*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Strategy and Tactics of the Communist International: What are Transitional Slogans?-August Thalheimer

Click on the headline to link to an August Thalheimer-related post from the American Left History blog.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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From What Next? No.13, 1999

Strategy and Tactics of the Communist International: What are Transitional Slogans?-August Thalheimer

This piece is a section of a much longer document written by Thalheimer in response to the programme drafted (mainly by Bukharin) for the Communist International’s Sixth Congress in 1928. The document was retrieved from the SED (East German Communist Party) archives and published in 1993 by Decaton, Mainz, as Programmatische Fragen: Kritik des Programmentwurfs der Komintern (VI. Weltkongreß), with a foreword by Theodor Bergmann. We are grateful to Mike Jones for providing a translation.

THIS PART seems to me to be the weakest in the whole draft. It is also the most important for those sections of the CI [Communist International] which still face the task of winning the majority of the working class for the principles and aims of Communism, thus to create the organisational and ideological preconditions for the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship.

This task still faces such important sections of the CI as the German, French, Italian, Polish, Czechoslovak, etc. I have mentioned here sections of the CI which are already mass parties. Some sections of the CI have not even reached this level yet. They are not yet mass parties, but rather small groups with small circles around them, whose activity is dominated by propaganda. Other sections may still be in the very early stage of circles. The borders here are of course not fixed, but fluid. However, it seems useful to us to make this classification.

In this part, the insufficient participation of the non-Russian sections in elaborating the draft is most perceptible. The tactical and strategical experiences of the individual sections are much richer, more multifarious, more specific, than it appears in this part. Of course, this part of the programme of the International cannot merely consist of a juxtaposition, nor a mere addition, to the experience of the individual sections. It should represent the general viewpoints which result from these tactical experiences. This also accords with the well-known decision of the Fourth Congress [of the CI], in which Lenin played a decisive role. Moreover, it also accords with the conception that I represented here. I would not have considered it worth mentioning if some comrades had not tried to distort the conceptions represented there by me (on behalf of, and in agreement with, the KPD [German Communist Party]). One has only to compare the texts of the reports, such as that of the resolution drawn up at the Fourth Congress, to completely clarify things. If necessary that can be checked later. I am not in possession of the texts in question at present

It would also surely have been beneficial for the elaboration of this part if the most important sections of the Comintern had complied with the instructions by the ECCI [Executive Committee of the CI] years ago: namely, to elaborate Action Programmes for their countries. As far as I know, an elaborated draft of a long-term Action Programme only exists on the part of the Italian section. In this regard, it indicates a maturity above the average of the other sections.

In our German section there is, as is known, a toing and froing in opinion on whether a long-term Action Programme is in accordance with the principles of the CI or not. The view was presented here that an Action Programme should only contain partial or day-to-day demands (minimum demands as they used to be called), which could be shifted out within 24 hours.

I regard this view as false. It is not in accord with the above-mentioned instruction from the Executive to the individual sections to elaborate their Action Programmes. It certainly did not intend a mere collation of partial and day-to-day demands. These might have to be changed a short notice, often from one day to the next. They shun a concrete fixation for longer periods. In addition, this view contradicts the fact of the Action Programme of the Italian section. It also contradicts the decisions of the Third Congress, in which Lenin played such a decisive role. And, finally, it contradicts the conception of the practice of Marx and Engels.

On the other hand, it accords with the Erfurt Programme. It is a relapse into an obsolete stage of the workers’ movement.

Now we come to the question of transitional slogans in general, and to the question whether transitional slogans may be propagated in non-acute revolutionary situations.

According to rumours of which I have become aware, some comrades have accused me of a frightful theoretical misunderstanding of the meaning of the transitional slogans of Marx and Engels. In the opinion of Marx and Engels they should only be propagated in an acute revolutionary situation, in the revolutionary overturn itself.

Furthermore: with transitional slogans in the sense of Marx and Engels are meant slogans that could only be realised after the conquest of power by the working class. The grave theoretical mistake here is wholly on the side of the comrades who mention the above described conception.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels speak of ‘despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production’. Which transition should these demands or measures effect? That from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production. Which force should effect this transition? The working class, which ‘raises itself to the position of ruling class’, which conquers ‘political power’, which has won ‘the battle of democracy’. The word democracy, used here by Marx and Engels without further definition, would appear to mean the workers’ and peasants’ democratic dictatorship. The revolutionary democracy of the Jacobins and not the parliamentary form. The proletarian dictatorship was defined in more detail by them to signify the smashing of the bourgeois stale machine only after the experience of the Commune.

Which demands or measures are posed here by Marx and Engels for fulfilment after the conquest of power?

The Communist Manifesto says in this regard:

’These measures will of course be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable

1.Abolition of property in land and application of all rents to public purposes.
2.A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3.Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4.Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5.Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6.Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7.Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8.Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9.Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10.Free education for an children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.’
As one can immediately see, here it is a question of exclusively transitional measures after the conquest of power by the working class. Hence, they are mostly maximum slogans (except for the ‘heavy progressive tax’, although it too has a revolutionary meaning here).

Transitional slogans in the sense of the tactical theory of the Third Congress of the CI are, by their nature, as by the period of their use, something else. They are slogans which in the course of the struggle for power, that is, in an acutely revolutionary situation, are take:n up and partially realised, even before the working class has established its state power, but where it is already capable, in a number of areas, if not yet in a centralised form, of weakening capitalist rule in the factories and the bourgeois state power, and of strengthening its own class power. The implementation of these measures against the resistance of the bourgeoisie, the attempt to extend them, unfolds the question of power in its full extent. The resistance of the bourgeoisie poses for the working class the alternative: either to wholly lose the partial gains again or to continue advancing further.

In Soviet Russia in 1917, the most important of these transitional slogans were workers’ control of production and the arming of the workers.

Upon the establishment of the proletarian state power these slogans are out of date, as the struggle advances. Control of the factories by the workers is superseded by complete expropriation of the capitalist factory manager and management of the factories by the organs of the workers’ state. Then workers’ control assumes new forms and becomes a subordinate issue. At the same time it becomes generalised. The aiming of the workers in the course of the struggle for power is replaced, after the seizure of power, by the state aiming of the workers and disarming of the bourgeoisie. The Red Army, etc., takes the place of the Red Guards, etc.

One has simply allowed oneself to be led astray by the common word ‘transitional’ in the expressions transitional measures in the sense of the Communist Manifesto and transitional slogans in the sense of the Third Congress. In the one and the other case it concerns in essence different transitions and therefore different periods of struggle. In the one case it means measures of the victorious proletarian revolution, in the other case slogans and actions of the working class struggling for power. If I envisage only the word ‘transition’, without considering from what to what is the transition, then the change of the socialist society into the communist is also a ‘transition’ with corresponding transitional measures, slogans and phenomena. In the first case it concerns the period of the proletarian dictatorship; in the second, the period of the conquest of power. But maximum slogans as well as transitional slogans are propaganda slogans, before they become slogans of action. And, indeed, in the propaganda, maximum and transitional slogans must be linked to each other, the maximum slogans must be derived from the transitional slogans.

Demands of the second character, that is in the sense of transitional slogans, are not contained in the Communist Manifesto, but in the 17 demands formulated by the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1848, that is in the already begun revolution, and moreover in the well known Circular of the Central Committee of March 1850, hence after the defeat of the German revolution, in the midst of the high tide of the reaction, in the expectation of a new upturn of the revolution

This circular said that, of course, at the start of the movement, the workers could not yet propose any directly communist measures, but they could compel the Democrats to intervene in as many sides of the hitherto existing social order as possible, to disturb its regular functioning and to compromise themselves, as well as to concentrate as many productive forces, means of transport, railways, etc., as possible in the hands of the state.

In this case, Marx, or the Central Committee, have in mind the transition from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution and, at the same time, the of the workers fighting for power.

It is obvious that the transitional slogans formulated here are not relevant for Germany today, where the bourgeois revolution lies behind us (even if it has still left a vast quantity of rubbish, like the separate states, the legal system amalgamated with elements left over from princely absolutism, etc.) and which faces the proletarian or socialist revolution as the next direct link.

Here the question for us was only one of characterising the general nature of ‘transitional slogans’ in the stage of the working class struggle for power, as opposed to transitional measures in the sense of the Communist Manifesto, which are, in truth, maximum demands. But the comrades who look here for an incomprehensible theoretical error of mine commit one themselves, as they confuse different things.

