A relapse was taking place within the Third International. There was an attempt to ressusitate the old Social Democracy, to restore it to what it had been before the crash of 1914 - complete with its revolutionary and opportunist wings. It was no longer a question of separating the new international from the social-chauvinists and parliamentary socialists of the Second International, who had proven themselves the implacable enemies of the proletariat in its civil war against its exploiters; instead the Comintern saw fit to discard the primary lesson of the imperialist war and the world revolution; "the absolute necessity for a split with the social-chauvinists."1
At the IVth World Congress of the Comintern in 1922, the Italian Communist Party (1CP) presented its Action Programme which vigorously rejected the proposed organizational fusion with the Italian Socialist Party (ISP), that the Comintern had peremptorily declared should take place on February 15, 1923. The ICP's refusal to go along with this directive was based on its demonstrably correct thesis that the role of the Socialist Party was to divert an important sector of the working class from its revolutionary struggle for political power by means of skilful electoral and trade union propaganda.
In fact, the projected fusion was providing the Socialist Party - whose ‘Third Internationalists' fraction had declared its willingness to accept the conditions for adhesion to the Third International drawn up at the Second Congress - with the possibility of camouflaging its real function within the class struggle and thus regain, in the eyes of the workers, the prestige it had forfeited forever through its actions in previous events.
Against this betrayal of the very principles acquired in the heat of struggle against Social Democracy (a betrayal initiated by the Comintern with the aim of attracting the ‘maximalist' turncoats), the delegation of the Italian Communist Party asserted that it was necessary to win over to communism those militants who were caught up in the Socialist Party's apparatus, through intervention at the fore of all struggles engendered by the economic situation. Similarly, it was necessary to wrest from the other so-called workers' parties their best militants, in other words those who fought for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This programme, correct in part, cancelled itself out in that it allowed for agitation within bourgeois organizations such as unions, co-operatives and friendly societies. The motions of the Communist Trade Union Committee, while denouncing the ‘Amsterdam betrayal' of the ‘Yellow International' could still remind the Italian General Federation of Labour of its ‘class duties'. None of this, however, prevented the latter from jumping on the capitalist bandwagon.
The fact that some communist militants did succeed in creating their own trade union cells closely linked to the life of the party, did not alter the harsh reality of the situation. They were not in a position to hold back the march of history, to prevent the trade unions from becoming encrusted in the very soil of capitalism, from wrapping themselves in the folds of the tri-colour.
As an experiment in the tactic of the Workers' United Front, which it had agreed to apply out of a sense of discipline and only on the level of immediate economic demands, the left participated in the national general strike on August 1922, in the belief that integrating the non-unionized workers the Labour Alliance would begin to take on the form of a workers' council. This served only to reinforce a number of prejudices already held by the workers of a country deeply affected by Sorelian illusions: trade union activity, the myth of the general strike, and democratic illusions. The call for a general strike issued by the Labour Alliance contained all the forms of bourgeois ideology. The Alliance invited the workers to struggle against the "dictatorial madmen" of fascism, all the while warning the workers of the danger entailed in using violence which would detract from the "solemnity of their demonstration"; it appealed for the reconquest of Liberty, "the most sacred possession of any civilized man".
It is useless to point out that for the Italian proletariat, already cruelly tried, this was an added defeat but unavoidable in such an unfavourable situation where in the class could only maintain itself in a defensive position with great difficulty. The number of strike days lost fell by 70 or 80% in relation to 1920.
In a series of incoherent turns, the Comintern one minute encouraged the ‘Third Internationalists' fraction of the old Socialist Party to split from the party and the next ordered them to stay in it and carry out fraction work. While the negotiations regarding fusion (which were to end in the creation of a party bearing the name Unified Communist Party of Italy) dragged on, the Comintern was pressing ahead with its indictment of ‘left-wing childishness'.
The opportunity for the manoeuvres for the Comintern to go unhindered arrived like manna from heaven in the form of fascism. In February 1923, after Mussolini had arrested Bordiga de Grieco and a number of other leaders who belonged to the left of the party, the Enlarged Executive of June 1923 was able to approve a provisional Executive Committee under Tasca and Graziadei: ‘trustworthy' men who would retain their functions in the Executive Committee after the freeing of the old leadership elected at Livorno and Rome.2
In Italy, as in France under Cachin, the International orientated itself towards the task of winning over the ‘masses' by supporting itself on the rotten edifice of Social Democracy. Obviously such tactics implied the removal of the communists who had founded its national sections by branding them as ‘left wing opportunists' because of their intransigent defence of principles.
What was being played out at this time was not a sordid game of power politics within the young communist parties, but a drama of colossal historic proportions: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat, fascism or communism. Alas, the final curtain was to fall on the historic scene to the disadvantage of the proletariat.
The new international line drawn up by Zinoviev characterizes the Social Democracy as the right wing of the workers' movement rather than as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. It scrubbed over the fact that Social Democracy at the head of the old organizations of the reformist period had, on 4 August 1914, gathered together all its forces into an anti-working class front committed to the salvation of bourgeois rule; that it had lent to the forces of reaction its Noskes, Scheidemans, Bohms and Peilds; that for the crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic it had provided Austria with a federal chancellor in the person of one K. Renner, who distinguished by rousing the peasantry against the workers. Thus, the Comintern ended up completely disorientating the working class, sowing the most terrible confusion in its ranks, with the tactic of the "Open Letter", of "forcing the reformists into a corner" of inviting them to form left wing electoral blocs, to fuse with the Communists, etc. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie, taking advantage of a major respite in the class struggle, was able to bind up the wounds in its political apparatus.
Gramsci and anti-fascismShortly after the Enlarged Exutive had removed Bordiga from his position of leadership, Gramsci became the official representative of the Comintern within the Italian Party. In conformity with the directives of the International, he set about preparing the young Communist party for ‘anti-fascist resistance'. Thus the practice began of distinguishing between the fascist and anti-fascist wings of the bourgeoisie: the latter it was asserted, could be integrated into an ‘historic bloc', since according to Gramsci-ite theory the Italian proletariat could not become the ‘hegemonic' class unless it managed to create an alliance with non-monopolistic strata. (Lyon Theses, IlIrd Congress of the Italian Communist Party)
Following the murder of the Socialist Deputy, Matteori, by fascist henchmen in June 1924, the Communist and Socialist Parties resolutely decided to "withdraw to the Aventinno (ie leave parliament). Gramcis's circle within the party developed an analysis of the situation in Italy wherein it stressed the need for the party to regroup the maximum number of anti-capitalist workers around its factory cells to fight for the immediate objective of regaining basic civil liberties. While it was correct to affirm that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not on the immediate agenda, it was a fatal falsehood to claim that the re-establishment of bourgeois democracy would be beneficial to the next revolutionary offensive.
By leaving parliament, the Socialist and Communist, especially the right wing Gramsci-ites, hoped to be able to provoke the dismissal of Mussolini. It was as if they saw the presence of a representative of a totalitarian party in the Chamber of Deputies as a stain on the purity of bourgeois government.
It was, quite simply, a question of suppressing any reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat and replacing it with the transitional demand for a Constituent Assembly. The ‘United Front' line elaborated by Zinoviev was to lead to a ‘workers' government' like the one set up in Saxe-Thuringia in 1923, or at least to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Gramsci-Togliatti duumvirate eagerly buckled down to the job. Their analysis was as follows: the ‘Aventino' where an embryonic democratic state had been set up within the fascist state, was destined to serve as the constituent body of a federal republic of soviets with the aim of carrying out a strictly national policy: the completion of Italian unity. This leit-motif had pride of in Gramsci's analysis: for him the Italian Communist Party had to show that it alone was capable of finally resolving the problem of national unity, a task which had been left dangling in the air by three generations of bourgeois liberalism.
This falsehood was the great contribution of the man whom the epigones of self-management unhesitatingly refer to as "the most radical of the Italian revolutionaries". From the very start Gramsci attempted to translate the lessons of the Russian October into a strictly Italian language. This provincialization of the universal experience of the international proletariat; this refusal to see that the questions confronting the class could only be solved by the sword of world revolution - all this was part of Gramsci's effort to align himself with the defence of ‘Socialism in One Country', that spicy dish concocted by the great chef, Stalin.
The central theses defended by Gramsci were that fascism derived from the peculiarities of Italian history and of the economic structure of Italy, rather than from the international situation. All this was necessary in order for Gramsci to justify the Constituent Assembly as an intermediary stage between Italian capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Didn't Gramsci declare that "a class with an international character must to some extent nationalize itself"?
For Gramsci, there had to be a national Constituent Assembly where all the deputies from "all democratic classes of the country", elected by the whole people, would draw up the future Italian constitution. A Constituent Assembly where, in the company of men like don Sturzo, Secretary of the Italian Popular Party; of liberal figures like Salvemini and Gobeti; and all the Turattis, a ‘progressive' regime could be set in motion.
Speaking at the Vth World Congress of the Comintern, Bordiga demolished Gramsci's position which saw fascism as a feudalist reaction of the landpwning interests. Bordiga addressed an International about to take up the theory of ‘building socialism in the USSR', in the following terms:
"We must reject the illusion that a transitional government would be naive enough to allow a situation to occur in which, through legal means, parliamentary manoeuvres and more or less skilful expediency, we could lay siege to the bourgeoisie, ie legally deprive them of their whole technical and military apparatus, and quietly distribute arms to the workers. This is a truly infantile conception! Making' a revolution is not that simple!"
But Gramsci, in the name of anti-fascism, had begun a rapprochement with the Party of Action (de Guista e Liberta), and with the Sardinian Party with which, as an islander himself, he had long established ties. These dated back to October 1913 when Gramsci supported an anti-protectionist manifesto for Sardinia. In order to avoid the "serious errors" of those whom they accused of "an abstract and verbal extremism", Gramsci-Togliatti erased from communist propaganda the only phrase which could accurately describe the situation: fascism or communism.
The origins and nature of fascismHeaps of pseudo-scientific rubbish litter the desks of the historians, all describing the origins and peculiarity of the fascist ‘phenomenon'. Actually, the coming to power of fascism some fifty years ago hardly merits the title of a coup die-tat, an idea widely tossed about by Stalinism and its leftist apologists.
The National Fascist Party entered the bourgeois parliament thanks to the elections of May 1921, in other words by the most ‘legal' channels possible. It had the support of the great democrat, Giolitti, who, on 7 April, had dissolved the previous parliament. On his orders, administrative interference with and judicial pursuit of people under his protection ceased to take effect; the fascists could now act openly, sure of immunity in high places. And so Mussolini, sitting on the extreme right with 34 other fascist Deputies, came to make use of the parliamentary tribune. On 26 June 1921, he announced his break with the man who had guided his foot into the electoral stirrup, Giolitti, who nevertheless remained in close contact with the parliamentary group of the Fascist Party via the prefect of Milan, Luisgnoli. Moreover, this connivance was two-faced: Nitti was quite happy to receive, in broad daylight, a visit from Baron Avezzana, whom Mussolini had sent to him in the hope of forming a grand coalition.
As Trotsky once said, "The programme with which National Socialism came to power reminds one, alas, of one of those big Jewish shops in out-of-the-way provinces. There is nothing you can't find in it."3 The same applies to Italian fascism. At that time, fascism was an incredible pot-pourri, borrowing from left and right ideas absolutely traditional to Italy. Its programme included:
anti-clericalism, the demand for the confiscation of the goods of religious congregations. At the 1st Congress of the Fasci, in Florence on 9 October 1919, Marinetti had proposed the devaticanization of the country in terms almost identical to those put forward by Cavour some 34 years before.
syndicalism, inspired by the ideas of Sorel, full of unbridled enthusiasm in praise of the ‘morality of the producer'. In light of the experience of the occupations, the fascists understood that it was necessary at all costs to associate the workers' unions with the technical and administrative functioning of industry.
the ideal of an enlightened Republic, its legitimacy based on universal suffrage, regional electoral lists and proportional representation. The fascists also stood for the right to vote and eligibility for women; and, true to fascism's cult of youth, it put forward the demand for the lowering of the voting age to 18, and of the age of eligibility of Deputies to 25.
anti-plutocratism, the threat of hitting big capital with a progressive income tax (what was called ‘authentic partial expropriation'), of revising all the contracts for war supplies and of confiscating 85% of profits acquired during the war.
The more a social programme is eclectic and rich in promise, the more numerous are its supporters. All kinds of people began to be drawn to fascism: nostalgic war veterans (the ‘arditti'), freemasons, futurists, anarcho-syndicalists.....All of them found a common denominator in a reactionary rejection of capitalism and its decadent parliamentary institutions. The hall of the San Sepolero, put at the fascists disposal by the Circle of Industrial and Commercial Interests, resounded with Mussolini's famous maxim: "We fascists have no pre-established doctrine; our doctrine is the deed." (23 March, 1919)
In the electoral sphere, fascism adopted the most varied and flexible tactics. In Rome it presented a candidate on the list of the National Alliance; in Verona and Padua it was for abstention; in Ferrare and Rovigo it joined the National Bloc; in Treviso it allied itself with the war veterans; in Milan it afforded itself the luxury of denouncing the demand for legal recognition of the workers' organizations, a hobby-horse so dear to leftist factions. The fascists said legalization would lead to the ‘strangulation' of those organizations!
Such was the nature of fascism in the early days, when whatever it may have been, it could hardly claim to be an independent political force with its own objectives. In particular, the fascists had to face up to one demand: the need to get rid of all propaganda which was embarrassing to the industrialists and which the ruling class found somewhat out of place in the propaganda of a party pledged to the re-establishment of social order. The ruling class had every reason to distrust a movement which, in order to attract the mass of workers and peasants, had been forced to make a spectacular show of contempt for social conformism. Fascism had to mature before it could meet the requirements of capital.
And so, this crude anti-clericalism, once so virulent in its atheistic outbursts, had its banners blessed in the nave of Milan Cathedral by Cardinal Ritti, the future Pope Pius XI4. From then on, not one fascist memorial, not one fascist rally, failed to receive the sprinkle of holy water. In 1929 the Lateran Pact was signed through which the regime recognized the Holy See's legal right to private property and granted it an indemnity of 750 million lira, plus the right to exact rent at 5% interest on capital of 100,000 lira. This appeased the Catholics and made them grateful to fascism for having reintroduced religious instruction into the curriculum of state schools. Now that Mussolini had shelved his anti-clerical passions, the Catholics dubbed him "the man of divine destiny". In all the churches of Italy, Te Deums were said for the successful completion of the task of national salvation to be carried out by fascism.
Likewise, this great republican movement rallied to the crown and the monarchy; on 9 May 1936 it offered the king and his descendants the title of Emperor of Ethiopia; and it gave representatives of the ruling dynasty official posts in the diplomatic corps.
This anarchistic, anti-party became the National Fascist Party with its pyramid of quadrumvires, hierarchs and podestats; showered honours upon state dignitaries; swelled the state bureaucracy with new mercenaries and parasites.
This anti-statism which in the beginning had proclaimed that the state was incapable of managing national affairs and public services, shortly declared that everything was part of the state. The celebrated words:
"We've had enough of the state as railwayman, the state as postman, the state as insurance broker. We've had enough of the state exercising its functions at the expense of the Italian taxpayer and aggravating the exhaustion of our finances." (Speech of Udine at The Congress of Fasci at Fioul, 20 September, 1922)
gave way to:
"For the fascist, everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual exists or has any value outside the state." (The Italian Encyclopedia)
This pseudo-enemy of the wealthy, of war profiteers and of the shady deals which flourished so much in the Giolitti period, was soon decked out from head to toe by the captains of industry and agriculture, and this was long before the famous ‘March on Rome'. From the very beginning the propaganda of Popolo d'Italia was regularly subsidized by the big firms of the armaments and war-provisions industry: FIAT, ANSALDO, EDISON, who were interested in seeing Italy follow an interventionist policy. The patriotic cheques provided by Minister Guesde's emissary, M. Cachin, also helped the first issues of that Francophile journal to come out.
It is true that within the National fascist Party conflicts arose which sometime led to the formation of dissident groupings, This was, for a time at least, the case with certain provincial fascist cells, notably the one led by the triumvirum made up by Grandi and Baldo and partly also by the Confederation of Agriculture. This sort of thing easily led to the idea of an ‘agrarian' fascism'.
But fascism appeared from the beginning in the big, highly industrialized urban centres; only afterwards was it able to make its entry into the countryside in the form of a rural syndicalism -with a kind of plebeian emphasis. Its punitive expeditions always went from the towns to the villages: and the ‘squadrisiti' only became the masters of the villages after often bloody struggles. Actually, the internal struggles among the fascists expressed the contradictions between those petit-bourgeois anarchistic elements of fascism who had been ruined by the war and the factions which arose to fulfill the general interests of the ruling class for economic concentration carried out by the state.
Thus, those old ‘comrades' who showed themselves good for nothing except wallowing in the old glories or wielding the cudgel against all comers, were to taste in turn the paternal rod. You have to be cruel to be kind. And, having put on a left face, fascism now began to move to the right over the heads of those who did not understand that the movement would squander all the fruits of its victories if it lost its sense of proportion. And the ‘right' proportion for fascism was anything which guaranteed the profits of capital.
Behind all the leftist mythology lies the indisputable fact that fascism was not a preventative counter-revolution carried out with the conscious aim of crushing a proletariat on the verge of destroying the capitalist system. In Italy it was not the Blackshirts who put an end to the revolution; it was the failure of the international working class which led to the victory of fascism, not only in Italy, but also in Germany and Hungary. It was only after the failure of the factory occupations movement, in the autumn of 1920, that repression came down on the heads of the Italian workers; this repression was carried out by two factions; the legally constituted forces of the democratic state, and the fascist squadristi.
Only after the defeat of the working class did the fascists really get going, thanks to the largesse doled out to them by the employers and the facilities granted them by the public authorities. At the end of 1919, the fascists had been on the verge of the void, with only 30 cells and rather less than 1,000 members; but in the last months of 1920 their numbers multiplied many times over to include 3,200 ‘fasci' containing 300,000 members.
It was Mussolini, of course, who became the ‘chosen one' for the Confederation of Industry and the Confederation of Agriculture, the Bankers' Association, government deputies and such glorious national figures as General Diaz and Admiral Thaon di Revel. It was Mussolini whom big capital put in the driver's seat and not someone like d'Annunzio whose nationalist adventures were unanimously repudiated by the bourgeoisie during the Christmas period, 1920. The poet of the ‘Naval Odes', (‘Arm the prows and set sail towards the world'), was allowed only to compose lyrical hymns to the mediocre Italian conquests in Africa; he was given the job of keeping the flag of nationalism burning, but not of finishing off the massacre of the workers. This role fell to Mussolini, ex-atheist, ex-libertarian, ex-left wing intransigent, ex-director of Avanti.
