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:
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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Second Congress of the Communist International
Manifesto
I
International Relations After Versailles
The bourgeoisie throughout the world sorrowfully recalls its yester-years. All of its mainstays in foreign and domestic relations have been either overthrown or shaken. ‘Tomorrow’ looms like a black threat over the exploiters’ world. The imperialist war has completely destroyed the old system of alliances and mutual guarantees which lay at the bottom of the world balance of power and armed peace. The Versailles Treaty has created no new balance of power in place of the old.
First Russia and then Austria-Hungary and Germany were eliminated as factors from the world arena. The mightiest countries which had occupied first places in the system of world seizures found themselves transformed into objects of plunder and dismemberment. Before the victory-flushed imperialism of the Entente there opened up new and vast horizons of colonial exploitation, beginning immediately beyond the Rhine, embracing all of Central and Eastern Europe and extending far to the Pacific Ocean. Are either the Congo or Syria, Egypt or Mexico in any way comparable to the steppes, forests and mountains of Russia and the skilled labour power of Germany? The new colonial programme of the conquerors is self-determined: the workers’ republic in Russia is to be overthrown, Russian raw material is to be plundered, and the German worker coerced into processing it with the aid of German coal, while the armed German entrepreneur acts as overseer – thus assuring a flow of finished products and, with them, profits to the victors. The programme of ‘organising Europe’, advanced by German imperialism at the moment of its greatest military successes, has been inherited by the victorious Entente. When the rulers of the Entente place the defeated bandits of the German Empire in the defendant’s dock, the latter will truly be judged by a ‘court of peers’ – their peers in crime.
But the victors’ camp likewise contains a number of those who have themselves been vanquished. Intoxicated by chauvinist fumes of a victory which she won for others, bourgeois France considers herself the conqueror of Europe. In reality, never before has France and the very foundations of her existence been so slavishly dependent upon the more powerful states – England and North America – as she is today. For Belgium, France prescribes a specific economic and military programme, transforming her weaker ally into an enslaved province, but in relation to England, France herself plays the role of Belgium, only on a somewhat larger scale.
From time to time the English imperialists allow the French usurers to exercise their arbitrary rule within specified limits on the continent. In this way they skilfully divert from themselves, and unload on France, the sharpest indignation of the toilers of Europe and of England herself. The power of ruined and blood-drained France is illusory, almost burlesque in character; sooner or later this will penetrate even into the brains of French social-patriots.
The specific weight of Italy in world affairs has dropped even lower. Without coal, without grain, without raw materials, with her internal equilibrium completely disrupted by the war, bourgeois Italy is incapable, though not from lack of ill will, of fully realising in life her right to plunder and violate even those colonial nooks and corners allotted her by England. japan, torn within her feudal shell by capitalist contradictions, stands on the verge of the profoundest revolutionary crisis which is even now, despite a favourable international situation, paralysing her flight into the imperialist skies.
And so, there remain only two genuine world powers: Great Britain and the United States. English imperialism has rid itself of the Asiatic rivalry of Tsarism and of the terrible German competition. British naval might has reached its zenith. Great Britain encircles continents with a chain of subject peoples. Having laid violent hands upon Finland., Estonia and Latvia, she is depriving Sweden and Norway of their last vestiges of independence and is transforming the Baltic Sea into one of Britain’s bays. She faces no opposition in the North Sea. By means of the Cape Colony, Egypt, India, Persia, Afghanistan, she has transformed the Indian Ocean into a British sea. Ruling the oceans, England controls the continents. Her role as a world power is delimited only by the American Dollar Republic and by – the Russian Soviet Republic.
The World War has completely dislodged the United States from its continental conservatism (isolationism'). The programme of an ascending national capitalism – ‘America for the Americans’ (the Monroe Doctrine) – has been supplanted by the programme of imperialism: ‘The Whole World for the Americans’. After exploiting the war commercially, industrially and through stock market speculation; after coining European blood into neutral profits, America went on to intervene in the war, played the decisive role in bringing about Germany’s debacle, and has poked its fingers into all the questions of European and world politics.
Under the ‘League of Nations’ flag, the United States made an attempt to extend to the other side of the ocean its experience with a federated unification of large, multi-national masses – an attempt to chain to its chariot of gold the peoples of Europe and other parts of the world, and bring them under Washington’s rule. In essence the League of Nations was intended to be a world monopoly corporation, ‘Yankee and Co.'
The President of the United States, the great prophet of platitudes, has descended from Mount Sinai in order to conquer Europe, ‘14 Points’ in hand. Stockbrokers, cabinet members and businessmen never deceived themselves for a moment about the meaning of this new revelation. But by way of compensation the European ‘Socialists’, with doses of Kautskyan brew, have attained a condition of religious ecstasy and accompany Wilson’s sacred ark, dancing like King David.
When the time came to pass to practical questions, it became clear to the American prophet that despite the dollar’s excellent foreign exchange rate, the first place on all sea lanes, which connect and divide the nations, continued as heretofore to belong to Great Britain, for she possesses a more powerful navy, longer transoceanic cables and a far older experience in world pillage. Moreover, on his travels Wilson encountered the Soviet Republic and Communism. The offended American Messiah renounced the League of Nations, which England had converted into one of her diplomatic chancelleries, and turned his back upon Europe.
It would, however, be childish to assume that American imperialism, beaten back by England during its first offensive, will withdraw into the shell of the Monroe Doctrine. No, by continuing to subordinate the Western Hemisphere to itself more and more violently, by transforming the countries of Central and South America into its colonies, the United States, through its two ruling parties – the Democrats and the Republicans – is preparing to create, as a counterweight to the English League of Nations, a league of its own, i.e., a league with North America as the centre of the world system. To begin the job properly, the United States intends during the next three to five years to make its navy more powerful than England’s. Therewith imperialist England is confronted with the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ The ferocious rivalry of these two giants in the field of naval construction is accompanied by a no less ferocious struggle over oil.
France – who had reckoned on playing the role of arbiter between England and the United States, but found herself drawn instead into the British orbit as a second-class satellite – discerns in the League of Nations an intolerable yoke and is seeking a way out by inflaming the antagonisms between England and the United States.
These are the most powerful forces working toward and preparing a new world conflict.
The programme of liberation of small nations, advanced during the war, has led to the complete ruination and enslavement of the Balkan peoples, victors and vanquished alike, and to the Balkanisation of a large part of Europe. Their imperialist interests have impelled the conquerors onto the road of carving out isolated, small national states from the territories of the defeated great powers. There is not even a semblance here of the so-called national principle: imperialism consists of overcoming national frameworks, even those of the major states. The new and tiny bourgeois states are only by-products of imperialism. In order to obtain temporary points of support imperialism creates a chain of small states, some openly oppressed, others officially protected while really remaining vassal states Austria, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bohemia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, and so on. Dominating over them with the aid of banks, railways, and coal monopolies, imperialism condemns them to intolerable economic and national hardships, to endless friction and bloody collisions.
What a savage irony of history is there in the facts that the restoration of Poland – which was part of the programme of revolutionary democracy and which led to the first manifestations of the international proletariat – has been achieved by imperialism with the object of counteracting the revolution; and that ‘democratic’ Poland, whose warrior-pioneers died on all of Europe’s barricades, is today playing the role of a foul and bloody tool in the thievish hands of Anglo-French gangsters – against the first workers’ republic in the world!
Alongside Poland stands ‘democratic’ Czechoslovakia, selling herself to French capitalism, supplying White Guard detachments against Soviet Russia and Soviet Hungary.
The heroic attempt of the Hungarian proletariat to break out of Central Europe’s state and economic chaos onto the road of a Soviet Federation – the only road of salvation – was strangled by the combined forces of capitalist reaction at a time when the proletariat of the strongest states of Europe, deceived by its parties, proved incapable as yet of fulfilling its duty both toward Socialist Hungary and toward itself.
The Soviet government in Budapest was overthrown with the collaboration of the social-traitors who, in their turn, after maintaining themselves in power for three and a half days, were cast aside by the unbridled counter-revolutionary scum whose bloody crimes surpassed those of Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel and other agents of the Entente. But even though temporarily crushed, Soviet Hungary is like a beacon light to all the toilers of Central Europe.
The Turkish people refuse to submit to the ignominious peace terms concocted for them by London despots. In order to enforce these terms, England has armed and incited Greece against Turkey. Thus the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor, Turks and Greeks alike, are condemned to utter devastation and mutual destruction.
In the struggle between the Entente and Turkey, Armenia has played the same programmatic role as Belgium did in the struggle against Germany; as Serbia in the struggle against Austria-Hungary. After the creation of Armenia – lacking any frontiers and without any possibility of remaining alive – Wilson spurned the Armenian mandate proffered him by the League of Nations: Armenia’s soil abounds neither in oil nor platinum. ‘Emancipated’ Armenia is more defenceless today than ever before.
Virtually each one of the newly created ‘national’ states has an irredenta of its own, i.e., its own internal national ulcer.
At the same time, the national struggle within the dominions of the victor countries has reached the peak of intensity. The English bourgeoisie, which seeks to be guardian over the peoples in the four corners of the world, is incapable of solving the Irish question under its very nose.
Even more grave is the national question in the colonies. Egypt, India, Persia are convulsed by insurrections. From the advanced proletarians of Europe and America the colonial toilers are acquiring the slogan: Soviet Federation.
Official, governmental, national, civilised, bourgeois Europe – as it has issued from the war and the Versailles Peace – resembles a lunatic asylum. Artificially split-up little states, whose economy is choking to death within their borders, snarl at one another, and wage wars over harbours, provinces and insignificant towns. They seek the protection of larger states, whose antagonisms are likewise increasing day by day. Italy stands hostilely opposed to France and is inclined to support Germany against France, the moment Germany is able to raise her head again. France is eaten by envy of England and in order to collect her dividends is ready to set Europe on fire again from all four corners. England, with the help of France, keeps Europe in a condition of chaotic impotence, thus untying her own hands for world operations aimed against the United States. The United States allows japan to become mired in Eastern Siberia in order meanwhile to secure by the year 1925 its naval preponderance over Great Britain provided, that is, Britain doesn’t decide to measure forces before then.
In harmony with this picture of world relations Marshal Foch, military oracle of the French bourgeoisie, has issued a warning that the next war will begin where the last one left off, namely, with airplanes and tanks, with automatic arms and machine guns instead of hand weapons, with grenades instead of bayonets.
Workers and peasants of Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Australia! You have suffered ten million dead, twenty million wounded and crippled. Today you at least know what you have gained at this price!
II
The Economic Situation
Meanwhile the impoverishment of mankind proceeds apace. Through its mechanisms the war has destroyed those world economic ties whose development once constituted one of the most important conquests of capitalism. Since the year 1914 England, France and Italy have been cut off from Central Europe and the Near East; since the year 1917 – from Russia.
A few war years destroyed what it took a whole number of generations to create; human labour, expended even to this end, was reduced to a minimum. Throughout these years wherever it was necessary to process existing supplies of raw material into the shape of finished goods, labour was employed primarily to produce the means and tools of destruction.
In those basic branches of economy where mankind enters directly into a struggle against nature’s niggardliness and inertia, in extracting fuel and raw materials from the bowels of the earth, production has steadily waned. The victory of the Entente and the Versailles Peace have not halted the process of economic ruination and decay, but have only altered its paths and forms. The blockade of Soviet Russia and the artificial incitement of civil war on her fertile borderlands have caused and continue to cause incalculable harm to the welfare of all mankind. With a minimum of technical aid, Russia, thanks to her Soviet forms of economy, could supply Europe – and the Communist International attests to this before the entire world with double and triple the quantity of foodstuffs and raw materials that Tsarist Russia used to supply. Instead of this, Anglo-French imperialism has compelled the Toilers’ Republic to devote all its forces to self-defence. In order to deprive the Russian workers of fuel, England has kept her clutches on Baku, whence she has been able to export for her own use only an insignificant portion of the oil output. The rich Donetz coal basin has been periodically laid waste by White Guard bands of the Entente. French engineers and sappers have laboured not little over the destruction of Russian bridges and railways. japan is right now pillaging and devastating Eastern Siberia.
German technology and the high productivity of German labour, these most important factors in the regeneration of world economy, are being even more paralysed after the Versailles Peace than was the case in wartime. The Entente is faced with an insoluble contradiction. In order to exact payment, one must provide the possibility of work. In order to make work possible one must make it possible to live. And giving crushed, dismembered, exhausted Germany the possibility to live means – to make it possible for her to resist. Fear of Germany’s revenge dictates the policy of Foch: a policy of ever tightening the military vice to prevent Germany’s regeneration.
Everywhere there is scarcity; everywhere there is need. Not only Germany’s trade balance but also that of France and England is decidedly on the deficit side. The French national debt has grown to 300 billion francs, of which, according to the reactionary French Senator Gaudin de Villaine, two-thirds accrues from embezzlement, theft, and general chaos.
The work of restoring the war-ruined areas accomplished in France is a mere drop in this ocean of devastation. Lack of fuel, lack of raw materials and lack of labour-power create insurmountable obstacles.
France needs gold; she needs coal. With his finger pointed at the countless graves of the war cemeteries, the French bourgeois demands his dividends. Germany must pay! After all, Marshal Foch still has enough black-skinned regiments to occupy German cities. Russia must pay! To inoculate the Russian people with this idea, the French government is expending for the devastation of Russia billions originally collected for the regeneration of France.
The international financial agreement, intended to lighten France’s tax burden through a more or less complete annulment of war debts, has not been reached: the United States shows no sign whatever of a desire to make Europe a gift of ten billion dollars.
The issue of paper money assumes ever greater proportions. While in Soviet Russia the growth of paper money and its depreciation, side by side with the simultaneous development of socialised planned distribution of necessities and its ever-expanding payment of wages in kind, signify only one of the results of the withering away of commodity-money economy; in capitalist countries the growing mass of paper money signifies the deepening of economic chaos and an inevitable crash.
The conferences of the Entente travel from one locality to the next; they seek inspiration in all of Europe’s vacation resorts. All hands are outstretched, demanding reimbursement in proportion to the number of men killed in the war. This travelling Stock Exchange of Death, which every two weeks decides anew whether France is to receive 50 or 55 per cent of German indemnities, which Germany cannot possibly pay, is the crowning achievement of the oft-proclaimed ‘organisation of Europe’.
Capitalism has degenerated in the course of the war. The systematic extraction of surplus value from the process of production – the foundation of profit economy – seems far too boresome an occupation to Messrs. Bourgeois who have become accustomed to increase their capital twice and tenfold within a couple of days by means of speculation, and on the basis of international robbery.
The bourgeois has shed certain prejudices which used to hamper him, and has acquired certain habits which he did not formerly possess. The war has inured him to subjecting a whole number of countries to a hunger-blockade, to bombarding from the air and setting fire to cities and villages, expediently spreading the bacilli of cholera, carrying dynamite in diplomatic pouches, counterfeiting his opponent’s currency; he has become accustomed to bribery, espionage and smuggling on a hitherto unequalled scale. The usages of war have been taken over, after the conclusion of peace, as the usages of commerce. The chief commercial operations are fused nowadays with the functions of the state, which steps to the fore as a world robber gang equipped with all the implements of violence.
The narrower the world’s productive basis, all the more savage and more wasteful the methods of appropriation. Rob! Ibis is the last word of capitalist policy that has come to supplant the policies of free trade and protectionism. The raid of the Rumanian gangsters upon Hungary, whence they carried off locomotives and finger-rings, is a fitting symbol of the economic philosophy of Lloyd George and Millerand.
In its domestic economic policy the bourgeoisie scurries to and fro between the programme of more extensive nationalisation, regulations and controls on the one hand, and, on the other, protests against the state intervention which had grown so much during the war. The French parliament is busy trying to square the circle, namely, creating a ‘unified command’ for the republic’s railway network without doing damage to the private capitalist interests of the railway corporations. At the same time, the capitalist press of France is conducting a vicious campaign against ‘Etatism’ which tends to hamper private initiative. The American railways, disorganised by the state during the war, have fallen into an even worse condition with the removal of state control. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has adopted a plank in its platform, promising to keep economic life free from arbitrary government intervention.
That old watchdog of capitalism, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labour, is conducting a campaign against the nationalisation of railroads which is being advocated in America, in France and other countries as a panacea by the simpletons and charlatans of reformism. As a matter of fact, the sporadic violent intrusions of the state into the economy only serve to compete with the pernicious activity of speculators in increasing the chaos of capitalist economy during its epoch of decline. A transfer of the principal branches of industry and transport from the hands of individual trusts into the hands of the ‘nation’, i.e., the bourgeois state, that is, into the hands of the most powerful and predatory capitalist trust, signifies not the elimination of the evil but only its amplification.
The fall of prices and the rise of the rate of exchange are merely superficial and temporary phenomena, occurring against the background of unchecked ruination. The fluctuation of prices does not alter the basic facts: viz., the shortage of raw materials and the decline in the productivity of labour.
