Socialist Classics: Karl Marx, ‘Marginal Notes on the Programme of the German Workers’ Party’

Joe Conroy examined a work which looks closely at the shift from capitalist to communist society in Issue 33 (September 2008).

This work is usually known as the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, although that title tells us less about it than Marx’s own. In 1875 a unification was taking place on the German left between those who more or less held to Marx’s kind of socialism and the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, a pioneering figure in the country’s labour movement until his death eleven years earlier. A programme for the united Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany was to be adopted at a congress in the town of Gotha. While welcoming moves towards in­creased co-operation, Marx saw the pro­gramme it was based on as extremely weak, and explained why in these notes he sent to leaders of the Marxist group.

The programme opens with the commonplace assertion that “Labour is the source of all wealth”, but this comes in for criticism: “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values”, and even human labour “is only the manifes­tation of a natural power”. This can be seen as one starting point in a Marxist ecology. Humanity’s endeavours are nothing without nature, “the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour”. People can only create wealth by relating to the natural world “as owners, treating it as belonging to them”. This doesn’t mean devastating the planet for profit, as elite ownership of it means. Possessing the world as our common heritage, interacting with it for our own good as a species, could only logically lead to a sustainable environ­mental future.

The demand for “equal primary education by the state” looks fair enough, but Marx calls it “entirely objectionable”. Funding and the enforcement of basic standards can come from the state, but that “is something entirely different from appointing the state as educator of the people! Instead, government and church should equally be excluded from all influence on the schools.” Far from the central­ised standardised state education often associated with socialist ideas, Marx’s sympathies clearly lie with a diverse and plural mix of educational approaches. He even advocates “early combination of productive work with instruction”, with tight restrictions on its duration and safety for various age groups, seeing it as “one of the most powerful means of transforming present society”. Having schoolchildren doing real work in the economy (as opposed to the wretched ‘work experience’ inflicted upon transition year students) would present its difficulties, but this is part of Marx’s concern to break down the division between academic and technical education, between mental and manual work—between learning and working, even.

He looks at the unity programme very closely, asking what precisely its various paragraphs mean and how much sense they make. In large part, he finds, it is “a failure in style and content”, with words thrown in without thought. Its demand for a “Normal working day” is meaningless, since it doesn’t bother to say how many hours that would be. It is still very common for left-wing programmes to be just as slapdash, advocating (for instance) an increase in housing or health spending without troubling to put a figure on it, or taking refuge in big-sounding but vague adjectives. The absence of worked-out detail betrays a poor opinion of those who may read such a programme, and a lack of conviction that it could ever form a basis for real action.

Likewise with the Gotha programme’s call for a “fair distrib­ution of the products of labour”, a form of which often crops up in socialist propaganda today. What seems fair to one person—or more importantly, to one class—will not seem fair to another, and so the demand doesn’t take things very far. But the whole emphasis on distribution is misplaced: “The distribution of means of consump­tion at any time is only the result of the distribution of conditions of production themselves. But the latter distribution is a factor of the mode of production itself.” When the factories, land and so on belong to a class, the products created with them will be distributed in a way that favours that class, but if they are “the co-operative property of the workers themselves” their products will be distrib­uted accordingly. The point is to shift the debate away from bigger or smaller slices of the cake, and on to the question of ‘Who owns the bakery?’

Similarly, the socialist criticism of capitalism needs to move from condemning low wages to condemning the wages system itself, pointing out “that the wage labourer only has permission to work for his own living, i.e. to live, as long as he works for a certain time free of charge for the capitalist… that therefore the system of wage labour is a system of slavery… whether the worker receives better or worse payment”. Remember that Marx’s objections here are to a socialist programme. Calls for ‘fair wages’ emerging spontaneously during struggle are nothing to be condemned, but for socialists laying out their principles to stick at that stage is a problem.

The programme should have been more concrete and less aspirational. Instead of relying on the claim that the current state of affairs is unjust to workers, it should have tried “to prove that in present capitalist society the material etc. conditions have been finally created under which the workers are enabled and compelled to break this social curse”—in other words, that socialism was not just a nice idea but one whose time had come historically. The challenge socialists face is seldom that of showing that the society we want to see would be a good one, and more often of showing that it would be practically possible.

And one of the most interesting aspects of the Marginal Notes is that they give Marx’s fullest insights into how a post-revolutionary society would operate. First of all he insists that a period of transition would be necessary: “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, as it has emerged out of capitalist society; which therefore in every respect, economically, ethically, intellectually, is covered with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerged.”

This recognition that people cannot leap overnight from an ex­ploitative society to a free one is testament to the self-emancipation that lay at the heart of Marx’s socialism. People reared in conditions of oppression have to change themselves as well as their external social circumstances, become new human beings fit and able to live with each other in freedom. This cannot but take time and space. To expect otherwise, that injustice can be abolished by diktat, is to expect that some enlightened minority will introduce the change over people’s heads, in spite of them. An instantaneous end to all the evils of class society may sound more radical than the more measured approach of Marx, but in reality it is the idea of those whose socialism cannot be based on the capacity of people to change the world for themselves.

Possibly the most difficult feature of the transformation would be acquiring the habit of working unselfishly as a member of a community rather than just for yourself. Most people from time to time do things with no expectation of reward, but making this into the everyday basis of work altogether would be a sea change radically different to what any of us have known. Marx maintains that, to begin with, a socialist society would have to link work to a material return, to distribute goods in proportion to the amount of labour performed. This distribution takes place only after those too old or sick or young to work have been looked after, and when a part has been set aside for social services like health and education: “This part increases from the outset in comparison with present society and grows in the same proportion as the new society develops.” While being far more equal than capitalism, distributing products according to work done does not eliminate all social in­equalities, “But these defects are unavoidable in the first phase of communist society”.

The programme’s demand for a “free state” makes Marx’s blood boil: the state has far too much freedom as it is.

What transformation will the state entity undergo in a communist society? In other words, which social functions remain there which are analogous to the present functions of the state?… Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. A political transition period corresponds also, in which the state can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

The phrase Marx underlines here has been the source of endless confusion, both honest and dishonest, ever since. The best way to understand it is to take it as meaning exactly what it says: the working class unambiguously hold political power to implement revolutionary change during a transition period—no more and no less. Marx doesn’t go into the precise mechanisms of workers’ rule here, as he did elsewhere. But nothing here provides for a section or a party of the working class to hold power, or for power to be held on behalf of or for the good of the working class. Nothing here provides for a dictatorship that implements anything other than, let alone opposed to, socialist revolution. Nothing here provides for a dictatorship that lasts indefinitely, without moving towards a communist society. There is no denying that all of the above have been done or pro­posed in Marx’s name, but that is to be laid at the door of those responsible, not at his.

It is also helpful to look at the context of 1875, when ‘dictator­ship’ meant something different to what it has come to mean since fascism emerged in the 1920s: the autocratic tyranny of one man or party. The allusion in Marx’s day was to the dictatura of ancient Rome, where law provided for one man to take power for a limited period and for limited purposes. The concept entered the political vocabulary again through the French revolution, during and after which many radicals foresaw a period of dictatorship to bed down a revolution. In fact Marx’s insistence on a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat itself was posed against those who wanted a clique of would-be socialist dictators to lead the workers by the nose into the promised land. Only if the working class itself literally held the reigns of power could capitalism be uprooted.

Which brings us to the other famous passage of the Notes:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labour and with it the antagonism of intellectual and physical work has dis­appeared; after work is not merely a means to live but has become itself life’s first need; after the all-sided development of individuals along with productive powers and all springs of co-operative wealth flow more fully—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully gone beyond and society write on its banners: From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs!

(To give credit where it’s due, Marx was quoting that last phrase rather than coining it: the French reformist socialist Louis Blanc came up with it 35 years earlier.)

Having argued the need for a transition period, it would have been easy to leave it hanging there, but Marx is actually fairly specific on the conditions necessary for that period to pass and give way to full-scale communism. These conditions can almost serve as a kind of checklist to see whether such a transitional society is headed for communism at all. The crucial need is the growth of people: from being chained to one particular type of work to turning their hand to various types, from working under compulsion to working because they want to. The increase of material plenty and the ability to produce it flow from that broad human development. For Marx, this abundant flowering of human personality and potential is both the end and the means of communism. In these notes and throughout his life, that formed the bedrock of his drive for revolution.

Socialist Classics: Raya Dunayevskaya, ‘Marxism and Freedom’

In March 2008 (Issue 31), Joe Conroy looked at a book that, fifty years earlier, rediscovered the emancipatory heart of Marxist politics.

Born in Ukraine in 1910, brought to the US as a child and active in the socialist movement there since her teens, Raya Dunayevskaya was the most interesting figure of a trend that, in the middle of the twentieth century, sought to renew Marxist thought in the face of new problems and challenges. After two world wars, the birth and death of the Russian revolution, and the development of capitalism into new fields with new methods, Marxism could only have any relevance if it could act as a framework to answer the questions that all this posed. The book Marxism and Freedom: from 1776 until today, published in 1958, is the outstanding result of her work in that direction.

One of the habits that had stultified the Marxist movement, she writes, was that of “presenting the results of Marx’s studies as if they were something to be learned by rote, and disregarding the process, the relationship of theory to history, past and present, in the development of Marxism”. She shows how Marx’s Capital developed in the light of contemporary workers’ struggles. The movement of American workers for an eight hour day led Marx, late in the writing process, to add a detailed historical exposition of how the length of the working day is established through political struggle between worker and capitalist. That movement along with other events in the 1860s—the Polish insurrection, the American civil war, the strikes in France and Britain that led to the International Working Men’s Association—informed Marx’s writing in a way that left Capital Book One a far superior work to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy he wrote in 1859.

She could have added Marx’s solidarity with the Fenians to that list, which led him to rethink the relationship of Ireland to England and to add a section on the Irish economy to Capital. (Although her description of a later movement for Irish independence is a bit laughable: she imagines that in 1916 “At Jacobs Factory, the poor workers of the district formed themselves as an unarmed human barrier around the factory”!) Her claim that later additions to the book were influenced by the Paris Commune doesn’t stand up as well. After all, some of Marx’s improvements were just down to thinking out his argument further and coming up with a better way of presenting it.

But there is a crucial truth here, that “Marxism is the theoretical expression of the instinctive strivings of the proletariat for liber­ation”. Marx didn’t pluck his theories out of his own head. The revolts of German and English workers first showed him that this class had the potential to overthrow an unjust society. Struggles for a shorter working day showed him how free labour could supplant the tyranny of the factory. The Paris Commune showed him how the capitalist state could be replaced with the democratic power of the workers. Again and again, “the actions of the workers created the conditions for Marx to work out theory”.

One of the earliest lessons he drew, and held to all his life, was that work under capitalism is alienated and alienating, a denial of humanity rather than an expression of it. What he aimed at was to end this state of affairs, not bring it under state control:

For Marx the abolition of private property was a means toward the abolition of alienated labor, not an end in itself.… Marx insisted that the abolition of private property means a new way of life, a new social order only if “freely associated individuals,” and not abstract “society,” become the masters of the socialized means of production.

So what if all those means of production were to be taken over by the state in the name of society, without the position of those who work being altered? “As long as planning is governed by the necess­ity to pay the labourer the minimum necessary for his existence, and to extract from him the maximum surplus value… that is how long capitalist relations of production exist, no matter what you name the social order”, replies Dunayevskaya. As long as the workers are exploited, whether by private capitalists or by a state, capitalism exists.

This applied most directly to Russia: “Russian Communism rests on the mainspring of capitalism—paying the worker the minimum and extracting from him the maximum”. Analysing Russian econ­omic statistics, Dunayevskaya shows just how effective it was at doing that, with workers’ wages in 1940 able to buy only 62.4 per cent of what they could buy in 1913. While the state was the single capitalist within Russia, it still faced competitive pressures inter­nationally, forced to produce as cheaply and quickly as the rest of the world or go under, and so enforced the same economic laws as any other capitalist conglomerate. As a result, “That State bears as much resemblance to a workers’ state as the President of the United States Steel Corporation does to a steel worker just because they are both ‘employees’ of the same corporation.”

This interpretation ran counter to that of Trotsky, who always maintained that, because private property didn’t exist, Russia was a workers’ state that had degenerated. Dunayevskaya worked as a secretary to Trotsky for a time, until he stuck to his theory of Stalin’s state even when it allied with Nazi Germany in 1939. She maintains that his interpretation “did violence to the very concept of social­ism”, and had tragic consequences in the 1930s when many were looking for an alternative to capitalism:

They met Stalinist Communism which spent an incredible amount of time, care, energy and vigilance to confine Marx and Lenin within the bounds of its warped philosophy that private property equals capitalism, and state property equals socialism. Because Trotsky’s conception, that workers’ state equals state property, was not fundamentally different from the Stalinist thesis, it could not become an independent polarizing force despite his continuous struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The result was that Russia continued to parade as if it were something different from capitalism, as if state capitalism were the new society of socialism rather than the ultimate develop­ment of capitalism.