For marxism, there is no ‘mystery' in fascism which cannot be understood and denounced in front of the working class.
The trade unions during the fascist periodIn the last weeks of 1920 the fascist offensive against the organizations and associations under the control of the Socialist Party, doubled in intensity. Once again the witch-hunting of the ‘Bolsheviks' got underway with a vengeance; Socialist leaders were molested, and, if they resisted, were cowardly assassinated; the headquarters of the Socialist papers, the Labour Ministry, the buildings of the cooperatives and Peasant Leagues were burned down and pillaged. And all this happened with the direct connivance of the democratic state which protected the fascist gangs with its own rifles and machine guns.
Confident of the bourgeois state's support, fascism quickly assumed control of the essential cogs of that state. It simply took over, by force if necessary, the state institutions which had previously so faithfully served the policies of the imperialist bourgeoisie of Italy.
Fascism made a big show of the very real interest it had in the trade unions by signing the Pacification Pact on 2 August, 1921. On that day, representatives of the National Council of Fasci, the Socialist Party, the Parliamentary Fascist and Socialist groups, and the Italian General Federation of Labour, together with the President of the Chamber, De Nicola, met in Rome and agreed not to surrender the streets to "outbursts of violence, nor to excite extremist partisan feelings" (Article Two). The two sides also agreed to "reciprocally respect each other's economic organizations" (Article Four). Each side recognized in their adversary a living force in national life, a force to be reckoned with. Everybody agreed to try to avoid confrontation.
By endorsing the Pacification Pact, all the political forces of the bourgeoisie, both the right and the left, showed that they understood the need to bury the working class, once and for all, by means of this pact for civil peace. Still not completely crushed the working class had fallen back to a defensive position; but the workers' resistance grew more and more difficult as the days went by. Inspite of these unfavourable conditions, the Italian proletariat continued to struggle every inch of the way against both the ‘legal' and ‘illegal' faces of reaction.
Turatti, while still putting his hopes on the formation of a coalition government supported by the ‘reformists' arrived at the following self-justification: "It takes courage to be a coward!" On 10 August the Socialist Party leadership - the same people whom the Comintern would later approach in order to ‘strengthen' the revolutionary movement - officially approved the Pacification Pact, The readers of the ‘anti-clerical' Avanti were then treated to an original serial called ‘The Life of Jesus', which, according to Pappini, was designed to make the pill of ‘pacification' easier to swallow.
The scenario of this ‘comedia del'arte'was played out in the following manner: the first actors openly used military force against a proletariat which was weakened and in retreat; the next exhorted the class to do nothing that might provoke the enemy, to undertake no illicit actions which might serve as a pretext for new and more violent attacks by the fascists. How many strikes were suspended by the Italian General Federation of Labour in agreement with stipulations imposed by the Socialist Party? It is impossible to keep count of them. In the face of a military offensive and attacks by the bosses in the form of lay-offs and wage cuts, the bourgeois left continued its work of sabotaging the workers' struggle. For example, the Italian Federation of Metallurgical Workers (FIOM) deemed lay-offs and wage cuts to be part of the natural order of life and consequently tailored its demands to fit the objective financial situation of each enterprise. (This was called the articulation tactic.)
Even the Alliance of Labour in which the Communist Party had had such high hopes ascribed to this programme for the salvation of the capitalist economy. It derailed strikes and moderated its agitation. All of these moves were recognized and vigorously denounced by the Communist Left.
What then was the proletariat to do? The answer given by the Social Democratic organizations was simple and obvious: regroup for the nth time on the electoral terrain, defeat the fascists via the ballot-box, and so facilitate the formation of an antifascist government containing a few Socialist leaders. Assured of a convincing victory, Mussolini himself` was in favour of such a ‘peaceful' confrontation:
"The spectre of elections is more than enough to befuddle the old parliamentarians, who are already campaigning for an alliance with us. With this bait, we will be able to do what we like with them. We were born yesterday, but we are still more intelligent than them." (Journal)
The march on Rome
Towards the end of October 1922, everything had been carefully prepared for Mussolini to come quietly to power under royal auspices. During the epic March on Rome (in railway coaches), which had been announced as early as the beginning of September at Blackshirt meetings and processions, the squadristi were met by official representatives of the state at the stations of Cremona, Merano, and Trento. In Trieste, Padua and Venice the authorities marched shoulderto-shoulder with the fascists; in Rome the military quartermaster fed and housed the Blackshirts in the barracks.
Once installed in power, fascism demanded the loyal collaboration of the Italian General Federation of Labour. The powerful railwaymen's union was the first to accept the fascist's call for a truce; its lead was soon followed by other union federations. And so, without having to resort to an armed insurrection, fascism was able to take over the main positions of the state apparatus. Mussolini as President of the Council also kept for himself the portfolios of Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs; his close comrades-in-arms were given the other important ministries - Justice, Finance, ‘Liberated' Territories.
Fascism was simply a change-over in the leadership of the bourgeois state. After the change-over, fascism was in a better position to make the workers taste the bile of intensified exploitation. In doing so, it used the whips and cudgels the Socialists had made with their own hands. The fascist state was therefore nothing but a form of organization resorted-to by the bourgeoisie in order to maintain capitalist accumulation in a situation in which parliamentary government was no longer feasible and had to give way to an overt dictatorship.
The economy in the fascist periodAll that fascism really did was to accelerate the objective process leading towards the fusion of the trade unions with the bourgeois state. For the trade unionists and social democrats no less than for the fascists, the class straggle was simply an obstacle in the way of those who wanted to find a solution to the problems of the national economy. Thus fascism put the trade unions at the service of the nation just as the latter had done on their own initiative during the post-war economic recession. The social gospel of solidarity between the classes was preached by both the fascists and the trade unions.
Formally speaking, the economy during the fascist period was based on the corporate principle, according to which particular interests had to be subordinated to the general interest. In place of the class struggle, corporatism stood for the union of classes and a national bloc of all the sons of the fatherland. It tried to persuade the workers to exert themselves selflessly for the supreme interests of Italy. The Charter of Labour, adopted in 1921 recognized the state as the sole agency for the elaboration and application of labour policies; any factional struggle, any particularistic settlements outside the state were excluded. Henceforward, conditions of employment and payment were regulated through the collective contract established by the Charter.
Fascism stood for the construction of an Economic Parliament composed of members elected according to their trade. This is why it attracted into its ranks many of the leading Sorelian syndicalists. These people found in this ‘daring' project a vindication of their principles of apoliticism and of trade union independence from political parties.
Thus corporatism appeared at a time of world crisis as a form of direct state intervention in the economy, which at the same time sought to force the working class into submission and obedience. The non-marxist, Gramsci, has to ask himself, "Is this the only way the productive forces of industry can be developed under the leadership of the traditional ruling classes?"5 It totally escaped the author of The (Russian) Revolution Against (Marx's) Capital, that capitalism was in decadence and that fascism was nothing but a mode of survival for capital.
The year 1926 marked the beginning of great economic battles which aimed at protecting the internal market of Italy through limiting the importation of food products and manufactured goods by developing industrial sectors which had previously proven unable to satisfy the needs of the internal market. The results of this reorganization were largely eclipsed by its negative side-effects; prices rose to a level above that of the world market. Thus, the mere resort to statist manipulations did not resolve any of the economic problems of a country poor in natural resources. In addition, the only rewards Italy had received from her participation in the imperialist war were a few territories which served neither as commercial outlets nor as a means of getting rid of her surplus work-force.
The strengthening of customs duties, draconian control over exchange rates, the granting of subsides, state orders, and, as a corollary, the freezing of wages - amounted to a continuation of policies which had grown up during the war. Under the pressure of economic necessity the state had to become a builder of factories, supplier of raw materials, planner of the market, sole buyer of production, sometimes even paying for it in advance, legislator, etc., etc. The state had become the centre of gravity of an enormous, impersonal productive apparatus, before which everyone, even those still attached to the principles of free enterprise, the creative spirit of the industrialists, had to bow the knee. For these reasons the habits of ‘liberal' life, of ‘democratic' practice, were replaced by the activity of the state. This was the soil in which fascism could bloom.
If an enterprise fell under the dark shadow of bankruptcy, the state would step forward to buy back its assets. If one sector was to be developed more than another, the state would issue its imperious directives. If it was necessary to block the importation of grain, the state would oblige by making a unique kind of bread whose yeast content it would fix in advance. If the lira needed to be revalued, the state would give it parity with the franc despite the warnings of the financiers. The state stimulated the concentration of enterprises; it made concentration obligatory in the iron and steel industry; it was a landowner; it put blocks on immigration; it put colonists in places where it was trying "to create a new, organic, powerful system of demographic colonization which would bring with it all the benefits of civilization"6; finally, it monopolized foreign trade.
By the end of 1926, the most important part of the Italian economy was in the hands of state or quasi-state committees: Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, National Council of Research, Cotton Institute, National Cellolose Council, Italian General Oil Company. A number of these councils had the task of procuring substitute products for the Italian economy: synthetic wool, artificial silk and cotton.
This whole programme of economic autarky, which sent many intelligent men into ecstasy at the time, was in fact Italy's preparation for World War II.
Italian imperialismThe imperialist decadence of capitalism which ravages humanity is forced, by its own relentless logic, to give birth to crises and wars, explosions indicating the growing contradictions of the system. This situation necessitates a bourgeoisie armed to the teeth.
Fascist Italy could not abstain from arming herself without renouncing her imperialist ‘rights' on the world arena. And these ‘rights' added up to a thick catalogue of demands. So that Italy could enjoy her ancestral birthright, Mussolini wanted to transform her into a power to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean basin, a power stretching eastward to the Balkans and Anatolia.
The USA, Britain and France intensified their armaments programme while at the same time waving the olive branch. They looked for a redivision of the world at the same time as uttering unctuous phrases about the ‘security of nations' and ‘international arbitration' under the benign auspices of the League of Nations. But Fascist Italy did not hesitate to announce openly its intentions: the mobilization of "eight million bayonets" of "masses of planes and torpedos":
"The fundamental duty of Fascist Italy is precisely to prepare all her armed forces on land, sea, and air ... When, between 1935 and 1940, we will have reached a supreme moment in the history of Europe, we will be in a position to make our voice heard and to see our rights recognized at last." (Mussolini's Speech to the Chamber, 27 May 1927)
Imperialist herself, Italy knew the score when the other members of the League of Nations ‘solemnly' committed themselves to reducing their armaments under international control; when the American government tried to get all countries to condemn war as "... illegal and to commit themselves to the renunciation of war and the use of litigation in international affairs." (The Kellog Pact, 27 August 1927)
Fascism recognized perfectly well that the problems which most affect a nation's life are problems of power and not of justice; that they are settled through the clash of arms and not through some mythic grace, whatever the Wilsonian idealists might claim. The young fascist militia men could read in the first phrase of their ‘Ten Commandments': "A real fascist, in particular a militia man, must not believe in perpetual peace". In the newspapers, in the cinemas at university graduation ceremonies, at sports meetings, the same message was hammered home: after having won the battle of 1914-18, Italy must continue her forward march.
If the state was already at the centre of social life, this trend accelerated greatly with the development of the army, navy and airforce on the eve of World War II. Even if we take into account the devaluation of the lira, Italy was spending twice as much on war production than on the eve of the Ethiopian War.
The Duce had warned the whole nation of the inevitability of war, of the need for severe sacrifices by the proletariat. After Italy had transgressed the sacrosanct principles of the Geneva Convention by invading Abyssinia, the 51 ‘democratic' nations sanctioned a commercial embargo against Italy. This allowed Mussolini to intensify his own crusade against the nations who had taken the pledge of ‘security'. Since this hypocritical application of sanctions did not ban the sale of coal, steel, oil and iron (ie all the goods indispensable to the armaments economy), fascism was able to reply with the mobilization of the workers around its programme.7
(To be continued)
R.C.
Note: (Benjie)
I cannot find where to put the footnote number 11 (6). I cannot find any footnote 11 (6) above.
11. Military budget in millions of liras (same source as for note 10)
1933 ...... 4,822 1936 16,357
1934 ......5,590 1937 13,370
1935 ...... 12,624 1938 15,030
1 Lenin, ‘Imperialism and the Split in Socialism' in Against the Current, Bureau d'Editions, T 11, p,262.
2 The Trotsky who wrote "The Central Committees of the left of many parties were dethroned as abusively as they had been installed before the Vth Congress" in The Communist International After Lenin, should have paused to consider his role in the policies of this kind.
3 ‘What Is National Socialism?', Trotsky, 10 June, 1933. Supplements a la Quatrieme Internationale, T 111 of Ecrits.
4 Elected by the Conclave of 6 February, 1922, Pius XI soon got down to business. Apostolic Nonce in Poland during 1918-21, ie during the civil war and victorious offensive of the Red Army, he vowed his undying hatred for a proletariat which had laid sacriligious hands on the state created on 11 November, 1919 by Versailles, in order to drive a wedge between Soviet Russia and the German Revolution.
5 ‘Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di B. Croce'.
6 The plan of May 17, 1938. From the end of that year 20,000 peasants from Pouilles, Sicily and Sardinia were working in Lybia on 1,800 rural enterprises composing 54,000 hectares under cultivation. In Lybia, the total number of Italians reached 120,000; in Ethiopia, there were 93,550, and so on. ‘L'imperialisme colonial italien de 1870 a nos jours', JL Miege, SEDES, 1968, p.250.
7 "The Italian workers have thus been presented with a choice between Italian imperialism and English imperialism, which is trying to act under the cover of the League of Nations. It is not a class dilemma which confronts the Italian proletariat, a dilemma which it could surmount inspite of the terrible difficulties it faces today; rather, it is a dilemma between two imperialist powers, and it is in no way surprising that, prevented by the counter-revolutionary policies of the two parties (the ‘centrists' as the Italian left called the Stalinists at that time, and the Socialists) from finding its own path, the proletariat, forced to make a choice, should opt for Italian imperialism, because for them the defeat of Italy would mean that their own lives, and the lives of their families, would be in peril, and that they would face an even greater deterioration of their living standards." (‘One Month After the Application of Sanctions' in Bilan )
In the second issue of Forward (Spring 1974), the theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Workers' Group (RWG*), there appears an international exchange between the International. Communist Current (lnternacionalismo: ‘Defence of the Proletarian Character of the October Revolution' and the RWG (‘Where lnternacionalismo goes wrong on the Russian Revolution). In their criticism of our article, the RWG raises important questions without being able to offer a framework for an overall understanding of the Russian experience.
Revolutionaries do not analyse history for its own sake, nor to discover ‘what they would have done had they been there', but to learn along with the rest of the working class, the lessons from the experience of the workers' movement so as to better define the path for future struggle.
The article from our Current, ‘In Defence of the Proletarian Character of the October Revolution', without any pretensions to being an exhaustive analysis on the complex question of the Russian Revolution, sought to clarify one essential point: that the Russian revolution was an experience of the proletariat and not a bourgeois revolution, that it was an integral part of the revolutionary wave that shook capitalism all over the world from 1917 to the early twenties. The Russian Revolution is not a ‘bourgeois action' that we can smugly ignore or fail to analyse; it would be disastrous for revolutionaries today in rejecting Stalinism, to reject the tragic history of their own class. The fixation of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, the carriers of counterrevolutionary ideology, on the so-called "material gains" of October and the ‘Workers' State' in order to justify the defence of Russian state capitalism or the demoralized rejection of all proletarian roots of the October revolution which is often espoused by the followers of the councilist tradition, are both unacceptable mystifications of the reality of revolutionary efforts.
With the recognition of the proletarian character of the October Revolution must come the realization that the Bolshevik party, which was in the forefront of the international left defending revolutionary class positions during the First World War and in 1917, was a proletarian party of the revolutionary wave. With the defeat of the international working class uprisings, the isolated Russian bastion suffered a counter-revolution from within and the Bolshevik party, the leaders of the international communist left in 1919, degenerated into a party of the bourgeois camp.
Despite the unfortunately, often unreadable, translation of the Internacionalismo article in Forward, these central ideas do stand out. But Forward really does not want to discuss the problem of the proletarian nature of October with which they agree, but rather the counterrevolutionary nature of later events. They have chosen the wrong article on which to hang their analyses because the Internacionalismo article deals only peripherally with that question. No one article in our publications is sufficient to deal with all the problems of history. But it is with genuine surprise that we read: "For the Internacionalismo comrades as for the Trotskyists and Bordigists there exists an insurmountable wall between the ‘days of Lenin' and the ‘days of Stalin'. For them, the proletariat could not have fallen until Lenin was safely in his tomb and Stalin was clearly head of the RCP." (Forward, no 2, p.42). Indeed, we recognize that this touching article of faith is to be found among the various Trotskyist groups from which the Forward comrades sprang out but it is no part of our Current:
"The Bolshevik party leaders' lack of understanding of the role of the soviets (workers' councils) and their erroneous conception of how class consciousness develops contributed to the process of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. This process eventually transformed the Bolshevik party, which had been the authentic avant-garde of the Russian proletariat in 1917, into the active instrument of the counter-revolution ... From the very beginning of the revolution the Bolshevik party was oriented towards transforming the soviets into organs of the party-state." (Declaracion de Principios, Internacionalismo)
And elsewhere:
"The October Revolution fulfilled the first task of a proletarian revolution: the political objective. Because of the defeat of the international revolution and the impossibility of socialism in one country, it could not go on to a higher stage, that is, provoking process of economic transformation.....If the Bolshevik party played an active role in the revolutionary process leading to October, it also played an active role in the degeneration of the revolution and in the international defeats.....By identifying itself organically and ideologically with the state and by seeing its task as primarily the defence of the state, the Bolshevik party was to become - especially after the end of the civil war - increasingly the agent of the counter-revolution and state capitalism." (Plateforme, Revolution Internationale)
It should be clear, then, from these excerpts, that the path towards counter-revolution was process whose seeds were sown early on with the stifling of the power of the soviets, and with the suppression of the self-activity of the proletariat; a process which led to the massacre by the state of a section of the working class at Kronstadt - all during Lenin's lifetime.
Why then did this degeneration of the Russian Revolution take place? The answer cannot be found in the framework of one nation, in Russia alone. Just as the Russian Revolution was the first bastion of the international revolution in 1917, the first in a series of international proletarian uprisings, its degeneration into counter-revolution was also the expression of an international phenomenon - the activity of an international class, the proletariat.