After undergoing the frightful hardships of war, the labouring masses are incapable of working with the same intensity under the same conditions. The destruction within a few hours of values it had taken years to create, the obscene dance of the billions engaged in by the financial clique which keeps rising higher and higher on heaps of bones and ruins – these object lessons of history are hardly helpful in maintaining within the working class the automatic discipline inherent in wage labour. Bourgeois economists and publicists speak of a ‘wave of laziness’, which, according to them, is sweeping over Europe and undermining its economic future. The administrators seek to mend matters by granting privileges to the topmost layers of the working class. In vain! In order to revive and further develop its productivity of labour it is necessary to give the working class the assurance that every blow of its hammer will tend to improve its own welfare and raise its level of education, without again subjecting it to the danger of mutual extermination. It can receive this assurance only from the social revolution.
The rising cost of living is the mightiest factor of revolutionary ferment in all countries. The bourgeoisie of France, Italy, Germany and other states is endeavouring by means of relief payments to ameliorate the destitution caused by high prices, and to check the growth of the strike movement. To recompense the agricultural classes for a part of their expenditure of labour power, the state, already deeply in debt, engages in shady speculation; it steals from itself in order to defer the hour of settlement. Even if certain categories of workers now enjoy higher living standards than they did before the war, this fact does not in any way tally with the actual economic condition of capitalist countries. These ephemeral results are obtained by borrowing fraudulently from the future, which, when it finally arrives, will bring with it catastrophic destitution and calamities.
But what about the United States? ‘America is the hope of humanity!’ Through the lips of Millerand, the French bourgeois repeats this phrase of Turgot in the hope of having his own debts remitted, although he himself never remits anyone’s debt. But the United States is incapable of leading Europe out of its economic blind alley. During the last six years, American reserves of raw material have been depleted. The adaptation of American capitalism to the exigencies of the World War has resulted in a narrowing of its industrial foundation. European immigration has stopped. A wave of emigration has deprived American industry of many hundreds of thousands of Germans, Italians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, who were drawn either by war mobilisation or by the mirages of a newly acquired fatherland. Shortages of raw material and labour power hang over the trans-Atlantic republic and are engendering a profound economic crisis; and as a result, the American proletariat is entering upon a new revolutionary phase of struggle. America is becoming rapidly Europeanised.
Nor have the neutral countries escaped the consequences of war and blockade; like liquid in connected vessels, the economy of interconnected capitalist states, both large and small, both belligerents and neutrals, both victors and vanquished, is tending toward one and the same level – that of poverty, starvation and extinction.
Switzerland lives from hand to mouth and every unexpected event threatens to disrupt her equilibrium. In Scandinavia the abundant influx of gold does not solve the food problem; coal must be obtained from England in dribbles, begging hat in hand. Despite the famine in Europe the fishing industry is living through an unprecedented crisis in Norway. Spain, from where France has pumped men, horses and foodstuffs, is unable to emerge from a grave food scarcity which brings in its train stormy strikes and street demonstrations of the starving masses.
The bourgeoisie firmly relies upon the countryside. Bourgeois economists assert that the welfare of the peasantry has improved extraordinarily. This is an illusion. It is true that the peasants who bring their produce to the market have prospered more or less in all countries during the war. They sold their products at high prices and used cheap money to pay off debts contracted when money was dear. For them this is an obvious advantage. But their economy has become disorganised and depleted during the war. They are in need of manufactured goods, but prices for these have risen in proportion to the declining value of money. The demands of the state budget have become so monstrous that they threaten to devour the peasant with all his land and products. Thus after a period of temporary improvement, the condition of the small peasantry is becoming more and more intolerable. Their dissatisfaction with the outcome of the war will continually increase; and in the guise of the regular army, the peasantry has not a few unpleasant surprises in store for the bourgeoisie.
The economic restoration of Europe, about which its statesmen talk so much, is a lie. Europe is being ruined and the whole world along with it.
On capitalist foundations there is no salvation. The policy of imperialism does not lead to the abolition of want but to its aggravation owing to the predatory waste of existing reserves.
The question of fuel and raw material is an international question which can be solved only on the basis of a planned, collectivist, socialist production.
It is necessary to cancel the state debts. It is necessary to emancipate labour and its products from the monstrous tribute extorted by the world plutocracy. It is necessary to overthrow this plutocracy. It is necessary to remove the state barriers which tend to atomise world economy. The Supreme Economic Council of the Entente imperialists must be replaced by the Supreme Economic Soviet of the world proletariat, to effect the centralised exploitation of all the economic resources of mankind.
It is necessary to destroy imperialism in order to give mankind an opportunity to live.
III
The Bourgeois Regime After the War
The entire energy of the propertied classes is concentrated upon two questions: to maintain themselves in power in the international struggle and to prevent the proletariat from becoming the master of the country. The former political groupings of the bourgeoisie have exhausted their strength on these tasks. Not only in Russia, where the banner of the Cadet Party became at the decisive stage of struggle the banner of all the property owners against the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, but even in countries with an older and deeper-rooted political culture, the former programmes which used to separate diverse layers of the bourgeoisie have disappeared, almost without a trace, prior to the open outbreak of the proletarian revolution.
Lloyd George steps forward as the spokesman for the amalgamation of the Tories, Unionists and Liberals for a joint struggle against the approaching rule of labour. This hoary demagogue singles out the holy church as the central power station whose current equally feeds all the parties of the propertied classes.
In France the epoch of anti-clericalism, so noisy only a brief while ago, seems like a sepulchral ghost. The Radicals, Royalists and Catholics are now constituted in a bloc of ‘national law and order’ against the proletariat that is lifting its head. Ready to extend its hand to every reactionary force, the French government supports the Black-Hundred gangster Wrangel and re-establishes diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Giolitti, confirmed champion of neutrality and Germanophile, has taken the helm of the Italian government as the joint leader of interventionists, neutralists, clericals and Mazziniists. He is ready to tack and veer on the subordinate questions of domestic and foreign policy in order all the more ruthlessly to repel the offensive of the revolutionary proletarians of city and country. Giolitti’s government rightfully considers itself the last serious stake of the Italian bourgeoisie.
The policy of all the German governments and government parties since Hohenzollern’s downfall has been to find in concert with the Entente ruling classes a common ground of hatred of Bolshevism, that is, of the proletarian revolution.
While the Anglo-French Shylock is tightening more and more savagely the noose around the neck of the German people, the German bourgeoisie, regardless of party affiliations, entreats its enemy to loosen the noose just enough to enable it to strangle the vanguard of the German proletariat with its own hands. This is the gist of the periodic conferences and agreements on disarmament and the delivery of war material.
In America the line of demarcation between the Republicans and the Democrats has been, completely erased. These two powerful political organisations of the exploiters, adapted to the hitherto narrow circle of American relations, revealed their total hollowness the instant the American bourgeoisie entered the arena of world plunder.
Never before have the intrigues of individual leaders and cliques in the opposition and in the Ministries alike – been marked by such open cynicism as now. But at the same time all of the leaders, cliques and parties of the world bourgeoisie are building a united front against the revolutionary proletariat.
Whilst the Social-Democratic blockheads persist in counterposing the ‘peaceable’ road of democracy to the violent road of dictatorship, the last vestiges of democracy are being trampled underfoot and destroyed in every state throughout the world.
Since the war, during which the national electoral bodies played the part of impotent but noisy patriotic stooges for their respective ruling imperialist cliques, the parliaments have fallen into a state of complete prostration. All the important issues are now decided outside the parliaments. Nothing is changed in this respect by the window-dressing display of enlarged parliamentary prerogatives, so solemnly proclaimed by the imperialist mountebanks of Italy and other countries. The real masters of the situation and the rulers of state destiny are – Lord Rothschild and Lord Weir, Morgan and Rockefeller, Schneider and Loucheur, Hugo Stinnes and Felix Deutsch, Rizello and Agnelli – these gold- , coal- , oil- , and metal-kings, who operate behind the scenes and who send their second-rank lieutenants into parliaments to carry out their instructions.
The French parliament – more discredited than any other by its rhetoric of falsehood, cynicism and prostitution, and whose chief amusement lies in the procedure of thrice reading the most insignificant legislative acts – this parliament suddenly learns that the four billions appropriated by it for the restoration of the devastated regions of France had been expended by Clémenceau for entirely different purposes, in particular for the further devastation of Russian regions.
The overwhelming majority of members of the supposedly all-powerful English parliament are scarcely more informed concerning the actual intentions of Lloyd George and Lord Curzon with regard to Soviet Russia, or even France, than are the withered old women in the villages of Bengal.
In the United States, Congress is a docile or disgruntled chorus for the President, who is himself a creature of the electoral machine, which is in its turn the political apparatus of the trusts – incomparably more so since the war than ever before.
Germany’s belated parliamentarianism, an abortion of the bourgeois revolution, which is itself an abortion of history, suffers in its infancy from every disease peculiar to cretins in their senility. ‘The most-democratic-in-the-world’ Reichstag of Ebert’s republic is impotent, not only before the Marshal’s baton of Foch but even before the stock market manipulations of its own Stinneses, let alone the military plots of its officer clique. German parliamentary democracy is nothing but a void between two dictatorships.
The very composition of the bourgeoisie has undergone profound modifications in the course of the war. Against the background of universal impoverishment throughout the world, the concentration of capital has made a sudden and colossal leap forward. Firms hitherto standing in the shadows have stepped to the forefront. Solidity, stability, a tendency toward ‘reasonable’ compromises, observance of a certain decorum both in exploitation and in the utilisation of its fruits – all this has been washed away by the torrents of the imperialist flood.
To the foreground have stepped the newly rich: war contractors, shoddy profiteers, upstarts, international adventurers, smugglers, refugees from justice bedecked with diamonds, every species of unbridled scum greedy for luxury and capable of any bestiality against the proletarian revolution from which they can expect nothing but the hangman’s noose.
The existing system stands before the masses in all its nakedness as the rule of plutocracy. In America, in France, in England, indulgence in postwar luxury has assumed a maniacal character. Paris, jammed with international patriotic parasites, resembles as admitted by Le Temps, Babylon on the eve of its destruction.
Politics, courts, the press, the arts and the church fall in line with this bourgeoisie. All restraint has been thrown to the winds. Wilson, Clémenceau, Millerand, Lloyd George and Churchill do not shrink from the most brazen deceit and the biggest lie and when caught red-handed they calmly go on to new criminal feats. The classical rules of political duplicity as expounded by old Machiavelli become innocent aphorisms of a provincial simpleton in comparison with those principles which guide bourgeois statesmen today. The law courts, which formerly concealed their bourgeois essence under democratic finery, have now openly become the organs of class brutality and counter-revolutionary provocation. The judges of the Third Republic have, without batting an eyelid, acquitted the murderer of Jaurès. The courts of Germany, which has proclaimed itself a socialist republic, give encouragement to the murderers of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and many other martyrs of the proletariat. The juridical tribunals of bourgeois democracies have become the organs for the solemn legalisation of all the crimes of the White Terror.
The bourgeois press has openly engraved the stamp of bribery, like a trade-mark, on its forehead. The leading newspapers of the world bourgeoisie are monstrous factories of falsehood, libel and spiritual poison.
The moods of the bourgeoisie fluctuate as nervously as the prices on its market. In the initial months following the termination of the war, the international bourgeoisie, especially the French, was shaken by chills and fever from the fear of oncoming Communism. It gauged the degree of its imminent peril by the enormity of the bloody crimes it had committed. But it has been able to withstand the first onslaught. The Socialist parties and the trade unions of the Second International, bound by chains of common guilt to the bourgeoisie, have rendered it their final service by absorbing the first wrathful blow of the toilers. At the price of the complete collapse of the Second International the bourgeoisie has bought a respite. The counter-revolutionary elections to parliament engineered by Clémenceau, a few months of unstable equilibrium, and the failure of the May strike – these sufficed to imbue the French bourgeoisie with confidence in the security of its regime. Its class arrogance has risen to the same heights today as did its fears of yesterday.
Threats have become the bourgeoisie’s sole means of persuasion. The bourgeoisie has no faith in words, it demands deeds: arrests, dispersals (of demonstrations), confiscations, firing squads. Striving to impress the bourgeoisie, bourgeois ministers and parliamentarians pose as men of steel. Lloyd George daily counsels the German ministers to shoot their own Communards, following the example of France in 1871. Any third-rank functionary can bank on tumultuous plaudits in the Chamber of Deputies so long as he concludes his inane report with a few threats addressed to the workers.
While the official state apparatus is being more and more openly transformed into an organisation for the sanguinary suppression of the toilers, alongside it, and under its auspices and at its disposal, various private counter-revolutionary organisations are being formed – for breaking strikes by force, for acts of provocation, for staging frame-up trials, wrecking revolutionary organisations, raiding and seizing Communist institutions, organising pogroms and incendiarism, assassinating revolutionary leaders and other similar measures devoted to the defence of private property and democracy.
Younger sons of landlords and of the big bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois who have lost their bearings, and all other declassed elements, among whom the bourgeois-noble emigres from Soviet Russia occupy the most prominent place, form an inexhaustible reservoir for the guerrilla detachments of the counter-revolution. At their head stands the corps of officers who have gone through the school of the imperialist slaughter.
Some 20,000 professional officers of the Hohenzollern army have formed themselves – especially after the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch into a strong counter-revolutionary nucleus which the German democracy is powerless to dissolve, and which can be crushed only by the sledge-hammer of the proletarian dictatorship. This centralised organisation of the old regime terrorists is supplemented by the White Guard guerrilla detachments organised on the Junker estates.
In the United States organisations like the ‘National Security League’, the ‘Loyal American League’ and other ‘Knights of Liberty’ constitute the storm troops of capitalism, at the extreme wings of which operate the ordinary murder gangs in the person of private detective agencies.
In France the Ligue Civique represents a socially-select organisation of strikebreakers, while the reformist Confederation of Labour has been outlawed.
The officers’ Mafia of White Hungary, which exists clandestinely alongside the government of counter-revolutionary hangmen supported by England, has given the world proletariat a sample of that civilisation and humanitarianism which Wilson and Lloyd George advocate as against the Soviet power and revolutionary violence.
The ‘democratic’ governments of Finland and Georgia, Latvia and Esthonia, are striving might and main to emulate this Hungarian model of perfection.
In Barcelona there is an underground gang of assassins, operating under police orders. And so it goes on, and so it is everywhere.
Even in a defeated and ruined country like Bulgaria, the officers, left without jobs, are uniting into secret societies, biding the first opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism upon the backs and bones of Bulgarian workers.
The programme of smoothing over contradictions, the programme of class collaboration, parliamentary reforms, gradual socialisation and national unity appears like a grim joke in the face of the bourgeois regime as it has emerged from the World War.
The bourgeoisie has entirely abandoned the idea of reconciling the proletariat by means of reform. It corrupts an insignificant labour aristocracy with a few sops and keeps the great masses in subjection by blood and iron.
There is not a single serious issue today which is decided by ballot. Of democracy nothing remains save memories in the skulls of reformists. The entire state organisation is reverting more and more to its primordial form, i.e., detachments of armed men. Instead of counting ballots, the bourgeoisie is busy counting up bayonets, machine guns and cannons which will be at its disposal at the moment when the question of power and property forms is posed point-blank for decision.
There is room for neither collaboration nor mediation. To save ourselves we must overthrow the bourgeoisie. This can be achieved only by the rising of the proletariat.
IV
Soviet Russia
Amidst the unbridled elements, the maelstrom, of chauvinism, avarice and destruction, only the principle of Communism has revealed a great power for life and creativeness. In spite of the fact that in the course of historical development Soviet power has for the first time been established in the most backward and ruined country of Europe, surrounded by a host of mightiest enemies – despite all this, the Soviet power has not only maintained itself in the struggle against such unprecedented odds but it has also demonstrated in action the vast potentialities inherent in Communism. The development and consolidation of the Soviet power in Russia is the most momentous historical fact since the foundation of the Communist International.
In the eyes of class society the creation of an army has usually been regarded as the supreme test of economic and state construction. The strength or weakness of an army is taken as index of the strength or weakness of economy and the state.
The Soviet power has created a mighty armed force while under fire. The Red Army has demonstrated its unquestionable superiority not alone in the struggle against old bourgeois-monarchist Russia,
which imperialism is endeavouring to re-establish by the aid of the White Armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, Wrangel, et al., but also in the struggle against the national armies of those ‘democracies’ which world imperialism is implanting for its own benefit (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland).
In the sphere of economy the Soviet Republic has performed a great miracle by virtue of the single fact that it has succeeded in maintaining itself during the first three trying and most difficult years. It remains inviolate and continues to develop because it has torn the instruments of exploitation out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and has transformed them into the means of planned economy.
Amid the roar of battle along her illimitable fronts, Soviet Russia has not let slip a single opportunity for economic and cultural construction. In the interval between the crushing defeat of Denikin and the murderous assault of Poland, the Soviet power undertook an extensive organisation of labour conscription, inaugurated a more precise registration and application of the forces and means of production, attracted sections of the army to the accomplishment of industrial tasks, and above all, began to restore its system of transportation.
Only the monopoly by the socialist state of the necessities of life, coincident with a ruthless struggle against speculation, has saved the Russian cities from starvation and made it possible to supply the Red Army with food. Only the unification by the state of scattered factories, plants, privately-owned railroads and ships has assured the possibility of production and transport.