Firstly, transitional slogans and transitional measures in the sense of the Communist Manifesto, that is, maximum slogans. Secondly, transitional slogans that are effective, transform themselves into action, in an immediate revolutionary situation, that is, in the course of the working-class struggle for power. Transitional slogans in our sense were posed and propagated by Marx and Engels only at the emergence of the revolutionary situation, at the outbreak of the revolution, then (1850) also in a time of profound reaction, the ebb of the revolution.

The situation will be fully clarified if one considers the situation in which the 1850 circular of the Central Committee was drafted. It was a period ‘between two revolutions’. The revolution had, for the time being, been defeated. Reaction ruled. Marx and Engels expected a new revolutionary upswing in connection with a new economic crisis, but this new revolutionary upturn had not yet arrived. The members of the Communist League are, of course, not meant to put the transitional slogans from the circular m their pockets until the appearance of the new revolutionary outbreak, but they should already now, before the outbreak, propagate them within the working class. The circular serves not only to develop the perspectives of the new revolutionary struggles for the members, to show them the basic lines of strategy and tactics, but also to nourish the present propaganda of the Communists in the working class. Through this propaganda the Communists shall prepare the working class for the coming revolutionary struggles. To start with propaganda for the struggle for power when it has already begun is typical chvostism (tail-endism). This was typical of the liquidatory Mensheviks and Trotsky in the years of reaction in Russia after 1907. The liquidators wanted those key slogans to be posed which presupposed a Tsarist regime with liberal additions. As the most important one they raised the freedom of combination. In opposition to them Lenin represented the viewpoint that a second revolution would be necessary, and that accordingly one should raise the unabridged revolutionary slogans: the well-known three whales – democratic republic, eight-hour day, landlord’s land to the peasants. The Leninist slogans were presented in the big mass strikes of 1912.

I assumed that these simple things would be well known. That was evidently a mistake.

Now we go to the twentieth century

Lenin deals with the question of transitional demands in his text on the Infantile Disorders of Leftism, where he speaks of the still not fully Communist slogans or measures which are necessary to draw the majority of the proletariat and working people close to the (already convinced) revolutionary vanguard. That was written in 1920. Lenin was careful and prudent enough not to put any time limit on when the majority of the working class and working people had or ought to be drawn around the vanguard. In any case, it is clear that for Lenin the transitional slogans ought to be propagated at a time when the Communist Party has not yet won the majority of the working class and the working people, in a generally revolutionary but not yet acutely revolutionary situation.

The issue will become clearer when we consider the Third Congress of the CI.

Let us look at Radek’s report on tactics. Of course, what Radek expressed here was not his personal view, but that of the leading Russian comrades, above all that of Lenin

On transitional slogans, the following general viewpoints were developed:

The minimum demands in the programme of pre-war Social Democracy were a system of demands which should improve the situation of the working class on the basis of capitalism, which should arm the working class against the depressing tendencies of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg once characterised the real function of the Social Democratic (minimum) programme, in a polemic with Sombart, in such a way that she declared: ‘Really we only struggle for the commodity labour power to be sold at its real price, so that the worker receives the wage which allows him to reproduce his own labour power.’

The Social Democratic minimum programme remained economically within the framework of the capitalist economic form, practically within the framework of the bourgeois-democratic state, the ‘well known democratic litany’, as Marx put it in his remarks on the Gotha Programme. The objective precondition for it was that the Social Democracy still envisaged ‘a long period of existence of capitalist society’.

The minimum programme of the pre-war Social Democracy posed demands ‘which were attainable within capitalist society, and which functioned in a revolutionary way, since capitalist society time and again, opposed these attainable and, for the working class, necessary demands’.

Here one should have added that the revolutionary effect of the political minimum demands, for example, in the Erfurt Programme, was connected to the fact that here, in the political area, the bourgeois revolution had been stuck in mid-course. In Bismarck-Hohenzollern Germany, the bourgeois-parliamentary republic slogan must, naturally, have a revolutionary effect. As is known, it was not contained in the Erfurt Programme, allegedly purely for police reasons. In reality, there was more to it, as was demonstrated by the opposition to the proposal by Rosa Luxemburg to propagate the republic (1910), and later (1918) by the Social Democratic attempts, even in the last hours, to save the monarchy. At the foundation congress of the KPD (Spartakusbund), in late December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg declared: ‘For us now there is no minimum programme, no maximum programme; socialism is one and the same, that is the minimum we have to achieve today.’

In the Spartacus programme, this minimum and maximum was posed as: ‘all power to the worker councils, arming of the proletariat, cancellation of state debts, seizing possession of the factories’, etc.

‘In which situation’, commented Radek, ‘did this programme arise? The workers’ councils were the highest power in Germany. Formally, the working class had the power in its hands. And the task of the Spartacus League consisted in just saying to these workers’ councils what the power of the working class consists of, and nothing more.’

‘It is clear’, continued Radek, ‘that now we do not find ourselves in this situation. The bourgeoisie has the power. The first working-class assault in the epoch of demobilisation was repelled. The proletarian revolution is now only growing.’

What is the consequence?

‘Primarily, it is this: one must try to lead all struggle over wage rises, over working hours, against unemployment towards the intermediate aim of control over production, not towards the system of production, control effected by the government, by passing a law, which the proletariat has then to respect, that the worker does not steal, and the capitalist has to watch that the worker works. Control over production means education in proletarian struggle, all factory organisations to be subject to elections, their local and district-wide connection on the basis of industrial groups in the proletarian struggle.’

Radek named ‘the arming of the proletariat, the disarming of the bourgeoisie’ as the second slogan.

And he draws the following general conclusion:

’One could mention even more slogans of that type. I will not do so. They grow out of the practical struggle. What we say to you, give to you as a general slogan, as a general orientation is, not to counterpose yourselves to the proletariat in all the struggles Which the masses undertake, but to sharpen, to extend the struggles of the masses for their practical necessities, and to teach them to have greater necessities: the necessity to conquer power.’

I mention one more passage from the report:

‘The preparatory work is not in opposition to the epoch of agitation ... struggle is revolutionary agitation, struggle is revolutionary propaganda, struggle is illegal organisations, the military training of the proletariat, party school, demonstration, uprising, is struggle.’

The Third Congress Theses on Tactics sum up the ideas in the report then as follows:

’The action tasks which will soon confront the VKPD [United Communist Party of Germany – the name initially adopted by the KPD after the fusion of the KPD (Spartakusbund) with the left of the Independent Social Democratic Party], because of the breakdown of the German economy and the capitalist threat to the living standards of the working masses, can only be accomplished if the party, instead of opposing the tasks of organisation and agitation to those of action, of the deed, keeps constantly on the alert the spirit of militancy in its organisations, makes its agitation really popular in character, and builds its organisations in such a way that through its ties with the masses, it develops the ability to weigh up situations most carefiffly, to determine the moment for fighting, and to prepare thoroughly for the fight.’ (Thesen und Resolutionen des 3. Weltkongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale, Hamburg 1921, part 4, pp.43-44.)

’The Communist Parties do not put forward any minimum programme to strengthen and improve the tottering structure of capitalism The destruction of that structure remains their guiding aim and their immediate mission. But to carry out this mission the Communist Parties must put forward demands whose fulfilment is an immediate and urgent working-class need, and they must fight for these demands in mass struggle, regardless of whether or not they are compatible with the profit economy of the capitalist class or not.

’It is not the viability and competitive capacity of capitalist industry, nor the profitability of capitalist finance to which Communist Parties should pay regard, but the limits of want which the proletariat cannot and should not endure any longer. If the demands correspond to the vital need of broad proletarian masses, if these masses feel that they cannot exist unless these demands are met, then the struggles for these demands will become the starting points of the struggle for power In place of the minimum programme of the reformists and centrists, the Communist International puts the struggle for the concrete needs of the proletariat, for a system of demands which in their totality disintegrate the power of the bourgeoisie, organise the proletariat, represent stages in the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship, and each of which expresses in itself the need of the broadest masses, even if the masses themselves are not yet consciously in favour of the proletarian dictatorship.’ (Thesen und Resolutionen, part 5, pp.46-7.)

‘1. ... To the extent that the struggles for partial demands, and the particular struggles of particular groups of workers develop into the general struggle of the working class against capitalism, the Communist Party must also intensify and generalise its slogans, up to the slogan of the direct defeat of the enemy In formulating their partial demands, the Communist Parties have to consider that these demands – anchored in the needs of the broadest masses – not only lead the masses in the struggle, but by their very nature also are organising demands. Every practical slogan which derives from the economic needs of the working masses must be channelled into the struggle for the control of production, not as a plan for the bureaucratic organisation of the national economy under the capitalist regime, but as the struggle against capitalism, through the factory councils and revolutionary trade unions.’ (Ibid., pp.47-8.)

