then extremely authoritative and popular October Revolution and its new International, offering a clean banner on which they could wipe their blood-besmirched hands.

To give you an example of the problems that the Comintern and the Bolsheviks faced, take the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Like the German party, in Czechoslovakia, the Comintern won a substantial section of the old Social Democracy and a party with hundreds of thousands of members. Now, the tradition of this party, very much like the French and German, was very reformist, very much in the tradition of Noske and the French Social Democracy. As late as 1919, a social-democratic coalition government sent Czech troops in to crush the Hungarian Soviet. However, this actually had a radicalizing influence on the base of the Social Democracy.

A substantial left wing took over the party headquarters and newspapers. The social-democratic leadership responded by calling in the troops. This resulted in a political general strike of one million workers in December 1920, just before the Third Congress of the Comintern. The most militant sections of this working class, however, were organized into separate national parties. Czechoslovakia was put together from the remnants of the Habsburg Empire, and the Slovaks and Sudeten Germans each had their own parties with substantial minorities of Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians—you name it, they had it. The parties were divided along national lines. And the strongest, the Bohemian-Moravian party, was also the most reformist and the last to declare its agreement with the Comintern and the 21 Conditions.

This was an anomalous situation: a country with two parties that said: 'We're ready, take us in!' And hanging back was a third party that says: 'We're almost ready! We agree with the 21 Conditions. We agree with getting together and having a united party.' Finally they held what many thought would be their unification congress in the middle of May, just one month before the Third Comintern Congress. But instead of unifying, the congress set up a "Committee of Action" for this purpose. It was really a delaying tactic to prevent the consolidation of a united communist party in Czechoslovakia. Going into the Comintern Congress, maybe there was a party, maybe there were three parties, but, then again, maybe no party. So, when you read reports and exchanges at the Congress, very angry about the leadership of the Czech Communist Party, you can understand why.
And this was not atypical. So much of the discredited Social Democracy was drawn in the wake of the authority and enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution that the sorting-out process was not easy.

NEP: A Necessary Retreat


Now, within the Soviet Union itself, the Soviet workers had successfully defended themselves from domestic counterrevolution backed by the intervention of 17 imperialist armies. The dictatorship of the proletariat was triumphant, but the proletariat was shattered as a class. It was at the expense of the physical existence of the working class that this victory was won.

In 1921, famine swept Russia. Even cannibalism reappeared. The proletariat, already a small minority of three million at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, was reduced by half. And very often this proletariat was subsidized, supported by the state simply to maintain intact remnants of the class, the basis for the dictatorship. This is graphically described in Deutscher's, The Prophet Unarmed: "...[B]y the end of the civil war, Russia's national income amounted to only one-third of her income in 1913...industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war...the coal-mines turned out less than one-tenth and the iron foundries only one-fortieth of their normal output...the railways were destroyed." -p. 4

All the stocks, reserves and the exchange of goods and services on which the economy depended for its work were utterly destroyed. Russian cities and towns became so depopulated after 1921 that Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of their former inhabitants. And the people of the two capitals had for many months lived on a food ration of two ounces of bread and a few frozen potatoes.

What was the situation in the military? There were five million soldiers in 1920. There was a policy of demobilization, but how? What to do with five million armed men and women? There were no trains to transport the demobilized troops home. There was no fuel for them in the barracks. Many of these troops demobilized themselves and became bandit partisans. They would simply roam the countryside and the cities and try to forage food and a little bit of clothing to stay alive. This became such a significant problem that the Cheka, which is often mis-translated as secret police but was actually the Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, formed a special section to combat banditism.

Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, worked in what was called the Department of Enlightenment and a lot of her "enlightenment" had to do with teenage bands that had no other way to survive than to act like gangs. They went out and foraged and stole what they could, by any means they could, to stay alive! At the time of the 1921 June-July Third Congress of the Comintern, bandit partisan warfare is still going on throughout the Soviet Union. I just mention one district, Temblov. In Temblov the old Socialist Revolutionaries had gotten together an armed band of 21,000, and this was just in one district. This was happening while the Third Congress was going on. If you read The Trotsky Papers (1917-1922), volume 2, put out by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam you'll see more paper is devoted to Temblov than is devoted to the Third Congress.

This problem was increasingly taking the form of a civil war of the countryside against the cities. How to deal with it? As Lenin said: 'the easy part was expropriating the bourgeoisie. Difficult was defeating the imperialist-backed counterrevolution. But we did that too. Now we've hit the real bedrock of capitalism: the petty proprietors, the peasants. Without their food the cities cannot be rebuilt. There cannot be any kind of reconstruction under this devastation of civil war.'

It was necessary to make what was openly called a retreat: introducing a tax in kind for the peasantry. This is what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The tax in kind meant instead of having all their grain and foodstuffs taken by the state, they had to pay a certain amount in the form of taxes. Then they could market the rest. That is the restoration—within the context of state ownership of land—of market trade. Likewise, there was encouragement—not with a lot of success—of foreign concessions and foreign investment in Soviet industry.

Now, this policy was attacked by various oppositions within the Bolshevik Party. And Lenin's speeches and the reports to the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party deal with these positions in trying to hammer out a policy to deal with the catastrophic economic and social collapse. Under these conditions, the Kronstadt sailors revolt. This was a different generation from the Kronstadt sailors who formed the Red Guard and a cornerstone of the Red Army. Another generation had gone into the military, very closely tied to the countryside, which represented the peasant unrest there.

It was fundamentally a counterrevolutionary uprising. The main demand was: "Soviets without Bolsheviks!" This was also one of the main demands of the Workers Opposition. In a situation where the proletariat itself was shattered as a class, its only cohesive identity as an instrument of proletarian class-consciousness was the party, which itself, of course, was devastated. In the middle of this Congress it was necessary to take every delegate with military training and send them to Constant to put down the uprising. That's what you call a working congress.

The reaction of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) right wing, Dittmann and Crispien, was to say, 'You see, we're _ for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in dark, backward Slavic Russia, to take power, to take responsibility for rebuilding from the devastation of the imperialist war, that is the source of all these problems. So, you see, yes we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not where it exists, not where it is struggling to survive.'

These policies were also attacked by the ultra-lefts in Germany and Holland. They were also attacked by the Italian Socialist leader Serrati— remember him from the Second Congress? He's the guy that kept interrupting John Reed's report on the black question. 'Let's get on to the real proletariat.' I guess he didn't know what was happening to America.

So, NEP and economic reconstruction was one of the important, fighting issues of the Third Congress of the Comintern. This was a retreat and it was necessary to lay this out before the Tenth Party Congress, but also before the highest tribunal of the Communist movement, the CI, at the Third Congress. Lenin treated the Comintern as an international soviet that would render the final judgment on the policies not only for Germany, not only for Italy, but also for the Soviet Union. He of course fought so that the policies he thought should win would win.

Lenin was orchestrating just about everything that happened at the Congress insofar as it was possible, as he was a sick man by this time. But his principal report was on the tactics of the Russian Communist Party. He tied these questions together with the policies that were necessary in Western Europe, especially in the advanced industrial countries, but not only there.

If you read Carr and Detacher—especially Carr is very strong on this point—they basically see the Third Congress as a whole chapter called the "Congress of Retreat." Carr's point is that with the defeat of the march on Warsaw, with the defeats in Hungary and Italy, the Soviet Union was forced to be "reasonable" and "statesmanlike," forced to adopt Realpolitik, the politics of national interest, to which the policies of the Comintern would be subordinate. If you want trade and investment from the capitalists of other countries you have to tone down overthrowing them, don't you? Which is exactly what Serrati charged about the NEP.

But the reality was that the Bolshevik Revolution was made for the world revolution, and its survival depended on world revolution. With its delay the Bolsheviks were compelled on the one hand to take certain measures to buy time within the Soviet Union, and at the same time to struggle for the preparation of these new parties of the Comintern so that they could fulfill their task.

Split at Halle Wins Mass Base for KPD

So what's happening in Germany? The USPD, which had considerable authority—it claimed at least on paper 700,000 to 800,000 members-had a congress in Halle in October 1920 to decide on affiliation to the Comintern on the basis of the 21 Conditions that had been adopted at the Second Congress. The USPD split, a majority going with the KPD and Comintern, a minority retaining the "Independent" label for another year while fading back into the SPD. The Communist Party brought 40,000 members to this unification, the USPD left wing brought about 300,000 to 400,000. So the number of Communists after the fusion increased tenfold.

It was not accidental that this congress was held in Halle. Halle was a left-wing stronghold of the workers movement in Germany. It was the center of a region, the province of Saxony, which contained a strong component of radical miners. Like American miners, they lived in relatively backward, isolated communities. Nevertheless, radicalized by their experiences in the blood-soaked trenches of WWI, they very often came back left-wing Social Democrats, members of the USPD.

Also, the war had accelerated the development of a petrochemical industry in Halle-Merseberg. In 1895 there were a thousand workers. By the end of WWI there were 35,000 workers, 23,000 of whom worked in the Leuna Werke [plant] near Halle. It was the biggest industrial plant then in Germany. It was a real stronghold of the USPD that claimed a membership in this one district of 80,000. Not only did the Communist Party and the USPD have a substantial base there, but so did the ultraleft syndic lists of the KAPD.

This was reflected in the class struggle in this region as well. Now, you might have read in your history books that in the Weimar Republic, with that wonderful, democratic constitution, workers got the eight-hour day. But it was a six-day or 48-hour workweek, so don't get so excited. And it was not implemented anywhere but in some sections of the civil service and in this region. Everywhere else people were working 54 hours a week. That was the norm. Wages were higher in this region. People got a third more vacation. And if I told you how little vacation you got you'd think you must be in America! Nevertheless they got a third more in this region and this represented some sharp class struggle.

I'll just give you one example. In January the mine bosses decided, 'We're gonna bring in a special police to be guards in the mines.' And workers just walked out and said, 'We're gonna hire our own guards, they're gonna be war veterans and workers who've been injured working in the mines, and they're gonna be beholden to us and not the mine chiefs.' And they won.

This was a militant section of the working class with a huge industrial base that had, just like in Russia, grown up in a period of less than 15 or 20 years. It had won substantial gains and was strongly Communist. On 20 February 1921, there were elections to the Prussian parliament (called the Landtag). In these elections to the Prussian state parliament the SPD got 70,000 votes. What was left of the USPD got 75,000 and the Communist Party got 197,000 votes. That is one-third more than the combined votes of the SPD and USPD. This didn't go unnoticed to the rest of the ruling class in Germany and is the background to the 1921 March Action, that took place mainly in this region.

This was a red sore in the eyes of the German bourgeoisie at a time when they had to pay substantial reparations to the victors of WWI, especially France and Britain. In fact one of the demands raised by the Communists was, "Make the bourgeoisie pay for Versailles!" Lenin's attitude was, 'We don't care about Versailles, we've got other things on the agenda. If we took power in Germany, we might also be compelled to pay reparations. But the main thing is to get the power.' He drew a very hard line in this regard against the kind of nationalist propaganda that came out in this period, including from the Communist Party. This problem worsens and will be dealt with in greater detail in the next class.

Back to 1921: What's going on in the KPD? After the fusion they had two chairmen: one from the old USPD left wing, Ernst Daumig, and the other who was the chairman of the Communist Party after Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches were murdered, Paul Levi. Paul Levi was an attorney who had defended Luxemburg and Liebknecht before the Kaiser's court. He joined the Spartacists and the left wing of the Zimmerwald Movement during WWI. He was known to Lenin, so he had some authority, but he also had some other less sterling qualities which we'll get to in a moment.
Radek was the Comintern rep in Germany, or seemed to be. They have a phrase in German—"the man for all things." So he was the all-purpose representative for this and that. Imprisoned by the Social Democrats, he met in jail with one of Germany’s foremost industrialists, Walter Rathenau, to discuss trade relations with Russia. Rathenau organized Germany's industrial supply line for WWI. He also happened to be Jewish. (Rathenau paid with his life for his trade and military negotiations with the Soviet Union, gunned down the following year by two fascist army officers.)

"Open Letter": Precursor to the United Front

One of the more intelligent things Levi and Radek came up with was the "Open Letter," which was drafted and printed in the beginning of January 1921, right after the fusion of the KPD and the USPD left wing. It was short, punchy and to the point. It consisted of a bunch of what we would call economic and transitional demands: for example, higher wages; the unemployed should be paid at the standard wage rate of the industry from which they have been laid off; pensions for the old people; distribution of cheap food; workers control, etc. Germany went through all these wars and the castles still stand, right? Throw out the princes, bring in the homeless.

The "Open Letter" was an appeal to all the workers' organizations—from the SPD and the big trade-union federation to the KAPD (a left split from the KPD) and its little union organization called the "one big union." This document was published in the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne [Red Flag] in January 1921. It anticipated the "Theses on Tactics" that would be discussed at the Third CI Congress and the united-front tactic that was elaborated at the Fourth. And it anticipated the Transitional Program upon which the Fourth International was founded.