The concentration of industry and transport in the hands of the state leads, through standardisation, to the socialisation of technology itself. Only upon the principles of socialism is it possible to fix the minimum number of types of locomotives, freight cars and steamships to be manufactured and repaired, and to carry on and periodically standardise mass production of machinery and machine parts, thus securing incalculable advantages from the crucial standpoint of raising the productivity of labour. Economic progress, the scientific organisation of industry, the introduction of the Taylor system divested of its capitalist-sweatshop features – no longer face any obstacles in Soviet Russia, save for those interposed from abroad by imperialist violence.
At the time when national interests, clashing with imperialist encroachments, are a constant source of incessant conflicts, uprisings and wars throughout the world, socialist Russia has shown how painlessly the workers’ state is able to reconcile national requirements with those of economic life, by purging the former of chauvinism and by emancipating the latter from imperialism. Socialism strives to bring about a union of all regions, all provinces and all nationalities by means of a unified economic plan. Economic centralism, freed from the exploitation of one class by another, and of one nation by another and, hence, equally beneficial to all alike, can be instituted without in any way infringing upon the real freedom of national development.
The example of Soviet Russia is enabling the peoples of Central Europe, of the South-Eastern Balkans, of the British dominions, all the oppressed nations and tribes, the Egyptians and the Turks, the Indians and the Persians, the Irish and the Bulgarians to convince themselves of this, that the fraternal collaboration of all the national units of mankind is realisable in life only through a Federation of Soviet Republics.
The revolution has made Russia into the first proletarian state. For the three years of its existence its boundaries have undergone constant change. They have shrunk under the external military pressure of world imperialism. They expanded whenever this pressure relaxed. The struggle for Soviet Russia has become merged with the struggle against world capitalism. The question of Soviet Russia has become the touchstone by which all the organisations of the working class are tested. The German Social Democracy committed its second greatest treachery – greatest in point of infamy since the betrayal of August 4, 1914 – when in obtaining control of the government it sought the protection of Western imperialism instead of seeking an alliance with the revolution in the East. A Soviet Germany united with Soviet Russia would have represented a force exceeding from the very start all the capitalist states put together!
The Communist International has proclaimed the cause of Soviet Russia as its own. The world proletariat will not sheathe its sword until Soviet Russia is incorporated as a link in the World Federation of Soviet Republics.
V
The Proletarian Revolution and the Communist International
Civil war is on the order of the day throughout the world. Its banner is the Soviet Power.
Capitalism has proletarianised immense masses of mankind.
Imperialism has thrown these masses out of balance and started them on the revolutionary road. The very concept of the term ‘masses’ has undergone a change in recent years. Those elements which used to be regarded as the masses in the era of parliamentarianism and trade unionism have now become converted into a labour aristocracy. Millions and tens of millions of those who formerly lived beyond the pale of political life are being transformed today into the revolutionary masses. The war has roused everybody. It has awakened the political interest of the most backward layers; it aroused in them illusions and hopes and it has deceived them. The craft division of labour with its caste spirit, the relative stability of the living standards among the upper proletarian strata, the dumb and apathetic hopelessness among the thickest lower layers, in short, the social foundations of the old forms of the labour movement have receded beyond recall into the past. New millions have been drawn into the struggle.
Women who have lost their husbands and fathers and have been compelled to take their places in labour’s ranks are streaming into the movement. The working youth, which has grown up amid the thunder and lightning of the World War, hails the revolution as its native element.
In different countries the struggle is passing through different stages. But it is the final struggle. Not infrequently the waves of the movement flow into obsolete organisational forms, lending them temporary vitality. Here and there on the surface of the flood old labels and half-obliterated slogans float. Human minds are still filled with much confusion, many shadows, prejudices and illusions. But the movement as a whole is of a profoundly revolutionary character. It is all-embracing and irresistible. It spreads, strengthens and purifies itself; and it is eliminating all the old rubbish. It will not halt before it brings about the rule of the world proletariat.
The basic form of this movement is the strike. Its simplest and most potent cause lies in the rising prices of primary necessities. Not infrequently the strike arises out of isolated local conflicts. It arises as an expression of the masses’ impatience with the parliamentary Socialist mish-mash.
It originates in the feeling of solidarity with the oppressed of all countries, including one’s own. It combines economic and political slogans. In it are not infrequently combined fragments of reformism with slogans of the programme of social revolution. It dies down, ceases, only in order again to resurrect itself, shaking the foundations of production, keeping the state apparatus under constant strain, and driving the bourgeoisie into all the greater frenzy because it utilises every pretext to send its greetings to Soviet Russia. The premonitions of the exploiters are not unfounded, for this chaotic strike is in reality the social-revolutionary roll call and the mobilisation of the international proletariat.
The profound interdependence between one country and another, which has been so catastrophically revealed during the war, invests with particular significance those branches of labour which serve to connect the various countries, and puts the railroad workers and transport workers in general into a most prominent position. The transport proletarians have had occasion to display some of their power in the boycott of White Hungary and White Poland. The strike and the boycott, methods resorted to by the working class at the dawn of its trade union struggles, i.e., even before it began utilising parliamentarianism, are today assuming unprecedented proportions, acquiring a new and menacing significance, similar to an artillery preparation before the. final attack.
The ever-growing helplessness of an individual before the blind interplay of historic events has driven into the unions not only new strata of working men and women but also white-collar workers, functionaries and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Prior to the time when the proletarian revolution will of necessity lead to the creation of Soviets, which will immediately assume ascendancy over all of the old labour organisations, the toilers are streaming into the traditional trade, unions, tolerating for the time being their old forms, their official programmes, their ruling aristocracy, but introducing into these organisations an ever-increasing and unprecedented revolutionary pressure of the many-millioned masses.
The lowliest of the lowly – the rural proletarians, the agricultural labourers – are raising their heads. In Italy, Germany and other countries we observe a magnificent growth of the revolutionary movement among the agricultural workers and their fraternal rapprochement with the urban proletariat.
The poorest layers among the peasantry are changing their attitude toward socialism. Whereas the intrigues have remained fruitless which the parliamentary reformists sought to base upon the muzhik’s proprietary prejudices, the genuine revolutionary movement of the proletariat and its implacable struggle against the oppressors have given birth to glimmers of hope in the hearts of the most backward and most benighted and ruined peasant-proprietor.
The ocean of human privation and ignorance is bottomless. Every social layer that rises to the surface leaves beneath it another layer just about to rise. But the vanguard doesn’t have to wait for the ponderous rear to dome up before engaging in battle. The work of awakening, uplifting and educating its most backward layers will be accomplished by the working class only after it is in power.
The toilers of the colonial and semi-colonial countries have awakened. In the boundless areas of India, Egypt, Persia, over which the gigantic octopus of English imperialism sprawls – in this uncharted human ocean vast internal forces are constantly at work, upheaving huge waves that cause tremors in the City’s stocks and hearts.
In the movements of colonial peoples, the social element blends in diverse forms with the national element, but both of them are directed against imperialism. The road from the first stumbling baby steps to the mature forms of struggle is being traversed by the colonies and backward countries in general through a forced march, under the pressure of modem imperialism and under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat.
The fruitful rapprochement of the Mohammedan and non-Mohammedan peoples who are kept shackled under British and foreign domination, the purging of the movement internally by doing away with the influence of the clergy and of chauvinist reaction, the simultaneous struggle against foreign oppressors and their native confederates – the feudal lords, the priests and the usurers – all this is transforming the growing army of the colonial insurrection into a great historical force, into a mighty reserve for the world proletariat.
The pariahs are rising. Their awakened minds avidly gravitate to Soviet Russia, to the barricade battles in the streets of German cities, to the growing strike struggles in Great Britain, to the Communist International.
The Socialist who aids directly or indirectly in perpetuating the privileged position of one nation at the expense of another, who accommodates himself to colonial slavery, who draws a line of distinction between races and colours in the matter of human rights, who helps the bourgeoisie of the metropolis to maintain its rule over the colonies instead of aiding the armed uprising of the colonies; the British Socialist who fails to support by all possible means the uprisings in Ireland, Egypt and India against the London plutocracy such a Socialist deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a bullet, but in no case merits either a mandate or the confidence of the proletariat.
Yet, the proletariat is being thwarted in its international revolutionary actions not so much by the half-destroyed barbed-wire entanglements that remain set up between the countries since the war, as it is by the egotism, conservatism, stupidity and treachery of the old party and trade union organisations which have climbed upon its back during the preceding epoch.
The leaders of the old trades unions use every means to counteract the revolutionary struggle of the working masses and to paralyse it; or, if they cannot do it otherwise, they take charge of strikes in order all the more surely to nullify them by underhand machinations.
The historical treachery perpetrated by the international Social Democracy is unequalled in the annals of the struggle against oppression. It had its clearest and most terrible consequences in Germany. The defeat of German imperialism was at the same time the defeat of the capitalist system of economy. Save for the proletariat there was no other class that could pretend to state power. The success of the socialist overturn was amply assured by the development of technology and by the numerical strength and the high cultural level of the working class. But the German Social Democracy blocked the road along which this task could be accomplished. By means of intricate manoeuvres in which cunning vied with stupidity, it was able to divert the energy of the proletariat from its natural and necessary task – the conquest of power.
For a number of decades the Social Democracy had laboured to gain the confidence of the proletarian masses only in order to place when the critical moment came and when the existence of bourgeois society was at stake – its entire authority in the service of the exploiters.
The treachery of liberalism and the collapse of bourgeois democracy are insignificant episodes in comparison with the monstrous betrayal of the toiling classes by the Socialist parties. Even the part played by the Church, the central powerhouse of conservatism, as Lloyd George has defined it, is dimmed beside the anti-socialist role of the Second International.
The Social Democracy justified its betrayal of the revolution during the war by the slogan, National Defence. Its counter-revolutionary policy following the conclusion of peace it cloaks with the slogan, Democracy. National Defence and Democracy – here are the solemn formulas of the capitulation of the proletariat to the will of the bourgeoisie!
But !he depths of the fall are far from plumbed by this. In pursuance of its policy of defending the capitalist system, the Social Democracy is compelled, on the heels of the bourgeoisie, to openly trample underfoot both ‘national defence’ and ‘democracy’. Scheidemann and Ebert are licking the hands of French imperialism, whose help they seek against the Soviet revolution. Noske has become the personification of the White Terror of the bourgeois counter-revolution.
Albert Thomas becomes a hired clerk of the League of Nations, that filthy agency of imperialism. Vandervelde, the eloquent incarnation of the superficiality of the Second International which he used to head. becomes the Royal Minister, the confederate of Delacroix member of the Clerical Party, defender of the Belgian Catholic priests and advocate of capitalist atrocities against the Negroes in the Congo.
Henderson, who apes the great men of the bourgeoisie, who appears on the scene now as His Majesty’s Minister and then again as a member of His Majesty’s most loyal Labour opposition; Tom Shaw who demands of the Soviet government documentary proof that there are crooks, thieves and perjurers in the London government – who are all these gentlemen if not the sworn enemies of the working class?
Renner and Seitz, Niemetz and Tuzar, Troelstra and Branting, Dasczinski and Chkheidze – each of them translates the shameful collapse of the Second International into the language of his respective petty-government chicanery.
Finally Karl Kautsky, ex-Marxist and ex-theoretician of the Second International, has become the snivelling privy counsellor for the yellow press of the world.
Under the pressure of the masses the more pliant elements of the old Socialism have changed their appearance and colouring, without changing in essence; they break away or are preparing to break away from the Second International, and meanwhile invariably shrink, as usual, from every genuine mass and revolutionary action and even from every serious preparation for action.
In order to characterise and at the same time brand the actors in this masquerade it suffices to point out that the Polish Socialist Party, led by Dasczinski and patronised by Pilsudski, this party of petty-bourgeois cynicism and chauvinist fanaticism, has announced its break with the Second International.
The leading parliamentary elite of the French Socialist Party, which is now casting its votes against the budget and against the Versailles Treaty, remains in essence one of the mainstays of the bourgeois republic. These gestures of opposition go only so far as is necessary to regain, from time to time, the semi-confidence of the most conservative layers of the proletariat.
So far as the fundamental questions of the class struggle are concerned, French parliamentary Socialism continues as heretofore to disintegrate the will of the proletariat by instilling into the workers the idea that the present moment is not propitious for the conquest of power, because France is too ruined, just as the situation was equally unpropitious yesterday because of the war; while on the eve of the war it was the industrial boom that interfered, and still earlier it was the industrial crisis. Alongside of parliamentary Socialism – and not a whit above it – there is the garrulous and mendacious syndicalism of the firm of Jouhaux & Bros.
The creation of a strong, firmly welded and disciplined Communist Party in France is a life-and-death question for the French proletariat.
In the strikes and uprisings a new generation of workers is being educated and tempered in Germany. They are getting their experience at the price of victims whose number grows in proportion with the length of time during which the Independent Socialist Party continues to remain under the influence of conservative Social Democrats and routinists who keep sighing for the Social Democracy of Bebel’s days, who do not understand the character of the present revolutionary epoch, who flinch from civil war and revolutionary terror, who doddle along at the tail end of events and who live in the expectation of a miracle which is to relieve them of their incapacity. In the heat of battle, the party of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht is teaching the German workers to find the correct road.
Routinism among the summits of the labour movement in England is so ingrained that they have yet even to feel the need of rearming themselves: the leaders of the British Labour Party are stubbornly bent upon remaining within the framework of the Second International.
At a time when the march of events during recent years has undermined the stability of economic life in conservative England and has made her toiling masses most receptive to a revolutionary programme – at such a time, the official machinery of the bourgeois nation: The Royal House of Windsor, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Church, the trades unions, the Labour Party, George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henderson – remains intact as a mighty automatic brake upon progress. Only the Communist Party a party free from routine and sectarianism, and closely bound up with the mass organisations – will be able to counterpose the proletarian rank and file to this official aristocracy.
In Italy where the bourgeoisie itself openly admits that the keys to the country’s future destiny are in the hands of the Socialist Party, the policy pursued by the Right Wing headed by Turati is to divert the proletarian revolution, which is developing powerfully, into the channel of parliamentary reforms. At the present moment this internal sabotage represents the greatest menace.
Proletarians of Italy, remember the fate of Hungary, which has entered the annals of history as a terrible warning to the proletariat that in the struggle for power as well as after the conquest of power, it must stand firm on its own feet, sweeping aside all elements of indecision and hesitation and dealing mercilessly with all attempts at treachery!
The upheavals caused by the war, which has brought a profound economic crisis in its wake, have ushered in a new chapter in the labour movement of the United States as well as in the other countries of the Western Hemisphere. The liquidation of the Wilsonian bombast and falsehood is at the same time the liquidation of that American Socialism which was a mixture of pacifist illusions and high-pressure salesmanship and which served as a domesticated supplement from the left to the trade unionism of Gompers and Co. The integration of the revolutionary proletarian parties and organisations of the American continent – from Alaska to Cape Horn – into a firmly-welded American Section of the Communist International, which will stand up against the mighty enemy, US imperialism – this is the task which must and will be accomplished in the struggle against all the forces which the Dollar will mobilise in its own defence.
The governmental and semi-governmental Socialists of various countries have no lack of pretexts on which to ground the charge that the Communists by their intransigent tactics provoke the counter-revolution into action, and help it mobilise its forces. This political accusation is nothing but a belated parody of the hoary plaints of liberalism. The latter always maintained that the independent struggle of the proletariat is driving the rich into the camp of reaction. This is incontestable. If the working class refrained from encroaching upon the foundations of capitalist rule, the bourgeoisie would have no need of repressive measures. The very concept of counter-revolution would have never arisen if revolutions were not known to history. That the uprisings of the proletariat inevitably entail the organisation of the bourgeoisie for self-defence and counter-attack, simply means that the revolution is the struggle between two irreconcilable classes which can end only with the final victory of one of them.
Communism rejects with contempt the policy which consists in keeping the masses inert, in intimidating them with the bludgeon of counter-revolution.
To the disintegration and chaos of the capitalist world, whose death agony threatens to destroy all human culture, the Communist International counterposes the united struggle of the world proletariat for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and for the reconstruction of national and world economy on the basis of a single economic plan, instituted and realised in life by a society of producers, a society of solidarity.
Rallying millions of toilers in all parts of the world round the banner of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet form of government, the Communist International purifies, builds up and organises its own ranks in the fire of the struggle.
The Communist International is the party of the revolutionary education of the world proletariat. It rejects all those organisations and groups which openly or covertly stupefy, demoralise and weaken the proletariat, exhorting it to kneel before the fetishes which are a facade for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: legalism, democracy, national defence, etc.
Neither can the Communist International admit into its ranks those organisations which, after inscribing the dictatorship of the proletariat in their programme, continue to conduct a policy which obviously relies upon a peaceful solution of the historical crisis. Mere recognition of the Soviet system settles nothing. The Soviet form of organisation does not possess any miraculous powers. Revolutionary power lies within the proletariat itself. It is necessary for the proletariat to rise for the conquest of power – then and only then does the Soviet organisation reveal its qualities as the irreplaceable instrument in the hands of the proletariat.
The Communist International demands the expulsion from the ranks of the labour movement of all those leaders who are directly or indirectly implicated in political collaboration with the bourgeoisie, who directly or indirectly render any assistance to the bourgeoisie. We need leaders who have no other attitude toward bourgeois society than that of mortal hatred, who organise the proletariat for an irreconcilable struggle and who are ready to lead an insurgent army into the battle, who are not going to stop half-way, whatever happens, and who will not shrink from resorting to ruthless measures against all those who may try to stop them by force.
