“As an emanation of the class, a manifestation of the process by which it becomes conscious, revolutionaries can only exist as such by becoming an active factor in this process.
To accomplish this task in an indissoluble way, the revolutionary organisation:
- participates in all the struggles of the class, in which its members distinguish themselves by being the most determined and combative fighters;
- intervenes in these struggles always stressing the general interests of the class and the final goals of the movement;
- as an integral part of this intervention, dedicates itself in a permanent way to the work of theoretical clarification and reflection which alone will allow its general activity to be based on the whole past experience of the class and on the future perspectives crystallised in such theoretical work.” (Platform of the ICC)
Up to now we have largely proceeded by negatives. We have seen why class consciousness is not an ideology. Why revolutionaries do not take power… We must now see what revolutionaries are, what they do, what are their tasks. In fact, the role of revolutionaries can be summed up in one sentence: it is to organise themselves on the basis of the proletariat’s historic interests with a view to giving the movement a clear political orientation and actively to aid the development of class consciousness.
This task, apparently so simple, demands a firm revolutionary will and clarity. Let us examine it in all its practical implications.Just as the proletariat’s grasp on its consciousness demands a constant will and effort, so the organisation of revolutionaries as a coherent collective body is not a process improvised at the mercy of chance. The fact that the communist organisation arises in response to an objective and historic need, that it appears as a part of the proletariat, as the fruit of the spontaneous class struggle, does not mean that it can let itself be carried along unthinkingly by the tide of events. Strict ‘obedience’ to the spontaneous flux of the struggle ends up by altering the truly revolutionary direction of this spontaneity. The proletariat’s historic interest does not consist in bowing passively before the situation as it arises ‘from day to day’. The revolutionary spontaneity of the proletariat tends to direct its struggles consciously and voluntarily towards a final goal. It has nothing to do with the chaotic and uncontrolled outbreak of a series of sporadic revolts. The workers’ struggle spontaneously tends towards a greater mastery and a considered self-control. Unlike the revolts of classes or strata with no historic future, it does not burn out as quickly as it flares up, but smoulders ceaselessly, bursting out into conflagration that destroys the existing order in a conscious manner.
For the proletariat, the sudden, spontaneous and largely unforeseeable reaction to the misery of capital, is combined with the possibility of generalising the struggle both materially and theoretically, of drawing the lessons of today’s strike to prepare those of tomorrow. Proletarian spontaneity includes the potential ability to confront the bourgeoisie, to incorporate isolated resistance into actions of a larger scale, into a wider political framework. This potential both makes the intervention of revolutionaries indispensable, and allows it to be something other than a dead letter, a seed sown in the desert. It is because it works on fertile soil, because it addresses comrades who can hear, understand, and put into practice political orientations corresponding to their historic interests, that the party plays so fundamental a role in the development of the proletariat’s capacity to direct itself towards its goal.
The organisation of revolutionaries in “distinct political parties”, on a clear programmatic basis, is a determining factor in the proletariat’s spontaneous will to master its struggles consciously. This for the simple reason that “the organisational question cannot be separated from the political question” (Lenin): it is itself a political problem.
The experience of history strengthens this idea. Thus, while the Bolsheviks showed a bitter determination to organise outside the current of the old Social Democracy — and so threw all their weight into the progress of the revolution - the left of the German Social Democracy hesitated to cut rapidly the umbilical cord attaching it to a corpse, and in doing so put a brake on the historical course of the world revolution.
Rosa Luxemburg, the most eminent representative of this left, although she had in her writings broken openly with Kautsky’s policies as early as 1910, and although she recognised the split between their political positions, nevertheless refused to carry this split onto the organisational level. This because she only saw here a mere ‘organisational recipe’ and not a fundamental political question.
Tied to the Social Democratic vision of the party, which defended the need to be ‘at the level of the masses’, she never arrived at an understanding of how the organisation of revolutionaries into a clear political fraction, distinct from the old organisations that had become the enemies of the proletariat, could help the spontaneous movement of the class to vanquish the opportunists, and constitute a living element of that spontaneity.
By insisting on the need for the spontaneous movement to overcome the opportunists itself, without any real intervention by the party, Rosa Luxemburg, despite herself, removed the organisational question and the existence of revolutionaries to the sidelines of this same spontaneous movement.
Obviously, the existence of revolutionaries and their regroupment in organisations and eventually as a party depend on objective conditions. We have also seen that the revolution can only be the work of the workers themselves and as a whole.
“Man does not make history of his own volition, but he makes history nevertheless. The proletariat is dependent in its actions upon the degree of maturity to which social evolution has advanced. But again, social evolution is not a thing apart from the proletariat; it is in the same measure its driving force and its cause as well as its product and its effect. Its action is itself a determining force in history. And though we can no more skip a period in our historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, it lies within our power to accelerate or to retard it… But (the victory) will never be accomplished if the burning spark of the conscious will of the masses does not spring from the material conditions that have been built up by past development.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, 1916, our emphasis.)