While being justifiably tough on Trotsky, however, Dunayev­skaya goes pretty soft on Lenin. She emphasises the philosophical transformation he underwent following the collapse of the left in 1914, but fails to note how he regressed as the Russian revolution did. She defends him against the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt revolt of 1921, and even his ban on inner-party opposition that year. She insists, rightly enough, that that ban was not the same as Stalin’s repression—but misses the point that it wasn’t absolutely different from it either, that it sealed shut whatever chance Russian workers may have had of exercising power in the state, and opened the way for another class to consolidate its own power.

Getting rid of private property is not enough to liberate the working class: “another transcendence, after the abolition of private property, is needed to achieve a truly new, human society which differs from private property not alone as an ‘economic system,’ but as a different way of life altogether”. Such a transcendence, such a human way of life is not a utopian dream, because this future is visible in the present: “The elements of the new society present in the old are everywhere in evidence in the thoughts and lives of the working class”. Dunayevskaya examines the East German uprising of 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, unofficial sit-down strikes against intensified exploitation in US factories and mines, and shows them concretely posing a new way of working, an alternative society to that dictated by capital. In such struggles, Marx’s critique of capitalism becomes flesh, “Marxism is in the daily lives and aspirations of working people”. Socialism can only arise from the selfsame source:

a new society is THE human endeavor, or it is nothing. It cannot be brought in behind the backs of the people, neither by the “vanguard” nor by the “scientific individuals.” The working people will build it, or it will not be built. There is a crying need for a new unity of theory and practice which begins with where the working people are—their thoughts, their struggles, their aspirations.

The great merit of Marxism and Freedom is that it rediscovered the symbiotic relationship of Marxist theory and working-class prac­tice. Dunayevskaya took absolutely literally Marx’s insistence that the working class can only win freedom by its own hands. The myriad divergences from that principle, partial oppositions to cap­italism that see some other agency bringing about the necessary change, or see the necessary change as something other than creating a world of free producers, have led the left down disastrous dead ends and continue to do so. Dunayevskaya’s work helps us keep our eyes on the prize, with the decisive avowal that “Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing.”

Revolutionary Lives: Leon Trotsky (part three: 1929-1940)

Joe Conroy concluded his examination of Trotsky in Issue 18 in March 2004.

The last decade of Trotsky’s life was marked by unprecedented adversity. While fascism took over more of Europe, Stalin’s rule in the USSR grew steadily more brutal. It drove Trotsky from one place of exile to another—from Turkey to France to Norway to Mexico—hounding him with lies, abuse and violence. The fact that he held fast to his principles throughout is a tribute to his undying loyalty to the socialist cause.

Fascism

Spain spent the 1930s in a continuous state of political crisis, culminating in Franco’s fascist coup in 1936. Much of the initial resistance consisted of workers and small farmers seizing factories and land from owners who sided with fascism. But the Communist party and others pushed for a ‘people’s front’ policy, in which all classes would put aside their differences and defend democracy. Working people would have to postpone hope of improving their situation in society and accept their inferior position until Franco was out of the way. Trotsky argued that such a strategy fatally weakened the struggle:

The demand not to transgress the bounds of bourgeois democracy signifies in practice not a defence of the democratic revolution but a repudiation of it.… The fighters of a revolutionary army must be clearly aware of the fact that they are fighting for their full social liberation and not for the reestablishment of the old (“democratic”) forms of exploitation.¹

The rise of Hitler in Germany was made easier by the Communist Party’s refusal to fight alongside the Social Democrats against him. They maintained that the reformists were little better than the fascists at the end of the day. Trotsky didn’t deny the Social Democratic betrayals of the working class but, because a Nazi victory would crush all workers’ organisations without exception, it was possible and necessary for revolutionaries to form a united front with them. This would mean unity in action, but not hiding differences with each other: “we shall criticize each other with full freedom… But when the fascist wants to force a gag down our throats, we will repulse him together!”²

In both cases the policy pursued by Stalin and the Communist Parties under his control had contributed to fascist dictatorships coming to power. The internal workings of these parties, wrote Trotsky, prevented them from taking a real part in the workers’ struggles:

The German Communist Party was growing rapidly… But before the hour of test came, it was ravaged from within. The stifling of the interior life of the party, the wish to give orders instead of to convince, the zigzag policies, the appointment of leaders from the top, the system of lies and deception for the masses—all this demoralized the party to its marrow. When danger approached, the party was found to be a corpse.³

The parties had created a layer of members unable to think for themselves, fit only to obey orders from the leadership: “Whoever bows his head submissively before every command from above, is good for nothing as a revolutionary fighter!”⁴

Stalinism

The disastrous effects of Stalinism in Russia itself were also ruthlessly exposed by Trotsky’s pen. While Stalin claimed that a socialist society was under construction, if not already built, Trotsky pointed to the glaring inequalities between ordinary workers and the bureaucrats: “such socialism cannot but seem to the masses a new re-facing of capitalism, and they are not far wrong”. There existed a “whole stratum, which does not engage directly in productive labor, but administers, orders, commands, pardons and punishes”.

the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise.…
The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically. In reality, he is compelled to live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage.… In the bureau­cracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer.⁵

But he maintained that the USSR was different to capitalist societies. The land, the means of production, and foreign trade were in the hands of the state, and this defined “the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state”. The bureaucracy, in so far as it maintained state ownership, “still remains a weapon of proletarian dictatorship”.⁶ For all its shortcomings, Russia “still remains a degenerated workers’ state”.⁷

Trotsky initially clung to the hope that Stalinist rule could be overcome peacefully, and only revised his view in 1933, when the Communist Parties signally failed to prevent Hitler coming to power. However, the revolution he revolution he then called for was one “confined within the limits of political revolution”, overthrowing the political rule of the bureaucracy but, in economic matters, going no further than “a series of very important reforms, but not another social revolution”.⁸ The USSR was “a damaged workers’ state… which still continues to run and which can be completely reconditioned with the replacement of some parts”.⁹

There is a clear contradiction between the reality of Stalinist society as Trotsky described it and the conclusion he drew from it. The state existing in Russia was no kind of a workers’ state at all, whatever qualifying adjective preceded the term. As workers in any nationalised company can testify, state ownership in itself doesn’t change the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. The economy belonged to the state, indeed, but the state belonged to a class of bureaucrats who played the role of capitalists. It is true, as Trotsky said, that they couldn’t pass their wealth on directly to their children, but in practice they could and did pass on their privileged lifestyle and social position. Overthrowing them would mean more than a “political revolution” with a democratisation of economic management systems, but rebuilding society anew from the ground up, starting with a fresh workers’ revolution.

Years before, in 1922, Trotsky had given a much clearer response to those who saw state ownership, rather than workers’ power, as the defining feature of socialism:

To this we Marxists replied that as long as political power remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie this socialization was not socialization at all and that it would not lead to socialism but only to state capitalism. To put it differently, the ownership of various factories, railways and so on by diverse capitalists would be superseded by an ownership of the totality of enterprises, railways and so on by the very same bourgeois firm, called the state. In the same measure as the bourgeoisie retains political power, it will, as a whole, continue to exploit the proletariat through the medium of state capitalism, just as an individual bourgeois exploits, by means of private ownership, “his own” workers. The term “state capitalism” was thus put forward, or at all events, employed polemically by revolutionary Marxists against the reformists, for the purpose of explaining and proving that genuine socialization begins only after the conquest of power by the working class.¹⁰

Just as Stalin’s failure to stop Hitler in 1933 caused Trotsky to abandon hope of reforming Stalinist Russia, so the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 led many of Trotsky’s followers to reject his definition of Russia as a workers’ state. Trotsky was having none of it—not least because he felt Stalin was on the brink of collapse anyway:

A totalitarian regime, whether of Stalinist or fascist type, by its very essence can only be a temporary transitional regime… incapable of perpetuating itself.… Might we not place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we affixed to the Bonapartist oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few years or even a few months prior to its inglorious downfall?¹¹

Seeing a passing phenomenon where, in reality, an established society existed clearly led Trotsky to underestimate the stability of the regime.

Because Trotsky saw Stalinist Russia as a more progressive society than others, he adopted a stance of “Unconditional defence of the USSR” in time of war. Even when Stalin occupied eastern Poland on foot of his deal with Hitler, Trotsky welcomed his imposition of Russian property forms there: “the statification of property in the occupied territories is in itself a progressive measure… the Kremlin with its bureaucratic methods gave an impulse to the socialist revolution in Poland”.¹² While he had previously written that “The bureaucracy which became a reactionary force in the USSR cannot play a revolutionary role in the world arena”,¹³ he now portrayed it overthrowing capitalism in eastern Europe. While he had previously written that “Only the working class can seize the forces of production from the stranglehold of the exploiters”,¹⁴ he now portrayed the Stalinist bureaucracy carrying out that task.

To the rule of Stalinist bureaucrats, Trotsky counterposed the demo­cratic rule of the working class:

the dictatorship of the proletariat by its very essence can and should be the supreme expression of workers’ democracy. In order to bring about a great social revolution, there must be for the proletariat a supreme manifestation of all its forces and all its capacities: the proletariat is organized democratically precisely in order to put an end to its enemies.… The heavy hand of dictatorship is directed against the class enemies: the foundation of the dictatorship is workers’ democracy.¹⁵

This would mean a range of different workers’ parties existing and criticising each other. While Trotsky glossed over the fact that he himself had justified one-party rule through the 1920s, his position now was a distinct advance. But in the heat of polemic he slid back towards the old position: “if the dictatorship of the proletariat means anything at all, then it means that the vanguard of the class is armed with the resources of the state in order to repel dangers, including those emanating from the backward layers of the proletariat itself”.¹⁶ Instead of the working class freely discussing the way forward while uniting to forcibly impose its will on the capitalists, this envisaged one “vanguard” section of the working class forcibly imposing its will on other sections—a far cry from pluralist workers’ democracy.

Leadership

Trotsky believed that the struggle for socialism couldn’t do without him in this period: “now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word… There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method”.¹⁷ The same went for the Fourth International, founded in 1938 to organise his supporters worldwide. He wasn’t lacking in high hopes for it: “During the next ten years the program of the Fourth International will become the guide of millions”.¹⁸

But it was not to be. Uniting socialists in as much common activity as possible was quite right, but 1938 was no time for a conference of 21 socialists to be proclaiming a world party of socialist revolution, complete with a fully-fledged intercontinental structure of organisation. The First and Second Internationals had emerged from upward swings of the workers’ movement, and the Third came on the back of an actual socialist revolution. On the other hand, the Fourth had, as Trotsky put it, “arisen out of… the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history”.¹⁹ An all-out revolutionary offensive launched in the decade of Hitler, Franco and Stalin was never likely to make much headway.

One of the new International’s problems was Trotsky’s contention that “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” The strike wave of 1936 in France, for instance, “revealed the wholehearted readiness of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system”, but their leaders “succeeded in canalizing and damming, at least temporarily, the revolutionary stream”.²⁰ The events of 1936 were undoubt­edly impressive, but a working class that was really ready to overthrow capitalism would hardly turn around and go back to sleep at the word of any leaders. By reducing everything to bad leadership, Trotsky’s view gave the impression of workers chomping at the bit but powerless to see through their leaders: if different leaders were only provided, then the revolution could proceed. An earlier comment of his was nearer the mark: “The quality of the leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference for the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and in the last analysis is not decisive.”²¹

Trotsky felt that socialists needed to have a programme of demands to present to workers. To take a typical example: “Against a bounding rise in prices… one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages.”²² So, if inflation reaches 5%, wages should automatically go up 5%. But it is more common, if conditions are at all favourable, for workers to demand 10%—to try and use the opportunity to increase their real wages rather than running to stand still. The demand for a sliding wage scale has seldom, if ever, been put forward in actual struggle. Telling socialists that it was the “only” way to fight inflation could only encourage them to privilege their own ready-made programme at the expense of demands emerging from real workers’ struggles. Trotsky had proposed a more flexible method of inter­vention some years before, when he said that revolutionaries needed to develop “the capacity to put forward at the right moment sharp, specific fighting slogans that by themselves don’t derive from the ‘program’ but are dictated by the circumstances of the day”.²³

The isolation of Trotsky’s followers bred an almost messianic convic­tion regarding their role as the one true revolutionaries. Trotsky made the absurd claim that “The advanced workers of all the world are already firmly convinced that the overthrow of Mussolini, Hitler, and their agents and imitators will occur only under the leadership of the Fourth International.”²⁴ No other socialists came up to scratch: they were “the only genuinely revolutionary current which has never repudiated its banner, has not compromised with its enemies, and which alone represents the future”.²⁵ Socialists in Spain who disagreed with Trotsky were informed by him that “Outside the line of the Fourth International there is only the line of Stalin-Caballero” (Largo Caballero was the Spanish prime minister).²⁶ When the revolutionary Victor Serge begged to differ, Trotsky resorted to the kind of tactics the Stalinists had employed against himself: Serge was only “a disillusioned petty-bourgeois intellectual” aiming “to subdue Marxism… to paralyze the socialist revolution”, and the likes of him were “carriers of infection” in the movement.²⁷ Trotsky’s point of view was often, though not always, correct; but unleashing his wrath on any socialist who thought differently was a recipe for severely narrowing the potential for agreement.