The Communist International is the world party of proletarian uprising and proletarian dictatorship. It has no aims and tasks separate and apart from those of the working class itself. The pretensions of tiny sects, each of which wants to save the working class in its own manner, are alien and hostile to the spirit of the Communist International. It does not possess any panaceas or magic formulas but bases itself on the past and present international experience of the working class; it purges that experience of all blunders and deviations; it generalises the conquests made and recognizes and adopts only such revolutionary formulas as are the formulas of mass action.
The trade union organisation, the economic and political strike, the boycott, the parliamentary and municipal elections, the parliamentary tribunal, legal and illegal agitation, auxiliary bases in the army, the co-operative, the barricade – none of the forms of organisation or of struggle created by the labour movement as it evolves is rejected by the Communist International, nor is any one of them singled out and sanctified as a panacea.
The Soviet system is not an abstract principle opposed by Communists to the principle of parliamentarianism. The Soviet system is a class apparatus which is destined to do away with parliamentarianism and to take its place during the struggle and as a result of the struggle. Waging a merciless struggle against reformism in the trade unions and against parliamentary cretinism and careerism, the Communist International at the same time condemns all sectarian summonses to leave the ranks of the multi-millioned trade union organisations or to turn one’s back upon parliamentary and municipal institutions. The Communists do not separate themselves from the masses who are being deceived and betrayed by the reformists and the patriots, but engage the latter in an irreconcilable struggle within the mass organisations and institutions established by bourgeois society, in order to overthrow them the more surely and the more quickly.
Under the aegis of the Second International the methods of class organisation and of class struggle which were almost exclusively of a legal character have turned out to be, in the last analysis, subject to the control and direction of the bourgeoisie, who use its reformist agency as a bridle on the revolutionary class; the Communist International, on the other hand, tears this bridle out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, conquers all the methods and organisations of the labour movement, unites all of them under its revolutionary leadership and through them puts before the proletariat one single goal, namely, the conquest of power for the abolition of the bourgeois state and for the establishment of a Communist society.
In all his work whether as leader of a revolutionary strike, or as organiser of underground groups, or as secretary of a trade union, or as agitator at mass meetings, whether as deputy, co-operative worker or barricade fighter, the Communist always remains true to himself as a disciplined member of the Communist Party, a zealous fighter, a mortal enemy of capitalist society, its economic foundation, its state forms, its democratic lies, its religion and its morality. He is a self-sacrificing soldier of the proletarian revolution and an indefatigable herald of the new society.
Working men and women! On this earth there is only one banner which is worth fighting and dying for. It is the banner of the Communist International!
Moscow, August 1920
The Second World Congress of the Communist International
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Anti-War Protest Season Continues-New York City Anti-War Rally April 9
Markin comment:
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
Sunday, March 20, 2011
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-"Lenin And The Vanguard Party" Part Two-"Bolshevism vs. Menshevism:The 1903 Split"
Lenin And The Vanguard Party
Markin comment on this series of articles:
Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.
Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
********
Markin comment on this article:
I think the Trotsky quote, from an early vocal and vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik organizational perspectives outlined by the 1903 internal party debates (and an opponent of its general political perspectives as well) for most of his early political career, kind of nicely summed up the real question. How the hell are you going to defeat the bourgeoisie and its vast resources without a strong, unified, and, yes, democratic centralist vanguard organization to counter all its obvious advantages? Tellingly, despite all the later Stalinist corruptions and distortions of Russian party (and CI) he held to the vanguard party concept for the rest of his political life after coming over to the Bolsheviks in 1917 (as did many other former opponents at that time, those who wanted to fight to the death for socialism).
As I have mentioned before although the concept of democratic centralism is a necessary component in the revolutionary struggle that concept itself is no guarantee, as we are painfully aware from the Stalinist experience, that a party (or a state apparatus, for that matter) will not degenerate into a bureaucratic malaise. With a healthy economic base, at least in America, (less need for someone to say who gets, and who does not get what-the basis for bureaucratic usurpation) that should be less of a problem. That fear, that fear of degeneration, in any case, is hardly a reason to flee from the struggle for the vanguard party, for the fight for an international party and for the struggle for socialism. American imperialism is that bad, and do not forget it.
*********
To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.
Bolshevism vs. Menshevism:The 1903 Split
The Second Congress of the RSDRP, held in Brussels and then London in July-August 1903, was to be the culmination of the Iskraist project to create a centralized party based on a comprehensive program. (In part because of repression, the formal founding congress of the RSDRP in 1898 did not change the nature of Russian Social Democracy from a move¬ment of localized propaganda circles.) The Economists were not excluded from the Congress, but it was arranged so that the Iskraists would be a decisive majority. The Iskra group accounted for about two-thirds of the Second Congress' 46 delegates. Of the remaining third, about half were anti-Iskraists. These consisted of a few prominent Economists (Martynov, Akimov) and the semi-nationalist Bund, which claimed to be the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat and demanded a federated party.
In the first phase of the Congress, a solid Iskraist majority carried its line. The Iskraist group, including future Mensheviks, voted unanimously for a program which included elements later very much characteristic of Leninism. For example, the section "On the Trade Union Struggle" contains the following passage:
"In so far as this struggle develops in isolation from the political struggle of the proletariat led by the Social Democratic Party, it leads to the fragmentation of the proletarian forces and to subordination of the workers' movement to the interests of the propertied classes."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Resolutions and Documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
However, beneath the seemingly solid front of the Iskra group were very considerable tensions. One such potential polarity was between Lenin and Martov, who was consi¬tently more conciliatory to the non- and anti-Iskraist elements of Russian Social Democracy. Even before the Congress, Martov was generally known as a "soft" Iskraist and Lenin as a "hard." Consequently, those Iskra supporters who favored a greater role for non-Iskraists in a unitary party looked to Martov as their natural leader; those wanting the Iskraists to keep a tight control of the party looked to Lenin.
The tension between Lenin's "hards" and Martov's "softs" manifested itself in a series of minor disputes from the very beginning of the Congress. As is well known, this tension exploded over the first paragraph of the rules which defined membership. Martov's draft defined a member as one who "renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations." Lenin's membership criterion was "by personal participation in one of the Party organizations."
Lenin's narrower definition of membership was motivated by both a general desire to exclude opportunists (who were less likely to accept the rigors and dangers of full organizational participation) and by a desire to weed out dilettantes who had been attracted to Russian Social Democracy pre¬cisely because of its loose circle nature. Interestingly, it was Plekhanov who stressed the anti-opportunist aspect of a narrower party, while Lenin emphasized more practical, conjunctural considerations. Here is the heart of Plekhanov's argument:
"Many of the intelligentsia will fear to enter, contaminated as they are with bourgeois individualism; but this is all to the good, since those bourgeois individuals usually constitute representatives of all kinds of opportunism. The opponents of opportunism should therefore vote for Lenin's project, which closes the door to its penetration into the party."
—quoted in Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (1955)
Lenin argued on somewhat different grounds:
"The root of the mistake made by those who stand for Martov's formulation is that they not only ignore one of the main evils of our Party life, but even sanctify it. The evil is that, at a time when political discontent is almost universal, when conditions require our work to be carried out in complete secrecy, and when most of our activities have to be confined to limited, secret circles and even to private meetings, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible in fact, for us to distinguish those who only talk from those who do the work. There is hardly another country in the world where the jumbling of these two categories is as common and as productive of such boundless confusion as in Russia.... It would be better if ten who do the work should not call themselves Party members...than that one who only talks should have the right and opportunity to be a Party member. That is a principle which seems to me indis¬putable, and which compels me to fight against Martov." [our emphasis]
—"Second Speech in the Discussion on the Party Rules" (2 (15) August 1903)
With the support of the Economists, Bundists and centrists, Martov's formulation carried. However, the Economists and Bundists soon thereafter quit the Congress when it refused to accept their respective organizational claims. This gave Lenin's "hards" a slight majority. The decisive split occurred over the election of the Iskra editorial board. The old editorial board contained four Martovite "softs" plus Lenin and Plekhanov. Lenin proposed that the board be reduced to three with him and Plekhanov forming a "hard" majority. This proposal was a highly emotional issue since the veterans, Axelrod and Zasulich, were sentimental favorites in the party. When Lenin's proposal carried, the Martovites refused to serve on either the editorial board or central committee.
Much acrimonious debate centered on whether Lenin had informed Martov of his plan to reduce the editorial board before the Congress, whether Martov agreed, etc. The prehistory of the editorial board fight is unclear because it involved private discussions. What is clear is that Lenin's unwillingness to compromise on the issue derived from the vote on membership criteria. It was definitely Lenin who began the factional struggle. He refused to regard the difference on membership criteria as an incidental dispute, but insisted it be made the basis for majority-minority representation on the party's leading bodies.
The period between the Second Congress and the beginning of the revolution of 1905 was marked by the erosion of the Leninist "hard" majority. Throughout this period most of Lenin's political energy was directed against those majority supporters who wanted to restore unity by capitulating to the Mensheviks, reversing the decisions of the Second Congress and liquidating the Bolshevik tendency.
The Mensheviks first counterattacked at a congress of the Foreign League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democracy in October 1903, where they secured a slight majority. When the League refused to recognize the authority of the lead¬ing bodies elected at the Second Congress, the Bolsheviks walked out. This finalized the split.
While Plekhanov supported the Bolshevik faction, he shrank from a definitive split over what appeared to be a purely organizational rather than a principled question. At a Bolshevik caucus meeting in November, he reportedly blurted out: "I cannot fire at my own comrades. Better a bullet in the head than a split" (quoted in Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: Father of Russian Marxism [1963]). He thereupon used his authority to co-opt to the Iskra editorial board the four Martovites from the old board; Lenin resigned in protest.
During 1904, the all-Bolshevik Central Committee, which Lenin joined after resigning from Iskra, followed Plekhanov's course. Lenin, believing that his supporters were stronger among the committee men in Russia than among the more intellectual exile milieu, came out for a new party congress to re-establish his majority and recapture the now-Menshevik central organ, Iskra. The Central Committee opposed a new congress, co-opted three Mensheviks and effectively expelled Lenin from that body.
In late 1904, Lenin completely broke with the official central party bodies and established a de facto Bolshevik central committee called the Bureau of Majority Committees. At the start of 1905, the Bolsheviks established their own organ, Vperyod.
The logic of the factional struggle drove the Mensheviks to the right; gradually they replicated the politics of the defeated Economists. Martov and Plekhanov wrote self-critical articles about the old Iskra, stating they had been one-sided (in other words, Leninists) in their attacks on the Economists. The organic fusion of the Mensheviks and Economists was signaled by the co-optation of A.S. Mar-tynov to the editorial board of the new Iskra.
The Leninists saw their struggle against the Mensheviks, both politically and organizationally, as a repeat of the fight of Iskraism versus Economism. One of Lenin's lieutenants, Lyadov, instructed a Bolshevik supporter in late 1904 to re-fight the campaign against Economism:
"We are not to leave the party, but to fight for all our worth.... We have to conquer Russia [i.e., the committees] despite the central institutions, and we shall do this in the same way as Iskra once did. We have to repeat the work of Iskra and bring it to completion."
—quoted in J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (1963)
By early 1905, Lenin was convinced the leading Mensheviks were incorrigible and organizationally unprincipled opportunists, and came out for a complete split. In contrast to the policy toward the Economists, Lenin opposed allowing the Menshevik leaders to participate in a new party congress, at which he intended to found a Bolshevik party:
"The [Menshevik] centres may and should be invited, but to accord them voting status is, I repeat, madness. The centres, of course, will not come to our Congress anyway; but why give them another chance to spit in our faces? Why this hypocrisy, this game of hide-and-seek? We bring the split into the open, we call the Vperyod-ists to a congress, we want to organise a Vperyod-ist party, and we break immediately any and all connections with the disorganizers—and yet we having loyalty dinned into our ears, we are asked to act as though a joint con¬gress of Iskra and Vperyod were possible." [emphasis in original]
—"Letter to A.A. Bogdanov and S.I. Gusev,"
11 February 1905
As Lenin projected, the Mensheviks boycotted the Third (all-Bolshevik) Congress held in London in April 1905 and convened their own rival gathering.
What did Leninism represent in 1904? Above all it represented a firm commitment to revolutionary social democracy, particularly the leading role of the proletarian party in the struggle against tsarist absolutism. It further represented an intransigent attitude toward demonstrated opportunists, like the Economist leaders, and a distrustful attitude toward their possible conversion to revolutionary politics. Lenin was committed to a centralized, disciplined party, and consequently intransigently hostile to the circlism-cliquism characteristic of the Russian social-democratic movement. Apart from the question of membership criteria, these differences between 1904 Bolshevism and Menshevism were difficult to express as counterposed principles. They manifested themselves over concrete organizational matters and appeared to most outsiders (like Kautsky) to represent differences in degree rather than in principle.
Trotsky's Menshevik Polemic
Among the numerous anti-Lenin diatribes in 1903-04, Trotsky's "Our Political Tasks" was much less significant than those of Axelrod, Plekhanov and Luxemburg. However, because of Trotsky's later authority as a great revolutionary, various reformists and centrists have given prominence to his 1904 polemic. Tony Cliff, longtime leader of the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party) of Britain, has devoted a whole essay to Trotsky's "prophecy" that Lenin's organizational conceptions would lead the party to "substitute itself for the working classes" ("Trotsky on Substitutionism," International Socialism, Autumn 1960; reprinted in the I.S. collection, Party and Class [London, n.d.]). In particular, such left social democrats, claiming that Trotsky foresaw that Leninism must lead to Stalinism, invariably cite the following passage:
"In the internal politics of the party, these [Leninist] methods, as we will see, lead to the party organization replacing the party itself, the central committee [replacing] the party organization and finally a dictator [replacing] the central committee." —from "Unsere politischen Aufgaben," in Leo Trotzki, Schriften zur revolutionaren Organisation (Hamburg, 1970)
Conversely, the Stalinists have exploited "Our Political Tasks" to argue that Trotsky's hostility to the Soviet bureaucracy was nothing but an expression of unre-generate Menshevism.
Apart from a large dose of subjective hostility toward Lenin motivated by a sentimental attachment to the pioneers of Russian Marxism, Trotsky's polemic, like Luxemburg's, is based on an ultra-Kautskyan conception of the party question. He sees the tasks of the party as raising the entire class to social-democratic consciousness through a lengthy, pedagogical process:
"One method consists of taking over the thinking for the proletariat, i.e., political substitution for the proletariat; the other consists of political education of the proletariat, its political mobilization, to exercise concerted pressure on the will of all political groups and parties....
"The party is based on the given level of consciousness of the proletariat, and intervenes in every great political event with the aim of shifting the line of development in the direction of the interests of the proletariat; and, even more importantly, with the aim of raising the level of consciousness, in order then to base itself on that raised
level of consciousness and again use it to further this dual aim." [emphasis in original]
Trotsky is here strongly influenced by Axelrod, frequently quoted in the polemic, who at this time came out for convening an inclusive, non-party "workers congress." This would, in effect, have liquidated the weak, fledgling RSDRP.
To postpone the revolutionary struggle for power until the entire working class has achieved socialist consciousness is to relegate it "to the Greek calends"; under capitalism, the working class in its overwhelming majority cannot completely transcend bourgeois ideological influence. The revolutionary vanguard party must lead the mass of active workers in struggle, but among these workers there are many whose socialist convictions will be partial, inconsistent and episodic.
In his major anti-Menshevik polemic of this period, "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" (May 1904), Lenin replies succinctly to the Axelrod/Trotsky position:
"The Party, as the vanguard of the working class, must not be confused, after all, with the entire class. And Comrade Axelrod is guilty of just this confusion (which is characteristic of our opportunistic Economism in general).... "We are a party of a class, and therefore almost the entire class (and in times of war, in a period of civil war, the entire class) should act under the leadership of our Party, should adhere to the Party as closely as possible. But it would be...'tailism' to think that the entire class, or almost the entire class, can ever rise, under capitalism, to the level of consciousness and activity of its vanguard, of its Social-Democratic Party." [emphasis in original]
It should be noted that Lenin's formulation of class-party relations here still does not completely break with the Kautskyan "party of the whole class" since he obviously assumes only a single party based on the proletariat.
It is not substitutionism for a revolutionary party to lead— through the trade unions, factory committees, Soviets, etc.— masses of workers who are not conscious socialists. This is precisely the task of the revolutionary vanguard. Substitutionism is when the vanguard engages in military action against the bourgeoisie without the support of the non-party masses. Substitutionism manifests itself in putschism, terrorism/ guerrillaism, dual unionism or minority attempts at general strike action (like the German March Action of 1921). Despite repeated Menshevik accusations of Blanquism, Lenin's Bolsheviks did not engage in such adventurist activities. By the eve of World War I the Bolsheviks had become the mass party of the Russian industrial proletariat, far outstripping the ill-organized, disparate Mensheviks.
