We are publishing below substantial extracts from the first part of an orientation text proposed for discussion in the ICC during the summer of 2001, and adopted by our organisation's Extraordinary Conference at the end of March 2002. This text refers to the ICC's recent organisational difficulties, of which we have given an account in our article "The struggle for the defence of organisational principle" in International Review n°110, as well as in our territorial press. Since we do not have the space here to return to these previous articles, we encourage our readers to refer to them for a better understanding of the questions dealt with. However, this text has been further annotated[1] in order to help the reader; we have also reformulated certain passages which, while comprehensible for militants of the ICC involved in our internal debate, were likely to be less so for readers outside the organisation.
"Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere" ("Do not laugh, cry or curse, but understand"). Spinoza: Ethics.
The current debates in the ICC on the questions of solidarity and confidence began in 1999 and 2000 in response to a series of weaknesses regarding these central questions within our organisation. Behind concrete failures to manifest solidarity with comrades in difficulty, a deeper-lying weakness was identified of developing a permanent attitude of daily solidarity between our militants. Behind the repetition of manifestations of immediatism in the analysis of and intervention in the class struggle (in particular the refusal to recognise the full extent of the set back after 1989), and a marked tendency to console ourselves with "immediate proofs" allegedly confirming the historic course, we brought to light a fundamental lack of confidence in the proletariat and in our own framework of analysis. Behind the damage to our organisational tissue, which began to be concretised in the ICC's section in France in particular, we were able to recognise a lack of confidence between different parts and members of the organisation and in our own mode of functioning.
Indeed, it was the fact of being confronted with different manifestations of a lack of confidence in our basic positions, in our historical analysis, in our organisational principles, and between comrades and central organs, which obliged us to go beyond each particular case and pose these questions in a more general, fundamental and thus theoretical and historical manner.
More specifically, the reappearance of clanism[2] at the very heart of the organisation necessitates the deepening of our understanding of these questions. As the activities resolution of the 14th ICC Congress says:
"The struggle of the 90s was necessarily one against the circle spirit and clans. But as we already said at the time, the clans were a wrong answer to a real problem: that of the weakness of proletarian confidence and solidarity within our organisation. This is why the abolition of the existing clans did not automatically resolve the problem of the creation of a party spirit and real fraternity within our ranks, which can only be the result of a profoundly conscious effort. Although we insisted at the time that the struggle against the circle spirit is permanent, the idea remained that, as was the case at the time of the First or the Second International, this problem would mainly be linked to a phase of immaturity which could be overcome and left behind. In reality, the danger of the circle spirit and clanism today is much more permanent and insidious than at the time of the struggle of Marx against Bakuninism or of Lenin against Menschevism. In fact there is a parallel between the present difficulties of the class as a whole to regain its class identity and to recover the elementary class reflexes of solidarity with other workers, and those of the revolutionary organisation to maintain a party spirit in daily functioning. In this sense, by posing the questions of confidence and solidarity as central issues of the period, the organisation has begun to continue the struggle of 1993, adding to it a 'positive' dimension, and thus going deeper in arming itself against the intrusion of petty bourgeois organisational slidings".
In this sense, the present debate directly concerns the defence and even the survival of the organisation. But precisely for this reason, it is essential to fully develop all the theoretical and historical implications of these questions. Thus, in relation to the organisational problems with which we are confronted today, there are two fundamental angles of attack. The uncovering of the organisational weaknesses and incomprehensions permitting the resurgence of clanism, and the concrete analysis of the unfolding of this dynamic, is the task of the report which the Information Commission will present.[3] The task of the present Orientation Text, on the contrary, is essentially to give a theoretical framework enabling a deeper historical comprehension and resolution of these problems.
In fact, it is essential to understand that the combat for the party spirit necessarily has a theoretical dimension. It is precisely the poverty of the debate on confidence and solidarity to date that has been a major factor in permitting the development of clanism. The very fact that such an orientation text has been written, not at the beginning, but over a year after this debate was opened, testifies to the difficulties that the organisation has had in coming to grips with these questions. But the best proof of these weaknesses is the fact that the debate on confidence and solidarity has been accompanied by an unprecedented deterioration of the links of confidence and solidarity between comrades!
In fact we are faced here with fundamental questions of Marxism, at the very basis of our understanding of the nature of the proletarian revolution, which are an integral part of the platform and statutes of the ICC. In this sense, the poverty of the present debate reminds us that the theoretical atrophy and sclerosis of a revolutionary organisation is an ever present danger.
The central thesis of this orientation text is that the difficulty in developing a deeply rooted confidence and solidarity within the ICC has been a fundamental problem throughout the history of our organisation. This weakness in turn is the result of essential characteristics of the historical period opened up in 1968. It is a weakness, not only of the ICC, but of the whole generation of the proletariat concerned. Thus, as the 14th Congress resolution said:
"It is a debate which must mobilise the most profound reflection of the whole ICC, since it has the potential to deepen our understanding not only of the construction of an organisation with a truly proletarian life, but also of the historic period in which we live".
In this sense, the issues at stake go far beyond the organisational question as such. In particular, the issue of confidence touches all the aspects of the life of the proletariat and of the work of revolutionaries - just as the loss of confidence in the class can manifest itself equally in the abandonment of programmatic and theoretical acquisitions.
a) In the history of the Marxist movement we do not find a single fundamental text written about either confidence or solidarity. On the other hand these questions are at the very heart of many of the most basic contributions of Marxism, from the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto to Social Reform or Revolution? and State and Revolution. The absence of a specific discussion about these questions in the workers movement of the past is not a sign of their relative unimportance. Quite the contrary. These questions were so fundamental and self evident that they were never posed in themselves, but always in reply to other problems raised.
If today we are obliged to devote a specific debate and a theoretical study to these questions, it is because they have lost their "self evidence".
This is the result of the counter- revolution that began in the 1920s and the break in organic continuity it caused among proletarian political organisations. For this reason, concerning the accumulation of self-confidence and living solidarity within the workers movement, it is necessary to distinguish two distinct phases in the history of the proletariat. During the first phase, extending from the beginnings of its self affirmation as an autonomous class until the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the working class was able, despite the series of often bloody defeats it suffered, to more or less continuously develop its self confidence and its political and social unity. The most important manifestations of this capacity were, in addition to the workers struggle itself, the development of a socialist vision, of a theoretical capacity, and of a political revolutionary organisation. This process of accumulation, the work of decades and of generations, was interrupted and even reversed by the counter-revolution. Only tiny revolutionary minorities were able to maintain their confidence in the proletariat in the decades that followed. The historic resurgence of the working class in 1968, by ending the counter-revolution, began to once again reverse this tendency. However, the new expressions of self confidence and class solidarity by this new and undefeated proletarian generation remained for the most part rooted in the immediate struggles. They were not yet based to the same extent as before the counter-revolution on a socialist vision and political formation, on a class theory, and on the passing on of accumulated experience and understanding from one generation to the next. In other words: the historic self confidence of the proletariat, and its traditions of active unity and collective combat belong to the aspects of its combat which have suffered most from the break in organic continuity. Equally, they are among the most difficult aspects to re-establish, since they depend more than many others on a living political and social continuity. This in turn gives rise to a particular vulnerability of the new generations of the class and its revolutionary minorities.
First and foremost it was the Stalinist counter-revolution that contributed to undermining the confidence of the proletariat in its own historic mission, in Marxist theory and in its revolutionary minorities. As a result, the proletariat after 1968 tends more than past undefeated generations of the class to suffer the weight of immediatism and the absence of a long-term vision. By robbing it of a large part of its past, the counter-revolution and the present day bourgeoisie deprives the proletariat of a clear vision of its future, without which the class cannot find a more profound confidence in its own force.
What distinguishes the proletariat from any other class in history is the fact that, from its very first appearance as an independent social force, it brought forward its own project of a future society based on the common ownership of the means of production. As the first class in history whose exploitation is based on the radical separation of the producers from the means of production, and on the replacement of individual by socialised labour, its liberation struggle is characterised by the fact that the struggle against the effects of exploitation (common to all exploited classes) has always been linked to the development of a vision of the overcoming of exploitation. The first collectively producing class in history, the proletariat, is called on to re-found society on a consciously collective basis. Since it is unable, as a propertyless class, to gain any power within the existing society, the historic significance of its class struggle against exploitation is to reveal to itself, and thus to society at large, the secret of its own existence as the gravedigger of exploitation and capitalist anarchy.
For this reason, the working class is the first class whose confidence in its own historic role is inseparable from its own solution to the crisis of capitalist society.
This unique position of the proletariat, as the only class in history which is at one and the same time exploited and revolutionary, has two important consequences:
- its confidence in itself is above all a confidence in the future, and is thus to a significant degree based on a theoretical approach;
- it develops in its daily struggle a principle corresponding to the historic task it has to fulfil - the principle of class solidarity, the expression of its unity.
In this sense, the dialectic of the proletarian revolution is essentially that of the relationship between goal and movement, between the struggle against exploitation and the struggle for communism. The natural immaturity of the first "infantile" steps of the class on the stage of history is characterised by a parallelism between the development of workers struggles and of the theory of communism. The interconnection between these two poles was initially not yet really understood by the participants themselves. This was reflected in the often blind and instinctive character of workers struggles on the one hand, and the utopianism of the socialist project on the other.
It was the historical maturation of the proletariat which made it possible to bring these two elements together, concretised by the revolutions of 1848-49, and above all by the birth of Marxism, the scientific comprehension of the historic movement and goal of the class.
Two decades later the Paris Commune, the product of this maturation, revealed the essence of the confidence of the proletariat in its role: the aspiration to take over the leadership of society in order to transform it in accordance with its own political vision.
What is the source of this astonishing self-confidence of a downtrodden and dispossessed class which concentrates all the misery of humanity within its ranks, and which appeared already in 1870? Like the struggle of all exploited classes, that of the proletariat has a spontaneous aspect. The proletariat is forced to react against the constraints and attacks imposed on it by the ruling class. But as opposed to the struggle of all the other exploited classes, that of the proletariat has above all a conscious character. The advances of its struggle are fundamentally the product of its own process of political maturation. The proletariat of Paris was a politically educated class that had gone through different schools of socialism, from Blanquism to Proudhonism. It was this political training during the preceding decades which to a large extent explains the capacity of the class thus to challenge the ruling order (just as it also explains the shortcomings of this movement). At the same time, 1870 was also the result of the development of a conscious tradition of international solidarity that characterised all the major workers struggles of the 1860s in western Europe.
In other words, the Commune was the product of a subterranean maturation characterised in particular by a more profound confidence in the historical mission of the class and by a more developed practice of class solidarity. A maturation, the culmination point of which was the First International.
With capitalism's entry into its period of decadence, the central role of confidence and solidarity is accentuated, since the proletarian revolution appears on the agenda of history. On the one hand, the spontaneous character of workers combat is more developed with the impossibility of the organisational preparation of struggles via mass parties and trade unions.[4] On the other hand, the political preparation of these struggles through a strengthening of class confidence and solidarity become even more important. The most advanced sectors of the Russian proletariat, which in 1905 was the first to discover the weapons of the mass strike and the workers councils, went through the school of Marxism in a series of phases: that of the struggle against terrorism, the formation of political circles, the first strikes and political demonstrations, the struggle for the formation of the class party and the first experiences of mass agitation. Rosa Luxemburg, who was the first to understand the role of spontaneity in the epoch of the mass strike, insisted that without this school of socialism, the events of 1905 would never have been possible. A
But it was the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, and above all the October Revolution which revealed the clearest the nature of the questions of confidence and solidarity. The quintessence of the historical crisis was contained in the question of the insurrection. For the first time in the whole history of humanity, a social class was in a position to deliberately and consciously alter the direction of world events. The Bolsheviks came back to Engels conception of the "art of insurrection". Lenin declared that the revolution is a science. Trotsky speaks of the "algebra of the revolution". Through studying the development of social reality, through the construction of a class party able to stand the tests of history, through the patient and vigilant preparation for the moment when the objective and subjective conditions for the revolution are united, and through the revolutionary daring necessary to profit from the occasion, the proletariat and its vanguard begin, in a triumph of consciousness and organisation, to overcome the alienation which condemns society to be the helpless victim of blind forces. At the same time, the conscious decision to seize power in Russia, and thus to assume all the hardships of such an act in the interests of the world revolution, is the highest expression of class solidarity. That is a new quality in the ascent of humanity, the beginning of the leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. And that is the essence of the self-confidence of the proletariat and of solidarity within its ranks.
b) One of the oldest maxims of military strategy is the necessity to undermine the self-confidence and the unity of the opposing army. Similarly, the bourgeoisie has always understood the need to combat these qualities within the proletariat. In particular, with the rise of the workers movement in the second half of the 19th century, the need to combat the idea of workers solidarity became increasingly central to the world view of the capitalist class, as is testified by the rise of the ideology of Social Darwinism, the philosophy of Nietzsche, the elitist "socialism" of Fabianism etc. However, until the entry of its system into decadence, the bourgeoisie was unable to find the means to reverse the advance of these principles within the working class. In particular, the ferocious repression which it imposed on the proletariat of Paris in 1848 and 1870, and on the workers movement in Germany under the Anti-Socialist Laws, while leading to momentary setbacks in the progress of socialism, did not succeed in damaging either the historic confidence of the working class or its traditions of solidarity.
The events of World War I revealed that it is the betrayal of proletarian principles by parts of the working class itself, above all by parts of the political organisations of the class, which destroys these principles "from within". The liquidation of these principles within Social Democracy already began at the beginning of the 20th century with the "Revisionism" debate. The destructive, pernicious character of this debate was not only revealed by the penetration of bourgeois positions, progressively abandoning Marxism, but above all by the hypocrisy it introduced into the life of the organisation. Although formally the position of the left was adopted, in reality the main result of this debate was to completely isolate the left - above all within the German party. The unofficial campaigns of denigration against Rosa Luxemburg, who had played a leading role in the struggle against revisionism, portrayed in the corridors of party congresses as an alien and even bloodthirsty element, prepared the terrain for her assassination in 1919.
In fact, the basic principle of the counter-revolution, which began in the 1920s, was the demolition of the very idea of confidence and solidarity. The despicable principle of the "scapegoat", a barbarity from the Middle Ages, reappears at the heart of industrial capitalism in the witch hunt of Social Democracy against the Spartakists, and of fascism against the Jews, the "evil minorities" which supposedly alone prevented the return to peaceful harmony in post war Europe. But it is above all Stalinism, spearhead of the bourgeois offensive replacing the principles of confidence and solidarity with those of suspicion and denunciation within the young Communist Parties, which discredited the goal of communism and the means to its achievement.
Nonetheless, the annihilation of these principles was not achieved overnight. Even during World War II, tens of thousands of workers' families still had enough daily solidarity to risk their lives by hiding those persecuted by the state. And the strike of the Dutch proletariat against the deportation of the Jews is still there to remind us that the solidarity of the working class is the only real solidarity with the whole of humanity. But this was the last strike movement of the 20th century over which the Left Communists have a significant influence.[5]
As we know, this counter-revolution was overcome in 1968 by a new and undefeated generation of workers, which once more had the confidence to take the extension of its struggle and its class solidarity in its own hands, to pose once again the question of the revolution and to secrete new revolutionary minorities. However, traumatised by the betrayal of all the main workers' organisations of the past, this new generation adopted an attitude of scepticism towards politics, towards its own past, its class theory and its historical mission. This did not protect it from the sabotage of capital's political left forces, but it prevents it from renewing the roots of its self-confidence and consciously reviving its great tradition of solidarity. As for the revolutionary minorities, they are also profoundly affected. In fact, for the first time a situation arises in which revolutionary positions gain an increasing echo in the class, whereas the organisations that defend them are not recognised, even by the most combative workers, as belonging to the class.
Despite the impertinence and "cock-suredness" of this new post-1968 generation, which initially succeeded in taking the ruling class by surprise, its scepticism towards politics covered a profound lack of self confidence. Never before has there been such a contrast between this capacity to engage in massive, largely self-organised struggles on the one hand, and the absence of this elementary self-assurance which characterised the proletariat between the 1840s and 1917/18. And this lack of self-assurance profoundly marks the Left Communist organisations too. Not only the new organisations like the ICC or the CWO, but even a group like the Bordigist PCInt, which had survived the counter-revolution, only to explode at the beginning of the 80s due to its impatience to get itself recognised by the class as a whole. As we know, both Bordigism and Councilism theorised, during the counter revolution, this loss of self confidence by establishing a separation between revolutionaries and the class as a whole, calling on one part of the class to be suspicious of the other.[6] Moreover both the Bordigist idea of "invariance", and the opposite councilist one of a "new workers movement" were theoretically false responses to the counter-revolution at this level. But the ICC, which rejected all such theorisations, was nonetheless itself not exempted from the damage to proletarian self-confidence and the narrowing of its base. And as we already pointed out in the mid 1980s, the blows to the confidence of the class in its political vanguard through the defeats inflicted by the left of capital is a principle reason why Councilism is a greater danger than substitutionism now and in the future.
Thus we can see, in this historic period, an inter-connection between a whole series of elements: the lack of confidence of the class in itself, of the workers in revolutionaries and vice versa, of political organisations in themselves, in their historic role, in the Marxist theory and the organisational principles inherited from the past, and of the whole class in the long term historical nature of its mission.
In reality, this political weakness inherited from the counter-revolution is one of the main factors in the entry of capitalism into the phase of decomposition. Cut off from its historical experience, its theoretical weapons and the vision of its historical role, the proletariat lacks the confidence necessary to go further in the development of a revolutionary perspective. With decomposition, this lack of confidence and perspective becomes the lot of society as a whole, imprisoning humanity in the present.[7] It is no coincidence, therefore, that the historical period of decomposition is inaugurated by the collapse of the main vestige of the counter-revolution, that of the Stalinist regimes. As a result of this renewed discrediting of its class goal and its main political arms, the proletarian movement is once again confronted with an historically unprecedented situation: an undefeated generation of workers loses to an important degree its class identity. In order to emerge from this crisis, it will have to relearn class solidarity, redevelop an historical perspective, rediscover in the fire of class struggle the possibility and necessity for the different parts of the class to have confidence in each other. The proletariat has not been defeated. It has forgotten, but not lost the lessons of its combats. What it has above all lost is its self-confidence.
This is why the questions of confidence and solidarity are among the principle keys to the whole historical impasse. They are central to the whole future of humanity, to the strengthening of the workers struggle in the coming years, to the construction of the Marxist organisation, and to the concrete reappearance of a communist perspective within the class struggle.
a) As the Orientation Text of 1993 shows,[8] all the crises, the tendencies and the splits in the history of the ICC had their roots in the organisational question. Even where important political divergences existed, there was neither agreement on these questions between the members of the "tendencies", nor did these divergences in general justify a split, and certainly not the kind of irresponsible and premature ones which became the general rule within our organisation.