In the past, bourgeois revolutions developed the nation-state as the logical framework for the development of capital, and bourgeois revolutions could occur with a hundred year or more interval between different countries. The proletarian revolution, on the contrary, is by its very essence an international revolution, which must go forward to incorporate the entire world or quickly perish.
The
first imperialist world war, signaling the end of the period of
capitalist ascendency, marked the absolute point of no return for the
workers' movement of the nineteenth century and its immediate
objectives. Popular discontent against the war became
rapidly politicized into frontal
attacks against the state in key countries in Europe. But the
majority of the proletariat was unable to cast off the relics of the
past (adherence to the policies of the Second International, which
was
now
in the camp of its class enemy) and to fully understand the
implications of the new era. Neither the proletariat as whole
nor its political organizations fully
understood the needs of the proletarian struggle in the new age of
"war
and revolution",
"socialism
or barbarism".
Despite the heroic struggles of the proletariat in this period, the
tide of the revolution was drowned in the massacre of the working
class in Europe. The fact that the Russian Revolution was the beacon
for all the working class in
that epoch did not alter the fact that its isolation was a serious
danger. Even a temporary gap between revolutionary
outbreaks can have its dangers, but by 1920 the gap was
becoming
increasingly unbridgeable.
Within the all-important context of the international retreat and the isolation of the Russian Revolution the very grave errors of the Bolsheviks played their role. These errors must be related to the experience and struggle of the class itself. The error or positive features of a class organization do not fall from the sky or just happen to develop arbitrarily. In the broadest sense they are the reflection of the class consciousness of the proletariat as a whole. The Bolshevik party was forced to evolve both theoretically and politically by the upsurge of the Russian proletariat in 1917 and the promise of international events in Germany and elsewhere. The party also reflected the isolation and decimation of the proletariat in the period of the growing victory of the counter-revolution. Whether we deal with the Bolsheviks or the Spartacists or any political organization as a whole, faced with the new tasks of the period of decadence following the First World War, their incomplete understanding provided the groundwork for grievous political errors.
But the party of the proletariat is not simply a passive reflection of consciousness; it is an active factor in the development and spreading of that consciousness, We can see for example that the clear expression of class goals by the Bolsheviks in the period of the First World War ("turn the imperialist war into a civil war") and during the revolutionary period (opposition to the bourgeois democratic government, "all power to the Soviets", the formation of the Communist International on the basis of a revolutionary programme) contributed to the definition of the road to victory. However, in the context of the decline of the revolution wave, the positions the Bolsheviks took up (alliance with centrist factions internationally, unionism, parliamentarism, united front tactics, Kronstadt) contributed to the acceleration of the counter-revolutionary process on an internation1 level as well as specifically in Russia. Once the crucible of proletarian praxis was excluded by the victory of the counter-revolution in Europe, the errors of the Russian Revolution were cut off from any further evolution. The Bolshevik party became the very instrument of the counter-revolution.
Because there is no possibility of socialism in one country, the question of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution is above all a question of the international defeat of the working class. The counter-revolution triumphed in Europe before it fully penetrated the Russian context ‘from within'. This does not, let us repeat, ‘excuse' the errors of the Russian Revolution or the Bolshevik party: for that matter it does not ‘excuse' the failure of the German or Italian proletariat to make the revolution either. Marxists are not concernedwith ‘excusing' or not ‘excusing' history but with explaining why events happened and drawing the lessons for future proletarian struggle. This general international framework is missing from the analyses of the RWG pamphlet which discusses the Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia almost exclusively in Russian terms. Although this may seem to be a helpful way to theoretically isolate a particular problem, it offers no framework for understanding why things happened in Russia and leads to turning round in a vacuum about the purely Russian phenomena which emerged. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, "In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not he solved in Russia."
In the confines of this article we will necessarily have to limit ourselves to a general over-view of the process of degeneration, leaving aside the details of various episodes.
The Russian Revolution was first and foremost seen as the avant-garde victory of the international struggle of the working class. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks called the First Congress of a new Communist International to mark the break with the traitorous Social Democracy and to join together the forces of revolution for the coming struggle. Unfortunately the workers' revolt in Germany had already been massacred in January 1919 and the tide of revolution was ebbing. Still, despite the almost total blockade of Russia and the distorted news reaching the Russian proletariat from the West, the revolution put its faith to the only hope for survival - the international unity of revolutionary forces under a clear programme of class goals:
"The soviet system assures the possibility of genuine proletarian democracy, democracy for the proletariat and within the proletariat, directed against the bourgeoisie. In this system the dominant place is given to the industrial proletariat and it is to this class that the role of ruling class belongs, because of its organization and its political consciousness and because its political hegemony will allow the semi-proletariat and poor peasants to gradually raise their consciousness."
"The indispensable pre-conditions for victorious struggle are: the break not only with the direct lackeys of capital and the executioners of the communist revolution - the right-wing social democrats - but also the break with the "Center" (Kautsky's Group) which at the critical moment abandoned the proletariat and joined the class enemy." (Platform of the Communist International, 1919)
This was the position in 1919 before the later alliances with centrists, which opened the party and the International to them and finally ended in the ‘united front'.
"Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia: the day of the proletarian dictatorship in Europe will dawn for you as the day of your deliverance." (Manifesto of the Communist International, 1919)
Not the other way round as the ‘leftists' would have it today, following the counter-revolutionary formulations on national liberation of the degenerating International.
"We ask all the workers of the world to unite under the banner of communism which is already the banner of the first proletarian victories, for all countries!" (Ibid)
Not socialism in one country.
"Under the banner or workers' councils, of the revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International, workers of the world, unite!" (Ibid)
These positions reflected the tremendous step forward the proletariat had made in the previous years. The positions put forward and defend by the Bolsheviks were often a clear departure from their previous programmes and were a clarion call to the whole class to recognize the new political needs of the revolutionary situation.
But by 1920 at the Second Congress of this same International, the Bolshevik leaders had made an about-face back to the ‘tactics' of the past. The hope of revolution was rapidly weakening and the Bolshevik party now defended the 21 Conditions for membership in the International, including: the recognition of national liberation struggles, of electoral participation. of infiltration of the unions; in short, a refurbishing of the Social Democratic programme, which was entirely inadequate for the new situation. The Russian party became the overriding force and focus of the International and the Amsterdam Bureau was closed down. Above all, the Bolshevik leadership succeeded in isolating the left communists: the Italian left faction under Bordiga, the English comrades around Pankhurst and Pannekoek, Gorter and the KAPD (which was excluded at the Third Congress). The Bolsheviks and the dominant forces of the International were in favour of joining with the ambivalent, traitorous centrists they had denounced only two years ago. With their manoeuvres and slanders of the left the Bolsheviks effectively scuttled any attempt at creating a principled basis for communist parties in England. France, Germany and elsewhere. By these actions the road was opened to the ‘united front' of the Fourth Congress in 1922, and finally the defence of the Russian homeland and ‘socialism in one country'.
Another point in the process of counter-revolution was the signing of the secret Treaty of Rapallo with German militarism, Whatever the analysis of the positive and negative points of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it was made in full daylight after lengthy debates among the Bolsheviks and was immediately announced to the world proletariat as an unavoidable step imposed by critical circumstances. But only four years later, the Treaty of Rapallo, (a secret military treaty with the German state), betrayed all that Bolshevism had stood for. The seeds of counter-revolution were sown with the speed characteristic of a revolutionary period when great changes are compressed into a few years or even months. Finally, all life left the body of the Communist International when the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country' was declared the international (sic) programme of the once so courageously defended International.
The whole violent history of the Communist International cannot be reduced to a saga of machiavellian Bolsheviks who deliberately schemed to betray the working class either in Russia or internationally. History cannot be explained by these childish notions. The working class, although it gave life to many who fought clearly for the interests of their fellow worker, did and eventually could not rise up to purify its own organizations because of the very defeat that sparked the political debasement of revolutionary principles.
Marx and Engels realized that a party or an International cannot last as an instrument of the class when a period of reaction sets in. This instrument of the class cannot remain as an organizational unity when there is no praxis of the class - it becomes permeated with the retreat or defeat and eventually serves confusion or the counter-revolution. That is why Marx disbanded the Communist League after the revolutionary wave of 1848 subsided and scuttled the First International (by sending it off to New York) when the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 signaled the end of a period. The Second International, despite its genuine contribution to the workers' movement, suffered a long process of corruption within the period of capitalist ascendency as it became more and more tied to reformism and a national focus for each party. The definitive passage to the bourgeois camp came with the 1914 war and the International's collaboration with the imperialist war effort. During these times of working class crisis, the continuous task of elaborating theory and developing class consciousness fell to revolutionary fractions of the class, coming from the old organization and preparing the groundwork for a new one. The Third International was built on the promise of the revolutionary wave of the years after the First World War but the defeat of revolutionary efforts and the victory of the counter-revolution spelled its doom as a class instrument. The process of counter-revolution was completed (although it began earlier) with the declaration of ‘socialism in one country' - the definitive end of the objective possibility of revolutionary fractions being able to remain in the International and the death knell of an entire an entire period.
Bourgeois ideology can seep into the proletarian struggle because of the force of the ruling class' ideological domination in society. But once an organization has definitively passed into the bourgeois camp, the path is closed for any possible ‘regeneration'. Just as no living fractions expressing proletarian class consciousness can arise from a bourgeois organization - which today includes the Stalinists, Trotskyist and Maoist parties (although individuals may be able to make the break) - so the Communist International and all the communist parties which remained in it were irrevocably lost to the proletariat,
This process is easier to see with hindsight than it unfortunately was at the time, either for the class as a whole, or for many of its more political elements. We cannot write history by hoping to read back into the past what fifty years of distance has taught. The process of counter-revolution which claimed the Communist International has produced terrible confusion in the workers' movement for the last fifty years or more. Even those who carried on the work of theoretical elaboration in the dark years of the thirties and forties, the remnants of the left communist movement, were slow to see the full implications of the period of defeat. Let the arrogant ‘modernists'1 who ‘figured it all out' in 1974 or 1975 teach the shadows what history should have been like.
The international programme of the Bolsheviks, their role in the counter-revolutionary process internationally, is practically ignored in the RWG pamphlet Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia and is only fleetingly mentioned in the Forward text. For these comrades, the counter-revolution was essentially defined by the NEP (New Economic Policy). The NEP was, for them, the "watershed in the history of the Soviet Union. It is the year that capitalism was restored, the political dictatorship defeated and the Soviet Union ceased to be a workers' state." (Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, p.7) First let it be said that whatever the events in the Russian context were, and whatever influence they may have had on proletarian consciousness elsewhere, an international revolution or an International does not die because of a wrong economic policy in one country. The reader of the RWG texts will look in vain for any coherent framework in which to analyse the NEP or the unfolding of events in Russia in general.
The degeneration of the revolution on Russian soil expressed itself in the gradual but deadly decline of the soviets and their reduction to a mere appendage of the Bolshevik state party. The self-activity of the proletariat, working class democracy within the soviet system, was the very basis of the victory of October. But as early as 1918 the signs were clear that the political power and expression of the workers' councils were being curtailed and eventually crushed by the state machine. This process of the decline of the soviets in Russia led to the massacre of a part of the working class at Kronstadt. Not so strangely, the RWG fixated on the NEP, does not even mention the Kronstadt slaughter in relation to the Russian state, There is no mention of Kronstadt in either of these two main texts on Russia just as there is not a word on Rapallo. It is perhaps understandable that the comrades of the RWG, fresh from Trotskyist dogma, did not, at the time that they wrote these articles, understand that Kronstadt was not the ‘counter-revolutionary mutiny' that Lenin and Trotsky said it was. It is less understandable, however, that they accuse our comrades in Internacionalismo of not being able to see "the degeneration of the revolution in Lenin's lifetime!"
The fundamental error of the Bolshevih party in Russia was the conception that power should be exercised by a minority of the class - the party. They believed that the party could bring socialism to the class and they did not see that the class as a whole, organized in worers' councils, is the subject of socialist transformation. This conception of the party taking state power was shared by the entire left, to one degree or another, including Rosa Luxemburg, up to the writings of the KAPD in 1921. The Russian experience of party-power, which the proletariat paid for in blood, marks the definitive class line on the question of a party or minority of the class taking power ‘in the name of the working class'. Henceforth it became the hallmark of revolutionary fractions of the class that the party and the state were not to be confused and, later on, that the role of political organizations of the class was to contribute to class consciousness and not to substitute themselves for the class as a whole.
The historical class interests of the working class as the destroyer of capitalism were not always absolutely clear from the outset, and could not have been, because proletarian political consciousness is constantly hindered by pressure from dominant bourgeois ideology, Thus Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto without seeing that the proletariat could not take over and use the bourgeois state machine. The living experience of the Paris Commune was needed to irrevocably prove that the proletariat must destroy the bourgeois state in order to exercise its dictatorship over society. In the same way, the question of the role of the party was debated in the workers' movement up to 1917 but the Russian experience marked the class line on this question. All those who today repeat or preach the repetition of Bolshevik errors are on the other side of the class line.
What the Russian state destroyed with the stifling of the soviets was no more or less than the very impetus of socialism itself. Without the organized, autonomous activity of the class as a whole, any hope of regeneration on the Russian scene was gradually eliminated. The economic policy of the Bolsheviks was debated, changed, modified but their political thrust in Russia, however, was unchanging, fundamental process of digging the revolution's grave. The seriousness of this process can be seen by the fact that the Russian tragedy was played out within the context of international defeat.
One of The first and primary lessons to be drawn from the entire revolutionary experience of the post-World War I period is that the proletarian struggle is above all an international struggle and that the dictatorship of the proletariat (in one area or world-wide) is first and foremost a political question.
The proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie is an exploited, not an exploiting class and thus has no economic privileges upon which to base its class destiny. The bourgeois revolutions were essentially the political recognition of an economic fait accompli - that the capitalist class had become the economically dominant class in society over a period of years prior to the actual moment of revolution. The proletarian revolution undertakes an economic transformation of society from a political point of departure - the dictatorship of the proletariat, which has no economic privileges to defend, either in the old society or in the new and has only its organized force and class consciousness, its political power through the workers' councils with which to guide the transformation of society. The destruction of bourgeois power and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie must be a world-wide victory before genuine social transformation can he carried out under the aegis of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The fundamental economic law of capitalist society, the law of value, is a product of the entire capitalist world market and cannot, in any way, shape or form, be eliminated in one country (ever one of the highly developed countries) or in any group of countries - only on a world-wide basis. There is absolutely no getting away from this fact - not even by paying lip-service to it and then ignoring it to talk about the possibility of abolishing money or wage labour (the direct outgrowth of the law of value and the capitalist system as a whole), straight away in one country. The transformation of society follows and does not precede the taking of power by the workers' councils internationally, the only weapons the proletariat has to carry out that transformation are:
The victory of the proletariat does not rest on whether it can ‘manage' a factory or even all the factories in one country. Managing production while the capitalist system continues to exist dooms such ‘management' to the management of surplus value production and exchange. The first duty of any victorious proletariat in one country or area is not to figure out how to create a mythical ‘island of socialism', which is impossible, but to give all their aid to their only hope - the victory of the world revolution.
It is extremely important to get priorities straight here. The economic measures the proletariat will take in one country, in one area, are a secondary question. Even in the best of cases these measures are only stop-gaps tending in positive direction: any errors can be corrected if the revolution advances. But if the proletariat loses its political coherence, or its armed strength, or if the workers' councils lose political control and their clear consciousness of where they are going, then there can be no hope of correcting any errors or of any socialist future.
There are many voices raised today to protest against this conception. Some of them claim that the political focus of proletarian struggle is jut old-hat reactionary nonsense. In fact, the conception of an objectively defined revolutionary class, the proletariat, is equally old-hat for them, and should give way to a new universal class of everyone who is ‘oppressed', psychologically tormented or philosophically inclined. ‘Communist relations', or according to one (now defunct) English group of the same name: ‘Communist practice' is immediately realizable as soon as ‘people' wish it. For them, the really important, thing is not of` course the proletariat taking power internationally and eliminating the capitalist class but the immediate institution of so-called ‘communist relations' through a spontaneous thrust of the ‘people'.
The purely abstract and mythical elements of this ‘theory' should not blind us to the fact that it can serve as the perfect cover for ‘self-management' ideology. As increasing working class discontent produces mass movements as a reaction to the depths of capitalist crisis, one reaction of the bourgeoisie may be to tell the workers that their real interests are not to bother with ‘mere political matters' like destroying the bourgeois state but to take over their factories and run them ‘for themselves' in good order. The bourgeoisie will try to have the workers exhaust themselves in a futile effort to implement an economic programme of the self-management of exploitation while the capitalist class and its state will wait it out to pick up the pieces. This is what happened in Italy in 1920, when Ordino Nuovo and Gramsci exalted the economic possibilities of factory occupations, while the left faction with Bordiga warned that although workers' councils have their roots in the factories, they must go forward to a frontal attack on the state and the entire system or die.
The comrades of the RWG do not reject political struggle. They limit themselves to saying that the political thrust and economic policy are equally important and crucial. In one sense they are simply repeating a marxist truism: that the proletariat does not fight for political power over the capitalist class just to assert some kind of power psychosis, but in order to lay the foundations for social transformation through class struggle and the organized self-activity of the only revolutionary class which can free itself and all humanity from exploitation forever. But the RWG comrades have no concrete idea of how the process of social transformation can take place. The revolution is a rapid assault on the capitalist state but the economic transformation of society is a world-wide process of great complexity. In order to successfully carry through this economic process, the political framework of the working class dictatorship must be clear. Furthermore, the taking of power by the proletariat is not tantamount to maintaining that socialism can be introduced by decree. Thus:
From our affirmation that the political dictatorship of the proletariat is the framework and the pre-condition for social transformation, the simple-minded conclude: "It appears that Internacionalismo denies the necessity of an economic war on capitalism by the proletariat." (Forward, p.44).
Contrary to Forward's claim, everything is not immediately of equal importance and of equal gravity for the revolutionary struggle. In a country which has just had a victorious revolution, the workers' councils may consider it necessary to work ten to twelve hours a day to produce arms and materials to send to their besieged brothers in another region. Is this socialism? Not to the extent that the basic tenets of socialism are production for human needs (not destruction) and the reduction of the work day. Is this therefore to be condemned as a counter-revolutionary proposition? Clearly not, as it is the working class' primary duty and hope of salvation to aid the spread of the international revolution. Do not we have to admit that the economic programme is subject to the conditions of the class struggle and that there is no way of creating a workers economic paradise in one country? Furthermore, we have to emphasize that a political weakening of the councils' power to decide policy and orient the struggle would be fatal.