Between the beginning of the struggle for power by the working class and the classes allied to it, the outbreak of the acute revolutionary period and its provisional closure at the conquest of power by the establishment of the council-power (provisional closure, since after the establishment of the council-power, the struggle continues for its maintenance), lies the period of the struggle for power itself. Many comrades ‘forget’ that. In Russia in 1917, the struggle of the working class for power lasted from March to October – eight months. Its starting point was the ‘dual-government’, the coexistence of the bourgeois-democratic state power (Kerensky government) and the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils, the latter of which realised in an original form the workers’ and peasants’ democratic dictatorship. Its end-point was the establishment of the soviet power in October, the destruction and removal of the bourgeois-democratic state power and state machine.

The main contents of the resolution are as follows:

(1) The rise of the councils of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies as organs of struggle of the revolutionary classes, their struggle with the organs of bourgeois democracy and finally their victory over them, which transforms the councils into the organs of the proletarian state power.

(2) The aiming and the armed struggles of the workers, peasants and soldiers, the undermining and destruction of the Tsarist army, finally the armed uprising, the victory of the armed workers, peasants and the creation of the Red Guards and the Red Army.

(3) The sporadic workers’ control of production, where the employers are still formally owners of the factories, but the control and, in part, management is subordinate to the factory councils. The end-point is, with the conquest of power, the seizure of the big enterprises by the council-state, their management by the organs of the workers’ state, simultaneously, systematic extension of workers’ control which, however, now assumes a wholly different character, where the employer is now replaced as owner and manager by the workers’ state. Workers’ control is integrated by, and subordinate to, the council-state leadership, generalised and transformed.

(4) The local, spontaneous and direct occupation of the land of the big landlords by the peasants. The end-point here is: the decree nationalising the land, the general confiscation of large-scale landed property by the state.

These eight months also constitute the transition or the change from the bourgeois-democratic into the proletarian-socialist revolution.

There is no doubt that Marx and Engels had in mind not only transitional measures after the conquest of power, after the establishment of the workers’ and peasants’ democratic dictatorship (as stated in the Communist Manifesto), but also transitional slogans for the preceding period, for the conquest of power itself (Engels 1847, the 17 demands of March 1848, the Central Committee circular of 1850).

This was a transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the proletarian-socialist revolution also under the conditions prevailing at the time in Germany. In present-day Germany, which has left the completed bourgeois-democratic revolution behind, the section of the struggle of the workers, and of those classes allied to and led by them, for state power cannot any longer, of course, be a transition from the bourgeois democratic to the proletarian-socialist revolution. In Germany, the different stages of the bourgeois and proletarian revolution, which were compressed into the space of time from 1905/06 to 1917 in Russia, that is12 years, are separated by over 70 years (the bourgeois revolution in Germany began in 1848, and is concluded in 1919; simultaneously, the proletarian revolution began in 1918).

One thing is certain, the struggle of the working class and its allies for power, in Germany and also in other counties with similar economic and administrative preconditions, will last for a determined period, not just a fleeting moment As its main contents one can already today indicate an outline as follows:

1) The formation of workers’ (small peasants’ and possibly soldiers’) councils as organs of struggle, their struggle against the organs of the bourgeois state power.

2) The arming and armed struggles of the workers, the undermining and finally the smashing of the bourgeois military and police power, and other military forces of the bourgeoisie.

3) The conquest of new positions of power by the workers against the employers in the factories, the control and partial management of individual factories by the workers; in probability, also already the partial expulsion or flight of capitalist employers from ‘their’ enterprises.

4) Probably also the local occupation of large scale landed property, big farm land, by farm labourers, rural semi-proletarians, dwarf- and small-holders and lower layers of the middle peasantry.

What kind of slogans?

If we take as an example the slogan of the local occupation of large-scale landed property and the land of large farmers by farm labourers, rural casual labourers, dwarf- and small-holders and part of the middle peasantry. Is that a partial slogan? Surely not. It is more. It already breaks the framework of the bourgeois order. Is it a maximum slogan? Not yet. It is less. A maximum slogan is the expropriation of the big landlords (and big farmers) and the appropriation of the land by the council state.

What we have here is a type of transitional slogan. There will be quite a few of them. Some can be foreseen, others cannot.

A second example – the slogan of the councils. They will arise in acute revolutionary situations. For a longer or shorter period they become organs of struggle of the working class and its allies, rather than organs of power. The maximum slogan is that of council power: ‘All power to the councils!’ But what is the ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government!’ slogan? It is surely not a bourgeois-democratic slogan. It already breaks the framework of the bourgeois state. Hence it is not a partial, reform or minimum slogan. It is a revolutionary slogan. Is it already a maximum slogan, the ready-made council-power, its ’synonym or pseudonym’? Two names or slogans for the same thing are superfluous. It is again a transitional slogan for the struggle for power: the council-power of the council state in its not yet perfect or finished, but still incomplete and transitory, form. (For example, in Russia, from 7 November up to the breaking-up of the alliance with the Left SRs in the soviets.)

This is also a type of transitional slogan, and as a condition a transitional one or a transitional measure in the here-mentioned sense.

Moreover, one must see that this period of struggle must be prepared agitationally, propagandistically, organisationally, that is, that the transitional slogans must be propagated before the struggle for power has begun, until and so that they become slogans of action in the struggle for powert

When and which specific transitional slogans are agitated for and propagated before the immediate struggle for power, depends on the concrete conditions, but must be investigated in each single case. In other words, that is the task of leading the masses to the struggle for power.

This task, which Lenin saw as the main task of the Communist Party in the most important countries in 1920, at a time when capitalism was much more convulsed than today, seemed attainable in a relatively short time. Today the objective circumstances indicate that it will necessitate a longer time.

But the essence of this task remains the same today as it did then.

To want to overlook or forget or argue away this task is to commit a great theoretical as well as a practical error. It means ignoring the subjective conditions necessary for the realisation of the transitional slogans. It means to forget the role of the Communist Party as the leader of the working class, which has to show it the next step. It means to limit oneself to ‘tail-ending’, to remaining behind the movement of the masses. It is Kautsky’s famous strategy of attrition.

The general result is this:

1) A limiting to a minimum programme, like that of the pre-war Social Democracy, which holds itself within the framework of the capitalist order and the bourgeois-democratic state, is not permissible in a time when capitalism finds itself in a revolutionary crisis and where the bourgeois-democratic state already exists in fact in the country in question.

2) Just as impermissible is limiting oneself to maximum slogans, in a time when capitalism finds itself indeed in revolutionary crisis, but the working class is not immediately fighting for power and the bourgeoisie has again consolidated itself in power for a longer of a shorter time.

3) In a period like that the task is, apart from propagating maximum slogans: agitation, propaganda and organisation of struggles around partial demands and transitional slogans.

The posing of the one or the other must conform to the concrete circumstances of the struggle.

Where do we find ourselves now? Not in the first period of struggle of the still unshaken capitalism. The draft programme is absolutely correct to speak of the general crisis of capitalism, which denotes the whole actual period of struggle. Even if the particular postiwar crisis has been overcome, the general crisis of capitalism has in any case remained. This crisis is already proved by the fact that the Soviet Union, an oasis with a dominating socialist economic form, exists and grows in the middle of the capitalist world.

Is world capitalism in 1928 different from that of 1921, that of the Third Congress? Certainly. Capitalism has, in the meantime, consolidated itself more firmly (but so have the Soviet Union and the Communist International).

But is the situation different in its fundamental characteristics, which determine the posing and propagating of transitional slogans? No!

Hence what follows?

Two things:

1) The continuing general crisis of capitalism proves today as in 1921 the necessity of posing and propagating transitional slogans.

2) The overcoming of the particular post-war crisis of capitalism, the ‘relative stabilisation of capitalism’, the development of contradictions, crises, conflicts on new bases, stipulates that the transitional slogans are adapted to a new situation, given new contents and forms, that their utilisation will have different forms, etc. It is not simply a question of repeating the old formulas and forms.

I content myself here with this general result. To deal with one of these transitional slogans, such as that of control of production, its actual possible content in a country like Germany or Italy, its form of propagation adapted to the situation, the organisational utilisation, etc., would go too far here.