The communist future

Treating Leon Trotsky as a revolutionary oracle—as some have done, and still do—is never going to utilise his contributions to the cause he was devoted to. His ideas of socialist organisation in his later years were seriously flawed. His opposition to Stalinism was all the weaker for being conditional, picking out good aspects of the system to defend. But his stand against the Stalinist bureaucracy in unimaginably hard times was truly heroic. His fight to provide an alternative to its betrayals still remains relevant—above all, his understanding of permanent revolution, linking the fight against all oppression with the international socialist revolution.

Stalin never forgave Trotsky, and made considerable efforts to silence him. In Mexico, where Trotsky lived from 1937, Stalin’s supporters perse­cuted him endlessly in the press and even launched a gun attack on his home. A Stalinist agent managed to infiltrate the household and, one day, smashed a pickaxe into Trotsky’s skull. Trotsky struggled with him fiercely and tried to survive. But on 21 August 1940 Trotsky’s revolutionary life came to an end.

Six months earlier, in poor health and aware of the threat of assassin­ation, Trotsky had written a testament:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolution­ist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.
…Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.²⁸

Notes

1. Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) (New York 1973), p 307, 320.
2. Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York 1971), p 355.
3. Leon Trotsky, Whither France? (London 1974), p 85.
4. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p 103.
5. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York 1937), p 120, 138, 43, 241-2.
6. Ibid, p 248-9.
7. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (New York 1973), p 102.
8. The Revolution Betrayed, p 288, 253.
9. Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism (London 1971), p 30.
10. Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume Two (London 1974), p 245.
11. In Defence of Marxism, p 16-17.
12. Ibid, p 51, 23, 163.
13. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p 106.
14. Whither France?, p 41.
15. Ibid, p 91.
16. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York 1973), p 59.
17. Trotsky’s Diary in Exile 1935 (London 1958), p 54.
18. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-9) (New York 1969), p 59.
19. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p 111.
20. Ibid, p 73-4.
21. The Revolution Betrayed, p 87.
22. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p 76.
23. The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), p 143.
24. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p 102.
25. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38) (New York 1970), p 160.
26. The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), p 262.
27. Their Morals and Ours, p 60-1, 66. For an indication of how little foundation Trotsky’s insults had, see Joe Conroy, ‘Revolutionary Lives: Victor Serge’, Red Banner 9.
28. Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, p 139-40.

Revolutionary Lives: Leon Trotsky (part two: 1921-29)

Joe Conroy‘s look at Trotsky continued in Issue 17 (November 2003).

The early years of the Russian revolution, for all their difficulties, engendered great hopes of human liberation. Trotsky was insistent that the emancipation of the most downtrodden was at the heart of socialism:

the revolution is, before and above all, the awakening of humanity, its onward march, and is marked with a growing respect for the personal dignity of every individual, with an ever-increasing concern for those who are weak. A revolution does not deserve its name if, with all its might and all the means at its disposal, it does not help the woman—twofold and threefold enslaved as she has been in the past—to get out on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest care possible of the children—the future race for whose benefit the revolution has been made.¹

The working class had not taken power to hold on to it indefinitely, but to remove the need for it. “The liberating significance of the dictatorship of the proletariat consists in the fact that it is temporary—for a brief period only—that it is a means of clearing the road and of laying the foundations of a society without classes and of a culture based upon solidarity.”² Such a culture would know no such thing as a state, people instead forming a voluntary social bond: “Just as people in a chorus sing harmoniously not because they are compelled to but because it is pleasant to them, so under communism the harmony of relationships will answer the personal needs of each and every individual.”³

Trotsky had always maintained that revolution could never survive in Russia alone, that socialism could only be victorious internationally. He spent much of his time encouraging and criticising the revolutionary groups that took shape across Europe following the first world war. Unless they succeeded in organising themselves effectively, clarifying their political activity and winning over a majority of the working class, great oppor­tunities would go to waste: “The most mature revolutionary situation without a revolutionary party of the necessary dimensions, without correct leadership, is just like a knife without a blade.”⁴

These revolutionaries had the support of only a minority of the workers, most of whom still supported the reformist politicians and union leaders. To win over the majority, socialists had to engage in joint activity with reformists on issues affecting the basic interests of the working class. Such united fronts would not mean that socialists would abandon their criticism of reformism. On the contrary, they would provide a chance to prove in practice that revolutionary politics made more sense:

We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment. It is precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than the others, that we are more audacious and resolute.⁵

The young revolutionary parties also needed vibrant internal democracy and debate in order to develop: “Without a real freedom of party life, freedom of discussion, and freedom of establishing their course collectively, and by means of groupings, these parties will never become a decisive revolutionary force.”⁶ But through the 1920s, this became less and less the case. The decay originated with the increasing bureaucratisation of Russia’s Communist Party.

The party leadership gathered ever greater control in its hands, pushing aside and silencing those who disagreed with the line from above. It started “to drop ready-made decisions on the party’s head, decisions that have been discussed and arrived at in gatherings of the ruling faction which are kept secret from the party”.⁷ As a result, “the party was living, as it were, on two storeys: the upper storey, where things are decided, and the lower storey, where all you do is learn of the decisions”.⁸

The devastation Russia had suffered in the world war and the civil war had left the working class exhausted and atomised. In the absence of workers’ revolution elsewhere, the bureaucracy held power and started to dig itself in. Joseph Stalin became the predominant spokesperson for their interests, above all with the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’: even without international revolution, Russia could build a socialist society on its own. Trotsky fought tooth and nail against this blatant abandonment of Marxist internationalism: “Soviet Russia will be able to maintain herself and to develop only in the event of world revolution… only if it serves as the starting point and remains an integral part of the world revolution of the international proletariat”.⁹

The Stalinist policy unfolded with disastrous results in China, a country in the grip of imperialism and landlord rule. Revolution broke out there in 1925, but the Chinese Communist Party had been instructed by Moscow to join the middle-class nationalist Kuomintang party, and to support its leadership without criticism. The Kuomintang suppressed uprisings of workers and peasants, and massacred Communists. The Communist Party was then made to transfer its allegiance to a left-wing faction of the Kuomintang, which went on to treat them in similar fashion. The Chinese working class went down to a tragic defeat.

Stalin’s theory had decreed that the fight for socialism was not on the agenda in China, and had to wait until national independence was won. Trotsky countered that national liberation would be won as part of a struggle which also addressed the social and economic oppression of the working people:

Really to arouse the workers and peasants against imperialism is possible only by connecting their basic and most profound life interests with the cause of the country’s liberation.…
The victory over foreign imperialism can only be won by means of the toilers of town and country driving it out of China.… They cannot rise under the bare slogan of national liberation, but only in direct struggle against the big landlords, the military satraps, the usurers, the capitalist brigands.

The imperialists and landlords would be overthrown by “a revolution on whose banner the toilers and oppressed write plainly their own demands”.¹⁰

The catastrophe in China led Trotsky to extend the theory of permanent revolution, which until now he had only applied to Russia. In countries like China, he argued, oppressed by colonialism and economic backwardness, the capitalists couldn’t be relied upon to fight as they were usually them­selves linked to the oppressor. Therefore,

the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation… The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.… it attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.¹¹

Powerful and all as the bureaucracy now was, Trotsky believed that the working class was still in ultimate control of Russia. “If we did not believe that our state is a proletarian state, though with bureaucratic deformations… if we did not believe that our development was socialist… then, it need not be said, our place would not be in the ranks of a Communist Party.” The struggle against the bureaucracy “is a reformist struggle”, because “Power has not yet been torn from the hands of the proletariat.”¹² If this were not the case, a different approach would follow:

If the party is a corpse, a new party must be built on a new spot, and the working class must be told about it openly.… if the dictatorship of the proletariat is liquidated, the banner of the second proletarian revolution must be unfurled. That is how we would act if the road of reform, for which we stand, proved hopeless.¹³

Although this is far clearer in hindsight than it was then, the road of reform was indeed hopeless by the time Trotsky wrote these words. The Stalinist bureaucracy was already too entrenched to be voted out of power at party conferences—conferences which were now no more than a rubber stamp for the bureaucracy’s policies. The opposition movement still had significant support in some sections of the working class: if, as some of its members proposed, it organised openly against Stalin as a new party for a new revolution, its chances of success would probably have been greater. Trotsky’s position prevailed, however, and the opposition resolved “to keep these differences within the confines of our continued work and our joint responsibility for the policy of the party”.¹⁴

He even agreed that no other party but the Communist Party should be allowed to exist: “the party has a monopoly in the political field, something absolutely necessary for the revolution”. Forming an opposition party was excluded in principle: “We will fight with all our power against the idea of two parties, because the dictatorship of the proletariat demands as its very core a single proletarian party.”¹⁵ Even the existence of factions within the party he ruled out of order: “I have never recognized freedom for groupings inside the party, nor do I now recognize it”.¹⁶ Trotsky’s commitment to the straitjacket of party unity reached a masochistic pitch in the following statement at a party conference:

Comrades, none of us wishes to be or can be right against the party. In the last instance the party is always right… I know that one ought not to be right against the party. One can be right only with the party and through the party because history has not created any other way for the realization of one’s rightness. The English have the saying ‘My country, right or wrong’. With much greater justification we can say: My party, right or wrong…¹⁷

So Trotsky yielded to party discipline. When the party ordered an end to debate, he obeyed and stayed silent. “We must not do anything at this moment”, he told his supporters:¹⁸ a recipe for sitting and waiting while the other side strengthened its position. When the bureaucracy decided to hush up Lenin’s deathbed advice to remove Stalin from power, Trotsky went along with the decision and even publicly denied that Lenin had said any such thing. When he did come out against the leadership, he formed alliances with people who proved untrustworthy and incapable of honest opposition. For the sake of such alliances he compromised on matters of principle. He even agreed to renounce his biggest contribution to Marxism, the theory of permanent revolution, which he announced to be irrelevant: “I myself regard it as a question which has long been consigned to the archives”.¹⁹

But the growing power of the bureaucracy did cause Trotsky to consider that counter-revolution could come in a new, unexpected way. Possibly, it “would not be carried out all at once, with one blow, but through successive shiftings, with the first shift occurring from the top down and to a large extent within one and the same party… a special from of counter-revolution carried out on the installment plan”.²⁰ He drew a comparison with the French revolution: on 9th Thermidor (according to the revolutionary calendar) the conservatives pushed the radicals out of power.

It is less the danger of an open, full-fledged bourgeois counterrevolution than that of a Thermidor, that is, a partial counterrevolutionary shift or upheaval which, precisely because it was partial, could for a fairly long time continue to disguise itself in revolutionary forms, but which in essence would already have a decisively bourgeois character, so that a return from Thermidor to the dictatorship of the proletariat could only be effected through a new revolution.²¹

In the final years of the decade, the bureaucracy moved to decisively consolidate its power. Thousands of its opponents were arrested: Trotsky himself was expelled from the Communist Party in late 1927 and exiled to Kazakhstan in the outskirts of the USSR two months later. Forced collect­ivisation in the countryside expropriated millions of farmers, and accel­erated industrialisation drove workers to work harder for less. Whereas Trotsky had seen the bureaucracy as an unstable intermediate group balancing between the workers and the remaining property owners, instead it now came into its own, establishing firm bases for its independent power in society, politics and the economy.

Although some of his analysis had proved inaccurate, Trotsky—unlike many others—had no intention of giving in before the overwhelming power of Stalinism. When the secret police presented him with an order to cease his political activity, he threw the ultimatum back in their faces:

To demand from me that I renounce my political activity is to demand that I abjure the struggle which I have been conducting in the interests of the international working class, a struggle in which I have been unceasingly engaged for thirty-two years, during the whole of my conscious life.… Only a bureaucracy corrupt to its roots can demand such a renunciation. Only contemptible renegades can give such a promise.²²

In January 1929 Trotsky was deported from the USSR altogether, and was never to return. But his fight against the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution was far from over.

part three

Notes

1    Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life (New York 1973), p 53.

2    Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Michigan 1960), p 194.

3    Problems of Everyday Life, p 176.

4    Leon Trotsky on Britain (New York 1973), p 162.

5    Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume Two (London 1974), p 96.

6    Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (London 1974), p 117.

7    Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27) (New York 1980), p 114-15.

8    Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25) (New York 1975), p 69.

9    Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume One (London 1973), p 358.

10  Leon Trotsky on China (New York 1976), p 161, 207-8, 189.

11  Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (London 1962), p 152, 154-5.

12  The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27), p 162-3, 489.

13  Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29) (New York 1981), p 300.

14 The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27), p 164.

15 Ibid, p 390, 394. These quotations are from the 1927 Platform of the Opposition, which was drafted collectively. Trotsky was its main author, however, and these quotations certainly reflect his own views. See, for instance: “We are the only party in the country, and in the period of the dictatorship it could not be otherwise.… the Communist Party is obliged to monopolize the direction of political life.” The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25), p 78-9.     

16 Ibid, p 154.

17  Quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929 (Oxford 1959), p 139.

18  Quoted in ibid, p 201.

19  The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27), p 145.

20  Ibid, p 260, 263.

21  The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29), p 139.

22  Quoted in Deutscher, p 468-9.

Revolutionary Lives: Leon Trotsky (part one: 1879-1921)

Joe Conroy began an examination of Trotsky’s life and work in Issue 16 (July 2003).

Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born in the Kherson province of Ukraine on 26 October 1879 (7 November by the western calendar) to a family of well-off Jewish farmers. By his late teens he had become involved in a group of revolutionaries working to overthrow the rule of the Tsar over the Russian empire. Although initially resistant, he became an enthusiastic Marxist, involved in organising strikes in the region. This earned him arrest in 1898 and deportation to Siberia. In 1902 he managed to escape, writing the name of one of his prison guards in his false passport, a name that stuck to him: Trotsky.

Revolutionary organisation

He made his way to London, where many of Russia’s leading socialists were gathered in exile. Like most of them—most notably, Vladimir Lenin—Trotsky advocated a centralised organisation to unite the scattered circles of socialists across Russia in co-ordinated action. But the congress that was to establish such an organisation in 1903 led to a deep split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

Trotsky saw two very different conceptions of revolutionary organis­ation at issue: “In the one case we have a party which thinks for the proletariat, which substitutes itself politically for it, and in the other we have a party which politically educates and mobilises the proletariat”. The first conception, that of the Bolsheviks, would mean “the Party organisation ‘substituting’ itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee”.¹ The relationship between a socialist party and the working class, he maintained, had to be a two-way street: “It is not only the party that leads the masses: the masses, in turn, sweep the party forward.”² Defending a party’s revolutionary essence was a question of politics, not organisational rules: “I do not believe that you can put statutory exorcism on opportunism.”³

Trotsky’s arguments did go somewhat overboard. His doom-filled prophecies of Bolshevik dictatorship were not fulfilled in the ensuing years. And while rules couldn’t defeat reformism, they could play some part in defining the nature of socialist activity. But at the same time, he did have a point. The arguments of Lenin and the Bolsheviks did too often put the building of their own party ahead of the struggle of the workers, and what progress they made was often due to quietly ignoring these ideas in practice. Trotsky’s insistence on the centrality of the working class and its activity to any socialist project was a necessary corrective.

Permanent revolution

All these theories were put to the test of an actual revolution in 1905: when troops opened fire on a demonstration seeking reform from the Tsar, it set off a wave of strikes and rebellions. Trotsky returned to Russia to play a central role, being elected leader of the Council of Workers’ Deputies in the capital St Petersburg. Workers elected such councils, or ‘soviets’, in work­places all over the country, and they constituted a potential challenge to capitalist rule:

a freely elected parliament of the working class… the Soviet really was a workers’ government in embryo… the organized expression of the class will of the proletariat… the democratic representative body of the proletariat at a time of revolution… It constitutes authentic democracy, without a lower and an upper chamber, without a professional bureau­cracy, but with the voters’ right to recall their deputies at any moment.⁴

The phenomenon of workers’ councils confirmed Trotsky’s refusal to join either faction of Russian socialism, because he envisaged greater revolutionary possibilities than either of them. The Mensheviks held that, in an economically backward country like Russia, replacing Tsarist rule with parliamentary democracy was as far as the revolution could hope to go for the time being. The job of the working class, as a small minority of the population, was to encourage liberal capitalist politicians to oppose Tsar­ism. The Bolsheviks had no such faith in the liberals, and aimed for a government in which workers would share power with the peasantry. While this would make a clean sweep of Tsarism, socialist change would not be on the agenda.

Although the working class formed only a fraction of Russia’s popu­lation, Trotsky argued, it was concentrated in the decisive areas of industry, giving it a disproportionate political weight. The hesitancy and political cowardice of Russia’s capitalist class were matched by the revolutionary spirit of its young working class. In such conditions, “It is possible for the workers to come to power in an economically backward country sooner than in an advanced country.”⁵

Once in power, the working class would immediately set about getting rid of Tsarism and introducing democratic reforms, but this would inevit­ably bring it into conflict with capitalism. Legislation to limit the working day, for instance, would meet the opposition of capitalists closing down factories and locking out workers. The workers’ government would have no alternative but to take over their factories: “the very logic of its position will compel it to pass over to collectivist measures”. The workers would have to take economic as well as political control: “The political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement.”⁶ The revolution would become permanent, moving directly from the overthrow of Tsarism to the overthrow of capitalism.

But the rule of the workers could not survive in isolation, least of all in a country as economically undeveloped as Russia. Their only hope would be for their revolution to inspire workers in other countries to follow their example and come to their aid. “The workers’ government will from the start be faced with the task of uniting its forces with those of the socialist proletariat of Western Europe. Only in this way will its temporary revolu­tionary hegemony become the prologue to a socialist dictatorship.”⁷

The workers could not hold power without the support of other exploited sections of the people, especially in Russia’s vast countryside:

The proletariat will find itself compelled to carry the class struggle into the villages and in this manner destroy that community of interest which is undoubtedly to be found among all peasants, although within compar­atively narrow limits. From the very first moment after its taking power, the proletariat will have to find support in the antagonisms between the village poor and village rich, between the agricultural proletariat and the agricultural bourgeoisie.

The revolutionary government should include representatives of the peasantry, but “the hegemony should belong to the working class”.⁸

Trotsky was right to insist that, rather than an alliance of equal partners, it would be a case of the peasantry following the lead of the workers. The position of the working class in the economy gave it a far greater collective strength, and its direct, immediate interest in carrying out socialist measures would give it the leading role in the revolution’s development. But he went too far in assigning only a passive role to the peasantry, asserting that “The proletariat in power will stand before the peasantry as the class which has emancipated it.”⁹ Rural revolt would add an extra dimension of its own to the revolution. He was wrong, too, in assuming that they would inevitably turn against the workers at some stage, that “The primitiveness of the peasantry turns its hostile face towards the proletariat.”¹⁰ A successful revolution would bring the rural poor to see the advantages of socialism for themselves.

The revolution of 1905 didn’t realise the potential Trotsky saw in it. By the end of the year, the ruling class was beginning to regain the upper hand. The leaders of the St Petersburg workers’ council were arrested and sent to Siberia. Again, Trotsky escaped and went into exile for what proved a barren period for Russia’s socialists.

Workers’ revolution

Trotsky took a prominent part in the international socialist opposition to the first world war. Tsarist Russia’s involvement in the slaughter proved to be the last throw of the dice for the regime. Growing discontent erupted in revolution in February 1917 which replaced the Tsar with a provisional government. Shortly after 1905 Trotsky had forecast that “the first new wave of revolution will lead to the creation of Soviets all over the country”,¹¹ and 1917 proved him right as workers’ councils mushroomed. In May he succeeded in getting back to St Petersburg.

His first port of call was the workers’ council, where he argued that the revolution’s next step should be “to transfer the whole power into the hands of the Soviets”.¹² The Mezhrayontsy, a group of socialists Trotsky had been linked to for a couple of years, had been advocating such a policy since February. At Lenin’s prompting, the Bolsheviks too were now calling for the workers’ councils to take power, dropping their old position. “The Bol­sheviks de-bolshevised themselves”, commented Trotsky.¹³ The Mezh­raiontsy merged with the Bolsheviks and many of their leading fig­ures, including Trotsky, were elected to the party’s leadership.

After six weeks’ imprisonment at the hands of the government, Trotsky emerged in September to a situation where the call for a second, workers’ revolution was winning majority support among the working class. He was elected president of the capital’s workers’ council again, and organised the insurrection of 25 October that overthrew the provisional government and handed power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

The workers’ council, foundation of the new government, was an “irreplaceable organization of working-class self-rule”, argued Trotsky.¹⁴ Delegates were elected by and responsible to a specific workplace, and so the councils truly reflected the workers’ will:

They depend directly on organic groups… there is the far more import­ant guarantee of the direct and immediate contact of the deputy with his electors. The member of the municipal council or zemstvo depends on an amorphous mass of electors who invest him with authority for one year, and then dissolve. The Soviet electors, on the other hand, remain in permanent contact with one another by the very conditions of their life and work; their deputy is always under their direct observation and may at any moment be given new instructions, and, if necessary, may be censured, recalled, and replaced by somebody else.¹⁵

As commissar for foreign affairs in the new workers’ government, Trotsky took prime responsibility for what he had long ago identified as the first necessity of a Russian revolution. “Our whole hope is that our revo­lution will kindle a European revolution”, he announced on taking up the post. “The Russian revolution will either cause a revolution in the West, or the capitalists of all countries will strangle our [revolution].”¹⁶ To this end, the Bolsheviks established the Communist International. “It has no aims or tasks separate and apart from those of the working class itself”, said Trotsky. It wanted to help establish, not “tiny sects, each of which wants to save the working class in its own manner”, but in each country “a genuine revolutionary organization, one that doesn’t tell the workers lies, doesn’t deceive them, doesn’t hide from them nor throw sand in their eyes, doesn’t betray them in the cloakrooms of parliamentarianism or of economic conciliationism but leads them unswervingly to the end”.¹⁷

Generalising from the Russian experience, he concluded that the heartlands of capitalism would likely be the toughest nuts for socialism to crack, while the system gave way at its weakest links:

The more powerful a country is capitalistically—all other conditions being equal—the greater is the inertia of “peaceful” class relations… Countries with a younger capitalist culture are the first to enter the path of civil war inasmuch as the unstable equilibrium of class forces is most easily disrupted precisely in these countries.… the task of initiating the revolution, as we have already seen, was not placed on an old proletariat with mighty political and trade union organizations, with massive tradit­ions of parliamentarianism and trade unionism, but upon the young proletariat of a backward country. History took the line of least resist­ance. The revolutionary epoch burst in through the most weakly barri­caded door.¹⁸

Whose dictatorship?

The class overthrown by the Russian revolution showed no signs of giving up without a struggle. Their resistance went on for years with the help of invading foreign armies, forcing the new-born workers’ republic to fight a war for its very existence. As commissar for war from 1918 Trotsky organised a Red Army from scratch that succeeded in beating back the forces trying to crush the revolution. Ruthless combat went hand in hand with humanitarian concern: “Let the hand be cut off of any Red Army man who lifts his knife on a prisoner of war, on the disarmed, the sick and wounded”, ran one of Trotsky’s orders.¹⁹

Violence in defence of the revolution was clearly justified in Trotsky’s eyes: “When a murderer raises his knife over a child, may one kill the murderer to save the child?” Renouncing violence would mean renouncing revolution itself. However, Trotsky tended to make an unfortunate necessity into a positive proposition:

the principle of the ‘sacredness of human life’ remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.… we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life’.… The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror.²⁰

Recognising the necessity for a socialist revolution to terrorise its enemies is one thing: sanctioning every single use of terror is another. Regarding human life as sacred is not the sole preserve of Kantian priests and vegetarian Quakers. Socialists should only kill, or support killing, if and when it proves absolutely necessary. Even then, it is the exception to the rule, an evil to be tolerated and kept to a minimum, not a principle to be exalted.

Years before the revolution, Trotsky had insisted that the dictatorship of the proletariat “wouldn’t be the dictatorship of a little band of conspirators or a minority party, but of the immense majority… the political rule of the organised working class”. The multitude of problems faced by the workers in power could be solved only

by long ‘debates’, by way of a systematic struggle not only between the socialist and capitalist worlds, but also between many trends inside socialism… No ‘strong authoritative organisation’… will be able to suppress these trends and controversies… for it is only too clear that a proletariat capable of exercising its dictatorship over society will not tolerate any dictatorship over itself.²¹

The revolution’s early years came surprisingly close to this ideal. For a period the Bolsheviks shared governmental power with another left-wing party. Other parties and schools of thought took a full part in political debate. Within the Bolshevik party itself various factions contended openly. The isolation of the revolution and its need to fight for survival threatened this democracy, however. Very little opposition remained within the framework of the workers’ power, as parties colluded with or surrendered to those trying to bring back the old regime. Soviet Russia effectively ended up as a one-party state.

This situation could be explained, at least in part, by the desperate straits the revolution found itself in. Trotsky, though, chose to justify and praise it as a good thing in all circumstances:

The exclusive role of the Communist Party under the conditions of a victorious proletarian revolution is quite comprehensible.… The revolu­tionary supremacy of the proletariat pre-supposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of a party, with a clear programme of action and a faultless internal discipline.
The policy of coalitions contradicts internally the regime of the revolutionary dictatorship. We have in view, not coalitions with bour­geois parties, of which of course there can be no talk, but a coalition of communists with other ‘socialist’ organisations… In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental…²²

He personally took a hand in ‘re-organising’ trade unions that disagreed with industrial directives from the government: “our state is a workers’ state… Hence the trade unions must teach the workers not to haggle and fight with their own state”.²³ But if the workers had no say in how the state was run, how could it be a workers’ state? Those who raised such questions were shut up, with Trotsky’s full support:

They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the party, as it were, as if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictator­ship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy.… The party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship… The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers’ democracy…²⁴

A greater and greater distance was opening up between an exhausted, decimated, isolated working class and the state power that ruled in its name. Meanwhile Trotsky noted the advent of the “new Soviet bureaucrat” who was becoming increasingly powerful: “This is the genuine menace to the cause of communist revolution. These are the genuine accomplices of counter-revolution”.²⁵ To his eternal credit, Trotsky was to fight a life-and-death battle against this bureaucracy. But that battle was severely weakened before it began by the excuses he himself made for state rule over the workers rather than workers’ rule over the state.

part two: 1921-29

Notes

1. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (London, no date), p 72, 77.
2. Leon Trotsky, 1905 (Harmondsworth, 1973), p 279.
3. Quoted in Tony Cliff, Trotsky: Towards October 1879-1917 (London, 1989), p 44.
4. 1905, p 235, 266, 268.
5. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (London, 1962), p 195.
6. Ibid, p 232-3.
7. 1905, p 333. It should be stressed that the dictatorship Trotsky has in mind here is the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, the undivided rule of the working class, as discussed further on.
8. Results and Prospects, p 208, 202.
9. Ibid, p 203.
10. Ibid, p 209.
11. The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, edited by Isaac Deutscher (New York, 1964), p 56.
12. Quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (Oxford, 1954), p 254.
13. Quoted in Cliff, p 209.
14. Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, volume one (London, 1973), p 51.
15. The Essential Trotsky (London, 1963), p 47. Zemstvos were rural councils in Tsarist Russia.
16. Quoted in Tony Cliff, Trotsky: The sword of the revolution 1917-1923 (London, 1990), p 21.
17. The First Five Years of the Communist International, volume one, p 159, 94.
18. Ibid, p 82, 84-6.
19. Quoted in Deutscher, p 461.
20. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (London, 1975), p 81-3.
21. Quoted in Cliff, Towards October, p 42, 63.
22. Terrorism and Communism, p 122-3. The Bolsheviks had renamed themselves the Communist Party in 1918.
23. Quoted in Cliff, The sword of the revolution, p 165.
24. Quoted in Deutscher, p 508-9.
25. Quoted in ibid, p 427.