As the ‘93 Orientation Text points out, all of these crises thus had their origins in the circle spirit and in particular in clanism. From this we can conclude that throughout the history of the ICC, clanism has always been the main manifestation of a loss of confidence in the proletariat and the main cause of the putting in question of the unity of the organisation. Moreover, as their future evolution outside the ICC often confirmed, the clans were the main bearers of the germ of programmatic and theoretical degeneration within our ranks.[9]
This fact, brought to light eight years ago, is nonetheless so astonishing, that it merits an historical reflection. The 14th ICC congress already began this reflection, showing that in the past workers movement the predominant weight of the circle spirit and clanism was mainly restricted to the beginnings of the workers movement, whereas the ICC has been tormented by this problem throughout its existence. The truth is that the ICC is the only organisation in the history of the proletariat within which the penetration of alien ideology has so regularly and predominantly manifested itself via organisational problems.
This unprecedented problem must be understood within the historical context of the past three decades. The ICC strives to be the heir of the highest synthesis of the heritage of the workers movement, and of the Communist Left in particular (...).
But history shows that the ICC assimilated its programmatic heritage much more easily than its organisational one. This was mainly due to the break in organic continuity caused by the counter-revolution. Firstly because it is easier to assimilate political positions via the study of past texts than to grasp organisational issues, which are much more a living tradition depending more heavily for their transmission on the link between the generations. Secondly because, as we have already said, the blow to the self-confidence of the class struck by the counter-revolution mainly affected its confidence in its historical mission, and thus in its political organisations. So whereas the validity of our programmatic positions were often spectacularly confirmed by reality (and since 1989 this validity is even confirmed by growing parts of the political swamp), our organisational construction did not meet with the same resounding success. By 1989, the end of the post war period, the ICC had not achieved any decisive steps forward in numerical growth, in the distribution of our press, in the impact of our intervention on the class struggle, or in the degree of recognition of the organisation by the class as a whole. It was indeed a paradoxical historical situation. On the one hand, the end of the counter revolution and the opening of the new historic course favoured the development of our positions: the new undefeated generation was more or less openly suspicious of the left of capital, bourgeois elections, sacrifice for the nation etc. But on the other hand, our communist militantism was perhaps less generally respected than in the days of Bilan. This historical situation led to deep-seated doubts about the organisation's historical role. These doubts sometimes surfaced at the general political level through the development of openly councilist, modernist or anarchist conceptions - more or less open capitulations to the dominant ambience. But above all they expressed themselves in a more shame-faced manner, at the organisational level.
To this we must add that in the history of the fight of the ICC for the party spirit, although there are similarities with the organisations of the past - the inheritance of our principles of functioning from our predecessors, and their anchoring through a series of organisational struggles - there is also an important difference. The ICC is the first organisation that forges the party spirit, not under conditions of illegality, but in an atmosphere soaked in democratic illusions. Concerning this question, the bourgeoisie has learnt from history: the best weapon of organisational liquidation is not repression, but the cultivation of an atmosphere of suspicion. What is true for the class as a whole goes for revolutionaries also: it is the betrayal of principles from within which destroys proletarian confidence.
As a result, the ICC never was able to develop the kind of living solidarity, which in the past was always forged in clandestinity, and which is one of the main components of the party spirit. In addition, democratism is the ideal soil for the cultivation of clanism, since it is the living antithesis of the proletarian principle that each gives to the best of his abilities for the common cause, and favours instead individualism, informalism and the forgetting of principles. We should not forget that the parties of the Second International were to a large extent destroyed by democratism, and that even the triumph of Stalinism was democratically legitimated, as the Italian Left pointed out (...).
b) It is evident that the weight of all of these negative factors is multiplied by the opening of the period of decomposition. We will not repeat what the ICC has already said on the subject. What is important here is that, as a result of the fact that decomposition tends to corrode the social, cultural, political and ideological bases of human community, in particular through the undermining of confidence and solidarity, there is a spontaneous tendency throughout present day society to regroup in clans, cliques and gangs. These groupings, where they are not based on commercial or other material interests, often have a purely irrational character, based on personal loyalties within the group and an often senseless hatred of real or imagined enemies. In reality this phenomenon is partly a relapse into atavistic and, in the present context, completely perverted forms of confidence and solidarity, reflecting the loss of confidence in the existing social structures, and an attempt to reassure oneself in face of growing anarchy within society. It goes without saying that these groupings, far from representing an answer to the barbarism of decomposition, are themselves its expression. It is significant that today even the two main classes are affected. Indeed, for the moment only the strongest sectors of the bourgeoisie seem to be more or less able to resist its development. As for the proletariat, the degree to which it is touched by this phenomenon in its everyday life is above all the expression of the damage to its class identity and the resulting need to reappropriate its own class solidarity.
As the 14th ICC Congress said: because of decomposition, the struggle against clanism is not behind but ahead of us.
c) Clanism has thus been the principle expression of a loss of confidence in the proletariat in the history of the ICC. But the form it takes is open suspicion, not towards the organisation, but towards part of it. In reality however, the meaning of its existence is the putting in question of the unity of the organisation and its principles of functioning. This is why clanism, although it may begin with a correct concern, and a more or less intact confidence, necessarily develops a suspicion towards all who are not on its side, leading to open paranoia. In general those who have fallen victim of this dynamic are completely unaware of this reality. This does not mean that a clan does not possess a certain consciousness of what it is doing. But it is a false consciousness serving the purpose of deceiving oneself and others.
The ‘93 Orientation Text already explains the cause of this vulnerability, which in the past affected such militants as Martov, Plekhanov or Trotsky, as being the particular weight of subjectivism in organisational questions. (...).
In the workers' movement, the origin of clanism has almost always been the difficulty of different personalities to work together. In other words, it represents a defeat in the face of the very first step in the construction of any community. This is why clanic attitudes often appear at moments of influx of new members, or of formalisation and development of organisational structures. In the First International it was the inability of the newcomer Bakunin to "find his place" which crystallised the already existing resentments against Marx. In 1903, on the contrary, it was the concern about the status of the "old guard" which provoked what went into history as Menschevism. This of course did not prevent a founding member like Lenin from championing the party spirit, or one of the newcomers who provoked the most resentment - Trotsky - from taking sides with those who had been afraid of him.[10]
(...)
Precisely because it overcomes individualism, the party spirit is capable of respecting the personality, and the individuality, of each of its members. The art of the construction of the organisation consists not least in taking account of all these different personalities so as to harmonise them to the maximum and allow each to give his or her best for the collectivity. Clanism on the contrary crystallises precisely around a suspicion towards personalities and their different weights. This is why it is so difficult to identify a clan dynamic at the beginning. Even if many comrades sense the problem, the reality of clanism is so sordid and ridiculous that it takes courage to declare that "the Emperor has no clothes".B How embarrassing!
As Plekhanov once remarked, in the relationship between consciousness and emotions the latter play the conservative role. But this does not mean that Marxism shares the disdain of bourgeois rationalism for their role. There are emotions which serve and others which damage the cause of the proletariat. And it is certain that its historic mission cannot succeed without a gigantic development of revolutionary passions, an unswerving will to victory, an unheard of solidarity, selflessness and heroism, without which the ordeal of the struggle for power and of civil war can never be withstood. And without a conscious cultivation of the social and individual traits of true humanity a new society cannot be founded. These qualities are not preconditions. They must be forged in struggle, as Marx said.
(...) As opposed to the attitude of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, for whom the point of departure of its radicalism was the rejection of the past, the proletariat has always consciously based its revolutionary outlook on all the acquisitions of humanity which precede it. Fundamentally, the proletariat is capable of developing such an historical vision because its revolution defends no particular interests opposed to those of humanity as a whole. Therefore, the approach of Marxism has always been, regarding all the theoretical questions posed by its mission, to take as its point of departure the best acquisitions which have been handed down to it. For us, not only the consciousness of the proletariat, but also that of humanity as a whole, is something that is accumulated and handed down through history. This was the approach of Marx and Engels concerning German classical philosophy, English political economy or French utopian socialism.
Similarly, we must understand here that proletarian confidence and solidarity are specific concretisations of the general evolution of these qualities in human history. On both of these issues, the task of the working class is to go beyond what has already been achieved. But in order to do so the class must base itself on these achievements.
The questions posed here are of fundamental historical importance. Without a minimum of basic solidarity, human society becomes impossible. And without at least a rudimentary mutual confidence, no social progress is possible. In history, the breakdown of these principles has always led to unbridled barbarism.
a) Solidarity is a practical activity of mutual support between human beings in the struggle for existence. It is a concrete expression of the social nature of humanity. As opposed to impulses such as charity or self-sacrifice, which presuppose the existence of a conflict of interests, the material basis of solidarity is a community of interests. This is why solidarity is not a utopian ideal, but a material force, as old as humanity itself. But this principle, representing the most effective, while collective means of defending ones own "sordid" material interests, can give rise to the most selfless acts, including the sacrifice of ones own life. This fact, which bourgeois utilitarianism has never been able to explain, results from the simple reality that wherever there are common interests, the parts are submitted to the common good. Solidarity is thus the overcoming, not of "egoism", but of individualism and particularism in the interests of the whole. This is why solidarity is always an active force, characterised by initiative, not by the attitude of waiting for the solidarity of others. Where the bourgeois principle of calculation of advantage and disadvantage reigns, no solidarity is possible.
Although in the history of humanity solidarity between the members of society was originally above all an instinctive reflex, the more complex and conflictual human society becomes, the higher the level of consciousness necessary for its development. In this sense, the class solidarity of the proletariat is the highest form of human solidarity to date.
Nevertheless, the flourishing of solidarity depends not only on consciousness in general, but also on the cultivation of social emotions. In order to develop, solidarity requires a cultural and organisational framework favouring its expression. Given such a framework within a social grouping, it is possible to develop habits, traditions and "unwritten rules" of solidarity which can be passed on from one generation to the next. In this sense, solidarity has not only an immediate but also an historical impact.
But not withstanding such traditions, solidarity always has a voluntary character. This is why the idea of the state as the embodiment of solidarity, cultivated in particular by Social Democracy and Stalinism, is one of the greatest lies in history. Solidarity can never be imposed against ones will. It is only possible if both those expressing solidarity and those receiving it share the conviction of its necessity. Solidarity is the cement which holds a social group together, which transforms a group of individuals into a single united force.
b) Like solidarity, confidence is an expression of the social character of humanity. As such, it also presupposes a community of interests. It can only exist in relation to other human beings, to shared goals and activities. From this flows its two main aspects: mutual confidence of the participants and, confidence in the shared goal. The principle bases of social confidence are thus always a maximum of clarity and of unity.
However, the essential difference between human labour and animal activity, between the work of the architect and the construction of a beehive as Marx put it, is the premeditation of this work on the basis of a plan.[11] This is why confidence is always linked to the future, to something that in the present only exists in the form of an idea or theory. At the same time it is why mutual confidence is always concrete, based on the capacities of a community to fulfil a given task.
Thus, as opposed to solidarity, which is an activity which only exists in the present, confidence is an attitude directed above all towards the future. This is what gives it its peculiar enigmatic character, difficult to define or identify, difficult to develop and to maintain. There is hardly another area of human life concerning which there is so much deception and self-deception. In fact, confidence is based on experience: learning through "trial and error" to set realistic goals and to develop the appropriate means. But because its task is to make possible the birth of what does not yet exist, it never loses this "theoretical" aspect. None of the great achievements of humanity would ever have been possible without this capacity to persevere in a realistic but difficult task in the absence of immediate success. It is the expansion of the radius of consciousness that allows for a growth in confidence, whereas the sway of the blind and unconscious forces in nature, society and the individual tend to destroy this confidence. It is not so much the existence of dangers that undermines human confidence, but rather the inability to understand them. But since life is constantly exposed to new dangers, confidence is a particularly fragile quality, taking years to develop, but prone to being destroyed overnight.
Like solidarity, confidence can neither be decreed nor imposed, but requires an adequate structure and atmosphere for its development. What make solidarity and confidence such difficult questions is the fact that they are affairs not only of the mind but also of the heart. It is necessary to "feel confident". The absence of confidence implies in turn the reign of fear, uncertainty, hesitations, the paralysis of the conscious collective forces.
c) Whereas bourgeois ideology today feels comforted by the alleged "death of communism" in its conviction that it is the elimination of the weak in the competitive struggle for survival which alone assures the perfection of society, in reality these conscious and collective forces are the basis of the ascent of mankind. Humanity's predecessors belonged to those highly developed animal species whose social instincts gave them decisive advantages in the struggle for survival. These species already carry the rudimentary hallmarks of collective strength: the weak are protected, and the strength of individual members becomes the strength of the whole. These aspects were crucial in the emergence of the human species, whose offspring remain helpless for longer than any other. With the development of human society and the forces of production, this dependence of the individual on society has never ceased to grow. The social (Darwin calls them "altruistic") instincts, which already exist in the animal world, increasingly take on a conscious character. Selflessness, bravery, loyalty, devotion to the community, discipline and honesty are glorified in the early cultural expressions of society, the first expressions of a truly human solidarity.
But man is above all the only species that makes use of self-made tools. It is this mode of acquiring means of subsistence which directs the activity of mankind towards the future.
"With the animal, action follows immediately after impression. It seeks its prey or food and immediately it jumps, grasps, eats, or does that which is necessary for grasping, and this is inherited as an instinct.... Between man's impression and acts, however, there comes into his head a long chain of thoughts and considerations. Whence comes this difference? It is not hard to see that it is closely associated with the use of tools. In the same manner that thought arises between mans impressions and acts, the tool comes in between man and that which he seeks to attain. Furthermore, since the tool stands between man and outside objects, thought must arise between the impression and the performance". He takes a tool, "therefore his mind must also make the same circuit, not follow the first impressions".C
Learning "not to follow the first impression" is a good description of the leap from the animal world to mankind, from the reign of instinct to that of consciousness, from the immediatist prison of the present to activity directed towards the future. Each important development in early human society is accompanied by an enforcement of this aspect. Thus, with the appearance of settled agricultural societies, the old are no longer killed but cherished as those capable of passing on experience.
In so-called primitive communism, this embryonic confidence in the power of consciousness to master the forces of nature was extremely fragile, whereas the force of solidarity within each group was powerful. But until the appearance of classes, private property and the state, these two forces, as unequal as they were, enforced each other mutually.
Class society tears apart this unity, accelerating the struggle for the mastery of nature, but replacing social solidarity with the class struggle within one and the same society. It would be wrong to believe that this general social principle was replaced by class solidarity. In the history of class society, the proletariat is the only class capable of a real solidarity. Whereas the ruling classes have always been exploiters, for whom solidarity is never more than the opportunity of the moment, the necessarily reactionary character of the exploited classes of the past meant that their solidarity necessarily had a furtive, utopian character, as with the "community of goods" of early Christianity and the sects of the middle ages. The main expression of social solidarity within class society before the rise of capitalism is that flowing from the leftovers of the natural economy, including the rights and duties which still tied the opposed classes to each other. All of this was finally destroyed by commodity production and its generalisation under capitalism.
"If in present day society the social instincts have still retained any force, then only thanks to the fact that generalised commodity production is still a very young phenomenon, hardly a hundred years old, and that to the extent that the primeval democratic communism disappears, and (....) thus ceases to be a source of social instincts, a new and much stronger source springs up, the class struggle of ascendant, exploited popular classes".D
With the development of the productive forces, the confidence of society in its capacity to dominate the forces of nature grew at an accelerating rate. Capitalism made by far the main contribution in this direction, culminating in the 19th century, the century of progress and optimism. But at the same time, by pitting man against man in the competitive struggle, and sharpening the class struggle to an unheard of degree, it undermined to an unprecedented extent another pillar of social self confidence, that of social unity. Moreover, to the extent that it began to liberate humanity from the blind forces of nature, it submitted it to the rule of new blind forces within society itself: those unleashed by commodity production, whose laws operate outside of the control or even the understanding - "behind the back" - of society. This leads in turn to the 20th century, the most tragic in history, which plunged a large part of humanity into unspeakable despair.
In its struggle for communism, the working class bases itself not only on the development of the productive forces achieved by capitalism, but also bases part of its confidence in the future on the scientific achievements and the theoretical insights brought forward by humanity beforehand. Equally, the heritage of the class in the fight for an effective solidarity integrates the whole experience of humanity to date in forging social links, unity of purpose, ties of friendship, attitudes of respect and attention for our fellow combatants etc.
[To be continued]
ICC, 15/06/2001
Notes from the original text
A Rosa Luxemburg: The Revolution in Russia
B Hans-Christian Anderson: The Emperors Clothes. It must be admitted that Anderson's stories are sometimes more realistic than the fairy tales which clanism is pleased to serve us.
C Pannekoek: Marxism and Darwinism.
D Kautsky: Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History.
[1] The notes belonging to the original text are numbered A,B,C and are to be found at the end of the article. Those added for publication are at the bottom of the page.
[2] For the ICC's analysis of the transformation of the circle spirit into clanism, on the clans that have existed in our organisation, and on our struggle from 1993 onwards against these weaknesses, see our text on "The question of organisational functioning in the ICC" and our article "The struggle for the defence of organisational principle" in International Review n°109 and 110 respectively.
[3] The Information Commission was set up by the ICC's 14th Congress. See our article in International Review n°110.
[4] On this subject, see the article on "The proletariat's struggle in the decadence of capitalism" in International Review n°23, where we highlight the reasons why, contrary to the 19th century, the struggles of the 20th century could not be based on a previous organisation of the class.
[5] In February 1941, the German occupying forces announced anti-Semitic measures which provoked a massive reaction from the Dutch workers. A strike broke out in Amsterdam on 25th February, rapidly spreading to other towns, particular The Hague, Rotterdam, Groningen, Utrecht, Hilversum, Haarlem. The strike even spread to Belgium before being savagely broken by the authorities and the SS. See our book on The Dutch-German Left.
[6] The councilist conception of the party developed by the Dutch communist left, and the Bordigist conception, an avatar of the Italian left, seem at first sight to be diametrically opposed: the latter considers that the role of the communist party is to seize power and to exercise a dictatorship on behalf of the class, including if necessary against the class, while the former considers that any party, including a communist party, is a danger for the class inevitably destined to usurp its power to the detriment of the revolution's interests. In reality, these two conceptions have in common the separation, or even opposition, that they see between the class and the party, expressing a profound lack of confidence in the former. For the Bordigists, the class as a whole is incapable of exercising the dictatorship, which is why the party has to take on the task. Despite appearances, councilism's confidence in the class is no greater, since it considers it inevitable that the party will inevitably strip the class of its power should it ever be allowed to come into existence.
[7] For our analysis of decomposition, see in particular "Decomposition, the final phase of capitalism's decadence", in International Review n°62.