The programme must give clear information over the question: what are transitional slogans, under what conditions should they be propagated, when do they become slogans of action, etc.

The questions are thrown up in the movement; they must be clearly and precisely replied to, in a general form, in the program.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Is the Time Ripe for the Slogan:‘The United States of Europe(A Discussion Article)-Leon Trotsky, June 30, 1923

Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky-related post from his Internet Archives.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

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Is the Time Ripe for the Slogan:‘The United States of Europe(A Discussion Article)-Leon Trotsky, June 30, 1923

Introduction by Jack Bernard
The following discussion article, first published in Pravda, June 30, 1923, has significance today in the light of the growing centrality of the European question within British politics and as a guide to the character of programme that revolutionary Marxists need to develop al establish.

The present beginnings of discussion on the European question within the working-class movement in Britain have revealed a division into maximilsm and minimalism. Some feel happy merely to counterpose to the plans of Maastricht a call for a socialist Europe of the indefinite future, others simply proclaim their preference for a European bourgeois state opposed to the present British bourgeois state. Of these two choices, the latter is preferable because merely opposing Maastricht on an abstract basis means to effectively endorse the status quo. 1t means defending the present wretched British state through failure to pose a feasible alternative.

In, the following article, Trotsky transcends the maximalist minimalist dilemma by filling his slogan of a United States of Europe with a transitional content. Arguing that ‘“The United States of Europe” is a slogan in every respect corresponding with the slogan “A Workers (or Workers’ and Peasants’) Government”’ he, for instance, says that ‘The Europe of Workers and Peasants will have its ... budget ... based upon a graduated income tax, upon levies on capital.’ Clearly, if capital still exists in this Europe then this is not the socialist Europe of the far distant future but a revolutionary Europe where the economy still conflicts with the state. In other words, though, it signifies a workers’ state and not merely a self-professed workers’ government that has been elected under the bourgeois political order and begrudgingly allowed to ‘govern’ within constraints set by the dominant power, i.e., not really a workers’ government. Trotsky’s United States of Europe is a Europe that is in transition from the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to that of the proletariat. The key point is that the programme for this United States of Europe is neither the programme of socialism nor a reformist programme.

As Trotsky explained elsewhere, as long as revolutionary Marxists do not have the ear of the masses they must adopt a definite stance to those who do, to those ’Parties and organisations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name’. This does not mean simply calling, at a European level, for a vote for Social Democracy and kindred parties. Instead it means demanding that these parties ‘break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers’ and peasants’ government’ Trotsky continued: ‘On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the programme of the “workers’ and peasants’ government”.’ Such demands are not limited to what’s achievable or feasible under the bourgeois order but neither are they fantastic demands that can, only be realised under a future, planned economy.

The value of this article by Trotsky, is that it is a particularly, important illustration of the method of Marxisim, applied to formulating political slogans. The latter are based in an analysis of the world economic whole, i.e., in this case the particular plight of European economy within this economic whole, but they also relate to the subjective factor, how they ‘Stem ... from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class’ but nevertheless ‘unalterably lead ... to one final conclusion. the conquest of power by the proletariat.’

Of course, the wording of a slogan cannot contain the entire content to be given, to the slogan. By ‘United States of Europe’ Trotsky signified a single-state federation of nations, i.e., the destruction of the national state in Europe. Those who vehemently oppose Maastricht by effectively defending the national state of their own bourgeoisie, often combine this defence of the utopia of ‘One nation, one state’ by, for example, supporting the re-Balkanisation of Yugoslavia under the guise of defending the principle of national self-determination. This pan-nationalism – that often attempts to pass itself off as Trotskyism, – has its roots in the privileges enjoyed by much of the working class of the imperialist metropolis. At best it attempts to explain Trotsky’s slogan in terms of a confederation of national states rather than a single-state federation of nations. This is the antithesis of internationalism, and an unfortunate indicator that apparently all the organisations that claim a heritage of the Fourth International or claim to be the Fourth International, have, like the Second and Third Internationals before them, degenerated to forms of national socialism.

NOTES
1. Trotsky: The Death Agony, of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, (the Transitional Progamme), 1938.

2. ibid.

3. Marx and Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels: Selected Works (in 3 vols.), vol.1, p.120, Moscow, 1969.


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The motor force driving to war was this, that the capitalist forces of production had outgrown the framework of European national states. Germany had set herself the task of ‘organising’ Europe, i.e., of uniting economically the European continent under her own control, in order then seriously to set about contending with Britain for world power. France’s aim was to dismember Germany. The small population of France, her predominantly agricultural character and her economic conservatism, make it impossible for the French bourgeoisie even to consider the problem of organising Europe, which indeed proved to be beyond the powers of German capitalism, backed though it was by the military machine of the Hohenzollerns. Victorious France is now maintaining her mastery only by Balkanising Europe. Great Britain is inciting and backing the French policy of dismembering and exhausting Europe, all the time concealing her work. In connection with the slogan of ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’, the time is appropriate, in my opinion, for issuing the slogan of ‘The United States of Europe’. Only by, coupling these two slogans shall we get a definite systematic and progressive response to the most burning problems of European development.

The last imperialist war was at bottom a European war. The episodic participation of America and Japan did not alter its European character.

Having secured what she required, America withdrew her hands from the European bonfire and returned home.

Britain’s traditional mask of hypocrisy. As a result, our unfortunate continent is cut up, divided, exhausted, disorganised and Balkanised – transformed into a madhouse. The invasion of the Ruhr is a piece of violent insanity accompanied by far-sighted calculation (the final ruination of Germany) a combination not unfamiliar to psychiatrists.

At bottom of the war lay the need of the productive forces for a broader arena of development, unhampered by tariff walls. Similarly, in the occupation of the Ruhr so fatal to Europe and to mankind, we find a distorted expression of the need for uniting the coal of the Ruhr with the iron of Lorraine. Europe cannot develop economically within the state and customs frontiers imposed at Versailles. Europe is compelled either to remove these frontiers, or to face the threat of complete economic decay. But the methods adopted by the ruling bourgeoisie to overcome the frontiers it itself had created are only increasing the existing chaos and accelerating the disintegration.

To the toiling masses of Europe it is becoming ever clearer that the bourgeoisie is incapable of solving the basic problems of restoring Europe’s economic life. The slogan: ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ is designed to meet the growing attempts of the workers to find a way out by, their own efforts. It has now become necessary to point out this avenue of salvation more concretely, namely, to assert that only in the closest economic co-operation of the peoples of Europe lies the avenue of salvation for our continent from economic decay and from enslavement to mighty American capitalism.

America ’s standing aloof from Europe, tranquilly biding her time until Europe’s economic agony has reached such a pitch as will make it easy to step in and buy up Europe – as Austria was bought up for a mere pittance. But France cannot stand aloof from Germany, nor can Germany stand aloof from France. Therein lies the crux, and therein lies the solution, of the European problem. Everything else is incidental. Long before the imperialist war we recognised that the Balkan states are incapable of existing and of developing except within a federation. The same is true of the various fragments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of the western portions of tsarist Russia now living outside the Soviet Union. The Apennines, the Pyrenees and Scandinavia are limbs of the European body stretching out toward the seas. They are incapable of an independent existence. The European continent in the present state of development of its productive forces is an economic unit – not a shut-in unit, of course, but one possessing profound internal ties – as was proved in the terrible catastrophe of the world war, and again revealed by the mad paroxysm of the Ruhr occupation. Europe is not a geographical term; Europe is an economic term, something incomparably more concrete especially in the present post-war conditions – than the world market. Just as federation was long ago recognised as essential for the Balkan peninsula, so now the time has arrived for stating definitely and clearly that federation is essential for Balkanised Europe.

There remain to be considered the question of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and that of Great Britain, on the other. It goes without saying that the Soviet Union will not be opposed either to the federative union of Europe, or to its own adhesion to such a federation. Thereby, too, a reliable bridge will be secured between Europe and Asia.

The question of Great Britain is far more conditional; it depends on the tempo at which her revolutionary development proceeds. Should the ‘Government of Workers and Peasants’ triumph on the European mainland before British imperialism is overthrown – which is quite probable – then the European Federation of Workers and Peasants will of necessity be directed against British capitalism. And, naturally, the moment British capitalism is overthrown the British Isles will enter as a welcome member into the European Federation.