In any case, those who would use the early Trotsky's polemic against Leninism must come to terms with Trotsky's own later renunciation and critique of his Menshevik and conciliationist position in those years. In My Life (1929) he wrote of the 1903 RSDRP congress:
"My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered 'moral' or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom, the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organization methods. I thought of myself as a centralist. But there is no doubt that at that time I did not fully realize what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order." Trotsky never authorized a reprinting of "Our Political Tasks," and it was explicitly not included in the Russian edition of his works published before the Stalinist usurpation.
Behind Luxemburg's Anti-Leninist Polemic
Rosa Luxemburg's "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," published in the SPD theoretical journal Neue Zelt and the Menshevik Iskra, is probably the most intrinsically significant of the anti-Lenin polemics following the 1903 split. It stands back from the immediate issues and personal recriminations of the split, and it does not engage in superficial unity mongering. Luxemburg's differences with Lenin exist both at the level of the problems, tasks and perspectives of the Russian movement and of the organizational nature of social democracy in general. In both the Russian and general cases these differences center on the nature of oppor¬tunism and how to combat it.
Their differences over social-democratic opportunism in Russia can be briefly expressed as follows. Before the 1905 Revolution, Lenin saw the main opportunist danger as adaptation to tsarist absolutism; Luxemburg saw it as the subordination of the Russian proletariat to revolutionary bourgeois democracy out of power. For Lenin, a social-democratic opportunist was a dilettante quick to make a personal peace with tsarist society, and perhaps an aspiring trade-union official. For Luxemburg, a social-democratic opportunist was a bourgeois radical demagogue actually striving for governmental power, a Russian version of the French Radical leader Georges Clemenceau, an ex-Blanquist.
For Lenin from 1901 through 1904, and for the Iskra tendency as a whole, the main expression of Russian social-democratic opportunism was Economism, an amalgam of minimalist trade-union agitation, passive adaptation to liberal tsarism, organizational localism and individualistic functioning. Luxemburg was no less opposed to pure-and-simple trade unionism than was Lenin, but evidently did not regard Economism as a serious opportunist current in Russia, as a serious contender for influence over the working class. As for the circle spirit and anarchistic individualism which Lenin took as his main enemy at the organization level, Luxemburg seemed to consider these traits an unavoidable overhead cost at the given stage of the social-democratic movement in Russia. When the socialist proletariat is small, believed Luxemburg, a loose movement of localized propaganda circles is the normal and, in a sense, healthy organizational expression of social democracy:
"How to effect a transition from the type of organization characteristic of the preparatory stage of the socialist movement—usually featured by disconnected local groups and clubs, with propaganda as a principal activity—to the unity of a large, national body, suitable for concerted political action over the entire vast territory ruled by the Russian state? That is the specific problem which the Russian Social Democracy has mulled over for some time.
"Autonomy and isolation are the most pronounced characteristics of the old organizational type. It is, therefore, understandable why the slogan of the persons who want to see an inclusive national organization should be 'Centralism!'... "The indispensable conditions for the realization of Social-Democratic centralism are: 1. The existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the political struggle. 2. The possibility for the workers to develop their own political activity through direct influence on public life, in a party press, and public congresses, etc.
"These conditions are not yet fully formed in Russia. The first—a proletarian vanguard, conscious of its class interests and capable of self-direction in political activity—is only now emerging in Russia. All efforts of socialist agitation and organization should aim to hasten the formation of such a vanguard. The second condition can be had only under a regime of political liberty." [our emphasis]
—Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy"
Luxemburg's belief in the gradual transition from a movement of localized circles to a centralized, unitary party was not only counterposed to Leninism, but logically placed her outside and to the right of the pre-split Iskra tendency as a whole.
The view expressed above is at some variance with Luxemburg's actual organizational practice in the Polish part of the Russian empire. The Luxemburg/Jogiches Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) was a very small, but highly centralized, propaganda organization. And, unlike Lenin's Bolsheviks, Luxemburg's SDKPiL made serious sectarian and ultraleft errors (see "Lenin vs. Luxemburg on the National Question," WV No. 150, 25 March 1977).
Mention of the SDKPiL is a reminder that one cannot simply take "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" at face value. Though from very different motivations, Luxemburg's Polish social democracy was just as protective of its organizational autonomy as was the Bund. The SDKPiL sent two observers to the Second RSDRP Congress, where they negotiated for broad autonomy within an all-Russian party. Lenin's advocacy of a centralized party of all social democrats in the Russian empire challenged, at least in principle, the highly valued organizational autonomy of Luxemburg's SDKPiL.
Luxemburg looked for Russian social-democratic opportunism in exactly the opposite direction than did Lenin. Luxemburg feared that the Russian social-democratic intelligentsia would give rise to a radical bourgeois party using socialist rhetoric, and thus suppress the development of political class consciousness among the Russian proletariat. With this prognosis, Luxemburg saw in Lenin's centralism, rather than in Menshevism, the most likely source of opportunism (i.e., adaptation to the bourgeoisie). Lenin's insistence on the leading role of social democracy in the struggle against absolutism and on the leading role of professional revolutionaries in the party appeared to Luxemburg (and not only to her) as characteristic of a bourgeois radical party.
In fact, it was common in Menshevik circles in this period to accuse the Leninists of being bourgeois radicals in social-democratic clothing. The leading Menshevik, Potresov, for example, likened the Bolsheviks to Clemenceau's Radicals. Luxemburg saw in Lenin's "Jacobinism" the unconscious desire of radical bourgeois intellectuals to suppress their working-class base after overthrowing tsarism and coming to power. She advocated a broad, loose social-democratic movement as a curb on radical bourgeois demagogues a la Clemenceau the ex-Blanquist:
"If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's organizational plan. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic strait jacket.... "Let us not forget that the revolution soon to break in Russia will be a bourgeois and not a proletarian revolution. This modifies radically all the conditions of proletarian struggle. The Russian intellectuals, too, will rapidly become imbued with bourgeois ideology. The Social Democracy is at present the only guide of the Russian proletariat. But on the day after the revolution, we shall see the bourgeoisie, and above all the bourgeois intellectuals, seek to use the masses as a stepping-stone to their domination.
"The game of bourgeois demagogues will be made easier if at the present stage, the spontaneous action, initiative, and political sense of the advanced sections of the working class are hindered in their development and restricted by the protectorate of an authoritarian Central Committee." [our emphasis]
—Ibid.
A central premise of Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Leninist polemic was that tsarist absolutism would soon be replaced by bourgeois democracy ("the revolution soon to break out in Russia will be bourgeois"). That is why she anticipated that radical parliamentarian demagogy would be the principal expression of social-democratic opportunism. The revolution of 1905 proved Luxemburg's prognosis wrong. The revolution demonstrated that bourgeois liberalism was totally cowardly and impotent. It also demonstrated that social democracy was the only consistently revolutionary-democratic force in the Russian empire.
During the revolution, Luxemburg condemned the Mensheviks for tailing the constitutional monarchists (the Cadets) and moved close to the Bolsheviks. Agreeing with Lenin on the leading role of the proletarian party in the anti-tsarist revolution, Luxemburg/Jogiches' SDKPiL formed an alliance with the Bolsheviks in 1906, an alliance which lasted until 1912 and gave Lenin leadership of the formally unitary RSDRP. At the Fifth RSDRP Congress in 1907, Luxemburg defended the narrowness and intransigence of the Bolsheviks, albeit with "soft" reservations:
"You comrades on the right-wing complain bitterly about the narrowness, the intolerance, the tendency toward mechanical conception in the attitudes of the Bolsheviks. And we agree with you.... But do you know what causes these unpleasant tendencies? To anyone familiar with party conditions in other countries, these tendencies are quite well known: it is the typical attitude of one section of Socialism which has to defend the independent class interests of the proletariat against another equally strong section. Rigidity is the form adopted by Social Democracy at one end when the other tends to turn into formless jelly, unable to maintain any consistent course under the pressure of events."
—quoted in J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (1966)
Liberals and social democrats have systematically suppressed reference to Luxemburg's close alliance with Bol¬shevism from the revolution of 1905 until 1912 and again from the outbreak of World War I until her assassination during the Spartakist uprising in 1919. They have, however, fully exploited her 1904 polemic in the service of anti-communism. Thus, the widely circulated Ann Arbor Paperbacks for the Study of Communism and Marxism reprinted "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" under the slanderous title "Leninism or Marxism?"
No less pernicious have been the efforts of many left-reformists and centrists to portray the Leninist democratic-centralist vanguard party as valid only for backward countries, while solidarizing with Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Bolshevik position for advanced capitalist countries. We have already noted that this was exactly the position of the reformist-workerist Tony Cliff, before "hard" Leninism became fashionable among radical youth in the late 1960s.
It is to be expected that an outright revisionist like Cliff would solidarize with Luxemburg against Lenin. What is not expected is that an ostensibly orthodox Trotskyist (i.e., Leninist) organization would adopt the "Luxemburgist" line as valid for advanced countries. Yet this is just what the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) does. In an introduction to a popular French edition of What Is To Be Done? OCI leader Jean-Jacques Marie dismisses Lenin's advocacy of a democratic-centralist vanguard as peculiar to early twentieth-century Russia, and asserts that Luxemburg's 1904 position is appropriate to an advanced country with a highly developed workers movement.
"The centralist rigidity of What Is To Be Done? is linked to the particular characteristics of the Russian proletariat; that is to say, of a nascent proletariat which had just recently come out of the countryside impregnated with the traits of the Middle Ages, lacking education, crushed by conditions of existence similar to those of the French or English proletariat at the beginning of the nineteenth century....
"The role of the revolutionary intelligentsia as a factor of organization and consciousness, such as Lenin depicted it, is thus proportional to the degree of relative backwardness of a proletariat legally deprived of any form of trade-union or political organization.
"Thus the conflict between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, appears—if you leave aside their personal traits—as the expression of the enormous difference which separated one of the most uneducated proletariats in Europe and the German proletariat, at that time the most powerful and politically most vigorous and mature in the world....
"If the struggle for the socialist revolution is international in essence, its immediate forms and also the means to lead it depend on numerous factors, among them the national conditions in which each party matures."
—introduction to Que Faire? (Paris, 1966)
The viewpoint which J.-J. Marie here attributes to Luxemburg is so diametrically opposed to her actual position it is hard to believe he has ever read "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy." As we have seen, Luxemburg's opposition to Leninist centralism for Russia was predicated precisely on the underdevelopment of the proletarian movement.
In 1904, Luxemburg was a centralizer and disciplinarian in the German party because the revisionist right was formally a minority. And this is explicitly stated in "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy": "The Social Democracy must enclose the tumult of the non-proletarian protestants against the existing society within the bounds of the revolutionary action of the proletariat.... "This is only possible if the Social Democracy already con¬tains a strong, politically educated proletarian nucleus class conscious enough to be able, as up to now in Germany, to pull along in its tow the declassed and petty-bourgeois elements that join the party. In that case, greater strictness in the application of the principle of centralization and more severe disci¬pline, specifically formulated in party bylaws, may be an effective safeguard against the opportunist danger. That is how the revolutionary socialist movement in France defended itself against the Juaresist confusion. A modification of the constitu¬tion of the German Social Democracy in that direction would be a very timely measure." [our emphasis]
Luxemburg's pressure for greater centralization in the SPD was successful at the radical-dominated 1905 Jena Congress, which adopted a genuinely centralist organizational structure. For the first time the officers of the basic party unit were made responsible to the national executive. Later on, of course, the SPD's famous centralized apparatus was used to suppress the revolutionary left led by Rosa Luxemburg.
The heart of the differences between Luxemburg and Lenin in 1904 and also later did not center on the degree of centralization, but on the nature of opportunism and how to combat it. The question of centralism and discipline derives its significance only in that context.
Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Lenin polemic was strongly conditioned by frustration at her essentially hollow victory over Bernsteinian revisionism. Revisionism was formally rejected by the SPD, the opportunists changed their tack and the party political activities continued much the same as before, in the spirit of passive expectancy. Not long after writing "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Luxemburg expressed in a letter (14 December 1904) to the Dutch left socialist Henriette Roland-Hoist her disillusionment with internal factional struggle in general:
"Opportunism is in any case a swamp plant, which develops rapidly and luxuriously in the stagnant waters of the movement; in a swift running stream it will die of itself. Here in Germany a forward motion is an urgent, burning need! And only the fewest realize it. Some fritter away their energy in petty disputes with the opportunists, others believe that the automatic, mechanical increase in numbers (at elections and in the organizations) is progress in itself!"
—quoted in Carl E. Schorske, German Social
Democracy 1905-1917(1955)
Luxemburg's belief that an upsurge of militant class struggle would naturally dispel the opportunist forces in the SPD proved very wrong. In 1905 and again in 1910 a rising line of mass agitation against restricted suffrage was effectively suppressed on the initiative of the trade-union bureaucracy. In 1910 the Neue Zeit, under Kautsky's editorship, even refused to publish Luxemburg's article advocating a general strike.
In concluding "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Luxemburg develops a theory of the inevitability of opportunism and even opportunist phases in a social-democratic party. Attempts to preserve the party against opportunism through internal organizational means will, she contends, only reduce the party to a sect. Herein lies Luxemburg's fundamental difference with Lenin in 1904 and later:
"It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of social reform.
"That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience, to hope to fix, once for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labor movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression.
"Marxist theory offers us a reliable instrument enabling us to recognize and combat typical manifestations of opportunism. But the socialist movement is a mass movement. Its perils are not the insidious machinations of individuals and groups. They arise out of unavoidable social conditions.
We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself—certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice.
"Looked at from this angle, opportunism appears to be a product and an inevitable phase of the historic development of the labor movement."
Due to attempts by semi-syndicalist and ultraleft communist elements (e.g., "council communists") to claim Rosa Luxemburg as one of their own, it is often ignored that her polemic against Lenin on the organizational question was rooted in orthodox social-democratic concepts. The above-quoted passage is ultra-Kautskyan in identifying the social-democratic party with the entire labor movement. From the premise of Kautsky's "party of the whole class," Luxemburg's logic is unassailable. Not only is there an opportunist wing of a social-democratic party, but there must be periods in which the influence of this wing is expanding.
From her German vantage point, Luxemburg saw that to form a Leninist party must mean a break with significant working-class tendencies under opportunist leadership and influence. This anti-social-democratic conclusion was blocked from Lenin's view by the unorganized state of the Russian party. In contrast to Luxemburg, Lenin was not faced with opportunist social-democratic tendencies which enjoyed a mass base. He believed the Mensheviks to be an intellectualist tendency incapable of building a mass work¬ers movement.
Kautsky/Bebel Intervene to Restore Unity
While Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Leninist polemic is today far better known, at that time the active pro-unity intervention of the SPD central leadership, Kautsky and Bebel, was more significant. It is important to consider Kautsky/Bebel's intervention in order to realize that Lenin built a programmatically homogeneous revolutionary party in Russia in the face of opposition from the leading authorities of the Socialist International.
In early 1904, one of Lenin's lieutenants, Lydin-Mandelstamm, wrote an article on the split for publication in Kautsky's Neue Zeit. Kautsky refused to publish it, and his reply to Lydin in mid-May 1904 is his earliest written statement on the split. He found the split entirely unjustified and profoundly irresponsible. He was also astute enough to recognize that it was Lenin's intransigence on the organizational question which perpetuated the split:
"Great responsibility rests upon the Russian social democracy. If it cannot unite, then it will stand before history and the international proletariat as a group of politicians which, out of personal and organizational difficulties of a very minor nature compared with its great historic task...has let slip an opportunity for striking a blow at Russian absolutism. But Lenin would bear the responsibility for having initiated this destructive discord." [our translation]
—quoted in Dietrich Geyer, "Die russische Parteispaltung im Urteil der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1903-1905," in International Review of Social History (1958)
On the substantive organizational question which led to the split, Kautsky saw "neither a principled opposition between the needs of the proletariat and intellectuals nor between democracy and dictatorship, but rather simply a question of appropriateness."
Kautsky sent a copy of his reply to Lydin to the Menshevik leadership, who rightly regarded it as support to their side. With the author's permission, it was published in the new Iskra. In a letter (4 June 1904) to Axelrod, Kautsky deepened his pro-Menshevik stance to the point of giving them advice on how to best Lenin:
"But to a great degree the differences between you and the other side seem to rest upon misunderstandings. Not between you and Lenin, that I consider out of the question, but between you and Lenin's supporters in Russia. I have at least had the opportunity of conversing with various supporters of Lenin who came from Russia and I have found among them no views which would render cooperation...impossible. Their prejudice against you seems often only to rest on misinformation. If this is so, then unification would have to be possible, over and above Lenin's head, if these elements are treated judiciously." —Ibid.
And, in fact, the Mensheviks sought, with some success, to win over the more conciliatory Bolsheviks.
A more public indication of Kautsky's anti-Lenin stance was that Neue Zeit published Luxemburg's "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" without dissociating the journal from the views expressed therein. When Lenin wrote a reply, Kautsky refused to publish it on the grounds that Neue Zeit was not the appropriate arena to fight out the RSDRP split. In a letter (27 October 1904) to Lenin,he justified publishing Luxemburg's article by asserting that:
"I did not publish Rosa Luxemburg's article because it treated
the Russian disputes but in spite of this. I published it because
it treated the organizational question theoretically, and this
question is also a subject of discussion with us in Germany.