Helen Macfarlane: Lost in translation

A forgotten figure of Marxist history was discussed by Joe Conroy in Issue 23 in November 2005.

David Black, Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (Lexington Books)

It has always been a bit curious that, while Karl Marx lived half his life in England, the natives of that country have always been slower than others in embracing his ideas. Finding English Marxists has always been problematic, and the worst of it is that some of those you do find, you kind of wish you hadn’t… This book unearths the career of a Marxist well worth getting to know. Marx himself described her as “a rare bird”, one of the few socialist writers in contemporary England with ideas of her own—and he was hard to impress at the best of times.

Rescuing Helen Macfarlane from historical oblivion was far from easy. Like George Eliot, she wrote under a male pseudonym to avoid the raised eyebrows and condescending smiles in store for a woman who spoke her own mind. She mysteriously vanishes from the historical record after a few very promising years in the socialist movement. (Apparently, this was due to a major bust-up with the wife of a left-wing editor—by the name of Mary Harney, if you don’t mind!)

In quantitative terms, she left little after her: the list of her published writings fits easily into two pages of an appendix here. It seems doubtful, indeed, if there is enough there to justify a book. The author spends much of his time writng around Macfarlane rather than about her. His discussions of Chartism, Hegelianism and other pies she had fingers in is interesting, but sometimes seem to act as padding. Maybe a thick pamphlet or a long article in a journal would have been enough to tell Macfarlane’s story.

Although this book places her primarily in an English context, Macfarlane herself—a Scot—looked to a socialist movement encom­passing all of Britain and Ireland. She called for the withdrawal of British troops from Ireland, which would soon cause the British political system to collapse and bring on the “social revolution” necessary in Ireland itself. In flowery language (literally!), she wrote in 1850 that freedom would not come “until the rose, the shamrock, and the thistle be woven into one wreath for the altar of Liberty; not until the Saxon and Celt—forgetting all their senseless feuds and animosities—rally round the Red Banner”.

But prefiguring the name of the magazine currently in the hands of you, gentle reader, is not Macfarlane’s most enduring achievement. What assures her a place in the history of Marxism is the fact that she did the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto, in 1850. This translation was the first occasion that Marx and Engels were publicly identified as authors of the Manifesto, and their preface to the 1872 edition revealed that Macfarlane lay behind the translator’s pseudonym of 1850. The Chartist magazine that published it cut bits out—partly to tone down its identification with revolutionary move­ments abroad, it seems—but the published version is given in full as an appendix to the book.

The distinctiveness of her translation jumps out from the first sentence: “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe.” This is followed by the well-known phrase about the spectre—she prefers “ghost”—of communism, but using two sentences to translate one brings out the wider meaning of Marx’s opening salvo. He was getting at the way reactionaries across Europe were trying to frighten people away with fairy tales of the red menace, and hence the need for a real statement of what the communists were about. The communist spectre was a bogeyman, what Irish speakers might call a púca, or in Victorian English, a frightful hobgoblin.

The Manifesto discusses “Kleinbürgerlicher Sozialismus”, which is usually translated directly as “Petty-Bourgeois Socialism”. Petty-bourgeois has never been a fortunate word, nor has it ever taken root in the English language outside the specialised realms of Marxist terminology. Within that realm its meaning is usually lost as it is reduced to a term of abuse for someone you don’t like, but can’t get away with calling bourgeois. The petty bourgeois owns productive property but doesn’t employ wage labour, a category all but ignored by conventional sociology and economics, so (contrary to popular belief) the term small businessman doesn’t cover it. Macfarlane’s word “shopocrat” is too Dickensian to work outside a nineteenth-century English context, but her attempt shows an admirable and rare concern to present a Marxist idea intelligibly.

Lumpenproletariat is another gobstopper. Meaning literally ‘ragged proletariat’, it is often taken to refer to unemployed workers or the poorer sections of the working class, but Marx had a separate class in mind: those who live by crime and pauperism, primarily. The English translation approved by Engels in 1888 calls them “The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum”, in language reminiscent of an enraged tabloid, but Macfarlane preferred “The Mob”. If this has something of a Sopranos feel to it today, maybe that’s no harm. The picturesquely-nicknamed underworld figures that fill the pages of the Sunday World are more lumpen than those usually brought under the heading. But we are probably stuck with the original.

The exploitation of the working class is at the heart of Marxist politics, but this was a difficult concept for Macfarlane to express. Exploiting in English still had the main connotation of working: exploiting the land or natural resources, for example. So she resorted to other phrases which don’t really do the job. Referring to “the used-up Proletarians” will strike a chord with most of us come five o’clock on a Friday, but it doesn’t convey the extraction of profit from workers that Marx had in mind.

When favourably mentioning early socialist literature, the Mani­festo name-checks Auguste Babeuf, but Macfarlane anglicises this a little by adding the Levellers of the 1640s. Her translation is often better than the standard 1888 one, but on the whole falls short—as is to be expected from a first attempt. It seems clear that the 1888 translation borrowed from hers, though: no two people could inde­pendently hit upon the word “superincumbent” to render a word that wouldn’t normally be translated as such. A new translation—done not as a literary curiosity, but a real attempt to recapture Marx’s and Engels’s message—is overdue.

Macfarlane’s ability to translate Marx was not just a linguistic talent, but a political aptitude. She put in the theoretical work that enabled her to properly grasp the concepts he was putting forward. Because she understood them, she was able to express them clearly in English, rather than lazily looking across the column of the dictionary. Too many Marxists do little more than change the spelling, revealing a jargon learnt by rote rather than an outlook thoroughly compre­hended. Macfarlane’s work, both as writer and translator, shows an enthusiasm for getting the message of socialist revolution across in a way that could be understood and acted upon. This book, in revisiting her work, should inspire us to take up that broken thread again.

Revolutionary Lives: Alexandra Kollontai

The life of the Russian socialist was recounted by Joe Conroy in Issue 11 in November 2001.

When Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born in the Russian capital of St Petersburg on 19 March 1872, a childhood of privilege awaited her as the daughter of an army officer. But she didn’t close her eyes to the inequalities that separated her from her poorer contemporaries. “I painfully felt the fact that everything was offered to me whereas so much was denied to the other children”, she later recalled. Marrying a man her parents dis­approved of—Vladimir Kollontai, an engineer—at the age of twenty one was a minor act of rebellion in itself.

A political turning point came in 1896 when she visited a factory where her husband was employed. For the first time she saw for herself the desperate conditions in which the Russian working class lived and laboured. “We can’t go on living like this, while other people live like animals”, she said to her husband, but he didn’t share her repulsion at capitalist indus­trialisation. Their diverging sympathies led to separation, as Alexandra Kollontai eventually left behind her a life as housewife and mother to join the young Russian socialist movement.

That movement faced its most serious test yet in 1905, as a popular revolu­tion against the Tsarist regime swept Russia. Not for the first time, as Kollontai noted, women workers were to be found “in the vanguard, fighting for the rights of the working class and for the emancipation of women”. Those two tasks complemented each other, she argued, and only a socialist society could put an end to the oppression of women: “As long as a woman has to sell her labour power and suffer capitalist slavery, she will not be a free and independent person, she cannot be a wife who chooses her husband only as her heart dictates, a mother who does not need to fear for the future of her children.”

This point of view won her no friends among those trying to organise a movement of all women alike, regardless of class. “The world of women is divided”, she insisted, “just as is the world of men, into two camps: one is in its ideas, aims and interests close to the bourgeoisie, the other to the prole­tariat”. As far as working women were concerned, it was not a question of women versus men:

They certainly do not see men as the enemy or the oppressor. For them, the men of the working class are comrades who share the same joyless existence, they are loyal fighters in the struggle for a better future. The same social conditions oppress both the women and their male comrades, the same chains of capitalism weigh on them and darken their lives.

Taking their part in the struggles of their class brought personal as well as political emancipation to women workers, wrote Kollontai: “the prole­tarian woman, until recently a humiliated downtrodden slave with no rights, learns to discard the slave mentality that has clung to her; step by step she transforms herself into an independent worker, an independent personality, free in love”. This corresponded to the fight for socialism, which had no place for passive, submissive creatures, but “requires a personality rising and rebelling against every kind of slavery, an active, conscious, equal member of the community, of the class”.

Kollontai clearly glossed over the resistance shown by many male workers—and some female workers, of course—to the liberation of women. But she pulled no punches when it came to the shortcomings of her fellow socialists on the issue. 1905 brought home to her, she wrote, “how little our party concerned itself with the fate of the women of the working class and how meagre was its interest in women’s liberation”. Her writings constituted

a polemical disputation with the bourgeois suffragettes but, at the same time, a challenge to the party to build a viable women workers’ move­ment in Russia.… I demanded from the party that it espouse the cause of women’s liberation. I did not always have an easy time of it. Much passive resistance, little understanding, and even less interest in this aim, over and over again lay as an obstacle in the path.

The Russian socialist party had split in 1903 into the Bolshevik and Menshevik groups. At first Kollontai took neither side, seeing the split as an irrelevance. She joined the Bolsheviks in 1904, but left them for the Mensheviks a year later. The Bolsheviks were initially suspicious of the events of 1905, seeing them as an anarchic wave of spontaneity to be brought under party control as quickly as possible. Their first reaction to the strike movement and the growth of workers’ councils, or soviets, was negative, failing to recognise them as potential vehicles for the working class to take power.

When the Tsar set up an undemocratic assembly, the Duma, in order to head off the revolutionary movement, the Bolsheviks flatly refused to have anything to do with it. Kollontai disagreed: “Along with the Mensheviks I espoused the point of view that even a pseudo-parliament should be utilised as a tribune for our party and that the elections for the Duma must be used as an assembly point for the working class.” While she had no time for the Menshevik policy of shepherding the workers behind the lead of the liberal capitalists, she felt excluded by the narrowness of the Bolsheviks: “it seemed to me as if they did not attach sufficient importance to the develop­ment of the working-class movement in ‘breadth and depth’”.

Following the defeat of the 1905 revolution Kollontai was forced into hiding and then exile. In 1908 she moved to Berlin and became an activist in the Social Democratic Party, the leading light among the world’s socialist parties. For all that, in 1914 the party turned its back on all its inter­nationalist rhetoric to fall in behind the German imperial war effort. Kollontai was shocked and horrified but, within a few weeks, saw it as an opportunity for a fresh start:

Maybe things have worked out for the best, historically speaking. Social democracy was at a dead end. Its creativity had dried up. All its activi­ties were hackneyed, repetitive, congealed. There was no spirit, no enthusiasm. Tradition and routine held sway.… the last thing they want to allow is criticism. What the party says goes.

The party’s political culture was one of following the leadership rather than the members thinking for themselves. When the war broke out the rank and file had no practice in using their own initiative, and so “they waited humbly and obediently for the ‘signal’ from above”. The lesson for a renewed socialist movement was clear to her: “If the working masses are to be capable of grasping the significance of current political events but also of responding actively to them without having to wait for the word from above, it is necessary to cultivate a tradition of open activity, to foster faith in one’s own strength and to allow for what one can call ‘revolutionary experience’.”

The crisis of the war radically changed the balance of forces among Russian socialists, too:

both Trotsky and Lenin, although both belonged to different factions of the party, had militantly risen up against the war. Thus I was no longer “isolated”. A new grouping took place in the party, the internationalists and the ‘social-patriots’.

Lenin spent considerable energy persuading Kollontai of his own position: that socialists not only had to oppose the war, but turn it into an opportunity for revolution. She was eventually convinced that the Bolsheviks were the most consistent opponents of the war, and rejoined them in 1915. She became one of the most prominent figures on the anti-war left, and millions of soldiers on both sides read her pamphlet Who Needs the War?