I've always believed this document had no impact except with people like Lenin and Trotsky. Wrong. The Social Democrats did not go rushing to endorse this document and to sign up to throw the princes out of the palaces and to seize the shutdown factories. But a big congress of metalworkers held in Berlin at the end of January unanimously adopted the demands of this document. No social-democratic representative from the union movement could vote against it, at most they could abstain, because the document was too powerful. There were meetings of what was called the trade-union Kartell or federation for Greater Berlin. The same thing happened, it was unanimously adopted. It was extremely popular.

It turns out the place where it had no impact was in the KPD, because the tactic was never fought out. Levi had a bright idea. He got together with Radek, they wrote it up—after all he's the Chairman, right—so it appears in their newspaper Rote Fahne, bang, that's it! Are we going to implement it? How are we going to implement it? Were there any discussions to that effect? No.

Livorno: "Unity" That Strangled Italian Revolution

Now the next thing that shapes the history of the German party doesn't happen in Germany, it happens in Italy. And we get back to our old friend, Serrati. The Italian Socialist Party called a congress in Livorno in January 1921. This is after this party, through its reformist right wing and the trade-union bureaucrats, had sabotaged this great industrial and agrarian workers uprising. Because it didn't lead to workers revolution, they had in effect opened the road to the fascists. So now they're going to have a congress and decide what they're going to do about the Comintern and those 21 Conditions.
And everybody's there from Turati and Serrati to Bordiga—they're all there. What the Comintern wanted was for Serrati to break with the reformists. He refused. The Comintern sent two representatives—the Hungarian, Rakosi, and a Bulgarian, Kabakchiev. It was very hard to get people into Italy at this point. They traveled there under extreme difficulties. Comintern agents did not get the red carpet treatment from border guards.

Zinoviev, who opens the Third Congress with one of his usual pithy four-hour reports on the work of the ECCI, describes what happens to these guys when they get to Livorno. They walk into the Congress and are greeted with delegates yelling, "Long live the Pope!" This is in Italy! You thought the Pope lived in Rome? No, the Vatican is in Moscow. If you didn't know, you found out at this congress. Zinoviev even claims somebody released a bird at this point, a dove, into the congress. The Comintern reps come this great distance at great peril to be heckled and mistreated. This is internationalism?

Paul Levi got better treatment. He went down there in part at the initiative of Clara Zetkin. He pursued an entirely different policy, a policy counterpoised to the Comintern. He argued, 'Well, if you've got a party that is outside the Comintern like the USPD, then it's okay to split it. But if you have a party that's already in the Comintern, like the Italian Socialist Party (the whole party had formally joined the Comintern), then how can you splinter them? It's like cutting off a part of the body, say the arm, to have such a split.'
And we're talking about 1921, that is several months after these same people that are sitting in the same hall had sabotaged the general strikes, the plant occupations, the occupation of land by agrarian workers, so magnificent and so betrayed. The bourgeoisie got scared enough that they then backed the fascists: 'We can't just rely on Serrati and Turati to keep this working class under control. Time to go for the surgical operation and apply the knife.'

Levi goes back to Berlin really proud of himself and makes a report to the Central Committee or Zentralausschuss—his report is counterposed to the policy of the Comintern. Everybody knows that. His report is put up for a vote. He loses, narrowly. At this point, Levi, who is the chairman of the Party, Clara Zetkin, Daumig, who is co-chairman, and two other members of the Zentralausschuss resign, like it's a parliamentary vote of no confidence: 'You didn't vote for me, so I'm not going to be on your Zentralaus¬schuss anymore. I'm taking a powder.' So they leave. However, they don't resign their actual seats in parliament. These they keep.

Now you had a party that was very much divided between the so-called left wing and a right wing of which Levi, and Zetkin, to a certain extent, were representative. They wanted to do things like the "Open Letter." They also wanted to do things like support Serrati at Livorno. But these issues were never fought out.

Lenin writes a personal letter to Levi and Zetkin in April 1921, after the March Action. And he says, 'On the Italian Question I think you're wrong. But I'm mad at you because you walked out of the central committee simply because you lost a vote. How are we ever going to build a collective leadership if we can't even have political struggle within the leadership? So, by doing this 1) you undermined the "Open Letter," which was never fought for anyway in the party, and 2) you opened the road to the so-called leftists in the party.' The leftists now felt they had a free hand.

Indeed they had. A funny thing, how often today's ultraleftists are tomorrow's rightists. Levi was replaced as chairman by Heinrich Brandler, who would go from being a leader of the so-called lefts to a leader of the Right Opposition associated with Bukharin in Soviet Russia. He was a construction worker, a union official from the age of 16, and an early supporter of the Spartacists. He would be chairman of the party again in the crucial months of 1923 when the KPD blew a final decisive revolutionary opportunity.

In Berlin the so-called leftists were represented by the Fischer-Maslow-Reuter group. You may have already heard of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. Ernst Reuter would go on to a short tenure as General Secretary of the KPD before following the road blazed by Levi back into the SPD.

Comrades who have visited Berlin may recall that in the center of the West part there is a traffic circle bordered by the Technical University called Ernst Reuter Platz. This was not named after Reuter for his service or disservice to German communism. At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 when Berlin was under four-power occupation, Reuter was elected "Lord Mayor" of Berlin. Notorious for his anti-communist views, Reuter was vetoed by the Soviets. The Lord Mayor returned the compliment, calling the country which freed Europe from fascism "a nation of slaves."

The German bourgeoisie has a long history of dealing with revolution—in Germany, in France, in Hungary and elsewhere. It has a lot of experience and it augmented its experience by recruiting a number of ex-leftists through the instrumentality of the Social Democracy.

The March Action

Back to Germany, early 1921. Who shows up in Germany but Bela Kun and Kun's sidekick, Jozsef Pogany, a.k.a. John Pepper, who in the United States steered the CP into the Farmer-Labor Party mess. These people messed up the 1919 Hungarian Revolution—they fused with the Social Democrats and refused to give land to the peasants. They made every mistake you could make, for which the working class, as always, paid. Based on this authority they were sent as Comintern agents to Germany. How this happened is not well documented and remains a mystery.

Bela Kun was big on the "Revolutionary Offensive." What is offensive about it we'll find out shortly. Backed by Kun and Pepper, suddenly Rote Fahne started raising a lot of abstract propaganda: "Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Down with the regime!"
Lenin's letters to the KPD after the Third Congress and Trotsky's remarks in "School of Revolutionary Strategy" underlined the German bourgeoisie’s method of operation. The rulers set up the German proletariat where they are most left-wing and provoke a premature, isolated uprising and chop off its head. Then they send the armed forces and Nazi gangs city to city, chop, chop, decapitating the party, its work facilitated by the KPD's federated structure. That's what we saw in 1919, first in January and later in March. That's what we saw in March of 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and what we see again in March of 1921. The architects of the bourgeoisie’s "March Action" were the very experienced social-democratic Prussian minister of police Carl Severing and Saxon President Otto Horsing.

In war-devastated Germany, working conditions were terrible. Miners, in order to survive, got to take a couple of bags of scrap coal home. That was stopped. No more free coal; buy it on the market like everybody else. Then the bosses claimed that the workers were stealing. That's always a big, explosive issue. The workers are the thieves, not the capitalists?

After WWI, most workers kept their guns. They thought they might come in handy for another kind of war. During the Kapp Putsch in the previous year, armed workers militias sprouted up throughout Germany. Although their arms were pathetic compared to the state arsenal, they could deter fascist gangs and some paramilitary forces. Now the capitalist rulers declared they were going to disarm the workers and put an end to "unrest"—the codeword for class struggle.

For this purpose they created a new paramilitary police force, the Schutzpolizei (Schupos) and organized it into groups of a hundred, or Hun-dertschaften. They were going to occupy the mines around Halle and search the homes of workers to suppress "stealing" and disarm the workers.

The Communist Party was also thinking of having a March offensive. Now, in Germany, everything revolves around holidays, like Easter. The country totally shuts down for the four-day Easter weekend. They wanted to have their general strike after Easter.
The bourgeoisie wouldn't cooperate. They started their offensive before Easter. Around the 16-17 of March they started moving Schupos into Halle. The workers were outraged and looked to the Communist Party for leadership. The Communist Party was not prepared, even though they'd been calling for a "general strike" and to "overthrow the bourgeoisie" for two months. The secret police raided the CP headquarters in February and reported: 'we can't find the evidence that they're preparing anything!' They hadn't prepared a damn thing.
Still the CP calls for a general strike. And it does get a response. In many of these small mining communities the workers took over, formed armed guards and set up committees that were embryonic Soviets. You had dual power in this one little region. In the Leuna Werke solidarity demonstrations increased in size to some 18,000 before all hell broke loose.

The government purposely didn't send enough troops to do the job. As the Schupos approached the Leuna Werke, the workers responded by occu¬pying the plant and forming a workers militia and a commissary. So Red Leuna is born; followed by Red Merseburg, then Red Ammendorf.

Communists were subjected to savage persecution in all capitalist countries and had to take certain elementary measures of self-defense. Recall the Palmer Raids—mass deportation of foreign-born leftists and mass imprisonment of many more here. That edifice to bourgeois democracy, the Weimar Republic, was built over the broken and bullet-riddled bodies of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and thousands of the finest fighters. The KPD also took to heart the attack of many Communists throughout the world that they had not adequately protected Karl and Rosa. The Comintern, in its statutes and the 21 Conditions for Membership, insisted that Communist Parties must conduct such defensive measures and must work even when they have been declared "illegal" by reactionary, witch-hunting laws or when work must be conducted "underground" due to persecution by the state or fascist bands.

For this work the KPD had set up military and counter-espionage organizations, the Militdrrat and Nachrichtendienst. However, in the KPD this, like all work, was highly federated. Much was left to local initiative which sometimes got completely out of control. In the midst of all this, you've got the anarcho-syndicalist KAPD and a substantial current in the KPD that believes the philistine German working class isn't going to respond unless we give them a kick in the ass.

And the KAPD had some assistance from Max Hoelz, the Robin Hood of the German proletariat. Hoelz was a very interesting guy. He was a very high-grade technician in the repair and servicing of railroads. He formed a workers militia in the November Revolution. The revolution was suppressed but his militia lived on. He would do bank jobs and distribute funds to the poor, in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's question: is it a greater crime to rob a bank or own one? Usually he'd pick targets that were often justly hated by the proletariat, like courthouses. He is reputed to have derailed just plain personnel trains that had nothing to do with the movement of military goods. If so, we would have opposed this. All of this was based on the "Theory of the Offensive," that the working class cannot be motivated by consciousness of its own political interests and historical destiny; we need to ignite the working class with deeds of great daring. There was nothing new about this theory, it was not invented by Radek and Bela Kun. The Marxist movement had combated some anarcho-syndicalist tendencies since its birth in the 1840s.

The KPD with its own theory of the "Revolutionary Offensive" was not in too good a position to combat this—on the contrary. So the KPD sent Hugo Eberlein down to Halle to help out. He was the KPD representative at the founding Congress of the Comintern. A fine comrade, but he was a bit loony, and known among his comrades and fellow workers as "Hugo the Fuse," as he was behind some of the military activity of the KPD. His advice was, 'to really get workers moving here what we ought to do is take the two regional party secretaries, who seemed like pretty good guys, kidnap them and say the police did it. If that doesn't work, then we'll blow up a couple of party headquarters
and blame that on the police!'

I think those two regional party secretaries spiked Eberlein's inventive proposals. But the main problem was that the action in the March Action was restricted to Saxony and Halle. The KPD did try to extend the strike into other sections of Germany. In Berlin they had almost no support and their appeal for a general strike resulted in fist-fights with workers in front of AEG and other big industrial plants. The KPD did write an appeal to social-democratic workers. It was called, "Either you're for us or against us." Paul Levi said this was a declaration of war on four-fifths of the working class. He was not wrong. It also had another charming quality. It called on them to hang their leaders from the lampposts. You might call this an early version of the united front from below. As comrade Robertson said, their hearts were in the right place. But as you can imagine, this didn't make much of an impact in extending the strike to the social-democratic workers.
Hamburg was even more tragic. On the docks you had a division among longshoremen very much like the United States. You had steady guys who were social-democratic and then you had the casuals who were Communists. The steady guys had the jobs—there was high unemployment at that point in Hamburg. So the CP organized the unemployed to seize the docks. There were big physical fights, but the CP mobilized enough forces so they were able to occupy the docks. There was no attempt to win over the SPD workers except by the threat: "join us or else."

The Hamburg KPD liked showy demonstrations so they marched off the docks and down to the nearby Fish Market while the police and the Social Democrats took back the docks. This was burned into the memory of the social-democratic work force. (In October 1923 when Thalmann tried to bring about the uprising not knowing it had been canceled—it had been voted down in Chemnitz again—many of the social-democratic workers joined the police as volunteers to suppress the KPD-led uprising.)