The Russian disputes are touched on there only in a fashion
that will not draw the uninformed reader's attention to them.
[emphasis in original]
—Ibid.
Kautsky's last assertion is disingenuous.
Kautsky advised Lenin to recast his reply in more theoretical terms if he wanted it published in the German organ. So far as we know, Lenin did not reply. One presumes Lenin regarded as decisive the specifics of the RSDRP split and didn't want to be drawn into an abstract discussion on principles of organization.
In October 1904, August Bebel, the venerated chairman of the SPD, proposed to the Menshevik leadership that they call a unity conference of all the groups present at the Second Congress of the RSDRP. Shortly thereafter, the German leadership urged a far broader conference including the petty-bourgeois populist Social Revolutionaries and national-liberationist Polish Socialist Party. Thus in 1904 the German Social Democratic leadership favored a bloc, if not a party, embracing all the oppositional forces in the tsarist empire to the left of the bourgeois liberals. The Mensheviks rejected such a broad unity as opportunist. This was an early indication that the Martovites were not, as Lenin mistakenly believed, to the right of the SPD central leadership.
Kautsky believed that the Mensheviks were as desirous of restoring unity as he was. But the Mensheviks' pro-unity stance was in part a pose for foreign consumption. In theory committed to a broad, inclusive party, the Menshevik leadership did not want to be in the same organization with Lenin's "hards." In response to Bebel's proposal, they agreed to call a "unity" conference inviting the Bund, Luxemburg/Jogiches' SDKPiL and some smaller social-democratic groups. But they refused to invite the Leninists! By this time Lenin had lost the former leadership of the RSDRP and had set up the Bureau of Majority Committees.
Kautsky now criticized the Menshevik leaders as irresponsible splitters. In a letter (10 January 1905) to Axelrod, he wrote:
"I don't understand your not inviting Lenin. This may well be justified on formal grounds, but one cannot view the matter so formally. From a political standpoint the exclusion [of Lenin] from the invitation seems to me an error. Even if he does not formally represent a particular organization, still he has a great deal of support, and your task is either to win him along with his supporters or separate these supporters from him.... In the present situation, which demands a unity of all revolutionary forces, it is my view that your task is to go the utmost in con¬ciliation. If unity is then demonstrated to be impossible, then Lenin will have placed himself in a bad light, then you can proceed against him with much greater force and success than at present, where your conflict appears almost solely one sim¬ply of authority." [emphasis in original]
—Ibid.
Following the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1905, the SPD leadership once again attempted to reunite the Russian social-democratic movement. Bebel publicly offered to arbitrate the differences. Bebel's offer concluded with a paternalistic scolding of Russian Social Democracy:
"The news about this split has stirred up great confusion and definite discontent in the international social democracy and everybody expects that after a free discussion both sides will find a common basis for struggle against the common enemy."
—quoted in Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War (1940)
The Mensheviks, knowing Bebel was close to them politically, readily accepted his proposal. Lenin in effect rejected the unity proposal. In a reply (7 February 1905) to the German party chairman, he stated that he had no authority to accept the arbitration offer, which had to be put to a new party congress. He then added that in view of Kautsky's onesided intervention, "it will not surprise me if intervention on the part of representatives of the German Social Democracy encounters difficulties within our ranks."
The all-Bolshevik Third Congress in April took no position on Bebel's proposal, in effect rejecting it. The Bolsheviks' self-confident spirit and unwillingness to accept German tutelage is well expressed by the delegate Barsov in his speech on Bebel's offer:
"Our German comrades are a force, they have matured through an inexorably critical, internal struggle against all forms of opportunism at party congresses and other meetings—and we must mature in the same way in order to play our great role, independently forging our own organizations into a party, not merely ideologically but in reality.... We must become active leaders of the entire proletarian class of Russia, by uniting and organizing ourselves immediately for struggle against autocracy for the glorious future of the reign of socialism." —Ibid.
Part Three will appear on March 25, 2011
Markin comment on this series of articles:
Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.
Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
********
Markin comment on this article:
I think the Trotsky quote, from an early vocal and vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik organizational perspectives outlined by the 1903 internal party debates (and an opponent of its general political perspectives as well) for most of his early political career, kind of nicely summed up the real question. How the hell are you going to defeat the bourgeoisie and its vast resources without a strong, unified, and, yes, democratic centralist vanguard organization to counter all its obvious advantages? Tellingly, despite all the later Stalinist corruptions and distortions of Russian party (and CI) he held to the vanguard party concept for the rest of his political life after coming over to the Bolsheviks in 1917 (as did many other former opponents at that time, those who wanted to fight to the death for socialism).
As I have mentioned before although the concept of democratic centralism is a necessary component in the revolutionary struggle that concept itself is no guarantee, as we are painfully aware from the Stalinist experience, that a party (or a state apparatus, for that matter) will not degenerate into a bureaucratic malaise. With a healthy economic base, at least in America, (less need for someone to say who gets, and who does not get what-the basis for bureaucratic usurpation) that should be less of a problem. That fear, that fear of degeneration, in any case, is hardly a reason to flee from the struggle for the vanguard party, for the fight for an international party and for the struggle for socialism. American imperialism is that bad, and do not forget it.
*********
To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.
Bolshevism vs. Menshevism:The 1903 Split
The Second Congress of the RSDRP, held in Brussels and then London in July-August 1903, was to be the culmination of the Iskraist project to create a centralized party based on a comprehensive program. (In part because of repression, the formal founding congress of the RSDRP in 1898 did not change the nature of Russian Social Democracy from a move¬ment of localized propaganda circles.) The Economists were not excluded from the Congress, but it was arranged so that the Iskraists would be a decisive majority. The Iskra group accounted for about two-thirds of the Second Congress' 46 delegates. Of the remaining third, about half were anti-Iskraists. These consisted of a few prominent Economists (Martynov, Akimov) and the semi-nationalist Bund, which claimed to be the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat and demanded a federated party.
In the first phase of the Congress, a solid Iskraist majority carried its line. The Iskraist group, including future Mensheviks, voted unanimously for a program which included elements later very much characteristic of Leninism. For example, the section "On the Trade Union Struggle" contains the following passage:
"In so far as this struggle develops in isolation from the political struggle of the proletariat led by the Social Democratic Party, it leads to the fragmentation of the proletarian forces and to subordination of the workers' movement to the interests of the propertied classes."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Resolutions and Documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
However, beneath the seemingly solid front of the Iskra group were very considerable tensions. One such potential polarity was between Lenin and Martov, who was consi¬tently more conciliatory to the non- and anti-Iskraist elements of Russian Social Democracy. Even before the Congress, Martov was generally known as a "soft" Iskraist and Lenin as a "hard." Consequently, those Iskra supporters who favored a greater role for non-Iskraists in a unitary party looked to Martov as their natural leader; those wanting the Iskraists to keep a tight control of the party looked to Lenin.
The tension between Lenin's "hards" and Martov's "softs" manifested itself in a series of minor disputes from the very beginning of the Congress. As is well known, this tension exploded over the first paragraph of the rules which defined membership. Martov's draft defined a member as one who "renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations." Lenin's membership criterion was "by personal participation in one of the Party organizations."
Lenin's narrower definition of membership was motivated by both a general desire to exclude opportunists (who were less likely to accept the rigors and dangers of full organizational participation) and by a desire to weed out dilettantes who had been attracted to Russian Social Democracy pre¬cisely because of its loose circle nature. Interestingly, it was Plekhanov who stressed the anti-opportunist aspect of a narrower party, while Lenin emphasized more practical, conjunctural considerations. Here is the heart of Plekhanov's argument:
"Many of the intelligentsia will fear to enter, contaminated as they are with bourgeois individualism; but this is all to the good, since those bourgeois individuals usually constitute representatives of all kinds of opportunism. The opponents of opportunism should therefore vote for Lenin's project, which closes the door to its penetration into the party."
—quoted in Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (1955)
Lenin argued on somewhat different grounds:
"The root of the mistake made by those who stand for Martov's formulation is that they not only ignore one of the main evils of our Party life, but even sanctify it. The evil is that, at a time when political discontent is almost universal, when conditions require our work to be carried out in complete secrecy, and when most of our activities have to be confined to limited, secret circles and even to private meetings, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible in fact, for us to distinguish those who only talk from those who do the work. There is hardly another country in the world where the jumbling of these two categories is as common and as productive of such boundless confusion as in Russia.... It would be better if ten who do the work should not call themselves Party members...than that one who only talks should have the right and opportunity to be a Party member. That is a principle which seems to me indis¬putable, and which compels me to fight against Martov." [our emphasis]
—"Second Speech in the Discussion on the Party Rules" (2 (15) August 1903)
With the support of the Economists, Bundists and centrists, Martov's formulation carried. However, the Economists and Bundists soon thereafter quit the Congress when it refused to accept their respective organizational claims. This gave Lenin's "hards" a slight majority. The decisive split occurred over the election of the Iskra editorial board. The old editorial board contained four Martovite "softs" plus Lenin and Plekhanov. Lenin proposed that the board be reduced to three with him and Plekhanov forming a "hard" majority. This proposal was a highly emotional issue since the veterans, Axelrod and Zasulich, were sentimental favorites in the party. When Lenin's proposal carried, the Martovites refused to serve on either the editorial board or central committee.
Much acrimonious debate centered on whether Lenin had informed Martov of his plan to reduce the editorial board before the Congress, whether Martov agreed, etc. The prehistory of the editorial board fight is unclear because it involved private discussions. What is clear is that Lenin's unwillingness to compromise on the issue derived from the vote on membership criteria. It was definitely Lenin who began the factional struggle. He refused to regard the difference on membership criteria as an incidental dispute, but insisted it be made the basis for majority-minority representation on the party's leading bodies.
The period between the Second Congress and the beginning of the revolution of 1905 was marked by the erosion of the Leninist "hard" majority. Throughout this period most of Lenin's political energy was directed against those majority supporters who wanted to restore unity by capitulating to the Mensheviks, reversing the decisions of the Second Congress and liquidating the Bolshevik tendency.
The Mensheviks first counterattacked at a congress of the Foreign League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democracy in October 1903, where they secured a slight majority. When the League refused to recognize the authority of the lead¬ing bodies elected at the Second Congress, the Bolsheviks walked out. This finalized the split.
While Plekhanov supported the Bolshevik faction, he shrank from a definitive split over what appeared to be a purely organizational rather than a principled question. At a Bolshevik caucus meeting in November, he reportedly blurted out: "I cannot fire at my own comrades. Better a bullet in the head than a split" (quoted in Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: Father of Russian Marxism [1963]). He thereupon used his authority to co-opt to the Iskra editorial board the four Martovites from the old board; Lenin resigned in protest.
During 1904, the all-Bolshevik Central Committee, which Lenin joined after resigning from Iskra, followed Plekhanov's course. Lenin, believing that his supporters were stronger among the committee men in Russia than among the more intellectual exile milieu, came out for a new party congress to re-establish his majority and recapture the now-Menshevik central organ, Iskra. The Central Committee opposed a new congress, co-opted three Mensheviks and effectively expelled Lenin from that body.
In late 1904, Lenin completely broke with the official central party bodies and established a de facto Bolshevik central committee called the Bureau of Majority Committees. At the start of 1905, the Bolsheviks established their own organ, Vperyod.
The logic of the factional struggle drove the Mensheviks to the right; gradually they replicated the politics of the defeated Economists. Martov and Plekhanov wrote self-critical articles about the old Iskra, stating they had been one-sided (in other words, Leninists) in their attacks on the Economists. The organic fusion of the Mensheviks and Economists was signaled by the co-optation of A.S. Mar-tynov to the editorial board of the new Iskra.
The Leninists saw their struggle against the Mensheviks, both politically and organizationally, as a repeat of the fight of Iskraism versus Economism. One of Lenin's lieutenants, Lyadov, instructed a Bolshevik supporter in late 1904 to re-fight the campaign against Economism:
"We are not to leave the party, but to fight for all our worth.... We have to conquer Russia [i.e., the committees] despite the central institutions, and we shall do this in the same way as Iskra once did. We have to repeat the work of Iskra and bring it to completion."
—quoted in J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (1963)
By early 1905, Lenin was convinced the leading Mensheviks were incorrigible and organizationally unprincipled opportunists, and came out for a complete split. In contrast to the policy toward the Economists, Lenin opposed allowing the Menshevik leaders to participate in a new party congress, at which he intended to found a Bolshevik party:
"The [Menshevik] centres may and should be invited, but to accord them voting status is, I repeat, madness. The centres, of course, will not come to our Congress anyway; but why give them another chance to spit in our faces? Why this hypocrisy, this game of hide-and-seek? We bring the split into the open, we call the Vperyod-ists to a congress, we want to organise a Vperyod-ist party, and we break immediately any and all connections with the disorganizers—and yet we having loyalty dinned into our ears, we are asked to act as though a joint con¬gress of Iskra and Vperyod were possible." [emphasis in original]
—"Letter to A.A. Bogdanov and S.I. Gusev,"
11 February 1905
As Lenin projected, the Mensheviks boycotted the Third (all-Bolshevik) Congress held in London in April 1905 and convened their own rival gathering.
What did Leninism represent in 1904? Above all it represented a firm commitment to revolutionary social democracy, particularly the leading role of the proletarian party in the struggle against tsarist absolutism. It further represented an intransigent attitude toward demonstrated opportunists, like the Economist leaders, and a distrustful attitude toward their possible conversion to revolutionary politics. Lenin was committed to a centralized, disciplined party, and consequently intransigently hostile to the circlism-cliquism characteristic of the Russian social-democratic movement. Apart from the question of membership criteria, these differences between 1904 Bolshevism and Menshevism were difficult to express as counterposed principles. They manifested themselves over concrete organizational matters and appeared to most outsiders (like Kautsky) to represent differences in degree rather than in principle.
Trotsky's Menshevik Polemic
Among the numerous anti-Lenin diatribes in 1903-04, Trotsky's "Our Political Tasks" was much less significant than those of Axelrod, Plekhanov and Luxemburg. However, because of Trotsky's later authority as a great revolutionary, various reformists and centrists have given prominence to his 1904 polemic. Tony Cliff, longtime leader of the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party) of Britain, has devoted a whole essay to Trotsky's "prophecy" that Lenin's organizational conceptions would lead the party to "substitute itself for the working classes" ("Trotsky on Substitutionism," International Socialism, Autumn 1960; reprinted in the I.S. collection, Party and Class [London, n.d.]). In particular, such left social democrats, claiming that Trotsky foresaw that Leninism must lead to Stalinism, invariably cite the following passage:
"In the internal politics of the party, these [Leninist] methods, as we will see, lead to the party organization replacing the party itself, the central committee [replacing] the party organization and finally a dictator [replacing] the central committee." —from "Unsere politischen Aufgaben," in Leo Trotzki, Schriften zur revolutionaren Organisation (Hamburg, 1970)
Conversely, the Stalinists have exploited "Our Political Tasks" to argue that Trotsky's hostility to the Soviet bureaucracy was nothing but an expression of unre-generate Menshevism.
Apart from a large dose of subjective hostility toward Lenin motivated by a sentimental attachment to the pioneers of Russian Marxism, Trotsky's polemic, like Luxemburg's, is based on an ultra-Kautskyan conception of the party question. He sees the tasks of the party as raising the entire class to social-democratic consciousness through a lengthy, pedagogical process:
"One method consists of taking over the thinking for the proletariat, i.e., political substitution for the proletariat; the other consists of political education of the proletariat, its political mobilization, to exercise concerted pressure on the will of all political groups and parties....
"The party is based on the given level of consciousness of the proletariat, and intervenes in every great political event with the aim of shifting the line of development in the direction of the interests of the proletariat; and, even more importantly, with the aim of raising the level of consciousness, in order then to base itself on that raised
level of consciousness and again use it to further this dual aim." [emphasis in original]
Trotsky is here strongly influenced by Axelrod, frequently quoted in the polemic, who at this time came out for convening an inclusive, non-party "workers congress." This would, in effect, have liquidated the weak, fledgling RSDRP.
To postpone the revolutionary struggle for power until the entire working class has achieved socialist consciousness is to relegate it "to the Greek calends"; under capitalism, the working class in its overwhelming majority cannot completely transcend bourgeois ideological influence. The revolutionary vanguard party must lead the mass of active workers in struggle, but among these workers there are many whose socialist convictions will be partial, inconsistent and episodic.
In his major anti-Menshevik polemic of this period, "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" (May 1904), Lenin replies succinctly to the Axelrod/Trotsky position:
"The Party, as the vanguard of the working class, must not be confused, after all, with the entire class. And Comrade Axelrod is guilty of just this confusion (which is characteristic of our opportunistic Economism in general).... "We are a party of a class, and therefore almost the entire class (and in times of war, in a period of civil war, the entire class) should act under the leadership of our Party, should adhere to the Party as closely as possible. But it would be...'tailism' to think that the entire class, or almost the entire class, can ever rise, under capitalism, to the level of consciousness and activity of its vanguard, of its Social-Democratic Party." [emphasis in original]
It should be noted that Lenin's formulation of class-party relations here still does not completely break with the Kautskyan "party of the whole class" since he obviously assumes only a single party based on the proletariat.