It might be asked: Why a European Federation and not a World Federation? But this manner of posing the question is much too abstract. Of course, the world economic and political development tends to gravitate toward a unified world economy, with its degree of centralisation dependent upon the existing technological level. But we are now concerned not with the future socialist economy of the world, but with finding a way out of the present European impasse. We have to offer a solution to the workers and peasants of torn and ruined Europe, quite independently of how the revolution develops in America, Australia, Asia or Africa. Looked at from this point of view, the slogan of ‘The United States of Europe’ has its place on the same historical plane with the slogan ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’; it is a transitional slogan, indicating a way out, a prospect of salvation, and furnishing at the same time a revolutionary impulse for the future.

It would be a mistake to measure the entire process of the world revolution with the same footrule. America came out of the war not enfeebled, but strengthened. The internal stability of the American bourgeoisie is still quite considerable. The American bourgeoisie is reducing its dependence upon the European market to a minimum. The revolution in America – considered apart from Europe – may thus be a matter of decades. Does that mean that the European revolution must align itself with the American revolutions? Certainly not. If backward Russia did not (and could not) await the revolution in Europe, all the less can and will Europe await the revolution in America. Workers’ and Peasants’ Europe, blockaded by capitalist America (and at first, perhaps even by Great Britain), will be able to maintain itself and develop as a closely consolidated military and economic union.

It must not be overlooked that the very danger arising from the United States of America (which is spurring the destruction of Europe, and is ready to step in subsequently as Europe’s master) furnishes a very substantial bond for uniting the peoples of Europe who are ruining one another into a ‘European United States of Workers and Peasants’. This opposition between Europe and the United States stems organically from the differences in the objective situations of the European countries and of the mighty transatlantic republic, and is not in any way directed against the international solidarity of the proletariat, or against the interests of the revolution in America. One of the reasons for the retarded development of the revolution throughout the world is the degrading European dependence on the rich American uncle (Wilsonism, the charitable feeding of the worst famine districts of Europe, American ‘loans’, etc., etc.). The sooner the popular masses of Europe regain the confidence in their own strength which was sapped by the war, and the more closely they rally around the slogan of ‘United Workers’ and Peasants’ Republics of Europe’, the more rapidly will the revolution develop on both sides of the Atlantic. For just as the triumph of the proletariat in Russia gave a mighty impetus to the development of the Communist parties of Europe so, and even to an incomparably greater degree, will the triumph of the revolution in Europe give an impetus to the revolution in America and in all parts of the world. Although, when we abstract ourselves from Europe, we are obliged to peer into the mists of decades to perceive the American revolution, yet we may safely assert that by the natural sequence of historical events the triumphant revolution in Europe will serve in a very few years to shatter the power of the American bourgeoisie.

Not merely the question of the Ruhr, i.e., of European fuel and iron, but also the question of reparations fits into the pattern of ‘The United States of Europe’. The question of reparations is a purely European question, and it can and will be solved in the period immediately ahead only by European means. The Europe of Workers and Peasants will have its own reparations budget – as it will have its own war budget – so long as it is menaced by dangers from without. This budget will be based upon a graduated income tax, upon levies on capital, upon the confiscation of wealth plundered during wartime, etc. Its allotments will be regulated by the appropriate bodies of the European Federation of Workers and Peasants.

We shall not here indulge in speculations as to the speed at which the unification of the European republics will proceed, in what economic and constitutional forms it will express itself, and what degree of centralisation will be obtained in the first period of the workers’ and peasants’ regime. All these considerations we may safely leave to the future, remembering the experience already gained by the Soviet Union, constructed on the soil of former Tsarist Russia. What is perfectly obvious is that the customs barriers must be thrown down. The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life.

It might be argued that we are in reality speaking of a European Socialist Federation as an integral part of the future World Federation, and that such a r6gime can be brought about only by the dictatorship of the proletariat. We shall not, however, pause to answer this argument, since it has been refuted by the international analysis made during the consideration of the question of a ‘Workers’ Government’. ‘The United States of Europe’ is a slogan in every respect corresponding with the slogan ‘A Workers’ (or Workers’ and Peasants’) Government’. Is the realisation of a ‘Workers’ Government’ possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat? Only a conditional reply can be given to this question. In any case, we regard the ‘Workers’ Government’ as a stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therein lies the great value of this slogan for us. But the slogan ‘The United States of Europe’ has an exactly similar and parallel significance. Without this supplementary slogan the fundamental problems of Europe must remain suspended in mid-air.

But will not this slogan play into the hands of the pacifists? I do not believe that there exists such ‘lefts’ nowadays as would consider this danger sufficient grounds for rejecting the slogan. After all, we are living in 1923, and have learned a little from the past. There are the same reasons, or absence of reasons, for fearing a pacifist interpretation of ‘The United States of Europe’as there are for fearing a democratic-SR-ist interpretation of the slogan ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’. Of course, if we advance 'The United States of Europe' as an independent programme, as a panacea for achieving pacification and reconstruction, and if we isolate this slogan from slogans of ‘A Workers’ Government’, of the united front, and from the class struggle, we shall certainly end in democratised Wilsonism, i.e., in Kautskyism, and even in something more degrading (assuming there is anything more degrading than Kautskyism). But I repeat, we live in the year 1923 and have learned a little from the past. The Communist International is now a reality, and it will not be Kautsky, who will initiate and control the struggle associated with our slogans. Our method of posing the problem is diametrically opposed to Kautsky’s method. Pacifism is an academic programme, whose object is to avoid the necessity of revolutionary action. Our formulation, on the contrary, is an incentive to struggle. To the workers of Germany, not the Communists (it is not necessary to convince them), but to the workers in general, and in the first place to the Social-Democratic workers, who fear the economic consequences of a fight for a workers’ government; to the workers of France, whose minds ire still obsessed by the questions of reparations and of the national debt; to the workers of Germany, France and of all Europe, who fear lest the establishment of the workers’ regime lead to the isolation and economic ruin of their countries, we say: Even if temporarily isolated (and with such a great bridge to the East as the Soviet Union, Europe will not be easily isolated), Europe will be able not only to maintain herself, but to consolidate and build herself up, once she has broken down the customs barriers and his united herself economically to the inexhaustible natural riches of Russia. ‘The United States of Europe’ – a purely revolutionary perspective – is the next stage in our generally revolutionary perspective. It arises from the profound difference in the situations of Europe and America. Whoever ignores this difference, will willy-nilly, drown the true revolutionary perspective in mere historical abstractions. Naturally, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Federation will not stop in its European phase. As we have said, our Soviet Union affords Europe an outlet into Asia, and from Asia into Europe. We are therefore, here envisaging only a stage, but a stag of great historical importance, through which we must first pass.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s Concept of the Party

Click on the headline to link to a Rosa Luxemburg-related post from the American Left History blog.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Rosa Luxemburg on Lenin’s Concept of the Party
THE ESSAY on Lenin’s Concept of the Party by Hal Draper, in What Next? No.9, ends before considering how the Communist International (CI) was structured as a world party, how the individual sections were structured, or how the ruling Soviet party structure developed. It would seem to me that these matters bear on the subject tackled, particularly in the case of the CI and the national Communist Parties, whereas one could argue that the ruling Soviet CP was a special case owing to the conditions imposed by civil war, imperialist intervention and isolation due to the lack of revolutionary success elsewhere.

The Second Congress of the Communist International in July-August 1920 (and in fact the first real one, as the first merely established the rudiments of a new International) adopted both the Statutes and the 21 Conditions. The former demanded ‘a strongly centralised organisation’ and granted the ECCI (Executive Committee) supreme power) while the latter, in Point 12, which declares Democratic Centralism a principle, demands on organisation ‘as centralised as possible’, with ‘iron discipline’, and a party centre ‘equipped with the most comprehensive powers’.

Of course, the above-quoted phrases do not necessarily mean a Stalinist-type set-up, and the legal CPs tended to have quite a democratic structure, with remnants of the rank-and-file cheeks and balances associated with the social-democratic parties. The removal of the election of the party functionaries and their accountability to the membership and the substitution of a top-down appointed method with all decisions residing in the Central Committee, came about through ‘Bolshevisation’ in the mid-1920s. However, the power of the ECCI was established already in 1920, so it seems to me that Rosa Luxemburg’s objections to Lenin’s party-concept need more serious consideration than given in Hal Draper’s essay.

Very little by Rosa Luxemburg was in print in 1963, when Draper penned his piece. The 5-volume Gesammelte Werke appeared between 1970 and 1975, the 5-volume Gesammelte Briefe between 1982 and 1984, a sixth volume of correspondence appeared in 1993, and a sixth volume of her works, translated from Polish, is at present under preparation.

