Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Third Congress of the Communist International
The March Events and the United Communist Party of Germany
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Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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9 July 1921
The Third World Congress notes with satisfaction that all its important resolutions, including the hotly-debated section of the resolution on tactics which dealt with the March Action, were passed unanimously, and that even the proposal put forward by the representatives of the German opposition expressed what was essentially the position of the Congress. Congress sees this as proof that co-ordinated and joint work on the basis of the decisions of the III Congress should and can be undertaken within the United Communist Party of Germany. Congress views any further atomisation of forces within the VKPD, any formation of sects – not to mention splits – as a great threat to the whole movement.
Congress expects the CC and the majority of the United Communist Party of Germany to take a tolerant attitude to the opposition, provided it carries out the decisions of the III Congress in a loyal fashion, and is confident that the EC will do everything possible to unify the Party’s forces. Congress demands that the former opposition immediately dissolve all fractional organisations without exception, fully and absolutely subordinate itself to the parliamentary fraction of the CC of the Party, put its press under the control of the relevant Party bodies and immediately cease any political co-operation with persons expelled from the Party and the Communist International (co-operation in their publications, etc.).
Congress charges the Executive Committee to follow carefully the further development of the German movement, and immediately to take the most energetic measures to deal with the slightest violation of discipline.
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Third Congress of the Communist International
The March Events and the United Communist Party of Germany
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
9 July 1921
The Third World Congress notes with satisfaction that all its important resolutions, including the hotly-debated section of the resolution on tactics which dealt with the March Action, were passed unanimously, and that even the proposal put forward by the representatives of the German opposition expressed what was essentially the position of the Congress. Congress sees this as proof that co-ordinated and joint work on the basis of the decisions of the III Congress should and can be undertaken within the United Communist Party of Germany. Congress views any further atomisation of forces within the VKPD, any formation of sects – not to mention splits – as a great threat to the whole movement.
Congress expects the CC and the majority of the United Communist Party of Germany to take a tolerant attitude to the opposition, provided it carries out the decisions of the III Congress in a loyal fashion, and is confident that the EC will do everything possible to unify the Party’s forces. Congress demands that the former opposition immediately dissolve all fractional organisations without exception, fully and absolutely subordinate itself to the parliamentary fraction of the CC of the Party, put its press under the control of the relevant Party bodies and immediately cease any political co-operation with persons expelled from the Party and the Communist International (co-operation in their publications, etc.).
Congress charges the Executive Committee to follow carefully the further development of the German movement, and immediately to take the most energetic measures to deal with the slightest violation of discipline.
Showing posts with label zinoviev. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zinoviev. Show all posts
Monday, March 07, 2011
Thursday, March 03, 2011
In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of The Communist International-From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series-War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:The Birth of the Comintern (1919)
War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:
The Birth of the Comintern (1919)
by George Foster New York, 14 June 1998
This class series will attempt to take to heart comrade Lenin's injunction in "Left-Wing" Communism: rather than simply hailing soviet power and the October Revolution, the real point is to study the experience of the Bolshevik Party in order to assimilate the lessons and international significance of October. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed that our capacity to understand the world— and he was referring to class society in particular—is in direct proportion to our ability to intervene in it. And as comrade Robertson recently observed, the lessons of the October Revolution and the Communist International have for us Marxists a very deep validity. They mark the high point of the workers movement, to be contrasted with the current valley in which we today find ourselves situated. This class will consider the First Congress of the Third International which took place in March 1919, in the midst of a civil war in which the October Revolution was fighting for its very life.
The story of the First Congress is mainly the story of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary international following the ignominious collapse of the socialist Second International on 4 August of 1914. It is above all the story of the struggle by Lenin's Bolsheviks to turn the battle against the first imperialist war into a civil war to abolish the capitalist system.
Younger comrades in particular have real difficulty grasping the enormous and traumatic impact of World War I on the bourgeois societies of the time and on the proletariat. From the end of the Franco-Prussian war [1870-1871] until the onset of the first imperialist war, a period of some 43 years elapsed in Europe without a major war. Most of the imperialist combatants who embarked on the First World War assumed it would be very short. The British bourgeoisie in particular was hoping that its rivals on the continent would mutually exhaust each other in a bout of bloodletting and, indeed, looked forward to the war. But it didn't turn out to be a short war.
The war dragged on for over four years. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered in a war to re-divide the world amongst the various contending imperialists, a war to see who would get how much loot and how much booty. To quote General Sherman: "war is hell." But, if war is
hell, World War I stood out in its grotesque brutality. WWI was fought mainly as a war of attrition, of trench warfare, of bankrupt strategies reflecting the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois society. It was a war in which the proletariat and even the scions of the bourgeoisie were cut down and slaughtered in enormous numbers. For example, the Prussian Junker class was, at the end of the war, a shadow of its former self. Likewise the war decimated the sons of the British ruling class.
To give you an example of the brutality of the situation, in 1916 there was a small salient of the German line projecting into the Entente lines in Belgium at a village called Ypres. The British general in the sector, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to straighten out this little pocket disturbing the geometrical regularity of his front. Over the space of three or four days he lost something like 600,000 men in this endeavor, which did not in any way alter the sanguinary stalemate.
At the beginning of the war there was only one significant republic in continental Europe and that was France. By the end of this war, the face of Europe had changed. Three empires—tsarist Russia, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Hohenzollern empire of Germany—disappeared from the political map to be replaced by various republics. So it was a very big change. I highly recommend to comrades two books. One is Carl Schorske's book, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and the other is a book by Richard Watt, a British chemist who wrote history in his spare time, called The Kings Depart.
The ignominious capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist bourgeoisie during the first imperialist war marks the point at which the struggle for the Third International began and it was a struggle from the onset taken up by the Bolsheviks. To understand the Third International and Bolshevism, which went through its final forging in its revolutionary struggle against the first imperial¬ist war, some remarks are in order about the Third International's predecessor, the Second International, about its origins and history and its collapse.
Going back over that history one is struck by an observation made by Jim Cannon about the early, pre-communist socialist movement in the U.S. In The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon observed that it took the Bolsheviks and the Communist International to clarify and settle a whole series of political and organizational questions that had bedeviled the movement—questions ranging from the counterposition between direct trade-union action versus parliamentarism to, in the case of the U.S., the black question. In a very real sense, Cannon's observation concerning the American socialists is more generally applicable to the Second International as a whole. That is, if you go back and you examine the history of the Second International, one gets a sense of participants who, in some sense, were sleepwalking.
It took the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had to deal with a wide spectrum of issues and conditions of work (such as the national question, trade-union struggle, legality versus illegality, work in parliament, Soviets, the 1905 mass strikes culminating in the Moscow insurrection), to really forge a new type of party that in its experiences had learned lessons that were valid for the entire workers movement in the imperialist epoch. And Bolshevism, it should be understood, was not born all at once but started as another party in the Second International and, indeed, a party which modeled itself after the preeminent party of the Second International, that is to say the German SPD.
Lenin makes the point that the Second International and the parties which constituted it were very much products of the pre-imperialist epoch, a period of protracted, organic capitalist growth and, as indicated, of peace among the major European powers. If the First International laid the foundation for an international organization of workers, for the preparation of the revolutionary attack on capital, the Second International was an organization, as Lenin remarked, whose growth proceeded in breadth at the cost of a temporary drop in revolutionary consciousness and a strengthening of opportunism in the party.
The SPD and Parliamentarism
The German Social Democracy itself underwent considerable change over these years. In February of 1881, in the period when the Social Democrats in Germany were outlawed by the Anti-Socialist Laws, Karl Kautsky wrote:
"The Social Democratic workers' party has always emphasized that it is a revolutionary party in a sense that it recognizes that it is impossible to resolve the social questions within the existing society.... Even today, we would prefer, if it were possible, to realize the social revolution through the peaceful road.... But if we still harbour this hope today, we have nonetheless ceased to emphasize it, for every one of us knows that it is a Utopia. The most perceptive of our comrades have never believed in the possibility of a peaceful revolution; they have teamed from history that violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.... Today we all know that the popular socialist state can be erected only through a violent overthrow and that it is our duty to uphold consciousness of this among ever broader layers of the people." —quoted in Massimo Salvador!, Karl Kautsky and
the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, p. 20 (Verso,
1979)
This was the young Karl Kautsky, at the beginning of his career as a Marxist. And by the way, both Kautsky and Bernstein, who were in a real sense the legates of Marx and Engels, were won to Marxism through Engels' work Anti-Duhring. It was the work which actually won key cadre of the Social Democracy to Marxism. Kautsky was to go on to become the editor of Die Neue Zeit, which was the theoretical paper of Social Democracy (and parenthetically, I would point out, he edited it longer than Norden edited WV) and became the preeminent German propagandist for Marxism for the whole period. In fact, he was known as the pope of Marxism and for a long time he was looked up to by Lenin and others as the embodiment of orthodox Marxism. Yet running through the orthodox Marxism of Kautsky was a strong parliamentarist thread which grew organically out of the conditions that the German party experienced.
As a consequence of the German Anti-Socialist Laws the SPD was outlawed from 1874 to 1886. Despite its illegality during this period, the Social Democracy managed to get about 9.1 percent of the votes in parliament. With the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the legalization of the party, the party began to grow. Notwithstanding some fits and starts the party began to experience a steady accretion of electoral support, both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers. This led the SPDers to think that German Social Democracy would simply grow organically. Some older comrades may remember that many years ago a comrade plotted three or four years of our growth and from that graph projected that by now we would probably have a billion members. Empirical reality rapidly shattered her illusion, but in the case of the SPD in that period, experience tended to confirm a steady pattern of growth.
A few scant years after the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Kautsky was putting forward a very different line from that of 1881. Very much influenced by Darwin and German biologists such as Haeckel, he postulated that socialism would be the natural evolutionary outcome of capitalism—that the working class would grow to be a larger and larger proportion of the populace, that through the votes of these workers, SPD representation would ineluctably grow in parliament and that inevitably Social Democracy would triumph. Kautsky, along with Bernstein, penned the Erfurt Program, a program that all comrades should take the time to read. It is the classic example of the minimum-maximum program of Social Democracy.
The Erfurt Program is also noteworthy for what it does not contain—it consciously avoided the whole issue of the state. Kautsky wrote the theoretical part of Erfurt and Bernstein the practical. By the way, in 1899, Lenin described the Erfurt Program as a Marxist document. But later, reconsidering it in The State and Revolution, and based on his experiences in the intervening period, he came to view it very differently.
Kautsky wrote a commentary on the Erfurt Program and in it he developed his central themes. One of them was the indispensability of parliament as an instrument of government in great states—for all classes—and, therefore, for the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie and, secondly, for the need to win a majority of parliament, treating elections as the fundamental, strategic avenue to power for the labor movement.
Kautsky posed an indissoluble link between the conquest of state power and the conquest of a majority in parliament, between the defense of the technical importance of parliament and the impossibility of a Paris Commune-type state. He thought that the Social Democracy, its political and social struggles and use of parliamentary legislation for socialist purposes, constituted the very content of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As early as 1892 Kautsky writes:
"In a great modern state, [the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, can] acquire influence in the administration of the state only through the vehicle of an elected parliament. Direct legislation, at least in a great modern state, cannot render parliament superfluous, [but can only represent a ramification of the administration. Hence the general thesis:] it is absolutely impossible to entrust the entire legislation of the state to it [direct legislation], and it is equally impossible to control or direct the state administration through it. So long as the great modern state exists..."
And notice there is no class character to this state:
"...the central point of political activity will always remain in its parliament. [Now:] the most consistent expression of parliament is the parliamentary republic."
—quoted in Massimo Salvador], ibid, pp. 35-36
And, therefore, the conquest of parliament was indispensable for Social Democracy. This was to be a signpost of German Social Democracy thenceforth, through the whole period up to the first imperialist war.
Now Wilhelm Liebknecht aptly termed the Kaiserine parliament a "fig leaf for absolutism." Germany at this time presented a strange combination of parliamentarism, with rather nominal powers, fronting for absolutist despotism ruling on behalf of German capital. This was reflected in the laws regarding suffrage. On a national level there was direct male suffrage. On the provincial level suffrage rights varied a lot, ranging from places like Prussia, which had a notorious three-class franchise system based on how much direct tax you paid, to some of the southern German states, which eventually had more or less direct suffrage, but were very short on proletarians and had large peasant populations.
It was clear that the German Social Democracy would have to contend on a parliamentary level if it were to be a political party in Germany, and it did so. During the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws, because the parliamentary fraction was granted immunity, it was relatively untouchable, and played a key role in leading the party. This early experience later played its part in reinforcing a tendency to fetishize parliament despite the fact that the Reichstag was impotent and could not compel the imperial government to answer to it. And on the provincial level it was downright bizarre to have parliamentary illusions, for example, if you look at the restricted suffrage in Prussia.
In the Prussian elections in 1913, the SPD got over 775,000 votes, some 28.3 percent of the total. But it only won ten seats in the Prussian parliament. In contrast the Deutsche Volkspartei, which received 6.7 percent of the votes, won 38 seats. The Free Conservative Party, with 2 percent, won 54 seats. The National Liberal Party, with 13 percent, won 73 seats. The Catholic Center Party, with 16 percent, won 103 seats and the German Conservative Party, with 14 percent, won 147 seats. How is this possible? The people who paid the top third in income tax got a third of the seats, etc. That was about 2 or 3 percent of the population. So, there is a certain level at which one's credulity is strained at the evident latching on very early to parliamentary cretinism.
The SPD and the State
Secondly, the SPD was clearly awed by the power of the German state and army. One gets the impression that the experience of the Anti-Socialist Laws resulted in an attitude of "Never again!" The party lived in real fear that it could be outlawed by a stroke of the Kaiser's pen. As the party accrued influence and organizational mass there was a corresponding reluctance to risk this organic growth by displeasing the powers that be. This sentiment went hand-in-hand with the conception of the SPD as the party of the whole class.
When, in 1875, the Marxian wing fused with the Lassalleans, the fusion was codified in the Gotha Program (basically a Lassallean program). When Marx penned his Critique of the Gotha Programmed, that critique was suppressed in Germany. It was suppressed by Rebel, Kautsky and Bernstein, because they were afraid it would provoke a split with the Lassalleans.
Likewise, when the Erfurt Program was penned, Engels wrote a very sharp criticism of it; you can read about it in The State and Revolution. Engels thought it was a very fine program, but the failure of the program to address the key issue of state power fundamentally compromised it. Engels opined that while it might be difficult to raise the demand for a democratic republic, that failure opened the door to politically disarming the party when it had to confront big revolutionary events. Engels' criticisms were suppressed to maintain unity with the opportunists and out of fear that their publication might expose the party to reprisals from the Kaiser's government.
During the life of the Second International, which was founded in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, 14 July 1889, the German Social Democrats were very hesitant to call any sort of May Day actions because they feared a strike in Germany on May Day would bring the government down on them. So, there was a very peculiar development of a sense of German exceptionalism, a feeling that things were going along swimmingly, the SPD was gaining in parliament, the organization was burgeoning. The mindset was that the party must at all costs avoid a premature confrontation with the bourgeoisie that could spell disaster. Tactical prudence was beginning to evolve into reformist adaptation.
Kautsky and others of the German Social Democrats were always concerned about a general strike because they thought it would be a one-shot proposition in the Kaiser's Germany. It would immediately lead to total confrontation with the bourgeoisie and either the proletariat would triumph or it would be smashed. And, since inevitably the SPD was gaining influence in parliament and expanding its press, trade-union organizations, and sporting groups and hundreds of other associations were growing, why wreck the inevitable march of progress toward socialism?
I have spent some time on the SPD's reformist adaptations because I would like to contrast it with the experience of the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik experience was needless to say very different.
It's an old saw that "you learn something new every day." But sometimes what you learn is important. Gary Steenson in his book "Not One Man! Not One Penny!" German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 [University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981] reveals a little-known fact:
"One very unusual aspect of the socialist congresses in Germany was the presence at most of them of police officials. These men had the right to interrupt speakers who ventured into forbidden territory, and they could even cancel a session altogether if the discussion got too extreme. But the congressional participants themselves usually knew the allowable limits, and after the end of the antisocialist law, the police officials did not often intervene. Their presence was, nonetheless, a source of embarrassment for the SPD and should have been for the authorities also."
-p. 125
This submission to cop censorship is absolutely breathtaking, and accommodation to it reveals the deep reformist rot that infected the SPD. It should be contrasted with the comportment of the Bolsheviks who took their responsibility to revolutionary Marxism seriously. Commenting on what can be said and what must be said, in 1917 Lenin wrote:
"At times some try to defend Kautsky and Turati by arguing that, legally, they could no more than 'hint' at their opposition to the government, and that the pacifists of this stripe do make such 'hints'. The answer to that is, first, that the impossibility of legally speaking the truth is an argument not in favour of concealing the truth, but in favour of setting up an illegal organisation and press that would be free of police surveillance and censorship. Second, that moments occur in history when a socialist is called upon to break with all legality. Third, that even in the days of serfdom in Russia, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky managed to speak the truth, for example, by their silence on the Manifesto of February 19, 1861, and their ridicule and castigation of the liberals, who made exactly the same kind of speeches as Turati and Kautsky." -Lenin, Collected Works [hereafter CW\ Vol. 23, p. 186
Clearly the SPD's many-years-long accommodation to police censorship played a significant role in its slide into social chauvinism when confronted by the revolutionary tasks imposed by the imperialist war.
The SPD's accommodation to bourgeois legality is all the more surprising given the very real repression the party experienced, particularly in its formative years. Liebknecht and Bebel, for example, opposed the Franco-Prussian war. For their efforts, they were thrown into prison for a couple of years. The party did face a situation of near illegality, even following the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Many, many people were arrested for crimes of lese majeste. SPDers were elected to parliament and when they got to Berlin found out their landlady had been told by the government not to rent them a place. Socialists were exiled, under old laws going back to 1850, to tiny provincial towns.
Kautsky summed up in 1888 what we have come to know as the social-democratic worldview when he wrote in A Social Democratic Catechism: "The Social Democracy is a revolutionary party, but it is not a party that makes revolutions...." The SPD's policy was one of revolutionary passivity, of waiting. Kautsky maintained that Social Democrats are not pacifists. The SPD would eventually prevail in parliament and if the bourgeoisie offers resist¬ance the Social Democratic workers would suppress them. But the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was for Kautsky really a question for future generations
The rise of imperialism and the rise of opportunism go hand in hand. Early on, in the heavily peasant areas of south Germany, where the Social Democracy was weaker and where there were fewer proletarians, SPD representatives began to openly adapt to alien class pressures. These pressures reflected themselves nationally when, in 1895, Bebel and Liebknecht, over the vociferous objections of Kautsky, revised the Erfurt Program to "include a demand for democratization of all public institutions, to improve the situation in industry, agriculture and transport within the framework of the present social and state order."