In other cities, where the CP had a base, there were short, one-day general strikes, such as Essen. But workers in the Ruhr and elsewhere were not aware of what was happening in Saxony. So there was no preparation and no apparatus to pull them into a struggle.
The KPD "Revolutionary Offensive" played right into the hands of the bourgeoisie, so that the general strike could be suppressed militarily. To take the Leuna Werke 1,200 Schupos backed up by the Reichswehr and artillery were used. They shot into the plant that made ammonia knowing that it could set off an explosion. They captured several hundred workers, locked them up in a silo and kept them there for two weeks. Two dozen Communist youth who sought to liberate these workers—very courageous individuals—were all murdered, massacred. The number of dead is hard to estimate-there was a cover-up. The number of arrested is public record—6,000. Special courts were set up to deal with this. The Rote Hilfe, or Red Aid [the first Communist-affiliated defense league and an inspiration for the International Labor Defense], got its start providing legal defense and material support to the prisoners and their families, in many cases widows and families who had lost the breadwinner to this action. That was the March Action, which ended with the end of March.

Comrades asked me in Chicago, "What would have been a correct policy for Communists?" In fact in the "School of Revolutionary Strategy" Trotsky answers:
"The offensive was in reality launched by the Social-Democratic policeman Hoersing. This should have been utilized in order to unite all the workers for defense, for self-protection, even if, to begin with, a very modest resistance. Had the soil proved favorable, had the agitation met with a favorable response, it would then have been possible to pass over to the general strike. If the events continue to unfold further, if the masses rise, if the ties among the workers grow stronger, if their temper lifts, while indecision and demoralization seize the camp of the foe—then comes the time for issuing the slogan to pass over to the offensive."
-p. 21

As this essay shows, there was a discussion in the Comintern of what should have been done and how the Party should be prepared to avoid a similar situation. That was a crucial fight.

Levi, as you'll recall, had resigned as chairman of the party. And knowing that the March Action was about to happen—because Clara Zetkin made Bela go talk to him about it—he did the responsible thing...and went on vacation. He was in Vienna on his way to Italy where he seemed to enjoy spending time. Then the March Action started and he did come back. In the beginning of April he issued a brochure entitled "Our Way." It contained many just criticisms of the March Action. But it also claimed that the March Action was the greatest putsch in history, that the CP had acted like General Ludendorff in WWI, sending endless waves of youth into a bloodbath on the front lines. It was a critique that lacked any solidarity whatsoever with the party but offered much material to the prosecutors. It was used, as he must have known it would be, by those special courts that had been set up to sit in judgment on the Communists and their supporters. For this he was expelled from the Communist Party and the expulsion was confirmed at the Comintern Congress.

It's clear in his 16 April letter to Clara Zetkin and Levi that Lenin didn't know even at that late date what had happened in Germany. But he quickly figures it out. He calls Bela Kun back from Germany. Lenin calls him in for a talk, which, according to Bela Kun's Hungarian biographer, resulted in Bela Kun, upon leaving Lenin's office, having a heart attack.

But the problem was not just Bela Kun. The KPD claimed the March Action was nothing less than a great victory. It was hailed by the "ultralefts" listed in "Left-Wing" Communism, by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern, by the Vienna Bureau, and by the Young Communist League. Everyone was on the March Action bandwagon, including Zinoviev, who was head of the Comintern, Radek, who was—insofar as he was official anything—official Comintern representative in Germany, and Bukharin. Lenin and Trotsky realized that they were about to lose the Comintern, that they were a minority, at least among the leading elements, probably in the IEC and several European parties.

Part of this was an understandable reaction against Social Democracy. But part of it was what Lenin described as infantile leftism: playing with phrases as a surrogate for the more arduous but essential task of forging a communist vanguard that wins the allegiance of a majority of the working class. Many "leftists" who attacked the necessary concessions to the peasantry for the survival of the Soviet workers state were the loudest champions of the "Revolutionary Offensive" and the March Action.

This fight had to take place simultaneously in the Russian delegation which had six members and was split evenly on the question of the March Action—between Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev on one side and Radek, Bukharin and Zinoviev on the other. That is the background to the Third Congress that is best described in the Prometheus Research Series bulletin on the Organizational Resolution passed at the Third Congress (Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work [New York, 1988]).

Third Congress: School of Revolutionary Stategy

The Congress is approaching: what is to be done? I encouraged comrades to read Lenin's "Letter to Zinoviev" on the "Thesis on Tactics" (CW, Vol. 42, pp. 319-323) because it shows how the fight would be waged before, during and after the Congress. Lenin decided that the cause of proletarian justice as well as Marxist clarity would best be served by having one of the principal malefactors, Radek, incorporate the lessons of the March Action defeat into his report "On Tactics" which would inform and guide all of the sections of the CI. Radek did a draft. As the delegates arrived Radek showed the draft to his buddies from Germany: Thalheimer, Brandler and Maslow. They suggested changes: 'You see, where it says "conquest of the majority of the working class," why don't you take that out and put in "important sections of the working class," or "decisive sections of the working class."' Just tone down the main thing that was supposed to be emphasized at this Congress! And if that wasn't enough, they got together with a recovered Bela Kun to draw up their own amendments.

On 1 June they ship this all to Lenin in an envelope. He opens it, reads the contents and furiously makes notes on the envelope, which are in the Russian edition, but alas, not the English. These notes are then developed in the letter to Zinoviev which opens: "The crux of the matter is that Levi in very many respects is right politically. Unfortunately, he is guilty of a number of breaches of discipline for which the Party has expelled him" ("Letter to Zinoviev," p. 319). Lenin is categorical that the "Open Letter" tactic was correct and important:
"...[Waverings in regard to The 'Open Letter' are extremely harmful, shameful, and extremely widespread. We may as well admit this. All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress."
-ibid., p. 321

To show how carefully crafted this congress was, it begins with an appeal to the German proletariat on behalf of Max Hoelz, who had just been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. While fully incorporating the Marxist critique of individual terror, the resolution passed by the Congress declares: "But his actions emanated from his love of the proletariat and his hatred of the bourgeoisie," and "instructs the German proletariat to defend him." It was as if you say, 'OK young hotheads and ultralefts, we will pound you politically, but we applaud your elan and seek only to give it Marxist direction and purpose.'

For the "rightists" you might say, there was also a celebration of Clara Zetkin's 65th birthday. Naturally a KPD "leftist," Fritz Heckert, gave a wonderful valedictory speech for Clara. The guy that did the presentation on the organizational resolution was another KPD left-winger, Koenen.

If some of this seems mildly perverse, Lenin was trying to make a point here. He was struggling for genuine homogeneity, not by hiding the issues but by fighting them out among comrades. He felt that 'we have gotten rid of the people—or they have gotten rid of themselves—that we don't want in this Communist International. Now we've got to fight to forge cadre.' The lesson you get, how this Congress was orchestrated, is a lesson in party building.

If the "Theses on Tactics" read a little vacuous in parts, it's not accidental. At the last minute Lenin couldn't get Radek to do all that many changes. There are passages that read like: 'When there's a defeat, it's necessary to retreat.' Except, that was bold language for some in this Congress. But, there is one section that runs from page 285 to 286 (Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International fink Links, London, 1980]) which is a description of the role of transitional demands that motivates Trotsky's Transitional Program. It is a very powerful statement.
Trotsky's "School of Revolutionary Strategy" is his summary and analysis of the key debates of the Third Congress. They are relevant to fights that we've had in our own party around the general strike in Italy and Germany. When I was in the SpAD we were advocating an adventurist policy on paper. We didn't do much except put out propaganda filled with phrases about "general strikes" and "mass strikes" in precisely the region where the March Action took place—the mining, industrial region that includes Bischofferode, Wolfen (which had also developed a big chemical industry), the Halle Leuna Werke.

The problem is that by 1990-91, when we started to make this general strike agitation, these plants were finished. The bourgeoisie had decided to close them down. In the case of Bischofferode the workers were only fighting over who would get the last paycheck to turn off the lights. The empty propaganda we put out at that time was counter-posed to explaining to the workers what hap¬pening was and what had happened to them because of capitalist counterrevolution.

In "School of Revolutionary Strategy," Trotsky has a devastating indictment of the Italian SP. He said: 'Yes, you called for the revolution. You called for mass strikes. You called for all these good things and you prepared nothing. You set these people up and led to a disaster.' In his criticism of the Comintern's draft program for the Sixth Congress Trotsky writes:

"The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read 'To the masses' but: 'To power through a previous conquest of the masses]' After the faction fight led by Lenin (which he characterized demonstratively as the 'Right' wing)...Lenin arranged a private conference toward the end of the Congress in which he warned prophetically: 'Remember, it is only a question of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap. The struggle for the masses is the struggle for power.'"
—The Third International After Lenin, pp. 90-91

These documents for us are living documents. When you read the Third Congress "Resolution on Communist Work among Women" you should know that there was a fight in the SL about this question when we had the opportunity to recruit from radical, feminist collectives in the early '70s. These documents became for us a living reference point and are reprinted in the early issues of Women and Revolution. The same thing with the document on the youth question. The communist youth theses lay out very clearly the motivating principles that became fighting issues in the very birth, first of the Revolutionary Tendency and then, after another kind of faction fight over our orientation to SDS, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus.

Because we claim the tradition of the October Revolution as ours, it is our obligation to examine critically our work and perspectives by the standards set at the first four congresses of the Comintern. I really appreciate the way Trotsky concluded Lessons of October. That is: revolutionary tradition is not a museum display, it's not an internet search engine. He writes:

"The party should and must know the whole of the past, so as to be able to estimate it correctly and assign each event to its proper place. The tradition of a revolutionary party is not built on evasions, but on critical clarity."

Summary following discussion

Markin comment- I have not republished the summary here as there is no context for the statements made during the course of the discussion.
*******
Reading List for Educationals on the Comintern

III. The Third Congress: Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization

Lenin, "Theses for a Report on the Tactics of the R.C.P.," 13 June 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 453461 Lenin, "Speech on the Italian Question," 28 June 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 462-467 Trotsky, "Speech on the Italian Question," 29 June 1921, FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 262-268

Lenin, "Speech in Defence of the Tactics of the Communist International, July 1," 1 July 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 468-477

Trotsky, "Speech on Comrade Radek's Report on Tactics of the Comintern' at the Third Congress," 2 July 1921,
FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 269-281 Trotsky, "Theses of the Third World Congress on the International Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern,"
4 July 1921, FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 238-261

Comintern, "Theses on Tactics," 12 July 1921, FFC, pp. 274-299

Comintern, "Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses," 8 July 1921, ibid.,
pp. 212-229

Comintern, "The Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement," 12 July 1921, ibid., pp. 230-233 Trotsky, "The School of Revolutionary Strategy," July 1921, FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 143 Lenin, "A Letter to the German Communists," 14 August 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 512-523 Additional Readings:
Trotsky, "Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International," 23 June 1921,

FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 174-226 Radek, "The Levi Case," excerpted in International Communism in the Era of Lenin, by Helmut Gruber, NY, 1967,
pp. 341-346, originally published in Die Kommunistische Internationale, II, No. 17, September 1921

Trotsky, "Paul Levi and Some 'Lefts'," 6 January 1922, FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 85-90 Trotsky, "Through What Stage Are We Passing?" 21 June 1924, excerpted in Challenge of the Left Opposition,1923-1925, pp. 167-174

Trotsky, "Report to the 8th All-Russian Congress of the Transport Workers' Union," 20 October 1923, The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon

Trotsky, (a.k.a. "How the Revolution Armed"), Vol. 5, pp. 193-221

Zetkin, C., Reminiscences of Lenin, pp. 21-32 (International Publishers, NY, 1934) Note: this section is excerpted in Gruber, pp. 351-354 Background:

Lenin, "The Party Crisis," 19 January 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 43-53

Lenin, "Report on the Political Work of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.), March 8," 8 March 1921, CW,Vol. 32, pp. 170-191

Wednesday, November 08, 2017

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Lev Kamenev

Click on title to link to the Lev Kamenev Internet Archive's copy of his 1924'contribution' to the Soviet Communist Party's intra-party political struggle over the course the revolution should take and the struggle of personal power against the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, "Leninism Or Trotskyism".

Markin comment:

Before everyone starts yelling and screaming I know that Kamenev's, like Zinoviev's, role in the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power was ugly ("strikebreaker" being the kindest way to express his position). I also know that he, again like Zinoviev his political bloc partner, was less, far less than brave in his opposition to Stalin and was wobbly at the end. But remember this- he was Lenin's man in Russia while he was in exile and in the key period before 1917 when World War I was going full blast and when revolutionary internationalists were scarce as hen's teeth he stood his ground. It is for that and his agitation during the months before the revolution that he gets a nod here.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

*PERSONAL POLITCAL SKETCHES FROM THE PEN OF LEON TROTSKY- WATCH OUT!