Thus the party cannot “skip a period in our historical development” and make up for the consciousness of the “great mass”. But does this class consciousness always appear as the widest majority movement? In 1916, when Rosa Luxemburg wrote these lines, could the Social Democracy, which had dragged the proletariat into the war, be said to express the class’ consciousness? And yet the great majority of the proletariat continued to have illusions in this organisation. Was this a sign of maturity and political consciousness?
The revolution will indeed be the conscious work of the workers as a whole. But the road there does not stretch out like a beautiful straight line. The proletariat does not travel calmly as one man towards it. The vast working masses do not always follow a single path, and do not always have the same consciousness. Even in a revolutionary period there are moments when the great majority of proletarians continue to be half-blinded by the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie. In these crucial moments the ‘acceleration’ introduced by a minority of revolutionaries can be decisive. In these moments, it is not the reaction of the great proletarian masses still under the sway of bourgeois ideology that allows you to measure the maturity reached by the class’ consciousness, but the position of the proletariat’s clearest elements. The task of these elements is to spread their understanding to the rest of the workers, and not to lower their politics to the level of the masses.
Far from following passively the flux and reflux of their class’ struggles, the communists’ role is to organise themselves so as to accelerate the revolutionary tendencies smouldering within these struggles. They are at the same time living products of their class, and an active factor in the maturation of the proletarian struggle.
Thus, once revolutionaries have understood the bankruptcy of an old political system, of a previous organisational form and political practice, their responsibility is not to wait until the rest of the workers have caught up before organising themselves on a clear basis and putting forward a perspective for the struggle. This attitude makes any progression of class consciousness impossible and ends up in a vicious circle. For how is the proletariat as a whole to become aware of the death of these old forms of organisation and of the bankruptcy of past political positions if its most conscious elements themselves hesitate to say that they are dead and to propose a new orientation?
Drawing together the energies of the revolution into a political organisation independent of the old workers’ parties that had gone over to the enemy camp, was not in Germany, or elsewhere, a mere “organisational” question. The organisational problem is fundamentally a political problem. The German left’s hesitations to break organisationally with the Social Democracy betrayed other, more profound ones. The revolutionaries hesitated to criticise openly and to denounce firmly the deeds of the executioners of the proletariat, who, after driving the workers into the bloodbath of the world war, were to become the “bloodhounds” of the bourgeoisie: Scheidemann, Ebert, Noske & Co — the whole stinking scum of the Social Democracy.
Thus in January 1918, the first great strikes to break out under the impact of the Russian revolution were consciously held back and misled into bourgeois legality — in other words, to their death by the Social Democratic Party. Confronted with these manoeuvres (which, moreover, were generalised throughout Europe), the Spartakists, the left wing, which had not yet broken with Social Democracy, remained completely impotent.
“In the afternoon, Scheidemann and Ebert (SDP) proposed to the action committee (elected during the strike), to enter into negotiations with the government through the intermediary of the union leaders, whom the chancellor was prepared to meet. The action committee’s members were disoriented. As Jogisches (Spartakist) emphasized, they no longer knew what to do with this revolutionary energy. They saw the trap that was prepared for them, but went no further than to affirm that only delegates from among the strikers could properly negotiate in their name!” (P. Broué, La Revolution en Allemagne, 1969, our emphasis.)
Drawing the lessons from the defeat of this strike — for which the revolutionaries bore a heavy responsibility -Jogisches later wrote:
“Through parliamentary cretinism, in its desire to apply the schema laid down for all union strikes, and above all through lack of confidence in the masses… the committee limited itself, under the influence of the Social Democratic deputies, to trying to enter into negotiations with the government, instead of rejecting all forms of negotiation and unleashing the energy of the workers in the most varied forms.” (Spartakist leaflet cited in Documents et Materiaux pour une Histoire du Mouvement Ouvrier en Allemagne (l9l4-l945), Vol. II/2.)
Still later, the Spartakists came to realise that their hesitations had been a dangerous error, and were to form an independent political party. This is why the Communist Party — the KPD (Spartakus) — was at last created in December 1918. Sadly, its birth came late, and in January 1919 the Communist Party was still shot through with the same fear of decisive intervention, the same eternal wrangling before any action could take place, the same lack of direction and of any clear political perspective.
Here is how a communist witness described, in the paper, first of the Spartakus League and then of the KPD(S), the movement of January 1919 and the reaction of the Communist Party.