Bernstein, who had lived for 20 years in exile in Britain, while there began to develop fundamental doubts on the possibility or necessity of proletarian revolution, doubts which he later systematized into a general revisionist assault on Marxism. Kautsky, since Bernstein was his good friend, temporized on launching a struggle against this revisionism.
However, eventually the battle was joined, with Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov weighing in very heavily against Bernstein (who was not handled in the party with kid gloves). Nonetheless, Bernstein and Kautsky both feared a split in the party. Kautsky hoped to ideologically defeat revisionism without a split, arguing that revisionism could be isolated and would cease to be dangerous. This generally was the approach of the Second International in the whole period leading up to the war.
I should mention, by the way, that Kautsky's deep but latent reformist streak found expression in the Second Congress of the Second International in Paris in 1890 when the issue of Millerandism came up. The French socialist politician Millerand had recently accepted a cabinet post in a bourgeois government. Kautsky led the charge against Millerand stating that it was absolutely impermissible to be a minister in a bourgeois government...except under "special circumstances." And the special circumstances were, for example, in the event of a war, where, say, the tsar invaded Germany. Only then, according to Kautsky, would a Social Democrat be compelled to join a government of the enemy class; only unity in defense of the nation made permissible that which in times of peace was impermissible!
Impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution
The 1905 Russian Revolution had an enormous impact on Germany, the class struggle in Germany, on the Social Democracy and on the trade unions. On the left of the party, Rosa Luxemburg saw 1905 through the lens of her experiences in Warsaw, where she went to participate in the revolution. For Luxemburg, the main lesson of the revolution was the efficacy of the mass strike as the road to revolution. She saw the mass strike as the chief instrument for realizing the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Through intervention in these struggles the socialists would win authority and lead the workers to victory. The assault on the capitalist power would not be through parliament, but through a series of convulsive strikes that would clean the party of revisionism and lead to the fall of capital. But while Luxemburg invested the mass strike and spontaneous action by the proletariat with great revolutionary import, she failed to grasp the significance of the Soviets and as well of the real rehearsal for October, the culmination of 1905, which was the Moscow insurrection.
Germany in 1905 experienced massive turmoil. There were thousands and thousands of strikes. There were numerous lockouts by employers. There were militant workers' demonstrations and street fighting between the workers and the police.
Under the impact of both Luxemburg and the events in 1905 in Germany and Russia, Kautsky was driven to the left. He certainly was among the most perceptive of the commentators on what was going on in 1905 in Russia from the outside. Both Lenin and Trotsky claimed Kautsky's analysis supported their views. Kautsky did, indeed, refer to what was going on in Russia as permanent revolution and stated that the unfolding of the revolutionary struggles in Russia turned out to be very different from what he had previously thought. Thus he wrote:
"The [Russian] liberals, can scream all they want about the need for a strong government and regard the growing chaos in Russia with anguished concern; but the revolutionary proletariat has every reason to greet it with the most fervent hopes. This 'chaos' is nothing other than permanent revolution. In the present circumstances it is under revolutionary conditions that the proletariat completes its own maturation most rapidly, develops its intellectual, moral, and economic strength most completely, imprints its own stamp on state and society most profoundly, and obtains the greatest concessions from them. Even though this dominance of the proletariat can only be transitory in a country as economically backward as Russia, it leaves effects that cannot be reversed, and the greater the dominance, the longer they will last.... Permanent revolution is thus exactly what the proletariat in Russia needs."
—quoted in Massimo Salvadori, op. cit., p. 102
Here he is speaking of permanent revolution in the sense of Marx's "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League."
In January of 1906, Kautsky, basing himself on the experience of the Moscow insurrection, declared that it was now necessary to re-examine Engels' famous preface to Marx's Class Struggle in France, the text of which the German Social Democracy had so often used to justify its own legalism. The reformists had fixated on an observation by Engels that the epoch of barricades and street fighting was definitely over. But Kautsky said that the battle of Moscow, where a small group of insurgents managed to hold out for two weeks against superior forces, indicated that victorious armed struggle by the insurgents was possible because of the mass strike wave, of which he said too little was known in Engels' time. It was precisely the strike wave and struggles around it that had undermined the discipline of the army and those lessons were applicable, not only in Russia, but possibly throughout Europe.
Thus Kautsky swung quite far to the left. But he was still very nervous about a mass strike in Germany, which he thought could only be a one-shot affair—all or nothing. For its part, the German ruling class was also drawing its own class lessons from the events in Russia. The Kaiser thought that it might well be necessary to send an expeditionary force into Russia to rescue his fellow monarch, the tsar, and, as a corollary to that, the Kaiser certainly was planning to suppress the German Social Democracy.
The turmoil surrounding 1905 frightened many of Germany's SPD trade-union leaders. In the main they had a very clear position: "No mass strikes! Nothing out of the ordinary!" These bureaucrats feared that the street demonstrations and turmoil were pulling in unorganized workers who had low consciousness and would threaten the organized and above all orderly German trade-union movement. In May of 1905 in Cologne, the trade unions came out on record against the mass strike.
The stage was thus set for an open division between the party and its affiliated trade unions. At the Jena Congress, the party, under the impact of what was going on in Russia, adopted the mass strike as a political weapon in defense of suffrage rights and the right of association in particular. The mass strike was presented as a means of extending suffrage in places like Prussia and of defending the right of a Social Democratic party to exist and organize in the trade unions. This mass strike resolution carried overwhelmingly, by 287 to 14 votes.
One of those voting against the resolution was a man named Carl Legien who just happened to be the leader of the SPD's trade-union federation. He importuned the party leadership and on 16 February 1906, at a secret meeting of the party and trade unions, the party capitulated to the trade unions.
Basically, the trade unions said to the party: if there are to be mass strikes and the party can't prevent them, it is the party and not the trade unions who should lead them. The trade unions promised to sup¬
port the party to the extent they could, but the party was to bear the brunt not only of the responsibility for leading mass strikes, but also of paying for them.
The very next year in September of 1906, Bebel at the Mannheim Congress declared that without the support of the unions, mass strikes are unthinkable and Legien said "Ja! They are unthinkable!"
At Mannheim the party endorsed the deal cooked up at the earlier secret conference. Bebel, who wielded immense authority in the German movement, pushed the proposal through by a vote of 386 to 5. Among those voting for it were Kitschy, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Following the events of 1905 there was a rise in German imperial ambitions. The German bourgeoisie reacted to 1905 with a great wave of chauvinist propaganda and in the 1907 elections the German Social Democracy got a really cold, wet rag smacked in its face. These were the so-called Hottentots elections and they were the first elections in which imperialist patriotism played a big role. In 1907, many of the petty bourgeois who had previously voted for the Social Democrats, didn't.
The percentage of the SPD votes didn't drop-very much in absolute numbers. It went from 31.7 to 29, but the number of SPD representatives in the Reichstag dropped from 81 to 43. At the time there were numerous political parties in Germany and thus provisions for runoffs if no party obtained a majority of the vote. The Social Democracy willy-nilly had been counting on a large number of petty-bourgeois votes.
In contesting for election in Germany, routinely the SPD had made blocs with the liberals. Where a Social Democrat didn't get in the runoff, SPDers were told to vote for the bourgeois progressive, and an appeal was made to the progressive voters to vote SPD if a socialist was in a runoff. Of course, Social Democrats, being disciplined, got many progressives elected. But following 1905, the progressives' bourgeois base would have nothing to do with these anti-patriotic reds and this bloc didn't work out so well from that standpoint.
The Social Democracy and Imperialist War
Turmoil growing out of events in Russia and the swell in imperialist and patriotic propaganda really drove the party leadership into frenzy. Thus the stage was set for erosion of the historic position of the SPD encapsulated in the slogan of Wilhelm Liebknecht of "not one man, not one penny."
Bebel started talking about being for national defense if Russia invaded Germany and, believe me, the Russian question was as big a bugaboo in Germany in this period as it was in America in the Cold War period. Bebel made a speech in the Reichstag explaining when he would be a defensist, at the same time sugar-coating it with a denunciation of Prussian discipline, mistreatment of soldiers and financial burdens. He was followed by a SPDer by the name of Noske, who contested the accusation that Social Democracy was anti-national or anti-patriotic. Noske said that there is no accusation more unjustified than the claim that the SPD wanted to undermine the discipline of the army. Where in Germany except in the army is there greater discipline than in the Social Democratic Party and the modern trade unions?
"'As a Social Democrat I agree with the honorable Minister of War when he declares that German soldiers must have the best arms.' Finally, he [Kautsky] proclaimed that the Social Democrats would repel any aggression against their country 'with greater determination' than any bourgeois party, that the SPD wanted Germany to be 'armed as well as possible,' and that 'the entire German people' had an 'interest in the military institutions necessary for the defence' of the 'fatherland'."
The quote is from Massimo Salvadori's Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, p. 119 (1938). Salvadori comments: "There could have been no more public funeral for the anti-militarist propaganda preached by [Karl] Liebknecht."
The party had begun to polarize into an incipient center, a left wing and a very insidious right wing. Karl Liebknecht had become the bete noire not only of the right wing but also of some of the center of the party with the publication of his book Militarism and Anti-Militarism, and for his efforts to organize an anti-militarist youth organization. In fact, Liebknecht's book earned him almost two years in prison—apropos the point about the reality of life in the Kaiser's Germany.
By the way, one must say that aside from Die Neue Zeit, which received a lot of criticism because it contained articles having nothing to do with Germany, German Social Democracy was very provincial in its views. It tended to concern itself mainly with domestic issues.
By 1910, the German Social Democracy panicked before the bourgeoisie's patriotic propaganda offensive. Some SPDers began to entertain the proposition that since they had always been for an income tax, the SPD should therefore support the direct tax, even though the purpose of the direct tax was to raise money for the war budget. The party pulled back from that position, but by 1912, when the party was really in a panic about regaining what it had lost in the elections, operationally it had moved very, very far to the right.
When the issue of the direct tax came up again in 1913 the Kautsky center gave critical support to the social-chauvinists on this issue. Rosa Luxemburg said that if Kautsky urged his followers to vote the direct tax, in a year they would be voting war credits. She was absolutely prophetic in that. When war came on 4 August 1914, the German party, which was the biggest party of the international, capitulated and voted war credits, betraying socialism. Nearly all parties of the Second International from the various belligerent countries followed suit with the honorable exceptions of the Russians, the Italians, the Serbs and, ultimately, a few Germans.
The Second International, to which the SPD was affiliated, was not an international in the Leninist sense. The war revealed it to be an international in little but name, more akin to a bunch of socialist pen pals.
That political rot which precipitated out on 4 August 1914 did not fall from the sky but grew, organically if you will, within the SPD. And there were premonitions of the problems which manifested themselves at earlier Second International congresses.
Thus, the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 actually debated whether there could be a socialist colonial policy. There was a commission in which the majority called for exactly that. That proposal by that commission was only narrowly defeated, by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. It was a near thing. Commenting on it, Lenin said that vote had tremendous significance. First, socialist opportunism, which capitulated before bourgeois charm, had unmasked itself plainly, and, secondly, there became manifest a negative feature of the European labor movement, which is capable of causing great harm to the proletariat.
Half of the SPD delegation at Stuttgart was made up of trade unionists and maintained the position of trade-union independence. And, then, of course, the war question also came up. If you read the Stuttgart resolution on the war, and the subsequent ones culminating in the Basel Manifesto, they all speak about how, to combat war amongst the capitalist powers, the proletariat should use whatever means are at its disposal when necessary.
Lenin objected to the slogan of a mass strike against war. How the proletariat is to conduct the struggle against war depends upon the particular conditions it confronts. Answering a war, he says, depends on the character of the crisis which a war provokes—the choice of means of struggle is made on the basis of these conditions. But the Germans really wanted any reference to any strike action against war deleted, because they opposed anything that would commit them, even on paper, to such a course.
Lenin in contrast stressed that the key thing about the resolution on war and peace was that the struggle must consist in substituting not merely peace for war, but socialism for capitalism. "It is not a matter of preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie." And he, Rosa Luxemburg and, I believe, Martov blocked to amend a resolution by Bebel (which was a very orthodox resolution) because it was possible to read the orthodox postulates of Bebel through opportunist glasses. So Lenin and Luxemburg amended the resolution to say that militarism was the chief weapon of class suppression, to say that agitation among the youth was necessary and indicated, and, third, that the task of the Social Democrats was not only struggle against the outbreak of war, or for an early termination of war which had already broken out, but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, it found Lenin in Galicia. He couldn't believe the SPD had voted for war credits, thinking it must be police propaganda.
After he managed to make his way back to Switzerland, Lenin's course was set. He and his comrades embarked on an implacable struggle for a new revolutionary international to replace the Second International, now fatally compromised by social chauvinism. The central issue was that the world war was an imperialist war, and that the answer to this war was not "peace," or "no annexations," or "the right of self determination of all nations," but, in fact, to turn this imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie, for socialism.
The war disrupted the Second International for a while, but shortly various national parties, each aligned with its own bourgeoisie, held "antiwar" congresses. First the Entente "socialists," then the central powers "socialists" met. This was followed by the Copenhagen Congress of neutral "socialists." The Bolsheviks at first were not inclined to participate in the Copenhagen Congress because of its demands: peace, no annexations, courts of arbitration and disarmament. But on reconsideration, the Bolsheviks attended Copenhagen to raise five points: socialists out of bourgeois cabinets, no vote for war credits, fraternization of troops, for civil war against the imperialist war, and for illegal organizations that organize for revolutionary propaganda and actions among the proletariat in the struggle for the Third International.
Forging the Third International
It was in the struggle against the social chauvinists and centrists that the Bolsheviks finally hammered out the key points of their international and political and organizational program. To do so it was necessary to swim against a raging stream of social chauvinism. Zinoviev says:
"It was in a manifesto on the arrested Bolshevik Duma fraction that we first advanced the slogan of turning the imperialist war into civil war. At that time, in the camp of the Second International, we were regarded literally as lepers. When we stated that this war had to be turned into a civil war, a war against the bourgeoisie, they seriously began to suggest that we were not quite right in the head."
The first international conference that pulled together socialists from various belligerent countries was, in fact, an international women's conference organized in Switzerland by Clara Zetkin. The Bolsheviks intervened and were voted down. That conference was followed by an international youth conference which also voted down the Bolshevik proposals.
It was only at the Zimmerwald Conference that the Bolsheviks were able to come forward as a weak minority—but a minority which was to become the nucleus of a new Communist Third International. At that conference Ledebour (who was one of the German center) confronted Lenin: "Civil war to end the imperialist war? Well, Lenin, go to Russia and try it there. It's pretty easy to say this in Switzerland." In the Second International all these centrists and chauvinist wiseacres proclaimed that all the Russian workers supported the war and that no one supported the Bolsheviks. During the period of 1915-1916 the Bolsheviks remained an insignificant minority. It was only in 1916 that they began to reestablish real and significant links in Russia.
Lenin was absolutely implacable in hammering on the issue of the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary task it demanded. His key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chance of revolution were the centrists, with their flowery conceits and illusions.
Take Kautsky, for example. Kautsky had not been a member of the German parliamentary fraction, but he was such a doyen of the party that he was invited to the meeting where they voted war credits. Kautsky had planned to suggest abstention, but when it became clear there was going to be no abstention, he said, fine, let's vote for the war credits and state that our condition is no annexations, blah, blah, blah. Well, the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg said, that's a good resolution. Let's just take this part out about no annexations. And that was what happened.
Liebknecht originally went along, as a disciplined member of the party, with the vote, but broke immediately thereafter. Once the war began in earnest Kautsky argued it was a war of defense for Germany. In an incredible exercise in muddle-headed obfuscation he argued it was, as well, a war of defense for the French, the Belgians and the British. After all, Social Democrats are not anti-national and can't present themselves to the nation as anti-national. His conclusion—the International is really a peacetime organization! After the war, everyone would get back together! So, to justify his support to voting for war credits, he supported the votes of all Social Democrats for "self-defense."
As the war progressed it became more hideous. And the fighting lasted far longer than anyone had imagined. Social tensions began to rise and the bourgeoisie and the centrists began to get nervous. By 1917 a turn occurred. The war had run its course. Germany had grabbed a fair chunk of territory. None of the combatants had the capacity to squeeze much more blood or sweat out of the proletariat. The Germans were beginning to think they had a chance to split Russia off from Britain and France and do a separate deal.
Kautsky began to worry about the news from the front—that everybody in the trenches supports Liebknecht. Liebknecht had made a famous speech against the war. For his troubles he had been drafted into the army out of parliament and then imprisoned. Luxemburg was arrested soon after Liebknecht. The centrists began to calculate that they were losing their influence. Thus, Kautsky and company began to redouble their offensive for "peace" and broke off from the official Social Democracy to form an independent party.
Lenin's struggle against the war meant not simply struggle against the centrists outside the party, but inside as well. Some Bolsheviks, exemplified by Bukharin's Bogy group, were seduced by the siren peace songs of the centrists. Bukharin and his co-thinkers also had a position against the right of self-determination for nations during the war, because, according to them, the imperialist war had rendered all such questions irrelevant. Lenin characterized this position as a caricature of imperialist economism.
It is very interesting to consider Trotsky's role in the struggle against the social chauvinists. He of course had a solidly internationalist position of opposition to the war. But until quite late in the war Trotsky rather quixotically conciliated various centrists. At times he sought out political blocs with the Mensheviks and for a brief period even hoped to obtain Kautsky's collaboration in the struggle against the war. For these reasons Lenin subjected him to some very harsh criticisms.
Forging the Bolshevik Party
The programmatic intransigence of Lenin laid the foundation for the struggle for October. In this regard let's examine the period of the Bolshevik Party from 1912 to 1914, and contrast it to the evolution of the German Social Democracy. There are three key periods of struggle in the development of Bolshevism: 1895 to 1903 against economism, from 1903 to 1908 against the Mensheviks, and from 1908 to 1914 against the liquidators. The liquidators were the Mensheviks of various stripes and origins who wanted a legal labor party in Russia. Given the conditions in Russia, Lenin made the point that such a party could not be a Marxist revolutionary party.