[8] Published in International Review n°109 under the title "The question of organisational functioning in the ICC".
[9] This is because "In a clan dynamic, common approaches do not share a real political agreement but rather links of friendship, loyalty, the convergence of specific personal interests or, shared frustrations (...)When such a dynamic appears, the members or sympathisers of the clan can no longer decide for themselves, in their behaviour or the decisions that they take, as a result of a conscious and rational choice based on the general interests of the organisation, but as a result of the interests of the clan which tends to oppose itself to those of rest of organisation" ("The question of organisational functioning in the ICC", International Review n°109). Once militants adopt such an approach, they tend to turn their backs on a rigorous, marxist, way of thinking, and thus become the conduit for a tendency to theoretical and programmatic degeneration. To give only one example, the clannish regroupment which appeared in the ICC in 1984, an which was to form the "External Fraction of the ICC", ended up by completely overturning our platform, whose best defender it had claimed to be, and by rejecting the notion of capitalism's decadence which is part of the heritage of both the Communist International and the Communist Left.
[10] When Trotsky arrived in Western Europe in the autumn of 1902, after escaping from Siberia, he was already preceded by his reputation as a talented writer (one of the pseudonyms given him was "Pero" - "the pen"). He soon became one of the foremost contributors to Iskra, published by Lenin and Plekhanov. In March 1903, Lenin wrote to Plekhanov proposing to co-opt Trotsky to Iskra's editorial committee. Plekhanov refused, fearing that the young militant's talent (Trotsky was only 23) would put his own prestige in the shade. This was one of the first expressions of the drift by the man who first introduced marxism to Russia, first to support for the Mensheviks, and finally into the service of the bourgeoisie as a social-chauvinist.
[11] "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose" (Marx, Capital, Book 1, Part 3, Chapter 7. See www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm [1])
The publication of the ICC's pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism is testimony to the re-emergence of revolutionary elements in a country where a once-great proletarian political tradition was buried under the terrible weight of the Stalinist counter-revolution. The ICC is well aware that without this rebirth, the translation of our pamphlet into Russian would not have been possible; we offer it therefore as a contribution to the clarification of communist positions in the debates now going on both within the Russian milieu itself, and between this milieu and the international expressions of authentic communism.
The introduction to the previous editions of this pamphlet already contains a history of the concept of decadence within the marxist movement, showing that from Marx to the Communist International and the left fractions that reacted to the latter's degeneration and demise, this notion was not based on a purely moral or cultural critique of capitalist society, as in the vulgar interpretation of "decadence" as a term of disapproval for various forms of art, fashion, or social mores. On the contrary, the marxist notion of decadence flows ineluctably from the very premises of historical materialism, and provides the granite foundation for demonstrating not only that capitalism has been in historical decline as a mode of production since the early part of the 20th century, but also that this period has also placed the proletarian revolution on the agenda of history. In this preface to the Russian edition we want to concentrate on the enormous contribution that the practical experience of the Russian working class, and the theoretical endeavours of its revolutionary minorities, has made to the concept of capitalist decadence.
We aim to be brief here, and therefore will present this contribution in the form of a chronology. Other documents - to be written perhaps by Russian comrades themselves - can explore this issue in greater depth. But this format will also be useful for highlighting the most important steps of the process through which the Russian section of the workers' movement added to the sum of understanding of the world proletariat as a whole.
1903: The split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is not merely about how to organise a workers' party under the repressive conditions of Tsarism. In a sense, despite its backwardness, Russia, with its highly concentrated proletariat and its inability to encompass the worker's movement within a legal and democratic framework, anticipates the totalitarian conditions that will face the world working class in the approaching epoch of proletarian revolution, where the working class will no longer be granted the room to maintain permanent mass organisations. Thus when Lenin rejects the Menshevik conception of a 'broad' workers' party and insists on the need for a disciplined party of revolutionary militants committed to a clear programme, he is anticipating the form of party organisation required for an epoch in which the direct struggle for revolution has superseded the fight for reforms within the bourgeois order.
1905: "The present Russian revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already over the summit, which is on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, The political Party and the Trade Unions). With its mass strikes and its discovery of the soviet form of organisation, the proletariat of Russia announces the approach of the new epoch, in which the old trade unionist methods will have become obsolete. While it is Rosa Luxemburg who most incisively demonstrates the dynamics of the mass strike, the left wing of Russian social democracy also begins to draw out the principal lessons of the 1905 events: Lenin - as opposed to the 'super-Leninists', whose first response to the soviets was to call on them to dissolve into the party - outlines the dialectical relationship between the organisation of the revolutionary minority, the party, and the soviet as a general organ of the whole class capable of forming the basis of a revolutionary dictatorship. Trotsky is even more aware of the importance of the soviet as a form of organisation suited for the mass strike and the struggle for proletarian power. And in his theory of permanent revolution, he inches towards the conclusion that historical evolution has already by-passed the possibility of a bourgeois revolution in backward countries like Russia: henceforward, any real revolution will have to be led by the working class, adopt socialist goals, and extend onto the international arena.
1914-16: Of all the proletarian currents opposed to the world imperialist war, it is the Bolsheviks around Lenin who are the most lucid. Rejecting the arguments of the social chauvinists who use the letter of Marx to kill the spirit, Lenin shows that there is nothing national, democratic, or progressive about this slaughter, and raises the slogan "turn the imperialist war into a civil war". The war, in sum, has opened up a new epoch in which the proletarian revolution is no longer a distant prospect, but has been placed directly onto the agenda of history. In his Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he describes imperialist capitalism as a system in decay. At the same time, Bukharin's book Imperialism and World Economy demonstrates that capitalism's plunge into militarism is the result of the creation of a world economy, which has laid down the objective requisites of a higher mode of production but now stands as a blood-soaked obstacle to its realisation. This thesis parallels Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of the historical limitations of the capitalist system, The Accumulation of Capital, which is a fundamental reference point for this pamphlet. Bukharin, like Luxemburg, also recognises that in a world order carved up by the imperialist giants, struggles for 'national liberation' have lost all meaning. Finally, Bukharin's work shows a grasp of the form that this new capitalist world economy will take: a deadly struggle between huge 'state capitalist trusts'. It is an anticipation that the statified form that capital has adopted during the war will be its classic method of organisation throughout its era of decay.
1917: the Russian proletariat again proves the unity of theory and practise by rebelling against the imperialist war, overthrowing Czarism, organising in soviets and moving towards the revolutionary seizure of power. Faced with the Bolshevik 'old guard' who cling to outdated formulae inherited from a previous period, Lenin writes the April Theses, in which he states that the goal of the proletariat in Russia is not some hybrid 'democratic revolution' but the proletarian insurrection as the first step towards the worldwide socialist revolution. Again, the October revolution is the practical verification of the marxist method embodied in the April Theses, which had been decried as ' anarchist' by 'orthodox marxists' who failed to see that a new period had opened up.
1919: the formation in Moscow of the Communist International as a key instrument for the worldwide extension of the proletarian revolution. The platform of the CI is founded on the recognition that "a new epoch is born. The epoch of capitalism's decay, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the proletarian communist revolution" and that consequently the old minimum programme of reforms is out of date, as well as the social democratic methods used to achieve them. From now on the notion of the decadence of capitalism has become a fundamental plank of the communist programme.
1920-27: the failure of the revolution to spread leads to the bureaucratisation of the Russian state and of the Bolshevik party which has mistakenly fused with it. A process of internal counter-revolution has opened up, culminating in the triumph of Stalinism before the end of the decade. But the degeneration of the Bolshevik party, and the CI which it dominates, is resisted by the communist left in countries such as Germany, Italy, and Russia itself. The left denounces the tendency to revert back to old social democratic practises like parliamentarism, or to seek alliances with the former socialist parties which have already passed over to the bourgeois camp. In Russia, for example, Miasnikov's Workers' Group, formed in 1923, is particularly clear in its repudiation of the CI's tactic of the United Front, while simultaneously castigating the proletariat's loss of political control over the 'soviet' state. As Stalin's faction consolidates its victory, the Russian left communists are among the first to realise that Stalinism represents the bourgeois counter-revolution, and that capitalist social relations can persist even in a fully statified economy.
1928-45: The Stalinist terror exterminates or exiles a whole generation of revolutionaries. The political voice of the Russian working class is silenced for decades, and the work of drawing the lessons of this defeat, and of analysing the nature and characteristics of the Stalinist regime, is taken up by the left communists in Europe and America. It is no easy task, and scores have to be settled with many erroneous theories, such as Trotsky's notion of the 'degenerated workers' state', before the essentials are fully grasped: that the Stalinist regime of integral state capitalism, with its totalitarian political apparatus and its economy geared to war, is above all a product of capitalist decadence, since capitalism in this epoch is a system that lives by war, and that relies on the state to prevent its simmering economic and social contradictions from reaching an explosive outcome. Against all the illusions that Stalinist state capitalism represents a way of overcoming these contradictions, or even a progressive development for capital, the communist left points out the terrible social costs of Stalinist industrialisation in the 1930s, showing that it is laying the basis for new and even more destructive imperialist conflicts. The USSR's ravenous participation in the second world carve-up confirms the left's argument that the Stalinist regime has its own imperialist appetites, and thus its refusal of any concessions to the Trotskyist call for the "defence of the USSR against imperialist attack".
1945-89: The Soviet Union becomes the leader of one of the two imperialist blocs whose rivalries dominate the international situation for four decades. But as we show in our theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern bloc, included as an appendix to this pamphlet, the Stalinist bloc is far less economically developed than its western rival, is weighed down by a vast military sector, and is too rigid in its political and economic structures to adapt to the demands of the world capitalist market. In the late sixties the economic crisis of world capitalism, which had been masked by the period of post-war reconstruction, once again resurfaces, raining continuous blows on the USSR and its satellites. Unable to carry through any economic or political 'reforms' without putting its whole edifice into question, unable to mobilise for war because it cannot rely on the loyalty of its own proletariat (a fact vividly demonstrated by the mass strike in Poland in 1980), the entire Stalinist building implodes under the weight of its contradictions. But contrary to all the lying propaganda about the collapse of Communism, this is the collapse of a particularly weak segment of the capitalist world economy, which as a whole has no way out of its historic crisis.
1989- : the collapse of the Russian bloc leads to the rapid disappearance of the western bloc, which has no 'common enemy' to hold it together. This enormous shift in the world situation marks the entry of decadent capitalism into a new and final phase - the phase of decomposition, whose principal features are elaborated in the theses which are also appended to the present work. Suffice it to say here that the situation of Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union reveals all the features of this new phase: at the international level, the replacement of the old bipolar imperialist rivalries with a chaotic struggle of each against all, in which Russia continues to defend its imperialist ambitions, albeit less 'exalted' ones than before; internally, in a tendency towards the further break up of the territorial integrity of Russia though nationalist rebellions and murderous wars like the current one in Chechnya; economically, through a total lack of financial stability together with soaring inflation and unemployment; socially through an accelerating decay of the infrastructure, spiralling pollution, growing levels of mental illness and drug addiction, and the proliferation of criminal gangs at every level, including the highest rungs of the state.
This process of inner disintegration is such that many in Russia already grow nostalgic for the 'good old days' of Stalinism. But there can be no going back: capitalism in all countries is a system in mortal crisis, which is starkly posing mankind with the choice between a plunge into barbarism or the communist world revolution. The reappearance of revolutionary elements in Russia today is clear evidence that the second alternative has not been buried by the relentless advance of the first.
We have tried to show in this preface that the concept of capitalist decadence is by no means 'foreign' to the authentic workers' movement in Russia; like the notion of communism itself, it is now the task of the new generation of revolutionaries in Russia to rescue the theory from its Stalinist kidnappers and thus to help return it to the working class in Russia and the rest of the world.
International Communist Current, February 2001
First of all, we want to salute the seriousness of this text, the efforts of the Marxist Labour Party to translate it and circulate it internationally, and the invitation to other proletarian organisations to comment on it. The nature of the October revolution, and of the Stalinist regime which arose out of its defeat, has always been a crucial issue for revolutionaries; and it is a problem which can only be approached by using the Marxist method. As the title of the text suggests, this is an attempt to uncover the "Marxist anatomy" of the October revolution, and it does so by referring to and seeking to elaborate some of the classics of Marxism (Engels, Lenin, etc). As we shall see, there are a number of points in the text with which we agree, and others which, although we do not agree with them, raise important points of debate. Nevertheless, we feel that the text does not succeed in its fundamental aim - to define the essential nature of the October revolution; and it is for this reason that we will focus mainly on our most important disagreements with the text.
It appears that the text is the product of a debate currently going on within the MLP. We do not know very much about the different points of view expressed within the debate, except that in the accompanying English translation of the preface to the MLP journal Marxist, there is talk of a division between 'Leninist' and 'non-Leninist' views of the Russian revolution - the text we are commenting on being a product of the latter current.
In the past the ICC has carried out a good deal of polemics with the 'councilist' view of the Russian revolution - the notion that it was essentially a belated bourgeois revolution and that the Bolsheviks were at best an expression of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, not the proletariat (see in particular our pamphlet 1917, start of the world revolution). The MLP text certainly bears a close resemblance to this point of view in a number of respects, in particular when it talks about the Russian revolution as a "dual revolution" - largely proletarian in the cities, but essentially dominated by the weight of the petty bourgeois peasantry, giving the formula that the October revolution "was not a socialist revolution. It was the apogee of the bourgeois-democratic pressure - the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, with a short term transition to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat". The language here is taken from the Bolshevik programme prior to Lenin's April theses; but the overall analysis of a "dual revolution" is strikingly similar to the thesis of the KAPD in the early 20s, which talked about a double revolution, proletarian in the cities, peasant/capitalist in the countryside, with the later increasingly dominating the former. Later on, the remnants of the German-Dutch left were to increasingly favour the notion of a purely bourgeois revolution in Russia; the idea of a dual revolution lived on largely through the contributions of the 'Bordigist' current.
At the same time, the MLP's approach bears little resemblance to councilism when it comes to their view of the Bolshevik party. While councilism concludes from the Russian experience that the party is by definition a bourgeois form, the MLP, as its name suggests, advocates it quite explicitly. The first point of its "basic statutes" argues that "The MLP is a party of the working class?the party sees its task in enlightenment and organisation of the workers for them to seize political and economic power, with the purpose of construction of a classless self-governed society". Neither does the MLP set itself as the retrospective judge of the Bolsheviks, ejecting them from the workers' movement because they were the victims of a defeated revolution: "What has been said is not at all an indictment of the Bolsheviks. They did what they had to do, under conditions of a backward peasant country - conditions which were aggravated by the defeat of the social revolution in the west".
This said, it seems to us that there is a crucial flaw at the heart of this text, reflecting councilist and even Menshevik theoretical weaknesses, and based on a failure to see the October revolution in its global, historical framework. Certainly there are plenty of references to the international dimension of October, particularly to the failure of the revolution in Europe as the key reason why the Soviet republic could only go towards the development of Russian capitalism. But it seems to us that, as with councilism and Menshevism, the basic analytical starting point is Russia, not the entire capitalist globe; and this is why the text makes a radically false comparison between 20th century Russia and 19th century France: "As history has shown, the completion of the entire cycle of bourgeois-democratic transformation in Russia took approximately as long as in France. There it was 1789-1871, and with us 1905-1991". By the same token Menshevism argued that Russia was still in the phase of the bourgeois revolution in 1905-1917; Trotsky's notion of the permanent revolution was already a considerable theoretical advance on this view, since it definitely began from the international context of the coming Russian revolution, while the old Bolshevik slogan of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" was essentially a half-way house between these two positions, and one that we think Lenin effectively abandoned in the April theses of 1917 (see the article on the 1905 mass strikes in International Review 90; the relevant section has been appended to this text). For us, the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are both the product of an historical and international evolution. Thus it's true that the era of bourgeois revolutions carried on in France through a good part of the 19th century; but this was because globally speaking capitalism was still in its expansive, ascendant phase. The epoch of the world proletarian revolution began in the early part of the 20th century because capitalism as a global system had entered its epoch of decline. And, as the comrades of Bilan insisted against both Stalinism and Trotskyism in the 1930s, the only possible point of departure for analysing the revolution in Russia is that of the international maturation of the social and economic contradictions of the capitalist system, and not the 'maturity' of each country taken separately. We quote at length from the first article in the important series on 'Problems of the period of transition', published in Bilan no 28, in 1936.
"At the beginning of this study we underlined the fact that although capitalism has powerfully developed the productive capacity of society, it has not succeeded in developing the conditions for an immediate passage to socialism. As Marx indicated, only the material conditions for resolving this problem exist "or are at least in the process of formation".
These restrictions apply even more strongly to each national unit in the world economy. All of them are historically ripe for socialism, but none of them are ripe in the sense of possessing all the material conditions needed for the building of an integral socialism. This is true whatever level of development they may have reached.
No nation on its own contains all the elements for a socialist society. The idea of national socialism is in diametrical opposition to the international nature of the imperialist economy, to the universal division of labour, and the global antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
It is a pure abstraction to see socialist society as a sum of complete socialist economies. The world-wide distribution of the productive forces (which is not an artificial product) makes it impossible both for the 'advanced' countries and for the 'backward' countries to complete the transition to socialism within their own borders. . The specific weight of each of the countries in the world economy is measured by the degree to which they are reciprocally dependent, not by how independent they might be. England, which is one of the most advanced sectors of capitalism, a country in which capitalism exists in an almost pure form, could not operate in isolation. Facts today show that, even when only partially cut off form the world market, the productive forces begin to break down. This is the case with the cotton and coal industries in England. In the U.S.A, the automobile industry can only go into decline if it is limited to the home market, no matter how vast the latter is. An isolated proletarian Germany would soon see its industrial apparatus breaking down, even if it initiated a huge expansion of consumption.
It is thus an abstraction to pose the question of countries being 'ripe' or 'unripe' for socialism, because on these terms you would have to say that neither the advanced countries nor the backward countries were mature enough.
The problem has to be posed in the light of the historical maturation of social antagonisms, which in turn results from the sharpening conflicts between the productive forces and the relations of production. To limit the question to the material factors at hand would be to take up the position of the theoreticians of the IInd International, of Kautsky and the German Socialists, who considered that because Russia was a backward economy dominated by a technically weak agrarian sector, it was not ripe for a proletarian revolution, but only for a bourgeois revolution. In this their conception was the same as that of the Russian Mensheviks. Otto Bauer declared that the proletarian state inevitably had to degenerate because of Russia's backwardness.
In the Russian Revolution Rosa Luxemburg remarked that, according to the conception of the social democrats, the Russian revolution ought to have stopped after the fall of the Tsarism.
'According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set its task the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian labour movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its further course, and all disorders it has suffered, are pictured as purely a result of this fateful error.'