The objections mentioned by Draper in Luxemburg’s Organisational Questions ... (1904) were not a one-off occurrence, but, according to renowned Polish Luxemburg scholar Feliks Tych, run through her writings up to her death. In Revolutionary History, Vol.6, No.2/3, I resuméd a number of articles on the latest research on Luxemburg-Jogiches regarding the question of their attitude towards Lenin’s party-concept and his methods, plus some newly found texts, contained in the respected German historical quarterly Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz ..., Vol.27, No.3. Writing in the Czerwony Sztandar in July 1912, following the split in the RSDLP, Luxemburg sees Lenin’s conception of organisation thus: ‘the Central Committee is everything whereas the real party is only its appendage, a mindless mass which moves mechanically on the orders of the leader like the army exercising on the parade ground and like a choir performing under the baton of the conductor’. That sounds just like a criticism of the ECCI as set out in 1920.

Mike Jones

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Soviets in Action-John Reed

Click on the healdine to link to a John Reed-related entry from the American Left History blog.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

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From Issue no.8, of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk.

Soviets in Action-John Reed

This piece was first published in October 1918 in The Liberator, a radical monthly edited by Max Eastman, which did pioneering work in rallying support for Bolshevism in the United States. The article provides an eye-witness account of the role of the soviets, and other organs of workers’ democracy such as the factory committees, before and after the October Revolution. The author is well-known for his celebrated account of the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. On his return to the USA, John Reed helped to found the Communist Labor Party, and was delegated to the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920. While in Russia, Reed contracted typhus and died. He was buried in Moscow’s Red Square.

THROUGH ALL the chorus of abuse and misrepresentation directed against the Russian Soviets by the capitalist press there runs a voice shrill with a sort of panic, which cries: ‘There is no government in Russia! There is no organisation among the Russian workers! It will not work! It will not work!’

There is method in the slander.

As all real socialists know, and as we who have seen the Russian Revolution can testify, there is today in Moscow and throughout all the cities and towns of the Russian land a highly complex political structure, which is upheld by the vast majority of the people and which is functioning as well as any newborn popular government ever functioned. Also the workers of Russia have fashioned from their necessities and the demands of life an economic organisation which is evolving into a true industrial democracy.

The Soviet state is based upon the Soviets – or Councils – of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. These Councils – institutions so characteristic of the Russian Revolution – originated in 1905, when, during the first general strike of the workers, Petrograd factories and labour organisations sent delegates to a Central Committee. This Strike Committee was named Council of Workers’ Deputies. It called the second general strike of the fall of 1905, sent out organisers all over Russia, and for a short time was recognised by the Imperial Government as the authorised spokesman of the revolutionary Russian working class.

Upon the failure of the 1905 Revolution, the members of the Council either fled or were sent to Siberia. But so astoundingly effective as a political organ was this type of union that all revolutionary parties included a Council of Workers’ Deputies in their plans for the next uprising.

In March 1917, when, in the face of all Russia rearing like a sea, the Tsar abdicated and Grand Duke Michael declined the throne, and the reluctant Duma was forced to assume the reins of government, the Council of Workers’ Deputies sprang fully-fledged into being. In a few days it was enlarged to include delegates of the Army, and called the Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Except for Kerensky the Duma Committee was composed of bourgeois, and had no connection with the revolutionary masses whatever. Fighting had to be done, order had to be restored, the front guarded. The Duma members had no way of executing these duties; they were obliged to appeal to the representatives of the workers and soldiers – in other words the Council. The Council took charge of the work of Revolution, of co-ordinating the activities of the people, preserving order. Moreover, it assumed the task of assuring the Revolution against its betrayal by the bourgeoisie.

From the moment when the Duma was forced to appeal to the Council, two governments existed in Russia and these two governments struggled for the mastery until November 1917, when the Soviets, with the Bolsheviks in control, overthrew the coalition government.

There were, as I have said, Soviets of both Workers’ and of Soldiers’ Deputies. Somewhat later there came into being Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. In most cities the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets met together; they also held their All-Russian Congress jointly. The Peasants’ Soviets, however, were held aloof by the reactionary elements in control, and did not join with the workers and soldiers until the November revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Government.

THE SOVIET is based directly upon the workers in the factories and the peasants in the field. At first the delegates of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Soviets were elected according to rules which varied with the needs and population of various localities. In some villages the peasants chose one delegate for each fifty voters. Soldiers in garrison were given a certain number of delegates for each regiment, regardless of its strength; the army in the field, however, had a different method of electing their Soviets. As for the workers in the great cities, they soon found out that their Soviets became unwieldy unless the delegates were limited to one for each five hundred. In the same way, the first two All-Russian Congresses of Soviets were roughly based upon one delegate for each twenty five thousand voters, but in fact the delegates represented constituencies of various sizes.

Until February 1918 anybody could vote for delegates to the Soviets. Even had the bourgeoisie organised and demanded representation in the Soviets, they would have been given it. For example, during the regime of the Provisional Government there was bourgeois representation in the Petrograd Soviet – a delegate of the Union of Professional Men which comprised doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.

Last March, the constitution of the Soviets was worked out in detail and applied universally. It restricted the franchise to: citizens of the Russian Socialist Republic of both sexes who shall have completed their eighteenth year by the day of election; all who have acquired the means of living through labour that is productive and useful to society and who are members of labour unions. Excluded from the right to vote were: employers of labour for profit; persons who lived on unearned increment; merchants and agents of private business; employers of religious communities; former members of the police and gendarmerie; the former ruling dynasty; the mentally deficient; the deaf and dumb; and those who had been punished for selfish and dishonourable misdemeanours.

As far as the peasants are concerned, each hundred peasants in the villages elect one representative to the Volost, or Township, Soviet. These Volost Soviets send delegates to the Uyezd, or County, Soviets, which in turn send delegates to the Oblast, or Provincial, Soviet, to which also are elected delegates from the Workers’ Soviets in the cities.

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was in operation when I was in Russia, may serve as an example of how the urban units of government function under the socialist state. It consisted of about 1,200 deputies, and in normal circumstances held a plenary session every two weeks. In the meantime, it elected a Central Executive Committee of 110 members, based upon party proportionality, and this Central Executive Committee added to itself by invitation delegates from the central committees of all the political parties, from the central committees of the professional unions, the factory shop committees, and other democratic organisations.

Besides the big City Soviet, there were also the Rayori, or Ward, Soviets. These were made up of the deputies elected from each ward to the City Soviet, and administered their part of the city. Naturally, in some wards there were no factories, and therefore normally no representation of the ward either in the City Soviet or in Ward Soviets of their own. But the Soviet system is extremely flexible, and if the cooks and waiters, or the street sweepers, or the courtyard servants, or the cab drivers of that ward organised and demanded representation, they were allowed delegates.

Elections of delegates are based on proportional representation, which means that the political parties are represented in exact proportion to the number of voters in the whole city. And it is political parties and programmes which are voted for – not candidates. The candidates are designated by the central committees of the political parties, which can replace them by other party members. Also the delegates are not elected for any particular term, but are subject to recall at any time.

No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revolution the popular will changes with great rapidity. For example, during the first week of December 1917, there were parades and demonstrations in favour of a Constituent Assembly -that is to say, against the Soviet power. One of these parades was fired on by some irresponsible Red Guards, and several people killed. The reaction to this stupid violence was immediate. Within twelve hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet changed. More than a dozen Bolshevik deputies were withdrawn, and replaced by Mensheviki. And it was three weeks before public sentiment subsided – before the Mensheviki were retired one by one and the Bolsheviki sent back.

AT LEAST twice a year delegates are elected from all over Russia to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Theoretically these delegates are chosen by direct popular election: from the provinces, one for each hundred and twenty five thousand voters - from the cities, one for each twenty five thousand; in practice, however, they are usually chosen by the provincial and the urban Soviets. An extraordinary session of the Congress can be called at any time upon the initiative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or upon the demand of Soviets representing one third of the working population of Russia.

This body, consisting of about two thousand delegates, meets in the capital in the form of a great Soviet, and settles upon the essentials of national policy. It elects a Central Executive Committee, like the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which invites delegates from the central committees of all democratic organisations.