“Then the incredible happened. The masses were there very early, from 9 O’clock on, in the cold and the fog. And the leaders were sitting somewhere deliberating. The fog thickened and the workers were still waiting. And the leaders deliberated. Midday came, and hunger was added to the cold. And the leaders deliberated. The workers were going crazy with excitement; they wanted a word, an act, that would calm their delirium. Nobody knew what. The fog thickened, and with it, the dusk. Sadly, the workers went home; they had wanted something big, and they had done nothing. And the leaders deliberated. Outside were the proletarians, gun in hand, with their heavy and light machine guns. And inside the leaders deliberated. At the prefecture the canons were aimed, there were sailors at every corner of the building, and all the rooms opening on to the outside were swarming with soldiers, sailors, proletarians. Inside, the leaders sat and deliberated. They sat and sat all night and into the following morning as the day became grey and so on and so on, and they deliberated. And groups gathered again on the Siegesallee, and the leaders still sat and deliberated. They deliberated, and deliberated, and deliberated.” (Die Rote Fahne, September 5, 1920.)
This description, despite its anecdotal and rather caricatured turn, sums up well enough the situation in the days of January 1919. Instead of intervening in the unfolding movement from the 4th January on, to give it the clear perspective of overthrowing the bourgeois government, the communists hesitated a long time, a prey to their own confusions. This had the effect of slowing down the workers’ revolutionary drive, and above all of maintaining their illusions. Only at the last moment, and pushed by the movement itself, did the KPD(S) advance the slogan of the seizure of power. This was not well received. In fact, neither the denunciation of the Ebert government, nor the setting forward of the movement’s final goal, had been prepared or argued well in advance. This is why, despite their combativity, the workers reacted hesitantly when faced with the perspective of breaking with the Social Democracy.
“The majority of Berlin workers were not prepared to take part in, or even to accept, this war that was on the point of breaking out between two camps, each claiming to be socialist. The meetings and assemblies held in the factories almost declared themselves for an immediate end to the fights between tendencies, to the ‘fratricidal struggle’, and for the universally demanded and applauded ‘unity’ of all the socialist currents.” (P. Broué, La Revolution en Allemagne, 1969.)
In Germany then, all the work of propaganda and political agitation on a clear programmatic and organisational basis was completely lacking. Later on, the KPD was to continue on its opportunist path, and merge, in December 1920, with the ‘left’ of the Social Democracy, the VKPD. This hazy attitude provoked a reaction of the healthiest elements of the political vanguard and their organisation in an independent party, the KAPD. Sadly this reaction came too late — i.e. in April 1920. The world revolution was already on a more difficult footing, and was to struggle through defeat after defeat to its final extinction in 1927. The revolutionaries had failed in their task — they had not organised early enough.In January 1918, Rosa Luxemburg had already drawn one important lesson from the revolutionary movement of 1917:
“If the cause of the revolution is to progress, if the victory of the proletariat and socialism are to be anything else than a dream, the revolutionary workers must set up leading organisms capable of using and guiding the combative energy of the workers.” (R. Luxemburg, Die Rote Fahne, 14th January, 1918).
This lesson, which was sadly not put into practice at the time, should be of use to us today. It should allow us to understand that the primordial task of revolutionaries today is to put forward a clear political orientation, and to prepare it through a whole preliminary work of propaganda. What does this mean concretely?
We have seen that the German revolutionaries’ hesitation to organise themselves separately went hand—in—hand with their lack of political perspectives. When they deliberated endlessly in closed session, while the armed proletarians waited for some concrete proposal from them, the revolutionaries of January 1919 were unable to decide rapidly on the immediate perspective because they were themselves confused about the global orientation that the movement should take. And because of this, they failed in one of the communist vanguard’s essential responsibilities — to insist constantly on the movement’s final goal and on the practical means for getting there.
“Communists are distinguished from the other working— class parties by this only:
1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat independently of all nationality.
2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” (Communist Manifesto)
For the communists, orienting the proletarian movement onto the path of the revolution means continually demonstrating the proletariat’s historical and international interests and final goal of the movement. This seems, and is, simple, but putting such a task into practice is far from easy.
But some revolutionaries mistrust such simplicity, which seems to them to hide some unpleasant trick. In their eyes, such simplicity can only be an easy way out, an ignorance and underestimation of the party’s lofty responsibilities. To put a bit more shine on this ‘simplicity’ and surround the party with its full glory, they feel obliged to give it the role of ‘leader’ or commander.
Orientating the proletarian movement is too passive a task for their taste. They want something a bit spicier, a bit more lively. Thus they slide away from the idea of ‘orientating’ or ‘giving a direction’ towards a false political interpretation of the role of revolutionaries. By making the apparently simple jump from ‘giving a direction’, to ‘leading’ in the sense of ordering or commanding, they give the impression of according greater importance to the activities of the party. In reality, they do nothing of the kind.
To give revolutionaries the task of making themselves passively obeyed and followed like generals by proletarian ‘troops’, is to carry over the old schemes of past revolutions into the communist revolution. In reality, such an approach makes it impossible for revolutionaries to have any real impact. For, as we have seen, as long as the workers do no more than passively follow orders (whichever camp they come from), this simply means that they are not yet ready for power, nor sufficiently conscious of their own interests. World capitalism will not be thrown to the ground by an imbecile and obedient army, but by a strong, united class, thoughtful and self-confident. It is for this that revolutionaries must work, not to make themselves adored as heroes and fine speechmakers.