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1932 article, "Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg".

Book Review

PORTRAITS-POLITICAL AND PERSONAL, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1977
BOOK REVIEW


Is this an indispensable work of Leon Trotsky that no militant leftist can afford not to read? No. Is it nevertheless a supreme example of the kind of political and psychological insight that Trotsky was able to call forth concerning the political actors, great and small, of his day in the tradition of his monumental History of the Russian Revolution? Most definitely, yes. This why we can benefit from reading such personal and political sketches today.

The range of articles presented here is impressive from the martyred Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg through various political associates of his revolutionary career- Lenin and his wife Krupskaya, Zinoviev, Kamenev, his own wife Natalia Sedova, his son Leon Sedov on through to Stalin. And additionally, various European writers and politicians of his time. The quality of the insights and the purpose for the writing of the sketch is a little uneven as is inevitable when dealing with this many personalities, however, two sketches stick out in this reviewer’s estimation. The two- one a political obituary for a fellow Left Oppositionist, Kote Tsintsadze (hereafter, Kote) and the other, also a political obituary, for a wavering Stalinist functionary, Abel Yenukidze (hereafter, Abel) give personal expression to what the great internal struggle in the Soviet Communist Party (and, by extension, to the Communist International) in the 1920’s and 30’s was all about.

Whatever else one can say about the fight for the Russian October Revolution the most striking aspect is how consciously planned it was both theoretically and in practice. Thus, one has to seriously look to how the cadre of the revolution developed. Trotsky, himself, presents a clear example of such development. But a few leaders do not a revolution make. Otherwise they would occur much more often than they do. What Trotsky and Lenin epitomized was the development of whole layers of like-minded cadre late 19th century Eastern Europe. No others came to their political level but they were more than adequate to carry out the revolution. Kote, as Trotsky notes in his obituary represents just such a cadre, particularly those who did not emigrate before the October Revolution. Kote fought through three revolutions, underground when necessary, above ground when possible. He fought to defend the revolution throughout the civil war. When the revolution showed signs of degeneration he joined the Left Opposition. In short, Kote was the consummate revolutionary. Such men are dangerous. Particularly to those who want to rein in the revolutionary struggle. Trotsky posed this question concerning the life and death of Kote- Where are the revolutionaries in the West who could measure up to the tasks of the revolution like Kote? That question says all that needs to be said about the plight of the Western socialist movement. We must do better.

Trotsky wrote reams of material about the effects of Stalinization on the Soviet political system. He spent the last part of his life politically fighting that process. Yet this writer believes that Trotsky never got a full handle on Stalin’s personality. For that matter this writer is still befuddled by that personality. Why? After analyzing all the social forces that contributed to the victory of Stalinism one is still left with the problem of how Stalin, given his personal style, was able to organize his victory. The case of Abel Yenukidze provides a window into that process. If Kote represented the vanguard of the internationalist fighters, the historically-motivated then Abel represented the ex-revolutionary turned bureaucrat- with this caveat. He truly believed Stalin represented the best course for Russian socialism even though he had some sympathies for the Left Opposition. And he paid with his life for that belief in Stalin. One cannot understand the 1930’s in the Soviet Union culminating in the Great Purges without understanding this. The greatest numbers of victims were Stalinists of an earlier period- the true believers, or at least those who went along. All that survived later were those who knew how to survive under any political regime- toadies. Sometimes in history there is no middle ground. This was one of those times. Read this book and draw your own conclusions on this political question.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

In Honor Of The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series- The Fourth Congress Of The Communist International (1922):The "Workers Government" and the Road to the German Revolution

Fourth Congress (1922):The "Workers Government" and the Road to the German Revolution

by T. Marlow New York, 23 January 1999

Overview

The Fourth Congress of the Communist International opened on 5 November 1922, 16 months after the Third Congress. In broad strokes, not much had changed: the precarious equilibrium of post-war capitalist rule still obtained, given the absence of Communist parties with sufficient authority in their native working classes to present a real threat to the bourgeois order. The Fourth Congress was also the last that Lenin was able to attend—from the Collected Works, it is clear he gave but one speech to the Congress on 13 November.

The real backdrop was the disintegration of the Versailles "peace” and resumption of inter-imperialist rivalries, and the increased role of U.S. imperialism in the world. As stated in the Fourth Congress resolution on the Versailles treaty: "The World War ended with the downfall of three imperialist powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Four exploiting Great Powers emerged from the war as victors: the United States, Britain, France and Japan.

"The peace treaties, the crux of which is the Versailles peace treaty, are nothing other than an attempt to stabilize the world domination of these four victorious powers; politically and economically, by reducing the rest of the world to the level of a single colony exploited by them, and socially, by creating an international union of the bourgeoisie designed to strengthen bourgeois rule both over the proletariat of their own countries and over the victorious revolutionary proletariat of Russia....

"At first glance it might appear that, of all the victorious powers, France has gained the most. Besides the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine and the claim to countless billions of German reparations, it has in military terms become the strongest power on the European continent. However, its economy, diminishing population, enormous domestic and foreign debts and consequent economic dependence on Britain and America do not provide a firm enough basis for its insatiable imperialist appetite. British control of all the important naval strongholds, and the British and American oil monopoly, greatly limit its political power.... All the financial experts are agreed that Germany cannot possibly pay the sums needed by France to revive its finances."

The resolution then goes on to Britain, noting its continuing possession of a vast colonial empire and its control of outlets to the oceans, and also its conflict with France over Germany:

"Here the interests of Britain and France violently clash: Britain wants to sell its goods to Germany, but this is prevented by the Versailles peace treaty; France wants to squeeze huge sums out of Germany as compensation for war losses, but this threatens to destroy German purchasing power. Hence Britain favours a reduction of reparations, while France is carrying on an undercover war against Britain in the Near East to compel greater flexibility on the question of reparations."
—Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International [hereafter FFC], pp. 383-385 (Ink Links)
As an example of U.S. imperialism's new power, there was a conference held at the end of 1921 in Washington, D.C. nominally to discuss "disarmament." The various imperialist powers were forced to accept U.S. conditions limiting the displacement, gun caliber and number of each country's battleships, which at this time represented the highest expression of military power. In reality, this was directed primarily against Japan, whose navy was limited to a size comparable to that of Italy. As a documentary film on sea power put it, the Second World War began, in effect, with Japanese resentment of its being forced to accept second-class status. And the Fourth Congress resolution noted:
"By using its economic supremacy to build a strong navy, the United States has forced the other imperialist powers to sign the Washington agreement on disarmament. In doing this, it undermined one of the most important bases of the Versailles peace treaty—British world supremacy at sea—and so has removed any interest Britain had in preserving the alignment of powers envisaged by the Versailles treaty."
-FFC, p. 386

France and Britain were also at loggerheads concerning their policies toward Soviet Russia. This of course proved quite useful to the Soviets. The imperialists had set up their League of Nations, a body which Lenin dismissed as follows in a June 1920 speech:

"... their League of Nations is a league only in name; in fact it is a pack of wolves that are all the time at each other's throats and do not trust one another in the least."
—"Speech delivered at the Second All-Russia Conference of Organisers Responsible for Rural Work," 12 June 1920, Collected Works (CW), Vol. 31, p. 172

Lenin noted in a speech to the Moscow Gubernia party organization (21 November 1920) how the Soviets had used the dissension between the imperialists, particularly Britain and France, after the war:

"The bourgeois states were able to emerge from the imperialist war with their bourgeois regimes intact. They were able to stave off and delay the crisis hanging over them, but basically they so undermined their own position that, despite all their gigantic military forces, they had to acknowledge, after three years, that they were unable to crush the Soviet Republic with its almost non-existent military forces.... Without having gained an international victory, which we consider the only sure victory, we are in a position of having won conditions enabling us to exist side by side with capitalist powers, who are now compelled to enter into trade relations with us. In the course of this struggle we have won the right to an independent existence."
-CW, Vol. 31, p. 412

It's very important to remember how isolated the young Soviet Republic was in this period. The defeat of the German March Action in 1921 signaled that proletarian revolution in Germany was not to be immediately forthcoming and in fact one of the main features of the Third Congress was to deal with the problems of the German party. British imperialism continued to make trouble in the countries on Russia's southern flank, e.g., Afghanistan, Persia and Turkey, while France pursued an active military policy against the Soviets, both in East Europe and in the Crimea where they supported the White forces.

However, with the defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw and the Soviet-Polish armistice of 12 October 1920 and the smashing of Wrangel's forces in the Crimea in November 1920, British fears of the Red Army conquering Europe and hopes of immediate counterrevolution were both dashed. David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, could hardly be accused of being soft on the Bolsheviks, but he was astute enough to realize that the recovery of the English, and in general the European, economies required some resumption of trade with Russia. After a spate of negotiations in late 1920, an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement was finally signed on 16 March 1921. British concerns had less to do with trade than with political concerns in the East. This is clear from one of the stipulations in the agreement:

"That each party refrains from hostile action or undertakings against the other and from conducting outside of its own borders any official propaganda, direct or indirect, against the institutions of the British Empire or of the Russian Soviet Republic respectively, and more particularly that the Russian Soviet Government refrains from any attempt by military or diplomatic or any other form of action or propaganda to encourage any of the peoples of Asia in any form of hostile action against British interests or the British Empire, especially in India and in the independent state of Afghanistan. The British Government gives a similar particular undertaking to the Russian Soviet Government in respect of the countries which formed part of the former Russian Empire and which have now become independent."
—E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 3, p. 288

The abstinence on the British side is laughable, since France had undertaken the anti-Soviet campaign in East Europe, particularly Poland. Carr notes an interesting exchange of diplomatic correspondence between Britain and Russia in the fall of 1921 where the Russians were accused of having violated the above terms of the trade agreement: "The Soviet authorities, who had been willing almost from the moment of the revolution to undertake to abstain from hostile propaganda against other states, interpreted that undertaking in a purely formal sense. It applied, so far as they were concerned, only to direct and avowed government policy and did not cover the action of agents in receipt of confidential instructions. Thus, they felt entitled to deny, in the face of well-known facts, that there was a propaganda school in Tashkent for Indian revolutionaries...; and the whole rejection of responsibility for the activities of Comintern and its agents rested on no more than a formal distinction.... In fact, both sides, undeterred by the agreement, continued to regard the activities of their own agents as legitimate retaliation or legitimate self-defence and those of the other party as unprovoked aggression."
—ibid., p. 345

Whereas the British were willing to explore the possibilities of economically sabotaging the Bolsheviks, the French were implacable. The holders of tsarist bonds would never forget or forgive the renunciation of tsarist debts. In the spring of 1921,-Poland and Rumania signed a treaty of alliance, with scarcely disguised encouragement from France. And as Carr states:

"In December 1921 the foreign ministers of Finland, Poland, Latvia and Estonia met in conference in Helsingfors and decided to negotiate a mutual assistance pact. Poland was the driving force in the alliance; and behind Polish initiative the hand of France, then at the height of her post-war military power and prestige, was plainly seen. Little attempt was made to deny that Soviet Russia was the potential enemy against whom protection was to be sought through common action. Far from having succeeded in opening a window towards the west, the Soviet Government began to have visions of a revival of the cordon sanitaire" -ibid., pp. 348-349

In what Carr calls a rare excursion into international affairs, Stalin wrote in the pages of Pravda in December 1921:

"Gone on the wing is the 'terror' or 'horror' of the proletarian revolution which seized the bourgeoisie of the world, for example, in the days of the advance of the Red Army on Warsaw. And with it has passed the boundless enthusiasm with which the workers of Europe used to receive almost every piece of news about Soviet Russia,...

"But we should not forget that commercial and all other sorts of missions and associations, now flooding Russia to trade with her and to aid her, are at the same time the best spies of the world bourgeoisie, and that now it, the world bourgeoisie, in virtue of these conditions knows Soviet Russia with its weak and strong sides better than ever before—circumstances fraught with serious dangers in the event of new interventionist actions."
-ibid., p. 349

It's pretty cheeky for Stalin to comment on the advance of the Red Army on Warsaw, since it was due to his efforts that the Red forces were fatally split, allowing the Poles (with the aid of French officers) to defeat the Red Army. Carr notes the deeper significance of Stalin's piece:

"The article, which bears marks of Stalin's longstanding antipathy to Chicherin, was significant, not because Stalin was at this time concerned in the framing of Soviet foreign policy, but because it appealed to prejudices and discouragements common in party circles about the policy of rapprochement with the western capitalist world which had been inaugurated in March 1921, and of which Chicherin and Krasin, with Lenin's support, were the most active exponents."
—ibid., p. 350

But in the absence of proletarian revolution in Europe, Russia's only hope was to play the imperialists off against each other and to expand whatever opportunities for trade relations there were. Lenin was willing to offer significant concessions to foreign investors. Carr cites Lenin's report to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921:

"In order to obtain the necessary assistance, he was ready to give extensive concessions 'to the most powerful imperialist syndicates'—for example, 'a quarter of Baku, a quarter of Grozny, a quarter of our best forests'; later he named timber and iron ore as typical products for concessions."
-ibid., pp. 352-353; c.f. Lenin, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 182-183

Contrary to Stalin's distrust of everything foreign—expressing the limited worldview of the Russian muzhik (peasant)—Lenin understood that, without revolutionary help from the West, it was only through such concessions that Soviet industry could be built. Thus despite the dangers inherent in the concessions policy, the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement gave the Bolsheviks a respite and recognition which they desperately needed. Carr notes that the de facto recognition of the Soviet government by Great Britain meant that the Soviets no longer had to fear that goods exported by them or gold issued for payment for imports would be subject to impoundment by creditors of the former tsarist regime.