It is not substitutionism for a revolutionary party to lead— through the trade unions, factory committees, Soviets, etc.— masses of workers who are not conscious socialists. This is precisely the task of the revolutionary vanguard. Substitutionism is when the vanguard engages in military action against the bourgeoisie without the support of the non-party masses. Substitutionism manifests itself in putschism, terrorism/ guerrillaism, dual unionism or minority attempts at general strike action (like the German March Action of 1921). Despite repeated Menshevik accusations of Blanquism, Lenin's Bolsheviks did not engage in such adventurist activities. By the eve of World War I the Bolsheviks had become the mass party of the Russian industrial proletariat, far outstripping the ill-organized, disparate Mensheviks.
In any case, those who would use the early Trotsky's polemic against Leninism must come to terms with Trotsky's own later renunciation and critique of his Menshevik and conciliationist position in those years. In My Life (1929) he wrote of the 1903 RSDRP congress:
"My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered 'moral' or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom, the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organization methods. I thought of myself as a centralist. But there is no doubt that at that time I did not fully realize what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order." Trotsky never authorized a reprinting of "Our Political Tasks," and it was explicitly not included in the Russian edition of his works published before the Stalinist usurpation.
Behind Luxemburg's Anti-Leninist Polemic
Rosa Luxemburg's "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," published in the SPD theoretical journal Neue Zelt and the Menshevik Iskra, is probably the most intrinsically significant of the anti-Lenin polemics following the 1903 split. It stands back from the immediate issues and personal recriminations of the split, and it does not engage in superficial unity mongering. Luxemburg's differences with Lenin exist both at the level of the problems, tasks and perspectives of the Russian movement and of the organizational nature of social democracy in general. In both the Russian and general cases these differences center on the nature of oppor¬tunism and how to combat it.
Their differences over social-democratic opportunism in Russia can be briefly expressed as follows. Before the 1905 Revolution, Lenin saw the main opportunist danger as adaptation to tsarist absolutism; Luxemburg saw it as the subordination of the Russian proletariat to revolutionary bourgeois democracy out of power. For Lenin, a social-democratic opportunist was a dilettante quick to make a personal peace with tsarist society, and perhaps an aspiring trade-union official. For Luxemburg, a social-democratic opportunist was a bourgeois radical demagogue actually striving for governmental power, a Russian version of the French Radical leader Georges Clemenceau, an ex-Blanquist.
For Lenin from 1901 through 1904, and for the Iskra tendency as a whole, the main expression of Russian social-democratic opportunism was Economism, an amalgam of minimalist trade-union agitation, passive adaptation to liberal tsarism, organizational localism and individualistic functioning. Luxemburg was no less opposed to pure-and-simple trade unionism than was Lenin, but evidently did not regard Economism as a serious opportunist current in Russia, as a serious contender for influence over the working class. As for the circle spirit and anarchistic individualism which Lenin took as his main enemy at the organization level, Luxemburg seemed to consider these traits an unavoidable overhead cost at the given stage of the social-democratic movement in Russia. When the socialist proletariat is small, believed Luxemburg, a loose movement of localized propaganda circles is the normal and, in a sense, healthy organizational expression of social democracy:
"How to effect a transition from the type of organization characteristic of the preparatory stage of the socialist movement—usually featured by disconnected local groups and clubs, with propaganda as a principal activity—to the unity of a large, national body, suitable for concerted political action over the entire vast territory ruled by the Russian state? That is the specific problem which the Russian Social Democracy has mulled over for some time.
"Autonomy and isolation are the most pronounced characteristics of the old organizational type. It is, therefore, understandable why the slogan of the persons who want to see an inclusive national organization should be 'Centralism!'... "The indispensable conditions for the realization of Social-Democratic centralism are: 1. The existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the political struggle. 2. The possibility for the workers to develop their own political activity through direct influence on public life, in a party press, and public congresses, etc.
"These conditions are not yet fully formed in Russia. The first—a proletarian vanguard, conscious of its class interests and capable of self-direction in political activity—is only now emerging in Russia. All efforts of socialist agitation and organization should aim to hasten the formation of such a vanguard. The second condition can be had only under a regime of political liberty." [our emphasis]
—Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy"
Luxemburg's belief in the gradual transition from a movement of localized circles to a centralized, unitary party was not only counterposed to Leninism, but logically placed her outside and to the right of the pre-split Iskra tendency as a whole.
The view expressed above is at some variance with Luxemburg's actual organizational practice in the Polish part of the Russian empire. The Luxemburg/Jogiches Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) was a very small, but highly centralized, propaganda organization. And, unlike Lenin's Bolsheviks, Luxemburg's SDKPiL made serious sectarian and ultraleft errors (see "Lenin vs. Luxemburg on the National Question," WV No. 150, 25 March 1977).
Mention of the SDKPiL is a reminder that one cannot simply take "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" at face value. Though from very different motivations, Luxemburg's Polish social democracy was just as protective of its organizational autonomy as was the Bund. The SDKPiL sent two observers to the Second RSDRP Congress, where they negotiated for broad autonomy within an all-Russian party. Lenin's advocacy of a centralized party of all social democrats in the Russian empire challenged, at least in principle, the highly valued organizational autonomy of Luxemburg's SDKPiL.
Luxemburg looked for Russian social-democratic opportunism in exactly the opposite direction than did Lenin. Luxemburg feared that the Russian social-democratic intelligentsia would give rise to a radical bourgeois party using socialist rhetoric, and thus suppress the development of political class consciousness among the Russian proletariat. With this prognosis, Luxemburg saw in Lenin's centralism, rather than in Menshevism, the most likely source of opportunism (i.e., adaptation to the bourgeoisie). Lenin's insistence on the leading role of social democracy in the struggle against absolutism and on the leading role of professional revolutionaries in the party appeared to Luxemburg (and not only to her) as characteristic of a bourgeois radical party.
In fact, it was common in Menshevik circles in this period to accuse the Leninists of being bourgeois radicals in social-democratic clothing. The leading Menshevik, Potresov, for example, likened the Bolsheviks to Clemenceau's Radicals. Luxemburg saw in Lenin's "Jacobinism" the unconscious desire of radical bourgeois intellectuals to suppress their working-class base after overthrowing tsarism and coming to power. She advocated a broad, loose social-democratic movement as a curb on radical bourgeois demagogues a la Clemenceau the ex-Blanquist:
"If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's organizational plan. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic strait jacket.... "Let us not forget that the revolution soon to break in Russia will be a bourgeois and not a proletarian revolution. This modifies radically all the conditions of proletarian struggle. The Russian intellectuals, too, will rapidly become imbued with bourgeois ideology. The Social Democracy is at present the only guide of the Russian proletariat. But on the day after the revolution, we shall see the bourgeoisie, and above all the bourgeois intellectuals, seek to use the masses as a stepping-stone to their domination.
"The game of bourgeois demagogues will be made easier if at the present stage, the spontaneous action, initiative, and political sense of the advanced sections of the working class are hindered in their development and restricted by the protectorate of an authoritarian Central Committee." [our emphasis]
—Ibid.
A central premise of Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Leninist polemic was that tsarist absolutism would soon be replaced by bourgeois democracy ("the revolution soon to break out in Russia will be bourgeois"). That is why she anticipated that radical parliamentarian demagogy would be the principal expression of social-democratic opportunism. The revolution of 1905 proved Luxemburg's prognosis wrong. The revolution demonstrated that bourgeois liberalism was totally cowardly and impotent. It also demonstrated that social democracy was the only consistently revolutionary-democratic force in the Russian empire.
During the revolution, Luxemburg condemned the Mensheviks for tailing the constitutional monarchists (the Cadets) and moved close to the Bolsheviks. Agreeing with Lenin on the leading role of the proletarian party in the anti-tsarist revolution, Luxemburg/Jogiches' SDKPiL formed an alliance with the Bolsheviks in 1906, an alliance which lasted until 1912 and gave Lenin leadership of the formally unitary RSDRP. At the Fifth RSDRP Congress in 1907, Luxemburg defended the narrowness and intransigence of the Bolsheviks, albeit with "soft" reservations:
"You comrades on the right-wing complain bitterly about the narrowness, the intolerance, the tendency toward mechanical conception in the attitudes of the Bolsheviks. And we agree with you.... But do you know what causes these unpleasant tendencies? To anyone familiar with party conditions in other countries, these tendencies are quite well known: it is the typical attitude of one section of Socialism which has to defend the independent class interests of the proletariat against another equally strong section. Rigidity is the form adopted by Social Democracy at one end when the other tends to turn into formless jelly, unable to maintain any consistent course under the pressure of events."
—quoted in J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (1966)
Liberals and social democrats have systematically suppressed reference to Luxemburg's close alliance with Bol¬shevism from the revolution of 1905 until 1912 and again from the outbreak of World War I until her assassination during the Spartakist uprising in 1919. They have, however, fully exploited her 1904 polemic in the service of anti-communism. Thus, the widely circulated Ann Arbor Paperbacks for the Study of Communism and Marxism reprinted "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" under the slanderous title "Leninism or Marxism?"
No less pernicious have been the efforts of many left-reformists and centrists to portray the Leninist democratic-centralist vanguard party as valid only for backward countries, while solidarizing with Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Bolshevik position for advanced capitalist countries. We have already noted that this was exactly the position of the reformist-workerist Tony Cliff, before "hard" Leninism became fashionable among radical youth in the late 1960s.
It is to be expected that an outright revisionist like Cliff would solidarize with Luxemburg against Lenin. What is not expected is that an ostensibly orthodox Trotskyist (i.e., Leninist) organization would adopt the "Luxemburgist" line as valid for advanced countries. Yet this is just what the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) does. In an introduction to a popular French edition of What Is To Be Done? OCI leader Jean-Jacques Marie dismisses Lenin's advocacy of a democratic-centralist vanguard as peculiar to early twentieth-century Russia, and asserts that Luxemburg's 1904 position is appropriate to an advanced country with a highly developed workers movement.
"The centralist rigidity of What Is To Be Done? is linked to the particular characteristics of the Russian proletariat; that is to say, of a nascent proletariat which had just recently come out of the countryside impregnated with the traits of the Middle Ages, lacking education, crushed by conditions of existence similar to those of the French or English proletariat at the beginning of the nineteenth century....
"The role of the revolutionary intelligentsia as a factor of organization and consciousness, such as Lenin depicted it, is thus proportional to the degree of relative backwardness of a proletariat legally deprived of any form of trade-union or political organization.
"Thus the conflict between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, appears—if you leave aside their personal traits—as the expression of the enormous difference which separated one of the most uneducated proletariats in Europe and the German proletariat, at that time the most powerful and politically most vigorous and mature in the world....
"If the struggle for the socialist revolution is international in essence, its immediate forms and also the means to lead it depend on numerous factors, among them the national conditions in which each party matures."
—introduction to Que Faire? (Paris, 1966)
The viewpoint which J.-J. Marie here attributes to Luxemburg is so diametrically opposed to her actual position it is hard to believe he has ever read "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy." As we have seen, Luxemburg's opposition to Leninist centralism for Russia was predicated precisely on the underdevelopment of the proletarian movement.
In 1904, Luxemburg was a centralizer and disciplinarian in the German party because the revisionist right was formally a minority. And this is explicitly stated in "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy": "The Social Democracy must enclose the tumult of the non-proletarian protestants against the existing society within the bounds of the revolutionary action of the proletariat.... "This is only possible if the Social Democracy already con¬tains a strong, politically educated proletarian nucleus class conscious enough to be able, as up to now in Germany, to pull along in its tow the declassed and petty-bourgeois elements that join the party. In that case, greater strictness in the application of the principle of centralization and more severe disci¬pline, specifically formulated in party bylaws, may be an effective safeguard against the opportunist danger. That is how the revolutionary socialist movement in France defended itself against the Juaresist confusion. A modification of the constitu¬tion of the German Social Democracy in that direction would be a very timely measure." [our emphasis]
Luxemburg's pressure for greater centralization in the SPD was successful at the radical-dominated 1905 Jena Congress, which adopted a genuinely centralist organizational structure. For the first time the officers of the basic party unit were made responsible to the national executive. Later on, of course, the SPD's famous centralized apparatus was used to suppress the revolutionary left led by Rosa Luxemburg.
The heart of the differences between Luxemburg and Lenin in 1904 and also later did not center on the degree of centralization, but on the nature of opportunism and how to combat it. The question of centralism and discipline derives its significance only in that context.
Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Lenin polemic was strongly conditioned by frustration at her essentially hollow victory over Bernsteinian revisionism. Revisionism was formally rejected by the SPD, the opportunists changed their tack and the party political activities continued much the same as before, in the spirit of passive expectancy. Not long after writing "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Luxemburg expressed in a letter (14 December 1904) to the Dutch left socialist Henriette Roland-Hoist her disillusionment with internal factional struggle in general:
"Opportunism is in any case a swamp plant, which develops rapidly and luxuriously in the stagnant waters of the movement; in a swift running stream it will die of itself. Here in Germany a forward motion is an urgent, burning need! And only the fewest realize it. Some fritter away their energy in petty disputes with the opportunists, others believe that the automatic, mechanical increase in numbers (at elections and in the organizations) is progress in itself!"
—quoted in Carl E. Schorske, German Social
Democracy 1905-1917(1955)
Luxemburg's belief that an upsurge of militant class struggle would naturally dispel the opportunist forces in the SPD proved very wrong. In 1905 and again in 1910 a rising line of mass agitation against restricted suffrage was effectively suppressed on the initiative of the trade-union bureaucracy. In 1910 the Neue Zeit, under Kautsky's editorship, even refused to publish Luxemburg's article advocating a general strike.
In concluding "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Luxemburg develops a theory of the inevitability of opportunism and even opportunist phases in a social-democratic party. Attempts to preserve the party against opportunism through internal organizational means will, she contends, only reduce the party to a sect. Herein lies Luxemburg's fundamental difference with Lenin in 1904 and later:
"It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of social reform.
"That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience, to hope to fix, once for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labor movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression.
"Marxist theory offers us a reliable instrument enabling us to recognize and combat typical manifestations of opportunism. But the socialist movement is a mass movement. Its perils are not the insidious machinations of individuals and groups. They arise out of unavoidable social conditions.
We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself—certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice.
"Looked at from this angle, opportunism appears to be a product and an inevitable phase of the historic development of the labor movement."
Due to attempts by semi-syndicalist and ultraleft communist elements (e.g., "council communists") to claim Rosa Luxemburg as one of their own, it is often ignored that her polemic against Lenin on the organizational question was rooted in orthodox social-democratic concepts. The above-quoted passage is ultra-Kautskyan in identifying the social-democratic party with the entire labor movement. From the premise of Kautsky's "party of the whole class," Luxemburg's logic is unassailable. Not only is there an opportunist wing of a social-democratic party, but there must be periods in which the influence of this wing is expanding.
From her German vantage point, Luxemburg saw that to form a Leninist party must mean a break with significant working-class tendencies under opportunist leadership and influence. This anti-social-democratic conclusion was blocked from Lenin's view by the unorganized state of the Russian party. In contrast to Luxemburg, Lenin was not faced with opportunist social-democratic tendencies which enjoyed a mass base. He believed the Mensheviks to be an intellectualist tendency incapable of building a mass work¬ers movement.
Kautsky/Bebel Intervene to Restore Unity
While Luxemburg's 1904 anti-Leninist polemic is today far better known, at that time the active pro-unity intervention of the SPD central leadership, Kautsky and Bebel, was more significant. It is important to consider Kautsky/Bebel's intervention in order to realize that Lenin built a programmatically homogeneous revolutionary party in Russia in the face of opposition from the leading authorities of the Socialist International.
In early 1904, one of Lenin's lieutenants, Lydin-Mandelstamm, wrote an article on the split for publication in Kautsky's Neue Zeit. Kautsky refused to publish it, and his reply to Lydin in mid-May 1904 is his earliest written statement on the split. He found the split entirely unjustified and profoundly irresponsible. He was also astute enough to recognize that it was Lenin's intransigence on the organizational question which perpetuated the split:
"Great responsibility rests upon the Russian social democracy. If it cannot unite, then it will stand before history and the international proletariat as a group of politicians which, out of personal and organizational difficulties of a very minor nature compared with its great historic task...has let slip an opportunity for striking a blow at Russian absolutism. But Lenin would bear the responsibility for having initiated this destructive discord." [our translation]
—quoted in Dietrich Geyer, "Die russische Parteispaltung im Urteil der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1903-1905," in International Review of Social History (1958)
On the substantive organizational question which led to the split, Kautsky saw "neither a principled opposition between the needs of the proletariat and intellectuals nor between democracy and dictatorship, but rather simply a question of appropriateness."
Kautsky sent a copy of his reply to Lydin to the Menshevik leadership, who rightly regarded it as support to their side. With the author's permission, it was published in the new Iskra. In a letter (4 June 1904) to Axelrod, Kautsky deepened his pro-Menshevik stance to the point of giving them advice on how to best Lenin:
"But to a great degree the differences between you and the other side seem to rest upon misunderstandings. Not between you and Lenin, that I consider out of the question, but between you and Lenin's supporters in Russia. I have at least had the opportunity of conversing with various supporters of Lenin who came from Russia and I have found among them no views which would render cooperation...impossible. Their prejudice against you seems often only to rest on misinformation. If this is so, then unification would have to be possible, over and above Lenin's head, if these elements are treated judiciously." —Ibid.