“The party’s historical function is not to be a General Staff directing the class as if it were an army, and, like an army, equally ignorant of the final goal, the immediate objectives of the operations, and the overall movement of the manoeuvres.
The socialist revolution is in no way comparable to a military action. Its realisation is conditioned by the consciousness of the workers themselves as they dictate their own decisions and actions.
Thus the party does not act in the place of the class. It does not demand its ‘confidence’ in the bourgeois sense of the word — that is, to be delegated to decide on the destiny of society. Its sole historic, function is to act so as to allow the class itself to become aware of its task and of the ends and means which are the foundations of its revolutionary action.” (‘On the Nature and Function of the Party’, Internationalisme, no. 38, 1948. Text reprinted in the Bulletin d’etude at de discussion, no. 6, our emphasis.)
Politically orientating the proletarian movement means acting so that the class can become conscious of the revolutionary direction that historically it is committed to take. In carrying out this task, in no way do revolutionaries ‘sacrifice’ their importance. On the contrary, this is what gives them a really primordial importance — for it is precisely the whole proletariat’s capacity for self-awareness and self-organisation that constitutes the only guarantee of the revolution’s victory.
What has the living example of the Russian revolution taught us?
It has shown us that revolutionaries, far from imposing on the proletariat a political leadership brought from outside, far from adopting a voluntarist attitude worthy only of petty corporals, far from forcing the course of events, simply worked to make the proletariat as a whole conscious of its historic interests. Contrary to the claims of bourgeois propaganda, which wanted to make them out as the ‘putschists’ of 1917, or as pitiless dictators, the Bolsheviks never received from the proletariat the task of taking power; they were never delegated by the workers to act in the proletariat’s place; they never won the workers’ confidence in the bourgeois sense of the term: “Vote for us and we’ll do the rest.” The Bolsheviks lived and acted in their class like fish in water. They had forged this unity after months and even years of patient work of explanation, propaganda, agitation, and constant insistence on the struggle’s final goal. This unity was possible because the party did nothing other than to give a more general political formulation to the needs and concrete tendencies existing in the proletariat. And this clear formulation decided the course of the revolution.
In this case, revolutionary theory was able to become a practical force, and to win over the workers as a whole. This was not thanks to some mysterious and magical seasoning provided by the party, but simply because it expressed in clear and general terms a real need of the workers. It is not surprising, then, that it found such an echo among the proletarians in Russia, and that the Bolshevik revolutionaries were naturally put at the ‘head’ of the combat. They did no more than to express clearly what the workers felt confusedly.
“The sailor Khorrin tells in his memoirs how the seamen who considered themselves Social Revolutionaries would in reality defend the Bolshevik platform. This was to be observed everywhere. The people knew what they wanted, but they did not know how to call it by name…
How was it that with this weak apparatus and this negligible circulation of the party press, the ideas and slogans of the Bolsheviks were able to take possession of the people? The explanation is very simple: those slogans which correspond to the keen demands of a class and an epoch create thousands of channels for themselves. A red—hot revolutionary medium is a high conductor of ideas. The Bolshevik papers were read aloud, were read all to pieces. The most important articles were learned by heart, recited, recopied, and wherever possible reprinted… The usual explanation of the success of Bolshevism reduced itself to a remark upon ‘the simplicity of the slogans’, which fell in with the desires of the masses.
But the toilers are guided in their struggle not only by their demands, not only by their needs, but by their life experiences. Bolshevism had absolutely no taint of any aristocratic scorn for the independent experience of the masses. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks took this for their point of departure and built upon it. That was one of their great points of superiority.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2)
Formulate clearly and simply a need existing in their class, starting from the experience of the struggles themselves, take account of the general and historical aspirations of the proletariat, orientate the movement and accelerate its revolutionary tendencies… these are the ‘mysterious’ means that revolutionaries use to fulfil their role effectively. Nothing very magical in fact. The simplicity of their tasks is easily explained: communists pursue no ends other than that of contributing actively to the consciousness of their class.Simplicity is not synonymous with easiness or fatality. Undoubtedly, the role of revolutionaries can be simply defined, but it nonetheless remains the product of a very complex situation, and its concretisation demands effort and continuity. First, as we have seen, revolutionaries have to organise themselves. They must remain constantly alert to the enrichment of revolutionary theory from the experiences of their class, draw the lessons of the past, keep in view the final goals, situate their activity in a long—term perspective. They are not always given the opportunity to have an impact in their class; they cannot proclaim themselves ‘the class Party’ and provide a wholly artificial solution to the complexity of class consciousness and its development. Like their class, and despite the continuity in their tasks and their existence, revolutionaries are part of social reality; they undergo the changes in the balance of class forces between them and the bourgeoisie, the flux and reflux of the class struggle. In periods of defeat for their class comrades, they remain a tiny minority, to draw out patiently the lessons of the defeat, and prepare for the renewal of the struggle. The communist organisation is not sheltered from these historical events, any more than it can escape entirely from the pressure of bourgeois ideology. It is a living body which must breath, nourish itself, act, get its breath back… and as such, it can also be struck by illness and death.