One problem in terms of trade was the deplorable state of Russian industry—what she could export was mostly agricultural products and natural resources, and not too much of either because of the devastation of the economy after the war.

But the major problem in terms of concessions was that the Soviet government represented state power in the hands of the proletariat. The state monopoly over foreign trade meant that the flow of foreign capital was subject to strict regulation. Trotsky referred to the significance of the monopoly of foreign trade in his report to the Fourth Congress: "It is one of our safeguards against capitalism which, of course, would not at all be averse under certain conditions to buy up our incipient socialism, after failing to snuff it out by military measures.

"So far as concessions are concerned today, Comrade Lenin has here remarked: 'Discussions are plentiful, concessions are scarce'." —Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International [hereafter FFYCI\, Vol. 2, p. 242

The Genoa Conference and the Rapallo Treaty

The subject of normalizing relations with Soviet Russia had been one of intense interest, particularly to Britain. As Trotsky noted in his speech to the Fourth Congress, it was not possible that collaboration and trade with Soviet Russia would bring immediate solutions to Europe's (and England's) economic woes. But Britain certainly had reasons to worry over the increasing French dominance of the European continent. On Lloyd George's initiative, the allied Supreme Council decided on 6 January 1922 to convene an economic and financial conference to which all the European countries, including Soviet Russia, would be invited. '"A united effort by the stronger Powers,' declared the resolution, 'is necessary to remedy the paralysis of the European system'" (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, p. 358). The question of German reparations was to be discussed and Rathenau, the German Minister of Reconstruction, participated in the talks.

The bright prospects Lloyd George had were cut short by the elections in France: Briand's government was replaced by that of Poincare, who was a bitter opponent of any rapprochement with Russia and also any relaxation of the reparations against Germany.
Behind the scenes, secret negotiations had been undertaken between German and Russian representatives—as Carr put it the two outcast nations of the Europe of Versailles. Despite the visceral anti-Sovietism of the German right, more far-seeing elements of the German bourgeoisie understood the advantages of an agreement with Soviet Russia. Ostensibly, these were about trade, and the technical details of how to deal with the Soviet trade bureaucracy. In fact, the real questions revolved around production of weapons, training of officers, which were forbidden to Germany by the terms of the Versailles treaty. To Soviet Russia, this offered the possibility of obtaining the latest in military arms and training for the Red Army; for the Germans, it meant a means to obtain the same outside of the eyes—and control—of the Entente. So German officers were dispatched along with technical experts.

Thus when the Allies opened the Genoa conference on 10 April 1922, the Russians were in a relatively strong position. Given French intransigence, Lloyd George wasn't able to get the agreement he needed, and the Germans were frightened at rumors that they were being cut out of a deal with Soviet Russia under article 116 of the Versailles treaty which had canceled the Brest-Litovsk accords. After some last minute waffling by the German delegation, the treaty of Rapallo was signed at 5 o'clock on 17 April. As Carr states:
"This major diplomatic event shattered the already creaking structure of the Genoa conference. The allied Powers had attempted to come to terms with Soviet Russia behind the back of Germany: Soviet Russia had come to terms with Germany behind their back." —ibid., p. 376

Carr's interpretation of the accommodation to Western capitalism (after noting the emergency of the civil war, necessary concessions to the peasantry, i.e., NEP, and so on) is that the interests of the Soviet state came to predominate over that of the Comintern and world revolution; in fact, Carr predates the switch to the autumn of 1920, when the Soviets pursued a strong diplomatic policy in the East; these culminated in various treaties which were signed in the Spring of 1921:

"In the east, as in the west, the autumn of 1920 had been a high-water mark of world revolution as the driving force of Soviet foreign policy, and of Comintern as its chief instrument, and was succeeded by a certain reaction. The idea of Moscow as the deliverer, through the processes of national and socialist revolution, of the oppressed masses of the east was not abandoned. But it began to take second place to the idea of Moscow as the centre of a government which, while remaining the champion and the repository of the revolutionary aspirations of mankind, was compelled in the meanwhile to take its place among the great Powers of the capitalist world."
-ibid., pp. 289-290

In other words, having defeated the forces of counterrevolution, the Bolsheviks regarded the Soviet workers state as the sine qua non, and that the affiliated parties of the Comintern were henceforth required to kowtow to the interests of Soviet Russia, even if at the expense of their own revolutions. Carr is wrong—while the delegates to the Fourth Congress certainly understood the necessity of defending Soviet Russia and admired the Bolsheviks who had made the revolution, they were not afraid to express differences with the leadership of the CI. The subsuming of the Comintern to the wishes of the emerging Stalinist bureaucracy would come later, at the Fifth Congress which initiated the program of "Bolshevization."

The Famine of 1921

If the troubles of the Civil War were not enough, Soviet Russia was afflicted with a severe drought which hit the Volga basin in the summer of 1921. By the end of the year, it was estimated that some 22 million people were seriously affected by the crop failures. In August, agreements were signed with the American Relief Administration (ARA), under no less than Herbert Hoover, and with the Red Cross. The terms were humiliating since they meant the admission into Russia of foreign agents, ostensibly to oversee the distribution of food aid. The ARA was especially suspect: its staff was widely seen to be spies or agents to secure their own or U.S. commercial interests. In an 11 August 1921 letter to Molotov and the Politbureau, Lenin wrote: ' "There is rank duplicity on the part of America, Hoover and the League of Nations Council. "Hoover must be punished, he must be slapped in the face publicly, for all the world to see, and the League of Nations Council as well."

Lenin added the following postscript:
"The conditions must be of the strictest: arrest and deportation for the slightest interference in our internal affairs."
-CW, Vol. 45, pp. 250-251

(Fortunately, the harvest of 1922 was excellent, the famine was outlived and the economy began to revive under the NEP.)

This calamity was no small political factor: Zinoviev in his report to the Fourth Congress noted how the Social Democrats of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals used it against Russia:

"For the non-party workers, lacking in political training to be faced with the fact that famine reigned in the first Soviet Republic and that the life of the Russian workers and peasants was one of suffering and hardships, it amounted to a great disappointment in the revolution in -general."
—Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Abridged Report of Meetings, p. 15 (Communist Party of Great Britain, London)

But in a report to the Moscow party organization on 22 October 1922, Trotsky noted that a temporary fall in the living standards was one of the overhead costs of every social revolution, including the French. He cited the conservative historian, Taine, who affirmed that even eight years after the Great Revolution, the French people were poorer than before its eve. At the same time, the French Revolution laid the basis for the further expansion of the French economy and culture on the basis of the overturn of feudalism. All the more wrenching would be the process in the course of a proletarian revolution which unfolded in a backward country:

"In other words, what I wish to say is that the five-year period (and we must say this to all our critics, malicious and well-meaning alike who employ this argument) does not provide a historic scale by means of which it is possible to weigh the economic results of the proletarian revolution. All that we see up to now in our country are the overhead expenditures in the production of the revolution."
-FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 191-192

Trotsky then posed the question which he intended to present at the Fourth Congress of the CI: "How do matters really stand with regard to the chances for the development of the European revolution? Because it is perfectly self-evident that the tempo of our future construction will in the highest measure depend upon the development of the revolution in Europe and America."
-ibid., p. 192

The Fourth Congress

As said above, the Fourth Congress was really an affirmation of the Third in terms of its basic policies. Trotsky gave the major report at the session of 14 November 1922, "Report on the New Soviet Economic Policy and the Perspectives of the World Revolution," (FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 220-263). He began with a capsule description of the Russian Civil War:

"We made mistakes in various fields, including, of course, politics as well. But by and large we did not set the European working class a poor example of resoluteness, of firmness and, when need arose, of ruthlessness in revolutionary struggle.... The Civil War was not only a military process, but something more. It was also—and even above all—a political process. Through the methods of war, the struggle unfolded for the political reserves, that is, in the main, for the peasantry. After vacillating for a long time between the bourgeois-landlord bloc, the 'democracy' serving this bloc, and the revolutionary proletariat, the peasantry invariably—at the decisive moment when the final choice had to be made—cast in their lot with the proletariat, supporting it—not with democratic ballots but with food supplies, horses, and force of arms. Just this decided the victory in our favor."
-ibid., p. 222

Trotsky also does a nice job demolishing the criticisms of those such as Otto Bauer, an Austrian Social Democrat, who from the right saw the NEP as a stage toward capitalist restoration. Trotsky first traced the existence of "War Communism" from the requirements of civil war:

"The military victory which would have been excluded if not for War Communism, permitted us, in turn, to pass over from measures dictated by military necessity to measures dictated by economic expediency. Such is the origin of the so-called New Economic Policy"
-ibid., p. 231

Trotsky then goes on to explain the real significance of the NEP:

"In March 1917 Czarism was overthrown. In October 1917 the working class seized power. Virtually all of the land, nationalized by the state, was handed over to the peasants. The peasants cultivating this land are now obliged to pay the state a fixed tax in kind, which forms the main fund for socialist construction....

"The contention that Soviet economic development is traveling from Communism to capitalism is false to the core. We never had Communism. We never had socialism, nor could we have had it. We nationalized the disorganized bourgeois economy, and during the most critical period of life-and-death struggle we established a regime of 'Communism' in the distribution of articles of consumption. By vanquishing the bourgeoisie in the field of politics and war, we gained the possibility of coming to grips with economic life and we found ourselves constrained to reintroduce the market forms of relations between the city and the village, between the different branches of industry, and between the individual enterprises themselves." -ibid., p. 232 Most to the point:

"Our most important weapon in the economic struggle occurring on the basis of the market is—state power. Reformist simpletons are the only ones who are incapable of grasping the significance of this weapon. The bourgeoisie understands it excellently. The whole history of the bourgeoisie proves it."
-ibid., p. 239

As to the encroachments of private capital under the NEP, Trotsky provided some interesting statistics: the private enterprises, about 4,000, employed only about 80,000 workers; the 4,000 state enterprises employed about a million workers. He adds:
"In reestablishing the market, the workers' state naturally introduced a number of juridical changes indispensable for obtaining a market turnover. Insofar as these legal and administrative reforms open up the possibility of capitalist accumulation they constitute indirect but very important concessions to the bourgeoisie. But our neo-bourgeoisie will be able to exploit these concessions only in proportion to its economic and political resources. We know what its economic resources are. They are less than modest. Politically its resources are equal to zero. And we shall do everything in our power to see to it that the bourgeoisie does not 'accumulate capital' in the political field. You ought not to forget that the credit system and the tax apparatus remain in the hands of the workers' state and that this is a very important weapon in the struggle between state industry and private industry."
-ibid., pp. 240-241

As to the political and economic conjuncture obtaining at the end of 1922, Trotsky basically reaffirmed the lessons and decisions of the Third Congress:
"As against a number of comrades [and here he is referring to the 'Lefts'] we defended the viewpoint that in the historical development of capitalism we must differentiate sharply between two types of curves: the basic curve which graphs the development of capitalist productive forces, growth of the productivity of labor, accumulation of wealth, and so on; and the cyclical curve which depicts a periodic wave of boom and crisis, repeated on the average every nine years—

"In 1920 there ensued—on the basis of universal capitalist decay—an acute cyclical crisis. Some comrades among the so-called 'Lefts' held that this crisis must uninterruptedly deepen and sharpen up till the proletarian revolution. We, on the other hand, predicted that a break in the economic conjuncture was unavoidable in the more or less near future, bringing a partial recovery. We insisted, further, that such a break in the conjuncture would tend not to weaken the revolutionary movement but, on the contrary, to impart new vitality to it....

"Today however, we have no reason to revise or modify our position. We did not judge our epoch to be revolutionary because the sharp conjunctural crisis of 1920 swept away the fictitious boom of 1919. We adjudged it to be revolutionary because of our general appraisal of world capitalism and its conflicting basic forces. Lest this lesson be wasted, we ought to reaffirm the theses of the Third Congress, as fully applicable at this very hour." -ibid., pp. 258-259

This in fact was done: the very first section of the Fourth Congress resolution on tactics, adopted 5 December 1922, reaffirmed the Third Congress resolutions on the world economic situation and the tasks and tactics of the CI.