Revolutionaries would be lying to their fellow workers if they held out rosy dreams of milk and honey and economic miracles instead of emphasizing the deadly struggle and tremendous waste and destruction of civil war. They would be demoralizing the class by declaring that inevitable economic set-backs (in one country or even in several countries or sectors), means the end of the revolution. By immediately putting these questions on the same plane as the political solidarity, working class democracy and decision-making power of the proletariat, they would be of detracting from the central focus of class struggle and the only hope inaugurating a world-wide period of transition to socialism.
The RWG answers that after all, "everything can't be the same after the revolution as before," and points to the tragic conditions of workers in Russia in 1921. But they really don't tell us what conditions they are talking about. Is it that the mass working class organizations were excluded from effective participation in the ‘Workers' State'? That workers were repressed for striking in Petrograd? If so, that is the kernel of the degeneration of the revolution. Or is it simply that there was famine? Here again, it is futile for us to pretend that the dangers of famine and hardship simply won't exist after the revolution. Or is it that workers still had to work in factories and that wages were not abolished (in one country), or that exchange still existed? Although these practices are clearly not socialism they may indeed be unavoidable unless we pretend that eliminating the law of value is simply a question of snapping your fingers. As the RWG says, "a line has to be drawn somewhere." But where? By confusing the crucial importance of political coherence and the power of the class with economic set-backs, the problems of future struggle become simply a matter of wish-fulfillment.
Socialism or communist social relations (these terms are used interchangeably here), is essentially the complete elimination of all "blind economic laws", especially the law of value which rules capitalist production, in order to fulfill the needs of humanity. Socialism is the end of all classes (the integration of non-capitalist sectors into socialized production and the beginning of freely associated labour deciding its own needs), and an end to all exploitation, all need for a state (the expression of a class-divided society), and accumulation of capital with its concomitants of wage labour and the market economy. It is the end of the domination of dead labour over living labour. Thus socialism is not a question of creating new economic laws but of eliminating the roots of the old ones under the aegis of the proletarian communist programme. Capitalism is not merely the cigar-smoking villain but the entire present organization of the world market, the present division of labour world-wide, production in private hands including the peasantry, under-development and misery, production for destruction, etc. All this is to be extirpated and eliminated from human history forever. This requires a process of economic and social transformation of gigantic proportions taking at least a generation in world terms, if not more. And what is even more telling, no Marxist can foresee the details of the new situation which will face the proletariat after the world revolution. Marx always avoided ‘blueprints' for the future and the Russian experience can only indicate the broad general lines of an orientation for economic transformation. Revolutionaries will be deserting their task if their only contribution is to berate the Russian Revolution for not creating socialism in one country or to make up pipe dreams about how the political changes and the economic transformations are simultaneous.
The real point about the economic programme of the revolution is that the broad outlines of where we are going must be clear, that the proletariat must know what measures tending towards the destruction of capitalist production relations (and thus the establishment of socialism) shou1d be implemented as soon as possible. It is one thing to say that in some conditions we may be forced to work long hours or not be able to abolish money right away in one area. It is another thing to state that socialism means working harder or even worse that nationalization and state capitalism are s step to socialism. Bolsheviks are not so much to he condemned for going from the chaos of War Communism to the NEP (from one inadequate plan to another) but for the fact that they preached that nationalization and state capitalism were a help to the revolution or that ‘economic competition with the West' would prove the splendours of socialist productivity. A clear programme for economic transformation is an absolute necessity and we today with fifty years of hindsight can see more deeply into this question than the Bolsheviks or any political expression or any political expression of the proletariat at the time.
The working class needs a clear orientation for its political programme, the key to economic transformation, but it does not need false promises of an instant end to difficulties or mystification about how the law of value can be eliminated by decree.
The RWG is not alone in placing the emphasis on the NEP. Many people just breaking from ‘leftism' and particularly its Trotskyist varieties, do the same. After all the meaningless garbage about a ‘Workers' State' today and collectivization in state hands ‘proving' that Russia is socialist today, they look "for the point between 1917 and today when a change must have taken place" in Russia. (Forward, p.44) It's the old "when did capitalism come back" query the Trotskyists are always arrogantly throwing out.
The NEP was not an invention out of the heads of the Bolshevik leaders. On the contrary, the NEP, in large part, merely takes up the programme of the Kronstadt revolt. The Kronstadt revolt put forward a key political demand to save the life's blood of the revolution: the regeneration of the power of the workers' councils, working class democracy and an end to the Bolshevik dictatorship through the state. But economically, the Kronstadt workers, forced by famine into pilfering tools to exchange individually with peasants for food, developed a ‘programme' of simply wanting to regularize exchange and putting it under workers' auspices - regularizing commerce so that starvation and economic stagnation would end. Trucks of food sent to the cities in Russia were stormed by the starving population and had to be accompanied by armed guards. The situation was a catastrophe and Kronstadt, as well as the Bolsheviks, had nothing more to offer than a return to some sort of economic normalcy. That normalcy could only be capitalism.
The RWG attack on the NEP lacks the historical context in which the NEP was adopted. Furthermore, it confuses some essential points about the war on capitalism it claims to defend.
1. "If events dictated the restoration of capitalist property in Russia as they partially did ............ while the restoration of capitalism meant the restoration of the proleariat as a class-in-itself (?)" (Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, p.7 and p.17)
"One wonders what more would have to be conceded to capitalism in order to have the restoration of capitalism?" (Forward, no 2, p.46)
All this is striking proof that there is a fundamental confusion here. The NEP was not the "restoration of capitalism" because capitalism had never been eliminated in Russia. The RWG confuses the matter even further by adding elsewhere: "While the NEP was not the rebirth of capitalist economic relations, it was the rebirth of normal, ie legal, capitalist economic relations." (Revolution and Counter-revolution in Russia, p.7) This is even more absurd. Whether capitalist relations are legal, ie recognized officially as existing, or not, is simply a juridical question. What ‘purity' can be gained by pretending reality doesn't exist? The NEP was not a watershed in the sense that it reintroduced (or recognized) the existence of capitalist economic forces - the fundamental laws of the capitalist economy dominated the system in Russia because they dominated the world market.2
This may lead some to say that they knew all along that Russia was capitalist and that there was thus no proletarian revolution. However, we will never be able to identify a proletarian revolution if we insist on wanting to see it not as an initially political thrust eliminating the capitalist class but as a complete economic transformation overnight. One again, we return to the theme of ‘socialism in one country' which hang over the Russian experience like an ominous cloud. The NEP was a step towards state capitalism with the nationalization of the ‘commanding heights', but it was not a fundamental reversal from ‘socialism' (or something other than capitalism) back to capitalism.
2. "It (the NEP) actually represented a principled retreat, a programmatic crossing of class lines." (Ibid, p. 7)
This is the kernel of the argument although it naturally follows from the previous point. No one would be so foolish as to claim that the working class can never retreat. Although in an overall sense the revolution must advance or die, this can never be taken unilaterally to mean that we can advance in a straight line with no problems. The question is then: what is an unavoidable retreat and what is a compromise of principles? The Bolshevik programme, insofar as it embodied an apology and mystification of state capitalism, was an anti-proletarian programme; but the inability to abolish the law of value or exchange in one country is by no means "a crossing of class lines". Either these are clearly separated, or else one ends up defending the position that the proletariat could have gone on to integral socialism in Russia. This being impossible, revolutionaries would simply have to cover up the inability to forge ahead according to the programme by lying about what was actually happening.
Retreat on the economic level will certainly be unavoidable in many instances (despite the need for a clear orientation) but retreat in political terms is death for the proletariat. This is the fundamental difference between the NEP and the Kronstadt massacre, between the NEP and the Treaty of Rapallo, or the ‘united front' tactic.
"What would the comrades of Internacionalismo have done in the same situation? Would they have restored the market economy? Would they have decentralized industry in the hands of the managers? Would they have rehabilitated the ruble? In short, would they have carried out a ‘retreat' that was in fact a defeat? .... Would they have subordinated the interests of world proletarian revolution to the interests of Russian national capital?"(Forward,p.45)
The ‘what would you have done' approach to history is fruitless by definition since history cannot be changed or invested with our consciousness (or lack of it) today. However, the RWG's naive questions show that they have not understood the difference between retreat and defeat.
The market economy? It was never destroyed internationally which is the only means of eliminating it, nor did anyone ‘restore' it in Russia - it always existed. The ruble? Again, this is an absurd question in terms of marxist writings on world capitalism and the role of money. Decentralization of industry? This political question profoundly compromised the power of the workers' councils and belongs to another domain entirely. Defending the interests of Russian capital? Clearly this was the death knell of the revolution itself.
The economic transformation "cannot be done by decree but the decree is the first step". If by decree the RWG means the programme of the working class then we have only to ‘decree' integral and immediate communism. And then what? How do we get there? Or do we say: a) let's throw in the towel completely or b) lie and pretend we can have socialism through little socialist republics?
The revolution in a country like Britain for example (by no means a backward, under-developed economy as Russia's in 1917) could last only a few weeks before being brought to death by slow starvation through blockade. What sense is there in talking about an ever-victorious economic war on capitalism in the midst of short-term starvation? The only policy to protect and defend a revolutionary bastion is an offensive struggle internationally and the only hope is the political solidarity of the class, its self-organization and the class struggle internationally.
The RWG with all their talk of the NEP does not offer any suggestions for a valid socialist orientation in the economy for tomorrow's struggle. In what direction should we head, as far as the circumstances of class struggle will allow?
These points should be taken merely as suggestions for an orientation for the future - a contribution to the debate within the class on these questions.
Because the RWG comrades do not understand the Russian situation, they are trapped within it. They try to offer an orientation for the future by choosing sides among the different factions that fought it out in Russia. Just as those who reject the past completely and pretend that revolutionary consciousness was born yesterday (with them of course), the RWG takes the seeming opposite side of the coin and answers history in its own terms. This is not an enrichment of the lessons of the past, it is a desire to relive it and ‘make it better' rather than address themselves to what we can draw out today.
Thus the RWG writes: "It is our programme, the Workers' Opposition programme of the self-activity of the working class against bureaucratism and capitalist restorationist tendencies." This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Workers' Opposition really meant in the context of the debates in Russia. The Workers' Opposition was one of the groups which fought against the evolution of events in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Far from rejecting their often courageous efforts, it is necessary to put their programme into perspective. The Workers' Opposition was not against ‘bureacratism' but against state bureaucracy and in favour of using the union bureaucracy. The unions were to manage capital in Russia and not the party-state machine. Although the Workers' Opposition may have wanted to defend proletarian class initiative, they could see it only in a trade union context. Genuine class life in the soviets in Russia was almost entirely eliminated by 1920-21 but this did not mean that unions and not workers' council were the instruments of working class dictatorship. This is the same kind of reasoning that led the Bolsheviks to conclude that since the programme of the First Congress of the Third International could not easily be taken up because of the defeats in Europe, it was therefore necessary to go back to aspects of the old Social Democratic programme (union infiltration, parliamentary participation, alliances with centrists, etc). Even if the soviets were crushed, independent class activity (not to mention revolutionary activity) in unions was over in the decadent period of capitalism. The entire trade union debate was based on a false premise on all sides: that unions could be substituted for class unity in workers' councils. In this sense the Kronstadt revolt in calling for the regeneration of soviets was much clearer on the question, even if equally doomed. The Workers' Opposition meanwhile agreed with and supported the military suppression of Kronstadt.
The fact that in Russia the debate revolved around how to ‘manage' the degeneration of a revolution has to be understood historically but it is the height of absurdity to adopt this programme as one's own today. Moreover, the RWG asserts:
"But we are sure of one thing: if the programme of the Workers' Opposition had been adapted, the programme of proletarian self-activity, the proletarian dictatorship in Russia would have gone down fighting capitalism rather than adapting to it (if it had gone down at all). And the chances are that it would have been saved by victory in the West. Had this programme of struggle been adopted there would have been no international retreat. The chances are, the International Left would have gained dominance in the Communist International." (Ibid, p.48-49)
This only proves that there is a residual conviction within the RWG that if Russia had done something better, all would have been different. Russia is the pivot of everything. It also assumes, as we have seen, that if the economic measures were different, the political betrayal would have been eliminated instead of vice-versa. But the historical absurdity of this hypothesis is most clearly expressed by this statement that "the chances are that the International Left would have gained dominance in the Communist International". The ‘International Left' we presume they are talking about, did not understand the economic programme very well at the time; but the KAPD, for example, was based on the rejection of unionism and its bureaucracy. The Workers' Opposition had little or nothing to say about Bolshevik strategy in the West and always rubber-stamped official Bolshevik policy on this question, including the 21 Conditions of the Second Congress of the Communist International (as did Ossinsky). The vision of the Workers' Opposition becoming the focal point of the International Left is a pure invention of the RWG because they do not know the history they talk about so glibly.
While the RWG condemns "crystial-ball gazing as not the task of revolutionaries". (Ibid, p.48) only a few lines previously they expound upon the infinite horizons the Workers' Opposition would have opened for the working class. One may say that in addition to avoiding crystal-ball gazing it would be better to know what one is talking about.
Our purpose is not essentially a polemical one in this article although clearing away certain absurdities is undoubtedly helpful. Essentially the task of revolutionaries is to go forward from history to draw the points of orientation for tomorrow. The specific debate on when the Russian Revolution degenerated is much less important than: 1) seeing that this did occur; 2) identifying why it occurred; and 3) trying to contribute to class consciousness by synthesizing the negative and positive lessons of this epoch.
In this sense we would like to contribute an over-view of the essential heritage of class positions that the experience o the post-war revolutionary wave has left us for today and tomorrow.
These points, sketchily outlined here, do not pretend to exhaust the complexity of revolutionary experience but can serve as general guidelines for future elaboration.
There are many young groups, like RWG, developing today in our period of reawakening class struggle and it is important to be aware of the implications of their work and to encourage an exchange of ideas in the revolutionary milieu. But there is a danger that after so many years of counter-revolution these groups may be unable to deal with the heritage of the revolutionary past. As in the case of the RWG many groups think they are discovering history for the first time as though nothing else existed before them. This can lead to aberrations like fixating on the programme of the Workers' Opposition or other Russian left groups in a vacuum as though each day a new ‘piece of the puzzle' is discovered, without putting it in a broader context. Without being aware of (and critical of) the work of the left communist movement (KAPD, Dutch left, Pannekoek, Gorter, Workers' Dreadnought, the Italian left around Bordiga, the reviews, Bilan in the thirties and Internationalisme in the forties, International Council Correspondence and Living Marxism as well as the Russian left communists, not just as individual pieces of a puzzle but in the overall terms of the development of revolutionary consciousness in the class, our work today will be doomed to sterility and the arrogance of the dilettante. Those who are making the vital effort to break with ‘leftism' should be aware that the path is not unique to them and that they are not alone either in history or today.
Judith Allen
* Revolutionary Workers' Group, PO Box 60161, 172 W. Devon, Chicago, Illinois 60660, USA.
1 See ‘Modernism: From Leftism to the Void' in World Revolution no. 3.
2 The policies of War Communism in the countryside during the Civil War, much vaunted in comparison by the RWG, were not more non-capitalist than NEP. Furthermore, the outright expropriation of peasant grain, although an absolute essential measure for the Russian proletarian offensive at the time, hardly constitute an economic programme (pillage?). it can easily be seen that these temporary measures of force against peasant production could not continue indefinitely. Before, during and after War Communism, the primary basis of production in the countryside was private property. Although the RWG is perfectly correct in stressing the importance of the class struggle of agricultural labourers in the countryside, this struggle does not automatically and immediately disintegrate the peasantry or its system of production.
The article reproduced here was first published in November 1933 in issue number II of Masses, an eclectic monthly publication connected to the left of French Social Democracy. It was written by A. Lehmann, a member of the ‘communist workers' groups' in Germany, which had their origin in the KAPD. We are republishing it today so that our readers can gain some idea of the degree of clarification achieved by the communist left which split from the Third International, and of the considerable regression of those ‘councilist' and ‘Bordigist' tendencies which claim descent from the left communists today.
This article carries with it some of the weaknesses prevalent in the German left at that time in their understanding of fascism, weaknesses which led if to think that fascism was in the process of extending itself to all countries. Although the article defines the general conditions which gave rise to fascism (the period of capitalist decline, an acute economic crisis), it fails to grasp the particular conditions which made fascism appear in Italy and Germany and nowhere else (the brutal defeat of the working class after a powerful revolutionary movement, and a small share in the re-division of the imperialist cake). The Italian left in the same period, while less precise in its understanding of the general conditions, was able to make a much clearer analysis of these particular conditions which allowed it to see ‘anti-fascism' as a major enemy of the proletariat (although after World War II it in turn took up the aberration of the ‘globalization of fascism'. In contrast, in this text there is no denunciation of anti-fascism.
Another weakness is in the analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and of the Third International. In this article these phenomena are presented essentially as consequences of the situation in Russia itself (backwardness, weight of the peasantry, etc), and not as a product of the retreat of the revolution on a world scale.
In spite of these weaknesses, the article contains a number of significant points which even today represent a much more valuable analysis than that of most of the groups who currently claim descent from the ‘ultra-left', points which can be summarized as follows:
* an understanding of the period opened up by World War 1 as that of the decline of the capitalist mode of production, which was linked to the disappearance of extra-capitalist markets;
* the impossibility of the bourgeoisie, in this period of decline, to grant any real reforms to the proletariat, leading to a considerable reinforcement of the state, to the integration of the trade unions, and to the end of all possibility of the proletariat making use of parliament in its struggle;
* transformation of the nature of crises: cyclical crises give way to the permanent crisis, the acute phases of which lead, in the absence of a proletarian response, to imperialist war;
* denunciation of all frontist and ‘anti-imperialist' policies;
* the proletarian character of the Russian Revolution and of the Third International - contrary to the ideas beginning to be developed at that time, particularly in the Dutch left;
* the capitalist nature of the regime then existing in Russia (even if the term is not explicitly used in the article) and the rejection of any policy of ‘defence of the USSR' by the proletariat;
* the necessarily world-wide character of the proletarian revolution;
* the necessity for the working class to equip itself with a party based on a clear and coherent programme, the most conscious fraction of the class, and by necessity a minority, which could not substitute itself for the class in the seizure of power, and which could only be created in a moment of rising revolutionary struggle and not in a period of defeat, as the voluntarists of Trotskyism and then of 'Bordigism' would have it.
These points form the axis around which the International Communist Current has constituted itself today. They demonstrate the continuity which exists between the revolutionary movement developing today and the movement in the past, marking the historic unity of the proletarian struggle throughout the terrible period of counter-revolution which we are now leaving behind.