Certainly Lenin's experience with the German Social Democracy in the Second International in this period was not exactly positive. The SPD-dominated International tried a number of times to foist unity on the Russian Marxists and it was fairly clear from the get-go that Kautsky in particular, like most of the SPD leadership, viewed Lenin as an incurable sectarian enrage.
The Germans were really pro-Martov; they wanted to enforce unity. The last effort at unity was in 1913-14, when the International demanded that all the Russian Marxists get into one room in front of a commission of the International and take steps to unite into one big party. And, by the way, the German Social Democracy also had its fingers on the purse strings of a lot of the money that the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had.
I really enjoyed reading about this conference. Lenin chose Inessa Armand as the Bolshevik representative. Armand was a very elegant and cosmopolitan woman, who spoke several languages, was intelligent, politically hard, and diplomatic. Following Lenin's instructions she told the conference that the Bolsheviks were in favor of unity, however, that unity had conditions attached to it.
"1. All-party resolutions of December 1908 and January 1910 on liquidationism are confirmed in a very resolute and unreserved manner precisely in their application to liquidationism. It is recognized that anyone who writes (especially in the legal press) against 'commending the illegal press' deserves condemnation and cannot be tolerated in the ranks of the illegal party. Only one who sincerely and with all his strength helps the development of the illegal press, of illegal proclamations and so forth, can become a member of the illegal party."
It goes on:
"3. It is recognized that the entry of any group of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party into a bloc or union with another party is absolutely not permissible and incompatible with party membership." —Ganken and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World
War, pp. 120-121 (Stanford University Press,
1940)
Bundism is to be condemned; it is incompatible with membership; national and cultural autonomy, this again, contradicts the party program; and the failure to recognize the resolutions of the party on that is incompatible with party membership. When Inessa Armand presented these conditions, her presentation was considered the worst of manners from the standpoint of all these Second International Social Democrats. How could the Bolsheviks act like this?
In fact, the reality on the ground in Russia was that there was one Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that mattered, and it was the illegal party of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. By the time that the international was trying to engineer unity among the Russian factions the Bolsheviks had about 80 percent of the active proletariat, in terms of their support, and correspondingly in press circulation.
The influence of the Bolsheviks amongst the Russian proletariat was initially undercut by the outbreak of the war, and indeed the war sharply undercut a rising tide of worker militancy in a number of countries, including Germany and Britain. One of the subsidiary reasons why the various bourgeoisies were not averse to embarking on imperialist war was that they thought it would quench class struggle at home.
The road of development of Bolshevism spans nearly a decade and a half. The fundamental point of this talk is that the October Revolution would not have been possible without the program and the tactics elaborated by the Bolsheviks in the struggle for the Third International and against imperialist war. For it was on the rock of the war that Menshevism, tying itself to the bourgeoisie, broke its neck. Because of the war, once the revolution broke out in Russia there was no room for a formulation akin to the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." In fact, the task that had been set in motion by the outbreak of World War I was that of civil war of the proletariat for socialist revolution.
Lenin's key three works of this period, Imperialism, The State and Revolution, and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, were polemics against the center, internationally, in Social Democracy. In the heat of battle, in Russia and across Europe, when the founding of the Third International took place, it was not easy to get delegates to Moscow, and most of those who turned up were people who either were lucky and made it through or happened to already be there. The delegates to the First Congress were thus necessarily a somewhat eclectic collection of parties and individuals. But it was an historic affirmation of the years of previous struggle and above all of the actual creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat embodied in Soviets. The key resolution at that Congress was, indeed, an upholding of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky spent the last 20 years of his life as an embittered, anti-Soviet Social Democrat, an apostle of bourgeois democracy, blaming all ills, including German fascism, on Bolshevism. Lenin, for his part, recognized the real issue which the Third International had to turn its attention to and that was the spreading of the October Revolution to other places. I wanted to quote something that he wrote in October of 1918, which I think kind of gives a measure of him as a revolutionist. If you look in the volume that has The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, there is, earlier on, a very short piece by the same name and in it Lenin notes:
"Europe's greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like -the Scheidemanns, Renaudels, Henderson’s, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.
"Of course* a mighty, popular revolutionary movement may rectify this deficiency, but it is nevertheless a serious misfortune and a grave danger.
"That is why we must do our utmost to expose renegades like Kautsky, thereby supporting the revolutionary groups of genuine internationalist workers, who are to be found in all countries." -CW, Vol. 28, p. 113
It was that task that the founding of the Third International took up.
The German delegation of the newly fledged Communist Party arrived in Moscow with a mandate (adopted before the Spartacus uprising) to oppose the launching of a Third International, because the German Communists could not yet break themselves from the conception of the party of the whole class. They still were mesmerized by the possibility of some sort of unity with various centrists and thought the formation of a new international premature. The German delegation was actually talked out of this position while in Moscow.
That was crucial. It had been a long and difficult struggle, but the banner of international proletarian revolution, besmirched by Social Democracy in 1914, was planted at this founding conference. Its key programmatic element, the dictatorship of the proletariat based on soviet power, was asserted. The struggle to forge new revolutionary parties was launched.
The new parties which adhered to the banner of October reflected a generational split. It was the young workers who had gone through the war who were to become the base of the new International. It was the older workers who tended to stay behind with the Social Democracy. Certainly our tasks today have obvious parallels. The sine qua non is to build parties of a Bolshevik type, to forge an international, and to contest for proletarian power and that really is the only road to new October Revolutions, which is what this class is all about.
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.
The Birth of the Comintern (1919)
by George Foster New York, 14 June 1998
This class series will attempt to take to heart comrade Lenin's injunction in "Left-Wing" Communism: rather than simply hailing soviet power and the October Revolution, the real point is to study the experience of the Bolshevik Party in order to assimilate the lessons and international significance of October. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed that our capacity to understand the world— and he was referring to class society in particular—is in direct proportion to our ability to intervene in it. And as comrade Robertson recently observed, the lessons of the October Revolution and the Communist International have for us Marxists a very deep validity. They mark the high point of the workers movement, to be contrasted with the current valley in which we today find ourselves situated. This class will consider the First Congress of the Third International which took place in March 1919, in the midst of a civil war in which the October Revolution was fighting for its very life.
The story of the First Congress is mainly the story of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary international following the ignominious collapse of the socialist Second International on 4 August of 1914. It is above all the story of the struggle by Lenin's Bolsheviks to turn the battle against the first imperialist war into a civil war to abolish the capitalist system.
Younger comrades in particular have real difficulty grasping the enormous and traumatic impact of World War I on the bourgeois societies of the time and on the proletariat. From the end of the Franco-Prussian war [1870-1871] until the onset of the first imperialist war, a period of some 43 years elapsed in Europe without a major war. Most of the imperialist combatants who embarked on the First World War assumed it would be very short. The British bourgeoisie in particular was hoping that its rivals on the continent would mutually exhaust each other in a bout of bloodletting and, indeed, looked forward to the war. But it didn't turn out to be a short war.
The war dragged on for over four years. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered in a war to re-divide the world amongst the various contending imperialists, a war to see who would get how much loot and how much booty. To quote General Sherman: "war is hell." But, if war is
hell, World War I stood out in its grotesque brutality. WWI was fought mainly as a war of attrition, of trench warfare, of bankrupt strategies reflecting the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois society. It was a war in which the proletariat and even the scions of the bourgeoisie were cut down and slaughtered in enormous numbers. For example, the Prussian Junker class was, at the end of the war, a shadow of its former self. Likewise the war decimated the sons of the British ruling class.
To give you an example of the brutality of the situation, in 1916 there was a small salient of the German line projecting into the Entente lines in Belgium at a village called Ypres. The British general in the sector, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to straighten out this little pocket disturbing the geometrical regularity of his front. Over the space of three or four days he lost something like 600,000 men in this endeavor, which did not in any way alter the sanguinary stalemate.
At the beginning of the war there was only one significant republic in continental Europe and that was France. By the end of this war, the face of Europe had changed. Three empires—tsarist Russia, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Hohenzollern empire of Germany—disappeared from the political map to be replaced by various republics. So it was a very big change. I highly recommend to comrades two books. One is Carl Schorske's book, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and the other is a book by Richard Watt, a British chemist who wrote history in his spare time, called The Kings Depart.
The ignominious capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist bourgeoisie during the first imperialist war marks the point at which the struggle for the Third International began and it was a struggle from the onset taken up by the Bolsheviks. To understand the Third International and Bolshevism, which went through its final forging in its revolutionary struggle against the first imperial¬ist war, some remarks are in order about the Third International's predecessor, the Second International, about its origins and history and its collapse.
Going back over that history one is struck by an observation made by Jim Cannon about the early, pre-communist socialist movement in the U.S. In The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon observed that it took the Bolsheviks and the Communist International to clarify and settle a whole series of political and organizational questions that had bedeviled the movement—questions ranging from the counterposition between direct trade-union action versus parliamentarism to, in the case of the U.S., the black question. In a very real sense, Cannon's observation concerning the American socialists is more generally applicable to the Second International as a whole. That is, if you go back and you examine the history of the Second International, one gets a sense of participants who, in some sense, were sleepwalking.
It took the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had to deal with a wide spectrum of issues and conditions of work (such as the national question, trade-union struggle, legality versus illegality, work in parliament, Soviets, the 1905 mass strikes culminating in the Moscow insurrection), to really forge a new type of party that in its experiences had learned lessons that were valid for the entire workers movement in the imperialist epoch. And Bolshevism, it should be understood, was not born all at once but started as another party in the Second International and, indeed, a party which modeled itself after the preeminent party of the Second International, that is to say the German SPD.
Lenin makes the point that the Second International and the parties which constituted it were very much products of the pre-imperialist epoch, a period of protracted, organic capitalist growth and, as indicated, of peace among the major European powers. If the First International laid the foundation for an international organization of workers, for the preparation of the revolutionary attack on capital, the Second International was an organization, as Lenin remarked, whose growth proceeded in breadth at the cost of a temporary drop in revolutionary consciousness and a strengthening of opportunism in the party.
The SPD and Parliamentarism
The German Social Democracy itself underwent considerable change over these years. In February of 1881, in the period when the Social Democrats in Germany were outlawed by the Anti-Socialist Laws, Karl Kautsky wrote:
"The Social Democratic workers' party has always emphasized that it is a revolutionary party in a sense that it recognizes that it is impossible to resolve the social questions within the existing society.... Even today, we would prefer, if it were possible, to realize the social revolution through the peaceful road.... But if we still harbour this hope today, we have nonetheless ceased to emphasize it, for every one of us knows that it is a Utopia. The most perceptive of our comrades have never believed in the possibility of a peaceful revolution; they have teamed from history that violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.... Today we all know that the popular socialist state can be erected only through a violent overthrow and that it is our duty to uphold consciousness of this among ever broader layers of the people." —quoted in Massimo Salvador!, Karl Kautsky and
the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, p. 20 (Verso,
1979)
This was the young Karl Kautsky, at the beginning of his career as a Marxist. And by the way, both Kautsky and Bernstein, who were in a real sense the legates of Marx and Engels, were won to Marxism through Engels' work Anti-Duhring. It was the work which actually won key cadre of the Social Democracy to Marxism. Kautsky was to go on to become the editor of Die Neue Zeit, which was the theoretical paper of Social Democracy (and parenthetically, I would point out, he edited it longer than Norden edited WV) and became the preeminent German propagandist for Marxism for the whole period. In fact, he was known as the pope of Marxism and for a long time he was looked up to by Lenin and others as the embodiment of orthodox Marxism. Yet running through the orthodox Marxism of Kautsky was a strong parliamentarist thread which grew organically out of the conditions that the German party experienced.
As a consequence of the German Anti-Socialist Laws the SPD was outlawed from 1874 to 1886. Despite its illegality during this period, the Social Democracy managed to get about 9.1 percent of the votes in parliament. With the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the legalization of the party, the party began to grow. Notwithstanding some fits and starts the party began to experience a steady accretion of electoral support, both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers. This led the SPDers to think that German Social Democracy would simply grow organically. Some older comrades may remember that many years ago a comrade plotted three or four years of our growth and from that graph projected that by now we would probably have a billion members. Empirical reality rapidly shattered her illusion, but in the case of the SPD in that period, experience tended to confirm a steady pattern of growth.
A few scant years after the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Kautsky was putting forward a very different line from that of 1881. Very much influenced by Darwin and German biologists such as Haeckel, he postulated that socialism would be the natural evolutionary outcome of capitalism—that the working class would grow to be a larger and larger proportion of the populace, that through the votes of these workers, SPD representation would ineluctably grow in parliament and that inevitably Social Democracy would triumph. Kautsky, along with Bernstein, penned the Erfurt Program, a program that all comrades should take the time to read. It is the classic example of the minimum-maximum program of Social Democracy.
The Erfurt Program is also noteworthy for what it does not contain—it consciously avoided the whole issue of the state. Kautsky wrote the theoretical part of Erfurt and Bernstein the practical. By the way, in 1899, Lenin described the Erfurt Program as a Marxist document. But later, reconsidering it in The State and Revolution, and based on his experiences in the intervening period, he came to view it very differently.
Kautsky wrote a commentary on the Erfurt Program and in it he developed his central themes. One of them was the indispensability of parliament as an instrument of government in great states—for all classes—and, therefore, for the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie and, secondly, for the need to win a majority of parliament, treating elections as the fundamental, strategic avenue to power for the labor movement.
Kautsky posed an indissoluble link between the conquest of state power and the conquest of a majority in parliament, between the defense of the technical importance of parliament and the impossibility of a Paris Commune-type state. He thought that the Social Democracy, its political and social struggles and use of parliamentary legislation for socialist purposes, constituted the very content of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As early as 1892 Kautsky writes:
"In a great modern state, [the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, can] acquire influence in the administration of the state only through the vehicle of an elected parliament. Direct legislation, at least in a great modern state, cannot render parliament superfluous, [but can only represent a ramification of the administration. Hence the general thesis:] it is absolutely impossible to entrust the entire legislation of the state to it [direct legislation], and it is equally impossible to control or direct the state administration through it. So long as the great modern state exists..."
And notice there is no class character to this state:
"...the central point of political activity will always remain in its parliament. [Now:] the most consistent expression of parliament is the parliamentary republic."
—quoted in Massimo Salvador], ibid, pp. 35-36
And, therefore, the conquest of parliament was indispensable for Social Democracy. This was to be a signpost of German Social Democracy thenceforth, through the whole period up to the first imperialist war.
Now Wilhelm Liebknecht aptly termed the Kaiserine parliament a "fig leaf for absolutism." Germany at this time presented a strange combination of parliamentarism, with rather nominal powers, fronting for absolutist despotism ruling on behalf of German capital. This was reflected in the laws regarding suffrage. On a national level there was direct male suffrage. On the provincial level suffrage rights varied a lot, ranging from places like Prussia, which had a notorious three-class franchise system based on how much direct tax you paid, to some of the southern German states, which eventually had more or less direct suffrage, but were very short on proletarians and had large peasant populations.
It was clear that the German Social Democracy would have to contend on a parliamentary level if it were to be a political party in Germany, and it did so. During the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws, because the parliamentary fraction was granted immunity, it was relatively untouchable, and played a key role in leading the party. This early experience later played its part in reinforcing a tendency to fetishize parliament despite the fact that the Reichstag was impotent and could not compel the imperial government to answer to it. And on the provincial level it was downright bizarre to have parliamentary illusions, for example, if you look at the restricted suffrage in Prussia.
In the Prussian elections in 1913, the SPD got over 775,000 votes, some 28.3 percent of the total. But it only won ten seats in the Prussian parliament. In contrast the Deutsche Volkspartei, which received 6.7 percent of the votes, won 38 seats. The Free Conservative Party, with 2 percent, won 54 seats. The National Liberal Party, with 13 percent, won 73 seats. The Catholic Center Party, with 16 percent, won 103 seats and the German Conservative Party, with 14 percent, won 147 seats. How is this possible? The people who paid the top third in income tax got a third of the seats, etc. That was about 2 or 3 percent of the population. So, there is a certain level at which one's credulity is strained at the evident latching on very early to parliamentary cretinism.
The SPD and the State
Secondly, the SPD was clearly awed by the power of the German state and army. One gets the impression that the experience of the Anti-Socialist Laws resulted in an attitude of "Never again!" The party lived in real fear that it could be outlawed by a stroke of the Kaiser's pen. As the party accrued influence and organizational mass there was a corresponding reluctance to risk this organic growth by displeasing the powers that be. This sentiment went hand-in-hand with the conception of the SPD as the party of the whole class.
When, in 1875, the Marxian wing fused with the Lassalleans, the fusion was codified in the Gotha Program (basically a Lassallean program). When Marx penned his Critique of the Gotha Programmed, that critique was suppressed in Germany. It was suppressed by Rebel, Kautsky and Bernstein, because they were afraid it would provoke a split with the Lassalleans.
Likewise, when the Erfurt Program was penned, Engels wrote a very sharp criticism of it; you can read about it in The State and Revolution. Engels thought it was a very fine program, but the failure of the program to address the key issue of state power fundamentally compromised it. Engels opined that while it might be difficult to raise the demand for a democratic republic, that failure opened the door to politically disarming the party when it had to confront big revolutionary events. Engels' criticisms were suppressed to maintain unity with the opportunists and out of fear that their publication might expose the party to reprisals from the Kaiser's government.
During the life of the Second International, which was founded in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, 14 July 1889, the German Social Democrats were very hesitant to call any sort of May Day actions because they feared a strike in Germany on May Day would bring the government down on them. So, there was a very peculiar development of a sense of German exceptionalism, a feeling that things were going along swimmingly, the SPD was gaining in parliament, the organization was burgeoning. The mindset was that the party must at all costs avoid a premature confrontation with the bourgeoisie that could spell disaster. Tactical prudence was beginning to evolve into reformist adaptation.
Kautsky and others of the German Social Democrats were always concerned about a general strike because they thought it would be a one-shot proposition in the Kaiser's Germany. It would immediately lead to total confrontation with the bourgeoisie and either the proletariat would triumph or it would be smashed. And, since inevitably the SPD was gaining influence in parliament and expanding its press, trade-union organizations, and sporting groups and hundreds of other associations were growing, why wreck the inevitable march of progress toward socialism?
I have spent some time on the SPD's reformist adaptations because I would like to contrast it with the experience of the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik experience was needless to say very different.