The question as to whether Russia was or was not ripe for the proletarian revolution can't be answered by looking at the material conditions of its economy, but at the balance of class forces, which had been dramatically transformed by the international situation. The essential condition was the existence of a concentrated proletariat -despite the fact that it was a tiny minority in relation to the huge mass of peasant producers - whose consciousness expressed itself through a class party powerfully armed with revolutionary ideology and experience. We agree with Rosa Luxemburg that:
"The Russian proletariat has to be seen as the vanguard of the world proletariat, a vanguard whose movement is the expression of the development of social antagonisms on a world scale. What is happening in St Petersburg is the result of developments in Germany, England, and France. It is these development which will decide the outcome of the Russian revolution, which can only achieve its goal if it is the prologue to the revolution of the European proletariat."
...We repeat that the fundamental condition for the life of the proletarian revolution is its ability to link up on a world scale, and this consideration must determine the internal and external policies of the proletarian state. This is because, although the revolution has to begin on a national scale, it cannot remain indefinitely at that level, however large and wealthy that nation might be. Unless it links up with other national revolutions and becomes a world revolution it will be asphyxiated and will degenerate. This is why we consider it an error to base one's arguments on the national conditions of one country".
For Bilan - unlike for Trotsky for example, or indeed the councilist current - the epoch of bourgeois revolutions was over because capitalism, taken not country by country, but as an integral whole, had become 'ripe' for the proletarian revolution. The consequence of the MLP's approach, however is that the Stalinist era in the USSR ceases to be, along with such manifestations Nazism in Germany, a classical expression of the bourgeois counter-revolution and of capitalism's universal decay. Of course, the MLP is perfectly clear that the Stalinist regime in Russia (like all the others across the world) was in no sense a workers' state, but a form of state capitalism (1); nevertheless, if you see it as an expression of the bourgeois revolution it inevitably becomes a factor of historical progress, laying the ground for the industrialisation of Russia and thus for the eventual triumph of the proletariat. And even though in their "basic statutes" the MLP correctly point out that the bureaucratised Russian soviet state "destroyed the Bolsheviks as the political party which had arisen in 1903", the 'Anatomy' text gives the impression of a real continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism. "Although even their most immediate goal - a socialist society free of commodity relations - was not accessible, the Bolsheviks achieved, in the end, a great deal. For 70 years Russia (USSR) experienced a significant leap in productive power". But, again applying the method used by the Italian left in the 30s, the criterion for judging whether Stalinism was playing a progressive role laid not in calculating the figures for economic growth under the five year plans, but in analysing its role as a profoundly counter-revolutionary factor on a world scale; on this level, it was evident that Stalinism was a reactionary phenomenon par excellence. At the same time, the Italian left - even while not fully grasping the capitalist nature of the Stalinist state - was perfectly well aware that the "formidable economic development of the USSR" was inseparable from the cultivation of a war economy in view of the approaching imperialist carve-up, and that this "development" - which was taking place in all the major capitalist countries at the time - was in turn the clearest expressions that capitalism as a whole was an obsolete mode of production on a world scale.
The problem of the Soviet state
In locating the capitalist development of USSR in conditions particular to Russia, the MLP, like the councilists, tend to deprive later generations of revolutionaries from drawing the vitally important lessons of the Russian experience. If what the Bolsheviks did in Russia was determined above all by the unavoidable necessity for Russia to develop along capitalist lines, to pass through a kind of belated bourgeois revolution, there is little point in criticising the errors made by the Bolsheviks with regard to the Soviet state, the mass organs of the working class, the economy and so on, since the weakening of the dictatorship of the proletariat was simply a result of objective circumstances beyond anyone's control. This is very different from the approach of the Italian left, which devoted a whole series of studies to learning what the Russian experience can teach us about the policies needed by any future proletarian power. The pity of it is that in an area considered absolutely crucial by the Italian left - the problem of the transitional state - the MLP have some important insights. They note, in particular, the importance of the fact that the specific organs of the proletariat were merged into the general apparatus of the Soviet state: "The case was like this: On the 13th January 1918, the 3rd Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies merged with the 3rd Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, Towards March the merger extended to the localities. In this way the proletariat, whose political dominion should have guaranteed the socialist transformation, and under pressure of the Bolsheviks, shared power with the peasantry". They also point out that the soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies already had a very strong peasant influence because of the social composition of the army. Furthermore, "an even more important circumstance was the fact that instead of strengthening the system of authentic workers' organisations - the factory committees - the Bolsheviks on the contrary contributed to its dissolution" by compelling them to merge into the state-controlled trade unions.
These were indeed important developments; but for us the lesson to be drawn from them is that, while in any revolutionary situation, there will be a necessity for the mass of non-exploiting strata to be organised in the transitional state, the working class can by no means submerge its own authentic organs - the workers' councils, factory committees, etc - into these general territorial bodies. In other words, the proletariat must maintain its autonomy towards the transitional state, controlling it but not identifying with it. And we must emphasise that this is not a problem specific to a country like Russia as it was in 1917, but concerns the entire world working class, which to this day does not constitute a majority of humanity. But instead of developing our understanding of how proletarian self-organisation was weakened by being subordinated to the transitional state, the MLP gets us lost in its rather ponderous theorisations about the passage from "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat to the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in 1919, and finally the subordination of the latter to a purely capitalist regime after 1921" - an experience that is presumably to be unique in history and thus carrying no lessons for the future practise of the proletarian movement.
Let us be clear: we have never argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia could have been saved by organisational guarantees, still less that it could have gone on to create a socialist society in Russia. Given the isolation of the Russian revolution, its degeneration and defeat was indeed inevitable. But this does not obviate the need to learn as much from its successes and failures as we can, because we have no other comparable experience in the history of the working class.
This leads us on to another question: the absence of communist economic measures taken by the Bolsheviks. As we understand the MLP's thesis, the revolution did not establish a "socialist dictatorship" but a purely political "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat"; and the text, although a little ambiguous about the nature of the measures taken under the heading of war communism, points out that, in essence, there was no abolition of commodity relations after the October revolution. But the implication here is that had the proletariat established a really socialist dictatorship, with no trace of power-sharing, through soviets of factory committees, then it would have been possible to introduce really socialist economic measures. But here again the comrades seem to forget not only the international dimension of the revolution, but also the very nature of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution can only commence as a political revolution, irrespective of the level of capitalist development in the country where it begins; this is because, as an exploited, propertyless class, the working class only has the lever of political power (which in turn expresses its consciousness and self-organisation) to introduce the social measures needed to move towards a communist order. Within a particular country, the proletarian revolution will certainly be compelled to take urgent economic measures to ensure its own survival. But it would a fatal illusion to think that capitalist relations can really be done away with in the confines of a single national economy. As the long quote from Bilan has already demonstrated, capitalism, as global relationship, can only be dismantled by the international dictatorship of the proletariat. Until the latter has been achieved through a more or less long phase of civil war, the proletariat cannot really begin to develop a communist social form. In this sense, the fundamental tragedy of the Russian revolution does not lie in any "restoration" of capitalist relations, since the latter never disappeared in the first place; it lies in the process whereby the working class took political power and then lost it; above all, it lies in the fact that this loss of power was disguised by a process of internal degeneration in which many of the old names were retained, while the essential content was utterly changed.
We will conclude by saying that the wider tragedy of the 20th century - the horrors of fascism and Stalinism, the whole devastating succession of wars and massacres - resides in the defeat of the world proletarian revolutionary wave of 1917-23 - the defeat of the hope offered by the October revolution. Humanity has paid a terrible price for that defeat, and continues to pay it today in a 21st century where the slide into barbarism is perhaps more evident than it has ever been before. The world-wide communist transformation of society was a material possibility in 1917, which is why we think the Bolsheviks were absolutely justified in calling for the Russian proletariat to take its first step.
CDW
(1) We will leave aside here the MLP's rather confusing use of the term "state socialism" to describe the Stalinist system, since it appears to all intents and purposes that this is just another term for state capitalism.
We are publishing here the introduction to the Russian edition of the ICC's pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, which has recently appeared thanks to the efforts of comrades in the newly emerging proletarian milieu in Russia. Our introduction focuses on the specific contribution of the workers' movement in Russia to our understanding of capitalism's decline. This is particularly apt because we have found that the concept or definition of capitalist decadence has been a major issue in our discussions with the various groups and individuals who make up the Russian milieu.
As we have explained in a number of texts, we consider that the notion that all hitherto existing forms of class society have been through epochs of ascent and decay is absolutely fundamental to the materialist conception of history. As Marx put it in his famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, at a given stage of its development, a mode of production enters an epoch of social revolution when its social-economic relations turn from forms of development into fetters on further progress. And we adhere to the conclusion of the Communist International, and the German and Italian Left fractions, that for capitalism the epoch of its "inner disintegration", of imperialist wars and proletarian revolutions, was inaugurated by the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 and fully confirmed by the great international revolutionary wave which arose in opposition to the imperialist war.
It's true that not all the historical currents of the communist left have continued this tradition. Both the Bordigist and councilist offspring of the Italian and German-Dutch lefts respectively have put the concept of decadence into question, both in their own ways arguing that capitalism could still undergo a youthful development in the former colonial regions, or that since the crises of capitalism remain cyclical in nature, there is perhaps a difference in quantity, but not in quality, between the upheavals these crises brought about in the period prior to 1914, and the catastrophes provoked in the ensuing period. We will find that such views appear to have a considerable influence on the new groups in Russia. Nevertheless, we would argue that these positions represent a regression in clarity, and that the groups who most faithfully continue the programmatic advances of the communist left have based their positions on the recognition that capitalism is a system in decay.
The intimate connection between historical materialism and the theory of decadence is also implicitly recognised in the ideological offensive against marxism which capitalism has been mounting since the collapse of the eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s. This offensive has been conducted largely through the campaign about "globalisation". According to this (admittedly vague and ambiguous) idea, capitalism only became a truly global system with the advent of the Reaganite "free trade" policies of the 80s, with the rapid increase in global communication brought about by the triumph of the microchip, and above all with the collapse of the eastern bloc which supposedly removed the last "non-capitalist" regions from the planet's economic topography. Those who adhere to this idea may praise or condemn the effects of globalisation, but at its heart is the belief that capitalism has entered a new epoch, a new kind of ascendancy, which belies the old fashioned marxist theory of capitalism as a system in decline. It is an outlook particularly antagonistic to that tradition within the communist left which draws its analyses from the theories of Luxemburg and Bukharin, who at the time of the first world war were arguing that capitalism was entering its period of decline precisely because it had become a global system, a veritable world economy. It is in equally stark contrast to the ICC's analysis of the period opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc, which we have characterised not as a new phase of capitalist ascent but as the final and most dangerous phase of its decline -the phase of decomposition, in which the alternative between socialism and barbarism is more and more becoming a daily reality.
Alongside this more general ideological assault, conducted by a host of ideologues from right wing 'neo-liberals' to the more radical-sounding gurus of the "anti-globalisation" protests, the theory of decadence has been under attack from a myriad of groups who claim to be advocates of communism, but who either inhabit the murky swamp between the left wing of capital and the proletarian milieu, or belong to the area of political parasitism. We already noted this phenomenon in the late 80s, prompting us to publish a series of articles under the heading 'Understanding the decadence of capitalism'. Here we responded in particular to the innovations and inventions of parasitic groups such as the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, Internationalist Perspectives, and others. These were groups who had arisen from splits within the ICC; and although there were other reasons behind the splits, it was noticeable that in the theoretical revisions these groups embarked upon in order to establish their political distance from the ICC, the theory of decadence was one of the first to be ditched - openly in the case of the GCI which adopted a semi-Bordigist method, and more insidiously with Internationalist Perspective, who first began to dilute and confuse the notion of decadence with learned expositions about the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital, and then turned on the heritage of the communist left by accusing its theory of decadence of being essentially mechanistic and "productionist". In the mid-90s, the "Paris Social Circle", also made up of elements who had left the ICC and fallen into parasitism, went in exactly the same direction. Its protagonists had begun by calling into question the ICC's conception of decomposition; it didn't take them very long to conclude that the real theoretical issue wasn't decomposition but decadence. And the latest addition to the parasitic pantheon - the "Internal Fraction of the ICC" - appears to be hurrying along the same road, since it is already openly scornful of the concept of decomposition.
These parasitic groups function as the direct conduit of the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns into the proletarian milieu. The success of these campaigns can be judged precisely by the number of former communists who have fallen for the propaganda about the bright new prospects for capitalism's growth. But lest it should be thought that the ICC alone has suffered from the pressure of the dominant ideology in this area, consider the case of the IBRP, which has almost uncritically integrated the notion of globalisation into its theoretical framework, while simultaneously downgrading the importance of decadence. In a text published on the IBRP website 'Reflections on the crises in the ICC', there is a similar logic to that of some of the ex-ICC 'thinkers': not only is decomposition a false idea, the concept of decadence doesn't explain that much either: "Let's go back to the founding concept of decadence. Let's stress that it only has a meaning if you are referring to the general state of society; it has no meaning when you are referring to the mode of production's capacity to survive. In other words, we can only talk about decadence if you understand by that a presumed growing inability of capitalism to proceed from one cycle of accumulation to another. We can also consider as a phenomenon of 'decadence' the shortening of the ascending phases of accumulation, but the experience of the last cycle shows that this brevity of the ascending phase doesn't necessarily mean the acceleration of the complete cycle of accumulation/crisis/war/new accumulation. What role then does the concept of decadence play at the level of the militant critique of political economy, i.e. of the profound analysis of the phenomena and dynamics of capitalism in the period we are living through? None. To the point where the word itself never appears in the three volumes which compose Capital".
This passage is somewhat buried in a text which hasn't appeared in any of the IBRP's journals, but it is the clearest expression yet of a definite tendency in the IBRP's thinking over the last few years. We have come a long way indeed from the times when the comrades of the CWO argued that the concept of decadence was the cornerstone of their political positions. We shall have occasion to return to this passage and its implications.
The Russian milieu and the concept of capitalist decadence
Given that the more 'established' groups of the communist left in the west have been subjected to such extreme pressures, it is hardly surprising that the concept of decadence should cause so many difficulties for the groups of the newly-emerging milieu in Russia, where the tradition of the communist left has been almost completely obliterated by the direct presence of the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The ICC has already published a good deal of its correspondence with the individuals and groups in this milieu, and a large part of it has been devoted to the question of decadence. Thus, in IR 101 we published an article 'Proletarian Revolution: the agenda of history since the beginning of the 20th century'. This was our answer to correspondence from comrade S in Moldovia, a member of the Revolutionary Proletarian Collectivist Group, which has now merged with another group to form the Communist Marxist Leninist Party. The principles of the RPCG, which we understand have been adopted by the new group, do define capitalism as a decadent system, but appear to date the onset of this decadence very late in the 20th century, since they argue that communism has not been a material possibility since the global development of microprocessors. Similarly, while their principles argue for the "negation of slogan 'right of nations to self-determination', which lost any progressive character in modern epoch of decline and decadence of capitalist society" and the "recognition of the imperialist character of all 'inter-national' conflicts in the modern epoch of the decadence of capitalism", it remains unclear at what point national conflicts lost their progressive character [1]; and even today it appears possible for the proletariat to support certain national movements: "support for movements of petty bourgeois and semi-proletarian classes of oppressed nations, movements which appear under slogans of 'national liberation', only to the degree that such movements are uncontrolled by the exploiting classes and objectively undermine all (including their own national) exploiters' statehood".
Such arguments seem to demonstrate the difficulty of the Russian groups in breaking with Lenin's argument that supporting national liberation movements is a way of opposing your own national bourgeoisie (above all when that national bourgeoisie has a long history of oppressing other national groupings, as in the case of the Tsarist empire). These "Leninist" sentiments are even echoed by the comrades of the Southern Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party, who loudly profess their non-Leninism but who don't hesitate to side with Lenin on this key question: "You have doubtless remarked how little Leninist we are. Nonetheless, we think that Lenin's position was the best on this question. Each nation (attention! Nation not nationality or national or ethnic group. etc?) has a complete right to self-determination within the framework of its ethnico-historic territory, to the point of separation and creation of an independent state" This passage is cited in our article 'The vital role of the left fractions in the marxist tradition' in IR 104, which also responds to many of the MLP's arguments. Similarly, these comrades seem unable to go beyond certain of Lenin's formulations which define the Russian revolution as a dual revolution, part socialist and part bourgeois democratic. They expound this view in a long text translated into English 'The marxist anatomy of October'. The ICC has written a reply to this contribution (see our website?). Our response leans heavily on the arguments of Bilan, which stress that since capitalism must be analysed as a global and historic system, the conditions for the proletarian revolution must necessarily arise internationally in the same period of history, so that it makes no sense to talk about the proletarian revolution being on the agenda in some countries while some hybrid or even bourgeois revolutions are on the agenda in others.
More recently we have published in World Revolution 254 the platform of another new group, the International Communist Union, based in Kirov. In our comments which welcome the appearance of this group, we noted that the ICU's platform appears to be ambiguous, at best, on the problem of decadence and of national struggles, and their reply to our comments have confirmed this assessment. Since we have not replied publicly to this letter, we will begin that task here by presenting the ICU's arguments to the best of our ability. Because of problems of language, it is not always easy for us to follow the argumentation of the ICU comrades. But based on their letter of 20.2.02, we think that they make six key points in reply to our comments:
We want to reply to these arguments in depth, and so will return to them in a subsequent article. It will, however, be apparent that whatever differences there may be between the various groups of the Russian milieu, the arguments they put forward are very similar. We thus think that the reply to the ICU should be seen as contribution to the whole of this milieu, as well as to the international debates about the perspectives for world capitalism.
CDW
1. In the article we published in International Review 104, we cite the following passage from comrade S, which appears to confirm that for his group, capitalist decadence, and thus the end of any progressive function for national movements, begins at the end of the 20th century: "Concerning your pamphlet Nation or Class. We agree with your conclusions, but don't agree with part of the motivation and historical analysis. We agree that today, at the end of the 20th century, the slogan the right of nations to self-determination has lost any revolutionary character. It is a bourgeois-democratic slogan. When the epoch of bourgeois revolutions is closed this slogan too is closed for proletarian revolutionaries. But we think that the epoch of bourgeois revolutions closed at the end of the 20th century not at its beginning. In 1915 Lenin was generally correct against Luxemburg, in 1952 Bordiga was generally correct on this question against Damen, but today the situation is reversed. And we consider your position to be completely mistaken that different non-proletarian revolutionary movements of the third world, that had not an iota of socialism but were objectively revolutionary movements, were only tools of Moscow as you wrote about Vietnam for example, rather than objectively progressive bourgeois movements".