A great number of ‘modernist' tendencies reject this continuity. These tendencies want to ‘innovate'. But today, in rejecting the past they also deprive themselves of any future - in the proletarian camp at least. For our part, we understand that we can only go beyond the gains of the communist left by beginning from these gains and not by rejecting them. That is why we resolutely claim a continuity with the communist left.
C.G.
Economic causes
In order to grasp the essential causes of fascism, it is necessary to consider the structural changes in capitalism which have taken place in recent decades. Up until the first years of the century capitalism was still developing in a progressive manner in which competition between private capitalists or shareholding companies acted as a motor force of economic progress. The more or less regular growth of productivity was fairly easily absorbed by the new markets opened up during the period of colonization by the imperialist powers. The form of political organization corresponding to this atomized structure of capitalism was bourgeois democracy which allowed the different capitalist strata to regulate their contradictory interests in the most appropriate way. The prosperous condition of capitalism allowed it to grant the workers certain political and material concessions, and created within the working class the preconditions for reformism and the illusion that parliament could serve as an instrument of progress for the working class.
The possibility of an ever-growing accumulation of capital, which had been manifested during this initial phase, came to an end as competition between national capitals became more and more intense due to the lack of new territories to be conquered for capitalist expansion. These rivalries caused by the restriction of markets led to the First World War. The same conditions also initiated the transformation of the structure of capitalism via the progressive concentration of capital under the domination of finance capital. The war and its consequences accelerated the process. Inflation in particular, by leading to the dispossession of the middle classes, allowed the development of monopoly capital on a huge scale: the organization of capital in vast trusts and cartels, horizontally and vertically, which began to go beyond even the national framework. The different strata of capitalism (financial, industrial, etc) lost their particular character and were absorbed into an increasingly uniform bloc of interests.
As the sphere of action of these trusts and cartels began to go beyond the framework of nation-states, capitalism was forced to influence the economic policies of the state in a more accelerated manner. The liaison between the organs of capitalist economic interest and the state apparatus thus grew closer, and the intermediary role of parliament became superfluous.
In the context of this structure, capitalism no longer had any need for parliamentarism, which only survived at first as a facade for the dictatorship of monopoly capital. However, this parliamentarism was still useful to the bourgeoisie, since it gave the dictatorship of capital a political base from which it could keep alive reformist illusions in the proletarian masses. But the aggravation of the world crisis, the impossibility of obtaining new markets, gradually led the bourgeoisie to lose all interest in keeping up the parliamentary facade. The direct and open dictatorship of monopoly capital came to be a necessity for the bourgeoisie itself. The fascist system showed itself to be the form of government most suited to the needs of monopoly capital. Its economic organization is best able to offer a solution to the internal contradictions of the bourgeoisie, since its political content allows the bourgeoisie to find a new basis of support, replacing a reformism which has become less and less able to sustain the illusions of the masses.
Social causesThe inability of the bourgeoisie to maintain its political base in reformism derives from the intensification of class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Since the war reformism in Germany has been nothing but a sterile game. Everyday the German working class lost a little more of what remained of the ‘conquests' of reformism. The prestige of reformism in the eyes of the masses survived only because of its powerful bureaucratic organization. But the recent most violent attacks against the workers' living standards, which have plunged them into the most unbearable poverty, have rapidly undermined the influence of reformism in the working masses and laid bare the class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Parallel to this process within the working class there was a process of radicalization among the different strata of the petit-bourgeoisie. The peasants were plunged into debt, reduced to poverty, and in some places, resorted to terrorist actions. The shop keepers felt the twin blows of the impoverishment of the masses and of the competition from the big stores and co-operatives. Intellectuals disorientated by uncertainty about what tomorrow might bring, students without a future, declassed ex-officers, all began to turn to adventurist ideas. White-collar workers - proletarianized and struck down by unemployment, redundant functionaries - also showed themselves to be ready to be mobilized by radical demagogy. A vague and utopian anti-capitalism grew up among these heterogeneous strata dispossessed by the grande bourgeoisie. Their anti-capitalism was reactionary in that it aimed at a return to a bygone stage of capitalism. Thus despite their radicalism they became a conservative factor and easily became the instrument of monopoly capitalism. In reality, for this radicalized, unconscious petit-bourgeois mass, incapable of playing an independent role in the economy and faced with the growing antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it was a question of making a choice between one or the other. It had to choose between monopoly capital, which was responsible for its desperate situation, and the revolutionary subject of history, the proletariat. Hatred of the proletarian revolution which would put an end to classes, and the petite-bourgeoisie's attachment to its privileges (privileges which were now only a memory), threw the radicalized middle classes into the arms of monopoly capital, thus supplying the latter with a sufficiently large social base for it to dispense with reformism, now on the verge of collapse.
Political rootsThe synthesis of these two contradictory aspects of fascism: dependence on monopoly capital and mobilization of the petit-bourgeois masses, expressed itself on the political plane in the development of the National Socialist Party. This party owed its development to a frenzied demagogy and to the subsidies of heavy industry. On the ideological level, this party gave vent to the despair of the petit-bourgeois masses via a radical and revolutionary phraseology, even going as far as to advocate certain forms of expropriation (eg banks, Jews, big stores); its liaison with monopoly capital was expressed, in its propaganda for class collaboration, for hierarchical corporative organization against the class struggle and Marxism.
The inconsistency of the ideological content of Nazi demagogy is shown clearly in its racist propaganda. The discontent of the masses was deflected against the Treaty of Versailles, capitalism's scapegoat, and against the Jews who were seen as the representatives of international capital AND promoters of the class struggle. This tissue of incoherent stupidities could only take root in the winds of the petite-bourgeoisie, whose secondary role in the economy makes it incapable of understanding anything about the economic facts and historical events into which it has been thrown.
The radicalized peasants and petite-bourgeoisie always formed the great mass of the National Socialist Party. It was only when its subordination to monopoly capital became clearer that the bourgeoisie itself came to reinforce the cadres of the Nazi Party and supplied it with officers and leaders. But until Hitler came to power, the Nazi Party found it impossible to make any serious encroachments into the working class, as witnessed in the elections to the works councils. The Nazis always had great difficulty in penetrating the unemployment registration bureaux (Stempelstelle); only a few hundred thousand mercenaries could be recruited for the S.A. and the S.S from among the unemployed white-collar workers and the lumpen-proletariat, even though there were millions of unemployed without any means of subsistence.
But if the working class did not allow itself to be significantly contaminated by fascist demagogy it was nonetheless incapable of preventing the development of the National Socialist Party. It did not manage to undo the formation of a bloc of reactionary classes. The big workers' parties tried without success to make use of this or that apparent divergence between monopoly capital and the National Socialists. Above all, the proletariat did not understand that the real contradiction was not between democracy and fascism, but between fascism and the proletarian revolution. It was thus the lack of the revolutionary capacity on the part of the proletariat which permitted the political development of fascism and the rise of Hitler.
To see how this was possible, we must examine in detail the ideological and tactical content of the main tendencies in the workers' movement.
Reformism
Reformism developed within the working class during the ascendant phase of capitalism. Its roots lay in the possibility for the bourgeoisie to rapidly develop the productive apparatus, a growth in production which in general found easy outlets in new markets. The result of this for the working class was a rapid development in its numbers and power. The bourgeoisie needed to assure the increased growth of a docile and satisfied working class and this could be easily obtained by ceding to the working class a small part of the ever-growing profits derived from imperialism. But even when the bourgeoisie was no longer able to accord any more concessions to the working class and actually had to deprive the working class of all the advantages it had won in a previous epoch, reformism still retained an important influence in the working class and was able to play the role of providing capitalism with a political base. This was the case for the trade union and political organs of reformism, which having developed during the years of prosperity continued to exist so long as they could fulfill the interests of capitalism. The principal method of the political organization (Social Democracy) was parliamentarism. Its activities had the aims of convincing the workers that they must wait peacefully for any improvement in their lot, which would be decided by parliament in the proper democratic way. Every time Social Democracy took the most active part in the massacre of the revolutionary workers it justified its betrayals by presenting itself as the defender of democracy. The trade union organization orientated itself towards discussing contract rates with the employers and in the last resort going to the state for arbitration. It prevented strikes whenever it could and, in the case of spontaneous strikes, tried to get the workers back to work by using all kinds of manoeuvres. The innumerable trade union bureaucrats, well paid and embourgeoisified, ruled over the workers through their control over various forms of assistance (sick pay, unemployment benefits, etc). Participation in these institutions and in the various trade union benefits maintained the docility of the workers and the power of the bureaucrats, despite their persistent and ever more cynical betrayals.
Parallel to development of the trade union bureaucracy, a special bureaucracy charged with the application of social legislation - assistance, unemployment, benefits, etc - grew up in the state apparatus. This kind of organism, and its functions should be seen as an auxiliary form of reformism, whose origin lay in the conjuction of parliamentary and trade union reformism - a state orientated reformism which contributed equally to maintaining order, obedience and illusions within the working class.
Thus reformism persisted in its organizational form even though it had lost its economic basis. Reformist ideology survived in the working class, but gradually it weakened under the pressure of the growing exploitation and poverty of the proletariat. When the proletariat was reduced to struggling for its most basic interests, it became clear to the bourgeoisie that it could no longer maintain a practical organizational form for class collaboration on the basis of reformist ideology. The practical organizational form had to be maintained at all cost, but the ideology had to be change; thus the bourgeoisie resolutely replaced reformism with fascism. First of all the trade unions were integrated purely and simply. There could be no question of resistance on the part of the bureaucrats because the organizational reality of class collaboration was kept up; the only thing that was thrown out, like a worn out glove, was the ideology of reformism. The replacement of reformism with fascism thus proceeded very smoothly, and if the bourgeoisie had no need of any new agents it was able to retain the services of the old clowns who asked for nothing more.
These developments proved that the trade unions were of no use to the working class, and that this was not the result of bad leadership but of the very structure and aims of the trade unions as representative organs of the corporative interests within capitalism; such organs have thus necessarily become part of the normal functioning of capitalism and cannot be used for revolutionary ends.
Bolshevism
The development of the Russian Revolution since October 1917 has been conditioned by contradiction between a very concentrated but numerically small proletariat and an immense backward peasantry. Russian industry was in general very modern technically, but its economic structure suffered from a number of weaknesses because it had been organized by foreign capital for the purposes of war or export. After the downfall of Tsarism the bourgeoisie was unable to hold onto the power which had fallen into its hands because it could find no support among the peasantry who wanted peace and land.
An audacious and conscious proletariat seized state power in October 1917, but it confronted enormous difficulties of organization in the face of a backward, already satisfied peasantry twenty times its size. The collectivization of enterprises was carried forward by the workers at great speed but attempts at a communist distribution of products came up against the passive and active resistance of the huge peasant mass. The NEP was a retreat by a proletariat forced to compromise by the peasantry; but the proletariat still remained master of the commanding heights of the economy. However, in this regime of compromise between collectivized industry and a fragmented agriculture, the hidden but real rivalry between the proletariat and the peasantry gave rise to an unheard of development of the state apparatus, to bureaucratic specialization and to the suppression of the power of the Soviets. The success of the planned economy accelerated this process of crystallization of a bureaucracy which gradually managed to rule without any controls over it, to impose coercive economic measures, both on the proletariat (re-establishment of piece work and the authority of management) and on the peasantry forced concentration of peasant enterprises), and also measures of political domination (replacement of popular tribunals with the decisions of the special political police, the GPU).
A parallel process took place within the Communist Party, the directing organ, which following a succession of crises, became the exclusive expression of the class interests of the bureaucracy. With the disappearance of the political power of the Workers' Soviets the dictatorship of the proletariat no longer existed, and had been replaced with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy as a class in formation.
The Third International and the Communist Parties in all countries suffered structurally from the repercussions of this transformation of the Russian regime; with the German party in particular, bureaucratization and the absence of internal democracy reached an extreme point. The influence of the working masses could not make itself felt in the policies of the K.P.D, Its strategy and tactics were imposed upon it according to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. Up until the NEP, Soviet foreign policy had been orientated towards the world revolution, despite errors which for example in the case of Radek, were to have disastrous consequences on the German Revolution. Today the theory of ‘Socialism in one country' puts all its weight on the construction of the industrial apparatus in Russia (this industrial construction having been baptized as ‘socialism'), and consequently accords the greatest importance to stabilization and policies of peace in foreign relations. With the disappearance of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia the world proletariat no longer had any interest in considering the developments of the situation in Russia as the axis of the world revolution.
The class interests of the bureaucracy engendered the theory of the ‘leadership party' which is the negation of the possibility of working class politics independent of other classes, in particular the middle classes, and it is therefore at the roots of opportunism. At the same time, the utilization of the world proletariat for the changing needs of Soviet diplomacy created a growing gulf between the masses and the K.P.D.
The essential consequence, which crystallizes the whole activity of the Soviet bureaucracy, has been the degeneration of the class character of the revolutionary movement. Instead of spreading class ideology, the K.P.D., for opportunistic and diplomatic reasons, promulgated a nationalist ideology (the slogan of social and national liberation, the theory that the German nation was oppressed by imperialism). The K.P.D. believed that by resorting to this manoeuvre it would cause disarray within the petit-bourgeois ranks of National Socialism. In reality it only caused confusion and disarray among the proletariat; it was able to do nothing to oppose the rise of fascism, while the coming to power of fascism won over to the ranks of National Socialism militants of the K.P.D. who had been deceived by its own nationalist slogans.
The incoherence of Bolshevik manoeuvres (united fronts now with the fascists, now with the Social Democrats), bureaucratic pretensions towards establishing a dictatorship over the masses, the absence of a proletarian ideology - all this condemned the K.P.D. to impotence. After having gone from ‘success' to ‘success' on the electoral arena, the K.P.D. found itself completely isolated from the masses when it did want to act (eg the Nazi demonstration in front of Liebknecht's house). However, it is not even possible to know whether it really wanted to act and to what purpose.
The roots of this incapacity are the same as with Social Democracy. In both cases they are a result of the penetration of bureaucratic ideology into the organization - the ideologies of parliamentarism (in the slogan ‘to stop Hitler, vote for Thaelmann'); trade unionism (attempts to conquer the unions) and opportunism which consisted of manoeuvres between classes and different strata of the working class.
Small Bolshevik groupingsThe theory of the ‘leadership party' and the practice of parliamentary, trade unionist, and opportunist manoeuvres are also to be found in the various Bolshevik opposition groups. The K.P.O.1 (Brandler), the Trotskyists and the S.A.P.2 have the same basic ideology, differing only in subtle details which are in any case changing all the time. For all these groupings, the tactic to be used against fascism is unity in action between reformism and Bolshevism. This tactic has not been applied, but the working class can expect to gain nothing from the unity of treason and impotence.
Perspectives for the worker's movement The lessons of revolutionary experiencePerspectives can only be based on experience - revolutionary experience which is already rich in lessons. From the Paris Commune to the October Revolution passing through the Revolution of 1905, experience has contradicted the tactics and strategy of Bolshevism; it has shown that the working class, in a given objective situation, is capable of acting independently as a class, and that in these situations it spontaneously creates organs for the expression and exercise of its will as a class: workers' councils or soviets. It is necessary to see how these organs were born and developed in Germany. The first workers' actions, which arose in 1917 against the will of the trade union bureaucrats who had been integrated into the war regime, engendered the ‘Revolutionary Shopstewards' (Revolutionare Betriebsobleute).
The Workers' Councils of 1918 were the direct descendants of this movement. The military collapse of Germany prematurely gave rise to unheard-of possibilities for the development of these councils, but they lacked a sufficient political clarity. The clearest awareness of revolutionary needs, represented in the Spartacus group, was still not sufficiently developed for the council movement to rid itself of certain anarchist illusions and also from habits inherited from the long period of reformism. The failure of the council movement in 1919 was to a large extent a result of insufficient awareness of the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the unstable situation of capitalism which lasted until 1923, the necessity for the workers to have revolutionary organizations based on production became clear, and almost everywhere in Germany the factory organizations grew up, formed more or less spontaneously against the counter-revolutionary trade unions and forming at this point a very important political current. The revolutionary efforts of the workers were ended in 1923 by the brutal action of the Reichwehr, crushing workers already demoralized by the doubly absurd tactic of the Communist Party, which proposed a united front to the fascists at Reventlow against French imperialism, and, at the same time, was participating in the parliamentary government of Saxony with the Social Democrats.
After 1924, the temporary stabilization of capitalism and the absence of revolutionary perspectives led to the disappearance of radical currents, gave a new lease of life to reformism supported by the state apparatus and inaugurated the period of parliamentary ‘success' for Bolshevism. This apparent consolidation of reformism and the illusory success of Bolshevism did not prevent, with the development of the crisis after 1929, the growth of the fascist movement and the deterioration of the living standards of the working class, which was suffering increasingly the blows of an unemployment which seemed to have no solution. At the same time, the masses showed a certain distrust of the existing parties, a certain effervescence tending towards the united front of the class; but on the whole there was still an attitude of waiting for the big organizations to act effectively. The coming to power of fascism without any resistance shattered the illusions of the workers.
Towards the organization of the proletariatThus the pressure of economic conditions led the bourgeoisie to destroy organizations which had in fact been the only ones able to block and paralyze any revolutionary movement of the class. This dialectical aspect of the rise of fascism has led us to see beyond the unfolding of the terror and the dispersion of the old workers' movement to the possibilities of progress and the basis for a new movement. The destruction of the old organizations opens up new perspectives for a new class movement. The proletariat finds itself unencumbered with the self-proclaimed proletarian parties which are effectively reactionary, with the paralyzing illusions of political and trade union reformism and of parliamentarism. The illusions of Bolshevism have also been shaken; the majority of revolutionary workers no longer believe that its every action has to be led by a party of professional revolutionaries standing above the working class; they no longer have any confidence in the Bolshevik methods of bluff and agitation which lead only to sterile actions.
The practice of illegal struggle has led the workers to develop new forms of political work. The revolutionary workers in the factories and among the unemployed are forming small groups which provocateurs are unable to penetrate, The distribution of leaflets full of agitational slogans and of bluff has been replaced by the elaboration of discussion material and by proletarian political education. The bureaucrats of the Communist Party are no longer able to impose their point of view without discussion.