And, in fact, the Mensheviks sought, with some success, to win over the more conciliatory Bolsheviks.
A more public indication of Kautsky's anti-Lenin stance was that Neue Zeit published Luxemburg's "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" without dissociating the journal from the views expressed therein. When Lenin wrote a reply, Kautsky refused to publish it on the grounds that Neue Zeit was not the appropriate arena to fight out the RSDRP split. In a letter (27 October 1904) to Lenin,he justified publishing Luxemburg's article by asserting that:
"I did not publish Rosa Luxemburg's article because it treated
the Russian disputes but in spite of this. I published it because
it treated the organizational question theoretically, and this
question is also a subject of discussion with us in Germany.
The Russian disputes are touched on there only in a fashion
that will not draw the uninformed reader's attention to them.
[emphasis in original]
—Ibid.
Kautsky's last assertion is disingenuous.
Kautsky advised Lenin to recast his reply in more theoretical terms if he wanted it published in the German organ. So far as we know, Lenin did not reply. One presumes Lenin regarded as decisive the specifics of the RSDRP split and didn't want to be drawn into an abstract discussion on principles of organization.
In October 1904, August Bebel, the venerated chairman of the SPD, proposed to the Menshevik leadership that they call a unity conference of all the groups present at the Second Congress of the RSDRP. Shortly thereafter, the German leadership urged a far broader conference including the petty-bourgeois populist Social Revolutionaries and national-liberationist Polish Socialist Party. Thus in 1904 the German Social Democratic leadership favored a bloc, if not a party, embracing all the oppositional forces in the tsarist empire to the left of the bourgeois liberals. The Mensheviks rejected such a broad unity as opportunist. This was an early indication that the Martovites were not, as Lenin mistakenly believed, to the right of the SPD central leadership.
Kautsky believed that the Mensheviks were as desirous of restoring unity as he was. But the Mensheviks' pro-unity stance was in part a pose for foreign consumption. In theory committed to a broad, inclusive party, the Menshevik leadership did not want to be in the same organization with Lenin's "hards." In response to Bebel's proposal, they agreed to call a "unity" conference inviting the Bund, Luxemburg/Jogiches' SDKPiL and some smaller social-democratic groups. But they refused to invite the Leninists! By this time Lenin had lost the former leadership of the RSDRP and had set up the Bureau of Majority Committees.
Kautsky now criticized the Menshevik leaders as irresponsible splitters. In a letter (10 January 1905) to Axelrod, he wrote:
"I don't understand your not inviting Lenin. This may well be justified on formal grounds, but one cannot view the matter so formally. From a political standpoint the exclusion [of Lenin] from the invitation seems to me an error. Even if he does not formally represent a particular organization, still he has a great deal of support, and your task is either to win him along with his supporters or separate these supporters from him.... In the present situation, which demands a unity of all revolutionary forces, it is my view that your task is to go the utmost in con¬ciliation. If unity is then demonstrated to be impossible, then Lenin will have placed himself in a bad light, then you can proceed against him with much greater force and success than at present, where your conflict appears almost solely one sim¬ply of authority." [emphasis in original]
—Ibid.
Following the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1905, the SPD leadership once again attempted to reunite the Russian social-democratic movement. Bebel publicly offered to arbitrate the differences. Bebel's offer concluded with a paternalistic scolding of Russian Social Democracy:
"The news about this split has stirred up great confusion and definite discontent in the international social democracy and everybody expects that after a free discussion both sides will find a common basis for struggle against the common enemy."
—quoted in Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War (1940)
The Mensheviks, knowing Bebel was close to them politically, readily accepted his proposal. Lenin in effect rejected the unity proposal. In a reply (7 February 1905) to the German party chairman, he stated that he had no authority to accept the arbitration offer, which had to be put to a new party congress. He then added that in view of Kautsky's onesided intervention, "it will not surprise me if intervention on the part of representatives of the German Social Democracy encounters difficulties within our ranks."
The all-Bolshevik Third Congress in April took no position on Bebel's proposal, in effect rejecting it. The Bolsheviks' self-confident spirit and unwillingness to accept German tutelage is well expressed by the delegate Barsov in his speech on Bebel's offer:
"Our German comrades are a force, they have matured through an inexorably critical, internal struggle against all forms of opportunism at party congresses and other meetings—and we must mature in the same way in order to play our great role, independently forging our own organizations into a party, not merely ideologically but in reality.... We must become active leaders of the entire proletarian class of Russia, by uniting and organizing ourselves immediately for struggle against autocracy for the glorious future of the reign of socialism." —Ibid.
Part Three will appear on March 25, 2011
***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Juke Box Cash-In
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Jerry Lee Lewis performing Breathless to give a little flavor of the early 1960s American teen angst night.
Markin comment:
Frankie, Frankie, king of the old North Adamsville neighborhood, Frankie, king hell king, Frankie, king arbiter of the teen social mores, was the alpha and omega. Or that is what his relentlessly self- promoted image would have you believe. Most of it was strictly “flak” and now that we have some serious distance of time and space to shield us from retribution it can be safely told that a lot of this “mystique”, this Frankie, king of the hill, mystique, was made up by me to enhance his authority. Nothing wrong with that kings, and lesser kings and, hell, just average jacks and jills have been using this gag for centuries. What is not a gag, what is not “flak” is what I have to tell you here.
Frankie and I, of course, if you have been paying attention went back to old North Adamsville middle school days and although we had some tight moments old king Frankie, giving the devil his due, guided me fairly well through the intricacies of, well, ah, girls, girlish ways, and girlish charms. No question that I would have been left to dry out, alone, in that great teenage angst night if not for my brother, Frankie. And I’ll just give you one example, and you can judge for yourself. Okay.
I was just the other day telling someone about how in the great 1960s teen night a lot of our time, our waiting around for something, anything to happen time, was spent around places like pizza parlors, drugstore soda fountains, and corner mom and pop variety stores throwing coins into the old jukebox to play the latest “hot’ song for the umpteenth time (and then discard them, most of them anyway, after a few days). This is the scene that Frankie ruled over wherever he set up his throne. I was also telling that person about a little “trick” that I used to use when I was, as I usually was, chronically low on funds to feed the machine.
See, part of that waiting around for something, anything to happen, a big part, was hoping, sometimes hoping against hope, that some interesting looking frail (girl in the old neighborhood terminology, boy old neighborhood terminology that is, first used by Frankie, and then picked up by everyone else) would come walking through that door. And, especially on those no dough days, would put some coins in that old jukebox machine. I swear, I swear on anything, that girls, girls, if you can believe this, always seemed to have dough, at least coin dough, in those days to play their favorite songs.
So here is the trick part, and see it involves a little understanding of human psychology too, girl human psychology at that. Okay, say, for a quarter you got five selections on the juke box. Well, the girl, almost any girl that you could name, would have a first pick set, some boy romance thing, and the second one too, maybe a special old flame tryst that still hadn’t burned out. But, see after that, and this is true I swear, they would get fidgety about the selections. And, boy, that is where you made your move. You’d chime up with some song that was on your “hot” list like Save the Last Dance for Me, or some other moody thing and, presto, she hit the buttons for you.
That choice by you rather than, let’s say Breathless by Jerry Lee Lewis which maybe was your real “hot” choice told her you were a sensitive guy and worthy of a few minutes of her time. So you got your song, you got to talk to some interesting frail (you remember who that is, right?), and maybe, maybe in that great blue-pink great American teen night you got a telephone number even if she had a boy friend, a forever boy friend. Nice, right?
But here is the part, the solemn serious part, that makes this a Frankie story although He is not present in this scene, at least not physically present. Who do you think got me “hip” to this trick. Yes, none other than Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie, king of the teen night, king of the North Adamsville teen night. And, this is why he was king. He was so smooth, after a while, at directing the selections that girls would not even get a chance to pick those first current flame and old flame selections but he would practically be dropping their quarters in the machine for them. Hail Frankie.
Markin comment:
Frankie, Frankie, king of the old North Adamsville neighborhood, Frankie, king hell king, Frankie, king arbiter of the teen social mores, was the alpha and omega. Or that is what his relentlessly self- promoted image would have you believe. Most of it was strictly “flak” and now that we have some serious distance of time and space to shield us from retribution it can be safely told that a lot of this “mystique”, this Frankie, king of the hill, mystique, was made up by me to enhance his authority. Nothing wrong with that kings, and lesser kings and, hell, just average jacks and jills have been using this gag for centuries. What is not a gag, what is not “flak” is what I have to tell you here.
Frankie and I, of course, if you have been paying attention went back to old North Adamsville middle school days and although we had some tight moments old king Frankie, giving the devil his due, guided me fairly well through the intricacies of, well, ah, girls, girlish ways, and girlish charms. No question that I would have been left to dry out, alone, in that great teenage angst night if not for my brother, Frankie. And I’ll just give you one example, and you can judge for yourself. Okay.
I was just the other day telling someone about how in the great 1960s teen night a lot of our time, our waiting around for something, anything to happen time, was spent around places like pizza parlors, drugstore soda fountains, and corner mom and pop variety stores throwing coins into the old jukebox to play the latest “hot’ song for the umpteenth time (and then discard them, most of them anyway, after a few days). This is the scene that Frankie ruled over wherever he set up his throne. I was also telling that person about a little “trick” that I used to use when I was, as I usually was, chronically low on funds to feed the machine.
See, part of that waiting around for something, anything to happen, a big part, was hoping, sometimes hoping against hope, that some interesting looking frail (girl in the old neighborhood terminology, boy old neighborhood terminology that is, first used by Frankie, and then picked up by everyone else) would come walking through that door. And, especially on those no dough days, would put some coins in that old jukebox machine. I swear, I swear on anything, that girls, girls, if you can believe this, always seemed to have dough, at least coin dough, in those days to play their favorite songs.
So here is the trick part, and see it involves a little understanding of human psychology too, girl human psychology at that. Okay, say, for a quarter you got five selections on the juke box. Well, the girl, almost any girl that you could name, would have a first pick set, some boy romance thing, and the second one too, maybe a special old flame tryst that still hadn’t burned out. But, see after that, and this is true I swear, they would get fidgety about the selections. And, boy, that is where you made your move. You’d chime up with some song that was on your “hot” list like Save the Last Dance for Me, or some other moody thing and, presto, she hit the buttons for you.
That choice by you rather than, let’s say Breathless by Jerry Lee Lewis which maybe was your real “hot” choice told her you were a sensitive guy and worthy of a few minutes of her time. So you got your song, you got to talk to some interesting frail (you remember who that is, right?), and maybe, maybe in that great blue-pink great American teen night you got a telephone number even if she had a boy friend, a forever boy friend. Nice, right?
But here is the part, the solemn serious part, that makes this a Frankie story although He is not present in this scene, at least not physically present. Who do you think got me “hip” to this trick. Yes, none other than Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie, king of the teen night, king of the North Adamsville teen night. And, this is why he was king. He was so smooth, after a while, at directing the selections that girls would not even get a chance to pick those first current flame and old flame selections but he would practically be dropping their quarters in the machine for them. Hail Frankie.
Rally for Bradley! Quantico VA. Sunday, March 20-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Bradley Manning Support Network website for more on the Private Bradley Manning story
Rally for Bradley! Quantico VA. Sunday, March 20
2011-03-13 58 comments
On March 20, 2011, there will be a rally at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Supporters will gather for a 2pm rally at the town of Triangle (intersection of Anderson Road and Route 1/Jefferson Davis Hwy), then march to the gates of Quantico. Bradley has been held at the Quantico brig in solitary-like conditions for eight months without any meaningful exercise. We stand for truth, government transparency, and an end to our occupation wars… we stand with Bradley! Event endorsed by the Bradley Manning Support Network, Veterans for Peace, Courage to Resist, CodePink, and many other groups.
We will meet at 2pm immediately adjacent to Rt. 1 and Anderson Road. Parking can be found at the Marines Corps Museum. They have HUGE parking lot, there. About 1/4 mile walk. There might also be some parking behind church adjacent to Inn Rd and Rt. 1, behind the rally location.
The day before, on Saturday, March 19th, in Washington DC, supporters of Bradley’s will be joining the noon rally at Lafayette Park and march on the White House to “Resist the War Machine!”
Reserve your seat (only $10 round trip) on our chartered bus from Washington DC at couragetoresist.org/bus. Buses will leave from in front of Union Station, Washington DC, at 12:30pm.
Download, view, print and share the event leaflet (PDF)
WHO: Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Paper’s Whistleblower; Ret. Col. Ann Wright; Representatives from Veterans for Peace, Bradley Manning Support Network.
WHAT: Rally in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning
WHERE: US Marine Corps Base Quantico Entrance and neighboring Triangle. Rally to be followed by a march to the intersection of Rt. 1 and Fuller Road where the main entrance to Quantico is located.
WHEN: Sunday, March 20, 2011 at 2:00 PM ET
CONTACTS: Pete Perry, Veterans for Peace. (P) 202-631-0974 (W)pete4peace [at] gmail [dot] com; Trevor FitzGibbon, FitzGibbon Media. (P) 202.406.0646 (W) Trevor [at] FitzGibbonMedia [dot] com
DRIVING DIRECTIONS TO THE QUANTICO RALLY
General Directions: Park in the Marines Corps Museum Parking Lot first. If that lot fills up, try and park in the church parking lot behind where we are going to rally.
After parking in the museum’s parking lot, walk back to Route 1 and turn left. Cross over Joplin Road. In another 30 yards you will be at the rally point on the left hand side of Route 1.
DIRECTIONS FROM I-95 SOUTH:
1.Take Exit 150A to Route 1 (Jefferson Davis Highway)
2.Turn right (South) onto Route 1
3.Travel approximately one-quarter (1/4) mile to the Museum entrance on the right.
DIRECTIONS FROM I-95 NORTH:
1.Take Exit 150 (Jefferson Davis Hwy)
2.Turn right (South) onto Route 1
3.Travel approximately one-quarter (1/4) mile to the Museum entrance on the right.
.
*****
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarted since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no ‘spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Read more: http://www.bradleymanning.org/16125/rally-for-bradley-quanitco-virginia-sun-march-20/#ixzz1Gt5eDliE
Rally for Bradley! Quantico VA. Sunday, March 20
2011-03-13 58 comments
On March 20, 2011, there will be a rally at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Supporters will gather for a 2pm rally at the town of Triangle (intersection of Anderson Road and Route 1/Jefferson Davis Hwy), then march to the gates of Quantico. Bradley has been held at the Quantico brig in solitary-like conditions for eight months without any meaningful exercise. We stand for truth, government transparency, and an end to our occupation wars… we stand with Bradley! Event endorsed by the Bradley Manning Support Network, Veterans for Peace, Courage to Resist, CodePink, and many other groups.
We will meet at 2pm immediately adjacent to Rt. 1 and Anderson Road. Parking can be found at the Marines Corps Museum. They have HUGE parking lot, there. About 1/4 mile walk. There might also be some parking behind church adjacent to Inn Rd and Rt. 1, behind the rally location.
The day before, on Saturday, March 19th, in Washington DC, supporters of Bradley’s will be joining the noon rally at Lafayette Park and march on the White House to “Resist the War Machine!”
Reserve your seat (only $10 round trip) on our chartered bus from Washington DC at couragetoresist.org/bus. Buses will leave from in front of Union Station, Washington DC, at 12:30pm.
Download, view, print and share the event leaflet (PDF)
WHO: Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Paper’s Whistleblower; Ret. Col. Ann Wright; Representatives from Veterans for Peace, Bradley Manning Support Network.
WHAT: Rally in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning
WHERE: US Marine Corps Base Quantico Entrance and neighboring Triangle. Rally to be followed by a march to the intersection of Rt. 1 and Fuller Road where the main entrance to Quantico is located.
WHEN: Sunday, March 20, 2011 at 2:00 PM ET
CONTACTS: Pete Perry, Veterans for Peace. (P) 202-631-0974 (W)pete4peace [at] gmail [dot] com; Trevor FitzGibbon, FitzGibbon Media. (P) 202.406.0646 (W) Trevor [at] FitzGibbonMedia [dot] com
DRIVING DIRECTIONS TO THE QUANTICO RALLY
General Directions: Park in the Marines Corps Museum Parking Lot first. If that lot fills up, try and park in the church parking lot behind where we are going to rally.
After parking in the museum’s parking lot, walk back to Route 1 and turn left. Cross over Joplin Road. In another 30 yards you will be at the rally point on the left hand side of Route 1.
DIRECTIONS FROM I-95 SOUTH:
1.Take Exit 150A to Route 1 (Jefferson Davis Highway)
2.Turn right (South) onto Route 1
3.Travel approximately one-quarter (1/4) mile to the Museum entrance on the right.
DIRECTIONS FROM I-95 NORTH:
1.Take Exit 150 (Jefferson Davis Hwy)
2.Turn right (South) onto Route 1
3.Travel approximately one-quarter (1/4) mile to the Museum entrance on the right.
.
*****
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarted since I was soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no ‘spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.” Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are true winter soldier.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who read this join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Read more: http://www.bradleymanning.org/16125/rally-for-bradley-quanitco-virginia-sun-march-20/#ixzz1Gt5eDliE
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