The text which we are publishing below is the complete version of a text from the Marxist Labour Party in Russia, excerpts of which have been published in the print edition of the International Review. Our reply can be read here [10].ICC
After decades of Soviet power, we have been accustomed to call the great October a socialist revolution. But much of those things to which we have become accustomed have now disappeared. What is the fate, under such circumstances of the "titles" of the October revolution?
Classical scientific Marxism asserts that the first act of the social revolution of the proletariat will be the take over by the proletarian class itself of the political power in the society. According to Marx, capitalism is separated from communism by a period of revolutionary transformation. This period cannot be anything other than a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Consequently, if we see no such class dictatorship, then of course it is inappropriate to speak of overcoming capitalist relations. Moreover, the strongly entrenched appellations and official signboards signify nothing. They may be simple errors (whether well or ill intended). Marx was himself convinced that neither epochs nor persons can be judged on the basis of how regard themselves. Each of us is already sufficiently convinced: membership in a party which calls itself communist does not signify communist conviction, as a nostalgia for the Red Flag over administrative buildings in no way testifies to the yearning for a new social relationship between people.
Russia, as is well known, is a country "with an unpredictable past" That's possibly why there is no single opinion now, when the proletarian dictatorship perished in Russia, or whether it existed at all. In our view, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia did exist. But, firstly, it was not the dictatorship of the proletariat in "the pure aspect", that is, not a socialist dictatorship of the proletariat involving a single class, but a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat", that is a union of the workers in the minority and of the poor peasants in the majority. Secondly, the span of its life was limited to a few months.
The case was like this: On the 13th (26th) January 1918, the 3rd Russian congress of Soviets of peasant deputies merged with the 3rd congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Towards March the merger extended to the localities. In this way, the proletariat, whose political dominion should have guaranteed the socialist transformation, and under pressure of the Bolsheviks, shared power with the peasantry.
The Russian peasantry itself in 1917 was not, as is well known, socially homogenous. A significant part of it, 'kulaks' [rich land-owning peasants-exploiters, partly or even completely outside the still remaining village community, comparable to English yeomanry, - translator's comment] and "middlers"[medium peasantry, those who seldom or never hired themselves out elsewhere for keeping their own farm afloat, - the so-called ' thrifty managers' not exploiting other community villagers - translator's comment] more and more were oriented in their economies towards the demands of the market. The 'middlers', in this way, became petty bourgeois, and the kulaks often engaged in an outright contractual economy, hiring labour - the 'batraks' - and exploiting them, that is, they were already the village bourgeoisie. The institution of the traditional peasant community in most localities was formally preserved, but it was more beneficial not to the middlers, and less so to the kulaks - "the blood suckers", the commune benefited the mass of the poor peasants, which constituted over 60% of the peasantry as a whole. The laws of capitalist development however, transformed many of the poor peasants into semi-proletarians. There were also in the village real proletarians - rural labourers who did not join the community and hired out to the landlords and kulaks along with the poor peasants.
Thus itself the merger of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies with the general peasant Soviets indicated the abandonment of "the pure dictatorship of the proletariat". However, the "purity", even to this extent was very much conditional. The Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies consisted not only of workers. The soldiers were fundamentally - up to 60% - former peasants: poor and middle peasants dressed in overcoats and armed by the Tsarist government. Factory workers among the soldiers constituted less than 10%.
The general arming of the people, and not solely of the advanced class, the proletariat, the merging of the two types of Soviets, and even the two-party coalition of the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs ('Socialist Revolutionaries') factually indicate the transition to the so-called "old Bolshevik formula" - the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. But this form of power was a step back, compared to what arose after the overthrow by the October revolution. At that time, as is known, power passed over to the 2nd congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, that is, in fact the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat" was introduced, although Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, also spoke of "the workers' and peasants' revolution" (PSS, vol. 35, p.2) and "the transition of local power to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' deputies" (op. cit., p. 11).
So the first experiment of establishing "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat" was limited to the period of October 1917 to January/February 1918, and in addition a steady retreat occurred from the positions achieved by the working class in October to November. After that time, which is called "the triumphal procession of Soviet Power" by soviet historians, not only the merger of the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets with the Peasant Soviets occurred. An even more important circumstance was the fact that instead of strengthening and developing the system of authentic workers' organizations - the factory committees, the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, contributed to its dissolution. But just the factory committees were able to become the authentic basis of Soviet power, if we understand it in the perspective of real socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. In other words, exactly the Soviets of Factory Committees ought to have ruled over the country. Instead of this in January/February 1918 at the first Russian congress of trade unions and the 6th conference of the Factory Committees of Petrograd, a decision was accepted on the initiative of the Bolsheviks on the merger of the Factory Committees and the Unions. The unions themselves were put under the control of the party-state apparatus which had been formed. Membership in the unions was obligatory for all workers, not only in the enterprises, but also in the institutions. The working class, however, opposed such state policy and the Soviet Authorities only managed to eliminate the autonomous factory committees in the beginning of 1919.
The merger of the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets with the Peasant Soviets, and the factory committees with the trade unions under statification were not the only things that washed away the proletarian constituent of the Soviet structure. Thus, in the course of the Civil war the Bolsheviks rejected their prior ideas held before October to create Soviets of agricultural labour, independent of the Peasant Soviets - these would have been organs of rural proletarian power. Soviet farms were created on the lands of the former estate holders, but Soviets of agricultural labourers, were not. But then again in March of 1919 trade unions of agricultural labourers were organized.
These and many other facts tell us that the Great October was in fact not a socialist revolution, as the Bolsheviks suggested, but merely the second, culminating stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, one of the fundamental goals of which was the settlement of the land question in favour of the Peasantry. Despite all of the activity of the working class and the proletarian political revolution in the capitals, the socialist revolution in October 1917 in capitalistically backward Russia never occurred. Karl Marx foresaw the possibility of such a situation in 1847. He wrote: "Therefore, if the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will be merely a short-lived one, will be merely an auxiliary moment in the bourgeois revolution itself, as was the case in 1794 (In France, ed), until in the course of history, in its "movement", the material conditions are again created, which necessitate the elimination of bourgeois means of production?" (K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian ed., v. 4, pp. 298-299). At that, "a revolution with political soul, in conformity with the limited and bifid nature of this soul, organizes a dominating stratum in the society at the expense of the society itself", - he warned, for "socialism cannot be realized without a revolution. It is in need of this political act since it is in need of abolition and destruction of the past. But where its organizing activity begins, where its end-in-itself, its soul comes forward, there socialism throws off its political envelope (op. cit. v. 1, p. 447-448 [written in July 1844]). It goes without saying that the Bolsheviks did not have "throwing politics off" in mind either under Lenin or after him.
However, V. I. Lenin himself declared in 1920: "The basic conditions complicating and slowing the struggle of the proletariat, which was victorious over the bourgeois, against the big peasantry in Russia, come in the main to the fact that the Russian revolution after the overthrow of 25 October 1917 passed through a 'general democratic' stage, that is, in its basis, through the bourgeois-democratic one - the struggle of the whole peasantry against the landholders; then - to the fact of cultural and numerical feebleness of the urban proletariat; and finally - to the fact of enormous distances and extremely bad ways of communication" (V. I. Lenin, Complete Collected Works, Russian edition, v. 41, p.176). In 1921 after the victory of the Reds in the Civil War and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the leader of the Bolsheviks, who suggested: "we have taken the bourgeois-democratic revolution to it's conclusion, as no one else has", none the less suffered a slip of the tongue and said: "We completely intend to drive ahead firmly and steadfastly, to the socialist revolution, knowing that it is not separated by a Chinese wall from the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and knowing that only the struggle will decide, to what extent we will succeed (in the final analysis) in moving forward, what part of our vast high goals we will complete, which part of our victory we will consolidate. We shall see what we shall see" (op. cit. v. 44, p. 144-145).
Not until the summer of 1918, after severing the coalition with the left SRs, did the Bolsheviks decide "to carry the proletarian revolution into the countryside". With the aim of assisting in the installation "of the food dictatorship" and the organization of surplus appropriation, "committees of the poor" were established on a widespread basis, which included the rural proletarians and semi-proletarians, as well as the small owners. With this the Bolsheviks hoped to achieve the neutrality of the middle peasantry as regards deploying the class struggle in the countryside.
Such was the second (and last) attempt to establish "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat". But development again set off on a descending line. In that time, when the activity of the Factory Committees was curtailed, and the real power moved from the Soviets to their executive committees and revolutionary committees, as well as committees of the RKP(b) (Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)), at various levels, in the village the attempt was made to act simultaneously through the Peasant Soviets and the poor committees. The poor committees, however, irritated the middlers. The policy of neutralization of the middle peasantry, especially in view of their constant growth, seemed at risk. The movement of the middle peasantry to the side of the Whites in the Civil War would be equivalent to defeat for the Bolsheviks. All of this became so obvious, that on 8 November 1918 Lenin, speaking at a conference of delegates of the poor committees of the central provinces, publicly declared: "The Central Committee of our party developed a plan for the transformation of the poor committees, which is being sent for approval to the sixth congress of Soviets. We resolved that the poor committees and the Soviets in the countryside should not exist in separation. Otherwise, there will be squabbles and unnecessary discussion. We are merging the poor committees with the Soviets, and we are doing this so that the poor committees will become Soviets." (Lenin, op. cit., v. 37, pp. 180-181). The last promise was not kept. The policy of "neutralization of the middle peasantry" was followed by "the stable alliance with it", and then by the New Economic Policy, with its return to market relations.
In this way, towards the beginning of 1919, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Soviet Russia, even in its undeveloped "democratic" aspect, suffered defeat. The factory committees and poor committees were abolished, the socialist perspective of the October revolution within the country was finally lost. After 6 months, the proletarian revolution in Europe also suffered defeat. The country in essence turned back to the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. However it was a short-lived existence, as the real power was no longer in the deputies of the Worker-Peasant Soviets, but in their executive committees and the committees of the RKP(b). The Soviets were more and more separated from the workers' collectives, and in the Soviet apparatus bureaucratic tendencies began to grow. The Bolsheviks, with absolute sincerity, called on the masses, and on themselves, to fight these tendencies. This process went so far that Lenin, speaking at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on November 13th, 1922, was obliged to confirm: "We adopted the old State apparatus, and this was our misfortune. The state apparatus quite frequently works against us. The fact is that in 1917, after we took power, the state apparatus sabotaged us. We were then very afraid and asked: "Please, return to us." They returned, and this was our misfortune. We have now a great mass of employees, but we do not have sufficiently educated forces, in order to really have them under our control. In fact it very often happens that here, at the top, where we have state power, the apparatus functions in a fashion, while below they wilfully manage themselves, and manage themselves in such a way that they often work against our measures. Above we have, I don't know how many, but I believe in any case, just some thousands, at a maximum some tens of thousands of our own. But below, hundreds of thousands of old officials, whom we received from the Tsar and the old bourgeois society, who work sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly against us" (Lenin, op. cit., v. 45, p. 290).
The introduction of the NEP in 1921 in turn was the logical end of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry: the petty bourgeois peasantry accomplished their market goals, the industrial proletariat at that time completely lost their organizational autonomy (especially after the introduction of one man management in the factories by the Bolsheviks), and besides it was already "thanks to the war and the desperate impoverishment and ruin, déclassé, that is, they lost their connection to their class." (V. I. Lenin, op. cit., v. 44, p.161). The NEP itself indicated, in the words of Lenin, "a movement to the restoration of capitalism to a significant degree" (op. cit., pp. 158-160). "If capitalism is restored, then the proletariat as a class is restored, engaged in the production of commodities", Lenin wrote (op. cit., p. 161). In addition, he declared that "to the extent that great industry was ruined, to that extent the factories stopped and the proletariat disappeared. It was sometimes accounted for, but it was not bound to economic roots." The leader of the Bolsheviks all the same oriented his comrades-in-arms to the position that "the proletarian state power is able, leaning on the peasantry, to hold the capitalists in check and to direct capitalism in the state's course, creating a capitalism subject to the state, and serving it" (op. cit., p.161). Here is clearly visible the specifics of Leninism, which demanded, starting with the April Theses, "not only considerations of class, but also of institutions" (op. cit. p. 31, p.123).
Thus, if there is any sense to call Soviet Russia "a workers' state", it's true only for the few months of its existence, and even then it is conditional! After all this, is it at all surprising that the development of the USSR ended with the restoration of classic bourgeois relations with private property, the new Russian" bourgeoisie, harsh exploitation and massive poverty?
What has been said is not at all an indictment of the Bolsheviks. They did what they had to do, under conditions of a backward peasant country -- conditions which were aggravated by the defeat of the social revolution in the West. But without this revolution even the Bolsheviks under Lenin did not think of the construction of socialism in Russia. Although even their most immediate goal - a socialist society free of commodity relations - was not accessible, the Bolsheviks achieved, in the end, a great deal. For 70 Soviet years Russia (USSR) experienced a significant leap in productive power. But why call this socialism? Industrialization, supplanting small production (in the city, and especially, in the countryside) with large commodity production, improvement of the cultural level of the masses, all these are processes of the development of bourgeois society. We do not call France socialist just because many factories have been built in the country and the "socialist party" governs! On the contrary, socialism implies, presupposes the strongly developed industrial society, as well as the power of the class of workers. That such a society was only in process of creation in Russia - USSR, excluding the working class from power, indicates how far the country was from socialism.
The changes in the system of Soviets, of course, were not accidental, nor were they the exclusive consequence of some error. The fact that the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat was not implemented in Russia, but rather a "democratic" dictatorship, which suffered defeat, was determined by the very nature of the October Revolution. But the character of a revolution, as it turns out, can be dual.
In 1910 the leader of the Bolsheviks V. I. Lenin spoke about the understanding of "the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution": "If we take it in the broad sense we understand by it the solution of objective historical goals of the bourgeois revolution, the "completion" of it, that is the elimination of the very basis that permits the birth of the bourgeois revolution, the completion of the entire cycle of bourgeois revolutions. In this sense, for instance, the bourgeois democratic revolution in France was completed only in 1871, but begun in 1789.
If we use the word in its narrow sense, it means a separate revolution, one of the bourgeois revolutions, one of the "waves", if you will, which beats the old regime, but does not finish it off, does not eliminate the basis for subsequent bourgeois revolutions. In this sense, the revolution of 1789 in France was "completed", we may say, in 1794, but in no way did it eliminate thereby the basis of the revolutions of the years 1830, 1848." (V .I. Lenin, PSS, v.19, pp. 246-247).
It was the overt bourgeois-democratic character of the transformation becoming unavoidable that made the leader of the Bolsheviks to put the question about a "broad" or "narrow" revolution. Would the Russian revolution be able to brush off all relics of feudalism, to complete the program of the "broad" revolution, to become the finishing "wave", or will other waves follow this one? Lenin constantly asked himself the question: "Was our fate a revolution of the 1789 type or the type of 1848 or the type of 1871?" (PSS, v. 9., p380; v.47, p.223, p.226) He often compared the revolutionary events in Russia with the French revolution of 1848, with the revolution of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871, as well as with the Great French revolution. He did this in 1917 too. His general leitmotiv was always the same: "Our cause... is to push the bourgeois revolution as far as possible." (PSS, v.9, p. 381) "...We are obligated", Lenin wrote, "to do our duty as leaders of the democratic, the "broad democratic" movement to the end, to the Russian 1871, to the complete turning of the peasantry to the side of "the Party of Order"... We will demand all in the sense of "democratic pressure": if we succeed we will receive everything, if we fail - a part." (PSS, v. 47, pp. 224-225).
In September of 1917 V. I. Lenin indicated that the revolution of 1848 "was most like our current one" (PSS, v. 34 p.124). With that he stressed one more aspect of the duality of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary process, which characterized France and Russia. Here is what Engels wrote in 1891 and 1895: "thanks to the economic and political development of France from 1789, there developed in Paris in the last 15 years such a situation, whereby every revolution that broke out could not help but assume a proletarian character, namely: having paid for the victory with their own blood, the proletariat advanced its own demands. These demands? in the end were reduced to the destruction of the class contradictions between the capitalists and the workers. How this is to occur, this, it is true, they didn't know" (K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian Ed., v. 22, p.190.) The discussion however was also about "the realization of the most authentic interests of the great majority", which "must soon become sufficiently clear to them in the course of their practical reality, as a result of the convincingly obvious nature of this reality." (Marx, Engels, op. cit. v. 22, p.535). And here, by the way, Engels writes as if to warn future generations of revolutionary Marxists of one serious error, which they and Marx made in those years: "...towards spring of 1850 the development of the bourgeois republic, which arose from the "social" revolution of 1848, led to the situation were the actual rule was concentrated in the hands of the great bourgeois, with additional monarchist inclinations, with all other classes, the peasantry and the petty bourgeois, of the other hand, grouping themselves around the proletariat, so that with the joint victory and after it the deciding factor should haven't been them, but the proletariat, made wiser by experience. Was it impossible under these circumstances to entirely count on the revolution of the minority being transformed into the revolution of the majority?
History has shown that we, and all people thinking like us, were wrong. It has clearly shown that the state of economic development of the European continent at that time was not so mature, as to be able to eliminate the capitalist means of production. It proved this by the economic revolution which by 1848 had seized the entire continent, and which for the first time established heavy industry in France, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and recently, in Russia. Germany it changed outright into a first class industrial country, and all this on the capitalist basis, which thus in 1848 still possessed great capacity to expand." (ibid).
After the October Revolution, in April of 1918, Lenin wrote: "If we take the scale of the Western European revolutions, we stand close to the level achieved in 1793 and in 1871. We can be proud of legal rights which have been raised to that level, and in one relation doubtless went further, specifically: we decreed and introduced in all of Russia the highest type of state, the Soviet power. But we cannot be satisfied with what we have in any case achieved, since we have only begun the transition to socialism. We have not yet realized the deciding factor in this regard." (PSS, v. 36, p.175). The deciding factor for the Marxist is "the transition from the simplest goals of the subsequent expropriation of the capitalists to the much more complex and difficult task of the creation of conditions, under which the bourgeoisie can neither exist, nor be recreated." (Ibid). "It's clear, that this goal is immeasurably higher and that without its resolution socialism does not yet exist", stressed the leader of the Bolsheviks.
We should note that, in the opinion of the Bolsheviks, the Paris Commune featured in turn, not only a proletarian, but also a petty bourgeois, and partly even a nationalist character. (see the 7th Russian conference of the RSDRP(b), April 1917. Protocol, Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1958, p.15; V. I. Lenin, PSS, v.7, p. 270; v.8, pp. 486, 487, 490; v. 9, p. 329, v.20, pp. 218, 219; v. 26 p. 325).