Trotsky then summed up the tasks of the Communist parties:

"Today revolutionary parties exist in all countries, but they rest directly only upon a fraction of the working class, to be more precise, a minority of the working class.... Upon becoming convinced through experience of the correctness, firmness and reliability of Communist leadership, the working class will shake off disillusionment, passivity and dilatoriness—and then the hour for launching the final assault will sound. How near is this hour? We make no predictions on this score. But the Third Congress did fix the task of the hour as the struggle for influence over the majority of the working class. A year and a half has elapsed. We have unquestionably scored major successes, but our task still remains the same: We must conquer the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the toilers. This can and must be achieved in the course of struggle for the transitional demands under the general slogan of the proletarian united front."
-ibid., p. 260

Exactly what that meant was the subject of no small amount of confusion in the discussions at the Fourth Congress when it dealt with the slogan of the workers government.

The Workers and XYZ Government


Debate on the "Theses on Comintern Tactics" took place from 9 to 12 November 1922, in conjunction with Zinoviev's report on the activities of the ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International] since the Third Congress. Before going into the discussion itself, it's worth examining what the "Theses on Comintern Tactics" actually said.
Its second thesis, on "The Period of Capitalist Decline," ends with the following two paragraphs:

"Capitalism to its very end will be at the mercy of cyclical fluctuations. Only the seizure of power by the proletariat and a world socialist revolution can save humanity from permanent catastrophe, caused by the existence of the modern capitalist system.
" What capitalism is passing through today is nothing other than its death throes. The collapse of capitalism is inevitable."
-FFC, p. 389

The first paragraph is incontestable; the second is not, and perhaps contributed to the confusion. As I recall, Lenin said that there was no impossible situation for the bourgeoisie; they would not simply fall from power but would have to be thrown out. This implies the necessary existence of the subjective factor—the revolutionary party.
The tenth thesis, "The United Front Tactic," actually presents a correct description of the proletarian united front, contrasting the efforts of the reformists to split the working class to the necessity of working-class unity in the face of a capitalist offensive against wages and working conditions:

"The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the Communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie....

"It is particularly important when using the united front tactic to achieve not just agitation but also organizational results. Every opportunity must be used to establish organizational footholds among the working masses themselves...."
—ibid., p. 396

Any read of that is what we understand as the united front: a common bloc in a particular action, but not an overall political bloc. [This section of the Theses explicitly refers to "Every action, for even the most trivial everyday demand...."] Unfortunately the Theses were far from clear; the eleventh thesis outlined five possible "workers' governments":

"1. A liberal workers' government, such as existed in Australia and is possible in Britain in the near future.

"2. A social-democratic 'workers' government' (Germany).
"3. A workers' and peasants' government. Such a possibility exists in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, etc.

"4. A social-democratic/Communist coalition government.

"5. A genuine proletarian workers' government, which can be created in its pure form only by a Communist Party."
-ibid., pp. 398-399

The eleventh thesis noted that Communists must be ready to "form a workers' government with non-Communist workers' parties and workers' organizations." But only on the conditions that the Communists were under the strictest control of the party, that they be in close contact with the revolutionary masses and that they have the unconditional right to maintain their identity and independence of agitation.

This is all very well and good, but it applies to how Communists engage in a united front action, "march separately, strike together," as Lenin put it. This is an entirely separate question from forming or entering a governmental coalition, which by definition is a political bloc. The thesis went on to offer every opportunist an open door:
"Communists are also prepared to work alongside those workers who have not yet recognized the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Accordingly Communists are also ready, in certain conditions and with certain guarantees, to support a non-Communist workers' government. However, the Communists will still openly declare to the masses that the workers' government can be neither won nor maintained without a revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie." -ibid. p. 399

Unfortunately we are not told what the conditions are nor who will give the guarantees.
It's no accident that the SWP [U.S. Socialist Workers Party] in the person of Joseph Hansen himself devoted an entire "Educational for Socialists" bulletin (April 1974) to the "Workers and Farmers Government," one which quoted from the Fourth Congress resolution and the discussion. Hansen was no fool, and was able to use the ambiguous formulations of the Fourth Congress to justify the SWP's capitulation to Pabloite revisionism over Castro's Cuba and the Algerian revolution. While the Castroites did in fact expropriate the Cuban bourgeoisie, the Algerian FLN did not.

I took the quotes from the CI theses from the Ink Links edition, which according to its translator's foreword was based on the 1933 Russian edition of the Comintern documents edited by none other than Bela Kun. It is interesting that Hansen's 1974 bulletin uses a translation from a French source which contains passages not included in the Ink Links version. If anything Hansen's version is more explicit in its confusion. In it, Communists are told not to participate in the first two types of "workers' governments" (the Australian and German varieties) since they "are not revolutionary workers governments but rather governments that camouflage a coalition between the bourgeoisie and the counterrevolutionary leaders of the working class." It adds: "To the contrary, they [the Communists] must relentlessly expose to the masses the real character of these phony 'workers governments.' In the period of the decline of capitalism, a period in which the principal task consists in winning a majority of the proletariat over to the revolution, these governments can objectively contribute to accelerating the process of the decomposition of the bourgeois regime."
—Hansen, p. 40

So, what it condemns in the first sentence, it gives back in the second. Hansen's version is even worse when describing the third and fourth possibilities (the "workers and peasants government" and a coalition government with Communists and Social Democrats):

"The other two types of workers governments are types that the Communists can participate in, although they still do not represent the dictatorship of the proletariat; they do not represent a necessary form of transition toward the dictatorship, but they can serve as a point of departure for attaining this dictatorship."
-ibid., p. 40

Think about the above citation: Communists can participate in these governments even though they are not the dictatorship of the proletariat, nor are they a necessary form of transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but they can serve as a point of departure to...the dictatorship of the proletariat!

The Fourth Congress Discussion

Remember that this resolution was the result of the consensus of the November 1922 discussion on Comintern tactics and the activities of the ECCI since the Third Congress. It certainly bears the stamp of Zinoviev and Radek; neither Trotsky nor Lenin participated in that discussion, according to the English-language proceedings. Zinoviev was the main reporter and spoke at length, as was his wont.

Zinoviev gave a brief precis of the problems of the major Comintern sections. These featured the French, which was a major focus of Trotsky's attention as well. Needless to say, having a section which tolerated leading members who were Freemasons, and allowed various holdovers from the old French SP to publish newspapers in the name of the new French CP which were opposed to the line of the CI—all this indicated the need for some severe internal housekeeping. The problems of the German section were interwoven with the "workers government" question, which has been addressed earlier and will be further.

Among the problems Zinoviev outlined there was that of the (now emigre) Hungarian party. This is one time I can really feel for Zinoviev and his exasperation:

"In Hungary, on the contrary, the situation is pitiful. I see many comrades here who have taken part energetically in factional strife and have contributed not a little to make the situation worse.... We have sometimes thought that political emigration was a necessity. But there are emigrations and emigrations." —Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Abridged Report of Meetings, p. 26 (Communist Party of Great Britain, London)
Unfortunately for the American party, some of those emigres were cast out of Europe and sent to America with unspecified roles. One of these, Jozsef Pogany (a.k.a. John Pepper) was to play a very malevolent, albeit energetic, role in the early American CP.
Zinoviev then turned to the international situation; he urged that the Congress reaffirm the Third Congress theses on the economic situation which had been presented by Trotsky and Varga. He then added his own flourish:

"What we are now living through is something more than one of the periodical crises of capitalism; it is THE crisis of capitalism; it is the twilight, the collapse of capitalism." -ibid., p. 29

Perhaps one of the more bizarre portions of Zinoviev's speech was when he addressed the question of fascism. On 28 October 1922 Mussolini's forces marched on Rome and shortly later he was empowered by the Italian king to form a cabinet and was granted unrestricted power by the Parliament. Zinoviev stated:

"If the Fascist maintain power in Italy (and it seems probable that they will do so during the immediate future), there can be little doubt that similar occurrences will take place in Germany, and perhaps throughout Central Europe. A Stinnes Government in Germany would be somewhat different in form from the Fascist Government in Italy. In substance, the two would be identical. Again, what is now happening in Austria is closely akin to the Italian situation. It, too, is a blow directed against bourgeois democracy, which in Austria has hitherto been defended, not only by the capitalist parties and the Second International, but also by the Two-and-a-Half International."
-ibid., p. 30

So, fascism here is seen primarily as a blow against bourgeois democracy, which served to undermine the position of the reformist Social Democrats! To be fair, Zinoviev did note that this would be "a time of trial for our Communist Parties" and preparations would have to be made for work underground. He then added:

"It is part of the process of revolution, for the revolutionary movement does not proceed along a straight line.... What we are witnessing in Italy is a counter-revolutionary movement. But when we take a broad view, we see that it is only an episodic intensification, a stage in the maturing of the proletarian revolution in Italy."
-ibid., p. 31

The whole thrust of this line—with the inevitable collapse of capitalism, fascism as a stage in the maturing of the revolution—reduces to a mechanical inevitability of the revolution. This of course leaves out the necessity of organizing the revolution, the formation of organs of dual power, be they Soviets as such or other similar proletarian organizations, and lastly the organization of the insurrection itself, i.e., the question of the revolutionary party. This was to prove fatal in Germany in 1923.

I believe that a lot of the confusion over the workers government came from the slogan (and its implementation) being seen as a natural extension of the united front tactic, albeit with conditions. Zinoviev said as much near the end of his speech:

"The tactics of the united front are almost universally applicable. It would be hard to find a country where the working class has attained notable proportion but where the tactics of the united front have not yet been inaugurated.... By no means can the same thing be said of the watchword of the Labour Government [by which he means the Workers Government]. The latter is far less universally applicable, and its significance is comparatively restricted. It can only be adopted in those countries where the relationships of power render its adoption opportune, where the problem of power, the problem of government, both on the parliamentary and on the extra-parliamentary field, has come to the front."
-ibid., pp. 36-37

In other words, the workers government "tactic" can only be used where the question of power is being raised both in the parliament and on the streets. But by definition if the question of power is being raised in the streets, that is a pre-revolutionary situation where the most fatal mistake is to confuse the workers as to the class nature of the state. Any coalition with the Social Democrats (the fourth "possibility" in the Theses) would of necessity still be a bourgeois government. The point is not to build illusions in such a government but to overthrow it!

During the discussion, one of the German delegates, Ernst Meyer, noted the troubles that the German Party had had with the question of the "workers' government":

"The most difficult question which we had to solve in connection with the United Front tactics—(and which we have probably not yet solved)—is the question of the Workers' Government. We must differentiate between social democratic governments and Workers' Governments. We have social democratic governments in Germany—in Saxony, Thuringia and formerly also in Gotha—governments which we had to support but which have nothing in common with what we understand by Workers'
Government. The chief difference between a Workers' and a social democratic government is—that the former, without bearing the label of a socialist policy, is really putting socialist-communist policy into practice. Thus, the Workers' government will not be based on parliamentary action alone, it will have to be based on the support of the wide masses, and its policy will be fundamentally different from that of the social democratic governments such as those existing in some of the countries of Germany."

He then noted that at an enlarged ECCI meeting Zinoviev had earlier described the workers government as follows: "The workers' government' is the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is a pseudonym for Soviet Government." This is not the position Zinoviev was arguing at the Fourth Congress. Meyer then continued:
"According to our conception this is wrong. The workers' government is not the dictatorship of the proletariat (quite so, from the German Delegation), it is only a watchword which we bring forward, in order to win over the workers and to convince them that the proletarian class must form a United Front in its struggle against the bourgeoisie."
—ibid., p. 41

One wonders why the KPD "had to support" those social-democratic governments in Saxony, Thuringia and Gotha, given that even in Meyer's terms they were not "workers' governments." Then he exposes Zinoviev's earlier comment that the "workers' government" is the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Zinoviev "clarified" in the discussion. What is most telling is Meyer's idea that this mythical "workers' government" would implement "socialist-communist policies," whatever that means.

Radek tried to clarify the muddle Zinoviev had created. He noted the dangers of the united front policy as applied to the workers government: "We are living in a period of transition to a new wave of revolution. In the meantime, however, there is no present opportunity for revolutionary action, and a sort of twilight mood may easily creep in among the ranks of the party: a sort of lonely feeling may urge some
Communists to walk arm-in-arm with Scheide-mann along Unter den Linden....

"With regard to the demand for a Workers' Government. A Workers' Government is not the Proletarian Dictatorship, that is clear; it is one of the possible transitory stages to the Proletarian Dictatorship....