However, this work of regroupment and self-education is still proceeding in a sporadic fashion and without enough political clarity. It is vital that the greatest possible programmatic clarity is the point of departure for all political work. The most conscious revolutionary elements, already grouped together in nuclei formed by tenacious preparatory work, will assist this process of clarification and regroupment among the groups which have been born out of the debris of the old organizations, but which are still looking for a new ideology. These communist workers' nuclei have developed during the period of deepening crisis. Through these nuclei the synthesis of the experience of the illegal struggle of the radical workers in the various revolutionary attempts since 1917 has been realized; and it has been realized with all the revolutionary ardour of the young, for whom the development of events has illuminated the necessity to break with the methods of reformism and Bolshevism. In their ideological clarity they bear the lessons of the past, and in their will to struggle the hopes of the working class reside.
During the period preceding the fascist terror, dominated by reformist and Bolshevik illusions, these nuclei were numerically weak in relation to the big mass organizations, but they were steeled in illegal propagandist activity and they were solidly right across Germany. Free of the sectarianism into which the remains of the radical organizations fell after 1923, they carried on their activity of ideological propaganda among the most advanced elements of the working class. Thanks to their experience in illegal work they continued their activities without any interruptions in spite of the terror and suffered only a few losses. Under the regime of terror, they grew considerably, while the barely reconstituted mass organizations got nowhere. At this time, the quantity of material distributed in Germany by the communist workers' nuclei is comparable to that at any other organization.
These nuclei, which must be the ideological armament of the proletariat, will have to integrate new elements step by step while avoiding the dilution of the clarity of their principles. Every nucleus must be firm and clear within itself so that hidden contradictions do not surface later on.
In the present phase of capitalism, the tactics of communists are determined by whether the situation is pre-revolutionary or revolutionary. In the present pre-revolutionary situation, the task at hand is the creation of the foundations of a revolutionary communist party. The communist nuclei in formation must act on the working class to accelerate the development of conditions for revolutionary struggle: the struggle for the clarification of class consciousness, destruction of the old conservative reformist (or Bolshevik) ideology, comprehension of the necessity for the class to organize itself in councils and propaganda for revolutionary methods of struggle. This action within the class can only become effective through permanent participation in the practice of the proletariat's struggle to survive on all fronts, because the workers can only really learn through direct experience.
In a revolutionary situation the goal is the destruction of bourgeois power by class action, the conquest of the means of production, the building of the power of the workers' councils on the economic and political terrain, and the beginning of the socialist reconstruction of society in general. All these goals call only be realized during the revolution through the closest possible liaison between the proletarian class and the revolutionary party, which is only the clearest and most active part of the class.
The aim of the party's work cannot be to raise itself above the class like a Bolshevik Central Committee commanding the revolution from on high. The revolutionary party can only be a lever in the development of the proletariat's own activity.
The present forces of left communism must be conscious of the fact that they cannot constitute the revolutionary party just at any time, but that the basis of this party can only be formed through a new task of reconstruction within the revolutionary struggle of the masses; that while "the revolution cannot triumph without a great revolutionary party" the inverse is also true - in a situation which is merely ‘becoming revolutionary' this party cannot anchor itself and develop itself in the working class as a whole.
The fundamental question for the revolutionary tactic of a communist nucleus in the class is not how to gather together, as quickly as possible, the maximum strength behind the organization to defeat the enemy - all thanks to the superior intelligence of the organization's leadership. No, the fundamental question is: how, at each stage of the practical struggle, can the consciousness, organization and capacity for action of the proletarian class be pushed forward, in such a way that the class as a whole can, reciprocally with the revolutionary communist party, carry out its historic task.
The task of revolutionary communist nuclei is therefore a double one: on the one hand, ideological clarification as the foundation of the development of the revolutionary party; on the other hand, the preparation of the bases of the factory organizations through the gathering together of the revolutionary workers with the most developed awareness. As capitalist exploitation grows more and more acute it will force the workers to defend their very existence and to enter into struggle even in the most difficult conditions. For lack of any other organization, the workers in struggle will create organs for the direction of the struggle like, for instance, the action committees. The role of the factory nuclei will be to participate in these movements, to clarify them by giving a political content and to work for their extension to the national and international arena.
To the extent that these struggles extend, the working class will enter into the struggle for political power. These organs of struggle, having become permanent, will take on a special character: they will become organs for the conquest of power by the proletariat and finally the sole organs of the proletarian dictatorship. These councils - organs emanating directly from the factories and the organization of the unemployed, revocable at all times - will have a double role: the political councils will have to complete the crushing of the bourgeoisie and the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the economic councils will take charge of the social transformation of production.
The perspectives of capitalismThese principles of organization and these perspectives for the development of the activity of the class are based not only on the historic experience of the working class, but also on the perspectives of capitalism.
The perspectives of capitalism are dominated by the deepening and broadening out of the crisis throughout the world. It is now clear to everyone that the present crisis is something quite different from the cyclical crises which used to be part of the normal functioning of capitalism. It is clear that the current crisis is a crisis of the system itself, or rather a stage in the decay of capitalism. The attempts made to surmount the crisis were accompanied at the beginning by enthusiasm on the part of the bourgeoisie but they fell apart a few months later - as is the case now with the schemes of Roosevelt. Capitalism can no longer do anything but modify the existing division of markets, that is, replace the sector hardest hit by the crisis with one hitherto less affected; but it cannot create any new outlets. The attempt at a new division of markets in the end only results in the extension of the disasters of the crisis to all countries and all branches of the economy, in the subjection of the workers of the whole world to an equally aggravated exploitation, and in the extension of fascism to new countries.
The attempt at a new division of markets leads to violent international contradictions all over the world. National capitalisms clash against each other through frenzied customs and monetary policies. Antagonisms become more and more acute and the points of friction, the sources of conflict, become more and more widespread. This deterioration of international political relations reacts in its turn on the economic conditions which have engendered it in the first place and make these conditions even more insurmountable. The result is that fascism can find no stable economic base. That is why, to divert the attention of the masses away from their own growing misery, it stirs up new international difficulties.
Thus the impossibility of capitalism surmounting its economic difficulties and the sharpening of contradictions on an international level open the way to fascism in all countries and, at the same time, exclude the possibility of fascism stabilizing itself. The solution to this dialectical contradiction can only lie in the proletarian revolution. However, a solution may be sought by the bourgeoisie in a new world war if the proletariat does not take the initiative towards decisive action. But the world war itself is not a solution and the dilemma which will be remorselessly posed is the one foreseen by Marx: Communism or Barbarism.
Revolutionary perspectives must therefore be envisaged on a world scale. The cyclical fluctuations of the conjunctural crisis, taking place within the framework of the permanent crisis of degenerate capitalism, will lead in the years to come, to a more brutal and unbearable deterioration of living standards for the working class.
The necessity for the working class to defend its most basic interests will inevitably produce the conditions for a new epoch of struggles on a world scale.
Faced with a world-wide development of fascism, we must not consider the situation of the German workers as something special, demanding mainly solidarity actions of a more or less utopian nature. The fundamental question being posed for the international proletariat is the following, how best to use the political end organizational lessons of the German experience so that, in the next epoch of struggle, the class enemy will find itself confronted with a world proletariat armed ideologically and organizationally in the best possible way.
The response is clear and flows from what has been said concerning activity in Germany. The same ideological and organizational lessons must from now on be applied throughout the world by revolutionary communists who have understood the lessons of the recent experience of shameful betrayal by reformism and of the downfall of Bolshevism. Clear-sighted revolutionary nuclei must form themselves and resolutely address themselves to the task of ideological clarification and of the renewed organization of the working class.
These new organizations must establish international links in order to lay the basis for the formation of the Fourth International through the same process of the transformation of nuclei into the party which must take place in the revolutionary conjuncture.
To raise the slogan now for the constitution of the Fourth International is as inconsequential as demanding the immediate constitution of a new ‘real party of the working class'. In reality, this slogan of the S.A.P. and the Trotskyists can only end up in the provisional reconstitution of Bolshevism, in a ‘Three-and-a-half International' which will be a shameful appendage of the Third International and destined to end in the same fiasco.
The proletariat has other things to do than to set up historical caricatures. Its task is to defeat the bourgeoisie and realize communism. It is up to us to prepare the weapons which will allow it to triumph.
A. Lehmann
1 Kommunistiche Partei Opposition.
2 Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (Socialist Workers Party).
Preface (1997) [5]
Preface (1975) [6]
The press of the ICC has recently carried a large number of articles to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Russian revolution. The central theme running through these articles has been to defend the October revolution against the bourgeoisie's monstrous campaigns about the 'death of communism' following the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. We are reprinting this article on the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, first published in 1975, in International Review no. 3 , for the same fundamental reason. The ruling class has always tried to make maximum use out of the Kronstadt tragedy to support its 'argument' that the October insurrection was no more than a minority putsch by the Bolshevik party, and that Stalinism was its inevitable result. The Bolsheviks' suppression of the Kronstadt revolt is presented as definitive proof of this thesis.
In this argument, the bourgeoisie has always been echoed by the anarchists, who see the failure of the Russian revolution as confirmation of their 'principled' opposition to the idea both of the revolutionary party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and who set themselves up as the true heirs of the Kronstadt rebels. .And just as the bourgeoisie as a whole is anxious to equate Stalinism with marxism, so the libertarians are equally concerned to make it seem that the only alternative to their view of Kronstadt is the Stalinist/Trotskyist one - ie, the fake marxist version - which openly justifies the repression of the revolt, which is portrayed as the result of a White Guard plot.
The pamphlet 'Beyond Kronstadt' by the milieu around Radical Chains and Aufheben is a recent example of this mystification. As the comrades of the Communist Workers Organisation pointed out in Revolutionary Perspectives 8, this milieu tries to convey the impression that prior to the original genius of Radical Chains, the only possible interpretations of the degeneration of the Russian revolution have been provided by Trotskyism or anarchism, and thus completely obscures the immense contribution to understanding this process made by the international communist left. Particularly important in the effort to draw the real lessons of Kronstadt was the work of Italian Left around the review Bilan in the 1930s. While never losing sight of the fact that the fundamental cause of the degeneration of the Russian revolution was its international isolation, Bilan also recognised that the mistakes of the organised workers' movement were an important contributory factor in this degeneration. In particular, they pointed to the dangerous consequences of identifying the proletarian party with the transitional state, and the necessity for the class as a whole to maintain a strict independence from the state organs that inevitably arise after the workers' conquest of political power. Lacking the historical basis to draw these lessons itself, the Bolshevik party became entangled in a state machine that was the focal point of the capitalist counter-revolution.
The article that follows is part of the ICC's effort to assimilate and deepen the analyses of the communist left. Certain formulations and approaches contained within it - particularly concerning Trotsky and the early Left Opposition - reflect the immaturity that then existed within the ICC on such questions. But in the main it carried out the essential task: drawing the lessons of the Kronstadt events from a standpoint of resolute solidarity with the October revolution and the Bolshevik party that was at its head. In republishing it, we are not only highlighting the lessons themselves, but also reaffirming that the communist left is the only political tradition that has been capable of drawing them.
ICC, December 1997
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This article is an attempt to analyse the Kronstadt events and the lessons to be drawn from them by the workers' movement today and tomorrow, written by a comrade of the International Communist Current. The analysis is situated within the general orientation of our Current. The essential points for understanding what these events have bequeathed to us are contained in the article and can he briefly resumed here:
1. The proletarian revolution is, by its own historic nature, an international revolution. If it is limited to the context of one country or even several countries it comes up against absolutely insurmountable difficulties and is inevitably fated to perish after a more or less brief period.
2. Contrary to other revolutions in history, the proletarian revolution demands the direct, constant and active participation of the whole class. This means that at no time can the class, without immediately opening up a tendency towards degeneration, tolerate the 'delegation' of power to a party, nor the substitution of a specialised body or fraction of the class, no matter how revolutionary, for the class as a whole.
3. The working class is the only revolutionary class not only within capitalist society but also throughout the period of transition, as long as classes exist in society on a world scale. This is why the total autonomy of the proletariat in relation to other classes and social strata remains the fundamental precondition for the proletariat to exercise its hegemony and class dictatorship with the aim of creating a communist society.
4. The autonomy of the proletariat means that under no pretext can the unitary and political organs of the class be subordinated to statist institutions, since this can only lead to the dissolution of the proletariat's class organs and to the abdication of the communist programme, of which the proletariat is the unique subject.
5. The forward progression of the proletarian revolution is not guaranteed by this or that partial economic measure no matter how important it may be. Only the whole of its programme, the total political vision and action of the proletariat constitutes this guarantee, and included within this totality are the immediately possible economic measures which are part of the overall orientation of the communist programme.
6. Revolutionary violence is a weapon of the proletariat in the face of and against other classes. Under no circumstances can violence serve as a criterion or an instrument within the class because it is not a means for the development of consciousness. This development of consciousness can only he acquired by the proletariat through its own experience and through the constant critical examination of experience. This is why the use of violence within the class, whatever its motivation and immediate justification, can only obstruct the self-activity of the masses and end up as the most serious obstacle to the development of consciousness, which is an indispensable precondition for the triumph of communism.
The Kronstadt uprising of 1921 is an acid test that separates those whose class position enables them to grasp the processes and evolution of the proletarian revolution from those to whom the revolution remains a closed book. It crystallizes in a very dramatic way some of the most important lessons of the whole Russian Revolution, lessons that the proletariat cannot afford to ignore as it prepares for its next great revolutionary upsurge against capital.
The Editors,
International Communist Current
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A marxist approach to the problem of Kronstadt can only depart from the affirmation that the October 1917 revolution in Russia was a proletarian revolution, a moment in the unfolding world proletarian revolution which was the response of the international working class to the imperialist war of 1914-18. This war in turn marked the definitive entry of world capitalism into its era of irreversible historical decline, thus making the proletarian revolution a material necessity in all countries. It must also be affirmed that the Bolshevik Party, which put itself at the head of the October insurrection, was a proletarian, communist party, a vital force in the international left after the betrayal of the Second International in 1914, which continued the defence of the class positions of the proletariat during the World War and the subsequent period.
Against those who describe the October insurrection as a mere 'coup d'état', a putsch carried out by a conspiratorial elite, we insist that the insurrection was the culmination of a long process of class struggle and of maturation in working class consciousness; that it represented a conscious seizure of political power by the working class organized in its soviets, factory committees, and Red Guards. The insurrection was part of a process of the liquidation of the bourgeois state and of the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship: and as the Bolsheviks passionately insisted, its main significance was that it was to mark the first decisive moment in the world proletarian revolution, the international civil war against the bourgeoisie. The idea that the insurrection was undertaken to build 'socialism' in Russia alone was far from the minds of the Bolsheviks at that time, despite a number of confusions and errors concerning the immediate economic programme of the revolution, errors which they held in conjunction with the entire workers' movement of the era.
It is only against this background that we can hope to understand the subsequent degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Since this problem is being dealt with in another text of our Current in this review ('The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution'), we shall restrict selves to a few general remarks here. The revolution initiated in October 1917 failed to extend itself internationally despite the many attempted uprisings of the class throughout Europe. Russia herself was torn by a long and bloody civil war that devastated the economy and fragmented the industrial working class, the backbone of the Soviet power. In this context of isolation and internal chaos, the ideological errors of the Bolsheviks, almost as soon as they had taken power, began to assume a material weight against the political hegemony of the working class. (This was however an uneven process. The Bolsheviks who were resorting to more and more bureaucratic measures inside Russia during 1918-20 could still help found the Communist International in 1919, with the sole and express purpose of accelerating the world proletarian revolution.)
The delegation of power to a party, the elimination of the factory committees, the gradual subordination of the soviets to the state apparatus, the disbanding of the workers' militias, the growth of a militaristic approach to difficulties as a result of the tensions of the civil war period, the creation of bureaucratic commissions, were all extremely significant manifestations of the process of the degeneration of the revolution in Russia.
These developments were not the only signs of a weakening of the political power of the working class in Russia prior to 1921, but they are certainly the most significant. Although some of them date back even before the period of War Communism began, it is the civil war period which sees the most unhindered evolution of this process. Since the Kronstadt rebellion was in many ways a reaction to the rigours of War Communism, it is necessary to be quite clear about what this period actually signified for the Russian proletariat.
As pointed out in the text 'The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution', we can no longer harbour the illusions of the Left Communists of the period, for many of whom War Communism represented a 'trite' socialist policy as against the 'capitalist restoration' instituted by the NEP. The near-disappearance of money and wages and the requisitioning of grain from the peasants did not represent an abolition of capitalist social relations but were simply unavoidable emergency measures imposed by the capitalist blockade against the Soviet Republic and by the demands of the civil war. As far as the real political power of the working class was concerned, we have seen that this period was marked by a progressive weakening of the organs of proletarian dictatorship and by a steady growth in bureaucratic tendencies and institutions. Over and over again the leadership of the Party-State argued that working class self-organisation was fine in principle but that right now everything had to he subordinated to the military struggle. A doctrine of 'efficiency' began to undermine essential principles of proletarian democracy. Under the cover of this doctrine the state began to institute a militarisation of labour, which subjected the workers to extremely harsh methods of supervision and exploitation. "In January 1920 the Council of Peoples' Commissars, largely at Trotsky's instigation, decreed a general labour obligation for all able bodied adults and, at the same time, authorized the assignment of idle military personnel to civilian work." (Paul Averich, Kronstadt 1921, Princeton 1970, p.26-7). At the same time labour discipline in the factories was enforced by the presence of Red Army troops. Having emasculated the factory committees, the way was now clear for the state to introduce one-man management and the 'Taylor' system of exploitation at the point of production, the same system which Lenin himself had denounced as "the enslavement of man to the machine". For Trotsky "the militarisation of labour ... is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces", (Report to the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1920). The fact that the state was now a 'Workers' State' meant for him that the workers could have no objection to subordinating themselves to it completely.
The harsh conditions of work in the factories were not compensated for by high wages or easy access to 'use values'. On the contrary, the devastation of the economy by war and the blockade, brought the entire country to the verge of starvation, and the workers had to make do with the most meagre rations, often extremely irregularly given out. Vast sectors of industry ceased to function altogether and thousands of workers were forced to forage and fend for themselves in order to survive at all. The natural response of many was simply to leave the towns and eke out some kind of existence in the countryside; thousands attempted to survive by trading privately with the peasants, often swapping items stolen from the factories for food. Since the regime of War Communism forbade private trade, charging the state with requisitioning and distribution of essential goods, many people only survived through the black market which sprang up everywhere. To counter the black market, the government set up armed roadblocks to check all travellers to and from the towns, while the activities of the Cheka in enforcing the decrees of the government became more and more vigorous. This 'Extraordinary Commission' set up in 1918 to fight counter-revolution was behaving in a more or less unrestrained manner, using ruthless methods that won it widespread hatred among all sectors of the population.