It's an old saw that "you learn something new every day." But sometimes what you learn is important. Gary Steenson in his book "Not One Man! Not One Penny!" German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 [University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981] reveals a little-known fact:
"One very unusual aspect of the socialist congresses in Germany was the presence at most of them of police officials. These men had the right to interrupt speakers who ventured into forbidden territory, and they could even cancel a session altogether if the discussion got too extreme. But the congressional participants themselves usually knew the allowable limits, and after the end of the antisocialist law, the police officials did not often intervene. Their presence was, nonetheless, a source of embarrassment for the SPD and should have been for the authorities also."
-p. 125
This submission to cop censorship is absolutely breathtaking, and accommodation to it reveals the deep reformist rot that infected the SPD. It should be contrasted with the comportment of the Bolsheviks who took their responsibility to revolutionary Marxism seriously. Commenting on what can be said and what must be said, in 1917 Lenin wrote:
"At times some try to defend Kautsky and Turati by arguing that, legally, they could no more than 'hint' at their opposition to the government, and that the pacifists of this stripe do make such 'hints'. The answer to that is, first, that the impossibility of legally speaking the truth is an argument not in favour of concealing the truth, but in favour of setting up an illegal organisation and press that would be free of police surveillance and censorship. Second, that moments occur in history when a socialist is called upon to break with all legality. Third, that even in the days of serfdom in Russia, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky managed to speak the truth, for example, by their silence on the Manifesto of February 19, 1861, and their ridicule and castigation of the liberals, who made exactly the same kind of speeches as Turati and Kautsky." -Lenin, Collected Works [hereafter CW\ Vol. 23, p. 186
Clearly the SPD's many-years-long accommodation to police censorship played a significant role in its slide into social chauvinism when confronted by the revolutionary tasks imposed by the imperialist war.
The SPD's accommodation to bourgeois legality is all the more surprising given the very real repression the party experienced, particularly in its formative years. Liebknecht and Bebel, for example, opposed the Franco-Prussian war. For their efforts, they were thrown into prison for a couple of years. The party did face a situation of near illegality, even following the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Many, many people were arrested for crimes of lese majeste. SPDers were elected to parliament and when they got to Berlin found out their landlady had been told by the government not to rent them a place. Socialists were exiled, under old laws going back to 1850, to tiny provincial towns.
Kautsky summed up in 1888 what we have come to know as the social-democratic worldview when he wrote in A Social Democratic Catechism: "The Social Democracy is a revolutionary party, but it is not a party that makes revolutions...." The SPD's policy was one of revolutionary passivity, of waiting. Kautsky maintained that Social Democrats are not pacifists. The SPD would eventually prevail in parliament and if the bourgeoisie offers resist¬ance the Social Democratic workers would suppress them. But the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was for Kautsky really a question for future generations
The rise of imperialism and the rise of opportunism go hand in hand. Early on, in the heavily peasant areas of south Germany, where the Social Democracy was weaker and where there were fewer proletarians, SPD representatives began to openly adapt to alien class pressures. These pressures reflected themselves nationally when, in 1895, Bebel and Liebknecht, over the vociferous objections of Kautsky, revised the Erfurt Program to "include a demand for democratization of all public institutions, to improve the situation in industry, agriculture and transport within the framework of the present social and state order."
Bernstein, who had lived for 20 years in exile in Britain, while there began to develop fundamental doubts on the possibility or necessity of proletarian revolution, doubts which he later systematized into a general revisionist assault on Marxism. Kautsky, since Bernstein was his good friend, temporized on launching a struggle against this revisionism.
However, eventually the battle was joined, with Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov weighing in very heavily against Bernstein (who was not handled in the party with kid gloves). Nonetheless, Bernstein and Kautsky both feared a split in the party. Kautsky hoped to ideologically defeat revisionism without a split, arguing that revisionism could be isolated and would cease to be dangerous. This generally was the approach of the Second International in the whole period leading up to the war.
I should mention, by the way, that Kautsky's deep but latent reformist streak found expression in the Second Congress of the Second International in Paris in 1890 when the issue of Millerandism came up. The French socialist politician Millerand had recently accepted a cabinet post in a bourgeois government. Kautsky led the charge against Millerand stating that it was absolutely impermissible to be a minister in a bourgeois government...except under "special circumstances." And the special circumstances were, for example, in the event of a war, where, say, the tsar invaded Germany. Only then, according to Kautsky, would a Social Democrat be compelled to join a government of the enemy class; only unity in defense of the nation made permissible that which in times of peace was impermissible!
Impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution
The 1905 Russian Revolution had an enormous impact on Germany, the class struggle in Germany, on the Social Democracy and on the trade unions. On the left of the party, Rosa Luxemburg saw 1905 through the lens of her experiences in Warsaw, where she went to participate in the revolution. For Luxemburg, the main lesson of the revolution was the efficacy of the mass strike as the road to revolution. She saw the mass strike as the chief instrument for realizing the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Through intervention in these struggles the socialists would win authority and lead the workers to victory. The assault on the capitalist power would not be through parliament, but through a series of convulsive strikes that would clean the party of revisionism and lead to the fall of capital. But while Luxemburg invested the mass strike and spontaneous action by the proletariat with great revolutionary import, she failed to grasp the significance of the Soviets and as well of the real rehearsal for October, the culmination of 1905, which was the Moscow insurrection.
Germany in 1905 experienced massive turmoil. There were thousands and thousands of strikes. There were numerous lockouts by employers. There were militant workers' demonstrations and street fighting between the workers and the police.
Under the impact of both Luxemburg and the events in 1905 in Germany and Russia, Kautsky was driven to the left. He certainly was among the most perceptive of the commentators on what was going on in 1905 in Russia from the outside. Both Lenin and Trotsky claimed Kautsky's analysis supported their views. Kautsky did, indeed, refer to what was going on in Russia as permanent revolution and stated that the unfolding of the revolutionary struggles in Russia turned out to be very different from what he had previously thought. Thus he wrote:
"The [Russian] liberals, can scream all they want about the need for a strong government and regard the growing chaos in Russia with anguished concern; but the revolutionary proletariat has every reason to greet it with the most fervent hopes. This 'chaos' is nothing other than permanent revolution. In the present circumstances it is under revolutionary conditions that the proletariat completes its own maturation most rapidly, develops its intellectual, moral, and economic strength most completely, imprints its own stamp on state and society most profoundly, and obtains the greatest concessions from them. Even though this dominance of the proletariat can only be transitory in a country as economically backward as Russia, it leaves effects that cannot be reversed, and the greater the dominance, the longer they will last.... Permanent revolution is thus exactly what the proletariat in Russia needs."
—quoted in Massimo Salvadori, op. cit., p. 102
Here he is speaking of permanent revolution in the sense of Marx's "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League."
In January of 1906, Kautsky, basing himself on the experience of the Moscow insurrection, declared that it was now necessary to re-examine Engels' famous preface to Marx's Class Struggle in France, the text of which the German Social Democracy had so often used to justify its own legalism. The reformists had fixated on an observation by Engels that the epoch of barricades and street fighting was definitely over. But Kautsky said that the battle of Moscow, where a small group of insurgents managed to hold out for two weeks against superior forces, indicated that victorious armed struggle by the insurgents was possible because of the mass strike wave, of which he said too little was known in Engels' time. It was precisely the strike wave and struggles around it that had undermined the discipline of the army and those lessons were applicable, not only in Russia, but possibly throughout Europe.
Thus Kautsky swung quite far to the left. But he was still very nervous about a mass strike in Germany, which he thought could only be a one-shot affair—all or nothing. For its part, the German ruling class was also drawing its own class lessons from the events in Russia. The Kaiser thought that it might well be necessary to send an expeditionary force into Russia to rescue his fellow monarch, the tsar, and, as a corollary to that, the Kaiser certainly was planning to suppress the German Social Democracy.
The turmoil surrounding 1905 frightened many of Germany's SPD trade-union leaders. In the main they had a very clear position: "No mass strikes! Nothing out of the ordinary!" These bureaucrats feared that the street demonstrations and turmoil were pulling in unorganized workers who had low consciousness and would threaten the organized and above all orderly German trade-union movement. In May of 1905 in Cologne, the trade unions came out on record against the mass strike.
The stage was thus set for an open division between the party and its affiliated trade unions. At the Jena Congress, the party, under the impact of what was going on in Russia, adopted the mass strike as a political weapon in defense of suffrage rights and the right of association in particular. The mass strike was presented as a means of extending suffrage in places like Prussia and of defending the right of a Social Democratic party to exist and organize in the trade unions. This mass strike resolution carried overwhelmingly, by 287 to 14 votes.
One of those voting against the resolution was a man named Carl Legien who just happened to be the leader of the SPD's trade-union federation. He importuned the party leadership and on 16 February 1906, at a secret meeting of the party and trade unions, the party capitulated to the trade unions.
Basically, the trade unions said to the party: if there are to be mass strikes and the party can't prevent them, it is the party and not the trade unions who should lead them. The trade unions promised to sup¬
port the party to the extent they could, but the party was to bear the brunt not only of the responsibility for leading mass strikes, but also of paying for them.
The very next year in September of 1906, Bebel at the Mannheim Congress declared that without the support of the unions, mass strikes are unthinkable and Legien said "Ja! They are unthinkable!"
At Mannheim the party endorsed the deal cooked up at the earlier secret conference. Bebel, who wielded immense authority in the German movement, pushed the proposal through by a vote of 386 to 5. Among those voting for it were Kitschy, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Following the events of 1905 there was a rise in German imperial ambitions. The German bourgeoisie reacted to 1905 with a great wave of chauvinist propaganda and in the 1907 elections the German Social Democracy got a really cold, wet rag smacked in its face. These were the so-called Hottentots elections and they were the first elections in which imperialist patriotism played a big role. In 1907, many of the petty bourgeois who had previously voted for the Social Democrats, didn't.
The percentage of the SPD votes didn't drop-very much in absolute numbers. It went from 31.7 to 29, but the number of SPD representatives in the Reichstag dropped from 81 to 43. At the time there were numerous political parties in Germany and thus provisions for runoffs if no party obtained a majority of the vote. The Social Democracy willy-nilly had been counting on a large number of petty-bourgeois votes.
In contesting for election in Germany, routinely the SPD had made blocs with the liberals. Where a Social Democrat didn't get in the runoff, SPDers were told to vote for the bourgeois progressive, and an appeal was made to the progressive voters to vote SPD if a socialist was in a runoff. Of course, Social Democrats, being disciplined, got many progressives elected. But following 1905, the progressives' bourgeois base would have nothing to do with these anti-patriotic reds and this bloc didn't work out so well from that standpoint.
The Social Democracy and Imperialist War
Turmoil growing out of events in Russia and the swell in imperialist and patriotic propaganda really drove the party leadership into frenzy. Thus the stage was set for erosion of the historic position of the SPD encapsulated in the slogan of Wilhelm Liebknecht of "not one man, not one penny."
Bebel started talking about being for national defense if Russia invaded Germany and, believe me, the Russian question was as big a bugaboo in Germany in this period as it was in America in the Cold War period. Bebel made a speech in the Reichstag explaining when he would be a defensist, at the same time sugar-coating it with a denunciation of Prussian discipline, mistreatment of soldiers and financial burdens. He was followed by a SPDer by the name of Noske, who contested the accusation that Social Democracy was anti-national or anti-patriotic. Noske said that there is no accusation more unjustified than the claim that the SPD wanted to undermine the discipline of the army. Where in Germany except in the army is there greater discipline than in the Social Democratic Party and the modern trade unions?
"'As a Social Democrat I agree with the honorable Minister of War when he declares that German soldiers must have the best arms.' Finally, he [Kautsky] proclaimed that the Social Democrats would repel any aggression against their country 'with greater determination' than any bourgeois party, that the SPD wanted Germany to be 'armed as well as possible,' and that 'the entire German people' had an 'interest in the military institutions necessary for the defence' of the 'fatherland'."
The quote is from Massimo Salvadori's Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, p. 119 (1938). Salvadori comments: "There could have been no more public funeral for the anti-militarist propaganda preached by [Karl] Liebknecht."
The party had begun to polarize into an incipient center, a left wing and a very insidious right wing. Karl Liebknecht had become the bete noire not only of the right wing but also of some of the center of the party with the publication of his book Militarism and Anti-Militarism, and for his efforts to organize an anti-militarist youth organization. In fact, Liebknecht's book earned him almost two years in prison—apropos the point about the reality of life in the Kaiser's Germany.
By the way, one must say that aside from Die Neue Zeit, which received a lot of criticism because it contained articles having nothing to do with Germany, German Social Democracy was very provincial in its views. It tended to concern itself mainly with domestic issues.
By 1910, the German Social Democracy panicked before the bourgeoisie's patriotic propaganda offensive. Some SPDers began to entertain the proposition that since they had always been for an income tax, the SPD should therefore support the direct tax, even though the purpose of the direct tax was to raise money for the war budget. The party pulled back from that position, but by 1912, when the party was really in a panic about regaining what it had lost in the elections, operationally it had moved very, very far to the right.
When the issue of the direct tax came up again in 1913 the Kautsky center gave critical support to the social-chauvinists on this issue. Rosa Luxemburg said that if Kautsky urged his followers to vote the direct tax, in a year they would be voting war credits. She was absolutely prophetic in that. When war came on 4 August 1914, the German party, which was the biggest party of the international, capitulated and voted war credits, betraying socialism. Nearly all parties of the Second International from the various belligerent countries followed suit with the honorable exceptions of the Russians, the Italians, the Serbs and, ultimately, a few Germans.
The Second International, to which the SPD was affiliated, was not an international in the Leninist sense. The war revealed it to be an international in little but name, more akin to a bunch of socialist pen pals.
That political rot which precipitated out on 4 August 1914 did not fall from the sky but grew, organically if you will, within the SPD. And there were premonitions of the problems which manifested themselves at earlier Second International congresses.
Thus, the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 actually debated whether there could be a socialist colonial policy. There was a commission in which the majority called for exactly that. That proposal by that commission was only narrowly defeated, by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. It was a near thing. Commenting on it, Lenin said that vote had tremendous significance. First, socialist opportunism, which capitulated before bourgeois charm, had unmasked itself plainly, and, secondly, there became manifest a negative feature of the European labor movement, which is capable of causing great harm to the proletariat.
Half of the SPD delegation at Stuttgart was made up of trade unionists and maintained the position of trade-union independence. And, then, of course, the war question also came up. If you read the Stuttgart resolution on the war, and the subsequent ones culminating in the Basel Manifesto, they all speak about how, to combat war amongst the capitalist powers, the proletariat should use whatever means are at its disposal when necessary.
Lenin objected to the slogan of a mass strike against war. How the proletariat is to conduct the struggle against war depends upon the particular conditions it confronts. Answering a war, he says, depends on the character of the crisis which a war provokes—the choice of means of struggle is made on the basis of these conditions. But the Germans really wanted any reference to any strike action against war deleted, because they opposed anything that would commit them, even on paper, to such a course.
Lenin in contrast stressed that the key thing about the resolution on war and peace was that the struggle must consist in substituting not merely peace for war, but socialism for capitalism. "It is not a matter of preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie." And he, Rosa Luxemburg and, I believe, Martov blocked to amend a resolution by Bebel (which was a very orthodox resolution) because it was possible to read the orthodox postulates of Bebel through opportunist glasses. So Lenin and Luxemburg amended the resolution to say that militarism was the chief weapon of class suppression, to say that agitation among the youth was necessary and indicated, and, third, that the task of the Social Democrats was not only struggle against the outbreak of war, or for an early termination of war which had already broken out, but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, it found Lenin in Galicia. He couldn't believe the SPD had voted for war credits, thinking it must be police propaganda.
After he managed to make his way back to Switzerland, Lenin's course was set. He and his comrades embarked on an implacable struggle for a new revolutionary international to replace the Second International, now fatally compromised by social chauvinism. The central issue was that the world war was an imperialist war, and that the answer to this war was not "peace," or "no annexations," or "the right of self determination of all nations," but, in fact, to turn this imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie, for socialism.
The war disrupted the Second International for a while, but shortly various national parties, each aligned with its own bourgeoisie, held "antiwar" congresses. First the Entente "socialists," then the central powers "socialists" met. This was followed by the Copenhagen Congress of neutral "socialists." The Bolsheviks at first were not inclined to participate in the Copenhagen Congress because of its demands: peace, no annexations, courts of arbitration and disarmament. But on reconsideration, the Bolsheviks attended Copenhagen to raise five points: socialists out of bourgeois cabinets, no vote for war credits, fraternization of troops, for civil war against the imperialist war, and for illegal organizations that organize for revolutionary propaganda and actions among the proletariat in the struggle for the Third International.
Forging the Third International
It was in the struggle against the social chauvinists and centrists that the Bolsheviks finally hammered out the key points of their international and political and organizational program. To do so it was necessary to swim against a raging stream of social chauvinism. Zinoviev says:
"It was in a manifesto on the arrested Bolshevik Duma fraction that we first advanced the slogan of turning the imperialist war into civil war. At that time, in the camp of the Second International, we were regarded literally as lepers. When we stated that this war had to be turned into a civil war, a war against the bourgeoisie, they seriously began to suggest that we were not quite right in the head."
The first international conference that pulled together socialists from various belligerent countries was, in fact, an international women's conference organized in Switzerland by Clara Zetkin. The Bolsheviks intervened and were voted down. That conference was followed by an international youth conference which also voted down the Bolshevik proposals.
It was only at the Zimmerwald Conference that the Bolsheviks were able to come forward as a weak minority—but a minority which was to become the nucleus of a new Communist Third International. At that conference Ledebour (who was one of the German center) confronted Lenin: "Civil war to end the imperialist war? Well, Lenin, go to Russia and try it there. It's pretty easy to say this in Switzerland." In the Second International all these centrists and chauvinist wiseacres proclaimed that all the Russian workers supported the war and that no one supported the Bolsheviks. During the period of 1915-1916 the Bolsheviks remained an insignificant minority. It was only in 1916 that they began to reestablish real and significant links in Russia.
Lenin was absolutely implacable in hammering on the issue of the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary task it demanded. His key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chance of revolution were the centrists, with their flowery conceits and illusions.
Take Kautsky, for example. Kautsky had not been a member of the German parliamentary fraction, but he was such a doyen of the party that he was invited to the meeting where they voted war credits. Kautsky had planned to suggest abstention, but when it became clear there was going to be no abstention, he said, fine, let's vote for the war credits and state that our condition is no annexations, blah, blah, blah. Well, the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg said, that's a good resolution. Let's just take this part out about no annexations. And that was what happened.