Even if they constitute the most conscious element of the proletariat, communists are not for all that infallible. We have seen the extent to which the confusions of the Bolsheviks played a nefarious role in the later development of the world revolution, and to what extent they became an active force in its degeneration. This remark is equally true for the confusions of the Dutch and German revolutionaries. To think of the development of class consciousness as a natural and inevitable fruition is as absurd as thinking that the magical power of the party can lead the proletariat to revolution. Revolutionaries will not develop the consciousness of the proletariat by sitting back and twiddling their thumbs, or by hitting the workers forcibly over the head with their unvarying programme. To think, either that the party is nothing, or that the party is always right, and that its task is to ‘force the course of events’ comes down in the end to killing all life in the real process by which the workers get a grip on their class consciousness. From these standpoints, the development of class consciousness is no longer a living thing that grows, overcomes its contradictions, develops qualitatively and collectively, but an impotent, paralysed, dying old hag. Revolutionary theory is no longer an active and necessary ferment, but a powerless and useless mummy.
This incomprehension of the living, practical and collective way that class consciousness develops thus leads, not only to confusion about the role of revolutionaries, but to serious dangers for the proletariat itself.
In fact, every time that revolutionaries have tried, through force, voluntarism or plain demagogy, to impose ‘their’ conceptions, they have only succeeded in pushing the workers into dead—ends and the Canon’s mouth.
Let us recall the lamentable experience of the opportunist wing of the VKPD, the Unified Communist Party of Germany, produced by the unnatural fusion of the KPD and the USPD, and which became the official section of the IIIrd International in 1920. For Levi, the eminent representative of this party, what mattered was to conquer ‘the hearts and minds’ of the labouring masses at any price, even if it meant flattering their illusions, while for the same party’s voluntarist and ‘putschist’ wing what mattered was, on the contrary, to go over straight away to action, without taking account of the real state of the struggle and the consciousness of the class. In fact, as Gorter and the KAPD quite rightly emphasized in the text ‘The Road of Doctor Levi and the VKPD’, this putschism is simply a normal extension of opportunism. Right from its foundation, the VKPD followed this path. It continued to work in the very unions that had gone over to the national patriotic camp in 1914; it adopted a parliamentarist tactic to win over the ‘broad masses’ and finally ended up defending the necessity of a United Front with the Social Democratic massacrers of the proletariat. In short, the VKPD adopted at their most extreme all the confusions that developed in the IIIrd International from the IInd Congress on. In Germany, only the KAPD raised its voice against such a practice.
“There then emerge two main tendencies, which can be recognised in every country, for all the local variations. The one current seeks to revolutionise and clarify people’s minds by word and deed, and to this end tries to pose the new principles in the sharpest possible contrast to the old, received conceptions. The other current attempts to draw the masses who are still on the sidelines into practical activity, and therefore emphasizes points of agreement rather than points of difference in an attempt to avoid as far as possible anything that might deter them. The first strives for a clear, sharp separation among the masses, the second for unity; the first current may be termed the radical tendency, the second the opportunist one… In contrast with the strong, sharp emphasis on the new principles — soviet system and dictatorship — which distinguishes communism from Social Democracy, opportunism in the IIIrd International relies as far as possible upon the forms of struggle taken over from the IInd International (Unions, parliamentarism).” (Pannekoek, ‘Die Entwicklung der Weltrevolution und die Taktik des Kommunismus’, 1920, reprinted in Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism)
Far from being contradictory, voluntarism and opportunism feed on each other; each complements the other’s errors. Both reveal an identical incomprehension of the process whereby the proletariat comes to consciousness, and of the active participation of revolutionaries in the process. Each of these confusions abandons the perspective of a long and patient work of explanation within the class, of a constant insistence on its final goal and historical needs. For the voluntarists, the proletariat must be led to action by the will and strength alone of a minority, for the opportunists it must be led by flattery and the abandonment of communist principles. In 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks followed neither of these courses. For them, the party had to go beyond the illusions remaining among the proletariat. Rather than waiting for the working class to get rid of them itself, without any intervention from its vanguard, it had to, on the contrary, put itself ahead of the confused aspirations of the workers, give them a clear expression, facilitate the development of class consciousness, act in such a way that the proletariat might arrive at a conception of its real historical interests. For Lenin, this was not a matter of flattering the prejudices that most workers still held to, nor of acting without taking into account the level of consciousness of the working masses, but of generalising throughout the proletariat the awareness of the necessity for the seizure of power and of making the proletariat capable itself of realising its historical task.