Neither did the summary treatment handed out to the peasants gain the universal approval of the workers. The close familial and personal relations between many sectors of the Russian working class and the peasantry tended to make the workers sympathetic to the complaints of the peasants about the high-handed methods which were often used by the armed detachments sent to requisition grain, especially when the detachments took more than the surplus product of the peasant and left him without the means for his own subsistence. In response to these methods the peasants frequently hid or destroyed their crops, thus aggravating the poverty and scarcity of the whole country. The general unpopularity of these measures of economic coercion was to be clearly expressed in the programme of the Kronstadt rebels, as we shall see.
If revolutionaries like Trotsky tended to make a virtue out of the necessities imposed by this period and to glory in the militarisation of social and economic life, others, and Lenin himself was one, were more prudent. Lenin did not hide the fact that the Soviets were no longer functioning as organs of direct proletarian rule, and during the 1921 debate with Trotsky on the trade union question he supported the idea that the workers must defend themselves even against 'their' state, particularly since the Soviet Republic was for Lenin not simply a 'proletarian state' but a "workers' and peasants' state" with profound "bureaucratic deformations". The Workers' Opposition and other left groups, of course, went further in their denunciation of these bureaucratic deformations that the state had undergone in the 1918-21 period. But the majority of the Bolsheviks firmly and sincerely believed that as long as they, the party of the proletariat, controlled the state machine, the dictatorship of the proletariat still existed, even if the working masses themselves seemed to be temporarily absent from the political stage. From this fundamentally false position, disastrous consequences inevitably followed.
While the civil war lasted, the Soviet state retained the support of the majority of the population since it was identified with the struggle against the old land-owning and capitalist classes. The extreme hardships of the civil war were shouldered with relative willingness by the workers and small peasants. But after the defeat of the imperialist armies, many began to hope that living conditions would be less harsh, that the regime would relax its tight grip on social and economic life.
The Bolshevik leadership, however, faced with the wholesale devastation left over by the war was reluctant to allow any let-up in centralized state control. Some left Bolsheviks, such as Ossinsky, insisted on the retention, indeed the reinforcement, of War Communism, especially in the countryside. He put forward a plan for "compulsory mass organisation of production", (N. Ossinsky. Goshdarstvennoe Regulirovanie Krestianskogo Khoziastva, Moscow 1920, p.8-9), under government direction, the formation of local 'sowing committees' to extend collectivised production, and of common seed banks into which the peasants would be required to pool their seed-grain, the government itself determining the overall distribution of this grain. All these measures, he foresaw, would lead to a genuinely 'socialist' economy in Russia.
Other Bolsheviks, such as Lenin, began to see the need for some relaxation, especially towards the peasants, but on the whole 'the party stood firm in defence of the methods of War Communism. As a result, the patience of the peasants at last began to wear out. During the winter of 1920-21, a whole series of peasant uprisings swept the country. In Tambov province, the middle Volga area, the Ukraine, western Siberia and many other regions, peasants formed themselves into crudely armed bands to fight against the food detachments and the Cheka. Often their ranks were swelled by recently demobilized Red Army men who brought a certain military know-how to their actions. In some regions, huge insurgent armies were formed, half guerrilla forces and half bandit-gangs. In Tambov, for example, the guerrilla army of A.S. Antonov numbered up to 50,000 men. These forces had little ideological motive save for the traditional peasant resentment against the city, against centralised government, in favour of the traditional dreams of the rural petit-bourgeoisie for independence and self-sufficiency. Having already confronted the peasant army of Makhno in the Ukraine, the Bolsheviks were haunted by the possibility of a generalized peasant Jacquerie against the Soviet power. It is not therefore altogether surprising that they should have assimilated the Kronstadt revolt with this threat from the peasantry. This is surely one of the reasons for the ruthlessness with which the Kronstadt uprising was suppressed.
But in between the wave of peasant rebellions and the uprising in Kronstadt, a series of events occurred which gives the action of the Kronstadt rebels a very different character from that ascribed to it by the Bolshevik leadership. In the middle of February 1921, spontaneous factory meetings, strikes and demonstrations took place in Moscow, demanding higher rations, an end to the methods of 'forced labour' instituted by War Communism, and a return to 'free trade' with the countryside. Troops and officer cadets had to be called in to restore order.
Almost immediately afterwards, a far bigger series of wildcat strikes swept through Petrograd. Beginning at the Trubochny metal factory, the strike rapidly spread out to include many of the largest industrial enterprises in the city. At factory meetings and demonstrations, resolutions were passed demanding increases in food and clothing rations, since most of the workers were both hungry and freezing. Alongside these economic demands, more political demands appeared also: the workers wanted an end to travel restrictions in and out of the city, release of working class prisoners, freedom of speech, etc. The Soviet authorities in the town, with Zinoviev at their head, responded by denouncing the strikes as playing into the hands of the counter-revolution, and they put the city under direct military rule, forbidding street meetings and imposing an 11pm. curfew. Undoubtedly some counter-revolutionary elements like the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries did intervene in these events with their own fraudulent schemes for 'salvation', but the Petrograd strike movement was essentially a spontaneous proletarian response to intolerable living conditions. The Bolshevik authorities, however, could not bear to admit that the workers could be striking against the 'Workers' State', and characterized the strikers as idlers, self-seekers, and provocateurs. They also sought to break the strike by means of lockouts, deprivation of rations, and the arrest of prominent speakers and 'ringleaders' by the local Cheka. These repressive measures were combined with concessions: Zinoviev announced the dismantling of the roadblocks around the city, the purchase of coal from abroad to ease the fuel shortage and plans to end grain-requisitions. This combination of repression and conciliation led most of the already weak and exhausted workers to abandon their struggle in the hope of better things to come.
But the most important outcome of the Petrograd strike movement was the effect it was to have on the nearby fortress-town of Kronstadt. The Kronstadt garrison, one of the main bastions of the October Revolution, had already been engaged in a fight against bureaucratisation before the Petrograd strikes. During 1920 and 1921 the rank and file of the Red Fleet in the Baltic had been fighting against the disciplinarian tendencies of the officers and the bureaucratic actions of the POUBALT (the Political Section of the Baltic Fleet, the party organ which dominated the soviet structure of the navy). Motions were passed at sailors' meetings in February 1921, declaring "P0UBALT has not only separated itself from the masses but also from the active functionaries. It has become transformed into a bureaucratic organ, enjoying no authority among the sailors". (Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune, Solidarity pamphlet, no.27, p.3)
Thus when news came of the Petrograd strikes and of the declaration of martial law by the Petrograd authorities, the sailors were already in a state of ferment. On 28 February they sent a delegation to the factories of Petrograd to discover what was going on. On the same day the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk met to discuss the situation and passed the following resolution:
"Having heard the report of the representatives sent by the general meeting of ships crews to Petrograd to investigate the situation there, we resolve:
1. In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret ballot, with freedom to carry on agitation beforehand for all workers and peasants;
2. To give freedom of speech and press to workers and peasants, to anarchists and left socialist parties;
3. To secure freedom of assembly for trade unions and peasant organizations;
4. To call a non-party conference of the workers, Red Army soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt, and Petrograd province, no later than 10 March 1921;
5. To liberate all political prisoners of socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labour and peasant movements;
6. To elect a commission to review the cases of those being held in prisons and concentration camps;
7. To abolish all political departments because no party should be given special privileges in the propagation of its ideas or receive the financial support of the state for such purposes. Instead, there should be established cultural and educational commissions, locally elected and financed by the state;
8. To remove immediately all roadblock detachments;
9. To equalise the rations of all working people, with the exception of those employed in trades detrimental to health;
10. To abolish Communist fighting detachments in all branches of the Army, as well as the Communist guards kept on duty in factories and mills. Should the guards be found necessary they are to be appointed in the Army from the ranks and in the factories and mills at the discretion of the workers;
11. To give the peasants full freedom of action in regard to the land, and also the right to keep cattle, on condition that the peasants manage with their own means, that is without employing hired labour;
12. To request all branches of the Army, as well as our comrades the military cadets (kursanty), to endorse our resolution;
13. To demand that the press give all our resolutions wide publicity;
14. To appoint an itinerant bureau of control;
15. To permit free handicrafts production by one's own labour.
Petrichenko, Chairman of the Squadron
Meeting
Pererelkin, Secretary"
(Averich, op cit, p.73-4)
This resolution quickly became the programme of the Kronstadt revolt. On 1 March a mass assembly of 16,000 took place in the garrison, officially convened as a meeting of the First and Second Battleship Sections, and attended by Kalinin, President of the All-Russian Executive of Soviets, and Kouzmin, political commissar to the Baltic Fleet. Although Kalinin was welcomed to the assembly with music and flags, he and Kouzmin soon found themselves completely isolated at the meeting. The whole assembly adopted the Petropavlovsk resolution, with the exception of Kalinin and Kouzmin, who spoke against the initiatives of the Kronstadters in a most provocative tone and were met with jeers and catcalls.
The next day, 2 March, was the day the Kronstadt Soviet was due to he re-elected. The mass assembly of 1 March therefore called a meeting of delegates from ships, Red Army units, factories and elsewhere to discuss the reconstitution of the Soviet. 300 delegates therefore met on 2 March at the House of Culture. The Petropavlovsk resolution was again endorsed and plans for new Soviet elections set in motion, with a view towards "the peaceful reconstruction of the Soviet regime", (Mett, op cit, p.13). In the meantime the delegates set up a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (PRC) charged with the administration of the town and organising defence against any government intervention. This latter task was seen to be especially pressing because of rumours of immediate attack by Bolshevik detachments and because of the violent threats of Kalinin and Kouzmin. These two proved so intractable that they were arrested along with two other officials. This act marked a decisive step towards open mutiny, and was interpreted as such by the government.
The PRC quickly assumed its functions. It began to publish its own Izvestia, and the first issue declared:
"The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached itself from the masses. It has shown itself incapable of getting the country out of its mess. Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow that clearly show that the party has lost the confidence of the working masses. The party is ignoring working class demands, because it believes that these demands are the result of counter-revolutionary activity. In this the party is making a profound mistake." (Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, 3 March, 1921)
The immediate response of the Bolshevik government to the rebellion was to denounce it as part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Soviet power. Moscow radio called it a "White Guard plot" and claimed to have evidence that the whole thing had been organized by émigré circles in Paris and by spies for the Entente. Although these fabrications are still repeated today, this interpretation of events has been discredited even by semi-Trotskyist historians like Deutscher, who admit that these accusations have no foundation in realty. Certainly, all the jackals of the counter-revolution from the White Guards to the Social Revolutionaries attempted to capitalise on the rebellion and offered it their support. But apart from accepting the offer of 'humanitarian' aid via the émigré-controlled Russian Red Cross, the PRC rejected the advances made to them by the forces of reaction. They affirmed that they were not fighting for the return of autocracy or of the Constituent Assembly, but for a regeneration of Soviet power free from bureaucratic domination. "The Soviets and not the Constituent Assembly are the bulwark of the toilers," declared the Izvestia of Kronstadt (Pravda o Kronshtadte, Prague 192l, p.32) "In Kronstadt power is in the hands of the sailors, the red soldiers, and the revolutionary workers. It is not in the hands a White Guards commanded by General Kozlovsky, as Moscow Radio lyingly asserts." (Appeal of the PRC, Mett op cit, p.22-3)
Since the idea of a pure White guard plot, has been revealed to be a fiction more sophisticated apologetics for the subsequent repression of Kronstadt have been put forward by those who uncritically identify with the degeneration of Bolshevism. Most of the arguments follow the justification given by Trotsky in later years. In 'Hue and Cry over Kronstadt', (New international, April 1938), Trotsky presented the following argument. True, Kronstadt in 1917 was one of the bastions of the proletarian revolution; but during the civil war the revolutionary proletarian elements of the garrison were dispersed and replaced by peasant elements dominated by reactionary petit-bourgeois ideology. These elements simply could not put up with the rigours of the proletarian dictatorship and the civil war, so they staged a revolt to undermine the dictatorship and secure for themselves privileged rations. "...the Kronstadt uprising was nothing but armed reaction of the petite-bourgeoisie against the hardships of social revolution and the severity of proletarian dictatorship." He goes on to say that the Petrograd workers, who in contrast to the dandies of Kronstadt bore these hardships without complaint, were "repelled" by the rebel lion, feeling that "the Kronstadt mutineers stood on the opposite side of the barricades" and do they 'supported the Soviet power."
We do not want to spend too much time examining these arguments; we have already cited enough facts to discredit them. The claim that the Kronstadt rebels demanded privileged rations for themselves can be dismissed simply by recalling point nine of the Petropavlovsk resolution, demanding equal rationing for all. Similarly the picture painted of the Petrograd workers tamely supporting the repression is rudely shattered by the reality of the wave of strikes which preceded the revolt. Although this is movement had largely subsided by the time the Kronstadt revolt broke out, important sections of the Petrograd proletariat continued to actively support the rebels. On 7 March, the day the government bombardment of Kronstadt began, workers at the arsenal factory held a mass meeting that elected a commission charged with agitating for a general strike in support of the rebellion. Strikes continued Pouhlov, Battisky, Oboukhov, and other major enterprises.
On the other hand we would not deny that there were petit-bourgeois elements in the ideology and programme of the rebels (free exchange, "freedom of action" for the peasants etc.) as well as in the personnel of the fleet army. But all proletarian uprisings are accompanied by a whole number of petit bourgeois and reactionary elements that do not change the fundamentally working class character of the movement. This was certainly the case with the October insurrectionary itself which had the support and active participation of peasant elements in the armed forces and in the countryside. The fact that the Kronstadt rebels still had a largely working class kernel can be gauged from the make-up of the delegate assembly of 2 March, which was strongly composed of proletarians from the factories and naval units of the garrison, and from the personnel of' the PRC elected by this assembly, which was made up of workers and long service sailors who had beer engaged in the revolutionary movement since at least l9l7. (See Mett, op cit, p.15 for a breakdown of the members of this committee.) But these facts are less important than the general context of the revolt: it occurred within a movement of working class struggle against the bureaucratisation of the regime, identified with that struggle, and saw itself as a moment in its generalisation. "Let the toilers of the whole world know that we the defenders of Soviet power are guarding the conquests of the Social Revolution. We shall win or perish beneath the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just cause of the proletarian masses." (Pravda o Kronshtadte, p.82)
Despite the fact that those ideologists of the petit bourgeoisie, the anarchists, claim Kronstadt as their revolt, and despite the fact that anarchist influences were undoubtedly present in the rebels' programme and phraseology, the demands of the rebels were not simply anarchist. They did not call for an abstract abolition of the state, but for the regeneration of Soviet power. Neither did they want to abolish 'parties' as such. Though many of the rebels left the Bolshevik party at that time, and although the rebels issued many confusing statements about 'Communist tyranny', they did not call for 'Soviets without Communists' as has often been asserted. Their slogans were freedom of agitation for different working class groups and "power to the Soviets, not the parties". Despite all the ambiguities inherent in these slogans, they express an instinctive rejection of the idea of the party substituting itself for the class, which was one of the main contributing factors in the degeneration of Bolshevism.
This is one of the main features of the rebellion. It did not present a clear, coherent political analysis of the degeneration of the revolution. Such coherent analyses should find expression in the communist minorities of the class, even though at specific junctures these minorities might lag behind the spontaneous consciousness of the class as a whole. In the case of the Russian Revolution, it was to take decades of painful reflection in the international left communist movement before a coherent understanding of the degeneration could be achieved. What the Kronstadt uprising did represent was an elemental proletarian response to the degeneration, one of the last mass expressions of the Russian working class in that period. In Moscow, Petrograd and Kronstadt the workers were sending out a desperate S.O.S. in defence of the declining Russian Revolution.
A great deal of fruitless debate has taken place about the relationship between the demands of the rebels and the New Economic Policy (NEP). For the unrepentant Stalinists of the British and Irish Communist Organization (B & ICO) the rebellion had to he crushed because their economic programme of barter and free exchange was a petit-bourgeois reaction against the process of 'building Socialism' in the USSR - 'Socialism' of course meaning the fullest possible state capitalist centralisation. But at the same time, the B & ICO defends the NEP as a step on the road to socialism! (See Problems of Communism, no 3, the theoretical journal of the B & ICO.) At the opposite end of the spectrum of confusion, the anarchist Murray Bookchin in his introduction to the Canadian edition of The Kronstadt Commune (Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1971) paints a picture of the libertarian paradise that would have come to pass in Russia if only the economic programme of the rebels had been put into effect: "A victory by the Kronstadt sailors might have opened a new perspective for Russia - a hybrid social development comprising workers' control of the factories with an open market in agricultural goods, based on a small scale peasant economy arid voluntary agrarian communes."
Bookchin then adds, mysteriously, that such an extremely revolutionary society could only have survived together with a successful revolutionary movement in the West, though why such a shopkeepers' dream of self-management should have constituted a threat to world capital is anyone's guess.
In any case, all this debate is of little interest 'for communists.' Given the failure of the 19l7-23 revolutionary wave, no economic policy, whether War Communism, attempts at autarky, the NEP or the Kronstadt programme, could have saved the revolution. As it happened many of the purely economic demands put forward by the rebels were more or less included in the NEP. As economic programmes both are inadequate and it would he absurd for revolutionaries today to advocate free trade or barter as economic measures suitable for a proletarian bastion. even though at critical junctures it may be impossible to eliminate them. The essential difference between the Kronstadt programme and the NEP was this: that while the latter was to he introduced from above by the burgeoning state bureaucracy in cooperation with the remaining private managers and capitalists, and without any re-establishment of proletarian democracy, the Kronstadt insurgents put as a precondition for any further advance in the revolution the restoration of genuine Soviet power and an end to the Bolshevik party-dictatorship.
This is the nub of the problem. It is useless to discuss today which economic policies were 'more socialist' at that time. Socialism could not have been built in Russia alone. The Kronstadt rebels perhaps understood this less than the more clear-headed Bolsheviks. The insurgents, for example talked about the establishment of 'free socialism' in Russia, without emphasizing the necessity for a world extension of the revolution before socialism could be inaugurated. "Revolutionary Kronstadt is fighting for a different kind of socialism, for a Soviet Republic of the toilers, in which the producer himself will be the sole master and can dispose of his products as he sees fit." (Pravda o Kronshtadte, pp.92, 173-4)
Lenin's sober assessment of the possibilities for 'socialist' progress in Russia at that time, though leading him to reactionary conclusions, was in fact a closer approximation to reality than the Kronstadters' hopes for a self-managed commune in Russia.
But Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, imprisoned by the state apparatus, failed to see what the Kronstadt insurgents were saying despite all their confusions and badly formulated ideas: the revolution can go nowhere at all if the workers are not in command. The fundamental precondition for the defence and extension of the revolution in Russia was all power to the Soviets - in other words, the reconquest of political hegemony by the working masses themselves. As pointed out in the text 'The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution', this question of political power is by far the most important one. The proletariat in power may make economic advances and suffer economic retreats without the revolution being lost. But once the political power of the class is undermined, no number of economic measures can salvage the revolution. It is because the Kronstadt rebels were fighting for the reconquest of this indipensab1e proletarian political power that revolutionaries today must recognise in the Kronstadt struggle a defence of fundamental class positions.
The Bolshevik leadership reacted with extreme hostility to the Kronstadt rebellion. We have already mentioned the provocative behaviour of Kouzmin and Kalinin in the garrison itself, the lies spread by Moscow Radio that this was an attempted White Guard counter-revolution. The intransigent attitude taken up by the Bolshevik government quickly eliminated any possibility of compromise or discussion. The peremptory warning to the garrison issued by Trotsky demanded only unconditional surrender and made no offer of concessions to the rebels' demands. The call to Kronstadt issued by Zinoviev and the Petrograd Defence Committee (the organ which bad put the city under martial law after the strike wave) is well known for its crudity, threatening to "shoot you like partridges" if the rebels persisted. Zinoviev also organized the seizure of rebels' families as hostages, using as an excuse the arrest of Bolshevik officials by the PRC (none of whom were harmed). These actions were denounced as shameful by the rebels, who refused to descend to the same level.
During the actual military assault on the fortress, the Red Army units sent in to crush the rebellion were constantly on the verge of total demoralization. Some even began fraternizing with the rebels. To ensure the 'loyalty' of the army prominent Bolshevik leaders were dispatched from the Tenth Party Congress then in session to lead the assault, among them members of the Workers' Opposition, who were anxious to avoid being identified with the uprising; at the same time the guns of the Cheka were trained on the soldiers' backs to make doubly sure that disaffection did not spread.
When the fortress finally fell, hundreds of insurgents were massacred on the spot or quickly condemned to death by the Cheka. Others were sent to concentration camps. The repression was pitilessly systematic. In order to wipe out all trace of the uprising, the garrison was put under military control, the Soviet was dissolved, and a purge of all dissident elements began. Even the soldiers who had taken part in the suppression of the revolt were rapidly dispersed to various units to prevent the 'germs' of Kronstadt spreading. Similar measures were taken with 'unreliable' units in the navy.
The development of events in Russia after the revolt makes nonsense of the claims that the suppression of the rebellion was a 'tragic necessity' to defend the revolution. The Bolsheviks believed they were defending the revolution from the threat of White Guard reaction in this crucial frontier seaport. But whatever the Bolsheviks thought they were doing, in fact, by attacking the rebels they were attacking the only real defence the revolution can have: working class autonomy and direct proletarian power. In doing so they made themselves the very agents of the counter-revolution from within, and these acts served to pave the way for the final triumph of the bourgeois counter-revolution in the form of Stalinism.
The extreme ruthlessness with which the government suppressed the uprising has led some revolutionaries to conclude that the Bolshevik Party was clearly and openly capitalist in 1921, just like the Stalinists and Trotskyists today. We do not want to get involved in a long discussion about when the Party finally and irredeemably passed over to the bourgeoisie and in any case we reject the methodology which attempts to limit an understanding of historical processes into a rigid formula of fixed dates.
But to say that the Bolshevik Party was 'nothing but' capitalist in 1921 is to say, in effect, that we have nothing to learn about the Kronstadt events, except the date of the revolution's demise. Capitalists, after all, always crush workers' uprisings and we don't have to 'learn' this over and over again. Kronstadt can only teach us anything new if we recognise it as a chapter within proletarian history, as a tragedy within the proletarian camp. The real problem revolutionaries must face today is how did a proletarian party come to act as the Bolsheviks did at Kronstadt in 1921, and how can we ensure that such an event never occurs again? In sum, what are the lessons of Kronstadt?
Top [9]
The Kronstadt revolt highlights in a particularly dramatic way many of the fundamental lessons of the whole Russian Revolution, which for the working class are the only 'gains' that survive the October Revolution today.
The proletarian revolution can only be successful on a world scale. It is impossible to 'abolish capitalism' or 'to build socialism' in one country. The revolution cannot be saved be save by programmes of economic reorganisation, but only by the extension of proletarian political power across the globe. Without this extension, the degeneration of the revolution is inevitable, not matter how many changes in the economy are brought about. If the revolution remains isolated, proletarian political power will be crushed either by external invasion or by internal violence, as at Kronstadt.
The tragedy of the Russian Revolution, and in particular of the Kronstadt massacre, was that the party of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks, saw its role as the taking of state power, and the defence of that power even against the working class as a whole. Thus while the state became independent from the class and stood against it at Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks saw their place as being in the state fighting against the class, and not in the class fighting against the bureaucratisation of the state.
Today revolutionaries must assert as a fundamental principle that the role of the party is not to take power in the name of the class. Only the working class as a whole, organised in its factory committees, militias and workers' councils, can take political power and undertake the communist transformation of society. The party is to be an active factor in the development of proletarian consciousness, but it cannot create communism 'on behalf' of the class. Such pretensions can only lead, as they did in Russia, to the dictatorship of the party over the class, to the suppression of proletarian self-activity under the excuse that 'the party knows best'.
At the same time, the identification of the party with the state, while a natural state of affairs for bourgeois parties, can only lead to the corruption and perversion of proletarian parties. A party of the proletariat has to constitute the most radical and forward-looking fraction of the class which is itself the most dynamic class in history; to burden the party with the administration of the affairs of state, which by definition can only have a conservative function, is to negate the whole function of the party and to hamstring its revolutionary creativity. The steady bureaucratisation of the Bolshevik Party, its growing inability to separate the interests of the revolutionary class from the interests of the Soviet state, its degeneration into a ruthless administrative machine - all this is the price paid by the party itself for its mistaken notions about the party exercising state power
Synonymous with the principle that no minority, however enlightened, can hold power over the working class, is the principle that there can be no relations of force or violence within the working class itself. Proletarian democracy is not a luxury that can be dispensed with in the name of 'efficiency' but is the only guarantee of the health of the revolution and of the possibility of the class learning through its own experience. Even if sections of the class are manifestly wrong, the 'correct line' cannot be forced onto them by another section, whether a majority or a minority. Only a total freedom of discussion in the autonomous organs of the class (assemblies, councils, party, etc) can resolve conflicts and problems in the class. This also implies that the whole class must have access to the means of communication (press, radio, T.V. etc) and that the whole class must retain the right to strike and to challenge directives issued by central organs.
Even if Kronstadt sailors had been in the wrong, the ruthless measures taken by the Bolshevik government would have been totally unjustifiable. Such actions can only destroy the solidarity and cohesion in the class and lead to demoralisation and despair. Revolutionary violence is a weapon that the proletariat is forced to use in its struggle against the capitalist class. Its use against other non-exploiting classes must be kept to a minimum as far as possible; but within the proletariat, it can have NO place
At the time of the Russian Revolution there was a basic confusion in the workers' movement which identified the dictatorship of the proletariat with the actual state which emerged after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, the Russian Federal Soviet Republic, whose most important body was the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. The dictatorship of the proletariat, while functioning through specific working class organs such as the factory assemblies and workers' councils, is not an institution but a state of affairs, a real movement of the class as a whole. The goal of the proletarian dictatorship is not that of a state as understood in Marxist terms. The state is that superstructural organisation arising out of class society whose function is to preserve the dominant social relations, the status quo between classes. The proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, has the sole aim of transforming social relations and abolishing classes.
At the same time, Marxists have always affirmed the inevitability of the state in the period of transition to communism, after the destruction of bourgeois political power. Thus the Russian Soviet state, like the Paris Commune, was an inevitable product of class society that existed in Russia after 1917.
Some revolutionaries hold the view that the only state that can exist after the destruction of bourgeois power is the workers' councils themselves. It is true that the workers' councils have to assume a function that has always been one of the main characteristics of the state: the exercising of a monopoly of violence. But to call the workers' councils the state because of this is to reduce the role of the state to that of a simple organ of violence and nothing else. Thus the bourgeois state today would, according to such a conception, consist only of the police and army, and not of parliament, municipalities, trade unions, and innumerable other institutions that maintain capitalist order without immediate use of repressive force. These bodies are organs of state because they serve to hold together the existing social order, to maintain class antagonisms within an acceptable framework. The workers' councils, in contrast, are the active negation of this statist function, in that they are above all organs of radical social transformation, not organs of the status quo.
But more than this, it is wishful thinking to expect that the only social institutions that will exist in the transition period will be the workers' councils alone. A revolution does not follow the clockwork conceptions of many revolutionaries. The immense social upheaval of the revolution gives rise to all kinds of institutions, not only from the working class at the point of production, but from the entire population which has been oppressed by the capitalist class. In Russia, soviets and other popular organs sprang up not only from the factories but everywhere - in the army, the navy, in the villages, in the residential areas of towns. It was not simply that "the Bolsheviks began to construct a state that had a separate existence from the mass organisations of the class" (Workers' Voice no 14). It is true that the Bolsheviks did actively contribute to the bureaucratisation of the of this state, through departing form the elective principle and setting up innumerable commissions outside the soviets; but the Bolsheviks themselves did not create the 'Soviet State'. It was something that emerged out of the very soil of Russian society after the October; it arose because that society had to give birth to an institution capable of holding its profound class antagonisms in check. To say that only the workers' councils can exist after the revolution is to advocate a permanent civil war not only between the working class and the bourgeoisie (which is indeed inevitable), but also between the working class and all other classes and categories. In Russia this would have meant a war between the workers' Soviets and the popular organs of the soldiers and peasants. This would clearly have been a terrible waste of energy and a diversion from the primordial task of the revolution: the extension of the world revolution against the capitalist class (Note 1 [10]). But if this Soviet state was to some degree an inevitable product of the post-insurrectional society, we can point out a number of grave defects in its structure and functioning after the October insurrection, quite apart from the fact that it was controlled by a party.
a) In the actual functioning of the state, there was a continual departure from the basic principles established through the experience of the Commune in 1871 and reaffirmed by Lenin in his State and Revolution in 1917: all functionaries elected and revocable at any time, remuneration of state functionaries the same as that of a worker, permanent armament of the proletariat. More and more commissions and offices emerged, completely unaccountable to the working class as a whole (Economic Councils, Cheka etc). Elections were constantly being postponed, set aside, or rigged. Privileges for state officials gradually became commonplace. The workers' militias were dissolved into the Red Army, which was itself neither under the control of the workers' Soviets, nor of the rank and file soldiers.
b) The workers' councils, factory committees and other proletarian organs were made into one part of the state apparatus among other parts (although the workers were given preferential voting rights). Instead of being granted an autonomy from and hegemony over all other social institutions, these organs tended more and more to be not only incorporated into the general state apparatus, but subordinated to it. Proletarian power, instead of being expressed through the specific organs of the class, was identified with the state apparatus. Moreover, the glib assumption that this was a 'proletarian', a 'socialist' state led the Bolsheviks to assure that the workers could have no rights or interests separate from those of the state. Consequently, any resistance to the state on the part of workers could only be counter-revolutionary. This profoundly erroneous conception was the heart of the Bolsheviks' reaction to the Petrograd strikes ad the Kronstadt uprising.
In the future, the principles of the Commune, of working class autonomy, must not be asserted on paper only, but must be fought for and defended as a fundamental precondition for proletarian power over the state. At no time can the proletariat's vigilance over the state apparatus be relaxed, because the Russian experience and the Kronstadt events in particular have shown that the counter-revolution can indeed expresses itself through the post-insurrectional state, and not simply through 'external' bourgeois aggression.
As a consequence, in order to ensure that the Commune-state remains an instrument of proletarian rule, the working class cannot identify its dictatorship with this ambiguous and untrustworthy apparatus, but only in its own autonomous class organs. These organs must tirelessly supervise the working of the state at all levels, demanding a maximum representation of delegates from workers' councils in the general Soviet congresses; the permanent and independent unification of the working class through its councils, and the workers' councils power of decision over all recommendations of the state. Above all the workers must prevent the state from interfering politically or militarily in its own class organs; but on the other hand the working class must maintain the capacity to exert its dictatorship over and against the state, by violence if need be. This means that the working class must guarantee its class autonomy by the general arming of the proletariat. If, during the civil war period, its becomes necessary to create a 'red army' out of the general population this force must be completely subordinated politically to the workers' councils, and dissolved as soon as the bourgeoisie has been militarily defeated. And at no time can the proletarian militias in the factories be dissolved.
The identification of the party with the state, and the state with the class, found their logical outcome at Kronstadt, when the party took the side of the state against the class. By 1921 the isolation of the Russian Revolution had made the state, by definition the guardian of the status quo, the 'guardian' of the stabilisation of capital and the taming of the workers. Despite all the good intentions of the Bolshevik leadership, who continued to hope for the saving dawn of the world revolution for several years more, their entanglement with this state machine was forcing them to act as obstacles to the world revolution and dragging them towards the final triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Some of them actually began to see that it was not the party that controlled the state, but the state which controlled the party. As Lenin himself said:
"The machine is getting out of the hands of those who are wielding it: one could say that there is someone in the saddle guiding this machine, but that the latter is following a direction other than that which was wanted, is being guided by a hidden hand... God alone knows to whom it belongs, perhaps to a speculator or a private capitalist, or both together. The fact is that the machine is not going in the direction desired by those who are supposed to be running it, and sometimes it foes in the opposite direction altogether" (Political Report of the Central Committee to the Party, 1922)
The last years of Lenin's life saw him struggling hopelessly against the emergent bureaucracy with pathetic schemes like the one for a 'Workers' and Peasants' Inspection', through which the bureaucracy would be 'supervised' through a new bureaucratic commission! What he could not admit, what he could not see, was that this so-called proletarian state had become a bourgeois machine pure and simple, an apparatus for the regulation of capitalist social relations, and could therefore only be fundamentally impervious to working class needs or reforms. The triumph of Stalinism was simply the cynical recognition of this fact, the final and definitive adaptation of the party to its role as overseer of the capitalist state. This was the real meaning of the declaration of 'Socialism in One Country' in 1926.
The Kronstadt uprising had posed the party with a monumental historic choice: either continue to manage this bourgeois machine, and thus end up as a party of capital -or separate itself from the state and stand by the whole working class in its struggle against this machine, this personification of capital. By taking the former path, the Bolsheviks probably signed their death warrant as a party of the proletariat, and added impetus to the counter-revolutionary process that openly declared itself in 1926. After 1921, only those Bolsheviks fractions that began to understand the need to identify directly with the workers' struggle against the state could remain revolutionary, and were able to participate in the international struggle of the Left Communists against he degenerating Third International. Thus for example, the Workers' Group of Miasnikov played an active role in the wave of wildcat strikes that swept Russia in August and September of 1923. This was in profound contrast to the Left Opposition led by Trotsky, whose struggle against the Stalinist faction was always fought from within the bureaucracy, and did not attempt to relate to the workers' struggle against what the Trotskyists defined as a 'workers' state' and a workers' economy. Their initial inability to disengage themselves from the party-state machine prefigured the subsequent evolution of Trotskyism as a 'critical' appendage of the Stalinist counter-revolution.
But historical choices' are rarely clear-cut at the time they have to be made. Men make their history within the definite objective conditions and "the traditions of the past generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (Marx). This nightmarish weight of the past was shouldered by the Bolsheviks, and only the revolutionary triumph of the western proletariat could have made it possible for the weight to have been removed, for the Bolsheviks or at least substantial elements of the party to have realised their mistakes and to have been regenerated by the inexhaustible creativity of the international proletarian movement. The traditions of Social Democracy, the backwardness of Russia, and above all the burdens of state power in the context of a declining revolutionary wave - all these factors were to push the Bolsheviks towards taking up a position on the wrong side of the class line at Kronstadt.
But it was not only the Bolshevik leadership that was unable to understand what was happening at Kronstadt. As we have seen, the Workers' Opposition in the party rushed to disassociate themselves from the rising and lead the assault on the garrison. Even when the Russian ultra-left had gone beyond the timid protests of the Workers' Opposition and entered into clandestine activity, it failed to draw the lessons of the rising and made little reference to it in its criticisms of the regime. The KAPD (Communist Workers' Party of Germany) at the Third Congress of the Comintern did recognise the proletarian character of the uprising, though denied that it had declared itself on the side of the rebels; and before long even this partial understanding was lost as the German Left began to repudiate the proletarian character of the Russian Revolution. By 1924, Gorter was characterising the Kronstadt rising as a revolt of the peasantry that forced the Bolsheviks to scrap the communist programme and 'restore capitalism' via the NEP. (Gorter, in 'The World Revolution'. Workers' Dreadnought. 9 February to 10 May, 1924).
In sum, few communists then understood the profound significance of the rising or drew the essential lessons from it. All this is testimony to the fact that the proletariat does not learn the basic lessons of the class struggle in one fell swoop but only through a painful accumulation of experience, of bloody struggle and of intense theoretical reflection.
It is not the task of revolutionaries today to make abstract moral judgements on the past workers' movement, but to see themselves as a product of that movement - a product, to be sure, capable of making a ruthless critique of all the errors of the movement, but a product nonetheless. Otherwise the criticisms of the past by revolutionaries today can have no grounding in the real struggles of the working class. Only by seeing the protagonists who faced each other at Kronstadt as tragic actors in our own history can communists today claim the right to denounce the action of the Bolsheviks and declare our solidarity with the rebel's defence of class positions. Only by understanding the Kronstadt events as part of the historical movement of the class can we hope to appropriate the lessons of this experience and apply them to the present and future practice of the proletariat. Only thus can we hope to ensure that there will be no more Kronstadts
CDW,
August. 1975
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This does not mean that we endorse the idea, held both by the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt rebels, of a 'workers' and peasants' power. The working class in the next revolutionary wave must affirm that it is the only revolutionary class. It must therefore ensure that it is the only class to organise as a class in the transition period, dissolving any institution that claims to defend the specific interests of any other class. The rest of the non-exploiting population will be permitted to organise itself within the limits of the proletarian dictatorship, and will be represented in the state only as 'citizens' through territorially elected soviets. The granting of civil rights and a franchise to these strata no more endows them with political power as a class than the bourgeoisie gives power to the working class by allowing it to vote in municipal and parliamentary elections. Back [11]
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Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/360/fascism
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#P01
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#P02
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#M00
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#L00
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#top
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#note_01
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR003_kron.htm#back_01