Liebknecht originally went along, as a disciplined member of the party, with the vote, but broke immediately thereafter. Once the war began in earnest Kautsky argued it was a war of defense for Germany. In an incredible exercise in muddle-headed obfuscation he argued it was, as well, a war of defense for the French, the Belgians and the British. After all, Social Democrats are not anti-national and can't present themselves to the nation as anti-national. His conclusion—the International is really a peacetime organization! After the war, everyone would get back together! So, to justify his support to voting for war credits, he supported the votes of all Social Democrats for "self-defense."
As the war progressed it became more hideous. And the fighting lasted far longer than anyone had imagined. Social tensions began to rise and the bourgeoisie and the centrists began to get nervous. By 1917 a turn occurred. The war had run its course. Germany had grabbed a fair chunk of territory. None of the combatants had the capacity to squeeze much more blood or sweat out of the proletariat. The Germans were beginning to think they had a chance to split Russia off from Britain and France and do a separate deal.
Kautsky began to worry about the news from the front—that everybody in the trenches supports Liebknecht. Liebknecht had made a famous speech against the war. For his troubles he had been drafted into the army out of parliament and then imprisoned. Luxemburg was arrested soon after Liebknecht. The centrists began to calculate that they were losing their influence. Thus, Kautsky and company began to redouble their offensive for "peace" and broke off from the official Social Democracy to form an independent party.
Lenin's struggle against the war meant not simply struggle against the centrists outside the party, but inside as well. Some Bolsheviks, exemplified by Bukharin's Bogy group, were seduced by the siren peace songs of the centrists. Bukharin and his co-thinkers also had a position against the right of self-determination for nations during the war, because, according to them, the imperialist war had rendered all such questions irrelevant. Lenin characterized this position as a caricature of imperialist economism.
It is very interesting to consider Trotsky's role in the struggle against the social chauvinists. He of course had a solidly internationalist position of opposition to the war. But until quite late in the war Trotsky rather quixotically conciliated various centrists. At times he sought out political blocs with the Mensheviks and for a brief period even hoped to obtain Kautsky's collaboration in the struggle against the war. For these reasons Lenin subjected him to some very harsh criticisms.
Forging the Bolshevik Party
The programmatic intransigence of Lenin laid the foundation for the struggle for October. In this regard let's examine the period of the Bolshevik Party from 1912 to 1914, and contrast it to the evolution of the German Social Democracy. There are three key periods of struggle in the development of Bolshevism: 1895 to 1903 against economism, from 1903 to 1908 against the Mensheviks, and from 1908 to 1914 against the liquidators. The liquidators were the Mensheviks of various stripes and origins who wanted a legal labor party in Russia. Given the conditions in Russia, Lenin made the point that such a party could not be a Marxist revolutionary party.
Certainly Lenin's experience with the German Social Democracy in the Second International in this period was not exactly positive. The SPD-dominated International tried a number of times to foist unity on the Russian Marxists and it was fairly clear from the get-go that Kautsky in particular, like most of the SPD leadership, viewed Lenin as an incurable sectarian enrage.
The Germans were really pro-Martov; they wanted to enforce unity. The last effort at unity was in 1913-14, when the International demanded that all the Russian Marxists get into one room in front of a commission of the International and take steps to unite into one big party. And, by the way, the German Social Democracy also had its fingers on the purse strings of a lot of the money that the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had.
I really enjoyed reading about this conference. Lenin chose Inessa Armand as the Bolshevik representative. Armand was a very elegant and cosmopolitan woman, who spoke several languages, was intelligent, politically hard, and diplomatic. Following Lenin's instructions she told the conference that the Bolsheviks were in favor of unity, however, that unity had conditions attached to it.
"1. All-party resolutions of December 1908 and January 1910 on liquidationism are confirmed in a very resolute and unreserved manner precisely in their application to liquidationism. It is recognized that anyone who writes (especially in the legal press) against 'commending the illegal press' deserves condemnation and cannot be tolerated in the ranks of the illegal party. Only one who sincerely and with all his strength helps the development of the illegal press, of illegal proclamations and so forth, can become a member of the illegal party."
It goes on:
"3. It is recognized that the entry of any group of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party into a bloc or union with another party is absolutely not permissible and incompatible with party membership." —Ganken and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World
War, pp. 120-121 (Stanford University Press,
1940)
Bundism is to be condemned; it is incompatible with membership; national and cultural autonomy, this again, contradicts the party program; and the failure to recognize the resolutions of the party on that is incompatible with party membership. When Inessa Armand presented these conditions, her presentation was considered the worst of manners from the standpoint of all these Second International Social Democrats. How could the Bolsheviks act like this?
In fact, the reality on the ground in Russia was that there was one Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that mattered, and it was the illegal party of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. By the time that the international was trying to engineer unity among the Russian factions the Bolsheviks had about 80 percent of the active proletariat, in terms of their support, and correspondingly in press circulation.
The influence of the Bolsheviks amongst the Russian proletariat was initially undercut by the outbreak of the war, and indeed the war sharply undercut a rising tide of worker militancy in a number of countries, including Germany and Britain. One of the subsidiary reasons why the various bourgeoisies were not averse to embarking on imperialist war was that they thought it would quench class struggle at home.
The road of development of Bolshevism spans nearly a decade and a half. The fundamental point of this talk is that the October Revolution would not have been possible without the program and the tactics elaborated by the Bolsheviks in the struggle for the Third International and against imperialist war. For it was on the rock of the war that Menshevism, tying itself to the bourgeoisie, broke its neck. Because of the war, once the revolution broke out in Russia there was no room for a formulation akin to the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." In fact, the task that had been set in motion by the outbreak of World War I was that of civil war of the proletariat for socialist revolution.
Lenin's key three works of this period, Imperialism, The State and Revolution, and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, were polemics against the center, internationally, in Social Democracy. In the heat of battle, in Russia and across Europe, when the founding of the Third International took place, it was not easy to get delegates to Moscow, and most of those who turned up were people who either were lucky and made it through or happened to already be there. The delegates to the First Congress were thus necessarily a somewhat eclectic collection of parties and individuals. But it was an historic affirmation of the years of previous struggle and above all of the actual creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat embodied in Soviets. The key resolution at that Congress was, indeed, an upholding of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky spent the last 20 years of his life as an embittered, anti-Soviet Social Democrat, an apostle of bourgeois democracy, blaming all ills, including German fascism, on Bolshevism. Lenin, for his part, recognized the real issue which the Third International had to turn its attention to and that was the spreading of the October Revolution to other places. I wanted to quote something that he wrote in October of 1918, which I think kind of gives a measure of him as a revolutionist. If you look in the volume that has The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, there is, earlier on, a very short piece by the same name and in it Lenin notes:
"Europe's greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like -the Scheidemanns, Renaudels, Henderson’s, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.
"Of course* a mighty, popular revolutionary movement may rectify this deficiency, but it is nevertheless a serious misfortune and a grave danger.
"That is why we must do our utmost to expose renegades like Kautsky, thereby supporting the revolutionary groups of genuine internationalist workers, who are to be found in all countries." -CW, Vol. 28, p. 113
It was that task that the founding of the Third International took up.
The German delegation of the newly fledged Communist Party arrived in Moscow with a mandate (adopted before the Spartacus uprising) to oppose the launching of a Third International, because the German Communists could not yet break themselves from the conception of the party of the whole class. They still were mesmerized by the possibility of some sort of unity with various centrists and thought the formation of a new international premature. The German delegation was actually talked out of this position while in Moscow.
That was crucial. It had been a long and difficult struggle, but the banner of international proletarian revolution, besmirched by Social Democracy in 1914, was planted at this founding conference. Its key programmatic element, the dictatorship of the proletariat based on soviet power, was asserted. The struggle to forge new revolutionary parties was launched.
The new parties which adhered to the banner of October reflected a generational split. It was the young workers who had gone through the war who were to become the base of the new International. It was the older workers who tended to stay behind with the Social Democracy. Certainly our tasks today have obvious parallels. The sine qua non is to build parties of a Bolshevik type, to forge an international, and to contest for proletarian power and that really is the only road to new October Revolutions, which is what this class is all about.
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.
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 91st Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (1920)-Lenin's Speech On The Fundamental Tasks Of The Communist International
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Markin comment on this post:
As noted in my commentary on the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920), reposted below since it also applies to these theses, such documents give the political movement it is addressed to its marching order. In a general sense, at least. These theses codify those general propositions outlined in the manifesto. Note here that this Second Congress took place as the international working class movement was going through a regroupment process right after World War I between the reformist socialists, the emerging communist vanguard, and the bewildered anarchists. Note also the difference in approaches to the more hardened reformist-led socialist parties, and to the ill-formed but more revolutionary-spirited anarchist formations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) here in America in their good days.
A manifesto, particularly a political manifesto, and especially a revolutionary communist manifesto like the one that issued out of the historic Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 should give a cogent analysis of the world political situation. It should also describe the nature of the period (revolutionary, non-revolutionary, heading toward or away from either, an estimation of the enemy’s capacities, and the obstacles in the way both inside and outside the workers movement (out side the treachery of the liberals and inside the perfidy of the labor bureaucracy resting on the labor bureaucracy). In short, give the international proletariat its marching orders. The Manifesto of the Second World Congress does just those things at a time when the fledgling Communist International was trying to consolidate its vanguard position in the world working class movement. The Communist International then, and for some time after, did yeoman’s work in that regard, not always perfectly but from a revolutionary perspective. Even as it degenerated politically toward the middle and late 1920s there were, as the Leon Trotsky-led International Left Opposition held, reasons, good reasons to adhere to its tenets. Only with the debacle around Hitler’s coming to power in Germany did Trotsky throw in the towel. That seemed right then, and now. I would argue that the Seventh (and last) World Congress in 1935 unquestionably put paid to that notion. We did not need a vanguard national party, or a vanguard revolutionary international party for that matter, to give the lead in the political struggle to the liberal bourgeoisie as the popular frontist politics of the CI proclaimed from that time onward (with a few “left” turns). There was an international for that “strategy”, or rather a mail-drop address, it was (is) called the Second International.
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Lenin's Speech On The Fundamental Tasks Of The Communist International
Comrade Lenin has the floor for the report. [Loud applause. All present rise and applaud. The speaker tries to speak, but the applause and cries in all languages continue. The ovation goes on for a long time.]
Lenin: Comrades, the Theses on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International have been published in all languages and offer nothing materially new (especially for the Russian comrades), for in the main they only extend a few basic features of our revolutionary experience and the lessons of our revolutionary movement to a number of Western countries, to Western Europe. For that reason I shall dwell in my report somewhat longer, even if in brief outline, on the first part of my subject, on the international situation.
The economic relations of imperialism form the basis of the international situation as it now presents itself. In the course of the twentieth century a new, highest and final stage of capitalism has taken shape. You all know of course that the most characteristic and essential feature of imperialism is the fact that capital has reached enormous dimensions. Giant monopolies have taken the place of free competition. An insignificant number of capitalists have, on occasion, been able to concentrate entire industries in their hands. These have passed into the hands of combines, cartels, syndicates and trusts, frequently international in scale. Thus entire industries, not only in individual countries but all over the world, have fallen into the hands of monopolists either in relation to finance or on the basis of property rights or with reference to production. On this basis there developed an unprecedented domination by a small number of great banks, financial tycoons and magnates who turned even the freest republics into financial monarchies. This was quite openly recognised before the war even by such by no means revolutionary writers as, for example, Lysis in France.
This domination by a handful of capitalists reached its full development when the whole globe had been divided up, not only in the sense that the various sources of raw materials and means of production had been seized by the capitalists, but also in the sense that the preliminary division of the colonies had been concluded. About forty years ago the population of the colonies was scarcely more than 250 million held in subjection by six capitalist powers. Before the war in 1914 the population in the colonies was already assessed at 600 million, and if such countries as Persia, Turkey and China, which are in the position of semi-colonies, are taken in addition, we reach the round figure of a thousand million people who are enslaved through colonial dependence by the richest, most civilised and freest countries. And you know that apart from being directly political and legal, this colonial subjection also involves a whole series of relations of financial and economic dependence and means a whole series of wars which cannot really be called wars because they so often degenerate into butchery, when European and American imperialist troops armed with the most perfected weapons of destruction slaughter the unarmed and defenceless inhabitants of the colonial countries.
It was from this division of the whole world, from this domination by the capitalist monopolies, from this universal power wielded by a very small number of great banks – from 2 to 5 in each state, no more – that the imperialist war of 1914-1918 inevitably sprang. The war was waged for the re-division of the whole world. The war was waged to decide which of the two groups of world powers – the English or the German – was to have the opportunity and the right to pillage, enslave and exploit the whole world. And you know that the war decided this question in favour of the British group. As a result of this war we have an immeasurable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. At a stroke the war relegated some 250 millions of the world’s population to what amounts to colonial status, that is to say Russia, whose population is put at around 130 million, and Austro-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria with no fewer than 120 million. 250 million people in countries which in part, Eke Germany, are among the most advanced, enlightened and cultured and stand technically at the pinnacle of modern progress. Through the Versailles Treaty the war has forced such conditions upon them that advanced nations have fallen into colonial servitude, misery, starvation, ruin and loss of rights. They are bound by the Treaty for many generations into the future and placed under circumstances such as no civilised nation has yet lived under. Thus you have a picture of the world that shows that after the war a population of at least 1,250 million is suddenly subjected to the colonial yoke, to the exploitation of a brutal capitalism. This capitalism once boasted of its love of peace, and perhaps it had some right to do so fifty years ago when the world had not yet been divided up, when the monopolies did not yet rule, when capitalism still had room for comparatively peaceful development without enormous military conflicts.
Now, after this peaceful epoch, the yoke becomes enormously more oppressive. We can already see the return to an even worse colonial and military subjugation than before. For Germany and a whole number of the defeated nations the Versailles Treaty has created conditions which make economic existence physically impossible, deprive them of rights and humiliate them.
How many nations profit from this?
In order to answer this question we must recall that the United States of America, the only country to profit fully from the war, which was transformed from a country burdened with debts into a country to which everybody owed money, has a population of no more than 100 million. The population of japan, who also made great profits by standing aside from the Euro-American conflict and seizing the enormous continent of Asia, is some 50 million. The population of Britain who, next to these countries, made the biggest profits, is about 50 million. And if we add the neutral states who also enriched themselves during the war we have in round figures 250 million.
Thus you have in a few short strokes a picture of the world as it has emerged after the imperialist war. A population of 1,250 million in enslaved colonies; countries like Persia, Turkey and China whose living bodies have been dismembered; countries defeated and turned into colonies. No more than 250 million people five in those countries that have maintained their former position, but they too have become economically dependent upon America and were, during the war, also militarily dependent upon her, for the war involved the whole world and did not permit a single state to remain really neutral. Finally we have a population of no more than 250 million in those countries in which, of course, only the ruling class, the capitalists, profited from the division of the world. The sum total, some 1,750 million people, equals the Earth’s total population. I wanted to remind you of this picture of the world since all the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, of imperialism, that lead to revolution, all the fundamental contradictions in the labour movement that have led to the bitter struggle against the Second International that the Comrade Chairman spoke of – all this is connected with the division of the world’s population.
Certainly these figures illustrate the world economy only in crude outline. And comrades, in reality exploitation by finance capital on the basis of this division of the world’s population has grown even greater.
Not only have the defeated colonial countries fallen into this state of subjugation, but also within each victorious country all the conflicts are taking sharper and sharper form, all the contradictions of capitalism are becoming more acute. I shall give a few examples to sketch what I mean.
Let us take the national debt. We know that the debts of the most important European countries grew no less than sevenfold between 1914 and 1920. I shall quote from another economic source of especially great significance. This is Keynes, the British diplomat and author of the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes took part in the peace negotiations at Versailles on behalf of his government and observed them directly from a purely bourgeois point of view; he studied the matter thoroughly step by step; he took part in the discussions as an economist. In the process he arrived at conclusions that are more cogent, graphic and instructive than any that a revolutionary communist could draw because they are drawn by an avowed bourgeois, an implacable enemy of Bolshevism. Like the petty-bourgeois Englishman that he is, he distortedly imagines this Bolshevism to be ferocious and brutal. He has come to the conclusion that, thanks to the Treaty, Europe and the whole world are heading for bankruptcy. He has resigned. He has thrown his book in the government’s face saying: ‘What you are doing is lunacy.’ I shall quote figures from Keynes’s book which by and large show the following.
How do the reciprocal debts of the great powers relate to one another? I shall convert British pounds sterling into gold roubles at a rate of ten gold roubles to one pound sterling. And now we see that the United States has assets of 19,000 million while they have no liabilities at all. Before the war it was indebted to Britain. At the last Congress of the Communist Party of Germany, in his report of April 14, 1920, Comrade Levi correctly referred to the fact that there are now two powers in the world that can act independently: Britain and America. Only America is absolutely financially independent. Before the war it was a debtor, now it emerges as a creditor. All the other world powers are debtors. Britain is reduced to a position where her assets are 17,000 million and her liabilities are 8,000 million. She is already half-way to being a debtor. In addition these assets include some 6,000 million of these assets owed by Russia. The military supplies received by Russia during the war are counted as part of her debt. When recently Krassin, as the representative of the Russian Soviet government, had the opportunity of talking to Lloyd George on the question of the debts, he made it extremely plain to the scholars and statesmen who lead the British government that they were suffering under an illusion if they assumed they were ever going to receive any of these debts. The British diplomat Keynes has already seen through this illusion. It is not merely, or rather not at all, a question of the Russian revolutionary government being unwilling to pay the debts. No government could have paid them, as they are the usurious interest for what has already been paid twenty times over. The very same bourgeois, Keynes, who certainly has no sympathies with the Russian revolutionary movement, says: ‘It is obvious that these debts cannot be taken into account.’
In relation to France Keynes quotes figures that give assets of 3,500 millions but liabilities of 9,500 million. And this was the country of which the French themselves said that it was the world’s moneylender, for her ‘savings’ were colossal; the colonial and financial robbery that brought them a gigantic capital enabled them to lend thousands and thousands of millions, especially to Russia. Gigantic revenues were thus gained. And despite all this, despite her victory, France has fallen into the position of a debtor.
An American bourgeois source quoted by Comrade Braun. a Communist, in his book Who Must Pay the War Debts? (Leipzig 1920) determines the ratio of debts to the national wealth as follows: in England and France they form over 50 per cent of the total national wealth, in Italy the ratio is expressed as from 60 to 70 per cent and in Russia as 90 per cent. But as you know these debts do not disturb us, for we followed Keynes’s excellent advice shortly before his book appeared, and annulled all our debts. [Stormy applause.].