The socialist potential of the first experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the world was evaluated paradoxically too. Thus in 1905 the future leader of the October revolution wrote about the Paris Commune: "...in history under the name of the Paris Commune such a workers government is known, which did not know how and could not differentiate the elements of the democratic and socialist revolution, which mixed the goals of the struggle for the republic with the goals of the struggle for socialism...and so on. In a word... this was such a government as ours should not be." (PSS, v. 11, p.70). In 1913 he remarked: "The Paris Commune (1871) finishes this development of bourgeois relations; the republic is only obliged to the heroism of the proletariat for its consolidation, that is that form of governmental organization in which class relations are presented in their plainest form." (PSS, v. 23, p.2). But in April of 1917 he clarified to Kamenev, who held the old Bolshevik position, that "The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in the introduction of socialism." (PSS, v.31, p.142).
But in relation to programmatic goals V. I. Lenin was strict and consistent. In 1905 he wrote in his concluding part to the report of A. V. Lunacharsky "The Paris Commune and the Goals of the Democratic Dictatorship": "This reference teaches us, first of all, that the participation of the representatives of the socialist proletariat together with the petty bourgeoisie in the revolutionary government is entirely permissible, and under certain circumstances, outright obligatory. This reference shows us, further, that the real goals which the Commune had to achieve, were first of all the realization of the democratic, not the socialist, dictatorship, the introduction of our "minimum program." Finally, this information reminds us, as we draw the lessons for ourselves from the Paris Commune, we must not imitate its errors. However, its practically successful steps mark the true path. We should not adopt the word "Commune" from the great fighters of 1871, nor blindly repeat every one of their slogans, but we should clearly select the programmatic and practical slogans that correspond to the situation in Russia, which are formulated in the words: the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." (PSS, v. 11, p. 132). In March of 1918 Lenin developed this thought at the 7th emergency congress of the PKP(b): "Now we must write the new program of the Soviet power in the place of the old, not at all distracted from the use of bourgeois parliamentarianism. To think that we cannot be pushed back, is utopianism.
One cannot historically deny that Russia created a Soviet republic. We say that with each push backward, we do not refuse to use bourgeois parliamentarianism. If hostile class forces drive us back on the old position, we will move to that which has been gained by experience, to the Soviet power, to the soviet type of state, the state of the type of the Paris Commune. This we must express in our program. Instead of the minimum program, we will introduce the program of Soviet power." (PSS. v. 26, p.54).
Despite the fact that the Soviet power was declared the "highest type of state, the direct continuation of the Paris Commune" (see V. I. Lenin, PSS, v. 36, p.110), the Bolsheviks were compelled in practice to retreat even from the principles of the Commune, for instance, agreeing to higher pay for bourgeois specialists and others (see op. cit., p. 179, 279).
Therefore, concerning the analogy of the Revolutionary process in France and Russia, Engels seems more correct, writing in 1885 in a letter to Vera Zassulich, the Russia "is nearing her 1789". "In a country, where the situation is so strained, where to such an extent the revolutionary elements have accumulated, where the economic situation of the enormous mass of the people becomes more intolerable from day to day, where all degrees of social development starting from the primitive community and ending with the present heavy industry and financial tops, where all these contradictions are violently restrained by a despotism which has no equal, a despotism which is more and more unbearable for the young who embody reason and the dignity of the nation - such a country should begin its 1789, and thereafter should not be low to follow with 1793", he stressed (K. Marx, F. Engels, Works, 2nd Russian ed., v. 36, p. 260, 263.)
An in fact, it was just in the events of the great French revolution that the Bolsheviks most often looked for the answers to Russian problems. When they came to power they even adopted the lexicon of the French revolutionaries of those times, for instance, the words: "commissar", "revolutionary tribunal", "enemy of the people", "food detachments". They sang the Marseillaise. All of this was because the Bolsheviks understood: Russia had to go through the purgatory of the radical bourgeois democratic revolution. This means they had to be as resolute and bold as were in their time the Jacobins in France. They, like the Jacobins, avenged themselves in the most radical way against absolutism and the relics of feudalism.
It's true, the Russian revolution went yet further - it completely avenged itself on the pre-Revolutionary bourgeois class. But this is by no means equivalent to the elimination of bourgeois relations, to the realization of an anti-commodity socialist revolution in the economy?
As to the socialist aspirations of the Bolsheviks, Engels foresaw such a possibility in the same letter to Vera Zassulich. "People who boasted about having made a revolution, were always convinced on another day that they did not know what they had done - the revolution they had made was not like the one they wanted to make. This is what Hegel called the irony of history, the irony which few historical personalities have avoided." (Marx and Engels, op. cit., v. 36, p.263). However, V. I. Lenin himself wrote in 1906 about the struggle for the socialist revolution in Russia, isolated and trapped in backwardness. "This struggle would be almost hopeless for the Russian proletariat alone, and its defeat would be just as unavoidable, as the defeat of the French proletariat in 1871, if the European socialist proletariat did not come to the aid of the Russian proletariat." (Lenin, PSS, v. 12, p.157). The matter is, of course, about "the socialist revolution in Europe" - "The European workers will show up 'how to do this', and then together with them we will make the socialist revolution." (ibid).
V. I. Lenin frequently called the October Revolution "the workers' and peasants' revolution", and he was undoubtedly correct in this. However the Great October, as already noted, was not a socialist revolution, it was the apogee of bourgeois-democratic pressure - the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry with a short-term transition to "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat." The anti-feudal transformation carried out by the Bolsheviks was not only in the workers interest, but also that of the broad peasant masses.
The October revolution itself, the victory of the Reds in the civil war, the suppression of numerous uprisings and mutinies were impossible without the support for the revolution by the common people - the basic mass of the toilers. What was the class composition of these toilers? From almost 140 million workers at the moment of the Revolution about 110 million were made up of the peasantry. Approximately 65% of the peasantry where poor peasants, the middle peasants were 20%, the kulaks were almost 15%. The urban petit bourgeois made up 8% of the population of the country. Proletarians were about 15 Million, just over 10% of the population, of whom industrial workers were only 3.5 million. (see 'Great October Socialist Revolution, Encyclopaedia', Moscow, "Soviet Encyclopaedia", 1977, pp. 276, 497). Therefore, it is not surprising that the revolution expressed a tone not so much proletarian, as that of the semi-proletarian and petty bourgeois masses. The leading role of the Proletarian Party did not save the situation. For this there is a completely Marxist explanation: the base determines the "superstructure", even such a "superstructure" as the RKP(b). Here is what V. I. Lenin himself wrote in 1917: "Russia is seething today. Millions and tens of millions? politically beaten by the awful whip of Tsarism and hard labour for the landowners and the factory owners, woke up and reached out for politics. But who are these millions and tens of millions? The greater part are small business owners, petit bourgeois, people who stand between the capitalists and the wage workers. Russia is the most petit bourgeois country of all European countries.
The gigantic petit bourgeois wave overwhelmed all, it suppressed the conscious proletariat not only by its numbers, but in ideas, i.e., it infected and held very broad circles in petit bourgeois views of politics." (PSS, v. 31, p.156).
The moving force of the October revolution was the workers and peasantry dressed in soldiers' uniforms and the proletariat held the hegemony under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. It seemed to the "New Bolsheviks" that with this act the socialist revolution itself began in Russia. However, later events demonstrated that the escalation of the political revolution of the proletariat beyond the boundaries of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary process (that is, "the revolution in the narrow sense"), did not occur. The attempts as the elimination of money, introduction of production on a communist basis, direct distribution of products, rule by direct order, these and other measures of "war communism" were said to be not worthwhile. The Bolsheviks did not succeed in the exchange of products between the city and the country. The petty bourgeois elements demanded markets, the law of value demanded mercantile relationships. These demands could only be quelled together with the petty bourgeois environment. But this environment made up the fundamental mass of the armed populace, the revolutionary army.
Turning next to V. I. Lenin, we should again note, that he had fewer illusions concerning the character of the October revolution than did other "new Bolsheviks." In the end of 1920 a discussion flared in the RKP(b) about the role and goals of the "reservoir of state power", the trade unions, in Soviet Russia. Once the workers have the state, from whom are the unions to protect the proletariat? Not from our own dear state? To this the leader of the Bolsheviks sensibly remarked: "Comrade Trotsky speaks of 'a workers' state'. Excuse me, this is an abstraction?It's not just workers, that's the thing. Here lies one of the fundamental errors of Comrade Trotsky. Our state is in fact not a workers', but a worker-peasant state. That's the first thing. And hence a great deal follows." "Our state is a workers' state", Lenin added, "with bureaucratic deformities." (PSS, v.42, pp. 207-208.) It's true that the leader of the Bolsheviks sought the way out of this in the following dialectic: "Our present state is such, that the universally organized proletariat has to defend itself, but we must use these workers' organisations for their defence from our state, and for the defence of our state by them. And this and other defence is actualized by the peculiar interlacing of our state measures and our agreement, our 'joint undertaking' with our trade unions...", Lenin explained, "The understanding of this 'joint undertaking' includes the necessity of knowing how to utilize measures of state power for defence of the material and spiritual interests of the universally united proletariat from state power" (op. cit. p. 209).
With the transition to the NEP, however, the Bolsheviks had to abandon this scheme as well. First of all, because of compulsory enrolment of all workers as members of the trade unions, and of the subsumption of the unions in the party, but principally from "every direct interference of the unions in the management of enterprises (see Lenin, PSS, v. 44, pp. 344-346). Complete power was finally concentrated "in the hands of factory management, regularly composed on the basis of a single manager", the trade unions were assigned a part of participating in the work of the economic and state organs - this role became "not direct, but by members promoted by the unions and confirmed by the party and the Soviet power to higher state institutions, by members of the economic collegiate, members of factory management (where collegial arrangements are permitted), administrators, their assistants, etc" and also "promotion and preparation of administrators from the workers and toiling masses in general", "the steadfast increase of discipline of labour and the cultural forms of struggle for it and the increase in productivity" with the help of the disciplinary courts, etc.(op. cit., p. 347). At the same time V. I. Lenin recognized, that "from all that is laid out above, results a series of contradictions among the different goals of the trade unions", but he explained them as "contradictions of the situation of the trade unions under the dictatorship of the proletariat" (!) and indicated that they were not accidental and were unavoidable over the course of several decades. To the extent "the indicated contradictions would provoke conflicts, disagreements, friction, etc. a higher instance, reliably authoritative is needed to immediately resolve them. Such instance is the Party and the international association of the Communist Parties of all countries, the Comintern." (ibid., p. 350). In the course of subsequent decades of Soviet power, the position of the trade unions in the county has in fact changed little. After the curtailment of the NEP the Stalinists again turned to the policy of universal membership in the trade unions, but the "authoritative instance" turned out in fact to be authoritarian, and bypassed the Comintern.
Although around the time of the introduction of the NEP V. I. Lenin had internally realized the non-proletarian nature of the Soviet power, his slogan, as we know, was: "to push the bourgeois revolution as far as possible." To push, in the hope of a quickly forthcoming social revolution of the European proletariat ('La Sociale', that is an authentically socialist revolution). This revolution would compensate for Russian backwardness, Lenin thought.
Simultaneously with the famous "Letter to the Congress" of 1922, the Bolshevik leader alerted his colleagues: "Our party relies [leans] on two classes, and because of this its instability and inevitable collapse are possible, if between these two classes consent can not be established" (PSS, v.45, p.344) "If we do not close our eyes to the reality, we must recognize that at the present time the proletarian policy of the party is determined not by its social composition, but by the immense wholehearted authority of that thinnest stratum, which we may call the "party Old Guard". Not a great internal struggle would be sufficient inside this stratum, and if its authority is not undermined, this stratum will be weakened in any case to the extent that the decision will not depend on it any longer", he wrote a little earlier (Ibid, p. 20).
For all of these reasons the leader of the Bolsheviks refused to publicly admit the non-proletarian nature of the society that arose out of the October revolution, and he even threatened any who publicly expressed these views with execution (see PSS, v. 45, pp. 89-90). This is that very Ulyanov-Lenin, who had himself written in 1905: "The complete revolution is the seizure of power by the proletariat and the poor peasantry. But these classes, when they come to power, cannot fail to seek the socialist revolution. Consequently, the seizure of power, which is from the first a step in the democratic revolution, will be led by the force of events, against the will, (and sometimes against the conscience) of the participants to the socialist revolution. And here the collapse is inevitable. But once the collapse of the experiment in socialist revolution is inevitable, then we, (as Marx in 1871, who foresaw the inevitable collapse in Paris) should advise the proletariat not to rise up, to wait, to organize, to step back in order to better leap forward" (PSS, v.9, p.382).
The Marxist prognoses of Lenin the theoretician (in distinction from his non-Marxist aspirations as a social Jacobin politician and practitioner) were fully justified. The RKP(b) experienced a bitter intra-party struggle and elimination of a significant portion of the old guard. As history has shown, the completion of the entire cycle of bourgeois-democratic transformation in Russia took approximately as long as in France. There it was 1789-1871, and with us 1905-1991. In addition, the similarity is surprising, down to the details. Lenin himself reminds us of Robespierre. He, like Robespierre in his time, repeatedly fought against the Left, for instance at the 10th Congress of the RKP(b) the "Workers' Opposition" was suppressed, which attempted to carry out one of the key positions of the new party program, that "the trade unions must come to factual concentration in their hands of the management of the entire economy, as a unified whole" (see V. I. Lenin, PSS, v. 38, p. 435).
The "Russian Robespierre" did not fall to the guillotine, but it is known that his wife N. K. Krupskaya suggested that Lenin could have been counted among the repressed in the years of the Stalin purges. After the death of the leader of the revolution, power in Soviet Russia, as in France in 1794, passed to a Thermidorian "Directorate" - to the more right(-wing) "NEPist communists", in the service of whom there were several former Mensheviks of pro-market inclination. The polemic which broke out around Trotsky's assessment of the Great October, testifies that the majority of the "new Thermidorians" in essence held "old Bolshevik" views?
When the NEP was replaced at the end of the 1920s, there arrived a Russian Soviet bureaucracy headed by I. V. Stalin, who embodied many features of Napoleon I and even to an extent of Napoleon II. The specific Russian Bonapartism (which has led many astray, up to the present day) consisted in the Soviet "Napoleon" bringing a limit to the development of the revolution, introducing a regime of "State Socialism" to the USSR. 'State Socialism' had been planned already in the 19th century by the saint-simonists, Rodbertus and others; it was a model of a society which Engels mercilessly criticized in the last years of his life. However, the fundamental characteristics of Bonapartism, described by Marx in the work 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx/Engels Works, v. 8 p. 115-217), can be seen in its special, Soviet variant. Here we have the cult of personality based on the "traditional faith of the people", and the "immense inner revolution" on its being discredited (op. cit. v.16, p. 376). Here is "the executive power and its immense bureaucratic and military organization", in which "every mutual interest is immediately torn from society, opposed to it as the high, general interest, torn from the sphere of the initiative of members of the society, and made an object of governmental activity, starting from the bridges, school buildings and communal property of any sort of village commune and ending with the rail roads, national property and state universities." The Russian revolution, like the Great French revolution "had to develop farther that which the absolute monarchy had started - centralization, but together with that it extended the capacity, attributes and number of the accomplices of government power" (ibid., v. 8, p.207). Stalin, like Napoleon, "completed this state machine" (ibid), and like Napoleon, he laid the basis of a new court-legal system, introduced a new administrative-territorial division, etc.
Under Stalin the industrialization of the country was instituted, as in the 19th century in France Napoleon III completed the industrial revolution. Stalin's leadership, as Bonaparte's rested on the peasantry, but in distinction from the latter, not on the parcelled peasant - the small owners (although in the middle 20s Stalin himself fluctuated), but on the peasants who possessed little, with strong communal relics, which even under NEP had constituted the majority of the village population. This explains the final success of collectivization of agriculture, which permitted the temporary preservation of the peasantry's special class status.
In connection with this one can recall the place in the letter of F. Engels to K. Kautsky of 15 February 1884: "Someone should take the trouble to expose state socialism, which is spreading like a plague; one can take its model in Java, where it flourishes in practice ? on a state basis the Dutch organized production based on the communism of the ancient rural community, thus guaranteeing the people a completely comfortable existence (as they understood it). This resulted in the people being held at the stage of primitive limitation, but the benefit to the Dutch state coffers is 70 million marks annually (now, probably more). The case is interesting in the highest degree and one can easily draw practical lessons from it. Among others, this is proof that the primitive communism in Java, as in India and Russia forms at the present time a splendid, very broad basis for exploitation and despotism (until it is shaken up by the elements of modern communism). In the conditions of modern society, it is a glaring anachronism, which either must be eliminated or developed further..." (Marx/Engels Works, v. 36, pp. 96-97).
Of course, in the Soviet Union there was another "case" of "state socialism", spread not by colonizers in a backward country with predominantly primitive natural economy, but by the VKP(b) (All Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)) with the goal of the rapid and massive proletarianization of the peasantry with the least resistance. At the same time the practice of Soviet "state socialism" confirmed that the institution of community, even having been transformed into collective farms, would remain the basis of [external] exploitation and despotism.
Collectivisation permitted the Bolsheviks to carry out as well the cultural revolution in the countryside necessary for industrialization. The further development of the old Russian community into a progressive agricultural commune proved impossible because of, first, its semi-decayed state, and, second, the absence of adjacent non-commodity socialism (modern European post-capitalist communism); therefore precisely the collectivisation enabled the gradual but final disappearance of the community and the pumping of more than 30 million workers from the village to the town.
The resemblance of the processes of the bourgeois transformation of France and Russia continued right up to Yeltsin's time. Boris Nikolayevich repeated almost every step of Louis Bonaparte. At first he too was selected president, then he broke up and shot the parliament, and he gave the country a new authoritarian constitution, all this using the recurrent Napoleonic-Stalinist ideas of a strong and unlimited government headed by a resolute personality. Under Yeltsin, as under Napoleon III, power was closely intertwined with the criminal world. Boris Nikolayevich, as opposed to Louis Bonaparte, did not become emperor, but he conducted a pro-imperial policy, and with the same result: if Napoleon III embarrassed himself in Mexico, then Yeltsin did in Chechnya.
The ultimate characterization given by Marx to the French revolution of 1848, considering the results of Louis Bonaparte's coming to power, is completely appropriate to apply to August Revolution of 1991: "However every slightly observant person, even if he has not followed the French events step by step, should have a presentiment that this revolution has in prospect an unheard of disgrace. It would be enough to listen to the complacent triumphant yapping of Mssrs democrats, who have congratulated themselves on the (expected) abundant results..." (Marx/Engels, Works, v.8, p.120).
However, there are enough real differences in the histories of France and Russia. Stalin conducted a social imperialist policy in relation to certain small peoples and neighbouring states, extending and strengthening the Soviet Union, but he was not defeated, as was Napoleon, but on the contrary he defeated the Nazi aggressor in the world war. In France after the collapse of Napoleon I the European reaction temporarily restored the monarchy, but this has not yet happened in Russia. It's not necessary to emphasize again that the basic difference was, finally, in the elimination by the radical Russian revolution both of the nobility in total, and the old bourgeois class, while in France the matter was restricted to the extirpation and expulsion of the landed aristocracy.