This augmented Central Executive Committee of the Russian Soviets is the parliament of the Russian Republic. It consists of about three hundred and fifty persons. Between All-Russian Congresses it is the supreme authority; it must not act outside the lines laid down by the last Congress, and is strictly responsible in all its acts to the next Congress. For example, the Central Executive Committee can, and did, order that the peace treaty with Germany be signed, But it could not make this treaty binding on Russia. Only the All Russian Congress has power to ratify the treaty.

The Central Executive Committee elects from its midst eleven Commissars, to be chairmen of committees in charge of the different branches of government, in place of ministers. These Commissars can be recalled at any time. They are strictly responsible to the Central Executive Committee. The Commissars elect a chairman. Ever since the Soviet Government has been formed, this chairman – or Premier – has been Nicolai Lenin. If his leadership were unsatisfactory, Lenin could be recalled at any moment by the delegation of the masses of the Russian people, or in a few weeks’ time directly by the Russian people themselves.

The chief function of the Soviets is the defence and consolidation of the Revolution. They express the political will of the masses, not only in the All Russian Congresses, for the whole country, but also in their own localities, where their authority is practically supreme. This decentralisation exists because the local Soviets create the central government, and not the central government the local Soviets. In spite of local autonomy, however, the decrees of the Central Executive Committee, and the orders of the Commissars, are valid throughout all the country, because under the Soviet Republic there are no sectional or private interests to serve, and the cause of the Revolution is everywhere the same.

Ill-informed observers, mostly from the middle class intelligentsia, are fond of remarking that they are in favour of the Soviets, but against the Bolsheviks. This is an absurdity. The Soviets are the most perfect organs of working class representation, it is true, but they are also the weapons of proletarian dictatorship, to which all anti-Bolshevik parties are bitterly opposed. So the measure of the adherence of the people to the policy of proletarian dictatorship is not only measured by the membership of the Bolshevik Party – or, as it is now called, the Communist Party – but also by the growth and activity of local Soviets all over Russia.

The most striking example of this is among the peasants, who did not take the leadership of the revolution, and whose primitive and almost exclusive interest in it was the confiscation of the great estates. The Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies at first had practically no other function except the solution of the land question. It was the failure of the land solution under the coalition government which turned the attention of the great mass of peasants to the social reasons behind this failure – that, coupled with the ceaseless propaganda of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and of the Bolsheviki, and the return to the villages of the revolutionary soldiers.

The traditional party of the peasants is the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The great inert mass of peasants whose only interest was in their land, and who had neither fighting stamina nor political initiative, at first refused to have anything to do with the Soviets. Those peasants, however, who did participate in the Soviets soon awoke to the idea of the proletarian dictatorship. And they almost invariably joined the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and became fighting partisans of the Soviet government.

In the Commissariat of Agriculture in Petrograd hangs a map of Russia, sprinkled with red-headed pins. Each of these red-headed pins represents a Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies. When I first saw the map, hanging in the old headquarters of the Peasants’ Soviets at 6 Fontanka, the red points were sprinkled sparsely over the vast country, nor did the numbers grow. For the first eight months of the revolution there were volosts, uyezds, whole provinces in fact where only one or two large towns would show a Peasants’ Soviet, and perhaps a scattering of villages. After the November Revolution, however, you could see all Russia redder under your eyes, as village after village, county after county, province after province, awoke and formed its Peasant Council.

At the time of the Bolshevik insurrection a Constituent Assembly with an anti~Soviet majority could be elected; one month later it would have been impossible. I saw three All-Russian Peasants Conventions in Petrograd. The delegates arrived – the vast majority of them Right Socialist Revolutionaries They met in session – and very stormy sessions they always were – under the presidency of conservatives of the type of Avksentiev and Peshekhanov. In a few days they would move to the left and be dominated by pseudo-radicals like Tchernov. A few days later the majority would become very radical, and Maria Spiridonova would be elected chairman. Then the conservative minority would split off and set up a rump convention, which in a few days dwindled to nothing. And the main body would send delegates to join the Soviets at Smolny. This happened every time.

I shall never forget the Peasants’ Conference which took place towards the end of November, and how Tchernov fought for control and lost it, and that wonderful procession of grizzled proletarians of the soil who marched to Smolny through the snowy streets, singing, their blood-red banners floating in the bitter wind. It was dark night. On the steps of Smolny hundreds of working men were waiting to receive their peasant brothers, and in the dim light the two masses moving one down and the other up, rushed together and embraced, and wept, and cheered.

The Soviets can pass decrees effecting fundamental economic changes, but these must be carried out by the local popular organisations themselves. The confiscation and distribution of the land, for example, were left to the Peasants’ Land Committees. These Land Committees were elected by the peasants at the suggestion of Prince Lvov, first premier of the Provisional Government Some settlement of the land question was inevitable, by which the great estates should be broken up and distributed among the peasants. Prince Lvov asked the peasants to elect Land Committees, which should not only determine their own agricultural needs, but should also survey and make a valuation of the landed estates. But when these Land Committees attempted to function, the landlords had them arrested.

When the Soviets seized the power, its first action was to promulgate the Decree of the Land. This Land Decree was not a Bolshevik project at all, but the programme of the Right (or moderate) Socialist Revolutionary Party, drawn up on the basis of several hundred peasant memorials. It abolished forever private title to land or to natural resources in Russia, and gave over to the Land Committees the task of apportioning the land among the peasants, until the Constituent Assembly should finally settle the question. After the dissolution of the Constitution Assembly, the Decree was made final.

Outside of these few general propositions, and a section providing for the emigration of surplus population in congested neighbourhoods, the details of confiscation and distribution were left entirely to the local Land Committee. Kalagayev, the first Commissar of Agriculture, drew up an elaborate set of rules to guide the peasants in their action. But Lenin, in a speech before the Central Executive Committee, persuaded the government to leave the peasants to manage the matter in a revolutionary way, merely advising the poor peasants to combine against the rich peasants. (‘Let ten poor peasants oppose every rich peasant’, said Lenin.)

Of course no peasant could own his land, but still, he could take what land was due him and treat it as his private property. But the policy of the government, acting through the local Land Committee, is to discourage this tendency. Peasants who wish to become private landlords may do so, but they are not assisted by the government On the other hand, peasants who farm co-operatively are given credit, seed, implements and modern technical training.

Attached to the Land Committees are agricultural and forestry experts. In order to co-ordinate the practices of the local Committees a central body is elected from them, known as the Main Land Committee, which sits in the capital, in close touch with the Commissariat of Agriculture.

WHEN THE March Revolution broke, the owners and administrators of many industrial plants either left or were driven out by the workers. In the government factories, where labour had long been at the mercy of irresponsible bureaucrats appointed by the Tsar, this was particularly the case.

Without superintendents, foremen, and in many cases engineers and bookkeepers, the workers found themselves faced with the alternative of keeping the works going or of starving. A committee was elected, one delegate from each ‘shop’ or department; this committee attempted to run the factory. Of course, at first this plan seemed hopeless. The functions of the different departments could be co-ordinated in this way, but the lack of technical training on the part of the workers produced some grotesque results.

Finally there was a committee meeting at one of the factories, where a workman rose and said: ‘Comrades, why do we worry? The question of technical experts is not a difficult one. Remember the boss wasn’t a technical expert; the boss didn’t know engineering or chemistry or bookkeeping. All he did was to own. When he wanted technical help, he hired men to do it for him. Well, now we are the boss. Let’s hire engineers, bookkeepers, and so forth – to work for us!’

In the government factories the problem was comparatively simple, since the Revolution automatically removed the ‘boss’, and never really substituted another. But when the Factory Shop Committees spread to the privately-owned works, they were viciously fought by factory owners, most of whom were making contracts with the unions.

In the private factories, too, the shop committees were the product of necessity. After the first three months of the Revolution, during which the middle class and the proletarian organisations worked together in utopian harmony, the industrial capitalists began to be afraid of the growing power and ambition of the workers’ organisations – just as the country landowners feared the Land Committee, and the officers the soldiers’ committees and Soviets. Along about the first part of June began the more or less conscious campaign of the entire bourgeoisie to halt the Revolution, and break down the democratic organisations. Beginning with the Factory Shop Committees, the industrial owners planned to make a clean sweep of everything. including the Soviets. The army was disorganised, supplies and munitions and food diverted from it, and actual positions betrayed to the Germans – like Riga; in the country the peasants were persuaded to hoard their grain, and provoked to disorders, which gave the excuse to the Cossacks to ‘restore peace’; and in industry, more important than all, the machinery and operation of the factories themselves were sabotaged, transportation was still further wrecked, and the coal mines, metal mines and sources of raw materials damaged as much as possible. Every effort was made to shut down the factories and starve the workers back into submission to the old industrial regime.