Here however Keynes only displays a common petty-bourgeois idiosyncrasy; in advising annulment of all debts he says that France of course will only gain by it and Britain will not lose very much since in any case there is nothing to be had from Russia. As is only fitting, America will lose, but Keynes counts on American ‘generosity’. In this respect our views diverge from those of Keynes and the rest of the petty-bourgeois pacifists. We think that if we are to manage to annul the debts we will have to put our hopes elsewhere and work in a direction other than faith in the ‘generosity’ of the capitalists.
From these few figures it is evident that the imperialist war has created a situation that is impossible even for the victorious countries. This is also indicated by the enormous disparity between wages and price rises. The Supreme Economic Council, a body that is supposed to protect the bourgeois order internationally from the rising revolution, adopted on March 8 of this year a resolution that ended with an appeal for order, industriousness and thrift, on condition, of course, that the workers remain the slaves of capital. This Supreme Economic Council, the organ of the Entente and of the whole capitalist world, presented the following summary.
On average, food prices in the United States have risen by 120 per cent while wages have only risen by 100 per cent. In Britain food prices have gone up 170 per cent, wages by 130 per cent; in France food prices by 300 per cent and wages by 60 per cent (I am quoting the figures from Comrade Braun’s pamphlet mentioned above and the Supreme Economic Council’s figures from The Times of March 10, 1920).
Clearly, under such conditions the growth of workers’ resentment. the growth of revolutionary moods and ideas and the growth of elemental mass strikes are inevitable, for the workers’ situation is becoming intolerable. The workers are convinced by experience that the capitalists have immeasurably enriched themselves in the war and are loading the burden of its costs and debts onto the workers. We recently learnt by cable that America wishes to deport another 500 Communists to Russia in order to get rid of these ‘dangerous agitators’.
If America deports not 500 but 500,000 Russian, American, Japanese and French ‘agitators’ it would make not the slightest difference, for the disparity between wages and prices, about which they can do nothing, would still remain. They can do nothing about it because private property is strictly safeguarded there, because in their country it is ‘sacred’. Only in Russia has the exploiter’s private property been abolished. The capitalists can do nothing about these disproportionate prices but the workers cannot live with the old wages. This misery cannot be fought with the old methods. No individual strikes, no parliamentary struggle, no vote can achieve anything here, for ‘private property is sacred’ and the capitalists have piled up such debts that the whole world is enslaved by a handful of people while the living conditions of the workers become more and more intolerable. There is no way out apart from the abolition of the ‘private property’ of the exploiter.
In his pamphlet Britain and the World Revolution, valuable extracts from which were published in our Bulletin of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of February 1920, Comrade Lapinsky points out that the export prices of British coal were twice as high as expected in official industrial circles.
Things have gone so far in Lancashire that share prices have risen 400 per cent. The banks’ net profits were at least 40 to 50 per cent, and even then it should be noted that in establishing the banks’ net profits the bank directors can juggle the figures by syphoning off the lion’s share of the net profits as repayments, commissions, etc. Here too, therefore, undeniable economic facts show that a tiny handful of people have grown unbelievably wealthy, that they live in unprecedented, excessive luxury, and that at the same time the poverty of the working class is constantly growing. We must also underline the circumstance that Comrade Levi brought out very graphically in his report, that is to say the change in the value of money. Money is everywhere becoming valueless as a result of debts, the issue of paper money. etc. The same bourgeois source that I have already quoted, the statement of the Supreme Economic Council, calculated that the fall in the value of money in relation to the dollar comes to almost a third in England, two thirds in France and Italy and as much as 96 per cent in Germany.
This fact proves that the mechanism of the international capitalist economy is falling apart completely., The trading relations on which the supply of raw materials and the sale of products rest under capitalism can no longer be maintained, particularly when a single country dominates a whole number of other countries as a result of the change in the value of money. Not one of the richest countries can continue to exist and to trade, because they cannot sell their products and obtain raw materials.
Thus we see America, this richest of all countries, to which all countries are subordinate, unable either to buy or sell. And the same Keynes who waded through all the fire and the water and the confusion of the Versailles negotiations is obliged to acknowledge this impossibility despite his obstinate determination to defend capitalism, despite his hatred of Bolshevism. As I have said, I do not think that there is a single communist or any kind of revolutionary appeal that can compare in its power with Keynes’s lines where Keynes describes Wilson and ‘Wilsonism’ in practice. Wilson was the idol of the petty bourgeois and the pacifists of the Keynes variety, and of a whole number of the heroes of the Second and also of the Two-and-a-half International who swore by the ‘Fourteen Points’ and wrote ‘scholarly’ books on the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policies, in the hope that Wilson would save the ‘social peace’, reconcile the exploiter with the exploited and bring about social reforms. Keynes has shown graphically what a fool Wilson made of himself, and how all these illusions fell to dust at the encounter with the businesslike, experienced and practical policies of capital personified by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The working masses are seeing more and more clearly as a result of their living experience, and the learned pedants can now even read in Keynes’s book, that the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policy were only sanctimonious, petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and a complete inability to grasp the class struggle.
In consequence of all this, two conditions, two fundamental circumstances have arisen of iron necessity: on the one hand the impoverishment and want of the masses has risen to an unprecedented degree, and that among 1,250 million people, that is 70 per cent of the total world population. This affects the colonial countries and the dependent countries whose inhabitants have no legal rights, whose administration has been handed over to the brigands of finance as a 4 mandate’. And moreover the Versailles Treaty has enslaved the defeated nations for all eternity, just like those secret treaties affecting Russia which, it must be admitted, have the same real force as the bits of paper that say that we owe so many thousands of millions. We have the first case in history of legal backing for the plundering, enslavement, subjugation, impoverishment and starvation of 1,250 million people.
On the other hand the workers in all the creditor nations have found themselves in a situation that is intolerable. The war brought about an intolerable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. This is the source of the deep revolutionary ferment that is constantly growing. For during the war men were placed under the constraint of military discipline, were driven to their deaths or threatened with summary punishment. Conditions during the war gave no opportunity to see economic realities; writers, poets, priests, the whole press dedicated themselves to the glorification of war, and it is only now, when the war is over, that the revelations begin. German imperialism is unmasked with its Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Versailles Treaty is unmasked which was meant to be a victory for imperialism but turned out to be a defeat. Amongst other things, the example of Keynes shows us that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people from the petty bourgeoisie, from among the intellectuals, in short from the ranks of the most highly developed and educated people in Europe and America must take the same path that Keynes trod when he resigned his office and threw into his government’s face a book that unmasked it. Keynes shows what is going on in the consciousness of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and what will go on as soon as they realise that all the speeches about a ‘war for freedom’ and so on were uninterrupted deceit, that in the final analysis only a very small number of people enriched themselves and the rest were ruined and reduced to slavery. Even the bourgeois Keynes says that it is vital for the salvation of British lives and the British economy to renew free trading relations between Germany and Russia. But how is that to be achieved? By cancelling all debts, as Keynes suggests! The learned economist Keynes is not alone in holding this idea. Millions will come to and reach this idea. And thousands of people will listen when the bourgeois economists say that there is no way out apart from cancelling the debts. And therefore ‘Damn the Bolsheviks’ (who cancelled the debts), let us appeal to America’s ‘generosity'! I think that such an economist and agitator for Bolshevism deserves to be sent a message of thanks in the name of the Congress of the Communist International.
If on the one hand the economic conditions of the masses are becoming intolerable, and if on the other hand the disintegration Keynes describes has set in and is growing in the insignificant minority of all-powerful victor nations, then we can see clearly the maturing of the two preconditions for the world revolution.
We now have before us a more or less complete picture of the whole world. We know what it means to have 1,250 million people robbed of the means of existence and dependent on a handful of the rich. But when on the other hand the League of Nations offered the nations a Covenant that declared an end to war and forbade anybody to disturb the peace, when this Covenant, the last hope of the world’s labouring masses, came into force, it was one of our greatest victories. So long as the Covenant was not in force they said: a country like Germany cannot be subjected to any special conditions. Wait until the Covenant comes out, then you will see how all will be well. And when the Covenant was published the most rabid opponents of Bolshevism had to repudiate it! When the Covenant started to become operative it became apparent that a tiny group of the richest countries Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson – had sat down to thread the new relations together. When they put the machinery of the Covenant into operation there was a complete breakdown.
We saw this in the war against Russia. Weak, ruined and crushed, a backward country, Russia proved to be the victor against the world, against the League of the richest and most powerful states dominating the whole world. We had no forces that even in the slightest degree equalled theirs, and yet we were nonetheless the victors. Why? Because there was not a shadow of unity between them, because each power worked against the other. France wanted Russia to pay her debts and threaten Germany. Britain wanted Russia to be divided up. Britain attempted to lay her hands on the Baku oilfields and conclude Treaties with the Russian border states. And among the official British documents there is a book where there are listed with the most extraordinary conscientiousness the names of all the states (there are 14 of them) who six months ago, in December 1919, promised to occupy Moscow and Petrograd. Britain based all her policies on these states, gave loans of millions to these states. Now however all these calculations have come to nothing and all the loans are gone with the wind.
Such are the conditions created by the League of Nations. Every day this Covenant exists provides splendid propaganda for Bolshevism, for the most influential supporters of the capitalist ‘order’ show that on every issue they are putting a spoke in one another’s wheels. A furious wrangle is raging between japan, England, America and France over the division of Turkey, Persia, Mesopotamia and China. The bourgeois press in these countries is full of furious invective and bitter reproaches against their allies for snapping up the booty in front of their noses. We see complete discord among the leaders of this tiny handful of the richest countries. For 1,250 million people it is impossible to live in the way that the most ‘progressive’ and civilised capitalism is trying to make them live, and that is 70 per cent of the population of the entire world. The tiny handful of the richest countries, England, America and japan (who had the opportunity to plunder the Eastern, Asiatic countries, but can have no independent financial and military power without the support of another country), these two or three countries are not able to restore order in the world economic situation and are pursuing policies which are undermining the policies of their partners and participants in the League of Nations. It is from this that the international crisis arises, and these economic roots of the crisis are the main reasons for the brilliant successes of the Communist International.
Comrades, we come now to the question of the revolutionary crisis as the basis of our revolutionary activity. But here we must deal above all with two widely-held errors. On the one hand the bourgeois economists always present this crisis, in the elegant English phrase, as mere ‘unrest’. On the other hand however revolutionaries sometimes try to prove that there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is a mistake. There are no absolutely hopeless situations. The bourgeoisie is behaving like an impudent robber who has lost his head; it is committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening its own downfall. All this is the case, but one cannot ‘prove’ that the bourgeoisie has absolutely no possibility of lulling some minority or other of the exploited by means of some small concessions or suppressing the movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. The attempt to ‘prove’ ‘absolute’ hopelessness in advance is empty pedantry or juggling With concepts and words. Only experience can provide a real ‘proof of this or similar questions. The bourgeois order is now undergoing an exceptional revolutionary crisis all over the world. We must now ‘prove’ through the practice of the revolutionary parties that they are sufficiently conscious, that they possess sufficient organisation, links with the exploited masses, determination and understanding to utilise this crisis for a successful and victorious revolution.
The preparation of this ‘proof’ is the main reason why we have gathered here for this Congress of the Communist International.
I would like to quote the leader of the British ‘Independent’ Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, as an example of how strong opportunism still is in the parties which seek to join the Communist International, how far the work of many of the parties is still removed from the preparation of the revolutionary class to exploit the revolutionary crisis. In his book Parliament and Revolution, which deals with the very basic questions that concern us now, MacDonald describes the state of affairs in more or less the spirit of the bourgeois pacifists. He recognises that the revolutionary crisis exists, that the revolutionary mood is growing, that the masses of the workers sympathise with soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat (he is speaking of Britain, mark you) and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the present dictatorship of the British bourgeoisie.
But MacDonald remains a thoroughgoing bourgeois pacifist and compromiser, a petty bourgeois who dreams of a government that stands above the classes. Like all the liars, sophists and pedants of the bourgeoisie, MacDonald recognises the class struggle as a fact to be written about. MacDonald is silent on the experience of Kerensky, of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, on the similar experiences in Hungary and Germany and so on, the experience of the formation of a ‘democratic’ government allegedly above the classes. MacDonald lulls his party and the workers who are unfortunate enough to think that this bourgeois is a socialist and that this philistine is a leader with the following words: ‘We know that all this (i.e. the revolutionary crisis, the revolutionary ferment) will pass ... will settle down.’ The war inevitably provoked the crisis, but after the war it will all ‘settle down’, if not all at once.
And the man that writes this is the leader of a party that wants to join the Communist International. We have here a revelation – all the more valuable for its extreme frankness – of what can be seen no less often in the leading layers of the French Socialist Party and the German Independent Socialist Party, and of the fact that it is not only a lack of understanding but an unwillingness to utilise the revolutionary crisis in a revolutionary way, or in other words it is a lack of understanding how and of willingness to carry out a revolutionary preparation of the Party and the class for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is the basic fault in many parties that have now left the Second International. For this particular reason I am spending a greater amount of time on the Theses that I have put before the Congress, in order to define if possible more exactly and more concretely the tasks of the preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
One further example. A new book against Bolshevism was recently published. Unusual numbers of such books are now appearing in Europe and America, but the more books that appear against Bolshevism the stronger and quicker sympathies for it will grow among the masses. The book I am talking about here is Otto Bauer’s Bolshevism or Social-Democracy. Here the Germans are graphically shown what precisely the Mensheviks are whose contemptible role in the Russian revolution is well enough known to workers all over the world. Otto Bauer has supplied us with a thoroughly Menshevik pamphlet although he tries to conceal his sympathy with Menshevism. It is now necessary to spread a precise knowledge of Menshevism in Europe and America, for it is the generic term for all those allegedly socialist, social-democratic and other tendencies that are hostile to and oppose Bolshevism. It would be boring if we Russians described to the Europeans what Menshevism is. Otto Bauer has really shown it in his book, and we thank in advance all those bourgeois and opportunist publishers who publish it and translate it into different languages. Bauer’s book is a useful if rather unique supplement to the text books of communism. Take any paragraph, any argument you like in Bauer’s book and you will see in it what Menshevism looks like, how it is the same fundamental outlook that the representatives of socialism, the friends of Kerensky, Scheidemann, and so on, have translated into deeds. This is a task that could usefully and successfully be set at ‘examinations’ to test whether somebody has assimilated communism. If you cannot solve this task you are not yet a communist and it would be better if you did not yet join the Communist Party. [Applause.]
Otto Bauer has expressed the essential content of international opportunism in an excellent manner in a single phrase for which, if we had a free hand in Vienna, we would erect a memorial for him while he is still alive. ‘To use force in the class struggle in modern democracy,’ says Bauer, ‘would be violating the social relationship of forces.’
No doubt you think this sounds strange and incomprehensible? Here you have an example of what Marxism can be reduced to, to what banality and defence of the exploiters revolutionary theory can be reduced. It takes the German variety of the petty-bourgeois outlook to create the ‘theory’ that the ‘social relationship of forces’ are number, organisation, place in the process of production and distribution, activity and education. If the village labourer or the urban worker commits an act of revolutionary violence against the landlord and the capitalist, this is not at all the dictatorship of the proletariat, not at all an act of violence against the exploiters and oppressors of the people. Nothing of the kind. It is ‘violating the social relationship of forces’.
Possibly my example is somewhat humorous. But by the very nature of modem opportunism its struggle against Bolshevism turns to humour. The most urgent and useful task for Europe and America is to divert the working class and all its more thoughtful members into the struggle of international Menshevism (the MacDonalds, Otto Bauers and Co.) against Bolshevism.
We must ask how the persistence of this current in Europe is to be explained and why this opportunism is stronger in Western Europe than it is here. This is the case because the more advanced countries made and make their culture possible at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed people, because the capitalists of these countries make more profits than just from plundering the workers of their own country.
Before the war it was calculated that the three richest countries Britain, France and Germany – made from 8,000 to 10,000 million francs each year from their capital investments abroad alone, not counting what they made from other sources.
It goes without saying that alms of at least 5,000 million from this hefty sum can be thrown to the labour leaders and the labour aristocracy in all imaginable forms of bribes. The whole thing amounts to bribery anyway. It can be done in thousands of different ways: by improving the cultural facilities in the great centres, by creating educational facilities, by providing thousands of jobs and official positions for the leaders of the Co-operative Societies and the trades unions and for parliamentary leaders. And all this goes on everywhere modern civilised capitalist relations exist. These super-profits of thousands of millions form the economic basis on which opportunism in the labour movement is built. In America, Britain and France we encounter much more obstinacy on the part of the opportunist leaders, the leading layers of the working class, the aristocracy of labour. They put up the strongest opposition to the Communist movement. For that reason we must be prepared for the fact that the liberation of the European and American workers’ parties from this evil will be much more difficult than it was here. We know that since the formation of the Communist International we have already achieved enormous successes in the process of curing this disease, but we have not yet finished the job; the purging of the workers’ parties, the revolutionary parties throughout the world, from bourgeois influence, from the opportunists in their own ranks, is far from complete.
I shall not go into detail on how this should concretely be done. This is what the Theses I have already published deal with. My aim is only to point out the deep economic roots of this phenomenon. This disease is protracted, its cure has taken a long time, longer than the optimists could have hoped for. Opportunism is our main enemy. The opportunism in the upper layers of the working class is not proletarian but bourgeois socialism. The practical proof of this is the fact that the leaders who belong to the opportunist tendency inside the workers’ movement defend the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie itself. Without their support the bourgeoisie could not defend itself against the workers . This is proved not only by the history of the Kerensky government in Russia but also by the democratic republic in Germany led by its social-democratic government and by Albert Thomas’s relations with his bourgeois government. It is proved by the corresponding experiences in Britain and the United States. Here is our main enemy and we have to defeat this enemy. We must go away from the Congress with the firm resolve to carry on this struggle right to the end in every party. That is our main task. In comparison with this task the correction of the mistakes of the ‘left’ trend in Communism will be an easy one. In a whole series of countries we can observe the phenomenon of anti-parliamentarism, which is less a product of the petty bourgeoisie than of a few advance guards of the working class who spread it out of contempt for the old parliamentarism, out of a justifiable, correct and downright urgently needed contempt for the behaviour of the parliamentary leaders in Britain. France, Italy, in all countries. It is necessary for the Communist International to give practical hints on this, to acquaint the comrades more fully with the Russian experience, with the significance of the really proletarian revolutionary party. Our work lies in the fulfilment of this task. But then the struggle with the faults of the proletarian movement will be a thousand times easier than the struggle with the bourgeoisie which, in the guise of the reformists, has found its way into the old parties of the Second International and carries out all their work not in the proletarian but in the bourgeois spirit.