In February 1917 women workers in St Petersburg decided that they had had enough of the wartime hardships, and their demonstrations triggered a revolution that overthrew Tsarism. A provisional government took power, workers’ and soldiers’ soviets sprang up, and socialists took the chance to return home from exile. When Kollontai reached the Russian border, the soldiers knew her by reputation, and a guard tore up the arrest warrant that had been out on her for nine years.

But, not for the first time, the Bolshevik leadership was caught on the hop. Their line was to support the provisional government, which refused to pull Russia out of the war, denied land to the landless, and wouldn’t confront the capitalists responsible for economic deprivation. Many rank-and-file Bolsheviks, including the thousands who had joined since February, disagreed with the party line, feeling that the working class should get rid of the government and run the country themselves. Kollontai was with them: at a pro-government women’s conference in April she jumped on to the platform and shouted “All power to the soviets!” before being thrown out by the organisers and criticised by Bolshevik leaders.

Lenin, too, was urging a change in Bolshevik policy and, when he returned to Russia later that month, advocated an end to co-operation with the provisional government, pushing instead for a government of the soviets. The party leadership dismissed his argument, some feeling that Lenin had evidently lost the plot while in exile. Kollontai’s was the only voice raised in support of his position. But, thanks to the influx of new revolutionaries in 1917, the Bolshevik party was able to turn itself around. The veterans took a back seat and a leadership composed largely of socialists who had been bitterly opposed by the Bolsheviks in the past, fitted the party to embody the workers’ will to power. Kollontai was one of them, elected on the central committee in August.

She was one of the most popular and effective Bolshevik activists of 1917, agitating, as one of her speeches put it, “for peace, for the power of the soviets, for fraternisation at the front, and for the liberation and full equality of women”. Women workers played a crucial role in 1917, and Kollontai was active in the protest movement of soldiers’ wives and a strike of laundry workers. “Women will never be handed their rights on a plate”, she wrote. “They themselves will have to take them and fight for their own interests.” As well as the women, she was pivotal in winning the soldiers and sailors of St Petersburg to supporting a new revolution. This earned her election to the city’s soviet as their representative—as well as seven weeks’ solitary confinement from the government.

Kollontai had always maintained that “Women will only become free and equal in a world where labour has been socialised and where communism has been victorious.” The chance to put this into practice came when the provisional government was overthrown in October 1917 and a workers’ government under Bolshevik leadership assumed power. Kollontai became the only woman in the government, as commissar for social welfare. Within months she had legislated for women’s rights: divorce was made available quickly and cheaply; women were entitled to four months’ maternity leave, and a four-day week while they were nursing their child.

These legal measures only went so far, though, as she later pointed out: “Women, of course, had received all rights but in practice, of course, they still lived under the old yoke: without authority in family life, enslaved by a thousand menial household chores, bearing the whole burden of maternity.” The oppression of women was not just inscribed in law, but also based on generations of tradition that consigned women to second place. This was especially true when it came to the family, where women were forced into the role of domestic labourers. “For women,” Kollontai had written years before, “the solution of the family question is no less important than the achievement of political equality and economic independence.”

A fully socialist society would do away with the family, she argued. The wasteful labour of individual housework would be replaced by collective cooking and cleaning. “Instead of the working woman having to struggle with the cooking and spend her last free hours in the kitchen preparing dinner and supper, communist society will organise public restaurants and communal kitchens.” The same principle applied to child-rearing: “care of the younger generation is not a private family affair, but a social-state concern”. Children would be brought up in common, with the burden shared socially rather than imposed on the individual mother. Women would still take as much of a part as they wanted, for as long as they wanted, in the upbringing of their own children, and love for children would be extended rather than abolished: “It is vital that the interests of each child be defended not only by its mother and father but also by the whole collective.”

Personal relationships also had to be addressed in the building of a socialist society, argued Kollontai. “One of the tasks that confront the working class in its attack on the beleaguered fortress of the future is un­doubtedly the task of establishing more healthy and more joyful relation­ships between the sexes.” This could not be achieved by laying down the law, but by encouraging the development of a healthy social attitude to sexual relations: “Instead of laws and the threat of legal proceedings, the workers’ collective must rely on agitational and educational influences, and on social measures… communist morality—and not the law—regulates sexual relationships”.

This new morality would promote a healthy approach to sexuality, neither licentious nor ascetic:

The sexual act must be seen not as something shameful and sinful but as something which is as natural as the other needs of a healthy organism, such as hunger and thirst.… Thus both early sexual experience (before the body has developed and grown strong) and sexual restraint must be seen as equally harmful. This concern for the health of the human race does not establish either monogamy or polygamy as the obligatory form of relations between the sexes…

Instead of a refuge from loneliness and the troubles of the world, sexual relationships would be an extension of the comradeship that would charac­terise human friendships in general. Instead of a jealous patch of selfish individualism, relationships would truly develop the individuals as part of the collective community.

In place of the old relationship between men and women, a new one is developing: a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal members of communist society, both of them free, both of them inde­pendent and both of them workers. No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family. No need for women to fear being left without support and with children to bring up.… In place of the individual and egotistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades.

Kollontai’s tenure as a commissar was short. Having called off the war with Germany, the revolutionary government dragged out peace talks for months, but by the spring of 1918 the Germans had had enough: they threatened a new offensive on Russia unless massive territories were surrendered to them. The majority of the Bolshevik leadership saw no alternative but to accept, but a significant minority, including Kollontai, refused. A great debate on the peace treaty took place in the Bolshevik party.

Kollontai argued that the Bolsheviks should go underground to battle German imperialism rather than compromise with it. “If our Soviet Repub­lic perishes,” she told the party conference, “another will raise our banner to defend not the fatherland but the Labour Republic. Long live the revolu­tionary war!” But the Russian working class was in no fit state to wage any kind of a war: its first desire was for peace and a chance to recover from the exhaustion of the world war. Revolution hadn’t yet broken out in Europe, and the Russian revolution would have to buy some time in order to hold out until it did. The treaty was accepted, and Kollontai resigned from the government in protest.

Three years later she was in opposition again. Following the civil war, when Soviet Russia defended itself against years of sustained military attack, attention turned to how the economy was to be rebuilt. Among the positions put forward was that of the Workers’ Opposition, a group with thousands of supporters in the ranks of the Communist Party and the unions, and Kollontai became one of its spokespersons.

The discussion, she argued, came down to how economic policy should be implemented: “shall it be by means of the workers organised into their class union, or—over their heads—by bureaucratic means, through canonised functionaries of the state?” Party leaders were losing sight of the basic truth that “it is impossible to decree communism. It can be created only in the process of practical research, through mistakes perhaps, but only by the creative powers of the working class itself.” A division was fast growing in Russian society: “we are the toiling people, they are the Soviet officials”.

A similar process was at work within the Communist Party:

Every independent attempt, every new thought that passes through the censorship of our centre, is considered as “heresy”, as a violation of party discipline, as an attempt to infringe on the prerogatives of the centre, which must “foresee” everything and “decree” everything and anything. If anything is not decreed one must wait, for the time will come when the centre at its leisure will decree. Only then, and within sharply restricted limits, will one be allowed to express one’s “initiative”.

This had led to many of the problems the Russian workers now faced:

Fear of criticism and of freedom of thought, by combining together with bureaucracy, often produce ridiculous results. There can be no self-activity without freedom of thought and opinion, for self-activity mani­fests itself not only in initiative, action and work, but in independent thought as well. We give no freedom to class activity, we are afraid of criticism, we have ceased to rely on the masses: hence we have bureaucracy with us.

Within the party, the Workers’ Opposition wanted a return to issues being freely discussed by the rank and file before the leadership declared its position; the right of dissenting groups to argue for their point of view at all levels; for party officials to be elected by members, not appointed by leaders. As for the economy, they wanted policy to be decided and carried out by an elected Congress of Producers.

The debate at the party conference confirmed a lot of what Kollontai had said about the erosion of party democracy. Leaders lined up to condemn the Workers’ Opposition, with insult largely replacing political analysis. Allowing such opposition was a “luxury”, Lenin said, and those involved “should be exposed and eliminated” for their “deviation”, which was clearly connected with “the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution”. Kollontai herself was subjected to moronic personal derision. The opposition was defeated, and all such groupings within the party were banned from then on.

But while Kollontai and the Workers’ Opposition had correctly raised the alarm about the rise of bureaucracy, their solution offered little practical help. “The Workers’ Opposition relies on the creative powers of its own class: the workers”, she had written, but this strength was also its weakness. By 1921 the Russian working class was in bits: many had been killed in the civil war or the starvation and fever that came with it; some had become party or state officials; more had left the factories to return to the country­side. In these circumstances, expecting them to push through “a clear-cut, uncompromising policy, a rapid, forced advance towards communism” just wasn’t on.

Kollontai expected that an about-turn in Communist policy would solve the problem: “As soon as the party—not just in theory but in practice—recognises the self-activity of the masses as the basis of our state, the Soviet institutions will again automatically become living institutions, destined to carry out the communist project.” With a decimated, demoralised working class, no such thing could happen. A breathing space, a temporary compro­mise with capitalism was needed so that it could recover its economic strength. Of course, there was always the danger that this would become a permanent state of affairs, with the workers exploited by a new class of bureaucrats. The absence of international revolution meant that this did indeed become the case, but the clampdown on dissent that Kollontai warned against also played a part in easing the way.

Following the defeat of the Workers’ Opposition Kollontai was given a job in the Russian embassy in Norway. Utilising her experience abroad and her knowledge of languages also proved a convenient way of getting a promi­nent oppositionist out of harm’s way. But she accepted the post gladly, feeling that there was little prospect of openly standing up to the new regime that was coming to power. She settled into a diplomatic career and wrote a heavily self-censored autobiography—an acknowledgement in itself, perhaps, that her life as a revolutionary had come to a conclusion.

When, a few years later, the Left Opposition emerged, putting forward criticisms similar to her own in 1921, Kollontai refused to support them. Echoing the condemnation she had then faced, she attacked them for vio­lating the all-important party unity. But in the process, she did put her finger on the limitations of their criticism:

Does the Opposition really think that the masses have such a short memory? If there are shortcomings in the party and in its political line, who else beside these prominent members of the Opposition were responsible for them? The Opposition’s argument comes to this: the politics of the party and the party apparatus went to pieces the day the Oppositionists broke with the party. There’s something unconvincing about this…

As Stalinism assumed undisputed power, Kollontai concluded that resistance was futile. She confided her sentiments to a friend:

What can you do? How can you oppose the apparatus? How can you fight, or defend yourself against injury? For my part, I‘ve put my prin­ciples into a corner of my conscience and carry out as well as I can the policies dictated to me.

The hopes aroused in 1917 were dashed, including the emancipation of women and sexual liberation. As all that the workers—and especially women workers—had gained was taken from them, Kollontai kept her head down and stayed quiet, and was officially decorated several times for her services. A few years before her death in 1952, she was to be found praising the way Russia helped “woman to fulfil her natural duty—to be a mother, the educator of her children and the mistress of her home”.

Alexandra Kollontai’s life came to a tragic end, as she denied her revo­lutionary instincts under imaginable pressure. But those instincts are in­dispensable to socialists still: that socialism is the free creation of the working class; that socialist revolution is needed to create the conditions for women’s liberation; that a socialism that fails to attack all forms of women’s oppression is no socialism at all. In her final years Kollontai thought of publishing her journals, in the hope that others could learn from her experiences. “Let them see that we were not heroes or heroines at all,” she wrote, “just that we believed passionately and ardently. We believed in our goals and we pursued them; sometimes we were strong, and sometimes we were very weak.”

Revolutionary Lives: Victor Serge

By Joe Conroy for Issue 9 in March 2001.

Victor Lvovich Kabalchich was born in Brussels on 30 December 1890, the son of Russians exiled for their opposition to the regime of the Tsars. In his teenage years Victor got involved in the youth wing of the Belgian socialist movement, but soon became disillusioned, seeing the official rhetoric of a distant socialist future belied by conventional reformist practice. Moving to Paris in 1908, he became an anarchist, advocating an end to all exploita­tion and authoritarianism. In 1912 he was imprisoned for refusing to in­form on a gang of anarchist bank robbers, despite having no involvement with their activities.

After five years he was released and deported. He went to Barcelona, where he became active in the anarcho-syndicalist movement, writing under the name Victor Serge. In the summer of 1917 he took part in an un­success­ful rising against the Spanish monarchy. But it was the Russian revolution of that year that would become the centre of his political life. Attempting to get to Russia through France, he was interned, but later included in an exchange of prisoners of war. He reached Russia early in 1919.

Tragedy of a revolution

He arrived to find the revolution under siege. “Today we are the witnesses of the tragedy of a social revolution being contained within national fron­tiers”, he wrote. As a result of its isolation, “We have seen many mistakes made, many errors revealed”, but whatever faults the revolution had, it should be remembered that it was existing in far from ideal conditions. “Alone and confronted by limitless tasks, the revolutionaries of Russia have not known a single day in which they did not have to conduct the violent defence of their very right to exist. And that explains a great many things.”

Serge wasted no time taking sides:

I was neither against the Bolsheviks nor neutral; I was with them, albeit independently, without renouncing thought or critical sense. Certainly on several essential points they were mistaken: in their intolerance, in their faith in statification, in their leaning towards centralism and ad­ministrative techniques. But, given that one had to counter them with freedom of the spirit and the spirit of freedom, it must be with them and among them.