"I believe one of the comrades has said, 'The Workers' Government is not a historic necessity but a historical possibility.' This is, to my mind, a correct formula. It would be absolutely wrong to assert that the development of man from the ape to a People's Commissar must necessarily pass through the phase of a Workers' Government."
—ibid., pp. 51-52

For his part, Zinoviev added to the confusion in his statement during the discussion itself:

"A third type is the so-called Coalition government; that is, a government in which Social-Democrats, Trade Union leaders, and even perhaps Communists, take part. One can imagine such a possibility. Such a government is not yet the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it is perhaps a starting point for the dictatorship. When all goes right, we can kick one social-democrat after another out of the government until the power is in the hands of the Communists. This is a historical possibility." -ibid., p. 88

No! In all cases where a Communist party with some mass base has tried such an experiment, such a government—a popular front to be accurate—has proved to be the prelude to the crushing of the proletariat. As comrade Robertson noted, this whole conception expressed a rather stupid assumption that the other side—the Social Democrats and the bourgeoisie-were incapable of thinking.

It was left to the Polish delegates to cut through at least some of the confusion. The first, listed in the discussion as Marklevsky [Julian Marchlewski, one of the members elected to the Fourth Congress Presidium] noted the electoral successes of the Polish Communists, despite their repression by the Polish bourgeois state, as an example of the combination of legal and illegal work. He then added:

"I would like to speak a few words on the slogan of the Workers' Government. I believe there has been too much philosophical speculation on the matter. ("Very true," from the German benches.) The criticism of this slogan is directed on three lines—the Workers' Government is either a Scheidemann Government or a coalition government of the Communists with the social traitors. It finds support either in Parliament or in the Factory Councils. It is either the expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or it is not. I believe that philosophical speculation is out of place—for we have practical historical experience. What did the Bolsheviks do in 1917 before they conquered power? They demanded 'All Power to the Soviets.' What did this mean at the time? It meant giving power to the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries [SR] who were in the majority in the Soviets. It meant at that time a Workers' Government in which social traitors participated, and which was directed against the dictatorship of the proletariat. But this slogan was a good weapon of agitation in the hands of the Bolsheviks." -ibid., p. 60

This is a bit off, but its thrust is toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. The essence of Bolshevik policy was to push the organs of dual power toward the insurrection. In fact, after the July days in 1917, Lenin was looking to factory committees as an alternative to the formal Soviets, then under a Menshevik-SR majority, which were repressing the Bolsheviks. The whole point of Lenin's policy was to break the proletariat from the bourgeoisie; this meant the organs of dual power. And by October 1917, when the Petrograd garrison said it would only accept orders from the Workers and Soldiers' Soviets, one had armed bodies of men whose allegiance was to a different social formation than the crumbling provisional government.

The second Polish delegate, Dombsky, really pointed to the problems raised in the formulations of Zinoviev and the ECCI:

"We have already accumulated a good deal of experience, and I believe that this experience is not encouraging to the adherents of the tactics of the United Front, as it has been applied of late. Of course, every time one says something against the United Front one gets the reply: But you do not understand that we must have the majority behind us!... Of course, we ought to win a majority of the proletariat, but it has to be a majority for a Communist Party, not for a hotch-potch of hazy and nebulous ideas....

"As regards the workers' government, I was in the same boat as my friend Comrade Duret, I could not understand the meaning of workers' government in our tactics. At last I have heard a clear definition of this government. Comrade Radek has solaced me in private conversation that such a government is not contemplated for Poland (Comrade Radek: I never said that). Oh, then Poland will also have to bear the punishment of this sort of government. It is thus an international problem. Comrade Radek says that the workers' government is not a necessity but a possibility, and it were folly to reject such possibilities. The question is whether if we inscribe all the possibilities on our banner we try to accelerate the realization of these possibilities. I believe that it is quite possible that at the eleventh hour a so-called workers' government should come which would not be a proletarian dictatorship. But I believe when such a government comes, it will be the resultant of various forces such as our struggle for the proletarian dictatorship, the struggle of the social-democrats against it and so forth. Is it proper to build our plans on such an assumption? I think not, because I believe that we should insist on our struggle for the proletarian dictatorship."
—ibid., pp. 76-77

A Brief Tour of the 1923 German Revolution

By late 1922, the Weimar government had failed to make reparation payments, or to be more precise, requisitions of coal and other basic commodities as dictated by the Versailles treaty. This prompted the French government to militarily occupy the Ruhr in January 1923. The German government, then under Chancellor Cuno, adopted a policy of "passive resistance"—i.e., civil disobedience toward the French and Belgian occupation authorities. Rightist paramilitary groups (who had been maintained by conservative industrialists both with private and government funds siphoned from the army budget) quickly infiltrated the Ruhr. There, they carried out provocative, albeit largely ineffectual, guerrilla warfare against the French troops. The occupation of the Ruhr triggered a massive burst of German nationalism—even the Ruhr workers responded with work stoppages.

The occupation also triggered massive financial chaos in Germany. Under armed guard, the French bourgeoisie got some of the raw materials for its blood-sucking reparations, but it crippled the rest of German industry. The result was inflation on a scale which is hard to believe. Werner Angress, in his book Stillborn Revolution, notes that the value of the German mark depreciated from 4,800 to the U.S. dollar in May to an astronomical 4.6 billion in August! That's a factor of a million in three months! Angress described the devastation wrought upon the German middle class and on the workers: "Savings accounts melted into nothing; pensions became worthless; heirlooms had to be sold for worthless paper marks, with denominations in billions stamped upon them, in order to buy food for the family. Respectable old civil servants living on retirement pay found themselves paupers overnight. Salaried employees and wage earners were paid several times a day during the height of this cataclysm, collecting the money in burlap bags. With these, their waiting spouses rushed to the grocer to buy bread before the store owner scribbled the new, always more astronomical exchange rate, on the blackboard which had become a necessary fixture in every retail business."
-pp. 285-286

The situation in Germany in the summer of 1923 presented a revolutionary opportunity unparalleled in history. The economic crisis had shaken even the faith of the civil servants in the bourgeois order, workers were flocking to the KPD, the influence (or rather control) of the SPD over the workers was waning, and the ruling class was paralyzed. Contrary to Revolutionary History, if ever there was a revolutionary situation, this was it. The climax came on 10 August, when the Berlin printers union struck against the wishes of the executive of the ADGB [Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschafts-bund—the German Trade-Union Federation—the majority of its seven million members were not members of any political party, but tended to vote SPD. The ADGB executive had sanctioned the strike vote but wanted government printing exempted]. The printers were soon joined by power workers, construction workers and those of the municipal transport system. To their credit, KPD activists were involved in some of the spread of the printers strike. But the possibility of a general strike was successfully spiked by the SPD.
On the same day that the printers went out, there was a meeting of the Berlin Trade-Union Commission, which invited representatives of the SPD, the USPD and the KPD.

As Angress relates, the KPD delegation put forward a motion for a three-day general strike "to obtain the following main objectives: a minimum hourly wage of 0.60 gold marks; the overthrow of the Cuno government; and the establishment of a workers' and peasants' government. Considering the tense circumstances under which the meeting was held, it is at least conceivable that a majority of delegates might have declared in favor of such a strike" (Angress, p. 371). However, the SPD moved in quickly with the promise of parliamentary reforms to end the inflationary spiral and the Communist motion was defeated.

While, as Angress notes, the KPD didn't simply accept the defeat of their motion as reason to pull up stakes (as they would in October), the party clearly carried with it the hoary ghost of the failed March Action of 1921. On 2 August, Die Rote Fahne carried an article which stated:

"We must fight the battles to which we are destined by history, but we must always keep in mind that we are at the moment still the weaker. We cannot as yet offer a general battle, and we must avoid everything which would enable the enemy to beat us piecemeal." —quoted in Angress, p. 367

What is so excruciating is that a sizable portion of the working class clearly was willing to fight. Even Angress states that the Communists got "a surprisingly strong response" and that wildcat strikes erupted in various parts of the country. He adds:

"There was a distinct possibility that these intermittent strikes might have turned into a general one, as had happened in March 1920 during the Kapp putsch. But before the Communists were able to fan these brush-fires into a major conflagration, their designs were thwarted by the announcement, on August 12, that Chancellor Cuno and his cabinet had resigned." -ibid., pp. 371-372

In a distorted way, this probably reflects the thinking of the KPD leadership, more particularly Brandler. Why, one might ask, didn't the strikes spread as they had in March 1920? Well, Germany in 1923 wasn't Germany of 1920. The German workers, especially the advanced elements, had learned something from the bloody Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the bloody suppression of the March Action of 1921. They were certainly ready to fight but this time they wanted a leadership with the ability to not only recognize that it was time for the decisive struggle, but also to organize it. This the KPD manifestly failed to provide, and the recession of the August strikes had more to do with that than the parliamentary follies in the Reichstag.

What is strikingly lacking is the absence of any conception of dual power on the part of the KPD during this period. In fact, Reuben has been reading some German sources and he says the thrust of their stuff was fighting against fascism, which was growing, but they said nothing about getting rid of the bourgeoisie. No idea that the existing state power would have to be replaced, that organs of proletarian power would have to be created and that the process would entail a military conflict. This was one point Jim really stressed.

The KPD was facing a small army, 100,000 men, but these were hard core volunteers and many were drawn from the ranks of the Freikorps units which had systematically smashed the workers' uprisings which had occurred in the aftermath of the November 1918 revolution. The idea that one would need very disciplined units of men armed not only with rifles but with machine guns and heavy weapons seems to have been totally beyond the ken of the KPD leadership.

Rather, the KPD leadership operated on the false view that the crisis would continue, and that the party's influence would increase in linear fashion and eventually the revolution would come, more or less on its own. Essentially, their tactic was to pressure the "left" SPD in a revolutionary direction. This was a fatal misreading of the situation.

The replacement of Cuno by Stresemann on 13 August hardly solved the problems of the German bourgeoisie. Stresemann, leader of the German People's Party, formed the so-called "Great Coalition" government, whose cabinet included four SPD members. Despite its name, Stresemann's party was really that of the large industrialists; his (and probably their) faith in bourgeois democracy is captured in a statement by Stresemann quoted by Trotsky: "We are the last bourgeois parliamentary government. After us come either the communists or the fascists" ("On the Road to the European Revolution," 11 April 1924, The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-1925, p. 165).

The fact that the head of the German government would state such a thing is evidence alone that the possibilities for a German proletarian revolution were far from lost. However, the KPD had missed its best opportunity in the late summer; by the fall the Stresemann government had brought the inflation under control and the bourgeoisie began to regain its confidence.

Trotsky had been following the German events closely since the spring and was convinced—rightly— that Germany had entered a revolutionary situation and that the KPD had to re-orient. But it wasn't until late August that the Russian PB finally met to discuss the possibility of an insurrection; Trotsky estimated that this could happen in a matter of weeks. Somewhat surprisingly, Zinoviev, heretofore a champion of the "Lefts," was equivocal, although one does recall Zinoviev's flinch on the eve of the October Revolution. Trotsky's Lessons of October cites the letter issued by Zinoviev and Kamenev on 11 Octo¬ber, two weeks before the October Revolution, which states: "We are deeply convinced that to call at present for an armed uprising means to stake on one card not only the fate of our party but also the fate of the Russian and international revolution" (The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-1925, p. 227). For his part, Stalin made a cautious venture into the realm of international politics in a secret letter to Zinoviev and Bukharin [in 1923] in which he stated that "the Germans must be curbed and not spurred on" (quoted in Maurice Specter's introduction to the New Park edition of Trotsky's Lessons of October).

Representatives of the various factions in the KPD were summoned to Moscow for consultations. Brandler was pessimistic regarding an insurrection-he felt the party was insufficiently prepared both politically and technically. Brandler eventually agreed to the decision to launch a bid for power, but he stood fast against Trotsky's proposal to fix a date. A compromise was reached whereby the German party was to initiate the preparations for insurrection but the exact date was left to them to decide. It should be clear that Trotsky's motivation was not to mechanically require that the German revolution take place on a particular day, but rather that without some kind of a timetable, the KPD would never get around to organizing it.

One wonders about what alarm bells were going off in Trotsky's head. Brandler was quite honest about his doubts regarding the insurrection and his abilities—he specifically said that he was no "German Lenin" and asked the Russians to send Trotsky to Germany. Jim told me that Brandler was hoping that Trotsky could conjure up Soviets and the revolution out of the ground, i.e., Brandler understood the inadequacies of the KPD.

Unfortunately for Brandler, and the rest of the world, German considerations were increasingly becoming subordinate to the vicissitudes of the factional struggle within the Russian party. There was no way that the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin would let Trotsky leave Russia. They made polite excuses as to why the Russian PB could not possibly spare Trotsky, but behind it, I believe, was a real fear on the part of the emerging bureaucracy—if Trotsky was to lead a German revolution, it would re-energize the Soviet workers and in any case would explode the whole raison d'etre for the bureaucratic caste.