Finally, comrades, I want to raise one more point. The Comrade Chairman has already spoken of the fact that the Congress truly deserves the name of a World Congress. I believe that it has a particular right to call itself that because there are among us not a few representatives of the revolutionary movement in the backward colonial countries. It is only a modest beginning, but the important thing is the fact that the beginning has been made. The unification of the revolutionary proletarians of the advanced capitalist nations with the revolutionary masses of the countries which have no or almost no proletariat, with the oppressed masses of the Eastern colonial countries, this unification will follow on from the present Congress. And cementing this unification – and I am convinced that we will do so depends on us. World Imperialism must fall when the revolutionary impetus of the exploited and subjugated workers inside each country defeats the opposition of the petty-bourgeois elements and the influence of the numerically small aristocracy of labour, and unites with the revolutionary pressure of the hundreds of millions of people who previously stood outside history and were only regarded as its object.
The imperialist war helped the revolution; the bourgeoisie withdrew soldiers from the colonies and the backward countries to take part in the war. The British bourgeoisie impressed upon the Indian peasants that it was their duty to defend Great Britain as soldiers against Germany. The French bourgeoisie impressed upon the soldiers from the French colonies that they, the Negroes, had to defend France. They taught them how to use arms. This is extremely useful knowledge: we can be very grateful to the bourgeoisie for it and thank them on behalf of all Russian peasants and workers and of the Russian Red Army in particular. The imperialist war dragged all the dependent peoples along with it into world history. One of our important tasks is to consider how to lay the foundation stone of the organisation of the Soviet movement in the non-capitalist countries. Soviets are possible there too; they will not be councils of workers but councils of peasants or of labouring people.
This will require a lot of work; mistakes will be inevitable; we will encounter many difficulties along this path. The main task of the Second Congress will be to work out practical guidelines so that the work, which has up to now been taking place in an unorganised way among hundreds of millions of people, can become organised, unified and systematic.
A little more than a year has passed since the First Congress of the Communist International, and in this time we have defeated the Second International. The ideas of soviets are not now spread only among the workers of the civilised countries, known to them and understood by them. Workers all over the world laugh at those super-clever people, among whom there are not a few who call themselves socialists, who learnedly or half learnedly condemn the ‘soviet system’ as the systematic Germans love to express it, or the ‘soviet idea’, as the British guild socialists love to say. This philosophising about the ‘soviet system’ or the ‘soviet idea’ not infrequently clogs the vision and the understanding of workers. But they cast this pedantic conflict aside and seize the weapon that the soviets give them. The understanding of the role and the significance of the soviets has now spread to the countries of the East.
A start has been made on the soviet movement throughout the East, throughout Asia.
The principle that the exploited should rise against their exploiters and form soviets is not too complicated. This will become clear to hundreds of millions of the oppressed and exploited masses throughout the world through the experience that we have made in two and a half years of the Soviet Republic in Russia and since the First Congress of the Communist International. If we in Russia now are not seldom forced to reach compromises and to wait, since we are weaker than the international imperialists, we nonetheless know that we are defending the interests of 1,250 million people. We are still held back by old prejudices and old ignorance, but they are disappearing by the hour. We are defending and representing more and more forcefully 70 per cent of the population of the Earth, the labouring and exploited masses. With pride we can say: at the first Congress we were only really propagandists. We sketched the basic ideas, the call to struggle to the international proletariat. We asked merely: where are the people to feel capable of taking this path? Now the advanced proletariat everywhere is on our side. Everywhere there are proletarian armies, even if they are poorly organised and in need of reorganisation. And if our comrades internationally help us to create a unified army, no shortcomings can hold us back from our intention. This work is the cause of the proletarian world revolution, the work of creating the world Soviet Republic. [Long continuous applause. The orchestra plays the ‘Internationale’.]
Zinoviev: Comrade Lenin’s speech will not be translated into the other languages during the session. The written translation of his speech will be distributed among the delegates. [Thereupon he gives the floor to Comrade Rosmer.]
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Markin comment on this post:
As noted in my commentary on the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920), reposted below since it also applies to these theses, such documents give the political movement it is addressed to its marching order. In a general sense, at least. These theses codify those general propositions outlined in the manifesto. Note here that this Second Congress took place as the international working class movement was going through a regroupment process right after World War I between the reformist socialists, the emerging communist vanguard, and the bewildered anarchists. Note also the difference in approaches to the more hardened reformist-led socialist parties, and to the ill-formed but more revolutionary-spirited anarchist formations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) here in America in their good days.
A manifesto, particularly a political manifesto, and especially a revolutionary communist manifesto like the one that issued out of the historic Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 should give a cogent analysis of the world political situation. It should also describe the nature of the period (revolutionary, non-revolutionary, heading toward or away from either, an estimation of the enemy’s capacities, and the obstacles in the way both inside and outside the workers movement (out side the treachery of the liberals and inside the perfidy of the labor bureaucracy resting on the labor bureaucracy). In short, give the international proletariat its marching orders. The Manifesto of the Second World Congress does just those things at a time when the fledgling Communist International was trying to consolidate its vanguard position in the world working class movement. The Communist International then, and for some time after, did yeoman’s work in that regard, not always perfectly but from a revolutionary perspective. Even as it degenerated politically toward the middle and late 1920s there were, as the Leon Trotsky-led International Left Opposition held, reasons, good reasons to adhere to its tenets. Only with the debacle around Hitler’s coming to power in Germany did Trotsky throw in the towel. That seemed right then, and now. I would argue that the Seventh (and last) World Congress in 1935 unquestionably put paid to that notion. We did not need a vanguard national party, or a vanguard revolutionary international party for that matter, to give the lead in the political struggle to the liberal bourgeoisie as the popular frontist politics of the CI proclaimed from that time onward (with a few “left” turns). There was an international for that “strategy”, or rather a mail-drop address, it was (is) called the Second International.
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Lenin's Speech On The Fundamental Tasks Of The Communist International
Comrade Lenin has the floor for the report. [Loud applause. All present rise and applaud. The speaker tries to speak, but the applause and cries in all languages continue. The ovation goes on for a long time.]
Lenin: Comrades, the Theses on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International have been published in all languages and offer nothing materially new (especially for the Russian comrades), for in the main they only extend a few basic features of our revolutionary experience and the lessons of our revolutionary movement to a number of Western countries, to Western Europe. For that reason I shall dwell in my report somewhat longer, even if in brief outline, on the first part of my subject, on the international situation.
The economic relations of imperialism form the basis of the international situation as it now presents itself. In the course of the twentieth century a new, highest and final stage of capitalism has taken shape. You all know of course that the most characteristic and essential feature of imperialism is the fact that capital has reached enormous dimensions. Giant monopolies have taken the place of free competition. An insignificant number of capitalists have, on occasion, been able to concentrate entire industries in their hands. These have passed into the hands of combines, cartels, syndicates and trusts, frequently international in scale. Thus entire industries, not only in individual countries but all over the world, have fallen into the hands of monopolists either in relation to finance or on the basis of property rights or with reference to production. On this basis there developed an unprecedented domination by a small number of great banks, financial tycoons and magnates who turned even the freest republics into financial monarchies. This was quite openly recognised before the war even by such by no means revolutionary writers as, for example, Lysis in France.
This domination by a handful of capitalists reached its full development when the whole globe had been divided up, not only in the sense that the various sources of raw materials and means of production had been seized by the capitalists, but also in the sense that the preliminary division of the colonies had been concluded. About forty years ago the population of the colonies was scarcely more than 250 million held in subjection by six capitalist powers. Before the war in 1914 the population in the colonies was already assessed at 600 million, and if such countries as Persia, Turkey and China, which are in the position of semi-colonies, are taken in addition, we reach the round figure of a thousand million people who are enslaved through colonial dependence by the richest, most civilised and freest countries. And you know that apart from being directly political and legal, this colonial subjection also involves a whole series of relations of financial and economic dependence and means a whole series of wars which cannot really be called wars because they so often degenerate into butchery, when European and American imperialist troops armed with the most perfected weapons of destruction slaughter the unarmed and defenceless inhabitants of the colonial countries.
It was from this division of the whole world, from this domination by the capitalist monopolies, from this universal power wielded by a very small number of great banks – from 2 to 5 in each state, no more – that the imperialist war of 1914-1918 inevitably sprang. The war was waged for the re-division of the whole world. The war was waged to decide which of the two groups of world powers – the English or the German – was to have the opportunity and the right to pillage, enslave and exploit the whole world. And you know that the war decided this question in favour of the British group. As a result of this war we have an immeasurable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. At a stroke the war relegated some 250 millions of the world’s population to what amounts to colonial status, that is to say Russia, whose population is put at around 130 million, and Austro-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria with no fewer than 120 million. 250 million people in countries which in part, Eke Germany, are among the most advanced, enlightened and cultured and stand technically at the pinnacle of modern progress. Through the Versailles Treaty the war has forced such conditions upon them that advanced nations have fallen into colonial servitude, misery, starvation, ruin and loss of rights. They are bound by the Treaty for many generations into the future and placed under circumstances such as no civilised nation has yet lived under. Thus you have a picture of the world that shows that after the war a population of at least 1,250 million is suddenly subjected to the colonial yoke, to the exploitation of a brutal capitalism. This capitalism once boasted of its love of peace, and perhaps it had some right to do so fifty years ago when the world had not yet been divided up, when the monopolies did not yet rule, when capitalism still had room for comparatively peaceful development without enormous military conflicts.
Now, after this peaceful epoch, the yoke becomes enormously more oppressive. We can already see the return to an even worse colonial and military subjugation than before. For Germany and a whole number of the defeated nations the Versailles Treaty has created conditions which make economic existence physically impossible, deprive them of rights and humiliate them.
How many nations profit from this?
In order to answer this question we must recall that the United States of America, the only country to profit fully from the war, which was transformed from a country burdened with debts into a country to which everybody owed money, has a population of no more than 100 million. The population of japan, who also made great profits by standing aside from the Euro-American conflict and seizing the enormous continent of Asia, is some 50 million. The population of Britain who, next to these countries, made the biggest profits, is about 50 million. And if we add the neutral states who also enriched themselves during the war we have in round figures 250 million.
Thus you have in a few short strokes a picture of the world as it has emerged after the imperialist war. A population of 1,250 million in enslaved colonies; countries like Persia, Turkey and China whose living bodies have been dismembered; countries defeated and turned into colonies. No more than 250 million people five in those countries that have maintained their former position, but they too have become economically dependent upon America and were, during the war, also militarily dependent upon her, for the war involved the whole world and did not permit a single state to remain really neutral. Finally we have a population of no more than 250 million in those countries in which, of course, only the ruling class, the capitalists, profited from the division of the world. The sum total, some 1,750 million people, equals the Earth’s total population. I wanted to remind you of this picture of the world since all the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, of imperialism, that lead to revolution, all the fundamental contradictions in the labour movement that have led to the bitter struggle against the Second International that the Comrade Chairman spoke of – all this is connected with the division of the world’s population.
Certainly these figures illustrate the world economy only in crude outline. And comrades, in reality exploitation by finance capital on the basis of this division of the world’s population has grown even greater.
Not only have the defeated colonial countries fallen into this state of subjugation, but also within each victorious country all the conflicts are taking sharper and sharper form, all the contradictions of capitalism are becoming more acute. I shall give a few examples to sketch what I mean.
Let us take the national debt. We know that the debts of the most important European countries grew no less than sevenfold between 1914 and 1920. I shall quote from another economic source of especially great significance. This is Keynes, the British diplomat and author of the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes took part in the peace negotiations at Versailles on behalf of his government and observed them directly from a purely bourgeois point of view; he studied the matter thoroughly step by step; he took part in the discussions as an economist. In the process he arrived at conclusions that are more cogent, graphic and instructive than any that a revolutionary communist could draw because they are drawn by an avowed bourgeois, an implacable enemy of Bolshevism. Like the petty-bourgeois Englishman that he is, he distortedly imagines this Bolshevism to be ferocious and brutal. He has come to the conclusion that, thanks to the Treaty, Europe and the whole world are heading for bankruptcy. He has resigned. He has thrown his book in the government’s face saying: ‘What you are doing is lunacy.’ I shall quote figures from Keynes’s book which by and large show the following.
How do the reciprocal debts of the great powers relate to one another? I shall convert British pounds sterling into gold roubles at a rate of ten gold roubles to one pound sterling. And now we see that the United States has assets of 19,000 million while they have no liabilities at all. Before the war it was indebted to Britain. At the last Congress of the Communist Party of Germany, in his report of April 14, 1920, Comrade Levi correctly referred to the fact that there are now two powers in the world that can act independently: Britain and America. Only America is absolutely financially independent. Before the war it was a debtor, now it emerges as a creditor. All the other world powers are debtors. Britain is reduced to a position where her assets are 17,000 million and her liabilities are 8,000 million. She is already half-way to being a debtor. In addition these assets include some 6,000 million of these assets owed by Russia. The military supplies received by Russia during the war are counted as part of her debt. When recently Krassin, as the representative of the Russian Soviet government, had the opportunity of talking to Lloyd George on the question of the debts, he made it extremely plain to the scholars and statesmen who lead the British government that they were suffering under an illusion if they assumed they were ever going to receive any of these debts. The British diplomat Keynes has already seen through this illusion. It is not merely, or rather not at all, a question of the Russian revolutionary government being unwilling to pay the debts. No government could have paid them, as they are the usurious interest for what has already been paid twenty times over. The very same bourgeois, Keynes, who certainly has no sympathies with the Russian revolutionary movement, says: ‘It is obvious that these debts cannot be taken into account.’
In relation to France Keynes quotes figures that give assets of 3,500 millions but liabilities of 9,500 million. And this was the country of which the French themselves said that it was the world’s moneylender, for her ‘savings’ were colossal; the colonial and financial robbery that brought them a gigantic capital enabled them to lend thousands and thousands of millions, especially to Russia. Gigantic revenues were thus gained. And despite all this, despite her victory, France has fallen into the position of a debtor.
An American bourgeois source quoted by Comrade Braun. a Communist, in his book Who Must Pay the War Debts? (Leipzig 1920) determines the ratio of debts to the national wealth as follows: in England and France they form over 50 per cent of the total national wealth, in Italy the ratio is expressed as from 60 to 70 per cent and in Russia as 90 per cent. But as you know these debts do not disturb us, for we followed Keynes’s excellent advice shortly before his book appeared, and annulled all our debts. [Stormy applause.].
Here however Keynes only displays a common petty-bourgeois idiosyncrasy; in advising annulment of all debts he says that France of course will only gain by it and Britain will not lose very much since in any case there is nothing to be had from Russia. As is only fitting, America will lose, but Keynes counts on American ‘generosity’. In this respect our views diverge from those of Keynes and the rest of the petty-bourgeois pacifists. We think that if we are to manage to annul the debts we will have to put our hopes elsewhere and work in a direction other than faith in the ‘generosity’ of the capitalists.
From these few figures it is evident that the imperialist war has created a situation that is impossible even for the victorious countries. This is also indicated by the enormous disparity between wages and price rises. The Supreme Economic Council, a body that is supposed to protect the bourgeois order internationally from the rising revolution, adopted on March 8 of this year a resolution that ended with an appeal for order, industriousness and thrift, on condition, of course, that the workers remain the slaves of capital. This Supreme Economic Council, the organ of the Entente and of the whole capitalist world, presented the following summary.
On average, food prices in the United States have risen by 120 per cent while wages have only risen by 100 per cent. In Britain food prices have gone up 170 per cent, wages by 130 per cent; in France food prices by 300 per cent and wages by 60 per cent (I am quoting the figures from Comrade Braun’s pamphlet mentioned above and the Supreme Economic Council’s figures from The Times of March 10, 1920).
Clearly, under such conditions the growth of workers’ resentment. the growth of revolutionary moods and ideas and the growth of elemental mass strikes are inevitable, for the workers’ situation is becoming intolerable. The workers are convinced by experience that the capitalists have immeasurably enriched themselves in the war and are loading the burden of its costs and debts onto the workers. We recently learnt by cable that America wishes to deport another 500 Communists to Russia in order to get rid of these ‘dangerous agitators’.
If America deports not 500 but 500,000 Russian, American, Japanese and French ‘agitators’ it would make not the slightest difference, for the disparity between wages and prices, about which they can do nothing, would still remain. They can do nothing about it because private property is strictly safeguarded there, because in their country it is ‘sacred’. Only in Russia has the exploiter’s private property been abolished. The capitalists can do nothing about these disproportionate prices but the workers cannot live with the old wages. This misery cannot be fought with the old methods. No individual strikes, no parliamentary struggle, no vote can achieve anything here, for ‘private property is sacred’ and the capitalists have piled up such debts that the whole world is enslaved by a handful of people while the living conditions of the workers become more and more intolerable. There is no way out apart from the abolition of the ‘private property’ of the exploiter.
In his pamphlet Britain and the World Revolution, valuable extracts from which were published in our Bulletin of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of February 1920, Comrade Lapinsky points out that the export prices of British coal were twice as high as expected in official industrial circles.
Things have gone so far in Lancashire that share prices have risen 400 per cent. The banks’ net profits were at least 40 to 50 per cent, and even then it should be noted that in establishing the banks’ net profits the bank directors can juggle the figures by syphoning off the lion’s share of the net profits as repayments, commissions, etc. Here too, therefore, undeniable economic facts show that a tiny handful of people have grown unbelievably wealthy, that they live in unprecedented, excessive luxury, and that at the same time the poverty of the working class is constantly growing. We must also underline the circumstance that Comrade Levi brought out very graphically in his report, that is to say the change in the value of money. Money is everywhere becoming valueless as a result of debts, the issue of paper money. etc. The same bourgeois source that I have already quoted, the statement of the Supreme Economic Council, calculated that the fall in the value of money in relation to the dollar comes to almost a third in England, two thirds in France and Italy and as much as 96 per cent in Germany.
This fact proves that the mechanism of the international capitalist economy is falling apart completely., The trading relations on which the supply of raw materials and the sale of products rest under capitalism can no longer be maintained, particularly when a single country dominates a whole number of other countries as a result of the change in the value of money. Not one of the richest countries can continue to exist and to trade, because they cannot sell their products and obtain raw materials.