“The temporary strength of the social patriots and the hidden weakness of the opportunist wing of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that the former leant on the prejudices and present illusions of the masses, while the latter accommodated themselves to them. Lenin’s principle strength lay in that he understood the movement’s internal logic and regulated his policies accordingly. He did not impose his plan on the masses. He helped the workers to conceive and realise their own plans. When Lenin brought all the problems of the revolution down to a single ‘explain patiently’, this meant: to bring the consciousness of the masses into accord with the situation, to which they had been driven by the historical process.” (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2, our emphasis)
This is what the real concern of revolutionaries should be!
This is how they should carry out the long work of explanation and criticism of past illusions, and push for the homogenisation of class consciousness. And to be able to carry out this work, they must avoid two pitfalls: the abandonment of principles and the final goal, and substitutionist and minority action. It was in this way that Lenin, when he put forward his ‘April Theses’ (which put forward the necessity of the world proletarian revolution) in April 1917, refused any possibility of conciliating the Mensheviks under the false pretext of reinforcing proletarian unity. At first, he remained in the minority of the party, where he was called an anarchist and a madman! Then, by this same patient and untiring work of ‘explanation’ he managed to convince the whole Bolshevik party. Lenin’s strength at this point was his political clarity, which corresponded to the confused desires of the workers and the actual necessities of the situation. And yet not for a moment did Lenin ‘bow’ to the illusions still held by a majority of the proletariat in this period.
“Not for one minute did Lenin close his eyes to the existence of an ‘honest’ national defence mentality among the masses. While not merging with them, neither was he disposed to act behind their backs. ‘We are not charlatans’, he said in reply to future objections and accusations, ‘We must base ourselves solely on the consciousness of the masses. But if, because of our positions, we have to remain in the minority, that’s fine!... The real government is the Soviet of workers’ deputies. In the Soviet, however, our party is in the minority… Nothing to be done about it!... There remains nothing for us to do but to explain patiently, perseveringly, and systematically the wrongness of their tactic. As long as we are in the minority we will carry out a labour of criticism, to separate the workers from this trickery. We don’t want the masses to take our word for it. We are not charlatans. We want the masses to detach themselves from their errors through their own experience.’” (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2)
These are Lenin’s words on the eve of the insurrection. What is he proposing? Does he defend the need for the party to impose itself by decree or minority action? Does he demand that the party direct events without taking account of the experience of the whole proletariat? Nothing of the kind! A few months before the revolution, Lenin is not proposing anything other than to begin a long process of criticism and explanation, a reminder of the final perspective. He proposed nothing other than to spread a revolutionary awareness, to generalise to the whole proletariat the political gains that had achieved a greater clarity in the organised workers’ vanguard.
For Lenin was perfectly aware that in February or even in July 1917, the proletariat as a whole was not yet sufficiently strong or conscious to seize power. Despite all the confusions that subsisted as to the necessity for the Bolshevik party to seize power, one thing still remained clear: it was the soviets that controlled and directed the seizure of power, and for them to be able to do so, the majority of workers had to be aware of the necessity of revolution.
“In July, even the Petrograd workers did not possess that preparedness for infinite struggle. Although able to seize the power, they nevertheless offered it to the Executive Committee. The proletariat of the capital, although inclining toward the Bolsheviks in its overwhelming majority, had still not broken the February umbilical cord attaching it to the compromisers (...) If the proletariat was not politically homogeneous and not sufficiently resolute, still less so was the peasant army (...) Thus the state of popular consciousness — the decisive factor in revolutionary policy made impossible the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in July.” (Trotsky, ibid.)
The attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1917 is opposite to that of the Comintern and the VKPD and its ‘putschist’ wing. The latter, and even a part of the KAPD, imagined that they could play the role of vanguard, through ‘exemplary’ acts that would show the truth of the communist programme, through forcing the rest of the workers to follow the same path. In this way, the militants of the VKPD (encouraged on the initiative of a member of the Communist International) were to try in March 1921 to ‘force the course of the revolution’. This attempt was to be a pitiful disaster.