Brandler returned to Germany in early October, not exactly enthused, but willing to go through the motions. The most favorable opportunities were in Saxony and Thuringia where the KPD had a base of support and nominally "left" SPD governments were in power. There had been a long festering fight over the KPD's attitude toward these provincial governments, in particular to the one in Saxony led by the SPDer Zeigner.
The question was whether or not the KPD should actually join a coalition government, together with the SPD. In fact, around the time of the Fourth Congress, a decision had been made that the KPD not enter the Saxon government, since they would only do so as an appendage to the Social Democrats. But on 1 October, the ECCI, in the person of Zinoviev, sent a telegram ordering the KPD to enter the Saxon government, ostensibly because an insurrection was estimated in four to six weeks:

"The situation compels us to raise in a practical form the question of our entry into the Saxon Government. On the condition that the Zeigner people [i.e., the Social Democrats] are really prepared to defend Saxony against Bavaria and the Fascists, we must enter. Carry out at once the arming of 50,000 to 60,000 men, ignore General Miiller. The same in Thuringia."
-E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, pp. 207-208

The motivation was supposedly to be able to use ministerial posts in these provincial governments to obtain weapons for the proletarian "Red Hundreds," which were to be the spearhead of the revolution.

The end result proved less than spectacular. Brandler and two other KPDers got minor ministerial posts in the Saxon government. But while Zeigner may have been a sincere left Social Democrat, he was still a Social Democrat! The KPD did attempt to organize some "military-technical" groups, but despite assistance from Moscow, these remained disorganized or simply on paper. Most to the point, the arming and organizing of the "Red Hundreds" was woefully inadequate.

While the Berlin government was weak, it wasn't totally impotent. As usual it had the service of the SPD tops (e.g., Ebert) who could recognize that the mere participation of the KPD in the Saxon government was enough of a red flag: it wasn't necessary for the KPD to call for Soviets. And while the Weimar government faced a stronger challenge from the rightist/Nazi forces in Bavaria, it was against "Red Saxony" that the government proceeded. As Angress notes, Stresemann attacked his weaker foe first.

The sad denouement came in a conference of labor leaders, held in Chemnitz on 21 October 1923. This was a fairly representative gathering in terms of the [Saxon workers] organizations; it probably did not reflect the mood of the German proletariat as a whole. Of some 300-400 delegates, 66 were from the KPD, about 240 from the factory councils and unions and only seven from the SPD. After reports on the political and economic crisis, Brandler presented a motion for an immediate call for a general strike, which was to be the spark for insurrection. Then the Saxon labor minister, an SPDer named Graupe, rose and said that if the KPD insisted on pressing Brandler's suggestion, he and the other SPDers (all seven of them!!) would walk out. There was no protest, and Brandler basically threw in the towel. It was, in Thalheimer's words, a "third-class" funeral.

As Trotsky later noted:

"It [the German party] continued even after the onset of the Ruhr crisis to carry on its agitation and propagandist work on the basis of the united front formula—at the same tempo and in the same forms as before the crisis. Meanwhile, this tactic had already become radically insufficient. A growth in the party's political influence was taking place automatically. A sharp tactical turn was needed. It was necessary to show the masses, and above all the party itself, that this time it was a matter of immediate preparation for the seizure of power. It was necessary to consolidate the party's growing influence organizationally and to establish bases of support for a direct assault on the state. It was necessary to shift the whole party organization onto the basis of factory cells. It was necessary to form cells on the railways. It was necessary to raise sharply the question of work in the army. It was necessary, especially necessary, to adapt the united front tactic fully and completely to these tasks, to give it a firmer and more decided tempo and a more revolutionary character. On the basis of this, work of a military-technical nature should have been carried on.

"The question of setting a date for the uprising can have significance only in this connection and with this perspective. Insurrection is an art. An art presupposes a clear aim, a precise plan, and consequently, a schedule. "The most important thing, however, was this: to ensure in good time the decisive tactical turn toward the seizure of power. And this was not done. This was the chief and fatal omission. From this followed the basic contradiction. On the one hand, the party expected a revolution, while on the other hand, because it had burned its fingers in the March events, it avoided, until the last months of 1923, the very idea of organizing a revolution, i.e., preparing an insurrection."
—Trotsky, "Through What Stage Are We Passing?", 21 June 1924, The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-1925, pp. 170-171

Trotsky's Position vis a vis the Workers Government

Trotsky's position in favor of the KPD entry into the "left" SPD governments in Saxony and Thuringia was not some sort of aberration in some speeches in the military writings in the fall of 1923. He clearly was in agreement with the Fourth Congress notions on the slogan of the workers government. In a report given after the Fourth Congress, Trotsky states:

"From the united front flows the slogan of a workers' government. The Fourth Congress submitted it to a thorough discussion and once again confirmed it as the central political slogan for the next period." -FFYCI, Vol. 2, p. 324

He clearly differentiated the "workers government" from a genuine workers government which will be established in Europe after the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie. But in order for that to happen, the proletariat in its majority must support the Communist Party. But since that wasn't true at the end of 1922, Trotsky states:

"And the slogan of a workers' government thus becomes a wedge driven by the Communists between the working class and all other classes:

and inasmuch as the top circles of the Social Democracy, the reformists, are tied up with the bourgeoisie, this wedge will act more and more to tear away, and it is already beginning to tear away the left wing of the Social Democratic workers from their leaders."
-ibid., Vol. 2, p. 324

He then goes on that under certain conditions, "...a moment may arise when the Communists together with the left elements of the Social Democracy will set up a workers' government in a way similar to ours in Russia when we created a workers' and peasants' government together with the Left Social Revolutionaries." And in his article on the slogan on the United States of Europe (30 June 1923), Trotsky repeats much of the same argumentation: "Is the realization of a 'Workers' Government' possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat? Only a conditional reply can be given to this question. In any case, we regard the 'Workers' Government' as a stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat."
-ibid., Vol. 2, p. 345

There are several problems here, to say the least. First, the comparison with the Bolshevik-Left SR government is way off base: (1) that government was installed after the proletarian revolution and the seizure of state power; (2) prior to October (and of course after) the Bolsheviks had secured a majority in the Soviets, which formed the basic organ of the newly created state power. As applied to the entry of the KPD into the Saxon SPD government in 1923, neither of these conditions obtained, in particular there were no Soviets or their equivalent. In fact, Trotsky notes that after the Fourth Congress in 1922, the KPD was advised not to enter because at best they would be an appendage to the SPD government.

Overall, I think that the two Polish comrades really had it right during the CI discussions. The playing with ambiguous formulations about the types of "workers governments" is really playing with the central question of the class nature of the state. Communists are for the dictatorship of the proletariat and any attempt to bring it in through a back door is destined to fail. A proletarian revolution obviously cannot succeed unless the majority of the advanced workers are animated by clear class interests, a revolutionary program and above all the leadership of the Leninist party. Especially in the immediate period prior to the insurrection, it is, above all necessary to keep the party banner clear. By entering into a coalition with the Social Democrats—which in this case would necessarily be on their terms—it throws confusion in the minds of the workers: If our job is to overthrow this bourgeois state, run by the reformists for the bourgeoisie, then what are the Communists doing accepting ministerial posts in that government? To ask the question is to answer it.

So how could Trotsky have supported the "workers government" such as posed at the Fourth Congress? Al made a very important contribution in the discussion in the Bay Area. He looked at it less in terms of the problems of the German party leadership and more from the standpoint of what was going on in the Russian party and the CI. One must remember that the Bolshevik Party was Lenin's party, and it had been split at the top at the time of Lenin's return to Russia in February 1917. Stalin, Molotov and many of the "Old Bolsheviks" were ready to give support to the Provisional Government, and they were taken by surprise at Lenin's vehement opposition. Lenin won the fight over the April Theses, but differences over the course of the insurrection carried over to its very eve—recall Zinoviev's and Kamenev's flinch. So by 1922, with the postwar revolutionary wave clearly over and with a new period of reaction, you get a back-sliding and what Al characterized as half-assed responses by the likes of Zinoviev, Stalin and Radek.

Al also noted that Lenin's absence in the period of the Fourth Congress was really telling—in fact he was writing his Testament in December 1922. Earlier, he had asked Trotsky to take up senior positions in the Soviet government, which Trotsky refused. One factor was that Trotsky was Jewish and feared an anti-Semitic reaction if he put himself forward. But in late 1923 he did launch a fight in the Russian party, which is detailed in the review of the Vilkova book in English Spartacist No. 53.

Trotsky learned from the 1923 German experience and underwent a steeling as the struggle within the Russian party emerged. One of the KPDers visited Trotsky in 1924 and told him about how disorganized the KPD really was in 1923, something which was a real eye-opener for Trotsky. What is really clear is that Trotsky's assessment of the German situation in 1923 underwent a qualitative change in about mid-1924. I cited his critical assessment of the failures of the KPD—this was written in June. More important was the classic Lessons of October, written in September 1924, which certainly has applicability outside the narrow question of Germany.

It is important to keep in mind that in the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks were facing new situations. Further experiences such as the Chinese revolution were still to come, and these served to convince Trotsky that rather than an exception, the Russian Revolution really showed the fundamentals which would apply to all future proletarian revolutions.

I would like to emphasize again how closely linked were the fates of the German revolution and that of the Comintern. Lenin took the foundation of the KPD as an independent party as the basis upon which the Third International could be launched. The Second Congress carried forth the work of weeding out the reformists while seeking to bring left elements into the fold—particularly the USPD in Germany. The German March Action convinced Lenin and Trotsky that a change was necessary to curb the ultralefts and to turn the European parties toward the difficult task of winning over the working-class masses from their traditional social-democratic leaders. The Third Congress codified this work, both in the tactical theses and the organizational guidelines which serve as our model to this day.

Secondly, one has to appreciate that the lessons of the history of the Leninist Comintern do not come to us as revealed wisdom, as Moses received the Ten Commandments. Rather, they represent the distillation of revolutionary experience, often paid for by cruel defeats. Lenin, Trotsky and the early Comintern made mistakes—fewer than most to be sure—and they learned from their mistakes. Trotsky's Lessons of October is a work that you should read and re-read—no matter how many times, it will always provide fresh lessons. In it he hammered home the point that above all else, the necessity in every revolutionary situation is to have a vanguard party with a leadership capable of switching gears in time and actually organizing the insurrection.

1923 marked a real watershed. As Trotsky wrote in 1928:

"The fundamental cause of the crisis of the October Revolution is the retardation of the world revolution, caused by a whole series of cruel defeats of the proletariat. Up to 1923, these were the defeats of the post-war movements and insurrections confronted with the non-existence of the communist parties at the beginning, and their youth and weaknesses subsequently. From 1923 on, the situation changed sharply. We no longer have before us simply defeats of the proletariat, but routs of the policy of the Comintern."
—Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin, p. 246

It had taken the fights in the Russian party in the late 1920s to really harden up Trotsky as' a Leninist, most particularly in the need for the struggle for leadership. In a fragment of his writings, which came from notes unfinished at the time of his murder, Trotsky noted the intimate connection needed between the party and the workers, and especially the party leadership:

"To cancel these elements from one's calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution, to substitute for it an abstraction, the 'relationship offerees'; because the development of the revolution precisely consists of the incessant and rapid change in the relationship of forces under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the proletariat, the attraction of the backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal."
—Trotsky, "The Class, the Party, and the Leadership," The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), p. 360

It was true in 1917. It was true in 1919, and in 1923, and it's true today. Our tendency is not here to comment on history—it is vitally necessary to change it.

Summary following discussion

Markin comment- I have not republished the summary here as there is no context for the statements made during the course of the discussion.
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Reading Materials For Class Series

IV. The Fourth Congress: The "Workers Government" and the Road to the German Revolution

Trotsky, "Report on the Fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution and the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International," 20 October 1922,

FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 185-216

Lenin, "Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution," 13 November 1922, CW, Vol. 33, pp. 418-432

Comintern, "Theses on Comintern Tactics," 5 December 1922 and appended "Theses on the United Front" (adopted by the ECCI, December 1921), FFC, pp. 388-409

Comintern, "Resolution of the Fourth World Congress on the French Question" (by Trotsky), adopted2 December 1922, ibid. pp. 346-354; also reprinted in
FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 275-284

Comintern, "A Militant Programme of Action for the French Communist Party" (by Trotsky), adopted 5 December 1922, ibid., pp. 422-427; also reprinted in FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 285-290

Comintern, "Theses on the Eastern Question," 5 December 1922, ibid., pp. 409-419

Comintern, "Theses on Communist Work in the Trade Unions," December 1922, ibid., pp. 429-436

Trotsky, "Report on the Fourth World Congress," 28 December 1922, FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 304-333

Trotsky, "Is it Possible to Fix a Definite Schedule for a Counter-Revolution or a Revolution?", 23 September 1923, FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 347-353

Additional Reading:

"Iran and Permanent Revolution," Spartacist [English Edition] No. 33, Spring 1982