He joined the Communist Party, but his solidarity with them never meant blind obedience—unlike others: “the majesty of the Russian Revolution disarmed its supporters of all critical sense; they seemed to believe that approval of it entailed the abdication of the right to think”.

Serge always maintained that the revolution had every right to defend itself with violence against its enemies: the only alternative would have been a counter-revolutionary dictatorship. At the same time he detected an authoritarian streak emerging in the workers’ state, a tendency to justify measures that were unfortunately necessary as if they were correct for all time. Revolutionaries who opposed these developments, however, should combat them by joining the Communists rather than abandoning them:

they will strive throughout these battles to preserve the spirit of liberty, which will give them a greater critical spirit and a clearer awareness of their long-term goals. Within the Communist movement their clear-sightedness will make them the enemies of the ambitious, of budding political careerists and commissars, of formalists, party dogmatists and intriguers. In other words, by their very presence within the organisa­tions, they make a substantial contribution to driving away the self-seekers.
In tactical and theoretical questions their role will be to fight the illu­sions of power, to foresee and forestall the crystallisation of the workers’ state as it has emerged from war and revolution, everywhere and always to encourage the initiative of individuals and the masses, to recall to those who might forget it that the dictatorship is a weapon, a means, an expedient, a necessary evil—but never an aim or a final goal.

While it was right and necessary to suppress those who wanted to re­store capitalist rule, it would be “criminal and disastrous”, wrote Serge, to give the same treatment to “the revolution’s own dissenters. The latter are not our enemies; they belong to our class; they belong to the revolution.” But this was an approach that the Communist government took less and less: “it has fought against every individual initiative, every opposition, every criticism—however fraternal and revolutionary—every infusion of liberty, by methods of centralised discipline and military repression”.

Serge’s attitude is exemplified by his response to the Kronstadt insur­rection of 1921, when sailors demanded reforms from the Communists. He felt that their demands were fundamentally just, but that the sailors’ rising would be exploited, whether they liked it or not, by those trying to bring back the old rulers: “They wanted to release the elements of a purifying tempest, but all they could actually have done was to open the way to a counter-revolution”. He accepted that there was no alternative to putting down the revolt, but he refuted the propaganda put out by the Communists to discredit Kronstadt, felt that they should have made a serious attempt at peaceful arbitration, and opposed the vindictive, unnecessary brutality employed against the sailors.

The workers driven from power

Serge became a supporter of the Left Opposition, attempting to keep the revolution from dying. They realised that its only chance lay in the out­break of revolution internationally to end the desperate isolation of the Russian workers. China offered hope in the mid-1920s when a revolution­ary move­ment fought against the imperial powers that held the country in thrall economically. The capitalist class, argued Serge, were incapable of deci­sively breaking with imperialism, and so it fell to the workers to do it:

Either the national revolution, strangled by the bourgeoisie, will be aborted and will have to start all over again in a few years, or it will triumph, led by the proletariat supported by the middle classes of the towns and the poor peasant masses; but in this case it could no longer confine itself to carrying out the democratic programme of the radical bourgeoisie… it will have to go further, it will go towards Socialism following the example of the Russian Revolution and with the support of the international proletariat. Moreover, in our period there are no longer clearly defined limits between a bourgeois revolution and a Soc­ialist revolution: there are only questions of power and of class-consciousness.

But the Stalinist line imposed upon the Chinese Communists forced them to tamely follow in the trail of the nationalists, and the revolution went down to defeat. “By this time”, Serge later concluded, “the bureaucracy has, in actual fact, driven the workers from power in the USSR. Of the dic­tatorship of the proletariat, only the name remains.”

Stalin consolidated his grip on power in 1928 and moved against the Opposition: Serge was arrested and expelled from the Communist Party. His only means of maintaining his family was writing books that could only be published abroad. Forbidden to comment on current events, he wrote a series of novels based on his own revolutionary experiences, and a history of the Russian revolution’s first year. Initially, as with many other Opposi­tionists, he proclaimed himself more loyal to the Party than the Party itself:

The patriotism of the British expresses itself eloquently in the powerful expression ‘My country right or wrong’. The Bolshevik mentality implies a similar patriotism, one of inestimable value in the class war, a patriotism of class and party: better to be wrong with the party of the proletariat than right against it. There is no greater revolutionary wisdom than this.

But this party patriotism held Serge, and others, back. Socialists who switch off their own intelligence and revolutionary conscience at the direc­tion of a committee are no good to anyone, least of all to the working class. As long as the Opposition tried to remain a loyal opposition, it was playing with a deck stacked by the Stalinists. Serge wasn’t long in changing his attitude.

In 1933 he was arrested once again, and sentenced to exile in the Ural mountains. Socialists and writers got an international campaign going which embarrassed the Russian regime into releasing Serge in 1936, but not without confiscating his manuscripts and depriving him of his citizen­ship. He settled in France, having escaped just before the Moscow show trials inaugurated the most intense phase of Stalinist repression.

Rivalry, scrutiny and struggle of ideas

Serge refused to believe that Stalin was the necessary and legitimate heir of the Bolsheviks:

It is often said that the germ of Stalinism was in Bolshevism. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism contained many other germs—a mass of other germs—and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the Revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse—and which he may have carried with him since his birth—is this very sensible?

But it would be stupid, he believed, for socialists to pretend that there were no bad germs until Stalin came along into power. In 1921, for instance,

After victory had been won in the Civil War, the Socialist solution of the problems of the new society should have been sought in workers’ democracy, the stimulation of initiative, freedom of thought, freedom for working-class groups and not, as it was, in centralisation of power, repression of heresies, the monolithic single-party system, the narrow orthodoxy of an official school of thought.… This extreme concentra­tion of power, this dread of liberty and of ideological variations, this conditioning to absolute authority disarmed the masses and led to the strengthening of the bureaucracy.

Mistakes were committed by the Bolsheviks right from the beginning. “Why not say so?” asked Serge. “We have no need of the fraudulent legend of an infallible Lenin.” Not least among their faults was their belief that they and they alone were right, that “The Party is the repository of truth, and any form of thinking which differs from it is a dangerous or reactionary error.” This intolerance naturally led to authoritarian temperaments and an authoritarian spirit winning out, and this played some part in preparing the ground for Stalin. So, Bolshevik politics needed re-examination:

Out of the vast experience of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxists will save what is essential, durable, only by taking up all the problems again from the bottom, with a genuine freedom of mind, without party vanity, without irreducible hostility (above all in the field of historical investigation) towards the other tendencies of the labour movement. On the contrary, by not recognising old errors, whose gravity history has not ceased to bring out in relief, the risk is run of compromising the whole acquisition of Bolshevism.

What socialists needed above all was open debate: “Socialism cannot develop in the intellectual sense except by the rivalry, scrutiny and struggle of ideas”. The old sectarian habits would have to be left behind:

I can see only one attitude that is productive: that of critical analysis and the disarming of the sectarian spirit. To keep calling one another ‘petty bourgeois’, instead of coolly studying the events of 1921, for example, in all their complexity, will get us nowhere. Rather let us bring our sanest faculties to bear upon reality… by liberating our minds from ex­hausted formulas, discredited clichés, the resentments of sects or indi­viduals, and above all from the insupportable claim to have a monopoly of the truth.

Serge wrote to Leon Trotsky that “we have immediately to work towards a unification of forces at present dispersed… and towards a party ideologi­cally firm and disciplined in action, but unsectarian and without a per­sonality cult in its leadership, genuinely democratic and comradely in its manner, in which people will feel free to be wrong, and to think and speak freely”. Building such a party would be “a practical rediscovery of what workers’ democracy means, proving that we fear neither debate nor rivalry”.

If socialists denied such free and democratic activity, they would be un­true to themselves, for “Socialism is essentially democratic… Liberty is as necessary to Socialism, the spirit of liberty is as necessary to Marxism, as oxygen to living beings.” In a declaration against Stalinist terror, Serge reiterated the fundamentals of socialist liberty:

We want honest and clear ideas within a healthy workers’ movement invigorated by fraternal competition and free debate. From the heart of threatened democracy, of Socialism and the workers’ movement, above all we defend freedom of opinion and the human dignity of the militant, the rights of minorities and the critical spirit. We fight relentlessly, and we will not cease to fight, against controlled thought, the cult of the leader, passive obedience and the despicable ploys of parties subject to blind discipline, as well as the systematic use of lies, slander and assassinations.

However, Serge sometimes allowed his opposition to sectarianism to develop into uncritical fudging of issues. When revolution broke out in Spain in 1936 he quite rightly supported and worked alongside the anti-Stalinist revolutionaries who had a real following in the working class. But he either went along with, or stayed quiet about, the important mistakes they made. Above all, he argued that the popular fronts—alliances of workers’ organisations with liberal capitalists in opposition to fascism—could become an instrument of class struggle. But this could only happen if they ceased to be popular fronts at all.

Rediscovering Serge’s spirit

When the Nazis occupied France, Serge managed to flee at the last moment, in 1941. He reached Mexico, where he attempted to live on his writing—a far from easy task for someone opposed to both Stalinism and Western capitalism. In his memoirs he reflected on his revolutionary life:

I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a Press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.

Victor Serge’s life was dedicated, from beginning to end, to fighting for human liberty, for a revolution that would emancipate human beings from oppression. He was not the only person to see the Russian attempt ulti­mately fail, but few were as honest and truthful about it as he was. Fewer still kept his commitment to maintain the socialist ideals that inspired it, and promote them generously and critically. Bringing revolutionary social­ism forward in our own time will require a rediscovery of his spirit.

On 17 November 1947 Serge died in Mexico City, with no possessions, no money, no nationality. His life had seen more defeat than victory, but he never lost the confidence that it would not always be so. The narrator of his novel Birth of our Power says:

Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, only stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar even­ing, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without impor­tance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.

A forceful argument

In Issue 12 (March 2002) Joe Conroy examined the role of violence in socialist revolution.

The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of every hitherto existing social order.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

There can be few of us who have never come across the old caricature of the bloodthirsty socialist. According to taste, the eyes can be either flitting around conspiratorially or fixed in a manic Norman Bates stare, but the constant in the equation is that socialists are just chomping at the bit for a chance to break bones and slit throats until the gutters run red with the foul blood of the exploiters. Of course, it’s all rubbish, more to be laughed at than resented. Your average socialist is a pretty peaceful type. Far from itching for the fray, one or two of us could produce a doctor’s note showing that we’re allergic to bullets (bring us out in a terrible rash, so they do). Now and again we may give vent to the desire that an individual politician or supervisor be put up against the wall after the revolution, but we usually calm down and accept that forcing them to do an honest day’s work for once in their lives will be revenge enough.

It bears reiterating that to be a socialist is to be a lover of peace. A socialist who is not motivated by a desire to eradicate war and all forms of violence from the world is no socialist at all. The glorification of the gun, common in nationalist traditions in Ireland and elsewhere, has no part to play in the socialist movement. At the same time, socialists cannot join the swelling ranks of those committed to exclusively peaceful means. You cannot be a pacifist, believing that violence is never justified, and be a socialist. What kind of a socialist can hold it to be morally wrong for a slave to shoot his master in an attempt to escape from slavery?

But if violence to overthrow capitalism is justified, there are those who think it might not be necessary. This view underestimates (to put it mildly) just how bestial a creature capitalism is. Just think back a decade or so to the carnage the capitalists unleashed in the Gulf in order to secure their control of the region’s oil. Look at the Iraqi children being killed by their sanctions still. Even on a more mundane level, look at Dublin’s building sites, where the bosses have been killing workers at the rate of roughly one per month. As James Connolly wrote: “When the capitalists kill us so rapidly for the sake of a few pence extra profit it would be suicidal to expect that they would hesitate to slaughter us wholesale when their very existence as parasites was at stake.”

‘Alright then’, some argue, ‘violence will be necessary—but only in self-defence. If the capitalists are prepared to accept that their rule is over, then everything is okay. But if they try to resist, then the workers will have the right to fight back until they do accept it. It shouldn’t take too much violence to beat them. Look at the Russian revolution, after all: more people were killed when they made a film of the storming of the Winter Palace than in the actual attack itself!’

Insisting that violence will be minimal and defensive is understandable. Socialists do not desire violence, and it’s perhaps natural that when people do accept its necessity, they try to downplay it. But spreading the idea that socialism can triumph with just a little defensive violence is at best un­helpful, and at worst dangerous.

When people commit themselves to working for socialist revolution, it is only right that they know what they are getting into. The history of attempts by the working class to take power is a far from peaceful one. If people were indeed killed while Eisenstein was making his film October (in other words, if this isn’t just another left-wing Chinese whisper) then it should raise questions about health and safety in the Soviet Russian film industry. But as far as violence in the Russian revolution is concerned, it doesn’t help us at all. Taking power in St Petersburg was very easy and peaceful, right enough, but that was only the opening salvo. Establishing the workers’ power in Moscow took a week of bloodshed, and holding on to it in the civil war proved extremely violent. The Russian revolution was a lot of things, but peaceful it wasn’t.