“On Thursday 24 March, the Communists were to try by every means, including force, to unleash a general strike. Detachments of militants tried to occupy the factories by surprise so as to bar the entry to those they called ‘scabs’ — the vast mass of non-communist workers. Elsewhere, groups of unemployed workers harass those going to, or at, work. Incidents occurred in several large Berlin factories, in the Ruhr, and in Hamburg where unemployed workers and dockers who had occupied the quays were chased after a lively exchange of fire. The overall score was low; 200,000 strikers according to the pessimists, half a million according to the optimists. Some failures were especially galling, like Sult’s, who failed to convince his comrades in the power stations.” (Pierre Broué, La Revolution en Allemagne, 1969)
The work of propaganda and agitation conducted by the Bolsheviks before October 1917 brought very different results:
“Where is the insurrection? There is no picture of the insurrection. The events do not form themselves into a picture. A series of small operations, calculated and prepared in advance, remain separated from one another both in, space and time. A unity of thought and aim unites them, but they do not fuse in the struggle itself. There is no action of great masses. There are no dramatic encounters with the troops. There is nothing of all that which imaginations brought up upon the facts of history associate with the idea of insurrection. The general character of the revolution in the capital subsequently moved Masaryk, among many others, to write: ‘The October revolution was anything but a popular mass movement. That revolution was the act of leaders working from above and behind the scenes.’ As a matter of fact, it was the most popular mass insurrection in all history. The workers had no need to come out into the public square in order to fuse together; they were already politically and morally one single whole without that (...) But those invisible masses were marching more than ever before in step with events. The factories and barracks never lost connection for a minute with the district headquarters, nor the districts with Smolny. The Red Guard detachments (armed workers) felt at their back the support of the factories. The soldier squads returning to the barracks found the new shifts ready. Only with heavy reserves behind them could revolutionary detachments go about their work with such confidence. (...) The bourgeois classes had expected barricades, flaming conflagrations, looting, rivers of blood. In reality, a silence reigned more terrible than all the thunders of the world. The social ground shifted noiselessly like a revolving stage, bringing forward the popular masses, carrying away to limbo the rulers of yesterday.” (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3)
In October 1917, as in Germany 1921, the struggle does not appear to us as a confused action by millions of workers. In both cases, revolutionary action is not carried by all the workers, taken individually. And yet despite this apparent similarity, there is a fundamental difference between the two events. In the March Action of 1921, the revolutionaries acted in small armed detachments totally cut off from the working masses; during the seizure of power in Russia, the action of armed detachments of the proletariat took place under the control of the collective will of millions of proletarians. It was the whole, conscious proletariat that directed the march of events, even if this participation did not take a spectacular, anarchic form.
The fusion of the revolutionary wills of the whole proletariat really existed in this moment. It lived through a thousand channels, through the contacts and innumerable exchanges between the soviets, the districts, the revolutionary committee and the workers, between the Red Guards and the Bolsheviks…
Everywhere, the revolutionary flame burned unceasingly, setting light to people’s energies, unleashing initiatives from every quarter. Propositions and decisions were born spontaneously from this mass of millions of workers. And at the same time, the consciousness gained by all these proletarians in arms, their wills welded together in pursuit of the same aim, gives the overall picture a remarkable appearance of calm, decision and precision.
The world proletarian revolution will not be a flash in the pan. It will not be the anarchic and uncontrolled explosion of thousands of desperate rebels without any future. The revolution of October 1917 has shown us: the communist revolution is the most conscious and controlled historical phenomenon that humanity has ever known. Under the political supervision of millions of proletarians, it will violently confront the blind and unrestrained forces of the bourgeois counter—revolution with precision, courage and self—awareness.
But the proletariat will come to such a determined and collective consciousness neither automatically, nor easily. Neither the thrust of events, nor the accentuation of the crisis, nor the fall in its living standards will be enough to open its eyes to the historical perspectives of its struggle. The crisis will urge it on, will force it to struggle ever more bitterly and massively. The decay of the bourgeoisie’s economic, social and political order will be the objective terrain of the revolution. But manure will never be anything more than manure. Life will never spring out of fertiliser alone. The proletariat’s situation in the process of production, the new relations of production that are an objective part of its condition, the historic force it bears within it, are so many seeds that must blossom out of so much dung. And yet this promise of life is so fragile that the slightest effort may stamp it out before it is able to blossom out completely. To protect and develop it more completely, so that a massive and homogeneous consciousness of the necessity of revolution might develop on the objective soil of this decay, the proletariat has provided itself with revolutionary organisations.
The history of the Russian revolution, and of the world wide revolutionary movements that shook the capitalist world at the same period, confirms that this is the function of revolutionaries. But how to carry out this task? Does developing and homogenising class consciousness simply mean propagating ideas and writing fine theoretical works? How are revolutionaries to conceive of their intervention within this class?
As part of their class, revolutionaries participate in this transformation of the world. They have nothing in common with sects of intellectual visionaries. The proletariat’s grasp on its self-awareness is a living, concrete process; it would be absolutely false to try to separate this process from the practice of the class struggle, from the movement of strikes and the proletariat’s partial struggles. Revolutionaries participate fully in this practice; they intervene actively in strikes, general assemblies, and the actions of their class in struggle. Revolutionaries do not reflect merely for the pleasure of contemplating their own navels. It is not simply to understand reality in theory that they deepen the communist programme. When revolutionaries enrich revolutionary theory, they only do so the better to define and orientate their concrete intervention in the class struggle, and to tie it in better to the practice of the proletariat. There is nothing passive nor strictly theoretical about their action in the development of class consciousness. Even if they are not a mechanical product of the class struggle, even if they have organised consciously in order to act, communists consider their intervention as a special moment of their class’ global practice.