Thus we see America, this richest of all countries, to which all countries are subordinate, unable either to buy or sell. And the same Keynes who waded through all the fire and the water and the confusion of the Versailles negotiations is obliged to acknowledge this impossibility despite his obstinate determination to defend capitalism, despite his hatred of Bolshevism. As I have said, I do not think that there is a single communist or any kind of revolutionary appeal that can compare in its power with Keynes’s lines where Keynes describes Wilson and ‘Wilsonism’ in practice. Wilson was the idol of the petty bourgeois and the pacifists of the Keynes variety, and of a whole number of the heroes of the Second and also of the Two-and-a-half International who swore by the ‘Fourteen Points’ and wrote ‘scholarly’ books on the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policies, in the hope that Wilson would save the ‘social peace’, reconcile the exploiter with the exploited and bring about social reforms. Keynes has shown graphically what a fool Wilson made of himself, and how all these illusions fell to dust at the encounter with the businesslike, experienced and practical policies of capital personified by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The working masses are seeing more and more clearly as a result of their living experience, and the learned pedants can now even read in Keynes’s book, that the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policy were only sanctimonious, petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and a complete inability to grasp the class struggle.
In consequence of all this, two conditions, two fundamental circumstances have arisen of iron necessity: on the one hand the impoverishment and want of the masses has risen to an unprecedented degree, and that among 1,250 million people, that is 70 per cent of the total world population. This affects the colonial countries and the dependent countries whose inhabitants have no legal rights, whose administration has been handed over to the brigands of finance as a 4 mandate’. And moreover the Versailles Treaty has enslaved the defeated nations for all eternity, just like those secret treaties affecting Russia which, it must be admitted, have the same real force as the bits of paper that say that we owe so many thousands of millions. We have the first case in history of legal backing for the plundering, enslavement, subjugation, impoverishment and starvation of 1,250 million people.
On the other hand the workers in all the creditor nations have found themselves in a situation that is intolerable. The war brought about an intolerable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. This is the source of the deep revolutionary ferment that is constantly growing. For during the war men were placed under the constraint of military discipline, were driven to their deaths or threatened with summary punishment. Conditions during the war gave no opportunity to see economic realities; writers, poets, priests, the whole press dedicated themselves to the glorification of war, and it is only now, when the war is over, that the revelations begin. German imperialism is unmasked with its Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Versailles Treaty is unmasked which was meant to be a victory for imperialism but turned out to be a defeat. Amongst other things, the example of Keynes shows us that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people from the petty bourgeoisie, from among the intellectuals, in short from the ranks of the most highly developed and educated people in Europe and America must take the same path that Keynes trod when he resigned his office and threw into his government’s face a book that unmasked it. Keynes shows what is going on in the consciousness of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and what will go on as soon as they realise that all the speeches about a ‘war for freedom’ and so on were uninterrupted deceit, that in the final analysis only a very small number of people enriched themselves and the rest were ruined and reduced to slavery. Even the bourgeois Keynes says that it is vital for the salvation of British lives and the British economy to renew free trading relations between Germany and Russia. But how is that to be achieved? By cancelling all debts, as Keynes suggests! The learned economist Keynes is not alone in holding this idea. Millions will come to and reach this idea. And thousands of people will listen when the bourgeois economists say that there is no way out apart from cancelling the debts. And therefore ‘Damn the Bolsheviks’ (who cancelled the debts), let us appeal to America’s ‘generosity'! I think that such an economist and agitator for Bolshevism deserves to be sent a message of thanks in the name of the Congress of the Communist International.
If on the one hand the economic conditions of the masses are becoming intolerable, and if on the other hand the disintegration Keynes describes has set in and is growing in the insignificant minority of all-powerful victor nations, then we can see clearly the maturing of the two preconditions for the world revolution.
We now have before us a more or less complete picture of the whole world. We know what it means to have 1,250 million people robbed of the means of existence and dependent on a handful of the rich. But when on the other hand the League of Nations offered the nations a Covenant that declared an end to war and forbade anybody to disturb the peace, when this Covenant, the last hope of the world’s labouring masses, came into force, it was one of our greatest victories. So long as the Covenant was not in force they said: a country like Germany cannot be subjected to any special conditions. Wait until the Covenant comes out, then you will see how all will be well. And when the Covenant was published the most rabid opponents of Bolshevism had to repudiate it! When the Covenant started to become operative it became apparent that a tiny group of the richest countries Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson – had sat down to thread the new relations together. When they put the machinery of the Covenant into operation there was a complete breakdown.
We saw this in the war against Russia. Weak, ruined and crushed, a backward country, Russia proved to be the victor against the world, against the League of the richest and most powerful states dominating the whole world. We had no forces that even in the slightest degree equalled theirs, and yet we were nonetheless the victors. Why? Because there was not a shadow of unity between them, because each power worked against the other. France wanted Russia to pay her debts and threaten Germany. Britain wanted Russia to be divided up. Britain attempted to lay her hands on the Baku oilfields and conclude Treaties with the Russian border states. And among the official British documents there is a book where there are listed with the most extraordinary conscientiousness the names of all the states (there are 14 of them) who six months ago, in December 1919, promised to occupy Moscow and Petrograd. Britain based all her policies on these states, gave loans of millions to these states. Now however all these calculations have come to nothing and all the loans are gone with the wind.
Such are the conditions created by the League of Nations. Every day this Covenant exists provides splendid propaganda for Bolshevism, for the most influential supporters of the capitalist ‘order’ show that on every issue they are putting a spoke in one another’s wheels. A furious wrangle is raging between japan, England, America and France over the division of Turkey, Persia, Mesopotamia and China. The bourgeois press in these countries is full of furious invective and bitter reproaches against their allies for snapping up the booty in front of their noses. We see complete discord among the leaders of this tiny handful of the richest countries. For 1,250 million people it is impossible to live in the way that the most ‘progressive’ and civilised capitalism is trying to make them live, and that is 70 per cent of the population of the entire world. The tiny handful of the richest countries, England, America and japan (who had the opportunity to plunder the Eastern, Asiatic countries, but can have no independent financial and military power without the support of another country), these two or three countries are not able to restore order in the world economic situation and are pursuing policies which are undermining the policies of their partners and participants in the League of Nations. It is from this that the international crisis arises, and these economic roots of the crisis are the main reasons for the brilliant successes of the Communist International.
Comrades, we come now to the question of the revolutionary crisis as the basis of our revolutionary activity. But here we must deal above all with two widely-held errors. On the one hand the bourgeois economists always present this crisis, in the elegant English phrase, as mere ‘unrest’. On the other hand however revolutionaries sometimes try to prove that there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is a mistake. There are no absolutely hopeless situations. The bourgeoisie is behaving like an impudent robber who has lost his head; it is committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening its own downfall. All this is the case, but one cannot ‘prove’ that the bourgeoisie has absolutely no possibility of lulling some minority or other of the exploited by means of some small concessions or suppressing the movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. The attempt to ‘prove’ ‘absolute’ hopelessness in advance is empty pedantry or juggling With concepts and words. Only experience can provide a real ‘proof of this or similar questions. The bourgeois order is now undergoing an exceptional revolutionary crisis all over the world. We must now ‘prove’ through the practice of the revolutionary parties that they are sufficiently conscious, that they possess sufficient organisation, links with the exploited masses, determination and understanding to utilise this crisis for a successful and victorious revolution.
The preparation of this ‘proof’ is the main reason why we have gathered here for this Congress of the Communist International.
I would like to quote the leader of the British ‘Independent’ Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, as an example of how strong opportunism still is in the parties which seek to join the Communist International, how far the work of many of the parties is still removed from the preparation of the revolutionary class to exploit the revolutionary crisis. In his book Parliament and Revolution, which deals with the very basic questions that concern us now, MacDonald describes the state of affairs in more or less the spirit of the bourgeois pacifists. He recognises that the revolutionary crisis exists, that the revolutionary mood is growing, that the masses of the workers sympathise with soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat (he is speaking of Britain, mark you) and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the present dictatorship of the British bourgeoisie.
But MacDonald remains a thoroughgoing bourgeois pacifist and compromiser, a petty bourgeois who dreams of a government that stands above the classes. Like all the liars, sophists and pedants of the bourgeoisie, MacDonald recognises the class struggle as a fact to be written about. MacDonald is silent on the experience of Kerensky, of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, on the similar experiences in Hungary and Germany and so on, the experience of the formation of a ‘democratic’ government allegedly above the classes. MacDonald lulls his party and the workers who are unfortunate enough to think that this bourgeois is a socialist and that this philistine is a leader with the following words: ‘We know that all this (i.e. the revolutionary crisis, the revolutionary ferment) will pass ... will settle down.’ The war inevitably provoked the crisis, but after the war it will all ‘settle down’, if not all at once.
And the man that writes this is the leader of a party that wants to join the Communist International. We have here a revelation – all the more valuable for its extreme frankness – of what can be seen no less often in the leading layers of the French Socialist Party and the German Independent Socialist Party, and of the fact that it is not only a lack of understanding but an unwillingness to utilise the revolutionary crisis in a revolutionary way, or in other words it is a lack of understanding how and of willingness to carry out a revolutionary preparation of the Party and the class for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is the basic fault in many parties that have now left the Second International. For this particular reason I am spending a greater amount of time on the Theses that I have put before the Congress, in order to define if possible more exactly and more concretely the tasks of the preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
One further example. A new book against Bolshevism was recently published. Unusual numbers of such books are now appearing in Europe and America, but the more books that appear against Bolshevism the stronger and quicker sympathies for it will grow among the masses. The book I am talking about here is Otto Bauer’s Bolshevism or Social-Democracy. Here the Germans are graphically shown what precisely the Mensheviks are whose contemptible role in the Russian revolution is well enough known to workers all over the world. Otto Bauer has supplied us with a thoroughly Menshevik pamphlet although he tries to conceal his sympathy with Menshevism. It is now necessary to spread a precise knowledge of Menshevism in Europe and America, for it is the generic term for all those allegedly socialist, social-democratic and other tendencies that are hostile to and oppose Bolshevism. It would be boring if we Russians described to the Europeans what Menshevism is. Otto Bauer has really shown it in his book, and we thank in advance all those bourgeois and opportunist publishers who publish it and translate it into different languages. Bauer’s book is a useful if rather unique supplement to the text books of communism. Take any paragraph, any argument you like in Bauer’s book and you will see in it what Menshevism looks like, how it is the same fundamental outlook that the representatives of socialism, the friends of Kerensky, Scheidemann, and so on, have translated into deeds. This is a task that could usefully and successfully be set at ‘examinations’ to test whether somebody has assimilated communism. If you cannot solve this task you are not yet a communist and it would be better if you did not yet join the Communist Party. [Applause.]
Otto Bauer has expressed the essential content of international opportunism in an excellent manner in a single phrase for which, if we had a free hand in Vienna, we would erect a memorial for him while he is still alive. ‘To use force in the class struggle in modern democracy,’ says Bauer, ‘would be violating the social relationship of forces.’
No doubt you think this sounds strange and incomprehensible? Here you have an example of what Marxism can be reduced to, to what banality and defence of the exploiters revolutionary theory can be reduced. It takes the German variety of the petty-bourgeois outlook to create the ‘theory’ that the ‘social relationship of forces’ are number, organisation, place in the process of production and distribution, activity and education. If the village labourer or the urban worker commits an act of revolutionary violence against the landlord and the capitalist, this is not at all the dictatorship of the proletariat, not at all an act of violence against the exploiters and oppressors of the people. Nothing of the kind. It is ‘violating the social relationship of forces’.
Possibly my example is somewhat humorous. But by the very nature of modem opportunism its struggle against Bolshevism turns to humour. The most urgent and useful task for Europe and America is to divert the working class and all its more thoughtful members into the struggle of international Menshevism (the MacDonalds, Otto Bauers and Co.) against Bolshevism.
We must ask how the persistence of this current in Europe is to be explained and why this opportunism is stronger in Western Europe than it is here. This is the case because the more advanced countries made and make their culture possible at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed people, because the capitalists of these countries make more profits than just from plundering the workers of their own country.
Before the war it was calculated that the three richest countries Britain, France and Germany – made from 8,000 to 10,000 million francs each year from their capital investments abroad alone, not counting what they made from other sources.
It goes without saying that alms of at least 5,000 million from this hefty sum can be thrown to the labour leaders and the labour aristocracy in all imaginable forms of bribes. The whole thing amounts to bribery anyway. It can be done in thousands of different ways: by improving the cultural facilities in the great centres, by creating educational facilities, by providing thousands of jobs and official positions for the leaders of the Co-operative Societies and the trades unions and for parliamentary leaders. And all this goes on everywhere modern civilised capitalist relations exist. These super-profits of thousands of millions form the economic basis on which opportunism in the labour movement is built. In America, Britain and France we encounter much more obstinacy on the part of the opportunist leaders, the leading layers of the working class, the aristocracy of labour. They put up the strongest opposition to the Communist movement. For that reason we must be prepared for the fact that the liberation of the European and American workers’ parties from this evil will be much more difficult than it was here. We know that since the formation of the Communist International we have already achieved enormous successes in the process of curing this disease, but we have not yet finished the job; the purging of the workers’ parties, the revolutionary parties throughout the world, from bourgeois influence, from the opportunists in their own ranks, is far from complete.
I shall not go into detail on how this should concretely be done. This is what the Theses I have already published deal with. My aim is only to point out the deep economic roots of this phenomenon. This disease is protracted, its cure has taken a long time, longer than the optimists could have hoped for. Opportunism is our main enemy. The opportunism in the upper layers of the working class is not proletarian but bourgeois socialism. The practical proof of this is the fact that the leaders who belong to the opportunist tendency inside the workers’ movement defend the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie itself. Without their support the bourgeoisie could not defend itself against the workers . This is proved not only by the history of the Kerensky government in Russia but also by the democratic republic in Germany led by its social-democratic government and by Albert Thomas’s relations with his bourgeois government. It is proved by the corresponding experiences in Britain and the United States. Here is our main enemy and we have to defeat this enemy. We must go away from the Congress with the firm resolve to carry on this struggle right to the end in every party. That is our main task. In comparison with this task the correction of the mistakes of the ‘left’ trend in Communism will be an easy one. In a whole series of countries we can observe the phenomenon of anti-parliamentarism, which is less a product of the petty bourgeoisie than of a few advance guards of the working class who spread it out of contempt for the old parliamentarism, out of a justifiable, correct and downright urgently needed contempt for the behaviour of the parliamentary leaders in Britain. France, Italy, in all countries. It is necessary for the Communist International to give practical hints on this, to acquaint the comrades more fully with the Russian experience, with the significance of the really proletarian revolutionary party. Our work lies in the fulfilment of this task. But then the struggle with the faults of the proletarian movement will be a thousand times easier than the struggle with the bourgeoisie which, in the guise of the reformists, has found its way into the old parties of the Second International and carries out all their work not in the proletarian but in the bourgeois spirit.
Finally, comrades, I want to raise one more point. The Comrade Chairman has already spoken of the fact that the Congress truly deserves the name of a World Congress. I believe that it has a particular right to call itself that because there are among us not a few representatives of the revolutionary movement in the backward colonial countries. It is only a modest beginning, but the important thing is the fact that the beginning has been made. The unification of the revolutionary proletarians of the advanced capitalist nations with the revolutionary masses of the countries which have no or almost no proletariat, with the oppressed masses of the Eastern colonial countries, this unification will follow on from the present Congress. And cementing this unification – and I am convinced that we will do so depends on us. World Imperialism must fall when the revolutionary impetus of the exploited and subjugated workers inside each country defeats the opposition of the petty-bourgeois elements and the influence of the numerically small aristocracy of labour, and unites with the revolutionary pressure of the hundreds of millions of people who previously stood outside history and were only regarded as its object.
The imperialist war helped the revolution; the bourgeoisie withdrew soldiers from the colonies and the backward countries to take part in the war. The British bourgeoisie impressed upon the Indian peasants that it was their duty to defend Great Britain as soldiers against Germany. The French bourgeoisie impressed upon the soldiers from the French colonies that they, the Negroes, had to defend France. They taught them how to use arms. This is extremely useful knowledge: we can be very grateful to the bourgeoisie for it and thank them on behalf of all Russian peasants and workers and of the Russian Red Army in particular. The imperialist war dragged all the dependent peoples along with it into world history. One of our important tasks is to consider how to lay the foundation stone of the organisation of the Soviet movement in the non-capitalist countries. Soviets are possible there too; they will not be councils of workers but councils of peasants or of labouring people.
This will require a lot of work; mistakes will be inevitable; we will encounter many difficulties along this path. The main task of the Second Congress will be to work out practical guidelines so that the work, which has up to now been taking place in an unorganised way among hundreds of millions of people, can become organised, unified and systematic.
A little more than a year has passed since the First Congress of the Communist International, and in this time we have defeated the Second International. The ideas of soviets are not now spread only among the workers of the civilised countries, known to them and understood by them. Workers all over the world laugh at those super-clever people, among whom there are not a few who call themselves socialists, who learnedly or half learnedly condemn the ‘soviet system’ as the systematic Germans love to express it, or the ‘soviet idea’, as the British guild socialists love to say. This philosophising about the ‘soviet system’ or the ‘soviet idea’ not infrequently clogs the vision and the understanding of workers. But they cast this pedantic conflict aside and seize the weapon that the soviets give them. The understanding of the role and the significance of the soviets has now spread to the countries of the East.
A start has been made on the soviet movement throughout the East, throughout Asia.
The principle that the exploited should rise against their exploiters and form soviets is not too complicated. This will become clear to hundreds of millions of the oppressed and exploited masses throughout the world through the experience that we have made in two and a half years of the Soviet Republic in Russia and since the First Congress of the Communist International. If we in Russia now are not seldom forced to reach compromises and to wait, since we are weaker than the international imperialists, we nonetheless know that we are defending the interests of 1,250 million people. We are still held back by old prejudices and old ignorance, but they are disappearing by the hour. We are defending and representing more and more forcefully 70 per cent of the population of the Earth, the labouring and exploited masses. With pride we can say: at the first Congress we were only really propagandists. We sketched the basic ideas, the call to struggle to the international proletariat. We asked merely: where are the people to feel capable of taking this path? Now the advanced proletariat everywhere is on our side. Everywhere there are proletarian armies, even if they are poorly organised and in need of reorganisation. And if our comrades internationally help us to create a unified army, no shortcomings can hold us back from our intention. This work is the cause of the proletarian world revolution, the work of creating the world Soviet Republic. [Long continuous applause. The orchestra plays the ‘Internationale’.]
Zinoviev: Comrade Lenin’s speech will not be translated into the other languages during the session. The written translation of his speech will be distributed among the delegates. [Thereupon he gives the floor to Comrade Rosmer.]
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