The main thing however seems to be that in the 20th century in Russia that thing occurred, against which Marx and Engels warned the European revolutionaries: "In France the proletarians will come to power not alone, but along with the peasants and the petty bourgeois, and will be obliged to carry out not their own measures, but those of the other classes." (Marx/Engels, Works, vol. 8, page. 585). "...on one beautiful morning our party, due to the helplessness and limpness of the other parties will come to power, in order to finally carry out all of those things which immediately address not our own interests, but the general revolutionary and specific petty bourgeois interests; in this case, pressured by the proletarian masses, constrained by our own party struggle with printed declarations and plans, which to a well known extent will be misconstrued and rashly pushed forward, we will be obliged to conduct communist experiments and run races, knowing full well how untimely they are. In addition we will lose our heads, we must hope only in the physical sense - the reaction will set in, and before the world will be in a position to give a historical assessment of similar events, we will be considered, monsters to be cursed, or fools, which is worse. It's hard to imagine another perspective" (ibid., v. 28, pp. 490-491). Sad to say, Lenin did not at all like this, and when they brought him similar expressions of the classics, he contemptuously called them "Punch's citations" (PSS, v. 9, p.409).
"State Socialism" as a Catching-up Capitalism
As far back as in 1849, Karl Marx, clarifying the bases of the capitalist formation, noted: "The existence of the class that owns nothing, except its capacity for labour, is a necessary prerequisite of capital? Capital presupposes wage labour, but wage labour presupposes capital. They mutually cause each other, they mutually generate each other" (K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian Ed., v. 6, pp. 443-444). Today, from the height of a new, post-Soviet epoch it is definitively clear that on the whole in the Union of Soviet "Socialist" Republics, under specific historical conditions, there occurred economic processes of the same sort. Having put the economy of the country during the NEP on a self-supporting, cost-accounting capitalist basis and thereby having anew restored, with the help of private capitalists, the working proletariat, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Stalin then definitively abolished the class of private owners which was hindering them. Hereafter the restored wage labour was called upon to generate state capital under the signboard of "socialism".
In 1891 the German Social Democrats, influenced by F. Engels, inserted the following thesis into the Erfurt Programme of their party: "The Social-democratic party has nothing in common with the so-called state socialism, i.e. the system of statification with the fiscal ends in view which puts the State on the place of private entrepreneur and hereunder unites in one hands the power of economic exploitation and political oppressing of workers." (see K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, v. 22, p. 623). Neither the programme of the Russian Social-democratic Labour Party which was common to the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, nor the programme of the Russian Communist party (Bolsheviks) contained a similar thesis, and the Russian Marxists almost did not take up this question at all (neither have done, alas, the Marxists-Leninists up to our days). Meanwhile the society created by efforts of the Russian Bolsheviks and their epigones proved to be exactly the practical embodiment of this well-known non-Marxist model of pseudo-socialism, but in reality - of state-capitalist monopolism. The Soviet Union never was either a socialist state, as the Stalinists maintain, or the degenerated workers' state, as the majority of Trotskyites believes. As a result of nationalization a state monopoly on means of production and exchange came into existence in the country, which is far from being equal to the socialization of property. As Karl Marx foresaw, "such abolition of private property is by no means a true mastering of it", for such sort of "communism" "community is only the community of labour and equality of wages paid by the communal capital, by commune as a common capitalist. Both sides of the interrelation are lifted on the stage of the imagined community: labour - as the destination of everyone, and capital - as the recognized community and strength of the whole society" (see K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, v. 42, p. 114; written in April 1844).
In the USSR the class structure of society was preserved, including the industrial working class, state-farm semi-proletariat and constantly reducing neo-communitarian collective-farm peasantry. Under the circumstances the role of the bourgeoisie was played by the politically dominating class of party-state bureaucracy ("nomenklatura"), which performed, according to Engels, "public official function of total aggregate entrepreneur" (Marx and Engels, op. cit., v. 20, p. 185). There were preserved the exchange of commodities between the state-owned sector of production and the collective-farm & co-operative one, the retail trade and other attributes of commodity-money economy. Whereas V. I. Lenin himself said: "We set ourselves as an object the equality as the abolition of classes. Then it is necessary to do away with the class difference between workers and peasants too. This is precisely our object. Society, which has preserved the class difference between workers and peasants, is neither communist, nor socialist society" (see V. I. Lenin, PSS, v. 38, p. 353). "The object is to create socialism, to do away with the division of society into classes, to make all society members toilers, to take away the ground of any exploitation of man by man" (op. cit., p. 385)". As a result of the NEP the country is to "come to the correct socialist exchange of products between the industry and agriculture", he believed (see V. I. Lenin, PSS, v. 44, p. 8), only then "it is possible to consider that the foundation of the socialist economy has been laid" (op. cit., p. 502), moreover "the transition from the money to the non-money exchange of products is unquestionable. That this transition may be successfully completed, it is necessary that the exchange of products should be realized (not the exchange of commodities)" (see op. cit., v. 52, p. 22).
The purpose of state socialism, as F. Engels pointed out, is "to transform the possibly greater number of proletarians into officials and retirees dependent on the state and to organize alongside with the disciplined army of soldiers and officials the same army of workers". "Compulsory elections under the supervision of an authority nominated by the state, instead of factory taskmasters - a fine socialism", he was indignant (K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, v. 35, p. 140). All this was in the USSR. During all seven decades of existence of this state the character of labour of workers in it remained hired - the administration hired workmen and was possessed of real power, and not the the reverse. Surplus product was estranged by the state apparatus and by it it was redistributed. In its turn, this stimulated [encouraged] the constant growth of those vast non-productive strata of population which Karl Marx called "'ideological' orders" and "the class of servants" (see K. Marx, F. Engels. Selected Works in 9 volumes. V.7. - Moscow: Politizdat, 1987, pp.414-415 [it's in the First Book of "Capital", Ch. XIII - "Machines and Large-scale Industry" - translator's note].) Only in contrast to England of 1861 "a perfect result of the capitalist exploitation of machines" was here the upkeep of almost all the 'servants' at the expense of the state. Taking into account this state of society, the "Social Status" column of Soviet questionary forms provided for only three categories of citizens: workers, collective farmers and "servants", the latter covering both the bourgeoisie-substituting "nomenklatura" and all the servants subordinate to it, including the so-called 'intelligentsia'.
Whereas Marx warned: "None of the forms of hired labour, though one of them can eliminate defects of another, is able to eliminate the defects of itself the system of hired labour" (see op. cit., v. 46, p. 62). If hired labour constantly reproduces capital, then some time or other those will appear who want to own this capital "as is customary" - on the rights of private property.
The monopoly-state mode of production that became firmly established in the course of realization of the model of "state socialism" and was based on wage labour in industry, services sector and large segment of agriculture - that peculiar state capitalism, which, according to V. I. Lenin, "no Marx and no Marxists could foresee" - proved in fact to be the road of backward, half-Asiatic, Russia to the modern capitalism. But then again, it was exactly K. Marx who had noted the existence of "the state mode of production in former epochs of Russian history" (see K. Marx, F. Engels. Selected Works in 9 volumes. V.8. - Moscow: Politizdat, 1987, p.109 [it's in the so-called Second Book of "Capital" - "The process of circulation of capital", Ch. IV - "Three figures of the process of circular movement" - translator's note]), so such a recurrence of traditionalism in the country was not something unexpected for the truly Marxist science.
The Party-managerial "nomenklatura" has carried out the objectively progressive task of organizing large-scale industry and integrating it with the collective-farm & co-operative sector into a single national-economic complex; thus there were overcome the economic orders, which the multinational country had inherited from feudalism and even pre-feudal modes of production. At the same time itself the "nomenklatura", as it has been said above, temporarily rallied into a dominating class, which, as F. Engels noted, had taken place more than once in the Asiatic history when "exercise of some public official function was in the basis of political domination" (see K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, v. 20, p. 185-186 [it's in Engels's "Anti-Dühring", Ch. "Theory of Violence. End" - translator's note])
However during the years of "socialist construction" a huge managerial system with its all-penetrating bureaucratic planning was created, and it was efficient only under two main circumstances: with not very substantial nomenclature and assortment of industrial products and with substantial volumes of cheap, with half-serfdom relapses, labour of collective farmers and of half-slave labour of millions confined in corrective-labor camps, which allowed instead of army of unemployed to restrain the increase of cost of labour power and understate its real price on the monopoly labour market. As these two factors were disappearing the administrative-command system was more and more skidding with each new five-year plan and by the mid-1980s it has stopped out and out. It was in the so-called "perestroika", i.e. in transition to the model of "market socialism" after the example of China, that the Party-State elite first attempted to find a way out of the impasse thus arisen, but it became immediately clear that in this process the most of the "nomenklatura" did not want to waive their privileges and their habitual half-parasitic way of life in general, which would be inevitable. Then there spread a struggle, in the course of which the "perestroikaites" raised the standard of "democracy and glasnost (openness) " - to be sure, the one of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois openness - and tried to win round all those who were discontented with the system inclusive of the most exploited part of the working class, thus having roused them to political activity. At the same time the part of the vehicle of market reforms was assigned to the socially active bourgeois intelligentsia, which earlier had been diligently serving the needs of the class of bourgeois bureaucracy.
It was in the course of the perestroika struggle that the most mature part of the "nomenklatura" had fully realized by the beginning of the 1990s the final trend of development of its class-exploiting interest and, by the use of bourgeois liberal democrats, it set to privatize everything that had been created in the USSR under its leadership. Thus in Russia there was completed the epoch of the bourgeois democratic revolution in its broad sense - the one which had been begun by the Revolution of 1905 and was finished by the August political revolution of 1991. And, paraphrasing Engels, one can say that the political domination of the class of bourgeois bureaucracy, i.e. of the "nomenklatura", lasted as long as "it performed this very public official function of total [aggregate] entrepreneur" (ibid). The transitional state mode of production based on wage labour was succeeded by a standard market-monopolistic capitalism; despite the hopes of Stalinists, the law of value gained its next convincing victory in the sphere of commodity economy, thus having proved the groundlessness of any commodity-money "models" of non-Marxist socialism - both state and market ones.
With this change of modes of production within the frame of commodity economy the former single exploiting class of bourgeois bureaucracy has made room for a usual spectrum of bourgeois strata and classes proper to the developed capitalism: financial oligarchy, bureaucratic bourgeoisie, trade [commercial] and industrial bourgeoisie. The class of the state-maintained servants has begun to decompose too. One part of it has reinforced the ranks of new exploiters, another one constitutes the basis of a vast stratum of the urban petty bourgeoisie which has been among the first to emerge, the third one is sinking into the proletariat or approaching [to] it from the point of view of its living conditions. There is a steady process of class delimitation in the country-side: the specific class of the collective-farm peasantry is quickly disappearing, classes of new agricultural workers, private farmers, big landowners are emerging. The legalization of the private ownership of land at the same time as of other means of agricultural production catalyzes this process.
The present political system of Russia - for all its obvious crisis-riddenness - is very advantageous for the whole bourgeoisie at large, seeing as all without exception large parties and associations - from the far right nazis to the allegedly left pseudo-communists - reflect in the end the economic and political interests of the rival groups of the dominating class, i.e. of the state-owned and private capital.
In 1990s the state power of Russia is in hands of the bloc of non-productive strata of the bourgeoisie - of the top bureaucracy and financial oligarchy supported by those traders who are engaged in export of raw materials and import of consumer goods. This bloc has full control over the sphere of money circulation in the country exploiting it in its purely speculative interests. The part of surplus value which remains at the disposal of the productive bourgeoisie is hardly enough for the maintenance of reproduction and its own insatiable consumption, so the proletariat - the producer of surplus value and the source of the whole of profit - is even deprived of wages funds. Thus the "patriotically spirited home commodity producers" - bourgeois ones - have invented a new kind of extorting absolute surplus value besides the extension of the working day and intensification of labour: introducing a system of voluntary servility of exploiting workers they reduce the necessary labour time to a minimum, but bring the surplus labour time to a maximum.
The whole activity of the ruling comprador bloc bears an openly parasitic and antinational character. That's why the factions of the bourgeoisie opposing it try to rally themselves and to lead under the chauvinistic slogans the possibly greater part of indigent and poor strata and classes (in robbery of which they have participated and are still participating). To promote this are called various combinations of 'state-patriotic' coalitions aiming for forming a bourgeois bloc of "patriot-professionals" from the former nomenklatura-CPSU politicians, regional elites, officials of middle and lower sections, industrialists and traders in the area of home industry, representatives of restricted small and middle business etc. In addition, the weakness of true communist internationalist forces result in the fact that the right-wing reactionaries more and more devour the political space to the left of the centre. Thus, not only "Red and White" alliances like 'the Communist Party of Russian Federation - People's Patriotic Forces of Russia' are created by their efforts, but also even "Red and Brown" ones as it has been in the case of the neo-CPSU "Trudovaya Rossiya" ["Labour Russia" headed by Victor Anpilov -translator's comment] and the fascist-like "National Bolshevist Party" [headed by Eduard Limonov - translator's comment]. No wonder that ultimately the great-powerism, Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism, defence of the "Orthodox spirituality» and any other Black-Hundredism of this sort become the common ideological platform of such-like associations and not Marxism-Leninism!
After having ousted the compradors from power the "people's patriotic forces" will try, in a protectionist manner, to create an effective market economy by means of rehabilitation of domestic industry and substantial strengthening of regulating role of the bourgeois state. Sure, the capitalist character of such economy would be then camouflaged as it now takes place in Byelorussia, and the agitators with red fillets would persistently call the completely impoverished toilers to unity with businessmen "in the name of rebirth of the Motherland". The most suitable thing for the national bourgeoisie in such a situation would be a tough political regime in the form of personal or, which is better, party dictatorship of right-wing trend. And it is quite able to come into being, and in any packing: White, "Red", Black, Brown, but most likely - in a mixed one. One can well understand that the extreme variant here is Nazism.
To our mind, the tasks of the proletariat and Marxist intellectuals in this situation are the development of an uncompromising class struggle against all the factions of the bourgeoisie - from the compradors to the national-patriots and their political attenders of any party colours; creation of genuine class workers' trade unions and rallying of the proletarian vanguard into a strong influential Marxist Labour party with a view to accomplish the genuine, international, worldwide socialist revolution and thus to abolish the whole system of commodity-money economy, class-exploiting structure of society and, consequently, any relations of social domination and subjection, the institution of the State.
At the same time the first step on this path may be the undivided power of that part of the proletariat which has been organized by the large-scale production and enlightened in Marxism, the power which it would establish in the course of radical social revolution, i.e. the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the socialist working class - the producer of the absolute majority of wealth [material values] in the present epoch - has the right to arming in order to avoid attempts of counterrevolution and restoration of old orders from anyone's side.
While the working class is in need of the state of this sort, the power in it must belong to it undividedly and directly - such is one of the main lessons of the defeat of Leninism.
[Translated from Russian by Mark Harris (the IWW, USA) and Dmitriy Fomin (the MLP, Russia) in 2001]
Footnote
1ICC note. This is the complete version of the text excerpts of which are published in the ICC's International Review no.111. This translation was done by the editors of the magazine Left Turn with elaboration by the South Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party, 1995 - 1997. References to Lenin's works are to the Complete Collection of V. I. Lenin's Works, 5th Russian Edition, abbreviated PSS. The works of Marx/Engels mostly refer to the 2nd Russian edition of the Works of Marx and Engels. Unfortunately, the references do not include the names or - occasionally - the dates of the original texts such that these cannot always be identified in the English version of Lenin's Complete Works.
The previous article in this series focussed on the debate on ‘proletarian culture’ in the early years of the Russian revolution. Our article also served as an introduction to an extract from Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution, which in our view presents the clearest framework for approaching this debate and outlining the policies of a proletarian political power towards the sphere of art and culture.
The following extracts, which are accompanied by our own comments, are taken from the final chapter of the same book, where Trotsky outlines his vision of art and culture in the developed communist society of the future. Having rejected the notion of ‘proletarian culture’ in previous chapters, Trotsky permits himself a glimpse of the truly human culture of classless society; it is a glimpse which takes us far beyond the particular question of art to the prospect of a transfigured humanity.
Ours is by no means the first attempt to present this final chapter and draw out its significance. In his monumental biography of Trotsky, Deutscher quotes large segments of it and concludes: “His vision of the classless society had, of course, been implicit in all marxist thought influenced as it was by French Utopian socialism. But no marxist writer before or after Trotsky has viewed the great prospect with so realistic an eye and so flaming an imagination” (p 197, ‘Not by politics alone’, The Prophet Unarmed, OUP edition).
More recently, Richard Stites, in his far ranging survey of the social-experimental currents that accompanied the early days of the Russian revolution, again draws a connection between Trotsky’s vision and the utopian tradition. Summing up the chapter in a single dense paragraph, Stites refers to it as “The mini-utopia or capsule project of a world under communism” which, he says, Trotsky describes “in a tone of controlled lyricism”. For Stites, this was “an extraordinary endorsement of the experimental utopianism that characterised the 1920s”; Revolutionary Dreams, Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, OUP, 1989, p 168). But here we must take care: as Stites explains in his introduction, the author of this work tends to counter-pose the utopian trend to the marxist one, so that in a sense he is endorsing Trotsky’s approach in so far as it is utopian rather than marxist. For more conventional bourgeois thought, however, marxism is utopianism – but only in the most negative sense, signifying that its vision of the future is nothing but pie in the sky. But for now, we are going to let Trotsky speak, and we can consider whether or not his work deserves to be described as utopian at the conclusion of this article.
The chapter begins by reiterating the essential argument of the chapter on proletarian culture: that the aim of the proletarian revolution is not to create a brand new ‘proletarian culture’ but to synthesise the best of all past cultural achievements into a genuinely human culture. Trotsky’s distinction between revolutionary art and socialist art reflects this precision:
“Revolutionary art, which inevitably reflects all the contradictions of a revolutionary social system, should not be confused with socialist art for which no basis has as yet been made. On the other hand, one must not forget that socialist art will grow out of the art of this transition period.
In insisting on such a distinction, we are not at all guided by a pedantic consideration of an abstract programme. Not for nothing did Engels speak of the socialist revolution as a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The revolution itself is not as yet the kingdom of freedom. On the contrary, it is developing the features of ‘necessity’ to the greatest degree. Socialism will abolish class antagonisms, as well as classes, but the revolution carries the class struggle to its highest tension. During the period of revolution, only that literature which promotes the consolidation of the workers in their struggle against the exploiters is necessary and progressive. Revolutionary literature cannot but be imbued with a spirit of social hatred, which is a creative historic factor in an epoch of proletarian dictatorship. Under socialism, solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature and art will be tuned to a different key. All the emotions which we revolutionists, at the present time, feel apprehensive of naming—so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians—such as disinterested friendship, love for one's neighbour, sympathy, will be the mighty ringing chords of socialist poetry”.