Of course, the vast majority of this violence lies at the door of capital­ism’s defenders. This is even more true of Paris in 1871, when workers’ corpses were piled up in the street, or of Germany in 1919, when the bodies of assassinated socialists were dumped in the canal. But one of the reasons that the Russian workers repelled the attack, where the Parisian and German workers succumbed to it, was that they managed to organise a force that was superior to it.

It is a shameful and disgusting fact, but a fact nonetheless, that one class overthrows another violently. In Leon Trotsky’s words, “history down to now has not thought out any other way of carrying mankind forward than that of setting up always the revolutionary violence of the progressive class against the conservative violence of the outworn classes”. The political superiority of the socialist idea will not be sufficient to get rid of capitalism and all the violence that goes with it. When it comes down to a revolution the balance of physical force is all-important: the side whose force is stronger, better organised and more effective wins. It is a horrifying state of affairs, and it will take horrible methods to end it.

To say otherwise puts the working class on the back foot. If people have signed up for a relatively peaceful revolution, they will be unprepared for a likely violent one. If our class is organised only for defensive violence, we will leave the initiative with our enemies, and will be reacting to the situa­tion rather than dictating it—ignoring the cardinal rule of Friedrich Engels: “The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies.”

Of course some revolutions are bloodier than others; a revolution can be more or less violent. But keeping violence to a minimum is only possible if we prepare for the maximum. If the ruling class come comparatively quietly, it won’t be because they’ve seen the light—but because we have mobilised a force that leaves them absolutely no option but surrender. Wavering and hesitating will only give them confidence; making them an offer they can’t refuse can nip their hopes of resistance in the bud. As the Latins used to say, if you want peace prepare war.

A shorter battle would depend upon the rank and file of the army taking the side of the working class instead of shooting us on the capitalists’ orders. This means, above all, that socialist ideas have to win among the soldiers as much as anywhere else. But soldiers appreciate military realities better than anyone. They won’t join a revolution—and risk being executed as mutineers—out of sympathy alone: they will need convincing that the revolution is serious about going into battle. In Tiananmen Square in 1989, the failure of the soldiers to support the students had less to do with politi­cally disagreeing with them, and more to do with not seeing much prospect of them winning the battle.

The thing is that organising violence seriously can minimise the need for it. In October 1917 a group of Russian military officers attempted a coup to strangle the revolution at birth. They failed, but were offered their freedom if they solemnly promised never to take up arms against the revolution again. They promised; they were released; and then they proceeded to take up arms against the revolution again. The misplaced generosity of the young revolution cost more lives and prolonged the agony, whereas shooting the ringleaders would have saved lives and curtailed the suffering.

But the revolution must at all costs avoid going to the other extreme. It is clear that many innocent people were wrongly killed in the Russian revolution. To deny this is not ‘defending the revolution’, it is covering up the truth. Every one of those killings is a stain on the Russian revolution; and future socialist revolutions must go out of their way to avoid repeating them, whether through honest mistake or corrupt intent. The revolution must be as violent as necessary—and as peaceful as possible. “A world must be destroyed, but each tear shed that could have been wiped away is an indictment”, wrote Rosa Luxemburg in the midst of revolution: “The most ruthless revolutionary energy and the most generous humanity—this alone is the true life’s breath of socialism.”

Socialist Classics: N Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’

In Issue 52 in June 2013 Joe Conroy looked at Lenin’s celebrated examination of what the state is and how to get rid of it.

This work emerged from the catastrophe of 1914, when Europe exploded into bloody war and its socialist movement collapsed into a heap of competing chauvinisms. Even Lenin was taken aback by the depth of that betrayal, and his fight against it led him to question the entirety of what had come to pass for Marxist politics. By early 1917 he was examining the role of the state in capitalist politics, and what would happen it in a socialist revolution. His notes are full of extracts from Marx and Engels on the subject, replete with underlinings and exclamation marks as he uncovers the real theory from under all the encrusted interpretations and glosses.

Following the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917 he return­ed to Russia from exile. His notebook on the state was left behind, although the insights he had gained informed his attempts to steer a course for another revolution. In July he was forced into hiding as the provisional government launched a witch hunt of Bolsheviks, but was anxious that his work not be lost, asking a comrade to have his notebook ‘Marxism on the State’ published “if they do me in”. He had the notes sent on to him, and set about writing a book on the subject, settling on the title The State and Revolution: The Marxist theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution.

The misrepresentation had gone so far, claimed Lenin, that “now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people”. Consequently, “our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state”. This means that much of the book consists of quotations, as Lenin is determined to anchor his arguments in the truth of what Marx and Engels actually had to say. Their words, he says, are “mostly quoted in the same manner as one bows before an icon… and no attempt is made to gauge the breadth and depth of the revolution” which they envisage.

Lenin argues that the state in capitalist society is a capitalist state, an instrument to maintain capitalist rule. He instances a minister who was forced to quit the provisional government but soon eased into a well-paid job in business. This was an example from Russia’s recent experience of democratic political forms, but similar cases abound from other countries and periods (not least modern Ireland). Such a political culture reinforces the bonds between big business and the political elite, whereby capital “establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it”. Of course, “the real business of ‘state’ is performed behind the scenes” by a permanent bureaucracy, with elected politicians little more than rotating figureheads.

In his notes for the book Lenin had gone further, probing similar tendencies among those supposed to be fighting to change all this: “the workers’ ‘socialist’ parties have, by ³/₄, ‘grown into’ a similar bureaucracy”. He expanded on the processes which draw socialist politicians into the capitalist web:

The bourgeois state admits workers and Social-Democrats into its institutions, into its own democracy, in a way, and only in such a way, that it (a) filters them by filtering away the revolutionaries; (b) wears them down by turning them into officials… (c) wins them through bribery… (d) besides gross bribery, practices a refined form, including flattery, to win them over, and so on—(e) keeps them busy, engulfs in “work”, chokes them under reams of “papers”, the foetid air of “reforms”, large and petty; (f) perverts them with the philistine comfort of a “culturally” bearable philistine life….

Lenin repeats Marx’s insistence that the working class can’t just take over the capitalist state and remould it: “the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible, not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class”. This was not Lenin repeating an eternal maxim, valid for all times and places. He agrees with Marx that, in nineteenth century Britain, capitalism could have been got rid of peacefully enough.

So do the capitalist societies of today resemble Victorian Britain to the extent that Marx’s peaceful transition to socialism is more likely than Lenin’s violent overthrow of the state? Marx explicitly saw such a transition as only a possibility, and only then in exceptional societies where the state bureaucracy and military apparatus were a com­paratively weak factor. By 1917 Britain and the US (Marx’s other example) had caught up with continental Europe, having moved from polities which happily tolerated revolutionaries to ones which subject­ed them to all manner of surveillance, hindrance, and repression when necessary. The power of the state has grown further in the meantime, but odd cases of ineffectual states could possibly arise here and there. The general point is that wherever the capitalist class has a proper state, it needs to be broken for a socialist revolution to succeed.

But while this particular state would be abolished by a revolution, there would still be a state, only a very different one. It would consist of “the political rule of the proletariat, of its dictatorship, i.e. of un­divided power”. This dictatorship of the proletariat has been the subject of no end of misunderstanding, confusion and distortion down the years. The word dictatorship is infamous enough in itself to cause a recoil, which is a good reason for avoiding the phrase as much as possible. But whatever name we use to express it, the actuality of workers taking and holding state power is an indispensable feature of a socialist revolution.

Fortunately, The State and Revolution is quite forthcoming in explaining what that might look like. The keynote of it is radical democracy: “democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian demo­cracy”. Widening and deepening the involvement and control of the people in running things brings us to “the interesting boundary line at which consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into socialism and, on the other, demands socialism”. It is a virtuous circle where the more people participate the firmer the new society is embedded, which in turn draws people into an expanding role.

This would be, as Lenin writes in his notes, “not present-day, not bourgeois democracy but democracy of a different kind, proletarian democracy”. It would not be a parliamentary system, where pol­iticians are elected to an overpaid position, sheltered from the voters between elections, debating things they never implement. It would work on the principles introduced by the Paris Commune of 1871: deputies could be recalled by their electors at any time, would receive no more than a worker’s wage, and be directly involved in carrying out the measures they propose. Workers’ democracy

substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account directly to their constituents. Representative institutions remain, but there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies. We cannot imagine demo­cracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism…

It is notable here that elections and debate are an integral component of what Lenin has in mind, not an aspect of bourgeois democracy to be set aside, but something to be developed and extended into areas currently dominated by bureaucracy and government.

“Under socialism,” writes Lenin, “all will take part in the work of government in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.” A statement like this leaves him open to an unlikely charge of utopianism, but he does back up his claim with modern economic realities:

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old “state power” have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary “workmen’s wages”, and that these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of “official grandeur”.

Since Lenin wrote, capitalist culture has gone further in the direction he noted. Computers, the internet, mobile phones and the rest have simplified administration even more. Such tasks do in fact tend to be carried out for ordinary workers’ wages now, with illusions of grandeur well knocked out of the average office worker’s head. The old mystique that once surrounded the way things are run is all but gone, and the working class is full of people who know their way around a spreadsheet as well as any bureaucratic mandarin, if not better. It would be one of the easier challenges facing a young socialist society to disseminate this ability in practice so that administrative tasks “will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population”.

No specific blueprint for organising a workers’ state is set out here. In fact, Lenin admits that “The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms”, as long as the workers are in the saddle. But the strength of workers’ power would come from below, not above. It would be centralised, but on a basis “of voluntary central­ism, of the voluntary amalgamation of the communes into a nation, of the voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes”. His notes speak of “Local self-government without inspection and supervision by the state from above”.

Lenin embraces the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to describe the working class power, showing far less compunction about it than Marx did, for instance. But the difficulty is not just a termino­logical one, because there is definitely something dictatorial about the way this power would operate:

the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie).… Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.… Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people…

The workers in power would absolutely dictate to the capitalists what they could and couldn’t do politically. The capitalist class would be neither capitalists nor a class if they were to submit to their ex­propriation without a struggle. Having taken control, workers would have no choice but to keep their enemies under guard until any prospect of resistance had disappeared. Property would be confiscated from them quite summarily, as would their ability to organise for a restoration of the old system. The flower of socialist democracy could only grow by pulling up the weeds of capitalist politics.

Just as it is at the same time a dictatorship and a democracy, it is also both a state and something else. Lenin calls it “the proletarian state or semi-state… something which is no longer the state proper”. It clearly shares some of the characteristics of a state: it is an organised power, backed up with violence or the threat of it, to enforce the interests of one class against another. On the other hand, no other state enforces the interests of the oppressed majority against the oppressing minority. It is tempting to just drop the word state altogether in this context, but that smacks of sugar-coating the harsh —albeit necessary—reality of class coercion with a more innocent sounding name.

It isn’t just the class character of this state which sets it apart, but the fact that it undermines its own foundations: “a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away”.

The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not at all differ from the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes.

The idea of the state withering away comes from Engels, and suggests bits of the state power dropping off by themselves, rather than consciously being dispensed with. Lenin in his notes recognised that it was “Open to opportunist interpretation”. But the need to utilise state power would disappear progressively: “people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse… without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state”. While “excesses on the part of individual persons” would still occur, they would be far rarer, and could be stopped without the aid of a state power, “as readily as any crowd of civilised people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted”. Lenin is unambiguous that only at such a stage could human liberation begin: “So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.”

The failure to understand, or the determination to distort, Marxism’s attitude to the state arises from an attitude on the left which “at bottom, not only does not believe in revolution, in the creative power of revolution, but lives in mortal dread of it”, writes Lenin. That creative power interrupted his work on the book as Russian workers’ opposition to a counter-revolutionary attempt paved the way for them to sweep aside the provisional government, but it was an interruption he welcomed: “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.” By the time The State and Revolution was published, its author was at the head of a new state emanating from a new revolution.

The cruel irony is that this new state was only briefly guided by the vision its leader had outlined. Much of the previous state apparatus was preserved rather than smashed, making good revo­lutionaries into bureaucrats. Instead of the working class wielding power directly from below, that state was administered from above by the Bolshevik party which had won their trust in the course of 1917. Debate and discussion was narrowed down to the confines of that party, before internal disagreements were also closed down. Over time, the state became another organ of a ruling minority enforcing its own interest on the working people.

The chief blame for all this lies with the capitalists inside and especially outside Russia, who determined to starve and strangle the Russian revolution. In addition, revolutionary attempts by workers in Europe didn’t prevail, leaving Russia cut off from the oxygen of solidarity. But the actions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks have to bear responsibility too. Their compromises and accommodations with capitalism were more often presented as theoretically correct eternal principles than as unfortunate necessary evils forced upon them temporarily. The State and Revolution became something that might be all very well in theory, but couldn’t possibly be relevant to the actual revolution going on.

Its opening passage tells of great revolutionaries fated to have their ideas distorted and disembodied by supposed followers: “robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revo­lutionary edge and vulgarising it… They omit, obscure or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul.” Lenin suffered such a fate grievously, of course, being literally mummified into an idol to justify atrocities which were the antithesis of the socialist vision he had espoused at his best. But the tragedy is greater, in that the robbery of his revolutionary soul had begun before his death, and that he himself had been involved in perpetrating it.