This the workers were forced to resist. The Factory Shop Committee sprang up and took charge. At first, of course, Russian workers made ludicrous mistakes, as all the world has been told again and again. They demanded impossible wages – they attempted to run complicated scientific manufacturing processes without proper experience; in some cases, even, they asked the boss to return at his own terms. But such cases are the great minority In the majority of plants the workers were resourceful enough to be able to conduct the industry without bosses.

The owners attempted to falsify the books, to conceal orders; the Factory Shop Committee was forced to find out ways to control the books. The owners tried to strip the works – so the committee had to rule that nothing should go in or out of the plant without permission. When the factory was going to close down for lack of fuel, raw material, or orders, the Factory Shop Committee had to send men half across Russia to the mines, or down into the Caucasus for oil, to Crimea for cotton; and agents had to be sent out by the workers to sell the product. In the breakdown of the railroads, committee agents had to make agreements with the Railwaymen’s Union for transportation of freight. To guard against strike-breakers, the committee had to take over the function of hiring and discharging workers.

Thus the Factory Shop Committee was the creation of Russian anarchy, forced by necessity to learn how to manage industry, so that when the time came the Russian workers could take over actual control with little friction.

As an instance of how the masses worked together, there is the matter of two hundred thousand poods of coal, which was taken from the bunkers of the Baltic battle fleet in December, and turned over by the sailors’ committees to keep the factories of Petrograd running during the coal famine.

Obukhov Works was a steel plant manufacturing supplies for the Navy. The chairman of the Obukhov committee was a Russian-Arnerican, Petrovsky by name, well known here as an anarchist. One day the foreman of the torpedo department told Petrovsky that the department would have to close down owing to the impossibility of procuring certain small tubes used in the manufacture of torpedoes. The tubes were manufactured by a factory across the river, whose product was contracted for three months ahead. The closing down of the torpedo department meant that four hundred men would be out of work.

‘I’ll get the tubes’, said Petrovsky. He went direct to the tube factory, where, instead of calling upon the manager, he sought the chairman of the local Factory Shop Committee. ‘Comrade’, he said, ‘if we don’t get tubes in two days, our torpedo department will have to close down, and four hundred of the boys will be out of a job.’

The chairman called for his factory’s books, and discovered that some thousands of the tubes were contracted for by three private plants in the vicinity. He and Petrovsky thereupon visited these three plants, and called on the Factory Shop Committee chairmen. At two of the factories it was discovered that the tubes were not immediately needed; and next day the tubes were delivered to the Obukhov Works, and the torpedo department didn’t shut down.

In Novgorod was a textile mill. At the outbreak of the revolution the owner said to himself. ‘Here’s trouble coming. We won’t be able to make any profits while this revolution is on. Let’s shut down the works until the thing blows over.’ So he shut down the works, and he and the office force, the chemists, engineers and manager, took the train for Petrograd. The next morning the workers opened the mill.

Now these workers were perhaps a little more ignorant than most workers. They knew nothing of the technical processes of manufacture, of bookkeeping or management, or selling. They elected a Factory Shop Committee, and finding a certain amount of fuel and raw materials in stock, set to work to manufacturing cotton cloth.

Not knowing what was done with cotton cloth when manufactured, they first helped themselves to enough for their families. Next, some of the looms being out of order, they sent a delegate to a nearby machine-shop saying that they would give cotton cloth in exchange for mechanical assistance. This done, they made a deal with the local city co-operative, to supply cloth in exchange for food. They even extended the principle of barter so far as to exchange bolts of cloth for fuel with the coal miners of Kharkov, and with the Railwaymen’s Union for transportation.

But finally they glutted the local market with cotton cloth, and then they ran up against a demand which cloth could not satisfy – rent. This was in the days of the Provisional Government when there were still landlords. Rent had to be satisfied with money. So they loaded a train with cloth and sent it, in charge of a committeeman, to Moscow. The committeeman left his train at the station, and went down the street. He came to a tailor shop and asked if the tailor needed cloth.

’How much?’ asked the tailor.

’A train-load’, answered the committeeman.

’What does it cost?

’I don’t know. What do you usually pay for cloth?’


The tailor got his cloth for a song, and the committeeman, who had never seen so much money at one time, went back to Novgorod highly elated.

So it was that all over Russia the workers were getting the necessary education in the fundamentals of industrial production, and even distribution, so that when the November Revolution came they could take their places in the machinery of workers’ control.

It was in June 1917 that the first meeting of delegates from the shop committees was held. At this time the committees had hardly spread outside of Petrograd. It was a remarkable gathering, composed of delegates of the actual rank and file, most of them Bolsheviks, many of them Anarcho-Syndicalists; and its character was that of protest against the tactics of the trade unions. In the political world the Bolsheviks were reiterating that no socialist had any right to participate in a coalition government with the bourgeoisie. The meeting of shop committee delegates put itself on record as taking the same attitude toward industry. In other words, the employing class and the workers have no interests in common; no class conscious worker can be a member of an arbitration or conciliation board except to acquaint the employers with the demands of the workers. No contracts between employers and the workers. Industrial production must be absolutely controlled by the workers.

At first the unions fought bitterly against the Factory Shop Committees. But the shop committees, who were in a position to clutch the command of industry at its heart, easily extended and consolidated their power. Many workmen could not see the necessity of joining a union; but all of them saw the necessity of participating in the elections of the shop committee, which controlled their immediate jobs. On the other hand, the shop committees recognised the value of the unions; no new worker was employed unless he could show a union card; it was the shop committees which applied locally the regulations of the different unions. At the present time the unions and the Factory Shop Committees work in perfect harmony, each in its place.

PRIVATE OWNERSHIP of industry in Russia is not yet abolished. In many factories the owner still holds title, and is allowed a certain limited profit on his investment, on condition that he works for the success and increase of scope of the enterprise; but control is taken away from him. Those industries whose owners attempt to lock out their workers, or who, by fraud or force, try to hinder the operations of the plant, are immediately confiscated by the workers. Conditions, hours and wages in all industries, private or government-owned, are uniform.

The reason for this survival of semi-capitalism, in a proletarian state, lies in the backwardness of Russia’s economic life, the surrounding highly-organised capitalist states, and the necessity for industrial production in Russia immediately, to combat the pressure of foreign industry.

The agency by which the state controls industry, both labour and production, is called the Council of Workers’ Control. This central body, sitting in the capital, is composed of delegates elected from local Councils of Workers’ Control, which are made up of members of Factory Shop Committees, Professional Union officials, and technical engineers and experts. A central executive committee manages the affairs of each locality, composed of common workmen, but the majority is composed of workmen from other districts, so that its rulings shall be unprejudiced by sectional interests. The local councils recommend to the All-Russian Council the confiscation of plants, report on the needs in fuel, raw materials, transportation and labour in their districts, and assist the workmen in learning to manage the various industries. The All-Russian Council has power to confiscate plants and to equalise the economic resources of the different localities.

If it had not been for democratic organisations which existed already before the revolution, there is little doubt that the Russian revolution would have been starved to its knees long before this time. The ordinary commercial machinery of distribution had been completely smashed. Only the consumers’ co-operative societies managed to feed the people, and their system has since been adopted by the municipalities, and even by the government. Before the revolution there were more than twelve million members of the co-operative societies of Russia. It is a very natural way for Russians to combine, because of its resemblance to the primitive co-operation of Russian village life for centuries. In the Putilov factory, where more than 40,000 workers are employed, the co-operative society fed, housed and even clothed more than 100,000 people – sending all the way to England for clothing.

It is this quality in the Russians that is forgotten by people who think that Russia can have no government, because there is no central force; and whose mental picture of Russia is a servile committee in Moscow, bossed by Lenin and Trotsky, and maintained by Red Guard mercenaries. Quite the contrary is true. The organisations which I have described are reproduced in almost every community in Russia. And if any considerable part of Russia were seriously opposed to the Soviet government, the Soviets could not last an hour.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History pots related to this entry.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
From What Next? No.12, 1999

A Letter About Lenin-From What Next? No.12, 1999

A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky

After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.

DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.

He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.

But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.

Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).

But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.

However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.

Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.

Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.

It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.

In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.

Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.

This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.

Vienna, 28 January 1924


Karl Kautsky

After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.

DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.

He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.

But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.

Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).

But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.

However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.

Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.

Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.

It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.

In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.

Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.

This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.

Vienna, 28 January 1924