Along with Rosa Luxemburg we may question Trotsky’s affirmation of “social hatred”, even in the period of the proletarian dictatorship. This notion is connected to the concept of the Red Terror, which Trotsky also defended, but which the Spartakusbund explicitly rejected in its programme (1).
But there is no doubt at all that “solidarity will be the basis of society” in the socialist future. This leads Trotsky to consider the argument that such an “excess of solidarity” would be inimical to artistic creation:
"However, does not an excess of solidarity, as the Nietzscheans fear, threaten to degenerate man into a sentimental, passive, herd animal? Not at all. The powerful force of competition, which in bourgeois society has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form. There will be the struggle for one's opinion, for one's project, for one's taste. In the measure in which political struggles will be eliminated—and in a society where there will be no classes, there will be no such struggles—the liberated passions will be channeled into technique, into construction, which also includes art. Art then will become more general, will mature, will become tempered, and will become the most perfect method of the progressive building of life in every field. It will not be merely ‘pretty’ without relation to anything else. All forms of life, such as the cultivation of land, the planning of human habitations, the building of theatres, the methods of socially educating children, the solution of scientific problems, the creation of new styles, will vitally engross all and everybody. People will divide into ‘parties’ over the question of a new gigantic canal, or the distribution of oases in the Sahara (such a question will exist too), over the regulation of the weather and the climate, over a new theatre, over chemical hypotheses, over two competing tendencies in music, and over a best system of sports. Such parties will not be poisoned by the greed of class or caste. All will be equally interested in the success of the whole. The struggle will have a purely ideological character. It will have no running after profits, it will have nothing mean, no betrayals, no bribery, none of the things that form the soul of ‘competition’ in a society divided into classes. But this will in no way hinder the struggle from being absorbing, dramatic and passionate. And as all problems in a socialist society—the problems of life which formerly were solved spontaneously and automatically, and the problems of art which were in the custody of special priestly castes— will become the property of all people; one can say with certainty that collective interests and passions and individual competition will have the widest scope and the most unlimited opportunity. Art, therefore, will not suffer the lack of any such explosions of collective, nervous energy, and of such collective psychic impulses which make for the creation of new artistic tendencies and for changes in style. It will be the æsthetic schools around which ‘parties’ will collect, that is, associations of temperaments, of tastes and of moods. In a struggle so disinterested and tense, which will take place in a culture whose foundations are steadily rising, the human personality, with its invaluable basic trait of continual discontent, will grow and become polished at all its points. In truth, we have no reason to fear that there will be a decline of individuality or an impoverishment of art in a socialist society”.
Trotsky then goes on to consider what style or school of art would be most appropriate to a revolutionary period. To some extent these considerations have a more local and temporary significance, in that they refer to schools of art which have long since disappeared, such as symbolism and futurism. In addition, as capitalism has sunk further and further into decadence, as commercialism, egotism and atomisation have plumbed new depths, artistic movements and schools as such have more or less disappeared. Indeed, by the 1930s,Trotsky’s manifesto of the projected International Federation of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, written in conjunction with Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, had already anticipated this tendency: “the artistic schools of the last decades, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, have superceded each other without any of them coming to fruition…It is impossible to find a way out of this impasse by artistic means alone. This is a crisis of the entire civilization…If contemporary society does not succeed in reconstructing itself, art will inevitably perish as Greek art perished under the ruins of slave civilization”. Of course it is very probable that a future revolutionary social upheaval will give a new impetus to more collective movements of artists who identify with the revolution, and who will no doubt draw inspiration from the schools of the past without slavishly imitating them. Let us just say that while Trotsky opted for the term “realism” to define the art of the revolutionary period, he did not therefore reject the positive contributions of particular schools even when –as in the case of symbolism for example – their concerns had been far removed from the social issues of the day and even tended towards a flight from reality (2):
“The new artist will need all the methods and processes evolved in the past, as well as a few supplementary ones, in order to grasp the new life. And this is not going to be artistic eclecticism, because the unity of art is created by an active world‑attitude and active life‑attitude”.
This is consistent with Trotsky’s more general view on culture which we examined in the last article, and which was opposed to the pseudo-leftism which wanted to jettison everything inherited from the past.
Trotsky applied the same method to the problem of fundamental literary forms such as tragedy and comedy. Against those who saw no place for tragedy or comedy in the art of the future, Trotsky provides us with a method for examining the manner in which particular cultural productions are connected to the more general historical evolution of social formations. Ancient Greek tragedy had expressed the impersonal domination of the gods over man, which in turn reflected man’s relative helplessness before nature in the archaic modes of production; Shakespearean tragedy, on the other hand, which was deeply connected to the birth pangs of bourgeois society, represented a step forward because it focussed on more individual human emotions:
“Having broken up human relations into atoms, bourgeois society, during the period of its rise, had a great aim for itself. Personal emancipation was its name. Out of it grew the dramas of Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust. Man placed himself in the centre of the universe, and therefore in the centre of art also. This theme sufficed for centuries. In reality, all modern literature has been nothing but an enlargement of this theme.
But to the degree in which the internal bankruptcy of bourgeois society was revealed as a result of its unbearable contradictions, the original purpose, the emancipation and qualification of the individual faded away and was relegated more and more into the sphere of a new mythology, without soul or spirit”.
Trotsky then shows that the conditions which give rise to tragedy are not limited to the past, but will continue to exist far into the future, because man (as Marx put it) is by definition a suffering being, confronted with the perpetual conflict between his limitless strivings and the objective universe that confronts him:
“However the conflict between what is personal and what is beyond the personal, can take place, not only in the sphere of religion, but in the sphere of a human passion that is larger than the individual. The super‑personal element is, above all, the social element. So long as man will not have mastered his social organization, the latter will hang over him as his fate. Whether at the same time society casts a religious shadow or not, is a secondary matter and depends upon the degree of man's helplessness. Babeuf's struggle for communism, in a society which was not yet ready for it, was a struggle of a classic hero with his fate. Babeuf's destiny had all the characteristics of true tragedy, just as the fate of the Gracchi had whose name Babeuf used. Tragedy based on detached personal passions is too flat for our days. Why? Because we live in a period of social passions. The tragedy of our period lies in the conflict between the individual and the collectivity, or in the conflict between two hostile collectivities in the same individual.
Our age is an age of great aims. This is what stamps it. But the grandeur of these aims lies in man's effort to free himself from mystic and from every other intellectual vagueness and in his effort to reconstruct society and himself in accord with his own plan. This, of course, is much bigger than the child's play of the ancients which was becoming to their childish age, or the mediæval ravings of monks, or the arrogance of individualism which tears personality away from the collectivity, and then, draining it to the very bottom, pushes it off into the abyss of pessimism, or sets it on all fours before the remounted bull Apis.
Tragedy is a high expression of literature because it implies the heroic tenacity of strivings, of limitless aims, of conflicts and sufferings…. One cannot tell whether revolutionary art will succeed in producing ‘high’ revolutionary tragedy. But socialist art will revive tragedy. Without God, of course. The new art will be atheist. It will also revive comedy, because the new man of the future will want to laugh. It will give new life to the novel. It will grant all rights to lyrics, because the new man will love in a better and stronger way than did the old people, and he will think about the problems of birth and death.
The new art will revive all the old forms which arose in the course of the development of the creative spirit. The disintegration and decline of these forms are not absolute, that is, they do not mean that these forms are absolutely incompatible with the spirit of the new age. All that is necessary is for the poet of the new epoch to re‑think in a new way the thoughts of mankind, and to re‑feel its feelings”.
What is striking about the approach Trotsky adopts in this section is how closely it conforms to the way that Marx poses very similar question in the Grundrisse – the draft for Capital, which was not published until 1939, and which in all probability Trotsky himself had never read. Like Trotsky, Marx is concerned with the dialectic between changes in forms of artistic expression, connected to the material evolution of the productive forces, and the underlying human content of these forms. The passage is so thought-provoking that it is well worth quoting in full:
“In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organisation. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns or also Shakespeare. It is even recognised that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of art, as such, begins; that is, that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. If this is the case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of the arts, it is already less puzzling that it is the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of society. The difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified.
Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and social relations on which Greek imagination and hence Greek mythology is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightening rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.
From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and an unattainable model.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naivete, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art is not for us in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society in which it grew. It is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return” (Introduction, p 111, Penguin edition).
In both these passages, there is a clearly shared starting point: to understand any particular artistic form, it must be located in its general historical context, and thus in the context of the evolution of man’s productive forces. It is this which enables us to understand the profound alterations which art has undergone in different historical epochs. But just as Trotsky also understands that the tragic dimension will never be entirely absent from art because it will never be entirely absent from the human condition, so Marx observes that the real theoretical challenge lies less in recognising that artistic forms are bound up with the forms of social development than in understanding why the creative achievement’s of man’s “childhood” can still resonate across the ages to present and future humanity. In other words, without reverting back to the “dumb genus” of Feuerbach, or the idealised mankind of bourgeois moralists, how can the study of art help us to discover the truly fundamental characteristics of human life activity, and thus of the human species as such?
Trotsky now turns to the practical relationship between art, industry and construction in the revolutionary period. He focuses in particular on the field of architecture, the meeting point between art and construction. Of course, at this level poverty-stricken Russia was still mainly limited to repairing ruined buildings and pavements. But despite its extremely modest resources, revolutionary Russia had sought to develop a new synthesis of art and practical building; this was especially the case with the constructivist school around Tatlin, who is perhaps best remembered for designing the monument to the Third International. But Trotsky appeared dissatisfied with these experiments and stressed that no real reconstruction could take place until the fundamental economic problems had been resolved (and this could not of course be accomplished in Russia alone). He thus appears to commit himself more to examining the possibilities for the generalised fusion of art and construction in the communist future, once the fundamental political, military and economic problems of the revolution had been resolved. For Trotsky, this was a project that would not involve a minority of specialists, but would be a collective effort:
“There is no doubt that, in the future—and the farther we go, the more true it will be—such monumental tasks as the planning of city gardens, of model houses, of railroads, and of ports, will interest vitally not only engineering architects, participators in competitions, but the large popular masses as well. The imperceptible, ant‑like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to titanic constructions of city‑villages, with map and compass in hand. Around this compass will be formed true peoples' parties, the parties of the future for special technology and construction, which will agitate passionately, hold meetings and vote. In this struggle, architecture will again be filled with the spirit of mass feelings and moods, only on a much higher plane, and mankind will educate itself plastically, it will become accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life. The wall between art and industry will come down. The great style of the future will be formative, not ornamental. Here the Futurists are right. But it would be wrong to look at this as a liquidating of art, as a voluntary giving way to technique…
Does this mean that industry will absorb art, or that art will lift industry up to itself on Olympus? This question can be answered either way, depending on whether the problem is approached from the side of industry, or from the side of art. But in the object attained, there is no difference between either answer. Both answers signify a gigantic expansion of the scope and artistic quality of industry, and we understand here, under industry, the entire field without excepting the industrial activity of man; mechanical and electrified agriculture will also become part of industry”.
Here Trotsky offers us a concretisation of the original vision of Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: man, when freed from alienated labour, will build a world “ in accordance with the laws of beauty”(4)
Trotsky now begins to move towards the crescendo of his vision, permitting himself a very graphic depiction of the cities and landscapes of the future:
“The wall will fall not only between art and industry, but simultaneously between art and nature also. This is not meant in the Sense of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that art will come nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more ‘artificial’. The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils' practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re‑registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad.
The jealous, scowling Kliuev declares, in his quarrel with Mayakovsky, that ‘it does not behove a maker of songs to bother about cranes’, and that it is ‘only in the furnace of the heart, and in no other furnace, that the purple gold of life is melted.’ Ivanov‑Razumnik, a populist, who was once a left Social‑Revolutionist‑—and this tells the whole story—also took a hand in this quarrel. Ivanov-Razumnik declares that the poetry of the hammer and the machine, in whose name Mayakovsky speaks, is a transient episode, but that the poetry of ‘God‑made Earth’ is ‘the eternal poetry of the world’. Earth and the machine are here contrasted as the eternal and temporary sources of poetry, and of course the eminent idealist, the tasteless and cautious semi‑mystic Razumnik, prefers the eternal to the transient. But, in truth, this dualism of earth and machine is false; one can contrast a backward peasant field with a flour mill, either on a plantation, or in a socialist society. The poetry of the earth is not eternal, but changeable, and man began to sing articulate songs only after he had placed between himself and the earth implements and instruments which were the first simple machines. There would have been no Koltzov without a scythe, a plough or a sickle. Does that mean that the earth with a scythe has the advantage of eternity over the earth with an electric plough? The new man, who is only now beginning to plan and to realize himself, will not contrast a barn‑floor for grouse and a dragnet for sturgeons with a crane and a steam‑hammer, as does Kliuev and Razumnik after him. Through the machine, man in socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. And man will do it so well that the tiger won't even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth. The machine is the instrument of modern man in every field of life. The present‑day city is transient. But it will not be dissolved back again into the old village. On the contrary, the village will rise in fundamentals to the plane of the city. Here lies the principal task. The city is transient, but it points to the future, and indicates the road. The present village is entirely of the past”.
In this passage there is a prescient rebuttal of the modern day primitivists who blame ‘technology’ for all the ills of social life and seek to return to an Arcadian dream of simplicity before the snake of technology entered the garden: as we have shown elsewhere (see for example our article on ecology in IR 64), this actually means a regression to a pre-human past and thus the elimination of mankind. Trotsky has no doubt that it is the city that points the way forward. But not in its present form: since he recognises that the present-day city is a transient phenomenon, we can be sure that he is fully in line with Marx and Engel’s notion of a new synthesis between town and country. And this notion has nothing in common with the devastating urbanisation of the globe which capitalism is currently inflicting on humanity; thus Trotsky envisages the deliberate preservation of the wilderness as part of an overall plan for the management of planet. Today the degradation of environment, not least the threat posed by the destruction of the great forests, has emphasised more than in Trotsky’s day how vitally necessary such a preservation will be. Today we face the very real danger that there will be no tigers and no forests for man to protect; and the proletarian power of the future will undoubtedly have to take rapid and draconian measures to bring this ecological holocaust to an end. But there is still no question that the communist regeneration of nature will be carried out on the basis of all the most important and sustainable advances in science and technology.
Trotsky now turns to the organisation of daily life in communism:
“The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm‑eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present‑day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi‑servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho‑physical moulding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful ‘parties’ will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples' palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous”.
And in the closing passage of the book, Trotsky’s vision reaches its climactic point, as he turns from the mountain-tops to the depths of the human psyche:
"More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo Sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho‑physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub‑soil. Is it not self‑evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man's extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self‑government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho‑physical self‑education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts — literature, drama, painting, music and architecture - will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self‑education of communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise”.
In our view, examining the implications of this final passage requires, at the very least, an article to itself. In particular: since it revolves around the notion of exploring (and indeed awakening) the unconscious levels of mind, it raises the problem of the relationship between marxism and psychoanalysis, which Trotsky himself addressed in other writings. But to conclude the present article, we must return to the question posed at its beginning: can Trotsky’s portrait of life in the communist future be defined as a form of utopianism, and thus outside the realm of real material possibility?
Here we can only refer to Bordiga’s remark that what distinguishes marxism from utopianism is not the fact that the latter enjoys describing the society of the future while the former does not, but that, unlike the utopians, marxism, by identifying, and identifying with, the proletariat as an implicitly communist class, has uncovered the real movement that can lead to the overthrow of capitalism and the installation of communism. Having thus overcome all abstract schemas based on mere ideals and wishes, marxism is thus well within its rights to examine the entirely of human history to develop its understanding of the real capacities of the species. When Trotsky talks about the average individual under communism reaching the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx, this judgment is based on the recognition that these exceptional individuals were themselves the product of wider social forces, and can therefore be used as milestones that point the way to the future, indications of what human beings could be like once the very material shackles of class privilege and economic scarcity have been left behind.
Trotsky wrote Literature and Revolution in 1924, in the days when the coils of the Stalinist counter-revolution were tightening around him. His vision is thus all the more moving as a testimony to his deep confidence in the communist perspective of the working class. In these days of capitalist decomposition, when the very notion of communism is more than ever being derided not only as a utopia but also as a dangerous delusion, Trotsky’s portrait of mankind’s possible future remains a defiant source of inspiration for a new generation of revolutionary militants.
CDW
NOTES
1. “The proletarian revolution requires no terror for the realisation of its aims: it looks upon manslaughter with hatred and aversion. It has no need for such means because the struggle it conducts is not against individuals but against institutions”. Needless to say that the Spartacists’ rejection of terror did not mean that they were opposed to revolutionary class violence, which is not the same thing.
2. When he used the term realism, Trotsky was talking about something wider than a particular school of art which had enjoyed its hey-day during 19th century. He meant “a realistic monism, in the sense of a philosophy of life, and not a "realism" in the sense of the traditional arsenal of literary schools”. It would also have been interesting to know Trotsky’s views following his later confrontation with the surrealist movement, with whom he shared some important points of agreement. We will return to this in the next article.
3. Neither, we can add in retrospect, does Trotsky’s definition of realism have anything in common with the one-dimensional banality of “Socialist Realism” as elaborated by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Contrary to all the best traditions of Bolshevism which had presided over a considerable flowering of artistic endeavour in the early years of the revolution, Socialist Realism demanded that art should be no more than a vehicle of political propaganda, and reactionary propaganda at that, since it used as a glamorisation of the Stalinist terror and the construction of a barracks regime of state capitalism. It was certainly no accident that in form and content Socialist Realism is virtually indistinguishable from Nazi kitsch. As Trotsky and Breton put it in the manifesto of the International Federation: ”The style of official Soviet painting is being described as ‘socialist realism’ – the label could have been invented only by a bureaucrat at the head of an Arts Department…One cannot without revulsion and horror read the poems and novels or view the pictures and sculptures, in which officials armed with pen, brush and chisel, and surveyed by officials, armed with revolvers, glorify the ‘great leaders of genius’ in whom there is not a spark either of genius or greatness. The art of the Stalin epoch will remain the most striking expression of the deepest decline of proletarian revolution”.
4. See the article in this series dealing with the 1844 Manuscripts and the vision of communism contained in them, in International Review n°70 and 71.
Links
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/orientation-texts
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1869/2002-confidence-and-solidarity-functioning-organisation
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/14/proletarian-revolution
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/111_mlp_reply.html
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/trotsky