Even when, at certain moments of historical development, they still have little impact and take on an essentially propagandist task of spreading general ideas whose echo among the workers remains minimal, revolutionaries never intervene at a strictly speculative nor intellectual level. When they intervene in the class struggle, they do not put forward a pure abstract theory that the workers are supposed to ‘appropriate’ instead of struggling. They are in the struggle.
In it, they defend demands, forms of organisation (strike committees, genera1 assemblies…). They support everything that can spread and strengthen the struggle. Their task is to intervene and participate — as far as they are able — in all the partial struggles of their class. They must stimulate every tendency for the proletariat to organise itself independently of capital. Revolutionaries will be present in every political and organisational expression of the proletariat, in every struggle, in the general assemblies, soviets, and neighbourhood committees. There they will rigorously attack the manoeuvres of capital’s guard-dogs who will use the cover of ‘working class’ language to try to detour the struggle into dead-ends and defeat.
In the pre-revolutionary period, the party will try through its press, its slogans, and the agitation of its militants in every struggle, to transform these struggles from simple economic reactions to the economic decomposition of capital, into political struggles for the destruction of the bourgeois state. In these movements the party supports every demand, every slogan capable of helping that transformation, capable of unifying the combat politically. Concretely, it calls for the centralised co-ordination and unification of autonomous strike committees, and for their transformation into political councils; it calls for the transformation of workers’ self-defence into an organised military offensive against the bourgeoisie. In the same way, during the insurrection, it participates in the proletariat’s military organisation to put forward the final goals of the armed struggle, and its analysis of the balance of class forces. During the civil war, it insists on the necessity of extending the international revolution, and of subordinating military and economic questions to this political aim.
This practical intervention of revolutionaries participates fully in the development of class consciousness. For developing class consciousness means developing a practical awareness which transforms the struggle and pushes it forward. Developing class consciousness does not just mean spreading revolutionary ideas, but also participating in the struggle as revolutionaries and as a fraction of the class, to defend the practical application of this theory. Homogenising the political gains of the struggle also means homogenising their concrete implications, while constantly emphasizing the movement’s final goal.
“We reject no partial action. We say that every action, every combat must be perfected. pushed forward. We can’t say that we reject this or that combat. The combat born of the economic necessities of the working class must, by every means, be pushed forward.” (Intervention of Hempel (KAPD) at the 3rd Congress of the CI, 1921, our emphasis.)
“…as communists, we do not have the task of initiating slogans of daily struggle amongst the working masses — these must be posed by the workers in the factories. We must always point out to the workers that the solution of these daily questions will not better their situation, and that in no way will it be able to bring about the downfall of capitalism. We Communists have the task of participation in this daily combat, of marching at the head of these struggles. Therefore, comrades, we don’t reject this daily combat, but in this combat we put ourselves ahead of the masses, we always show them the road and the great goal of communism.” (Intervention of Meyer—Bergman (KAPD) at the same congress)
What do revolutionaries do to ensure that class consciousness moves forward?
They participate in every struggle and in its organisation, and from beginning to end they use the driving force of each combat to take the greatest possible number of steps towards the constitution of the proletariat as a force capable of overthrowing the dominant system.
“The aim of communist intervention is to contribute to this apprenticeship. In every struggle, communists must show the movement’s historical and geographical dimensions, but this does not mean remaining satisfied with setting out the final goal of world—wide communism. We must, moreover, at each instant know how to weigh up the point the struggle has reached, and be able to make proposals which are concretely realisable, and at the same time represent a real advance of the struggle in the development of the unity and awareness of the whole class. To go as far as possible in each struggle, to push its potential capacities to the limit by proposing goals which are realisable but always more advanced — this is what revolutionaries aim, for when they intervene in the open struggles of their class. In decadent capitalism, these working class struggles follow the same law that governs revolutionary struggles, and which Rosa Luxemburg resumed thus: “the Russian revolution only confirms the fundamental lessons of all great revolutions, which all have the following vital law: either they advance resolutely, with a very rapid momentum, beating down all obstacles with an lion hand, and always setting their goals further ahead, or they are very quickly driven back beyond their weak point of departure, and rushed by the counter-revolution: in a revolution, it is impossible to stop, to mark time, or to be satisfied with the initial aim once it is reached.” (R. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918)” (Report on intervention adopted at the 3rd Congress of Revolution Internationale, June 1978.)
The intervention of communists thus consists essentially in stimulating the forward march of the workers’ consciousness and combat — in using each moment of the proletariat’s combat to make it evolve qualitatively and collectively towards the world revolution and communism.